ANTHROPOLOGY

PASTICHE

By:Nasser Yousaf

I remember these words of some wise man from my pretty younger years. I read this in one of the older editions of the Reader's Digest: people who talked too much about their ancestors were like potatoes, both the potatoes and their roots always remained under the earth.

It was in another edition of the said Digest that I found this curious information about a particular high-altitude area in China. It said that clouds in that particular area hung so low that a few raindrops would fall from the clouds if someone yelled a little too loudly. When I shared it with my elder cousins they laughed it off as ridiculous and made fun of me.

He builds up the clouds heavy with rain; the thunder ⛈️ sounds His praises, as do the angels in awe of Him (Chapter 13 Al-Ra'd Verse 12)

Those copies of the Reader's Digest were from the library of one of my uncles about whom I remember little except that when he died I heard a howl raised by the women in our extended family. My grandfather, a leading lawyer of his times, died sometime in the mid 1960s. He was followed soon thereafter by my father and his brothers, all of heart ailments which had earlier taken the life of their fifth and eldest brother long before I was born. Huffing and puffing, they all went to their graves hurriedly as if they didn't want their father to miss them long in the unbeknownst world of the hereafter.

We lived in a joint family and used to get Pakistan Times and several Urdu-language newspapers. My elder cousins would read Pakistan Times only to check out the latest cricket scores. As I began to know the written word, I realized what a great treasure trove my uncle had left behind in the shape of a veritable library. He looked to be of a meticulous and artistic bent of mind which one look at his collection would instantly reveal.

Hundreds of copies of the Reader's Digest wrapped in solid covers along with books on every subject lay piled up neatly in the wood and glass almirahs awaiting to be read. I have read some of the great novels and histories in the oldest hardbound covers lying unnoticed in that fantastic library.

When I try to imagine how my uncle must have selected and touched these timeless classics, and which I have had the good luck of reading, an ecstatic sense of pride seizes me: The Lawless Roads by Graham Greene, Inside India by Halide Edib, Roads to Freedom by Bertrand Russell, The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence, The Mayor of Casterbridge and The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy and The Shape of Things to Come by H. G. Wells etcetera.

Those having lived in Peshawar a few decades ago might recollect Wahab Studio, squatting sagely in the relative solitude of the Mall Road. That photography shop too was set up by my books-loving uncle. He had named it after his elder brother by that name. One of our kin, a jolly and plumpish fellow with flabby cheeks had been deputed to look after the business which in those days was brisk. The shop had a wide range of wood and glass showcases which added to its rustic beauty.

People revisiting Peshawar after long absence still ask for that photography shop, and can't help stop wondering where in the concrete jungle, which is the present-day Peshawar Mall, has it disappeared.

Fate has battered me in several different ways. But in one particular case Fate has favoured me beyond my humble expectations. Divinity has, as if by hand, led me to the hidden quarters where books I could only dream of were waiting for me to be grabbed. I got an untouched leather bound copy of Brothers Karamazov from a secondhand knick-knacks shop in the Peshawar Saddar for just Rs. 200/.

Of course, Aldous Huxley couldn't reconcile himself to traveling in the company of Divinity. But, nonetheless, I recently found 'Music At Night' by Huxley in the long-ignored legacy of my late uncle. It is a collection of riveting essays written in the first quarter or thereabouts of the 20th century. It's a Penguin publication and my uncle bought it for RS. 1/ as the price scribbled in pencil on the first blank page indicates.

The following is from one of the essays titled 'Foreheads Villainous Low' by Huxley, which I need not emphasize how dearly I loved:

'If by some miracle the dreams of the educationist were realized and the majority of human beings began to take an exclusive interest in the things of the mind, the whole industrial system would instantly collapse. Given modern machinery, there can be no industrial prosperity without mass production. Mass production is impossible without mass consumption. Other things being equal, consumption varies inversely with the intensity of mental life. A man who is exclusively interested in the things of the mind will be quite happy (in Pascal's phrase) sitting quietly in a room. A man who has no interest in the things of the mind will be bored to death if he has to sit quietly in a room. Lacking thoughts with which to distract himself, he must acquire things to take their place; incapable of mental travel, he must move about in the body. In a word, he is the ideal consumer, the mass consumer of objects and of transport.'

Divinity had blessed Huxley with an incredible foresight although I am sure the late writer would have found it repugnant hearing me say this. His take on snobberies is a must read. The arrival of the cell phone on the scene must have brought a mischievous smile on his long-dead old face.

Snobberies have denied us the pleasures of this ephemeral life in many different ways. There are countless people in the well-off society who rubbish reading literature as showy.

To be showy must, therefore, be worth enjoying it. For how else could one have access to these splendid thoughts of Keats expressed in his letters to his dear ones. To Benjamin Bailey, Keats wrote:

I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination - What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth - whether it existed before or not, and to his brothers George and Thomas, Keats wrote: The excellece of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth.

And not having read about Don Juan by Byron, I would never have come across these words by Maurice Brown about the poem: His purpose was to expose the hypocrisy and the corruption of the high society which he knew so well, and in his hero to depict 'a vicious and unprincipled character, and lead him through those ranks of society, whose high external accomplishments cover and cloak internal and secret vices.'

In order not to be called a potato 🥔, I must now atone for bringing up my family in this discussion. Our family, as I had seen it during the days of my boyhood before my father and uncles left, has fallen apart. I would be the last person to shed tears for the aforesaid for that is how Nature works in its inscrutable ways. My grandfather and his wards were too vain to fear that Nature would dare attack their dearly-held unity.

It's degeneration, plain and simple. Most of my elder cousins too are no more. But I don't remember anyone of them talking about the books collected by the family. I can only see the younger ones fighting over the scraps leftover from my grandfather's priced property. I see decay all around me. My squeamishness wouldn't allow me to draw comparisons with omnivores.

'We died because our fathers lied,' thus wrote Rudyard Kipling in his poem 'Common Form' after enlisting his son in the military during World War 1, despite the fact that the boy had a poor eyesight.