Of Smokeless Fire by A.A. Jafri (i wanna iguana read aloud TXT) 📕

them from the memory of your children,’ he fulminated at the country’s educational system.

Why was he wasting hard-earned money sending his son to the most prestigious school in the city? So they could teach him mendacities? Mansoor needed a re-schooling, a liberal edification. Noor felt compelled to take him under his tutelage. And thus began his daily lectures in the humanities and liberal arts, carefully calibrated, judiciously deliberated. Noor started ordering books from Thomas & Thomas for Mansoor. Located in Saddar, the city’s centre, it was Karachi’s oldest bookshop which had survived the mayhem of the Partition. Sadiq and Noor often went there together. While the professor would buy Turgenev and Trollope, Noor would purchase Bertrand Russell’s books. The first book he bought for Mansoor was an abridged edition of Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which he forced his son to read. Once the boy was done reading a book, Noor would then discuss it with him. This became his practice.

Mansoor, on the other hand, noticed a sharp rise of vitriol in his father’s nightly discourses. He lashed out against the country, relentlessly berated the military rule and cursed the religious establishment. And all this time, Noor used the English language, as if to irk Farhat. But it annoyed Mansoor more than it annoyed his mother, especially when Noor kept referring to Pakistan as ‘your country’, as if he himself was just a passing critic, an alien resident—someone inside, looking from the outside. Mansoor hated his father’s attitude towards Pakistan.

‘Abba, why do you keep saying that it’s my country? Is this not your country, too?’ Mansoor asked one night.

‘It is your country! You were born here; I was not.’ Then, after a slight pause, Noor continued, ‘I can live here physically, but I don’t have to accept it mentally.’

Noor’s estrangement with the country had deepened in 1958, after a military coup overthrew the prime minister and the President and tossed out the country’s first Constitution into the rotting trash bin of history.

‘Why didn’t you go back to India if you disliked Pakistan so much?’ Mansoor sighed.

Noor pursed his lips, then sighed before continuing, ‘Because, my son, the India I grew up in has also left me.’

‘Isn’t there any other country where you can live?’

‘I am a man with no country; I am a man with no faith. I can live anywhere and nowhere at the same time.’

The irony of his father’s statement whizzed past Mansoor, but he still nodded; and Farhat, knowing little English, remained frustrated. Occasionally, she protested; frequently, Noor reprimanded.

‘Why can’t you two talk in Urdu . . . after all, it is our mother tongue and the national language,’ she said.

‘Why didn’t you learn English? It is an international language, after all,’ Noor replied in a mocking tone.

Belching out a sardonic ‘huh’, she replied, ‘Who would have taught me English? If I had insisted on it, my father would have kicked me out of the house.’

‘Just keep quiet when you don’t know anything,’ Noor shot back, his choler rising as he heard the truth in her statement.

‘You men are afraid of educated women.’

‘Yes, many men are, but I am not. If you had really wanted an education, you would have got it yourself.’

‘Are you saying it is my fault? It was men like you who didn’t want women to be educated.’

‘Men like me would have given their daughters the same education that they gave to their sons. You don’t have to go far. Look at my sister. I fought with my father to get her an education, and now look at her! She has a PhD in political science and is a respected professor in Australia.’

Noor did face his father’s ire when, against his wishes, he got his sister, Rehana, admitted at Patna University and then later paid the tuition for her to study at Oxford. His father did not speak to him for three months. In contrast to Rehana, Farhat had received only a primary education, that too at home, and mostly imparted by her grandfather. She studied fifth-standard textbooks, but as was the case for many of her other female cousins, the doors to education were slammed shut on her after that. Obscurantist tradition put a damper on her dreams, and Farhat’s schooling settled on religious education, reciting the Qur’an in Arabic and the Hadith in Urdu. Technically, she was not illiterate, for she knew how to read and write in Urdu. But that was all she could do. She was not exposed to literature; she was never introduced to the discipline of history, or ever had any encounters with the liberal arts.

Tears rolled down Farhat’s eyes as she turned to the other side of the bed. Mansoor felt a rush of blood to the head. He resented his father for treating her so gruffly, and although Noor never abused her physically, he would lash out verbally whenever she challenged him. After a temporary pause, Noor recollected his scattered thoughts and continued with his diatribe, ‘Son, the ruin that ignorance has brought on this nation, especially on women, is unforgivable.’

Mansoor didn’t know who to blame or what to do. Clearly, his mother regretted the fact that she had not received an education, and it was also clear that she had wanted it. He wished he could teach her everything he learned at school. But now, it was too late.

Eight

Haider Rizvi had learned from one of his ‘anonymous sources’ that the coup of 1958 had the backing of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the American President who knew about the overthrow of the government even before the Pakistani prime minister did. Haider’s sources also informed him that Zakir had returned to Pakistan to move permanently to Islamabad, the new capital of the country, where he would head a new university rumoured to be funded by the American government. When Noor heard this, he yelled, ‘Mashallah, this is Zakir’s clever way of ingratiating himself with the new dictator. He wants to be