Wandering in the Afghan quarters of Karachi during a Ramzan afternoon, the 70-year-old diabetic Abdullah, the portly protagonist of H.M. Naqvi’s paean to the port city, is confronted with an existential question: “ Tum musalman ho ?” (Are you a Muslim?). The faith-based challenge to his identity is hurled angrily at him by a stranger — a bearded bloke — who espies an evidently parched Abdullah take a swig of water during the fasting hours. Abdullah erupts in justifiable outrage, declaiming that his piety is a matter between himself and his god. “If you’re sensible, then your god is sensible,” he thunders, “but if you’re a dolt, your god’s a dolt!”
The street-corner theological encounter, which occurs fairly early on in the novel, is as good a way to get introduced to Abdullah, an endearing Sufi-esque character whose expansive liberalism of spirit works as a metaphor for a Karachi (and a Pakistan) that once was. In a broader sense, the foundational question that Abdullah faces is instantly familiar to many across the Indian subcontinent who have embraced a liberal worldview — and who are occasionally called upon, by self-proclaimed foot-soldiers of the faith, to validate their fidelity through public abidance of orthodox tenets.
Abdullah “the Cossack” earned his sobriquet, we are told, in 1974 when he famously ‘out-drank’ a delegation of Russian technocrats. But today, the bumbling bachelor and the favourite chachajaan of his ‘Childoos’ nephews — whose jollity of spirit isn’t widely shared even within his immediate family — faces a few other existential challenges as well. Three of his brothers are conspiring to evict him from the run-down family seat, Sunset Lodge, and redevelop it for their own children. In a weak moment of desolation, he even contemplates leaping off the balcony on his ‘platinum jubilee’ birthday and ending it all, but is stopped short by a curious twist of circumstances: evidently a ‘guardian angel’ is watching over him.
A string of other events conflate to gift Abdullah with a ‘blended family’ of sorts. His Anglo-Indian and Goan friends throw him an impromptu birthday party — the scene where they perform the anthemic ‘Take Five’ brings vividly alive the ‘jazz age’ of Karachi — at the end of which his friend Felix Pinto, facing an unsavoury situation involving the land mafia, entrusts his grandson Bosco to Abdullah for a spot of “character building and all that jazz”.
The ‘guardian angel’ who saved Abdullah earlier comes forcefully into his life in the shapely form of Jugnu, the erstwhile moll of ‘Langra Dacoit’: she’s bubbly, and soon gets Abdullah’s long-dormant male hormones gushing — even though the precise details of her gender identity on the spectrum of possibilities remain tantalisingly out of his reach.
Fulfilling though that amatory relationship is, it puts Abdullah squarely in the crosshairs of the Karachi underworld. His problems are compounded by the strong-arm methods invoked by one of Abdullah’s brothers, Bakaullah (aka Comrade), an erstwhile Communist, to reclaim Sunset Lodge. Feeling the heat, Abdullah commandeers a family jalopy and, along with Jugnu and Bosco, heads for the Interior to enlist the support of Tony, the brother who left the family fold.
That journey, which is punctuated by several sparkling moments of hilarity, marks the first step in the process of reconciliation between the brothers, although there are still some hurdles along the way, not least because the Comrade is still keen to evict Abdullah. The resourceful Cossack, working strategically, gets the Langra Dacoit to back off from Jugnu, and strikes a deal with the new don ‘Rambo’ to secure the ‘strong arm’ support that even a man of moral standing needs in order to survive in Karachi’s mean streets.
Naqvi weaves a masterful tale, rich in chuckle-inducing irony as he leads us gradually to get to know Abdullah the Cossack, and peer into the soul of Karachi. In some ways, Abdullah puts you in mind of the eponymous protagonist of A Man Called Ove , although Abdullah is an infinitely more joyous character. Even his idiosyncracies — including his haemorrhoids, which cause him acute “rectal disharmony” — render him adorably human, and the passages where he playfully engages with his nephews and orients Bosco’s moral compass are among the most endearing.
A reflective Bosco once asks him: “Are you religious, Uncle Cossack?” To which Abdullah responds: “The call to prayer was whispered in my ear when I was born, and I will be buried with traditional rites, whether I like it or not. So I was born a Musalman, will die a Musalman, but in the interim, I wonder… I wonder what is good, what is bad, does morality have anything to do with god? I wonder if we all misunderstood the message...”
It’s a predicament that will resonate with many who abide by a fluidity in matters of faith. Evidently, even rakish, jovial uncles can impart thoughtful life lessons.
The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack by H.M. Naqvi, 4th Estate, 270 pages, ₹599
