PART TWO

Personalities

Only My Own Death is Never Dying

I did not know him as a man. I did not know him as father or friend. I only knew him as a teacher and in my time, we were told to be respectful to our teachers. And the teachers kept their distance. They were superior beings, full of knowledge and wisdom; and we were supposed to sit at their feet as supplicants. The ' Awami Raj ' of Dr. Nazir Ahmad had yet to begin at the Government College.

          To barge into the Principal's office and to take a seat without being invited to do so was inconceivable. You just couldn't dream of it. There were unwritten rules of the game and everyone followed them except, among my contemporaries, Zahid Dar, Lahore's rebel laureate to this day. In an era of prime propriety, frail of frame, contemptuous of Malthus, Ricardo, Marshal, Cole, Keynes, the local economists, and of economics generally, Zahid Dar destroyed classroom decorum with acerbic impunity. He was the city's original angry young man. He was the odd man out. He still is.

          This was the era of Siraj and Rashid, of Safdar Mir and Ashfaq Ali Khan, and Nazir Ahmad, above all, and for me especially; it was the age of Prof. Khawaja Mansoor Hosain, the most elegant Aligarian you ever saw. Always in immaculate c huridars and an austere achkan , every hair combed severely back, he abhorred dirt and disorder. As clean as a whistle, as soft as eiderdown, as caring as Christ, Manzoor Hussain commanded universal respect like Faiz, he was deeply affectionate and again like Faiz, really rather remote and extremely reticent in his choice of words. Both as teacher and principal, he kept his distance but, at the same time, was always accessible, always helpful.

I had only one direct contact with him, not enough to assess him, I admit, but well worth recalling, I was never good with the books and such ability as I have, has come not from the library but from life. Forced into economics and statistics against my wishes by father, I quickly developed hatred for the printed word.

          At the very beginning of my first term at Government College, I found myself in complete agreement with Carlyle's description of economics being the bastard child of ignorance. Economists the world over theorize in academic isolation and the so-called laws of economics never apply to any given situation anywhere because "other things" never remain the same.

          As for statistics, the law of averages has never worked in my favour. And I don't have to tell you that there are lies, damned lies and statistics. Let us leave my academic misfortunes alone, however, and return to Prof. Manzoor Hussain. I decided to do honours in English for which it was necessary to take a test. It was a single-question test. "Give a critical appreciation of the best book you have read." I took the test even though I had read only a handful of books. However, during summer vacation, I had worked my way through Hugo's Les Miserables  and it had made me cry a great deal.

          Khawaja Manzoor Hussain  was my examiner. He summoned me and I, feared the worst. There he sat, show-room fresh, and you had the impression he had washed and changed a minute ago. Do please take a seat, he said. I quickly took a seat with my heart pounding.

          " Miserables  is the best book you say you have read?"

"That is so, Sir," I almost whimpered in answer.

          "What other books have you read?" He asked, smiling a shy smile and looking at my answer book. I gave him a phony list of books that I have heard about but never read.

          "Surely, Less Miserable can't be the best of the lot?"

"Well, Sir, you asked for my views and these are my views."

          "That is true, but don't you think Les Miserable is really rather melodramatic?"

          "That's for you to say, Sir but I insist it is the best I've read."

"Insist. That's a strong word you use. You have a long way to go yet. By the way, you just said you have read the Old Testament ."

          "That is right, Sir."

"How do you rate it?"

          "But of course, it is marvellous."

"How would you compare it with the Hugo book?"

          "I won't, Sir, that won't be fair."

"Why?"

          "Because one cannot compare an ordinary mortal's work with that of God."

          "I see," Khawaja Sahib smiled and relaxed for the first time in his presence. "Give me a line or two from the Bible."

          "Would that mine enemy had written a book," I quoted immediately and in retrospect, I think, with intent to hurt the gentlest of men.

          The sarcasm was not lost on Khawaja Sahib. He returned my answerbook to me, and smiling softly, almost coyly, told me I had been admitted to the honours class.

          I expressed my gratitude and stood up to take leave.

          Khawaja Sahib motioned me back into the chair. "Let's talk a little more," he said. I waited for him to begin.

          "There's difference between being compassionate and being fearful. The compassionate never cry. To cry is to surrender to adversity, to cruelty. "

          "Shouldn't I cry even if my father dies?"

          "That would be grief, and those who grieve do not necessarily lack character," said Khawaja Sahib.

          I now began to get the hang of it. "How did you know that I had cried over Les Miserables ?" I asked.

          "We will not go into that," he said. But I knew that Khawaja Sahib had also been a teenager once, and that admonishing me for my taste, he was perhaps censuring himself for having shed un-brave tears long ago.

          One last word and I shall have done: Khawaja Sahib never wore his Aligarianism  on his lapel, as some of his lesser contemporaries do. He did not belong to our era of vulgar materialism nor did he deserve the pain he suffered in his last days.  For his daughter, Samina, I quote from a Hungarian poet, whose name I forgot:

    Only my own writer is not fleeting.
    Only my own death is never dying.
    Birds to which I gave their freedom never.
    Will return to me flushed from their cover.
    Foliage, which fell from me-no green will deck it.
    Death, alas, must take us, all must like it.

December 24, 1984