Recounting Irregular Verbs and Counting She-Goats

Which, of course, is not the case with Aziz Ahmad’s short story Pagdandi (foot trail), [4]  where it is hard to see Azad, the protagonist who is studying in Paris, as anything other than a sex maniac, forever chasing after girls. Although in his later years Aziz Ahmad did quite a bit to redeem himself by writing on Muslim intellectual history, it is hard to miss an undercurrent of sexuality qua sexuality in some of his earlier fictional work. Anyway, faking love, Azad finally gets what he wanted. He takes Yvonne for an outing to a small village on the banks of the Seine, some twenty miles from Paris. As they are walking on a foot trail, Yvonne censures him for being an incorrigible materialist.

“Revolutionaries are materialists too,” he said and kissed her again. This time she melted completely. He thought that perhaps no one had kissed her so passionately before, no one had taken such liberties with her body. He knew that at this moment her mind was completely incapable of dealing with the complexities of revolution, materialism, communism, love, and emotions. What was evident, though, was that her warm, young flesh was trembling with excitement. He didn’t let the opportunity slip. He lifted her in his arms, quickly found a spot in the thicket, gently laid her down and started to unbutton her pale yellow jacket. He caressed her breasts, which resembled pink blossoms among the lush green trees. Then he covered her whole body with his like a stretch of cloud spreading itself over a clump of flourishing trees.

Later, when he helped her get up from the bed of grass he felt a strange feeling of satisfaction wash over him. This girl was not a virgin, and he was not the first man in her life. Some other comrade, some other revolutionary and materialist had kissed her before, taken liberties with her body and accepted her virginity as a tribute. (p.202)

Lyricism aside, “comrade,” “revolutionary,” “materialism,” “communism”—the familiar Progressive jargon is all here, and serves no useful purpose, except saman-bandi (atmospherics), if that can be a purpose. The purpose is to use Yvonne for his own pleasure. The story doesn’t move beyond lovemaking, minus the love. Yvonne, too, is a terribly immature, indecisive, naïve, and confused girl, with no ability to fathom the impulses of her body. Then again, perhaps she is none of these and this is only how the narrator chooses to see her; after all, he too is an Indian. The story tells us precious little about this self-conceited, self-obsessed protagonist. What it does tell us, though, is something we can well do without, for if we reflect a bit more, a none-too-wholesome window will burst open to reveal the preoccupations of a flamboyant scion blowing his parents’ money in Europe not on study but on “skirt-chasing.” The only image of the protagonist that is formed in our minds after we are finished reading the story is that of a young Indian man desperately trying to bed down with a white European woman, after the belief, rampant among the élite of the Indian subcontinent back in pre-Partition days (and maybe even now), that European women are promiscuous and easy to get. Now, this is what Manto would unhesitatingly call “obscene.”

After this brief excursus, here interposed to explain Manto’s preoccupation with sex providers, I cite a delightfully revealing passage from the article Ismat-Faroshi.

This woman—a bawd first, a woman second—gives her body over to the man in lieu of a few coins, but a body bereft of her soul in those moments. Listen to what one such woman has to say: “Men take me out into the fields. I just lie there, immobile, without a sound—dead inert, only my eyes are open, gazing far, far into the distance, where some she-goats are going at one another under the shade of the trees. Oh, what an idyllic scene! I start counting the she-goats, or the ravens on the branches—nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two … Meanwhile the man is finished, withdrawn, and is panting heavily some distance from me. But I’m not aware of any of this.” (p.160)

This reminds me of the scene from Milan Kundera’s novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, [5]  where Tamina has surrendered her body to this “nice guy” Hugo, not because she is after sex, but because he has promised to bring back to her the diaries she left behind in Prague when she and her now dead husband had escaped from Czechoslovakia. They contain her memories of their life together, all those yearly vacations they took.“But when she was fully naked, Hugo […] was stupefied to discover that Tamina’s genitals were dry” (p.108). Nevertheless when he goes into action, Tamina

quickly shut her eyes. Once again she began going through the vacations, like irregular verbs: first the vacation at the lake, then Yugoslavia, the lake, and the spa—or was it the spa, Yugoslavia, and the lake?—then the Tatras, then Bulgaria, then things got hazy, then Prague, the spa, and finally Italy. (p.110–11)

Why has Tamina succumbed to Hugo—Tamina, who loved her husband dearly, and is described by the narrator touchingly as: “I picture the world growing up around Tamina like a circular wall, and I picture her as a small patch of grass down below. The only rose growing on that patch of grass is the memory of her husband.” (p.83)

Doesn’t this sound like a cruel paradox?