Azhar Abidi

Into Oblivion - a short story

noreply@blogger.com (Azhar Abidi) — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 11:11:00 +0000

The ghost was standing at a road crossing. I saw her face as she watched the traffic go past. I stood fixed to my spot, watched the light turn green. She walked with a slow, meditative stride and she raised her hand to shield her eyes from the sun. A hand from my past reached out and brushed my cheek.

My aunt, Nusrat Begum, had lived and died in Pakistan many years ago. She was married to my mother’s brother and they had a son together, but my uncle passed away in the early seventies and she spent the rest of her life as a widow in Karachi, bringing up her child in a house made of limestone block and red Mangalore roof tiles in Old Clifton. Her house too remained preserved in its own time, like a lost world, full of hunting trophies, a billiard table, deep, sunken leather chairs, onyx consoles and carpets of great antiquity. Things were covered with dust. Traces of old wealth existed amid decay. Real Mughal miniatures hung from the walls even though the paint was peeling off. Glass cabinets full of bohemian crystal and china dolls nestled against musty Empire sofas. There was even my uncle’s old Rolls Royce rusting on bricks in the garage. Grass grew underneath it and a cat had somehow made its way inside and given birth to a litter of kittens on the back seat. Since my aunt could not drive, no one had used it after my uncle died.

My uncle used to sleep with a revolver under his pillow. One day, he put the gun to his head and shot himself. I was told that he had had a heart attack. The neighbours found my cousin hugging his father’s body. For months afterwards, he did not utter a single word. I was told it was some kind of sickness. Mercifully he made a full recovery except that he remembered nothing at all about his father’s suicide. And so the family hushed up the whole thing. Until my mother told me about it decades later, I had no idea of what actually happened.

My uncle, after trying his hand at several businesses, became a distributor of Western and Indian films in Pakistan. By the early sixties, he had made a fortune. He threw big parties and entertained lavishly. I remember his house was always filled with visitors. There were writers and actors and some beautiful actresses who I was in love with. After the 1965 war, the import of Indian films into Pakistan came to a stop and the film business went into a decline. My uncle took to drink and then he started having affairs. When my aunt found out, she left him. From that moment, he must have realised that he had run out of luck.

My aunt placed great affection on us – her nephews and nieces. When night fell, she would sit in her Voltaire chair dressed in her faded green dressing gown, while we gathered around her feet and listened to stories as the cicadas screeched outside. Ghost stories were our favourite. I remember the night she read us The Ancient Mariner from the wonderfully translated and abridged edition published by Ferozsons that some people might remember. We were so scared that we could barely sleep for it was a windy night and the shadows of trees turned and twisted like demons outside, but we loved every moment of it. Then there was Oscar Wilde’s story about the haunted house where a fresh bloodstain appeared on the floor in the morning. It scared me for weeks afterwards. The more gruesome and frightening the ghosts, the better. She obliged us, God bless her, she indulged us in our fetish until we squirmed but her favourite, I suspect, were stories of solitary and melancholic ghosts, lost souls in empty places, ghosts who remained ghosts because of unrequited love, or because they remained unconquered in spirit, or because, in their foolishness, they did not realise that the world could not be theirs.

I still remember the day she told us about the ghost of an English soldier who haunted the house where she lived when she was a young girl growing up in Calcutta. Unlike ghosts who left bloodstains on floors and dragged chains or banged doors in the dead of the night, this was a literary ghost who wrote. No one in her family could see him or hear him except for her. When she was ten or eleven years old, she spotted him writing in a window in the attic. At first, she thought that they had a guest staying with them but the servants knew nothing. Summoning all her courage, she went up into the attic. There was a chair and a desk by the window and in the drawer lay a manuscript. She started reading it and discovered that the ghost was writing his memoirs. Her English was good. She spotted some mistakes and she corrected them in pencil. The next day, she went up again and discovered new pages of the manuscript. She made some more corrections. The following day, a dozen pages awaited her. And from then on, she became a regular reader of the ghost’s memoirs. When Partition came in 1947, my aunt’s family sold their house and migrated to Pakistan.

I have many impressions of my aunt but if there is one impression, one picture, that always comes to mind, it is the image of her sitting on a musty sofa, in her faded green dressing gown, reading a novel. She was a voracious reader. She claimed that she had five thousand books in her house. She borrowed every new title that arrived at the British Council and the Sindh Club libraries and when she could not borrow new books there, she went to the Thompson & Thompson bookstore in Saddar to buy them. I saw her read everything from Daphne du Maurier, Melville, D. H. Lawrence, and the usual sub-continental suspects, James Michener and M. M. Kaye. She picked up whatever she could find.

Sometimes I noticed her reading an old, handwritten manuscript. When I asked her if it belonged to the ghost, she laughed and told me that ghosts not only haunted places and buildings, they haunted people too. I asked her why ghosts existed.

‘Well, my child, some of us cannot let go of the past and we remain trapped in it because it seems better than the present or because we cannot forget our suffering. I think it is quite possible that ghosts, if they exist, are no different. They cannot let go of the moment when they were most happy or when they suffered the most and so they remain in that moment forever, doing whatever it is that they were doing. They might have been writing or playing a child’s game – yes, ghosts come back as children too – trapped in their nostalgia. They might have been mothers who could not come to terms with the grief of losing a child, and so they become ghosts trapped in sorrow. They might have been innocent men murdered for crimes they did not commit, and so they come back as vengeful ghosts, or they might have died before they were unable to make peace with themselves and with those who loved them, and they so remain trapped in regret.’

‘When do they stop being ghosts?’ I asked.

A faint smile played on her lips. ‘Ghosts are ghosts because they are unable to make choices,’ she said. ‘Someone else has to make the choice for them. Someone who is still mortal needs to save them. When that person concludes for them whatever it is that they are doing, they become free.’

She seemed weary now. ‘But sometimes they cannot be helped,’ she said. ‘Sometimes they are too far gone, and there is no one left who remembers them or cares for them, and then they remain ghosts forever.’

I saw the ghost once. My aunt was asleep downstairs and I was upstairs, rummaging through a pile of old National Geographic magazines. I was turning the pages when I was drawn by the smell of pipe tobacco to one of the rooms. I peeped through the door and could just make the figure of a sandy haired Englishman writing on a desk. Everything about him was silent and still. It was so quiet in fact that I could hear the ticking of the clock from the dining room downstairs. He looked up at me and put a finger to his lips. Even as I blinked, he was gone and I was running down the stairs.

When I was older, I dismissed the vision as a figment of my imagination but ghosts, I discovered, do not only come in human guise. Some years ago, I was in a bookshop in Peshawar where I came across a memoir of an English soldier who had been killed in action during the second Afghan over a century ago. I turned over a few pages and a shiver ran down my spine - the dedication was for my aunt. I bought a copy but I lost it and I could not find another. It is not as if the book is rare. It simply does not exist.

All these things happened a long time ago. When I left Pakistan, I left this life of mine behind and no evidence remains of it now in my life in Australia except my memory of it. One should never put trust in memories. Memories fade or they turn into dreams. And so much is forgotten and so much is simply not remembered and so little trace is left of the things we said and did. Even the person I was once seems unrecognisable to me. It is as if there was another self of mine that is lost to me. Or as if I had never been born.

On cluster bombs

noreply@blogger.com (Azhar Abidi) — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 21:53:00 +0000

Few Australians would endorse investing in human misery but, as Azhar Abidi writes, investors need to be conscious of precisely where their money is being directed.

The Magic Carpet Flight Manual - BBC Friday Documentary

noreply@blogger.com (Azhar Abidi) — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 11:00:00 +0000

Available for a week on the BBC iplayer

And indefinitely on the World Service documentary archive

Sunday Times:

An emblem of what Marina Warner calls “orientalist fantasy”, flying carpets appear more in Hollywood films than the Arabian Nights. But Cathy FitzGerald, the presenter and producer of this enchanting half-hour, maintains a strong sense of magic as she quizzes a St Andrew’s physicist, a Japanese astronaut and a Pakistan-raised engineer [sic] who has chronicled their history. A lovely programme, also aired earlier in the day, that looks down at the prayer mat — and up to the stars.
Paul Donovan

The Secret History

noreply@blogger.com (Azhar Abidi) — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 01:24:00 +0000

I have uploaded the full text of my story, The Secret History of the Flying Carpet here.

Road to Chitral

noreply@blogger.com (Azhar Abidi) — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 03:58:00 +0000

Here is a new memoir/travelogue/essay about Pakistan that I wrote for Granta.

Pulp fiction

noreply@blogger.com (Azhar Abidi) — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 09:51:00 +0000

I wrote in an earlier post that I grew up reading the classical Urdu epics. True, but not entirely. I don't want to give the impression that I grew up in a high-brow literary household. Far from it. I collected comics and I read adventure stories. I never cared for the long, turgid novels by Dickens or Dumas. Tried to read them, couldn't and probably never will. I loved the action-packed fantasy novels of John Carter of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, which I still collect and read. With Dickens, I felt like watching automata going about their clockwork lives. His work never breaks its bounds. Dumas is swash-buckling but boring. Burroughs, in my humble opinion is fantastic. From page 1 of Princess of Mars, I was hooked. In a PC world, Burroughs' text is full of racism, imperialism and the superiority of the fighting white man (Confederate) but you've got to give credit where it's due. He's good. My measure for good is Italo Calvino: in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Calvino lists lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility and multiplicity as the things he values most in stories. Incidentally, he reckons that Dumas has all the ingredients. I reckon that Burroughs has them in spades. My hope is that one day, Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill (creators of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) will write a graphic novel based on the Princess of Mars. They show what they are capable of in the first chapter of the League, Vol 2 (the Phases of Deimos, to be precise!). If they do it, it'll be a monster.

The Magic Carpet Flight Manual

noreply@blogger.com (Azhar Abidi) — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 23:05:00 +0000

Coming up on the BBC World Service.

BBC WORLD SERVICE Friday 24 September 2010
www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice

The Magic Carpet Flight Manual

Friday 24 September

8.00-8.30pm BBC WORLD SERVICE

A tale of flying carpets, rockets and dreams, this programme examines why people still care about magic in an age of techno-wizardry... and how it feel when science threatens to make magical objects real.

Web-dreaming one day, writer Cathy FitzGerald stumbled on a site belonging to a museum in Iran. It purported to tell the "true history" of the flying carpet and detailed its many uses – military, as a means of aerial attack; commercial, as a vehicle for the transport of goods; and cultural, as a device to help readers in the library at Alexandria reach the high books. The article appeared across the web, rarely with any caveat or credit.

In search of a "real" flying carpet, Cathy tracks down the article's author, Azhar Abidi, who helps her separate carpet fiction from carpet fact. She goes on to meet a physicist working on levitation in the quantum world, and a Japanese astronaut who took a carpet ride in space.

Cathy FitzGerald explores the past, present, and future of the magic carpet and wonders what our desire to defy gravity tells us about ourselves.

Presenter/Cathy FitzGerald

noreply@blogger.com (Azhar Abidi) — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 07:07:00 +0000

Lama with radio.

noreply@blogger.com (Azhar Abidi) — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 10:27:00 +0000

My father bought his first hi-fi system when I was five years old. It consisted of an Akai amplifier, a pair of Yamaha speakers, a Dual gramophone and an Akai tape spool. The apparatus took up the entire side of a room but in 1973, it was state of the art. In this photograph, he is trying out the Akai headphones for the first time in our house in Bonn, Germany, where we lived at the time.

Father bought all of his records and spools in Germany too. In his music collection, there were dozens of gramophone records, a collection of Mendelssohn, Brahms (but no Mozart and Beethoven), various Engelbert Humperdinck hits, the Les Humphries Singers, Tom Jones, Beatles (A Collection of Beatles Oldies) and Frank Sinatra (Come Fly with Me). On those spools, he had selections by John Denver, Carpenters and Elton John that one of my cousins recorded for him.

When it became easier to buy music on tape during the late seventies, he splurged on a Panasonic tape deck. A flood of Abba and Bee Gees bootlegged music tapes followed. Years later, when I had my own hi-fi, I compared the two sound systems and I was surprised at the muffled and feeble sound that his system produced but when I think about that time now, all I remember is how much I did enjoy listening to music on it. It lifted me. It filled my mind with pure sound.

Now, 37 years after I took that photograph, I have my own pair of Bose speakers at home, a fancy amplifier and an ipod. I have bought pair after pair of headphones, from Sony, Grado, Bose - and now, a dainty little pair of aluminium earphones from Bang & Olufsen. The search for hi-fi equipment has its pleasures because it's a quest. It gives me a fix but it is a fleeing and momentary joy and it is usually followed by remorse. Basically, it's not the same anymore. I don't have a child’s concentration so the quality of the hi-fi makes no difference.

Sometimes though, for a fleeing moment, I do listen to music. I can hear every sound, every note as it is meant to be and then it it is the only thing I am doing. I am all ears again. My universe is music and I am a part of it. And sometimes the experience is so clear and so fresh that my eyes fill with tears. Then that passes too and I return to my own self once again, deaf to things.

Rocketeers

noreply@blogger.com (Azhar Abidi) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 08:13:00 +0000

This photograph dates from 1976 or 1977. My father took it at the cricket ground in Wah where my friends and I are about to launch a model rocket. From left to right, there is Shoaib Zaidi, a boy whose name I have forgotten, Shoaib Haleem, Shahid and his sister Huma, and, in the green shorts, Naveed Asghar. The boy running into the frame on the far left is our servant's son, Munna. He had to run to the ground. Everyone else went there in my father's yellow Volkswagen. I am the boy next to the car.

With a functional imagination it was not difficult to transport ourselves to Cape Kennedy, especially if one lay down on the grass or sat low enough, a foot or two above the ground, so that the dimensions changed - the grass turned into savannah and rocket in the distance towered over its launching pad like a real Saturn V, whence at any moment the engines ignited and with a great swoosh it hurtled up into space. Estes rockets could climb upto a thousand feet. Peering up, we would then wait for the parachute to open and the vessel to return to earth. The excitement of the thing was greatest when things went wrong, the parachute foiled and the rocket plummeted or when it caught fire and corkscrewed in a far corner of the field. We quite forgot ourselves in the thrill of witnessing disaster because it made the play real and true, although the joy was soon clouded over by dismay at the loss of a toy.

Hoshruba and the plum trees

noreply@blogger.com (Azhar Abidi) — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 07:08:00 +0000

When I was growing up in Pakistan, I read the Adventures of Amir Hamza and Tilism Hosh Ruba in Urdu, in the wonderful abridged editions published by Ferozsons that some people might remember. I was eight or nine years old and, for a few summer holidays, I read nothing else except for these belligerent, violent and wonderfully magical romances that had once been the staple of Urdu literature. I loved the rhythm of these books. I loved how the princes wore their hearts on their sleeves; how the fairies were utterly ravishing and the sorcerers truly evil, and the long, epic battles where blood flowed ankle-deep, corpses piled high and cloven heads flew through the air. After reading these passages, I felt so bloodthirsty that I had to recreate the battles myself.

There were two plum trees in our house. While my parents slept in the afternoon, I would gather the plums lying on the ground and count them. If they weren't enough to constitute two respectable armies - or if they had been pecked by birds and were not fit for military duty, I would climb up the trees and pluck more. I would arrange them on the ground in ranks - the legions of the evil, nefarious god-king Laqa on one side, and the allies of Amir Hamza on the other, and then, with a rock in my hand, I would dispatch the evil-doers to the abode of perdition.

The game required a great deal of imagination. I had to recreate the din of battle. I had to imagine how the fire pots from the catapults set alight the trunks of the lead elephants. I had to think of what an elephant scorched by fire, did to a columns of soldiers. Sometimes, I stole cocktail sticks and toothpicks from my father's cabinet so that I could sweep the enemy lines with a torrent of iron darts. In the frenzy of hand-to-hand battle, I had to find compassion for treating casualties. Plums impaled by lances or hacked by swords would be filled with mud, taped up and sent back into battle, so the slaughter could continue. Sometimes the battles went on for weeks. The armies regrouped and mounted new assaults. New campaigns were devised. The arsenal was modified. As long as there were plums, there was war.

I was routinely reprimanded because the plums from our garden never made it to our dining table. Their crushed and cloven seeds lay scattered under the trees instead - in their graveyards - but my battles released a whole lot of energy and gave me enormous satisfaction. And I never cared for plums anyway.

Brooke Bond House

noreply@blogger.com (Azhar Abidi) — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 09:23:00 +0000

A memory of growing up in Pakistan -

The house was not visible from the road. It was built into the side of a hill, and a steep path through its own private woodland led to its door. There were other grand residences in Murree from the days of the Raj but none like this trophy house, which had been custom built during the sixties for the German Consulate but later sold to Brooke Bond, a tea company in Karachi where my uncle worked. It was a charming place, built in the style of a Swiss chalet with low roofs, exposed beams and oak floors. The lounge room was an enormous area with a large stone fireplace and chestnut panelling along the walls. It had a northern aspect with three large windows that looked out across the valley of Kashmir. The brown curtains on the windows blended with the dark green carpet and the mauve sofas. There were four bedrooms along the outer rim of a L-shaped corridor. The largest was ensuite and had a small balcony with flower boxes. There was a communal bathroom and toilet for the remaining three. Towards the end of the corridor, a stairwell led down into the basement, but since the entire house was built into the side of a hill, the basement was not below ground but on a lower elevation. It lay underneath the lounge room and opened out to a small meadow of wild forget-me-nots, daisies and blue gentians.

I went there in the autumn of 1976 to stay with two of my uncles and their families. I was eight years old but the memory of that time is as clear in my mind as if it was yesterday. My father drove us there on the potted, rutted, rain-washed Murree Road from Islamabad, which skirted around the dry Margalla ridge. The air changed after Chorra Pani where we stopped for Coca Cola. It became noticeably cooler and clearer as if we were entering another medium. We could see into the hills where the scattered metal roofs of houses glinted on the wooded slopes. On the right side of the road, on a green hilly slope, we saw the ruins of the Lawrence sanatorium, where the orphans of English soldiers once used to live. Nothing remained of it except three crumbling walls and the arches of a roof, which had collapsed. Next we came to the S-shaped turn in the road at Bansragali, where a road forked out from the main path towards Lawrence College, one of the four public schools that the British built in India on the model of Eton and Harrow.

It was noon when we arrived at the residence. When the car engine was turned off, we could hear the sound of wind in the trees and the faint calling of mountain crows. The gatekeeper appeared wrapped in a grey woollen shawl. He had been sitting under the shadow of a tree and had arisen like a djinn when he saw us appear. He opened the small iron gate and carried the suitcases down to the house while I ran past him.

My uncle, my aunt and my three cousins from Karachi were already there, comfortably seated in the lounge room, sprawling and reclining on the various sofas and ottomans that lay scattered around the large room. My aunt had made a survey of the cupboards in the house and she was in ecstasies over her discoveries. The English crockery was a delight but it was a Meissen tea set in glazed white with purple flowers, each piece marked on the base with two swords, that took her breath away.

Murree is in the Himalayan foothills. The town lies on a four or five mile long ridge, about seven thousand feet above sea level. In the seventies, it still retained a quaint, colonial air. The main road was called the 'Mall' and many of the other roads had also kept their old English names, just as the shops were still called emporiums. There were only two restaurants there, Sam's and Lintott's, where we would have tea and cucumber sandwiches. The waiters were old soldiers from the disbanded British Indian Army, who wore their starched white uniforms with pride. Many of the buildings, such as the Cecil Hotel, were landmarks from before the Partition and lent the place the air of a forgotten world, a sort of Avalon, separated from the seething plains.

Time passed slowly in Murree. The effect took place after a few days of hectic activity. The fear of indolence, of losing time, of not seeing the sights, propelled us into an initial burst of outings. The first few days were eaten up by these distractions. The family was marshalled into picnics, long walks and excursions. We walked to Pindi Point the first day in preparation for the longer walk to Kashmir Point the next day. After these walks, we proceeded by motor car to further destinations like Ayubia and Nathiagali. Following this flurry of activity, the remainder of the holiday had little variation in the daily routine spent walking, reading books and playing board games. The walks would commence from the Post Office and end with a stroll along the Mall, where the women would browse in the various emporiums while the men inspected the two well-stocked bookstores. Some days, we lingered at the Mall, and other days our circumnavigation of the ridges took longer, but most days were generally the same. When the rains began, the light failed and we were confined in the house for days. With nothing else left to do, there was no remorse of time lost.

We were not a religious family. No one fasted or prayed with any regularity. One of my cousins was a hippie. In his faded denim bell-bottoms and horn-rimmed glasses, he looked like John Lennon. People on the Mall would stop and stare but we children were in awe of him because he was studying at Berkeley, which we all knew was one of the finest universities in the world. Hippiedom was his prerogative. The girls wore jeans and T-shirts and none of the women covered their hair. The men were partial to Johnny Walker Black Label and the women talked to each other in English, like the aristocratic Russians in Tolstoy's novels who speak French. We wouldn't have called ourselves westernised because that implied an apeing of manners rather than a refinement of taste, but my aunts did have a fondness for Louis XV sofas and Bohemian crystal.

I had five uncles on my father's side. They were descended from Indian nobility but their fortune had declined with time and there was little left of the old splendour. Stories of old Lucknow were rarely mentioned in our family, in particular to us children lest we too fall into the mischief of decadent pastimes. Only a few years ago did I discover that my great-grandfather nearly ruined himself by refusing to accept defeat in a kite-flying match for fourteen years. This involved taking up a new kite as soon the adversary brought down the previous one, whether it was day or night, sunshine or rain. The kites were waterproofed. Servants worked in shifts round the clock and guests were continually fed and entertained by singers and dancers, all at considerable expense. The British administrator eventually intervened to save him from complete ruin. Observing how the family was squandering its wealth, my grandfather left home in 1899 and enrolled himself at the Hewitt Engineering Institute in Lucknow. Our future belonged to technology and industry. The gilded drawing rooms of my aunts were the culmination of the same positivist enlightenment that guided my grandfather and his sons, who studied in technical colleges and were shaped by a progressive belief in science.

Zia's Islamisation soured things for us. My father, a British-educated engineer, found himself at odds with the times. When the fashion changed to shalwar kameez, he continued to wear his suits – an act of subversion perhaps, in which he was abetted by his brother in Karachi. His brother would have nothing to do with the prevailing dogma either, his only concession to religion being meditation in the Zen Buddhist tradition, which was his equivalent of prayers. And long after most of his acquaintances rediscovered the mosque, my father would stay at home, barricaded behind a copy of The Economist. It pained him that Pakistan was falling behind the rest of the world. We were going backwards, he would tell us. The mullahs and the military were taking over and it was time to leave.

I never returned to Brooke Bond House. I migrated to Australia many years ago and have lived here since, happily, but there are times when something in the breeze, or the sunlight falling through the leaves, tugs and snatches at my old memories and then, by some strange process of transmutation, the years fall away and I find myself transported back to my childhood. There I am, at Brooke Bond House. I am eight years old and I am standing outside watching my beam of torchlight dissolve into the dark night. I can hear voices from inside the house. The yellow light streams through the windows. The warm fireplace beckons. The August air has a wintry chill but the night sky commands me to observe it as if it can only become aware of itself through a child's eyes. And so, spellbound I stand there, gazing up at the Milky Way that looks the like a great, silent river of light. That memory still obliterates everything before it because it showed me perfection.

Azhar Abidi

Into Oblivion - a short story

On cluster bombs

The Magic Carpet Flight Manual - BBC Friday Documentary

The Secret History

Road to Chitral

Pulp fiction

The Magic Carpet Flight Manual

BBC WORLD SERVICE Friday 24 September 2010 www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice

The Magic Carpet Flight Manual

Rocketeers

Hoshruba and the plum trees

Brooke Bond House

BBC WORLD SERVICE Friday 24 September 2010
www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice