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

Gilli-dundda is a popular subcontinent game that only needs a big stick, the dundda, and a small stick, the gilli. The objective of the game is to hit the gilli with the dundda as far as possible.

Suspicious of the dictator’s intentions, the barrister had nicknamed him General Dundda Khan, because he was often pictured with a stick in his hand, especially when he donned his grandiose military uniform, the warrior image demanding to be seen in all its sinister glory in order to demoralize his democratic enemies.

*

It had been a while since The Unholy Quartet had had a proper gathering. So, this time around, Haider invited all of them for dinner at his house to celebrate Zakir’s return and his new career as a would-be academic. He wanted to find out from the man himself whether what he had heard from his source was true or not. Haider lived in the north Nazimabad area of Karachi, a newly built enclave originally designed for federal government employees. When the capital shifted to Islamabad, many middle-class families were also allowed to move to this residential area. Since it was one of the best-planned areas in Karachi at the time, designed by Italian architects, Haider had decided to build his house there. It was a modest bungalow without a name—unlike the Kashana-e-Haq—and with a fractional address: 33/8, Block C.

Having no separate men’s quarters, Haider had his friends ushered in by a Bengali servant to his working library. Cluttered with books, some opened, many piled precariously over each other, and with papers strewn all over his writing desk, his library accentuated its value in use. Four large bookshelves covered two adjacent walls. A twenty-four-volume set of Encyclopaedia Britannica and a fifty-four-volume set of The Great Books of the Western World, bookended by a brass horse, occupied much of the space. There were other smaller bookshelves in the room as well, containing an array of books on politics, a Roget’s Thesaurus and two volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary. In one corner, an old sitar stood alone, surrounded by two chairs, a dusty reminder that someone fiddled with music in this household.

‘Are you working on a story, Haider?’ Sadiq asked, noticing all the handwritten notes that lay scattered over the writing desk.

‘Actually, I am working on a book on the representatives of Muslims in the partition of India.’

‘Oh, really? What are you going to call it?’ Noor asked.

‘Representatives of Muslims and the Partition of India.’

‘A scholar amongst us?’ Noor asked.

‘We already have a scholar amongst us, and his name is Sadiq Mirza,’ Haider clarified.

‘Oh, yes. I forgot about your books, Sadiq. Sorry!’

‘Don’t worry, Noor; I am trying to forget about them, too,’ Sadiq replied.

Although everyone laughed at his joke, one of Sadiq’s books, Poetry of Rebellion in the Urdu Tradition, had already been hailed by the critics as path-breaking work.

After a few rounds of London Lager, the conversation turned to Pakistani politics, a requirement as usual. Two years into power, the field marshal, the first military dictator, had issued a public proclamation designating 27 October—the anniversary of his coup—a public holiday to commemorate the day as the ‘day of revolution’. In one of his radio broadcasts, he declared: ‘My beloved citizens, my ultimate aim is to restore democracy. I declare this to you, unequivocally, in the presence of God.’

‘The man doesn’t even know how to spell democracy,’ Noor complained to his friends.

‘Give the general a chance; don’t be so quick to judge him,’ Zakir defended the man.

‘Give General Dundda a chance to do what? Ruin the country? Establish tyranny?’

‘Is this the face of a tyrant?’ Zakir asked.

‘The face of a tyrant doesn’t always resemble Stalin’s, and the gulags are not always in Siberia.’

‘You just need an excuse to criticize anything and everything about Pakistan. Show some patriotism, my good man!’ Zakir got fed up with Noor.

‘“Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious,” said Oscar Wilde,’ Noor replied. After a pause, he continued, ‘If I criticize Pakistan, it is not out of hate, it is because of love, and if you don’t criticize your country for its faults, you don’t take your country seriously.’

A dead silence took over the room. It seemed that Zakir’s confrontations with the barrister had begun to happen with greater frequency and with increasing zeal.

The call to dinner by Haider’s servant came at a fitting moment, forcing the friends to move to a different room and shifting the conversation from the infuriating to the banal. During dinner, Zakir revealed that he had actually resigned from the FAO and was going to join the Planning Commission that Dundda Khan had set up. No wonder he was defending the government. Now that he has to wipe the field marshal’s ass, he will not accept any criticism of the government, Noor thought.

Corruption in the country continued with reckless abandon as General Dundda promoted himself to become the Chief Martial Law Administrator (CMLA). To Noor, CMLA was really an acronym for ‘Coordinate My Lies Accordingly’. After a slight hiatus, when the general appointed his cronies to write a new Constitution, Zakir hailed his decision as something wondrous, the outcome of which would usher ‘real democracy in Pakistan’. Zakir’s joining of the general’s government created an uneasy distance between him and the rest of the group. From then on, the other three regarded him as a government mole.

*

Mansoor’s education continued as planned by his parents, but Noor remained oblivious to the religious teacher’s existence. Maulvi Nazir, a corpulent, grizzled-haired man, in the image of Sancho Panza, sans the donkey, his clothes smelling of spicy food, had endeared himself to Mansoor. His two-hundred pounds, sitting precariously on a five-foot, three-inch frame, shook with his deep rumbling laughter every time he told a joke. In between these jokes, Maulvi Nazir mostly scared Mansoor with threats of punishments of the grave. He told Mansoor that drinking alcohol was the root of all evil, and that the penalty for this