Page 149 - Train to Pakistan

your navel with your nose. Have perfect control over the senses. Make women
come till they cry ‘Enough!’ and you can say ‘Next, please’ without opening

your eyes. And all the mumbo-jumbo of reincarnation. Man into ox into ape into
beetle into eight million four hundred thousand kinds of animate things. Proof?
We do not go in for such pedestrian pastimes as proof! That is Western. We are

of the mysterious East. No proof, just faith. No reason, just faith. Thought,
which should be the sine qua non of a philosophical code, is dispensed with. We
climb to sublime heights on the wings of fancy. We do the rope trick in all

spheres of creative life. As long as the world credulously believes in our capacity
to make a rope rise skyward and a little boy climb it till he is out of view, so long
will our brand of humbug thrive.

Take art and music. Why has contemporary Indian painting, music,
architecture and sculpture been such a flop? Because it keeps harking back to
BC. Harking back would be all right if it did not become a pattern—a

deadweight. If it does, then we are in a cul-de-sac of art forms. We explain the
unattractive by pretending it is esoteric. Or we break out altogether—like

modern Indian music of the films. It is all tango and rhumba or samba played on
Hawaiian guitars, violins, accordions and clarinets. It is ugly. It must be
scrapped like the rest.
He wasn’t quite sure what he meant. He poured another whisky.

Consciousness of the bad is an essential prerequisite to the promotion of the
good. It is no use trying to build a second storey on a house whose walls are

rotten. It is best to demolish it. It is both cowardly and foolhardy to kowtow to
social standards when one believes neither in the society nor in its standards.
Their courage is your cowardice, their cowardice your courage. It is all a matter
of nomenclature. One could say it needs courage to be a coward. A conundrum,

but a quotable one. Make a note of it.
And have another whisky. The whisky was like water. It had no taste. Iqbal

shook the flask. He heard a faint splashing. It wasn’t empty. Thank God, it
wasn’t empty.
If you look at things as they are, he told himself, there does not seem to be a

code either of man or of God on which one can pattern one’s conduct. Wrong
triumphs over right as much as right over wrong. Sometimes its triumphs are
greater. What happens ultimately, you do not know. In such circumstances what

can you do but cultivate an utter indifference to all values? Nothing matters.
Nothing whatever …