For My Abbi Ji
* These are my impressions and thoughts about my grandfather and our love story. If anyone has problems with any of it, feel free to skip over.
a) This is not about you. b) Fundamentally, I do not care.
I suppose it is customary after someone dies to try and make sense of how they lived.
I have been trying to do so this past week in the wake of my grandfather’s death, who in every way that counts was a kindred spirit and guide. I am bogged by the fact that I couldn’t be there to tell him so in person during his last days and some part of the displacement I now feel is a byproduct of not really knowing how to mourn him. Mourning is difficult when death is wrought by old age, disease and pain and where a huge part of your love for someone warrants that you seek relief on their behalf. Mourning is further complicated when one doesn’t ascribe to a framework that helps articulate it. I refer here, to religion, or lack thereof. Ironically, this is something I feel only he ever really understood my opinions on. In some ways, I feel like I lost my Abbi a couple of years ago when his memories began to fade in a fundamental way and we could no longer converse with each other. Not that we ever conversed much with words but there was always a silent understanding in those odd hours where we sat side by side, each buried in a book. We were always surrounded by words, my Abbi and I, and so there was little need to ever actually word anything. But before I left Pakistan, those silences became crippling and far too quiet for comfort. Being alone, away and reading, they are proving to be even more so. Still, there is a finality and emptiness that comes with death, no matter how prepared one feels for it. Death always prompts a conversation about what life means.
I suppose, that’s why religion exists in the first place.
My Abbi and I spent long hours debating the Occam’s Razor-edge that might explain why he always agreed with me on the futility of divinity and its accompanying strictures but still never missed a single prayer. There never really was much of an explanation for it but he used to put it along these lines ‘Ohho Beta, ki pata. Kuch nahin he. Lekin agar hoya, te fir meri tarfon koi kasar nahi rahi’ (Ohho, Beta. Who knows? There’s nothing in the end. But if there is, then I’ve done my part.) My Abbi brought me to Urdu, in fact his exact words on the subject were ‘Tu mere ghar ich reh ke Urdu parhna vi nahin jandi? Te mein te fir fail.’ (You’re living under my roof and you can’t even read Urdu properly? Then I’ve failed.) In part because I really wanted to be able to understand him and in part because I couldn’t let him fail, I let Abbi bring Urdu back to my life. He would sit back somewhat patiently, flinching, as I read him the paper at an excruciatingly broken and glacial pace and then over verse that flowed a bit easier until it finally began to sink in and take root. It was poetry that offered him solace and comfort in seeking out all those pesky questions that plagued us both and I am drowning myself in his poem these days while I cocoon myself among his favourites - Faiz and Ghalib. We never did manage to agree on Iqbal.
On some deeply discomforting level, I know that I take after my grandfather in very fundamental ways. That is not necessarily a good thing but I always sought pride in it anyway. My poor Nani often bemoaned how ‘tussi dono bilqul ik jese o, kamreyan te kitaaban vich band’ (You both are just the same. Locked in rooms, buried in books) and while I wished I could offer her the companionship she craved and deserved from me, a part of me secretly relished being likened to my Abbi. But I also recognize the pitfalls of being inherently uncomfortable in one’s own skin and navigating the world simultaneously crippled by an inferiority and superiority complex. Not wanting to ever be upstaged by anyone but also loathing the tedious conversation offered by most company because far better company lay in quiet corners buried amid frayed bindings. It sounds romantic and Lord knows we tried to make it seem so, but in truth it’s probably much closer in scope to narcissism. I know why we preferred our rooms, it wasn’t because they were comfortable...it was because they were safe and because we were scared.
I have also been trying to make sense of what my Abbi’s life means, not just for myself but in the larger scope of ‘things’. He was a lifelong bureaucrat and he knew what it meant to ‘serve’, as few of us today do. He rose, an orphan from a small village steeped in poverty and carved out a future by teaching himself and those around him in schools shaded by trees and little else. He realised very early on that his only real asset was his mind. He scored a series of scholarships and ended up at Government College and then in the Civil Service. He was a historian, poet, jurist and philosopher. He wrote two books - one public ‘An Agrarian History of Pakistan’ and the other private ‘Fard e Hayat’ and all I have ever heard said of him and about him is that he was unflinchingly honest in his work and in his dealings. I have heard that he ‘never compromised on his principles’. And I am trying to contextualise what this means now beyond casual epithets we throw around like we do words such as ‘khaandaani’ and ‘izzat’ that mean so little owing to their ubiquity.
What does it mean to be ‘honest’ beyond sense and saving grace and what does it mean to not compromise on one’s principles, ever? It meant that he was transferred from pretty much every posting he ever held because he was impossible for his seniors to contend with; it meant that he didn’t toe lines that were designed to be ‘toe-ed’ and those that most of us toe simply to survive and succeed at pretty much anything. It meant that he did not make friends easily because he lacked the skill to praise people, be pliable or stroke egos that desperately needed stroking. It meant that even though by his own measure he lived a life of integrity, it was never a life of plenty. It meant that he was, by definition, not a practical man. It meant that he was always aware of the success he could have achieved, had he been willing to toady up (or down, depending on how one looks at it) to his superiors but settled for the success he could account for having earned on his own. It meant he loathed all pomp and circumstance.
I’ve been sitting here, all the way in Buffalo, trying to be ‘honest’ with myself about how I would fare against such a standard and it doesn’t look good. One would like to blame it on a generational default designed to cater to self-gratification over duty and ‘individuality’ over service but I think it goes beyond that. After all, self-interest isn’t specific to any generation. I keep trying to reconcile an image of self where I don’t constantly need validation from something or someone: from likes and shares on Instagram photos or pats on the back for ‘thinking’ and ‘communicating’ grand ideas and/or ideals online or at conferences rather than having to ‘act’ and ‘live’ them day in and day out. On some level, our generation is stifled by saturation – of information, of ideology, of self-gratification and of self-righteous rage. I wouldn’t even know where to begin being content with learning for learning’s sake or reading for reading’s sake or having lived and struggled without due acknowledgement or rewards for doing one’s ‘duty’.
I don’t understand how he did that.
I know with unflinching certainty that I couldn’t do it.
And I’m not saying his life was in any way small because it was lacking in pomp and circumstance. If anything, it was all the grander for not needing it. I think of my Abbi, and it brings me back to why Don Quixote has always been one of my favourite books. He never read it and yet it feels like he lived it in so many spaces:“If Chrysostom's impatience and violent passion killed him, why should my modest behaviour and circumspection be blamed? If I preserve my purity in the society of the trees, why should he who would have me preserve it among men, seek to rob me of it? I have, as you know, wealth of my own, and I covet not that of others; my taste is for freedom, and I have no relish for constraint; I neither love nor hate anyone; I do not deceive this one or court that, or trifle with one or play with another. The modest converse of the shepherd girls of these hamlets and the care of my goats are my recreations; my desires are bounded by these mountains, and if they ever wander hence it is to contemplate the beauty of the heavens, steps by which the soul travels to its primeval abode.”
For now, I am just sad. I am sad for endless debates over the evening news where he would ask me every night as I returned home from hours of editing hopelessness in newsrooms “Batao aaj koi achi khabar thi?” (tell me, was there any good news today) and I never understood how a lifetime of serving could still leave one with such resilient hope for a country that I often found to be hopeless, even though I hadn’t put in the time to earn any right to such an opinion. I watched on in frustration and despair as he drowned himself in the evening news and panel pontification of self-proclaimed ‘experts’ that I always knew would come to nothing because those of us who work as journalists know how journalism dies each day as we try and cover something real over the pantomime that entertains millions for money no amount of honest reporting could match. I always marveled at how someone who stood up to military dictatorships and lost family in blood-soaked trains during partition could see something good come out of all this death and despair but he did. His entire generation still waits each day for ours to give them a spark of that ‘achi khabar’ that might be delivered by some beleaguered Messiah they still insist on waiting on. My Nani always asks me ‘Beta, phir humain kaun bachaye ga?’ (Beta, then who will save us) and how do you tell someone who earned that question after a lifetime of service that no one saves those who don’t save themselves and very few of us are interested in saving anything anymore? I don’t know how one can have served the time and still die having hope where so many of us have barely begun serving ours but already consider hope to be nothing short of naiveté – burdensome at best, broken at worst.
I have been reading Abbi’s poem each morning since he passed on and every time it brings me back to the realization of why he and I are kindred. In his life of honesty, honour and duty, it was my own father who shamed him brutally and so publicly that it forced him into hiding, in his room and behind his desk and it is this verse that speaks of our parting. I believe, from the bottom of my heart that I was meant to return to my Abbi, and that is why I am grateful for our final decade together. I am grateful to have known him and to have found in him a quiet, shrouded integrity that I hope I can live up to someday. I am grateful for random moments before his early morning walks where he would come up to my room and say ‘Tu huni tikar jaag rahi e? Chal hun meri jaagan di baari aa gayi e, te tu hun saun ja.’ (You’re still awake? Well now I’m up so it’s your turn to go to sleep) and I would see him out before I grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge and made my way to bed at 6 am. I remember him pausing over my bookshelves and randomly pulling out volumes and putting them back asking me to recommend a book as he did the same from his shelves. I remember him and my Nani waiting up for me each night as I made my way home from putting the paper to bed no matter how often I told them to go to sleep because I could let myself in. I remember him recounting over and over again my childhood stories, told while perched on his shoulders in the Monkey Forests of Bali where I kept telling him ‘Dekho Abbi, aik haur kamaal’ or asking him in lieu of my best Tanhaaiyan recollections ‘Abbi, Kya aap vaaqi samjeeda hein?’. I remember him guarding my bookshelves as if they were his own when I left for England. I remember him always restlessly double and triple checking if our main gate and front door was locked. I remember him cheating at cards, so heartily and happily, because it was the only place he ever allowed himself to cheat. I remember him and I sneaking in spicy food when my Nani was asleep and us agreeing to keep it our secret. I remember him, on very rare occasions, singing in an unfathomably beautiful baritone. I remember him jumping up and down buzzing with excitement reading out my Oxford acceptance letter before I even knew I had gotten in.
And now I remember to remind myself that I must learn from him to have hope in the face of all this hopelessness.
‘Chalo Abbi Ji, hun meri jaagan di baari aa gayi e, te hun tussi saun jao’
And now, Abbi Ji, it’s my turn to wake up and it’s your turn to go to sleep.
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