“IT was the age of uncivilized people.” The mystic Safa Adeshi said, “It was the age of uncultivated and uncultured people. They did not live in apartments and palatial houses. Hence, they bore the brunt of unbearable summers and winters, for their accommodations were not insulated. They were the naked dwellers of the caves, and the rugged flatlands.”
“Did the uncivilized people eat burgers?” A youngster among the audience asked.
“No.” Safa Adeshi said, “They were savages. They hunted animals and ate raw meat.”
“Did they grab each others’ domains and the terrains?”
“Yes, they did. Snatching other people’s possessions for personal gains is man’s ancient instinct that he has inherited from his forefathers, the animals.”
“What was the mode of their combats?”
“Uncivilized people’s era was not an era of nuclear weapons, for that matter any weapon.” Safa Adeshi looked at us, and said, “It was era of chivalry and physical invincibility. He who flattened his challengers was heralded chieftain.”
“How did a chieftain of one domain establish his supremacy over chieftains of other domains?”
“Theirs was freakish way of establishing one dominion’s prowess over other dominion.” Safa Adeshi said, “The chieftains of the two dominions grappled with each other in front of their people. He who vanquished his opponent was heralded joint chieftain of the two dominions.”
Surprised, an elderly person asked, “Are you suggesting the chieftains in the uncivilized era had no armies to fight on their behalf?”
Safa Adeshi replied, “The uncivilized chieftains did not like other people to die on their behalf.”
We, the seekers of the answers to the forbidden questions, listened to Safa Adeshi in pin drop silence. His unkempt long locks rested on his broad shoulders covered with a piece of coarse cloth. He had untrimmed beard on his conspicuously radiant face. While talking to us he occasionally raised his head, and looked at us with his deep sunk eyes from behind the steel rimed spectacles.
Safa Adeshi is a freelance lecturer. He treads the earth in search of knowledge that he lovingly shares with us. An ancient Karachiite, Adeshi doesn’t come back to his ancestral city frequently. He spends years after years delivering lectures in the downtowns, ghettoes, slums, and the dens of the disillusioned in the Eastern and the Western hemispheres.
At certain places, he is not welcomed. He is jeered at and is ridiculed. In the countries mostly inhibited by the pious people, he is looked at suspiciously. He has often been hounded, incarcerated and subjected to interrogation. In the estimate of the Agencies defending the ideological frontiers of their respective countries, Safa Adeshi is a deranged person. In the modern day context, many people in Pakistan believe Adeshi is an agent of Western demons.
But for the redundant residents of Ramswami, Safa Adeshi is a castaway son of Karachi. With the passage of time he is looked at as an alien in his own city. Now in his seventies, Adeshi doesn’t come back to Karachi very often. While on his way back to East Indies after lecturing at Bangkok, Adeshi stayed with us last week for two days in Karachi. He politely declined an invitation from a NGO to deliver a lecture to the elite of Karachi in a five-star hotel. He told the organizers, “I will talk to my friends in Ramswami. Let elite of Karachi sit with us on an uneven bare floor of a half-lit dilapidated room and share life experiences.”
Disenchanted organizers before departing said, “It stinks in Ramswami.”
Safa Adeshi has his distinct way of deliberating on a subject. He invites questions from his audience. While deliberating on an answer, he explicitly explains his own point of view on the subject by encouraging counter questions from his audience.
I remember him to have had once said, “It is not my personal innovation. The inimitable teacher of all the teachers Socrates always encouraged his students to put to him questions that came to their mind. He had the art of converting his answers into exploratory queries from his pupils.”
It is a simple way of learning. We like it. With reference to what goes on in Iraq, we asked, “Adeshi, we do not understand what goes on around us.”
“The world has split into two diametrically opposed segments, the rulers and the ruled, call them subjects.” Adeshi said, “The rulers have their own axe to grind. Like chieftains in the uncivilized era, the rulers in today’s civilized age do not grapple with each other for supremacy.”
“What do they do then?”
“They unleash hail from heavens on other ruler’s subjects.” Safa Adeshi said, “A ruler who grills more children in inferno establishes supremacy.”
