​

My first memory of Javed Alavi was when he joined Colvin in the seventh standard. Before that, I was studying in the local maktab at our paternal village in Daryabad, where the majority of the landlords’ children studied, seated on rice sacks memorizing the Koran. Javed was a tall, lean boy, his head abnormally big, hair too short. He was so tall that, in a class of thirty-four students, you could spot him from anywhere. The other students, especially the two boys Kaukab and Jahanzaib, who hailed from the family of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, always made fun of Javed. Sometimes they stood outside the school, passed comments on him, and laughed with their hands on their bellies. They used to call him Javed-the-giraffe. Sometimes they made fun of his father who was a short man. They used to say that his mother slept with a giraffe so that her son wouldn’t be a dwarf like his father. He was so shy, and sincere, that he never replied to any of those comments. He would keep his head down and walk in sheer silence. 

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Javed usually sat in the second-last right-hand row of the class, his head down, his lips moving as if he were reciting verses. The other students would laugh at him, making planes by tearing the pages from the notebook and hitting him on the head. But he would be so engrossed in the novel, like Da Vinci working on his last painting.

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One day I decided I would sit beside him. That day I found he was secretly reading a novel (Kafka’s Amerika) stuffed into the chemistry book. When the teacher came closer he would hide the book in his torn bag and pretend to find the valency of the elements written on the blackboard. Then as he went to the other students, he would take out the novel and read it again. 

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He would read in all the classes, then at home, during the morning, and late in the night with the help of a candle constantly burning on his bedside table. He had got the book from the library of his mother, Jahanara Begum, who was one of the prominent writers of the Progressive Writers Movement started by Sajjad Zahir and Ahmed Ali. She broke with the movement on the pretext that it wasn’t capable of creating any meaningful fiction that was closer to the works of the stalwarts of World Literature. According to her, the only writers whose works needed to be read and reread were Kafka, Dostoyevsky and Camus, but only his early works. And no Urdu writer had ever been able to produce any seminal work close to them. Urdu works mainly revolved around filthy romances or societal issues, two problems which, according to Jahanara, shouldn’t be dealt with in the realms of literature. Literature, according to her, was meant for greater artistic purposes, something no other art form was capable of doing. 

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In 1957, she parted ways from the movement and started working on The dreams of the dead, which, according to her, would be the new Urdu novel. The novel, according to Javed, was loosely based on Kafka’s short story ‘In the penal colony’. Her revolutionary ideas were vetted by Shamsur Rehman Faruki, the noted Urdu critic who later, in June 1966, started the acclaimed journal Shabkhoon. 

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Jahanara Begum didn’t wait to transform the literacy scene in Lucknow. In 1959, she left and went to Tel Aviv to meet Max Brod (Kafka’s friend, who published his work against his wishes) and seek his permission and guidance to work on her novel based on Kafka’s story. They had been exchanging letters for two years, and Javed believed his mother had fallen in love with Brod, who was around her father’s age. When I was at his home, he showed me the letters, and also a black-and-white photograph of the old professor. He wore black-rimmed spectacles and had a small black moustache. Javed was devastated by his mother’s absence. He called her mean and selfish, and many other things which I can’t write here. When he was done calling her names, he would burst into tears like a young bride leaving her father’s home. 

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She wrote letters to Javed that he used to hide in Kafka’s books and read at school. Sometimes, in the middle of class, he would start crying inconsolably. Once, the chemistry teacher, Mr Kareem, came to enquire about the matter. I hid the book inside my bag. The teacher asked Javed to go outside and wash his face. ‘Who broke your heart, young boy?’ he asked him when he came back, his face still wet. He didn’t say anything, walked to his seat, and then put his head down on the wooden bench. 

*

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Manzilat also had her head down. Manzilat was one of our classmates, who had a crush on Javed. She was beautiful like a childhood dream. But no one sat beside her in the class. She smelled of mustard seeds. Her mother used to put a lot of mustard oil in her hair so she would have long and strong hair like Rapunzel’s. Even from a distance, you could see a stream of yellow mustard oil dripping from her hair, going towards the nape of her neck. Her little eyes looked like those of the pigeons on Javed’s roof, her hands like the branches of a rose tree. Her eyes were always glassy, like she had been crying, but she said the membrane of her eyes was weak, and sometimes too much light or lack of sleep made her eyes watery. Most of the girls and boys of those days didn’t sleep. They were all in love – some with boys like Javed, some with girls like Manzilat. Some were love in with imaginary boys and girls. 

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That summer when school started again, she wrote a letter to him, confessing her love. Javed gave the letter to me without reading it. I still remember the day when I opened the letter and a few rose petals and two strands of hair fell on my school’s trousers. The hair smelled of mustard oil, the roses like roses. He asked me to tell her that he didn’t have time for trivial things in life like love and that he was made for some noble purpose, to create a work of great artistic importance. 

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I will never forget that day when I told her everything in the school alley. She was shivering. She wiped her tears with the edges of her white sleeve which were yellow with patches of mustard oil. I wanted to take her in my arms and tell her that I loved her more than Javed. I told her that Javed was already in love, not with a girl, but with a dead man called Kafka. She didn’t know Kafka. No one in Lucknow knew Kafka. She thought Kafka was some European saint, and when I heard his name for the first time I had also thought of him like a Vatican priest. I told her who Kafka was. She kept on looking at me for two minutes. I looked around the empty alley, there was no one, just an old man cleaning the floor near the girls’ washroom. I wish there had been some other students around that day, so  I wouldn’t have committed that mistake – the mistake of confessing my love. She looked at me, wiping her tears. She thought I was trying to take advantage of her vulnerable condition. Maybe I was. I had loved her from the time when there was no Javed and no Kafka. She ran towards her home, her black shoes thumping on the school stairs. I can still hear that sound, the sound of a girl running up and down the stairs of that locked house inside my head. Someone still running away, their shoes thumping like they were jumping over my body, like the beating of empty drums at the advent of Muharram.

 

*

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From that day, whenever I tried to look at her she would turn her head away. Maybe I was ugly, and it was all an excuse that she still loved Javed. I was worried that she would tell everything to Javed. Maybe Javed wouldn’t have cared, as he didn’t care about anything. Thanks to God, though, at the beginning of the ninth standard, she stopped coming to school. I was lovesick but was also happy. And then we heard through one of her friends that her father, who was a government doctor, had been transferred to Shahjahanpur. I never saw her again. 

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Some nights, though, I saw her in my dreams. I vividly remember that dream. We were together inside a very large room, like the hall of a ruined palace. We were seated on the edge of a large bed. There was someone at the door looking at us. Her face was masked. But I knew who was behind that mask. She came closer and whispered something in my ears, in a very distinct language. Even in the dream she smelled like mustard oil. I said I  couldn’t understand a word. She put her hand on my mouth and asked me not to speak. She closed my eyes with her henna-stained hand. Her gold ring brushed against my eyelids. She put me to sleep. I tried to wake up but her hand was on my eyes. They smelled of henna. I could hear her breath. When I tried to speak she put the other hand on my mouth. 

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I kept sleeping inside that palace for 767 years. I was tired of sleeping. One afternoon I moved her hands. She wasn’t there. Two hands were lying on the bed. I moved from the bed and looked at myself in the windowpane. I had grown a beard longer than the equator. My eyes were yellow and sunken, like the eyes of a dying man. I would die by the evening. I walked out of room very slowly, like Grandpa used to walk before his death. In the other room, I saw two old men, working on a book. ‘You are awake. See who is here,’ said one. I looked at the other man, whose eyes were sadder than Javed’s. And the hair was neatly combed, the way Amma used to comb my hair when she was alive. He looked at me, then extended his wrinkled hand. ‘I am Kafka.’

*
 

Those winter afternoons, after classes were over, I and Javed would sit on that unplastered wall of his roof. There, amid the pigeon shit, and white feathers lying all around, we would smoke cigarettes bought from the money I stole from Abba’s pocket.  I would teach him how to smoke. He would cough, like those old men in those government hospitals, sick with tuberculosis. I would crush the butt under my torn slippers, and then he would read me the letters Kafka wrote to Milena. Javed told Milena was Kafka’s lover. I looked at Milena’s portrait on the cover. ‘Doesn’t she look like Manzilat? If she wore these Western clothes, she would look like Milena.’ Javed looked at my curious face and then at the book’s cover. He didn’t say anything, as if he couldn’t remember how Manzilat looked.

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I wish I could write a letter like Kafka to Manzilat. I tried not to think of her. In the sky, two pigeons were flying. One came and sat near the pack of cigarettes on the wall. Javed was busy reading the letter. The pigeon looked at me. It felt as if she was sent by Manzilat. She had sent a message. She wanted her hands, which she had forgotten in my dream. I won’t give her those hands. If she wants those hands, she would have to give me back those nights when I dreamt about her and couldn’t sleep. I tried to burn her feathers with a burning matchstick. She moved in haste and then flew towards the western sky. The dusk slowly arrived, like a distant relative knocking on the door of a locked house. And then followed the loneliness of night.

 

*
 

Javed had a difficult relationship with his father who thrashed him almost every day just for fun. His father had sold all the paternal land and the house he had received from his grandfather, Nawab Kazim Mirza, and spent all the money on gambling and alcohol. After he passed the eleventh standard, Javed had to leave the college as his father was unable to pay the fee. He found a job as an apprentice at Shah Kareem Jewellers in Aminabad. We met at the Danish Mahal (the bookshop beside Central Hotel where all the budding writers and poets met) every evening when he came back from work. The shopkeeper paid him fifty rupees every month. He tried to save two-thirds of the money so that he could buy the books he wanted to read.

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One afternoon, Javed’s father found one of the letters Javed’s mother had been writing to him for months. He read the letter and started crying. I was at their home with a new pack of Capstan. Javed was lying on the floor and his father was beating him with a cane – he was drunk. I ran towards them and threw his father off. I sat over Javed’s father and threatened him: ‘If you touch him again, I will cut off your hands.’ 

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Javed’s father knew my father: he had been his junior at the Shia College. They had some old beef, it was about a particular incident when Abba had found Javed’s father in the bathroom with a boy. They were smoking but Abba and his friends spread rumours that Javed’s father had his pants down. He was embarrassed, and everyone made fun of him. He left college in the middle of the year. He once stood outside the college with his father’s gun and tried to kill Abba. Luckily Nawab Karim’s old revolver didn’t work or Abba would have been dead, and I wouldn’t have been narrating this story. That afternoon Abba and his friends beat him profusely. They even took off his pants, and the poor man ran home naked. He locked himself in his room for four months and came out only when his father came to take him back to Daryabad for his mother’s funeral. 

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I hated my father. I knew he was a devil. I was happy when I discovered that Javed’s father was also a devil. Maybe fathers were like that. I never let Javed know about that incident, though I knew it wouldn’t have affected our friendship since his relationship with his father was sour. Still, I felt sorry for the man, for the suffering that Abba had caused. But when I saw him treating his son like that, like the way he was treated. I wished he was dead. 

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Javed said that his father didn’t touch him after that day, ‘I don’t know why he is afraid of you,’ he said one day. I tried to change the topic and asked him what he had written the other night. He picked out a paper from his pocket. Whenever he wrote a story, he would ask the same question, ‘Does it sound like Kafka?’ 

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Javed’s father avoided my gaze when I was at his house. That autumn, he died of an overdose of morphine. His body was found in the lavatory of Balrampur Hospital. Javed was happy, he was now free to leave the city and go in search of his mother. We started arranging money, but before he could leave his mother’s final letter arrived (she committed suicide after Brod’s death), and the unfinished manuscript of her book The dreams of the dead. 

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Javed was locked in his house for five months. His face was black, like the kohl in the eyes of a young bride,  like a patient in an abandoned sanatorium. I tried my best to take him out of that bout of depression. For days and nights, I would sit by his bed and read Kafka’s The trial and The castle. I would try to change the plots and make them humorous, filled with lewd jokes. Javed couldn’t control his laughter. Sometimes he would chase me holding up his torn shoe. ‘You scoundrel, if Kafka was alive, he would have crucified you for messing with his manuscript!’ 

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*
 

That Eid Javed left his job and began teaching English to the neighbourhood children. He saved money to buy books, books, books and more books. He read those books again and again. Literature was a consolation from life’s melancholy. He ate less and lost twenty kilograms. He was a walking corpse. He read all the works of Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Camus and his new-found treasure, Cervantes. Whenever he discovered a new author, his first question was whether he was as good as Kafka. He translated them all into Urdu, and then Persian, a language he taught himself. He had memorised the whole of Don Quixote and sometimes, when he was happy, he would say you are my Sancho Panza. 

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I couldn’t understand his literary references. I never read books. I am a doctor. My literary education was through Javed. I didn’t know any Dostoyevsky or Camus. I knew Javed Alavi. He was my Camus and Dostoyevsky. I bet even if I knew how to read, and had read those stories in seclusion in those lonely nights. They wouldn’t have given me the joy, the joy that I received when my old friend read those stories on that pigeon-shit-stained roof of his house. Those winters, the cold wind. The two pigeons in the sky. And the memory of Manzilat in my head. 

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*
 

In 1971, Javed married Maimoona, a girl in her late twenties whom he had taught English. Maimoona’s parents married her to Javed as they couldn’t find a husband suitable for her. Javed married her for the dowry. They gave him ten thousand rupees, furniture, and a Persian cat. The marriage lasted for two years. Maimoona couldn’t tolerate his stinginess. He also coughed badly and one day, when she tried to kiss him, he spat blood over her face. 

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A few months after the marriage, Maimoona got close to Kemal Rizvi, a young literature student from Christian College who used to bring his poetry to show to Javed for comment. Javed knew what was going on between Kemal and his wife but he wasn’t bothered. All he wanted was peace and the time to write that one Kafkaesque story. Javed once told me that Kemal’s poetry was worse than a schoolboy’s: ‘He will never be able to publish a word.’ ‘Then why don’t you tell him that?’ I asked. ‘Why would I?’ he said. ‘I am surviving on the money he pays me every month.’ I didn’t say anything after that. One day I told him that the shopkeeper Abdel Malek had been telling a customer about his wife’s affair with Kemal. ‘If that’s true then it’s better, this way she won’t bother me for anything,’ he said, and lit a Capstan.

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For years, Kemal didn’t write anything of any worth, and his father finally asked him to drop the idea of becoming a poet. He stopped coming to the poetry sessions and joined his father in the timber business. Then, one day, he came to Javed’s house and said that he wanted to marry his wife. Maimoona came out of her room, and told him that there was no point asking Javed, saying ‘He is neither my father nor husband.’ That day she packed a suitcase and left the house with Kemal. Two days later, a court order for divorce arrived.

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Though I was sure, Javed never loved Maimoona, after she left he was hit by depression. For days he stayed inside that little house, smoking cigarettes, and writing letters to his departed mother. On the wintry nights of December, the whole neighbourhood heard his cries and laments. No one went to console him, we all knew, no one could soothe the heaviness of his heart. 

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I suggested that he sell the house, and start living with me in my house. This way he would have enough money and won’t be required to waste his time on private tuition. ‘If I sold this house, it would be like I am selling my mother. All the memories I have are in this house, if the house weren’t there, there won’t be anything left, no past, no memories. I need this house, my mother gave me birth in this house, where on earth I would go and dream about her?’ He was in tears. 

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*
 

One day he sent a neighbourhood boy to call me: ‘Help me, my friend, or I will die.’ He was lying on the floor amid a mass of papers. He had written more than a thousand pages of stories. I read a few, but couldn’t understand much because of the bad handwriting. His hair was dishevelled. I took him to the barber. I took him to see Dr Mazhar Hussain, a prominent psychiatrist at King George Hospital. The medicines helped him to sleep but not much. His insomnia worsened. He started seeing his mother. As the days passed he became like a fleeting afternoon shadow on a wall.

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For two weeks we didn’t meet and then, one day, he arrived at my clinic unannounced. He needed money. ‘Amma is going to Bombay to see her friend. I will return the money in two months,’ he said. That’s what he always said: I will return the money in two months, but he never paid it back. I wasn’t worried about the money but my friend’s failing mental health. That evening I reminded him that he was wasting his time on writing stuff that no one would be able to read, trying to write that one perfect Kafkaesque story. I said I would help him buy a typewriter and he should start working on his mother’s unfinished novel, The dreams of the dead. 

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It took him seven months to write two chapters. Shamsur Rehman Faruqi praised them and published them in Shabkhoon. Not only that, he helped to get the chapters  translated into English and Persian, as he believed the international audience, which knew Kafka very well, would celebrate them the way they should be celebrated. Indeed, Gholam Hosseini an Iranian novelist, read the chapters and wrote a letter to Javed. He also asked if they could meet in person.

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Javed was excited to leave for Iran. He wanted to do everything to help the novel reach the right audience. At the time, Khomeini was back from exile in France. There were protests in the streets of Tehran. I was worried. But Javed wasn’t ready to listen.

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*

 

The year before Javed left for Tehran, I had married Nigar, the eldest daughter of my father’s cousin Rashid Alavi. Nigar was the girl who used to sit beside me at the maktab in Daryabad. After I left the village, I never met her till we married. 

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When Javed reached Tehran he wrote a letter to me, telling me only about the weather and the food. In his second letter, he gave me a telephone number. I had to spend a lot of money to get a telephone installed in my home just to talk to Javed. I was dying to hear his voice. Nigar didn’t like the continuous intrusion of Javed into our lives. He also wanted to speak to her, but she complained of a fever or a stomach ache. Every time a new ailment, every time he asked to speak to her. I knew Javed, he wasn’t interested in people. He considered talking to people a waste of time. Saving those minutes would have enabled him to read books that he thought made more sense than humans. He wanted to speak to Nigar for my sake.

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That October Nigar got pregnant. She delivered a child at the end of June 1980. It was a boy and I named him Javed, against Nigar’s wishes. His chubby cheeks resembled her mother’s and he had an aquiline nose like mine. He had a sadness in his eyes, the sadness I always saw in the eyes of Javed. The boy died when he was two of some sudden unexplained cause. Nigar accused me of killing him. ‘You gave all your money to your friend and didn’t spend a penny on your child’s health. You ignored us and talked all the time with that madman. God knows when he will die.’

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Nigar mourned for her child. One day she went back to her parents. She left a letter. She said I had ruined her life. She said in reality I should have married Javed. She hoped I would never find any peace in my life and would beg for a night’s sleep.

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Javed called me daily to console me. ‘We weren’t meant for marriage or love. We are meant to suffer. And the sooner we accept our loneliness the better it would be.’ I begged him to come back. I didn’t want to rot alone, thinking of the past over and over, crawling over time like a spider on a white sheet. I dreamt of death. I saw a dead body wrapped in a white sheet, with a big spider over the face. I couldn’t know whether it was my funeral,  Javed’s or someone else’s. 

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Javed decided to come back. He needed money. I sold everything in the house: the old Tesla television, the jewellery Nigar had left behind, beds and tables, the old books. I sent him all the money I could get my hands on. On the phone, Javed coughed loudly and couldn’t speak. He said he would come back by the winter’s end. When I called him that evening, the number was out of service.

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I would go every day to the railway station and wait till every train coming from Delhi had arrived. I looked at every man and woman, every cat and dog coming out. They all looked like Javed. But when I went closer and tapped on their shoulders, they were mere shadows of a forgotten past. I was scared, I thought he would never come back. I went to the railway station daily for two months. At night, I couldn’t sleep. The thought of his death made me crawl over the floor. I talked to my shadow on the wall and begged him to talk back to me. The loneliness ate me like a termite. I began thinking my friend had conned me. Nigar was right. He had needed me for the money. He didn’t like people. All he had wanted were his books, and money so that he could keep smoking those cheap cigarettes. 

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*
 

It took Javed two years to write the book. The story was a total departure from Kafka’s ‘In the penal colony’. Hosseini passed it to his literary friends, who appreciated the narrative structure of the novel. Farzaneh Golshiri, a well-known literary critic and Hosseini’s friend at that time, said that the writer would one day receive the Nobel Prize – the same prize that Camus, whom Hosseini greatly admired, had won. Hosseini got the manuscript translated into Persian and published it under his name. He convinced Javed that, for his book to gain recognition and the fame his mother deserved, it should be published under the name of an established author. Javed knew what Hosseini was trying to do, but for him, the important thing was the publication of the novel, not his name. 

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The book became a huge success. Hosseini became so busy attending meetings and conferences he abandoned poor Javed, leaving him with his friend Reza Saeedi. His delusions worsened and no one was there to help him. Reza gave him opium, so Javed could not come out of the dreams. He cried for his mother. He saw her seated on a rocking chair, knitting a sweater for him. He told everything to Reza. He asked him to tell his mother that he needed a yellow sweater, his favourite colour. The bastard Reza, on a few occasions, dressed up like Javed’s mother and physically assaulted him, saying it was a mother’s love for his child. One afternoon, when Reza had gone out, Javed closed all the doors and windows of the house. Then he switched on the gas and sat on the sofa. A few minutes later, he took out his lighter and lit his final cigarette.

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*
 

One afternoon I heard about a dead body being brought into the neighbourhood from Tehran. My heart sank like a broken ship. I knew Javed was dead. I went to the funeral. The body was like the remains of a burnt tree. The man wasn’t recognisable. They wrapped him in a white shroud and then buried him at Turiyanganj Karbala. That walk from the graveyard to my home was very long. My legs were weak. It felt like I would never reach home. 

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* 
 

I once had this dream that I would grow old with my friend. In the late evening, we would sit at my clinic and he would tell me about the book he was writing, I would describe the patients who visited me; we would smoke, laugh, and sometimes weep, using our hands to wipe the tears of the other. That dream was shattered, like many dreams of the past.

I came home around dusk. I locked the termite-eaten door and closed the windows. I wanted to sleep, the way Javed was sleeping in his grave. I wanted to see that dream. I wanted Manzilat to come again and put her henna-stained hands on my eyes. I promised I would never open them. But every time Manzilat came and put her hand on my eyes, Javed would come and remove those hands. He would never let my soul be soothed by the smell of henna coming from Manzilat’s sweaty hands. He knew love would make me weak, writers needed to be strong, how else they would create monumental works, the tombs of dead saints? 

I wanted to cry out, there is nothing as a monumental work, and you were a mediocre writer, go away now, let me dream, and love is better than all the books in the world. I wanted to say, the true homeland of a man is the grave, and tombs are for saints that never existed, an work of art will never lead to immortality, and God doesn’t write fiction.  

I knew I would never be able to sleep nor dream. I had had a friend. Then he died and became a book, a book written by Kafka.

For days, I lay on the bed alone. Then I heard a voice again, it was Javed’s. I tried to open the door but couldn’t. And then I realised that, living with darkness, I have become a part of darkness, a figment of the past, a fleeting memory, without any reality of its own. My body became weak and I fell to the floor. The window of my room was open. A cold wind was freezing my body. A cold wind was blowing over the grave of my beloved friend. Lying there, I stared out the window. The leaves were falling, one after the other. Autumn had arrived. I knew I wouldn’t be able to see the winter. I was dying, with only two breaths left to breathe. I closed my eyes. Someone closed the window.
 
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