It’s an elegy, this time for her beloved Pip — “patriotic and preposterous” — the father Sara Suleri never let the reader of Meatless Days forget: his pedestrian English accent; his irascibility with his brood of six (“You tended to chide us before we were children”). The English professor at Yale gripped us with the cold-blooded murder of the fairest of all, Ifat, her sister (“She dies inside me daily”), and the hit-and-run death of her Welsh mother, Surraya Mair Suleri, daughter of John Amos Jones, by a rickshaw driver at Punjab University where she, like her daughter, taught English and was adored by her students (I think each of us died in some way the day they buried Mamma).
Privy to the most intimate memories of the Suleri household embedded in the golden era of Lahore, “Oh, City of Lights, the grave-homes of our mother, sister and now our father.” Sara robustly engaged us in the intrepid social fabric of the fabulous 1960s and ’70s, woven around the changing seasons and her father’s blind devotion to ‘General Zulu’ Haq: “You were quite chummy with that maniacal general.”
A decade and two years later, there she is, in the dim-lit corridor of Yale, waddling along in her black patent flats and burdened by the endlessly flowing kurta — a rich silk Wedgwood blue stripes — worn with a loosely-fitted chooridar and a scarf carefully clutching her shoulders, but girlishly pushed away. Her characteristic bob, parted in the middle, still drapes the sad, sad face. Walking like a “sated crab...the old Sara of yore, fleet of foot and sure of step”, mourns Tillat, the youngest, at her sister’s sorry sight.
Sara starts to read and opens the first chapter of her new book, Boys Will Be Boys: a daughter’s elegy, hot from the University of Chicago Press. It’s a title jokingly chosen by Z.A. Suleri for his unwritten autobiography.
Her voice cracks as she recites Ghalib, Iqbal and many more during the next one hour, narrating nuggets from randomly picked pages packed in a graveyard of memories. The 13 chapters, prefixed always by an Urdu couplet: “Pip who loved Ghalib with a passion typical to his nature” are enticingly crafted around her family with Z.A.S as the chief protagonist.
Death-like silence prevails in the small room where Sara Suleri Goodyear, 50, celebrates the life and times of her father. “When Pip died, I moaned. I thought some remnant in me had been discarded.” As if to make amends for the fun she poked at him, cruelly taking the wind out of his pompous sails, the daughter now wants to make her peace. “On Judgment Day, I will say to God, ‘Be merciful, for I have already been judged by my child’,” Z.A.S. would chide her.
But her rendition is inaudible, poorly constructed. She appears in pain, her face distorted, lips puckered, head bent, shoulders sagging, Sara halts often as she turns the pages and stumbles over sentences once too often. Her vocal chords suffer, whispering hoarsely while attempting to mouth words. A glass of water is pushed sympathetically towards her to salve her tortured delivery.
“Whatever continents may intrude to interrupt our narrative, the circle of life only seems to grow tighter and tighter.”
Is her inside weeping? Her heart tearing? Her soul grieving? None dare fidget. The crowd is mostly Indian. Sara reads a letter from the son of Pothan Joseph, explaining (as if they know?), “He (P. Joseph), as a former editor of Dawn, had written to me a gently chiding letter. Dawn was not founded in Karachi, as apparently I had claimed when my father was his father’s sub-editor. Mr Joseph proceeded to describe Pip’s quirks and intensities, all too well known to me. He concluded this letter from Bombay by writing charmingly, “Please excuse my puckish manner” and had the sweetness of soul to seek out and send to me pictures of Pip when he first worked at Dawn.
“When I looked at the photographs of that young man — with a face disturbingly like my own — I knew that if I did not love him already, I would until God’s heavenly Muslim universe had descended and taken him from me for good.”
But she quickly sets the record straight: “A saddening thought. But you were, Pip, always exuberant about your editorials and your articles, even when you did them everyday.”
When all is over, I walk away, self-contained, a trifle triumphant over the Yale-wallahs: I consider Sara’s discourse my intellectual property right solely as a Pakistani first and a Lahori second. I saw it happen. “She looks so dukhi (sad),” says the young Nandini as we walk out together. Her male companion, another Indian student, has specially come to hear Sara, but leaves disappointed. “Maybe she’s not well...it seems that she didn’t really want to be here.”
Read the book! That’s what I did and could not lay it down. “A Proust in Pakistan, to wander among her own several lives” now gives us a rare peep into the secret life of Pip — a man with human frailties, never mind his self-righteousness.
The aging and ailing Lion, as Sara calls her father, “adopts” Shahida in the hoary twilight of his life. The woman — crude to the core and scheming to the hilt, according to Sara’s accounts — works in the advertising section of The Pakistan Times where Z.A.S. is the big boss. She comes howling with a complaint of sexual harassment. Not only is the alleged abuser (innocent of the crime) summarily kicked out, but “Pip came home with his blushing daughter”, giving Sara and her siblings a “stepsister”!
Sara tantalizes the reader with the ambivalent relationship between the young woman and her father. We’re told how Shahida takes over the life and home of Pip, who badly needed a “companion”, and allows this peroxide blonde with a generous bosom to ransack their home — throw “Mamma’s china” out, put up shining cheap curtains, get rid of the gold-nib Parker and Mont Blanc that “Papa” loved to write with. She even accompanies him to New York during a UN session and stays grandly at the UN Plaza!
“After you had left, Pip, stepsister Shahida began pestering each of us for “por-torni”, until they finally figured out that what the Punjabi wench wanted was a power of attorney to keep Z.A.S.’s Lahore house where she’s set up a Z.A. Suleri Trust Foundation and ambitiously appointed herself the President!
Sara regales us with her tale of “Scorch and Soda” (Scotch) that Z.A.S. enjoyed furtively and loved eating “meat sausages” — who cares if they had a bit of pork! “Get rid of the sausages! Hide the sausages!” bellowed ‘Pip’ to his kids when some “religious-looking visitors turned up” at the hospital in London where Z.A.S. was admitted.
As for politics: there was “Bobby Shafto (Nawaz Sharif) fat and fair with his Model Town estates and innumerable mills of corruption”; while Benazir Bhutto “promised some hope until she married her scoundrel.”
Sara abbreviates “Paki” for Pakistan and “Mozzies” for Muslims throughout the book. They make for an easy read, why quibble?
“Ifat wore rings, just as I do”. Sara can say that again: I have a hard time counting the number of glittering baubles covering all her eight fingers as she tentatively turns the pages while reading from them.
“Yes Pip, he (Austin) is still my husband...you see me married, domesticated,” Sara addresses her father and recounts her marriage to a widower; a millionaire, a Goodyear (the tyre man); double in age with a daughter “older than I am...I leapfrogged to become a step-great grandmother”. Austin Goodyear owns a yacht called Mermaid and a farmhouse in Maine. “Sara, make him a Muslim,” urges Z.A.S. from afar.
“Goddamn it, son of a b... (Austin’s favourite refrain) was Pip’s most mouthed. Z.A.S., my father, has a certain uncanny connection with AG, my spouse,” even though the two never met.
Who won’t remember Abdul Ali Khan — “a feudal gentleman if ever there was one” as the Principal of Aitchison College. Well, the tyrant expelled Shahid (Sara’s brother) for writing “libelous and obscene lyrics about his various teachers. Pip called him over the phone a bull and a pig” when he refused to take Shahid back.
And Zeno — Dawn’s most respected columnist: “would send poisoned darts at Pip and Pip would send them back at Zeno”.
“What was it about Pip’s relationship to friends?” asks the daughter who cannot “recall a single of his friendships that was not somehow trammelled by history.” Of his cousins, “Uncle” Shamim and his younger brother, Nasim, the journalist, who later became the UN Ambassador at New York, ‘Pip’ never saw eye to eye.
“Pip, your handwriting still can wrench me as your Quran (that Z.A.S. gave when Sara left for the US in 1976) has travelled with me — and will forever — from home to home.”
“Ifat-Tillat-Nuzhat-Sara”, Z.A.S. would yell and each of them would come running: “If possible, we would still be running to his side today.”
Except Ifat and Nuzhat are dead, and so is ‘Pip’.
“Good night, sweet Pip, flights of angels sing thee to thy rest! You will be back more times than you know. I was always obstinate,” thus ends a daughter’s elegy, Boys Will Be Boys.
It’s an elegy, this time for her beloved Pip — “patriotic and preposterous” — the father Sara Suleri never let the reader of Meatless Days forget: his pedestrian English accent; his irascibility with his brood of six (“You tended to chide us before we were children”). The English professor at Yale gripped us with the cold-blooded murder of the fairest of all, Ifat, her sister (“She dies inside me daily”), and the hit-and-run death of her Welsh mother, Surraya Mair Suleri, daughter of John Amos Jones, by a rickshaw driver at Punjab University where she, like her daughter, taught English and was adored by her students (I think each of us died in some way the day they buried Mamma).
