Ansar Ali and the music of our times

The writer is a lawyer.

We are told that as the Titanic sank, amidst the clamour that ruptured the placid night sky, two sounds stood out. First, the ringing of the watchtower bell – alerting the crew that ice had punctured metal. For the next couple of hours, the crew frantically attempted to keep the ship afloat. And then came the violins.

This week’s column was originally intended to be about the TLP and things like the Futility of Banning an Idea. Borrowing from Salman Raja Sahib writing in these pages some years ago (albeit in a different context), I might have pondered how “minds congeal much like blood.”

The temptation to swap bells for strings is all too familiar to those who have taken it upon themselves to tell the tales of homes that can’t find peace. But this week, as I sat down to finally write this piece, I found myself reaching for the violin. At the heart of it all is my friend, Ansar Ali.

For the unversed, here’s how it happened. In the year 2013, while I was in my junior year at LUMS, the Photographic Society did a series of individual portraits called Humans of LUMS. One such image shows a lanky 22-year-old in a cobalt-blue dress shirt, arms hanging awkwardly by his sides. His cheeks are sunken, his eyes stare at a distant point away from the lens. Behind him, bold letters on a bright signboard announce that he is at ‘Zakir Tikka’. This is Ansar Ali from eight years ago.

“When did you begin working here?”, the caption tells us he is asked. “Since 2010”, he says.

“What did you do before that?”

“"I was doing Matric, but had to leave studies in 2009 because my father died. I had to start earning for my family.”

Has he considered going back to studying?, he is asked. “It’s too late now”, he says; his family needs to eat. “Sometimes I meet my classmates, some of them are doing their BA degrees and others have finished studies and have good jobs. In school, I used to be one of the best students in class. I used to score well on every test. Whenever we were given a hard exam, my classmates would always tease me and say, “Man, Ansar will obviously pass this test.”. I really miss that.”

At this point, it wouldn’t be hyperbolic to say that those one hundred and fifty words changed his life. Over the next year and a half, the student body decided to put Ansar back in school. Ansar went on to clear his Intermediate exams with an overall A-grade. He got into SZABIST in Islamabad. Today, he is set to graduate with a degree in Accounting and Finance. Ever since the Twitter thread with his story went up, Ansar has spent much of the past week warming couches on Ramazan shows, his name featuring in headlines and Twitter’s top trends, alike. And Ansar has earned it.

Two things have been constant in people’s reactions: praise for Ansar’s perseverance, and the ‘feel-good story’ label. That’s fair enough given that Other Thing that the country was dealing with the same week. Ansar’s story, it would seem, couldn’t have come at a better time.

But there’s another part about the Titanic’s last moments that fewer are familiar with. When the band first began playing, it chose bright, upbeat music thinking that it would distract passengers. It was the passengers, themselves, who asked for the hymns. And so it happened that as the ship heaved its last, the final piece played was ‘Nearer My God to Thee’.

There is value in the violin. But it is more than mere distraction.

In a 1995 lecture, American author Kurt Vonnegut described the five ‘beautiful shapes’ that a story could take. The very first he describes is ‘Man in Hole’: “Somebody gets into trouble [and] gets out of it again.” As Vonnegut later remarked, “It is not accidental that the line ends up higher than where it began.” To most, Ansar’s story is the Man in Hole variety: boy is a good student, boy hits hard times, boy perseveres, boy becomes a national sensation, and the yolk of the sun trickles serenely over the horizon. But to force the credits to roll after that happily-ever-after is to forsake all those whose stories will never be told.

Consider how this particular story came to be told, at all. We decided to share Ansar’s journey after he had already received a job offer from a firm he had interned at over the summer. The Twitter thread was, as such, the search for a special end to a special tale. We had a full-stop, but longed for an exclamation mark.

The bit that didn’t make it to the thread was the fact that when the job he was offered was posted on an online job-portal, it received over 300 other CVs. Those 300 other applicants may not have had to overcome as much as he but, on paper, many were still equally qualified. With the CVs came dozens of other messages, pleading that applicants were willing to work for half of what was being offered. For context, these were college graduates begging for less than minimum wage.

Or consider a story that was never told at all – the story of Abdul Qadir. On Sundays, Abdul Qadir bowls yorkers with his cricket buddies. For the rest of the week, he collects the trash in the streets of Islamabad. Much like the Ansar from that picture eight years ago, Abdul Qadir is a young man whose youth was cut short: he had to quit school in the eighth grade when his father injured his spine.

A year ago, I told him Ansar’s story and asked him if he ever thought about going back to school. Like Ansar, he too, loved school. Unlike Ansar, Abdul Qadir never got to go back. His school bag still hangs from a nail on his wall - exactly where he left it after his last day of school. He says he can't bear to so much as look at it. And so, it hangs there to this day: homework assignments past their deadlines, pages that will never be turned.

In truth, the violin isn’t all that different from the alarm bell. It, too, guides us to our truth – just a little more gently.

Some years ago, The Spectator carried a story titled ‘My Grandfather, the Titanic’s Violinist’. It told the tale of Jock Hume, one of the musicians who nursed the great ship at her deathbed and then went down with it. The very day that Jock’s body was brought back, his father received a bill of outstanding dues from the White Star Line – the wages owed to his dead son weren’t enough to cover the cost of the buttons on his uniform.

That part of the story was not as important to James Cameron and Heroism in Hollywood. But it was a story that mattered to Jock Hume’s father. Andrew Hume refused to pay the bill. Instead, he sent it to the Amalgamated Musicians Union, which published it in its newsletter. And it mattered to others like him, because from this began a process that resulted in compensation for the families – of real recognition, even if not of respite. Both stories needed to be told.

There are two sides to Ansar’s story, too. There is the sedative, and there is the stimulant. There is Ansar’s success, and there is our collective failure. What we do with it is very important. Because, while Ansar may not need us anymore, Abdul Qadir still does.

What is to be the music of our times?

Email: salaar.khan@columbia.edu

Twitter: @brainmasalaar