Jinnah’s Ustaadi

I am reading a writer who says the relationship between those who walk the streets of a city like Mumbai and those who built those streets is like the relationship between descendants and their ancestors. Of course, I am from Karachi, but the first time I came to Bombay, and roamed in the Fort and Colaba area, I felt I was walking in the city of my ancestor. I could feel it as I turned street corners, sat in Irani cafes or went into a cinema. A preposterous idea grew in me even as I was engaging in ordinary, even boring, activity, walking in the heat, failing in cooling myself off with a Fanta in a café, watching a bad film at The Regal. Karachi is to Bombay what a potted plant is to the nursery it came from.

What madness to remember Elphinstone Street, Karachi when walking towards Flora Fountain from whichever direction! It was a slow madness, coming at me at the pace at which I was walking. At that time I blamed the afternoon heat and the boredom of my tourism. Everyone walking these streets was there because they had to. Just as I would not be found on the streets of Saddar, Karachi unless I had work.

I was pursuing, more truthfully I was being pursued, by a thought: I felt I was back in Karachi encountering a feeling from all those years of driving through Saddar facades that Karachi will someday grow up. Or, that it was supposed to grow up a certain way and didn’t.

The gloom of the evening was no relief. In the silhouette of Bombay University I saw my school Karachi Grammar School, the old building that has been around since 1847. Walking listlessly, the school silhouette still visible, past pavements full of books, much thumbed Harold Robbins, arcane programming books, I came across a grey statue, I had seen several in the day but had not paused to read the print. In a city where I knew no one, no one at all but where walking the streets brought me ungrounded joy, I saw the name Dadabhai Naoroji.

This then is my ancestor! Along with the rest of the grey statues of Parsis the captains of commerce and law, responsible for these streets, and whose hand I could now see behind Karachi facades. Its not the dust and fallen facades of Saddar, Karachi that this statue was recalling, it was the Karachi in my mind, a city I was trained to aspire to.

Naoroji was Mohammed Ali Jinnah's mentor. I laughed, feebly: any ustaad of Jinnah is good enough for me.

Akbar S. Ahmed's feature film on Jinnah is not worth speaking about but there is a documentary he has produced in which there is generous use of footage of Jinnah in Bombay: his Savile Row suits, two toned brogues, snookeering at the club, all his friends Parsi, and Ratti wearing sleeveless at receptions. This documentary has now been shown several times on PTV, including on Pakistan Day 14th August. Everyone approves of this image of Jinnah, the posterchild of Muslim modernity. It is young Jinnah, modernity resplendent, the Savile Row image not old-man-Jinnah-in-a-sherwani idea that hangs in the disused National Assembly in Islamabad.

Ashis Nandy says the great journeys of the twentieth century were of the mind, but I really do think that for a Pakistani nothing, not even television, beats walking Bombay streets, stumbling across Parsi statues. I thought of my school, Karachi Grammar School, ill afforded by my parents, an establishment Macaulay, Naoroji and Jinnah would have approved of. I thought of my father who went to a school in Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi, an other enterprise to make modern the Muslim boy. All of this kaleidoscoping in front of the suited booted statue that is father to Jinnah's modernity!

I recalled Rohinton Mistry's novel's title Such a Long Journey and thought of the journey of Muslim boys and could not associate it with destinations (villages, cities, nations, schools, clubs, saddars, silicon valleys) or self transformations. I could only feel exhaustion. I could only associate with our journeys the great, a great deal of, energy expended.

I'll end with a quote from the book Arcades Project, by Walter Benjamin. He was walking in Paris. His ideas speak to me, with a heavy accent.

"Boredom is a warm gray fabric lined on the inside with the most lustrous and colorful of silks. In this fabric we wrap ourselves when we dream. We are at home then in the arabesques of its lining. But the sleeper looks bored and gray within his sheath. And when he later wakes and wants to tell of what he dreams,

he communicates by and large only this boredom. For who would be able at one stroke to turn the lining of time to the outside? Yet to narrate dreams signifies nothing else. And in no other way can one deal with arcades (covered city-streets of Paris, like today's shopping malls) structures in which we relive, as in a dream, the life of our parents and grandparents, as the embryo in the womb relives the life of animals. Existence in these spaces flows then without accent, like the events in a dream."