A Passion for History in a Stifling Present

Alif, the hero of Anjum Hasan’s novel History’s Angel (Bloomsbury 2023), is a middle-aged, mild-mannered history teacher, living in contemporary Delhi at a time when Muslims are seen either as hapless victims or live threats. Though his life’s passion is the history he teaches, the present is pressing down on him: his wife is set on a bigger house and a better car while trying to improve her career prospects; his teenage son wants to quit school to get rich; and his old friend Ganesh has just reconnected with a childhood sweetheart with whom Alif was always rather enamoured himself. In this darkly funny, sharply observed and deeply moving novel, Hasan deftly and delicately explores the force and the consequences of remembering your people’s history in an increasingly indifferent milieu. Read an excerpt below.

Alif and Salim walk north through the lanes of Tiraha Bairam Khan and emerge before the grand Jama Mosque just as the light is slipping from the sky and coming on in all the many open-mouthed establishments of Urdu Bazaar. A hundred different enactments of daily commerce – sellers of fly-speckled dates heaped in all shades of brown; squawking cages with scrawny chickens and fluff balls of yellow chicks; biryani rice boiling in a huge cauldron of cloudy water and a man testing one grain between two fingertips; another man outside on his haunches contemplatively smoking his hookah; a hopeful woman with nothing but a tiny heap of garlic cloves for sale; men in spotless white presiding over festering goat trotters; a bookshop with signs for sale that all say the same thing in different calligraphed Urdu words, Kushaamdeed, Istiqbaal, Tashrif Layeye – that is, Welcome and Welcome and Welcome; heaped on the pavement an incredibly emaciated beggar with a bald head the size of an infant’s, an even more emaciated child asleep on her lap. Her bare limbs are entangled with the baby’s and difficult to tell apart. She is nibbling on a samosa from a tinfoil plate, chewing with dazed slowness as if eating too much or too quickly will kill her after years of eating too little. She has received her iftar from the other side of the road where the row of folding tables on which those small plates of snacks and paper cups of juice that were laid out for the poor fasters like her are now being put away.

A banner strung between electricity poles flaps in the breeze, asking the government to please leave Muslims alone. A high-windowed, air-conditioned coach full of behatted tourists from foreign lands trundles past them. Salim talks about the nuisance of his physics homework – ‘I just don’t get the laws of optics but does it matter when I can see?’ – and he does not notice these small things because they are ordinary and Alif notices them because they are ordinary and with each passing day made for him more distinct by their lack of distinctiveness. He sees how an ancient-looking rickshaw cyclist is actually very young and a young-looking ittar shop a hundred years old. And he catches, as always, snatches of phrases that reinforce the laugh- able puniness of this human drama and the gigantic command of him, the only God – Baki Allah ki marzi . . . Bismillah kar ke . . . Masha Allah . . . Alhamdullilah.

When they reach it, Alif and Salim settle down on the broad, warm southern steps of the mosque with the others sitting there like them, in individual or joint contemplation, their hunger sated for this day, one eye on tenebrous sky as they talk of how things were when things were better. Behind them – red sand- stone, white marble and black marble; grandiose gateways; striped and fluted minarets and beautiful, bulbous domes; vast court- yard edged with colonnaded cloisters; proportion and precision; plainness and ornament; simplicity and beauty – this, the grandest of Mughal mosques, in whose shadow both men have grown up and within sight of which Alif would like to die. What better place – these flagstones pressed by five hundred years’ worth of supplicating feet and an equal number of weary foreheads kissing the earth, submitting before the manmade symmetry of the prayer hall in order to believe in a heaven which mirrors it.

Delhi. The city on which the apocalypse descends every day and the city where the apocalypse is always awaited. One of those women had looked down on him from that tourist bus and he wondered what she’d seen – a local, touched with local colour, living his local life. She would preserve in some corner of her mind the mosque built by that building-crazy emperor Shah Jahan in the seventeenth century. And with the mosque there is him – the man in the background or foreground, the minor figure, the passing native. He has always been there to accentuate this grandeur by his apparent humbleness – because he mucks about in these mucky lanes, and so is an element of the scene, as timeless as the stones of which the mosque is made.

But that’s not who I am, thinks Alif, and there are days when he is so tired of this – eager day-trippers who come and go, or serious flâneurs who take the measure of the old city, painstaking collectors of historical bricks and falling door posts and vaulted arches. He is tired of the trilling of anklets on the dancing girl’s feet and the easy rhyming of the cheesy ghazal, he is tired of the saaqi and the filled-to-flowing jaam, the majnoon and the always unreliable jaan-e-jaana, the shamma and the death-seeking parwaana – all those tawdry characters on the lighted stage on which Muslim culture in this country has played out for eight hundred years.

‘What did you want to say, Abba?’ asks Salim, not happy to be pulled outdoors.

Alif looks at his son and wishes he could kiss him. He has just berated him for his lack of history, and yet he cannot help, every time, overlooking this too – this insouciance, this blatant disregard.

‘The time you waste . . .’