The Young Philosopher

I have come back to Lahore after a year. Yesterday I ventured out. I was driven down The Mall to the old city. There is more police and army personnel on the streets than last year, I have never had a driving license, and I fear challenge with so many uniforms out on the street. Therefore, I asked to be driven.

On The Mall was a sign I had not seen from last year: The Mall is beautiful, drive beautifully. I am not translating.

The Mall becomes dark green as it passes Lawrence Gardens and the air turns chambeli.

---------

The friend who was driving me, and her friend, whom I had not met before, both work for Reza Kazim's Sanjan Nagar Institute in Lahore. She works in the musicology department and he in the philosophy department. Reza Kazim is in his 70s and a very successful lawyer, meaning rich, and he has set up a center to propound certain theories on music and culture. From what I hear Sanjan Nagar is working on a novel notion of classifying classical music. I don’t know classical music though I have attended concerts that Sanjan Nagar have organized in Lahore (They have nvited, among others, Hari Prasad Chaurasia and Pandit Jasraj). Nevertheless, I can put questions to one who calls himself a philosopher.

And then who can resist a Pakistani philospher? Here a young philopher is rare. One meets all manner of foreign and indigenous trained political scientists and economists. Never a philosopher. A Young Philospher at that!

What are you interested in?

In Brain Science.

He proceeded to tell me what sounded kin to theories in cognitive science that a friend of mine that majored in "cog-sci" from an American university used to mention.

What are you doing at Sanjan Nagar?

Putting together Reza Kazim's book on philosophy.

What is that?

Reza wants to go pre Wiittgenstein and post Marxism (that’s how I sum it up in recall), he said. I did ask him what post Marxism meant.

I can't remember his answer, for the life of me, but whatever it was it was not offensive.

This man has a sweet manner.

Accha bolta hai.

We drove to Cookoos, the café in Heera Mandi. Its décor is mirrors and doors and shelves taken from havelis pulled down in the androon shehr. Its run by a painter who teaches at the National College of Art. He grew up in Heera Mandi and has never left.

We sit in the middle of an empty room surrounded by mirrors whose frames are mindful of jharokas, the tiles on the floor are black and white.

The room is empty save us. Black and white and our images surround us.

I asked The Young Philosopher whether there was a concept of Irony in Urdu.

He said Mirza Ghalib.

He pointed out through the window to the great mosque of Auranzeb, and then gestured towards us sitting inside a building which is part of the 300-year-old red light area of Lahore. He quoted the Ghalib shaer of desiring decadence within the shadow of a mosque.

Yes, but what is the Urdu for Irony?

He said Urdu is the language of disinherited feudals. There is no philosophy in Urdu.

Urdu was the language of cities that did not have a bourgeoise: Delhi and Hyderabad and Lucknow. Urdu was a court language, so much so that commoners did not speak it. Remember that in Shatranj ke Khilari the servants of the houses of the feudal households of Sanjeev Kumar and Saeed Jaffrey cant speak Urdu.

He really said all this.

I said Urdu could have been the language of a bourgeoise of Lahore, if there had been no partition. He took notice. I took notice he took notice.

Nevertheless.

He said that he'll always remember the exchange that occurred between the feudal and his servant boy in one of the last scenes of Shatranj ke Khilari. The boy says, in Poorbi, angrezi paltan aagawi hai sarkar. Sanjeev Kumar responds: fauj nawab ki ho ya angrez ki fauj fauj hoti hai. Boy insists: Sarkar, kiya raj badlay ga…

The servant shows an awareness of a loss, or a change, not the Urdu speaking feudal.

Urdu was a dulhan, he quotes a hard-to-remember shaer. Nobody has made more beautiful a bride as we made of Urdu.

But as for philosophy: Mir Taqi Mir was no philosopher. Ghalib imitated Rumi and Hafiz, he said.

The Young Philosopher went to Government College Lahore for his BA and MA and joined Reza in 1995.

We order a haandi, seekh kebabs and tawa chicken, none of which is cooked on the premises. Cuckoos has runners which will bring the food from different places in the neighborhood.

Why open a restaurant in the middle of the greatest cooking of its kind in the world and start your own kitchen?

Three young women enter: green, blue and yellow shalwar kameezes. They disappear into the restaurant. Where have they gone I ask the person waiting on us? The roof is open as well, he answers. I marvel at the impact of the tightness of the fit of the kameezes of the receding women and the fulsomness of their youth. There really is something to the youngness of women, I imagined saying and annoying any number of my 30 something women friends, when men walk in: "their" men, and ruin the spectacle by their mundane look.

After dinner we go up three floors and find ourselves overlooking the courtyard of the Badshahi Masjid. The minars feel like they are peering down at us.

We lean against the balcony looking down into the gloom of the courtyard. His voice: these minar used to be a third of their size higher. There was damage and the British brought them down to this size for preservation.

Under Ranjit Singh there were administration offices inside the mosque, he pointed to a line of rooms, and in the great courtyard of the mosque, they quartered their horses.

The stones of the courtyard were not as they are now, they used to be kharay pathar. You can still see that style in the havelis. One can trip over them as Iqbal did. That’s Allama Iqbal.. He was ailing but that injury confined him to bed. He never recovered.

Iqbal probably died of cirrhosis of the liver. He could not write without drink, that is known. That I said.

The Young Philosopher and I said everything in a winning way, the ignorant and the bright.

On the way down, one floor from the bottom of the stairs, I heard strains of a song coming out of a door. I stopped: live music? Neendiya na aaaeey… it was a tape but the stains of the song had floated out beautifully.

She said that is a private apartment you have your ear against.