Print & EmailBy HM Naqvi
Illustrations by Vikram Nongmaithem
I WAS ensconced at Thomas & Thomas one afternoon, inhaling the balm of damp pages, when a lean, elderly gentleman strode in, dressed in a woollen three-piece suit, and demanded a copy of Robinson Crusoe at the register. Although he wore a knit skullcap, his wan complexion — like the delicate flesh of our bekti — and orotund pronunciation suggested he was an Englishman, which was curious, because Englishmen had become a dwindling species since the Raj. When he persisted in learned, laboured Urdu – “Toom samajta hai?” the boy behind the register shook his head like Man Friday. Surveying the shelves with one open eye, the gentleman grimaced then produced a kerchief to pat his creased forehead. “Sala,” he muttered from under his beaked nose and whiskers, “jahil,” before turning to walk out.
But before he could leave, I called out, “This way, sir.” I could have located any volume in the store. It wasn’t because I had formally studied history or philosophy or literature. I hadn’t. I had studied communication, a discipline so new and nebulous that neither instructor nor student could articulate a cogent thought about it. In other times, I might have joined the restive, unemployed, or marginally employed youth of Karachi, known to move in packs on motorcycles with detached silencers, but since the coup, there had been a renaissance in the media industry, an irony never quite reconciled by discourse. In time, MTV set up shop, a cross-dresser hosted a talk show, and politicians were held accountable on primetime (“Un ki patloon utar dee,” some would say). And in due course, I was snapped up by a startup channel and put to work, procuring images, mostly from the Internet, that corresponded to international news. Once in a while, during a strike or the monsoon, I was called upon to write a bulletin. Later, I would become a television personality in my own right, but at the time, a year and half into my career, I was frustrated by the long hours, general lack of stimulation, and whenever I had a free afternoon, I would return to my childhood haunt and ways. I had practically grown up at Thomas & Thomas; I lived upstairs.
As I guided the gentleman to Robinson Crusoe, negotiating shelves spaced too closely together, he asked whether I had read the novel. I nodded. I had read it a decade earlier, perched tenuously on a stack of Life magazines, which eventually toppled over. “Well, young man,” he intoned, “what do you make of it?”
“It’s okay,” I blurted. “It’s nice.”
“Okay?” he repeated like a schoolmaster. “Nice?”
“Well,” I stuttered, “I could elaborate.”
When the ostensible Englishman nodded emphatically, I told him that I found it stylistically archaic and dramatically somewhat flat but its role in the formal development of the novel, not to mention its philosophic implications, made it worthwhile. As he considered my response, considered me — he did not speak or move for a full minute — I avoided his tealeyed gaze by scrutinizing my feet. Finally, he pronounced : “We should discuss this matter over a cup of tea.”
Grabbing me by the elbow, he tugged me out into the weak sunshine, and hailed a passing rickshaw. “I live around the corner,” he mentioned as we negotiated rush hour traffic. But he didn’t live around the corner.
THE RICKSHAW deposited us curbside off Bandar Road — across the street from the fancifully named Abraham Lincoln Ayurvedic Clinic and adjacent to Capri cinema. It was the outer periphery of the old Parsi Colony. “We’re here,” my host announced with a wave. There was a vacant plot behind us bordered by a boundary wall and a narrow lane, apparently a one-way; angry crows picked at a heap of rubbish halfway down. “Would you be so kind as to pay the rickshawallah?”
The charge wasn’t much — thirty, maybe forty rupees. When I turned, I watched my companion bounding down the street with the pace and line of a fast bowler. As I scuttled after him, my eye happened to catch a verse of doggerel rendered in calligraphic graffiti against the side of a building: KASH MERA DIL PATANG HOTA… Then I lost sight of the man. Put differently, he vanished.
There was no way he could have reached the end — the road stretched for a good furlong — even at his impressive stride. Perhaps, I mused, he had leapt into an open manhole. Only when I reached the garbage mound, I heard a voice calling, like a hawker’s. Then I noticed a V-shaped crack cleaving the wall. Climbing in, I found myself in a vast plot overrun with rushes and slumped fronds. Relics lay scattered amid the growth: a fractured dining chair, a bent umbrella, and what I guessed was a bidet.
At the arid far end rose a double-storied bungalow daubed, it would seem, by a dirty mustard varnish. It was one of those colonial sandstones that could be found in monochrome shots in the pages of lost publications such as the Civil & Military Gazette, featuring pillars and jutting latticed balconies and striated arched doorways. I had always thought such edifices had long been abandoned, under litigation or the purview of the land mafia. I was wrong. Avoiding a depleted flowerbed marked by broken bricks, I approached the place, warily. A weathered sign, fixed to a hollow metal pole, read:
NO TRESPASSI
VIOLATORS WILL BE SHO
SURVIVORS WILL BE SHOT AGA
My host emerged from inside after a few moments, purposefully brushing his trousers, before offering an extended hand. “You can call me Skinner, Mr Skinner.”
WHILE SKINNER arranged tea — I could smell a gas burner (and, I believed, wet spinach leaves) — I sat cross-legged and still on an armchair in the darkened belvedere. The curtains were heavy and drawn and at least one of the three French windows was boarded up. Although the place was remarkable in many ways — the tiled floor beneath my feet was engraved with quatrefoils, there was a copula overhead — the novelty of the ambience, the relict air, gave way to a tickling sense of unease. The sign warning trespassers had been a bit much (although, I supposed, it might have been a joke); and somewhere in the house, a dog barked riotously (but then, dogs bark). It was when I spotted the pistol on the mantle amid the haberdashery — a smooth, whale gray, old fashioned contraption — that I felt a bead of sweat trickle down the side of my ribs.
“You aren’t a thief, are you?”
Startled, I sat up like I had been slapped across the nape. “No, sir!”
Skinner had presumably been observing me for some time, tray in hand. Setting it down, he said, “That’s a Mauser, if you’re wondering” — I wasn’t — “a C96.” Picking it up by the hilt, a bulbous thing, he aimed it at arm’s length from my head. “It’s Germanmanufactured, he continued, “Churchill carried one, and Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence.”
Leaning to one side, I nodded vigorously.
“Please,” he added, waving the thing in the air, “have a cup of tea. It will get cold. I’m sorry but I don’t believe I can offer you any biscuits.”
“Oh,” I blurted immediately, helping myself to a cup of black tea, “that’s okay. I’m not that fond of biscuits anyway.”
Putting the pistol away —or rather, shoving it between his thigh and the arm of the divan — Skinner remarked, “But you are fond of literature.”
I nodded again.
“Conversing with you,” he said, “is an exercise in pulling teeth.”
There was no way he could have reached the end of the road, even at his impressive stride. Perhaps he had leapt into an open manhole
“Well,” I should have said, “you were pointing the Mauser at me,” but of course didn’t. And then the dog howled, causing me to jump.
