his friends. A man from Qazween came in and joined them. Since people from that city are reputed to be awkward and foolish, Mirza Sa'ib playfully asked him, "Do you have cuckolds in Qazween?" That man was equally playful; he replied: "Sure. m Qazween is a big city. But not in such large numbers that they must sit in rows." The jokes about the Sayyids of Barha are not without fun, and are on the lips of the people of Hind. I remember one or two. Once an indigent Sayyid left his home and came to Shah-jahanabad to look for livelihood. Constant starvation had made him lean and weak. At home he had once seen the Quranic verse, "Qui ya ayyuha'l-kaflruna . . ," written on a tablet in very large letters. It so happened that in Shahjahanabad he passed by a school where they had written the same verse in small letters. The Sayyid exclaimed: "Praise be to Allah! The grind of Time didn't leave even the poor 'Quiya' unaffected. It has become so lean and thin I could hardly recognize it." People asked a Sayyid of Barha, "How long has that city of yours existed?" The Sayyid said, "For about five thousand years." The people said, "The Sayyid-hood originates from the Prophet, and the whole world knows when that most excellent person lived." He replied: "But he was one kind of Sayyids, and we are another." Najmuddaulah Ishaq Khan would often have special dishes prepared and sent to the Emperor Aurangzeb. Once the Emperor commanded that a dish of liver and heart be prepared for him. Ishaq Khan came home and ordered his servants to bring to him immediately some hearts and livers from the butchers. They did so. [As he inspected the meat] he discover a liver that had no heart attached to it. He looked up in anger. The superintendent of the kitchen was a man of humour; he said: "Sir, it's no fault of mine, nor of the butchers. This is the liver of Mirza Bedil." [Bedil, lit., 'without a heart,' was the taxallus^ of a famous contemporary poet.] Muhammad Husain Kaleem wrote verses in Rekhta in the style of Mirza Bedil. One day he came to Nawab Bahadur Asad Yar Khan Bakhshi—a man of great humor--and read to him for a long time his latest verses. The Nawab got fed up and turning to me said, "Last night I had a strange dream." I asked, "How was it?" He said, "I saw that I was in the presence of our holy master Ali, the Chosen One, and that someone was making a lot of noise at the door. Our master gestured to me to go and see who it was. I went and found a heavy-set faqir standing there, his loins girded and a formidable stick on his shoulder. He was crying and wailing. I said to him, 'You have such a heavy build—who could have hurt you that you cry so much?' He replied: 'I am Bedil. There is a Rekhta poet named Kaleem who every day takes a couple of hundred ideas from my collection and, clothing them in worthless phrasing, declaims them as his own. It hurts me to the soul. Please tell that heartless person to stay away from my verses.' I said to him, 'You go now. I'll try to put some sense into him.'" Poor Kaleem was so embarassed he got up and left. A sodomite was fucking a galandar in the doorway of a 50