SANITY BAG

In a series slugged ‘Sanity Bag’, I am posting portions from Anees Salim’s ‘Vanity Bagh’ as I progress reading the novel. I know my exercise of reproducing passages is not as exciting as the book itself. I read slow and in fits and starts.


Post 1:

We called ourselves ‘5 ½ Men’, though there were a whole six of us. But everything in the mohalla has a strange name, and a strange story. The imam of Masjid-e-Mosavi once said our area had been named after the wife of the British engineer who built the bridge across the Moosa River a century ago. But did a lady named Vanity ever exist on planet earth? I seriously doubt the authenticity of this story even though the imam in question happens to be my own father.

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The day the City Chronicle renewed the legend of Franklin in its Sunday edition—sometimes these newspapers have so much free space they write about any crap, even about garbage disposal and eunuchs—we started hating the tree. What was a tree that reeked of Christianity doing in a Muslim neighbourhood? People started talking about felling it; they were furious that it was planted by a Christian who must have bribed a few dozen Muslims into kafirs. Probably the Pintos had been practicing Muslims a century ago; the mohalla-wallahs were almost sure that Moses, the senior-most member of the Pinto clan, had been called Moosa before his conversion. His wife was still called Fatima, whom the mohalla-wallahs now suspected of secretly fasting during Ramzan.

Anees is a fabulous storyteller, who can’t stop telling us stories. Unlike some writers who write ‘epoch-making’ books once in a blue moon and veers away into an ‘intellectual exercise’ of changing the society and healing the many ills of the generation through protest and silence, Anees keeps telling us stories of simple men in their simpler neighbourhoods. Anees sees the unseen and hears the unheard—the imam breaks wind during a serious discussion about where to bury a child in an Islamic way, and Imran gets ‘the same sulphuric smell that pervaded our house’. Anees presents grave situations with laced with dark, subtle humour, making us laugh till we remember the sores of our life—much like his protagonist in Vanity Bagh, Imran Jabbari, says: Leaning against a pillar, we laughed until we remembered we were convicts.