Paul Tajar was an Indo-Armenian ladies’ man who remained a bachelor all his life. When he died in 1956, his diary, with most of the pages eaten by silverfish, was found by a friend who gave it to this scribe for restoration and filling up the blanks. The following piece was retrieved from it and is reproduced as reported speech after subbing. Though it is not in the same class as Charles Lamb’s “Dream Children”, it is nevertheless not without an uncanny attraction of its own even after more than 62 years:
“Tajar got up with a hangover. Sitting out in the sun he lapsed into a reverie, watching the kites circling high in the sky. Sex had been the dominant theme of his life. The common sense view was that the thrill did not lie below the waist but in the mind. One didn’t have to be sexy all one’s life to realise that. In school it was the hallmark of adolescence, as was smoking in the lavatory, gram and jaggery at the Buddi’s and jungle-jalebi behind the tuck-shop. His thoughts became more and more disjointed. What did Bobbie do to the girl trying to pick a flower at Aram Bagh? She screamed just like the shapely blonde from Illinois impaled in the Id crowd at Matia Mahal or the frisky woman in a red petticoat pinched by the cook as she bent at the public hydrant.
There was Charlie William Sebastian, the Cathedral guard who pricked the sleep-walking Archbishop’s shoulder with his spear one night thinking he was an intruder. The tonga driver with two daughters who ran away with the school mistress was also from the past, as was the man with the elephant leg of whom he was mortally afraid in childhood. Yes, that terror visited the house for the last time the day the Nawab, who had fallen in love with a courtesan, shot his wife. Courtesans meant passion and envy in the pre-Partition days. Even the dull boy Ahmed Ali thought as much when he pressed the drum-key into the hand of one dainty thing at a wedding dance and got a rap in return.
Then there was Shabban, the barber, picked up by the chowkidar when he fainted on seeing an apparition at the cross-roads. It was he who saw the Sayyid Baba coming on a white horse at midnight when Dilshad’s mother was unable to deliver. She loosened her pyjamas at his command and lo, gave birth to a boy. It was the spirit of the saint that had done it. The mohalla gang sought blessings from the Baba but Tajar preferred to pray at the Grotto of the Virgin which had its own aura. Thinking of the ghosts of the past, he still couldn’t fathom why the jinns haunted a mosque in Firozabad and left behind kulhars (earthen pots) after drinking milk there, or how the fairies danced for the dervish in the wilderness, the seance at the Forest Lodge and the murder at the Kalhari (tavern). That was the time when the old hunter Cyril speared a man-eating crocodile. The cigar-smoking Nawabzada befriended him. That handsome man lived in a haveli outside which sat Ballo, the water-carrier’s brother, who had gone daft during a chilla (40-day ritual) and the Khansama who saw the devil on the church wall.
From the balcony he saw different sights – morning, noon and night. There were the hawkers – the kalakand seller, the one-eyed kachori maker, the dark chap who brought plums in the afternoon, the thin one of the evening noted for his halwa sone. And at twilight the strange woman “Oo-Oo” whom they termed a babbal (ominous mystery) walking on her toes, stopping at each door for a roti and unnerving the young. Close by lived the vivacious Bubu and behind her garden the washerwoman who brought a husband every year from the village. She was sometimes seen below the red tamarind tree which shaded the house of the mysterious Khanam. It was in the same class as the thatched bungalow on the hill. He remembered the mad woman who cooked in a discarded commode and Sharro-ki-Dadi who survived the Kali-Andhi tornado.
What fantasies! The blind Kambalia waking up the faithful during Ramzan with his alto “Pyare logon”. The blanket-wearing Kabuli with his cry of “Didil-da-Didil-dee.” The fakir’s call which invariably woke him up on Sunday mornings. The dead schoolmaster who beat the road with a cane every night but couldn’t scare the Bengali Babu’s mistress in the babool thicket, and poor dog Rover buried under the starlight.
There were other funny characters like Pajji Dhap, the maulvi from Iran. Hafeez of the big teeth and the domiciled African who dwelt in the Sayyid’s “takia” and sometimes hitched a ride on the ekka of the tonga union’s president. He was the one who saw the depressed girl lying clothe-less on the grave of the Reverend Mother behind the fig garden, past which one went to the locality where the gypsy girl paid with a kiss when she ran short of cash at the pastry shop. A pimple-stricken chap called Phunsi and the spirit woman Bhootni who breast-fed her wailing orphan at dusk. It was too much and Tajar fell asleep to dream of sweetheart Shima. A chameleon changed colour in it. Shima shrieked and Tajar got up with a start to find the sun gone and the evening chill creeping up fast. He sneezed and pulled in the chair hoping for a hot cup of tea but his sweetheart had disappeared with the dream”. Tajar’s diary is probably now in Melbourne with his grand-niece but his house in Nicholson Road no longer exists while he himself rests in Lothian Road cemetery with a missing tombstone.
