Preparing for the Eid holidays

Islamabad diary
Why are people criticising the prime minister for spending the last week of Ramazan in the Holy Land? Of course there are problems to attend to at home but what exactly would he have achieved if he had stayed back?
It’s been a tough year for him, problems piling up, nothing turning out right, and loadshedding, that biggest curse of all, turning the golden mandate of just a year ago to something very like ashes and dust. He deserves a break. His water and power minister has already called for divine intervention to help ease the power crisis. He too could do with divine help.
And it’s not just him taking a much-needed break. Having fulfilled its spiritual obligations by going through the rigours of fasting, the country is giving itself a week’s break for the Eid holidays. In times gone by Eidul Fitr used to be a two-day affair while there were usually three holidays for the bigger Eid. But now our mathematical ability is at its sharpest when it comes to calculating these holidays, adding days before and after and ensuring that a country where nothing much gets done anyway, is shut down completely for another week. But the question is: apart from eating and sleeping and just sitting around and gossiping, what else is to be done to fill the long and heavy hours?
I give myself a break by making it a point to see no one…resultantly ‘peace, perfect peace with loved ones far away’. But to while away the hours some resource is necessary, books to begin with. On my shelves there are many books still to be read. So I either go to them or reread old favourites. At a low point some weeks back I reread Ivanhoe. There are romances and adventure stories that one can go back to again and again…Tales of My Landlord remain as gripping as ever.
A year ago from Siddiqui’s Old Bookshop at the Regal Crossing on the Lahore Mall I bought I think nearly the entire collected works of Walter Scott in a very good edition. The price was reasonable too. Siddiqui’s is the best old bookshop in Lahore and over a short period I’ve got some wonderful stuff from there.
Just imagine, I walked there once and there was a young man at the counter engrossed in a book. When he saw me browsing he came up and asked whether there was anything in particular I was looking for. Putting on a slightly superior air I said would he have Mommsen’s History of Rome? Just a minute, he said…and to my utter surprise, going up to a bookshelf, pulled out Volume Two of an Everyman’s edition of the History. I was suitably deflated.
Another time I got a 1929 edition of a life of Bismarck by C Grant Robertson, Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford…as it declares on the jacket. I only mention this because I find this particular biography better than other Bismarck stuff I have come across. But it has an old world feel to it and I don’t think it would be in print nowadays.
There is so much of the old that I haven’t read that I feel little inclination for delving into ‘modern’ prose. Gibbon off and on I have dipped into for the last 30 years. But I haven’t at a stretch read him from cover to cover. I now feel that if I postpone it for much longer I may never get to do it at all. The shadows lengthen and time goes by…you get my meaning. So do I start this Eid? Let’s see. T E Lawrence once said that a hundred classics were all that one needed to keep, probably to read over and over again. This didn’t make much sense to me then. It does now. Of course good stuff gets written all the time…about Syria and Iraq and so on. But much of it is for instant information. You read it and then keep it to one side.
I feel ashamed to say it but there is so much music that I am only discovering now. What have we done with our years? Time wasted, so much not experienced, so much unknown and undiscovered. We knew the usual suspects – Bach, Mozart and Beethoven – but even regarding them most of us were familiar with the more usual stuff: symphonies and the like. Beethoven’s string quartets, for instance, how many people here, as opposed to classical music enthusiasts in the west, would know about them?
This is no reflection on our taste or our musical knowledge. Living not just in any eastern country but in Pakistan where access to such stuff is so limited, where the frontiers of learning have shrunk, where we are into other things, salvation in the Hereafter a more pressing concern than doing anything about the here and now, we just don’t have the opportunities or we don’t seek them, which are taken for granted elsewhere.
The obverse is also true. The westerner with some liking for eastern classical music may be familiar with Ravi Shankar, perhaps Vilayat Khan. But unless he is a rarity, it’s hard to imagine him going into raptures over the bandishes of, say, Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan.
YouTube is one key to opening up these closed horizons and for any recent discoveries I have made I am indebted entirely to this medium. Let me give an example. I had never heard of Kirsten Flagstad, by all accounts the greatest Wagnerian soprano to have lived. I happened to be YouTube hunting one day and came suddenly upon her and when I heard her I felt a bit like Keats ‘On first looking into Chapman’s Homer’: “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies…When a new planet swims into his ken…”
Flagstad is truly stupendous – there is no other word for it – and I can only urge those with the slightest interest in Wagner to listen to her. Richard Strauss’s Last Four Songs…had never heard of them until recently. Let me recommend Im Abendrot by Flagstad and I bet anything you’ll find it hair-raising.
Two more samples, if I may: Furtwangler conducting Entrance of the Gods into Valhalla, and Toscanini conducting Wagner’s Forest Murmurs. Why aren’t these things taught in our schools? Why isn’t Wagner played on PTV? Why have we cut ourselves off so completely from the best that there is in the world?
I can’t help mentioning once more (I did mention it once) how Keats wrote this sonnet, one of the most beautiful in the language. His friend Cowden Clarke happened to get hold of a copy of Chapman’s translation of Homer. Now let me quote Middleton Murray: “…Keats was immediately summoned over in the evening to Clarke’s lodging in Clerkenwell to share the feast. They read Chapman together till dawn; then Keats went home to his lodgings in the Borough, two miles away. At 10 o’clock in the morning Clarke found the sonnet on his breakfast table.” Keats was then 21. If this is not the hand of God, tell me what is?
Many evenings recently I have spent watching film noir classics, again on YouTube, the website banned in Pakistan for the safety of our souls. Try the Raymond Chandler classic, ‘Farewell, My Lovely’. The art of cool…that’s what Robert Mitchum gives a tutorial on as he plays Philip Marlowe, the cynical, hard-bitten detective. The taste in the mouth left by all the Ramazan spirituals – the Aamir Liaquat show and the like, not to forget Maulana Tariq Jamil’s Islamic lectures (truly hilarious) – will be washed away by Philip Marlowe.
One evening Maulana Tariq Jamil was going on so much about the pleasures of drinking in the Hereafter – wahan aik sharab ka darya ho ga – that I thought even a teetotaller, with no hint of sin on his mind, would be tempted to taste the stuff. As for his take on the houris of Paradise if I were to give a verbatim account I would be accused of making it up. No one would believe it.
Email: winlust@yahoo.com