Not a pretty face

We have beauty contests and pet exhibitions and we award the most beautiful women, dogs and cats. No one has yet bothered to offer prizes for the ugliest of living creatures. This occurred to me after many years of watching films on nature on various television channels. I prefer to see them rather than to waste time on news, commentaries, debates, bhajans, bhangra or soap operas. I decided to draw my own list of the ugliest.

I eliminated creatures that do not qualify for consideration. First of all, I deleted birds from my list. Not one of their kind is ugly, many are beautiful; and a few such as peacocks, golden aureoles and pheasants are spectacular. I eliminated insects next. They too include some very colourful species such as butterflies, moths, beetles, ladybugs, fire-flies, glow-worms and others. I have no allergy towards different species of spiders either and watch the eight-legged ones while I sit in the loo.

Serpents give me the creeps but I have to concede that, seen from a safe distance, they are not ugly. On the contrary, a few varieties are very colourful and many others, like the king cobras, are terrifying in their murderous splendour. When they raise their spread-out, bespectacled hoods and hiss venom, they are awesome. I prefer calling them by their other name, ‘hamadryad’. Turtles, also reptiles, have ugly faces but, often, attractive carapaces. The same can be said about crocodiles and alligators: ugly faces, not-so-ugly bodies. Among the lizards, chameleons can change the colour of their heads while I don’t find house-lizards (geckos) difficult to live with; in fact, I have a family breeding behind framed pictures and bookshelves, whose members emerge when they spot a fly or a mosquito on the wall.

But I don’t like rats or mice and scream like a woman when I see one. I set traps for them. When one of them is foolish enough to get caught, I have it deposited in my neighbour’s garden. I don’t like taking life. The only species I really consider among the ugliest of the ugly are bandicoots (ghoose). They are repulsive creatures. Their coats are greyish black and they slither on their bellies, making ugly sounds and leaving their droppings everywhere.

Then I came to under-water species. Fish are of many colours and some are iridescent. The only sea creatures I find revolting are octopuses and squibs, the former, with their bulbous eyes and serpentine limbs, certainly qualify as ugly. The Japanese, of course, love the dried, salted flesh with their sips of sake. I tried it when I was living in Japan. It tasted like salted rubber.

Lions, tigers, leopards, cheetahs panthers, pumas and the rest of the cat family are all graceful. You will be charmed by seeing their cubs at play. The same goes for members of the dog family such as wolves, hyenas, jackals and foxes. Then there are herbivores like elephants, giraffes, rhinos, deer, wild buffaloes and bisons. Elephants and rhinos are good to look at as are other ruminants. They all are thereby eliminated from the contest.

But that leaves me with few options. I find hippopotamuses very ugly without a single redeeming feature: huge mouths, enormous ugly teeth, tiny ears that don’t go with the massive body, large, expressionless eyes and a call like a pig’s grunt. I would give it the gold medal for ugliness. I would offer the silver to the Tasmanian devil, a disgrace to the dog family. It looks like a hybrid of hyena and pariah dog. Its screams —a mixture of howling and barking — match its name. The bronze I would give to the bandicoot.

Remembrance of things past

Seventy-five years ago I got to know Rashid Ahmed who was a year senior to me at Government College, Lahore. He was a handsome young fellow, good in studies and the best speaker in the college. He was a great favourite of Ahmed Shah Bokhari, the professor of English. Both men were much sought after among the student fraternity.

I lost track of them for the five years I was studying abroad. When I returned to Lahore in 1939, Bokhari had moved from the academic world to become the director general of All India Radio. He had taken quite a few of his favourite students with him: Iqbal Singh, Ramesh Chandra and Rashid. While Bokhari went to Delhi, Rashid was posted in Lahore, and we resumed our acquaintance. Among the new friends my newly-married wife and I made was a young girl, Zeenat, who, after getting a degree from a British university, had taken up a teaching job in a local college. It was my wife’s idea that the two might make a nice couple. We asked them over for dinner. That was their first meeting. They clicked and soon became man and wife.

Once again we lost contact with the partition of the country in 1947. Professor Bokhari first became head of Pakistan Radios and then joined the UN to become the head of its press and public relations department. Rashid rose to become director general of Radio Pakistan. After retiring he settled down in Karachi. The last time I was there, some seven or eight years ago, I spent a morning with him. Zeenat was out of town. Two years ago, their daughter, Rana, better known by her nick-name Beo, and her husband Zafar came to visit me in Delhi. Soon, Rashid and Zeenat died within a couple of months of each other. I thought my association with the family was over.

Not so. Last month Beo sent me a beautiful coffee-tabler of her poems illustrated by Tabinda Chinoy. As with the best of Pakistani writing in English, this collection, entitled The Dreamer Awakes, is published in India — in this case by Ashok Butani of Bibliophile. Beo’s poems are in the mystic sufi tradition and hence somewhat obscure at times, and need to be read over and over again to be understood. Others are straightforward and very moving like the tribute to her late mother. She uses alliterations to create music out of her words. A good example is “Seeking Moses after she rejects the pharaoh”:

But now it is another season I am filled with sight, sound and

reason

Now my sightless eyes can see

My soundless ears can hear

And my scattered mind has merged.

It is time for my soul to soar

To find the qualities I adore

To merge with someone’s kindness

To flow with their humility

To celebrate their selfless reason

In a magnificent exchange of purity

It is time to find Moses.

Then a short poem, “Death of a Man,” is typical of her style of composition:

Who killed the man

Or did the man kill himself

Will we ever know?

Was it his mistress

Or was it his wife.

For in fact he had distressed

them both.