by Anjum Niaz
It’s an elegy, this time for
her beloved Pip, “patriotic and preposterous” – the father Sara Suleri never
let the reader of Meatless Days forget: his pedestrian English accent; his
irascibility with his brood of six (“You tended to chide us before we were
children”). The English professor at Yale gripped us with the cold-blooded
murder of the fairest of all Ifat, her sister, (“she dies inside me daily”) and
the hit and run death of her Welsh mother: Surraya Mair Suleri, daughter of
John Amos Jones, by a rickshaw at Punjab University where she, like her
daughter, taught English and was adored by her students.(“I think each of us died
in some way the day they buried Mamma”).
Privy
to the most intimate memories of the Suleri household embedded in the golden
era of Lahore, “Oh, City of Lights, the grave-homes of our mother, sister and
now our father”, Sara, robustly engaged us in the intrepid social fabric of the
fabulous 60’s and 70’s woven around the changing seasons and her father’s blind
devotion to ‘General Zulu’ Haq: “You were quite chummy with that maniacal
general”.
A
decade and two years later, there she is, in the dim-lit corridor of Yale,
waddling along in her black patent flats burdened by the endlessly flowing
kurta – a rich silk Wedgwood blue stripes – worn with a loosely fitted
chooridar and a scarf carefully clutching her shoulders but girlishly pushed
away. Her characteristic bob, parted in the middle, still drapes the sad, sad
face.
Sara
starts to read and opens the first chapter of her new book, Boys will be
Boys: A daughter’s elegy,
hot from the University of Chicago Press. It’s a title jokingly chosen by Z.A.
Suleri (Z.A.S.) for his unwritten autobiography. The prominent political
journalist turned editor died in 1999. He was 86.
Her
voice cracks as she recites Ghalib, Iqbal and many more during the next one
hour, narrating nuggets from randomly picked pages packed in a graveyard of
memories. The 13 chapters, prefixed always by an Urdu couplet: “Pip who loved
Ghalib with a passion typical to his nature” are enticingly crafted around her
family with ZAS as the chief protagonist.
Deathlike
silence prevails in the small room where Sara Suleri Goodyear, 50, celebrates
the life and times of her father. “When Pip died, I moaned. I thought some
remnant in me had been discarded.” As if to make amends for the fun she poked
at him, cruelly taking the wind out of his pompous sails in Meatless Days, the
daughter now wants to make her peace. “On Judgment Day, I will say to God, ‘Be
merciful, for I have already been judged by my child,” ZAS would chide her.
But
her rendition is inaudible, poorly constructed. She appears in pain, her face
distorted, lips puckered, head bent, shoulders sagging, Sara halts often as she
turns the pages and stumbles over sentences once too often. Her vocal chords
suffer, whispering hoarsely while attempting to mouth words. A glass of water
is pushed sympathetically towards her to salve her tortured delivery.
“Whatever
continents may intrude to interrupt our narrative, the circle of life only
seems to grow tighter and tighter,” she continues.
Is
her inside weeping? her heart tearing? her soul grieving? None dare fidget. The
crowd is mostly Indian.
On
Indo-Pa war and liberation of Bangladesh in, Sara says philosophically: “ I
watched you, Pip, during the bitter war of 1971. It take me much time to
mention that war because of its colossal failures, its unutterable consumption
of lives. I am not sorry Bangladesh is in place – it was a stupid idea, anyway
, to have an east wing and a west wing of Pakistan, separated by a thousand-odd
miles of enemy territory, like a bird without a body.
Sara well remembers how they had to be
collecting funds for the cyclone victims to the erstwhile East Pakistan. Nuzzi,
her sister, had a cook from Bengal who “told me that the last time he returned
to Bangladesh there was another enormous upheavel in the Ganges. Uprooting
villages, wreaking havoc where havoc should not have been wreaked. He said he
and his family spent days clinging to some trees…I felt ashamed.”
Referring
to some photographs of her father from his early days as editor for Dawn which someone had sent to her she says, “When I
looked at the photographs of that young man – with a face disturbingly like my
own – I knew that if I did not love him already, I would until God’s heavenly
Muslim universe had descended and taken him from me for good.”
But
she quickly sets the record straight: “A saddening thought. But you were, Pip,
always exuberant about your editorials and your articles, even when you did
them everyday.”
When
all’s over, I walk away, self-contained, a trifle triumphant over the
Yale-wallahs: I consider Sara’s discourse my intellectual property right solely
as a Pakistani first and a Lahori second. I saw it happen. “She looks so dukhi
(sad)” says the young Nandini as we walk out together. Her male companion,
another Indian student, has specially come to hear Sara, but leaves
disappointed. “Maybe she’s not well…it seems that she didn’t really want to be
here.”
Read
the book! That’s what I did and could not lay it down. “A Proust in Pakistan,
to wander among her own several lives” now gives us a rare peep into the secret
life of Pip - a man with human frailties, never mind his self-righteousness.
The
aging and ailing Lion as Sara calls her father “adopts” Shahida in the hoary
twilight of his life. The woman – crude to the core and scheming to the hilt
according to Sara’s accounts, works in the advertising section of The Pakistan
Times where ZAS is the big boss , she comes howling with a complaint of sexual
harassment. Not only is the alleged abuser (innocent of the crime) summarily
kicked out, but “Pip came home with his blushing daughter”, giving Sara and her
siblings a “stepsister”!
Sara
tantalizes the reader with the ambivalent relationship between the young woman
and her father. We’re told how Shahida takes over the life and home of Pip, who
badly needed a “companion” and allows this peroxide blonde with a generous
bosom to ransack their home – throw “Mamma’s china” out, put up shining cheap
curtains, get rid of the gold nib Parker and Mont Blanc that “Papa” loved to
write with. She even accompanies him to New York during a UN session and stays
grandly at the UN Plaza!
“After
you had left, Pip, stepsister Shahida began pestering each of us for
‘por-torni’”, until they finally figured out what the Punjabi wench wanted was
a power of attorney to keep ZAS’s Lahore house where she’s set up a Z.A Suleri
Trust Foundation and ambitiously appointed herself the President!
Sara
regales us with her tale of “Scorch & Soda” (Scotch) that ZAS enjoyed
furtively and loved eating “meat sausages” – who cares if they had a bit of
pork! “Get rid of the sausages !Hide the sausages!” bellowed ‘Pip’ to his kids
when some “religious-looking visitors turned up” at the hospital in London
where ZAS was admitted.
As
for politics: there was “Bobby Shafto (Nawaz Sharif) fat and fair with his
Model Town estates and innumerable mills of corruption”; while Benazir Bhutto
“promsied some hope until she married her scoundrel.”
Sara
abbreviates “Paki” for Pakistan and “Mozzies” for Muslims throughout the book.
They make for an easy read, why quibble?
“Ifat
wore rings, just as I do”. Sara can say that again: I have a hard time counting
the number of glittering baubles covering all her 8 fingers as she tentatively
turns the pages while reading from them.
“Yes
Pip, he (Austin) is still my husband…you see me married, domesticated,” Sara
addresses her father and recounts her marriage to a widower; a millionaire, a
Goodyear (the tyre man); double in age with a daughter “older than I am…I
leapfrogged to become a step- great grandmother”. Austin Goodyear owns a yacht
called “Mermaid” and a farmhouse in Maine. “Sara make him a Muslim”, urges ZAS
from afar.
Who
won’t remember Abdul Ali Khan - “a feudal gentleman if ever there was one” as
the Principal of Aitchison College. Well the tyrant expelled Shahid (Sara’s
brother) for writing “libelious and obscene lyrics about his various teachers.
Pip called him over the phone a bull and a pig” when he refused to take Shahid
back.
And
Zeno – Dawn’s most respected columnist: “would send poisoned darts at Pip and
Pip would send them back at Zeno”.
“What
was it about Pip’s relationship to friends?” asks the daughter who cannot
“recall a single of his friendships that was not somehow trammeled by history.”
Of his cousins “Uncle” Shamim and his younger brother Nasim the journalist who
later became the UN Ambassador at New York, ‘Pip’ never saw eye to eye.
“Pip
your handwriting still can wrench me as your Quran (that ZAS gave when Sara
left for the US in 1976) has traveled with me – and will forever – from home to
home.”
“Ifat-Tillat-Nuzhat-Sara”,
ZAS would yell and each of his daughters would come running: “If possible we
would still be running to his side today.”
Except
Ifat and Nuzhat are dead and so is ‘Pip’.
“Good
night, sweet Pip, flights of angels sing thee to thy rest! You will be back
more times than you know. I was always obstinate,” thus ends a daughter's
elegy, Boys
will be Boys.
NOTE: This article was first published in Dawn,
23 Nov 2003. We have published it here on Jazbah.org with permission from the
author.
© Jazbah.org 2008. (source:http://kazbar.org/)