BOOK REVIEW: Saqi’s unrepentant sinfulness

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 by Khaled Ahmed

 Aap-Beeti/Paap-Beeti;
By Saqi Farooq;
Akademi Bazyaft Karachi 2008;
Pp176; Price Rs 300

Saqi’s gravitation to Habib Jalib was natural in a way too because he saw the anarchist in him where others saw a revolutionary, and the quarrels that took place were incidental to the way they related

You don’t know what kind of irreverent sinner you are up against in this book till I have told what he did in his earlier book titled Hajibhai Paniwala. This was also the main poem in the collection and Paniwala was not the shopkeeper who sold water but he was so called because there was water in his testicles. He sat squatting with his enormous waterlogged genitals in front of him covered with cloth like a table; in fact, he packed the spices on top of them.

What kind of animal is Saqi Farooqi? Reading his life of paap (sin) I am put in the mind of Henry Miller’s work. If he is a self-publicist showcasing his sins like Josh, then the difference between him and Josh is that he is a constantly self-deprecating picaro who insults because he doesn’t respect himself. In the process, he puts a two-pronged poker through Urdu’s tight sphincter and violently shakes up the contents of its clotted colon. The result is a lot of flatulence of platitudes through which Saqi walks with his nose tweaked in his fingers, followed by some very fresh explosion of funny expressions in the style of Perelman.

He is the suicide-bomber of Urdu literature who has survived. There was nothing for it but to get the bomber’s jacket and pack it with TNT and ball-bearings of honest opinion and walk into the palace of a strangely arrested post-1947 Urdu literature and its calcified practitioners. Saddled with a heart-breakingly stupid name Qazi Muhammad Shamshad Nabi Farooqi, Saqi went to school in Dhaka but clashed with Urdu in Chittagong when vacationing with his uncle, gobbling a collection of Urdu put together by Lahore’s literary journal Adab-e-Latif.

After partition, Saqi spent his youth in Pakistan — and the book under review records those experiences — before migrating to the UK disguised as a ‘grocer/butcher’ to avoid death through wandering and fornicating dangerously in an increasingly ideological Pakistan. In London, he admired but did not fail to insult Noon Meem Rashid and Faiz Ahmad Faiz simply because he had his own point to make to them about their work. The book sheds new light on Noon Meem that might help in deciphering this rather self-marginalised egoist who produced poetry that Urdu literature was not destined to be ready for. But both poets loved him for what he was, which is Saqi’s wicked way of proving their greatness.

Saqi’s highly original squint at things got him into trouble with the expatriate Paki community in the UK. He got caught in the crossfire of the furore over Salman Rushdie’s blasphemous novel which Saqi thought mediocre anyway. The bearded Paki in London, who compensates with his intolerance for being away from the religious paradise that is Pakistan, riles Saqi no end. He produces a purple patch in Urdu to shame Rabelais in French, describing the pious expatriate’s “untrimmed beard looking like the clotted pubic hair of an unwashed ill-smelling behemoth”. When an offended Paki rang him to tell him that his wife could be raped in revenge, Saqi asked him where he could bring his German wife so that the pious rapist could go through the act.

An exhibitionist Saqi appears naked on the back of the book, vengefully hugging a bottle of wine. That is to make your Paki pieties quiver a little in rage. Yet, as you read his wanderings with his friends in Karachi you are frequently brought close to tears. Saqi can be insidious with his understated griefs. The decade from 1953 to 1963 saw him half-heartedly employed as clerk or tutor with no loyalty to anything he did except his love of literature. That got him in touch with the big people of Urdu like Ibrahim Jalees, got printed in Sibte Hasan’s Lailo-Nihar and Qasimi’s Imroze in Lahore. He sat with Nazeer Naji too trying to negotiate his linguistic creativity with the more practical breadwinning world of journalism.

He got to know Jon Elia, the fourth brother of Rais Amrohvi taken away by the sectarian violence of Karachi, Syed Muhammad Taqi of Jang and Syed Muhammad Abbas. There was instant resonance between the two, only Elia was self-heroic and Saqi anti-hero. Both however could reach back and trace themselves to the angular genius of Yas Yagana. Saqi’s gravitation to Habib Jalib was natural in a way too because he saw the anarchist in him where others saw a revolutionary, and the quarrels that took place were incidental to the way they related.

But Saqi’s depth of feeling was plumbed by Salim Ahmad whose brother Shamim Ahmad — who loved the same girl as Saqi but was devastated when Saqi bedded her first — was equally known in the world of Urdu letters as a critic. He spent a lot of ‘quality time’ with prose-writer Asad Muhammad Khan too — understand this as total slothful do-nothingism — which produced creativity in defiance of all laws of moral justice.

Saqi understood the Salim Ahmad he revered as an endlessly creative person who, instead of forward, went backward, like Muhammad Hasan Askari and Akbar Ilahabadi before him, into what can be described as an unoriginal religious recidivism. The persons he most admired without finding chinks in them were Jamil Jalibi and Mushfiq Khwaja. Jalibi, with his ready-for-others car and his official capacity in the revenue department, impressed with his persistent humanity and devotion to chronicling Urdu literature. Mushfiq Khwaja, ‘the man of the manuscripts’, was more subtle in doing what Saqi has done to Urdu with insult: mourn the death of creativity in Urdu literature after 1947 with a belle-lettres humour.

Since he doesn’t submit himself to the tyranny of meaning, Saqi ends his memoir — ‘wait for the sequel with impatience’ — with a description of Noon Meem’s death that might finally get us close to a distant genius of Urdu poetry. The second wife was a white woman — his office secretary — who openly admitted to being uninterested in his muse, and a son who agreed to his father’s desire for cremation but failed to turn up at the funeral. Noon Meem had humanity deep down but was unable to express it. He couldn’t communicate it to even his children. Saqi is convinced that he loved them; only the news never reached where it should have. *

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Tags: Aap-Beeti, autobiography, Book, khalid ahmed, Paap-Beeti, poet, poetry, Saqi Farooqi, Urdu