Apr
26
English, Pakistani style
Filed Under Private View
By and large, we write English like a dead language. Every piece of writing reads like every other piece of writing. Phrases and idioms long dead and buried are used with predictable regularity. It is automatic writing, lacking in freshness, verve and a sense of life. What we write gives no delight and springs no surprises. For instance, if someone is doing his best, he will be doing not just his best but his ‘level best’. If someone is saying something of which he is utterly certain, he has to precede it with ‘without fear of contradiction’. It is as if the entire world was waiting to contradict this person, the moment certain words left his mouth. A crime is not a crime unless it is ‘dastardly’ or ‘heinous’ and, preferably both. Commitment by itself is not enough. It has to be ‘selfless’ as well. Simple duty won’t do, unless it was turned into ‘bounden duty’, nor can a tribute be paid without it being ‘warm’. And, yes, it always has to be paid in the plural, not singular, which would be the correct form. An honour has to be ‘coveted’ and a privilege must be qualified by ‘great’. Designs always have to be ‘nefarious’ and no matter what time of the year it is, one of the ugliest-sounding words in the English language - ‘eschew’ – is in season. A simpler word, easy on the tongue and understood by everyone, won’t be used.
During the 1965 war, Hamid Jalal said, “If Shastri’s mother were to die suddenly, the story would be reported in the English language press in these words: ‘The hand that rocked the cradle of the man who launched naked aggression against the sacred soil of Pakistan, kicked the bucket last night.’
It is not that we think in Urdu, Punjabi, Pashtu or Sindhi and then say or write it in English. Were that true, our English would have both bite and colour, freshness and music, vigour and joy. It would have the tang of our earth and the smell of our air. But what do we have? Clichés and metaphors that lumber thorough our prose like the living dead. We use idioms and proverbs that were archaic when the steam engine was invented.
Just pick up a newspaper and read it at random. So and so is calling for such and such to be done on a “war footing”. So and so is “exhorting” (another ugly word we can’t seem to banish from our lives) the nation to “eschew” this and that. So and so has issued a “dire warning” (always dire like consequences, not just warning or consequences) to such and such. Miscreants are asked to “cease and desist”, a phrase that belongs to the Pakistan Criminal Procedure Code not normal speech or writing. By the way, ‘miscreants’ began to be used during the 1971 civil war in East Pakistan and has been with us since and is employed about anyone who has to be bumped off or put away. We are also always ‘hearkening back’ to the nation’s ‘glorious past’ (past has to be glorious, not just past).
Service always has to be yeoman’s service, although yeomen disappeared a couple of hundred years before the British departed these shores. They only now exist in the Tower of London or in the Royal Navy, assigned in the latter to perform visual signalling. And, of course, they are alive and well from Landi Kotal to Karachi. We revel in nouns and adjectives. Consider these evergreen national Pakistani favourites: utmost importance, strict adherence, crucial need, exemplary courage, gallant struggle, diabolical designs/machinations (the latter word another monstrosity we love), Spartan spirit, dedicated service, inspiring example, tireless efforts and so on and so forth, day after tiresome day. It never occurs to us that the adjective can be dropped quite easily without any serious damage to, or diminution in, the meaning. The same goes for adverbs.
Where else but in Pakistan – and India, of course – will you find such horrors on the printed page and in ordinary conversation as these: Achilles’ heel (only to be found, apart from the Subcontinent, in the pages of Homer’s ‘Iliad’), Herculean strength (poor Hercules has been dead a couple of thousand years, assuming he ever lived, but he is unforgotten in the Subcontinent), pioneering role (an essentially military term, a pioneer being the member of an infantry group serving to prepare a road for the main body of troops), onerous responsibility (never just simple responsibility), espousing a cause (not supporting or favouring but espousing; one would think that the person so doing was running away form his or her spouse), beacon light (fine if you are standing on top of a hill and signalling to a ship or a spy aircraft, but not otherwise), guiding spirit/light, flying colours (all right if you are marching or sailing), befitting manner, zealous attempt (no attempt in the Subcontinent is without zeal which may be why so little gets done), pillar of strength (makes one think of Samson of Delilah fame), foreseeable future (though very little of future can be foreseen anyway) etc.
Friend Ahsan Khwaja had a most colourful uncle who served the better part of his life as a railway guard during the Raj. Once a memsahib gave him a cake for safekeeping in the brake, to be collected when she left the train. Old Khwaja, a big man who always went around in khakis and a solar hat, narrated this story in the following words. “My mouth watered and taking my courage in both hands and girding up my loins, I took the lion’s share out of that cake.” Once when he was sick, he told the doctor who had come to take a look at him, “Doctor, mend me or end me.”
Nobody has given better advice on clichés than George Orwell. He wrote that the moment you suspect a word, phrase or expression to be a cliché, it is. Drop it like a hot potato (which, I concede, is also a cliché because you can drop a word without turning it into a potato which should be on your plate, not your hand). What is it about idioms and proverbs that we can’t get rid of in favour of simple, day-to-day expressions? Perhaps there should be a law forbidding the use of the following: carrying coal to Newcastle, setting the Thames on fire, a Daniel come to justice, by hook or by crook, fishing in troubled waters (which makes no sense because if the waters are troubled, no fish in its right mind would bite), between the devil and the deep (blue) sea, adding insult to injury, qualities of head and heart, brains and brawn, plucking up courage, in the thick of battle etc.
Also externed from Pakistan’s sovereign territories should be the following living insults to the English language: in respect of, insofar as, notwithstanding the fact that, as a matter of fact, the fact of the matter, as far as this is concerned, in the case of, without the shadow of a doubt and that all-time Pakistani favourite: proud privilege.
I am aware of the political fallout of my proposals. Ministers of the government, leaders of political parties, both living and defunct, editorial writers, reporters on the run, supercat bureaucrats, members of the higher judiciary given to slicing ribbons to mark the opening of gasoline outlets and the like, will no longer have a leg to stand on, which I confess is as good a cliché as any.
Obviously, the thing is more infectious than the flu.
Apr
19
Omar Kureishi’s Casablanca
Filed Under Private View
When Omar Kureishi, all but twenty years old, if not less, landed in San Francisco, the country he had left behind still being British India, and Pakistan yet several months away from birth, one of the first questions he was asked was if he could do the Indian rope trick. As was to be expected of Omar, he said he could. Another American was surprised he could speak English. “So am I,” replied Omar by way of a hot return catch. Omar had sailed all the way from Bombay where, and in Poona, he had spent his boyhood, one of his best buddies being young Zulfi who was even more keen on cricket than Omar. Skipper Abdul Hafiz Kardar once told me that ZAB had the potential of playing first class cricket.
Omar had come to join the Southern California University at Los Angeles and was soon to be followed by Zulfi. Omar, who has not been measuring out his life in coffee spoons, to borrow from his favourite poet T. S. Eliot, but dribbling it out in short, evocative newspaper pieces, has been happily persuaded to put them all together. And Omar – the late Farooq Mazhar’s Mr Kureishi and my Kureishi sahib – has done just that and thus what we have is a nostalgic and wonderful book. The narrative is seamless with one episode flowing into the next.
You would not think by talking to Omar with his razor sharp and caustic wit that he was a romantic, but that he has to be otherwise why would he call this mosaic of memories of his early youth ‘As Time Goes By’, the theme song from the most romantic movie ever made – ‘Casablanca’. Remember Humphrey Bogart saying goodbye to Ingrid Bergman on that train station in Paris. Pass me the handkerchief Mickey!
And here is a Casablanca moment from Omar’s book. It is about Mary Jane Finch, the first American girl he met at the university. “Mary Jane, the blonde with the smiling blue eyes whose satchel I would carry when we went to the library in the evenings, to ‘hit the books’ and pick up some doughnuts which we ate, sitting on a park bench under a starlit Californian sky, a gust of wind tousling her blonde hair and she patting it back to set it right.”
ZAB, Zulfi to Omar then and always, even after he became Prime Minister, arrived before long and it was decided that the two will share lodgings. They also decided to take up tennis, not out of any particular love for the game, but because the instructress was rather pretty. Their tennis careers were short as they realised that ‘anyone for tennis?’ meant just that and no more. ZAB was always a young man in a hurry and so was Omar and they moved on. They found a double room on 3421 South Flower Street, Los Angeles, that they shared. One of the seniors at the university’s school of journalism was Art Buchwald. Omar and Zulfi also invested in a used Nash car, which like its two owners is made no longer. The car broke down on the first serious trip it made. It was finally abandoned because it was not considered worth more than the $18 parking charge that a garage wanted.The two friends also discovered that there was cricket in L.A., thanks to British actors like Ronald Coleman and David Niven. They joined a club called Corinthian whose opening batsman Zulfikar Ali Bhutto became. One American told Omar, “How can anyone take a game seriously that stops so that the players can have tea?”
They were soon joined by another Bombay friend, Piloo Modi, who had come out to study architecture. Piloo, whom I also had the pleasure of knowing, remained ZAB’s best and closest friend. Omar and another friend from back home, Bobby Farooki, who was studying sociology became famous debaters, winning university and college debates from coast to coast. Omar recalls the first Arab-Israeli war which angered Zulfi so much that he would sit in the cafeteria and abuse the new Jewish state. One day he had a fight with a Jewish student who threatened to shoot him. Zulfi’s retort was classic. He said he would disembowel him with a ceremonial dagger, a family heirloom. The next thing they knew, Zulfi was receiving death threats on the phone. Finally, they went to the police to report the threats. “Half the college kids are nuts,” the officer on duty told Zulfi and Omar and sent them away. Zulfi subsequently moved to the Berkeley campus to do law (he studied under Kelsen, the man who invented the fateful Doctrine of Necessity) and after graduation went to Oxford where he was Hugh Trevor-Roper’s student.
Of the many famous people Omar got to know in his final student years was the tennis player Gussie Moran who had made a splash at Wimbledon because of her lace-fringed panties. She was from Santa Monica and she and Omar became good friends. “She would show up in her Cadillac (courtesy a shadowy character named Pat de Sico) and she and I would go to a drive-in and get a hamburger.” Omar writes that Gussie wasn’t quite the girl next door but “someone who lived in the neighbourhood, near but not near enough.”
Omar had started writing and printed more than one article in the ‘Christian Science Monitor’. Nasir Ahmed Farooki, who went to Stanford a year or two later, was another Pakistani to undertake extensive writing assignments for the ‘Monitor’. Finally, Omar left California, leaving his heart and a girl friend named Lizzie behind. He came to England, where his father Col. Kureishi was living, and after some months during which he watched Hashim Khan win the first British squash championship, decided to go to the new country called Pakistan. Off and on, he would go to the Pakistan High Commission with“Bapu” Murad, the first air attaché.
Writes Omar, “The High Commission, in a way, was an introduction to Pakistan. Everyone seemed to be gunning for everybody. Although they did not seem disgruntled, in the words of P.G. Wodehouse, they were not exactly ‘gruntled’.” He sailed to Karachi in a ship called ‘Cecilia’ and was received at the docks by his brother Sattoo. Omar had returned to the subcontinent after seven years. Those were the most memorable seven years of his life and here in this book, he has preserved them for us. Thank you Mr Kureishi, as Farooq Mazhar would have said.