Boys Will Be Boys

A Daughter's Elegy

Sara Suleri Goodyear

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780226044675

Sara Suleri Goodyear's Meatless Days, recognized now as a classic of postcolonial literature, is a finely wrought memoir of her girlhood in Pakistan after the 1947 partition. Set around the women of her family, Meatless Days intertwines the violent history of Pakistan's independence with Suleri Goodyear's most intimate memories of her grandmother, mother, and sisters. In Boys Will Be Boys, she returns—with the same treasury of language, humor, and passion—to her childhood and early adulthood to pay tribute to her father, the political journalist Z. A. Suleri (known as Pip, for his "patriotic and preposterous" disposition).Taking its title from that jokingly chosen by her father for his unwritten autobiography, Boys Will Be Boys dips in and out of Suleri Goodyear's upbringing in Pakistan and her life in the United States, moving between public and private history and addressing questions of loss and cultural displacement through a resolutely comic lens. In this rich portrait, Pip emerges as a prodigious figure: an ardent agitator against British rule in the 1930s and 1940s, a founder of the Times of Karachi and the Evening Times, on-and-off editor of the Pakistan Times, for a brief time director of the Pakistan military intelligence service, and a frequently jailed antagonist of successive Pakistani leaders. To the author, though, he was also "preposterous... counting himself king of infinite space, " a man who imposed outrageously on his children. As Suleri Goodyear chronicles, Pip demanded their loyalty yet banished them easily from his favor; contrary and absurdly unfair, he read their diaries, interfered in their relationships, and believed in a father's inalienable right to oppress his children.Suleri Goodyear invites the reader into an intimacy shaped equally by history and intensely personal detail, creating an elegant elegy for a man of force and contradiction. And perhaps Pip was not so preposterous after all: "On Judgment Day, " he told his daughter, "I will say to God, 'Be merciful, for I have already been judged by my child.'"

We are the lover, they the impatiently disdaining:

Dear God! What kind of business is this, anyway?

—GHĀLIB

I cannot remember the time when Pip regarded all of his children in equal good favor. As I have mentioned, there were six of us, and never when we congregated around a luncheon table was Pip on speaking terms with all of us at the same time. Dadi at the foot of the table was always incognito, and I suspect rather enjoyed her status as persona non grata, which she played to the hilt. Pip was inevitably at the head of the table, Mamma to his right, while we children scrambled to find places as far away from Pip as possible. That was achievable, but then we still had to face the phulka trauma, lunch after lunch. Phulkas are freshly cooked rotis, light and full of steam, that the cook would make once we were at the table and the bearer would carry in, one by one. They would be deposited in a breadbasket next to Pip’s place setting, and he was almost Christlike when he tore them in two and passed them down to his long line of children. There were obvious problems, however, when one of us was in Coventry, which was always. He did not deign to hand the disfavored any bread, which in a way was quite a relief, since lunch was much too big a meal anyway. Once, when I had the misfortune of sitting next to Pip and alongside Ifat, who was in disfavor, Pip kept piling my side plate with roti after roti. I did not dare know what to do until he snarled at me, “You selfish girl! Can’t you pass on some bread to your sister?” I did so with relief, and as she and I exchanged glances of recognition, I knew this steaming piece of bread betokened a ceremony through which Ifat could pass from disfavor into favor.

It wouldn’t last for long. And in the interim we had to endure the lunch of the bouncing boti. It tires me to explain what exactly that lunch may be. Consider a curry, made with mutton, into which a vegetable is also thrown. Think of it as a stew, if you will, but one highly spiced and delicately decorated with sautèed coriander and parsley. The meat in that salan is hard to describe: I would avoid it, sticking to the vegetables alone. (Years later, it made Shahida exclaim, “Look at Sara! She eats just like a Hindu!” I do not think the term was one of endearment in her lexicon.) In any case, the lunchtime gol boti, as they were called, happened to be rounded fragments of a meatiness that were considered most prized. “Oh, a gol boti, Zia!” exclaimed my mother. “You have it!” She bounced the boti at my father’s plate. “No, you have it!” and Pip would bounce it back again. “No, you have it!” and off went the bouncing boti. It was as though two turtledoves were in dalliance, positively playing badminton with that boti. They accompanied it with loving smiles, our parents; the boti kept on bouncing, while their children just stared down at their plates, mashing veggies into smaller and smaller slivers.

When Ifat was in disfavor, it usually had to do with the man who was shortly to be her husband, a person on whom I do not wish to dwell. But with the rest of us, Pip’s motives were far less easily defined. Shahid would be put in Coventry because his two schoolteachers had taken to dropping by our house on holiday afternoons: hardly a crime, you’d think, but it grated on Pip’s nerves to no small degree. I did not wish to be Shahid when, on one winter afternoon, Pip returned from his office for lunch only to find the dining room occupied by Shahid’s teachers and friends. Pip would not join them. He flounced out to the garden in high dudgeon, leaving strict instructions with the bearer to let us know the moment Shahid’s guests had finished eating, so that he could have his lunch and return to work. The lunch lasted longer than it should have, to Pip’s increasing impatience. I certainly did not wish to be poor Karam Dad, the bearer, when he came out to announce that Shahid and his friends had ended their repast, and then was forced to add: “How would you like your eggs cooked, sir?” “Eggs?” shouted Pip. “Eggs?” You see, the chicken curry had been polished off, as had been the rice, the lentils, and the veggies. I thought a luncheon omelet was a fine idea, but it put Pip into a fuming rage, and he wouldn’t speak to Shahid for weeks on end.

Poor Mamma. She did her best to protect us from Pip’s disfavor, and so would keep secret her routine visits to Father Byrne at St. Mary’s, Shahid’s school, or to Mother Baptist at Presentation Convent, my school, while we were still in Rawalpindi. (Tillat was also at the convent, but she was too small to be considered the epitome of misrule.) It seems we were always under threat of expulsion, and two incidents in the convent remain the most memorable to me. The first was when I persuaded two of my classmates to enter the bishop’s garden—a territory strictly out-of-bounds—knock upon his door, and ask to be converted to Catholicism. Our story was as follows: we were three half-sisters, for our father had married three times, first to a Hindu, then to a Muslim, and lastly to a Lutheran missionary. Our beliefs were consequently in confusion, and we sought the solace of the church instead. The bishop looked perplexed: “Did your father marry these ladies simultaneously?” he asked. We girls did look remarkably close in age, and there was not a lot of family resemblance between us. But he heard us out politely, advised us to consult our father and multiple mothers, and to stop in the chapel on our way out for a moment of quietude and prayer. It was in the chapel, while we were shrieking with laughter, that Mother Baptist caught us. “You!” she whipped round at me. “You are the ringleader!” Did I have the mark of ringleader printed on my brow to be thus constantly singled out? The trouble is, she was usually right. “Honestly, Sara,” Mamma mourned as I stood outside the principal’s office in expulsion posture, “sometimes you go too far.”

The second incident was during the month of Muharram, the opening month of the Islamic calendar. It has nothing of the chirpiness of a new year, really, since it also commemorates the tragedy of Karbala and the slaughter of Muhammad’s relatives, an event that will make every Muslim sorrow. Today, the American news is full of “Ker-Bālla,” as it is called: a spot emptied of history, a mere dot on the road map to Baghdad. And our class decided—there were only ten of us to a class—that we would lock up our book bags (tacchy-cases, they were called, as in attachè). We would then cover our heads, look mournful, and refuse to talk about anything but religion. Our Urdu teacher, a Mrs. Mustafa, was quite pious herself and totally approved of our piety: she lectured us for a good hour on the sad happenings of Karbala. The geography teacher, however, was not so amenable, and the biology teacher not at all. Miss Riaz declared to us, quite taken aback, that she knew nothing about religion, did not want to talk to us about religion, but wanted to teach us about cacti instead. We students feigned horror at such blasphemy, touched our ears to ward off evil, and solemnly trooped out of the classroom in single file, our heads duly covered with veils. “Come back!” shouted Miss Riaz. “Come back, come back!” We made a solemn progress down the corridor until we met my nemesis, Mother Baptist, habit aflying, bearing down on us with rage. And so I was back outside the principal’s office until Mamma was summoned to plead for me. “Honestly,” she said on our way home, “honestly, Sara, honestly.”

There were some disfavors, however, from which she could not protect us. Ifat’s runaway marriage was one, although the less said about that, the better. And Mamma could hardly intervene in the days when we lived in Rawalpindi and Shahid was sent to Aitchison College in Lahore. It was midterm; Pip was at home writing, when suddenly out of the blue Shahid arrived. Pip—always delighted to see his firstborn son—exclaimed, “Shahid!” and was quite ready to kill the fatted calf forthwith. But my brother was slightly uneasy. “I have brought a teacher with me,” he ruefully explained. It transpired that while Shahid was in the Aitchison infirmary for some minor ailment, his mail was routinely opened by the matron, who was horrified to find that it contained some remarkably libelous and obscene lyrics about his various teachers, both in Rawalpindi and Lahore. They were coauthored by Shahid and his friends. She took them to the principal, Abdul Ali—a feudal gentleman if ever there was one—and Shahid was summarily expelled. Pip took up Shahid’s case most vigorously, but Abdul Ali was not to be budged. It did not help matters much when I came into the drawing room one evening to hear Pip on the telephone, calling Abdul Ali a bull and a pig. The gentleman immediately challenged Pip to a duel, which he promptly accepted: a foolish thing to do, since the only weapon he had been known to wield was his tongue. Luckily the encounter never took place, and a chastened Shahid returned to complete high school in Rawalpindi, at St. Mary’s, under the benevolent tutelage of Father Byrne. Pip never did say much about the porno poems of Shahid’s that Abdul Ali had made him read: I have a feeling that he secretly admired them, porno though they were, for their wit and èclat. “My son is a writer, after all,” he must have thought to himself with satisfaction.

So Shahid eventually went off to Cambridge to read law, along with the burden of Pip’s designed-to-be-disappointed expectations. It wasn’t Shahid’s fault: he was too intelligent for that venerable institution, too innately prone to breaking rules. He would take on the strangest summer jobs, once selling ice cream in the London theater district and standing stock-still each time the actress sang “Bring in the Clowns,” with tears pouring down his face at the chords of that admittedly moving song. Once he sold kebabs at a Kebabchi whose owner was an admirer of my father’s, and soon came to be an admirer of Shahid’s, too. “Shahid, my son,” he would say with the greatest respect. “You should be a Punjabi film actor! With that voice, that face! I’ll lay money on it that—if you put on some weight—within a season you would become a heartthrob star!” The Kebabchi notwithstanding, Shahid did put on weight, but to the best of my knowledge never became a Punjabi heart-throb film star. I rather regret it. I would have liked to see him bearing his chest, beating it, prancing around an extremely voluptuous actress, and conferring the impressiveness of his voice on an audience rather than on me.

And Tillat, in the middle of these traumas, what unnecessary rebukes she had to sustain! As the youngest daughter, I believe she was given some respite, but not on tiny issues, matters you should not have noticed, Pip. But you did. There was a time when she returned from Karachi after a fortnight with her friend Shabana wearing a denim pantsuit that would put Hillary Clinton to shame. Pip looked at her with a curved-lipped sneer: “And who do you think you’re becoming, Tillat?” It brought her close to tears, and I felt it incumbent upon myself to declare, “But she looks very, very nice!” On the terrible day, which was close to the time of my departure for the United States, Tillat had—quite insequentially—put curlers in her hair and sat around the dining table with her head bound up in a silk kerchief. “If you think this is a good idea,” Pip snarled, “you are wrong!” I would have tried to intervene, but it was not necessary. Dadi, from the opposite end of the table, looked up with considerable pleasure. “Aha,” she said, “aha! Tillat has chosen to wear a turban! Aha!” We had to be silenced, no words allowed, when Dadi transmitted her pleasure to Tillat, and my father simply turned his head in a gesture of pure denigration. My Tillat sobbed later, over the ironing board, “At least he could have been kinder to you, on your last birthday at home!” “No,” I told her, “no.”

No. She was stronger than I was and could take sidelong recrimination more quietly than her sister could. Over one lunch, Pip looked up with his lips curling in disgust. He leveled his bushy brows at my sister. Tillat had plucked her eyebrows, as women are wont to do, but she was not allowed to forget that perfectly ordinary female activity. “Tillat!” said Pip, abhorrence exuding from his pores. “What have you done to your eyebrows?” That may have been after a boti-bouncing episode, so that a smile quite left his stern eyes. Around that overdetermined dining table, he would look at her with ultimate disgust, to add: “Look at Sara! How beautiful her eyebrows are! Not a single disfigurement of nature!” Since I had trotted off to have my eyebrows pruned that very week, I simply stared down at my meal and blushed modestly. Tillat was about to make one of her “jolly well!” remarks, but she endured the reprimand and only looked at me with understandable hatred. My father then quoted poetry of a ludicrous extravagance about what bows eyebrows are, what scimitars eyelashes are, so that our very faces were transmuted to a battlefield. We looked down at our plates and speculated whether our jawlines could be frontlines, or a twentieth-century trench, the clefts in our chins. It would be fair enough, Pip, if you had cast your sarcastic barbs in our direction and then left us, with the force and strength of a bumblebee. But you didn’t. You tended to chide us before we should be chidden. And please realize, out of love for you, Pip, we were busy inventing reasons for which you could keep chiding us.

I don’t know which was worse for my brothers, the tenacious concentration Pip inflicted on Shahid or the benign neglect he administered to Irfan. We were all at fault in leaving Irfan to his own devices, although Ifat tried, while she was alive, to provide him with an alternative home; Nuz did so in Karachi, too; and he lived three years with Shahid in London. I am sorry that he has never visited me in America, an absence that could perhaps be remedied. We all have to remind ourselves that Irfani was the only one present when Pip came home with his blushing daughter, Shahida, at his side. For one missing his mother and his sister, that must have been a trauma. Irfan was working in the advertising department of the Pakistan Times in those days and was quite successful at it. In a moment of mutiny, however, the union members of the newspaper challenged Pip about his appointment, citing someone from their clan as a substitute. How proud I felt of Pip when, rather than defending himself by citing a list of Farni’s many talents, he replied with slow dignity, “He is my son. Would you rather I let him go to the dogs?” You didn’t, Pip. And today when I see Irfan working so hard in Birmingham, with Attiya and their three children, there is something dignified even in the air of his fatigue, and I know to say, “Yes, Pip, he is your son.”

In earlier times, however, when we were all at home, it soon became clear to me that the only reason for my not being in more frequent disfavor was because I was too useful. Pip was politic enough to know that he needed me to copy out his articles, to proofread, to care for Mamma, to cope with the cook. And I was politic enough to know my uses and to stretch like an elastic band the boundaries between favor and disfavor. The band would snap, of course, and sometimes on the most incomprehensible occasions. When I was invited to act in the Caravan Theater, a touring company, I was only given Pip’s permission if I adopted a stage name, Saira Ahmad, and thus did not sully either Sara or Suleri. (I was twenty-one at the time. Why on earth did I need permission? Curious to contemplate today, but I most certainly did.) That arrangement was fine by me, because I liked to act at any cost, so Pip’s reaction came as quite a surprise to me when—some months later—I wrote a play under the pseudonym of Saira Ahma...