Better Than Fiction 2

by Lonely Planet

  When the 240-second running time of our film came to its end, the live-stream cut to a shot of a stage at Sony Pictures Studios in Los Angeles, where the actress Goldie Hawn introduced Dr Madan Kataria. After describing his mission to ‘connect the whole world’ by establishing ‘one million laughter clubs,’ Dr Kataria spread his arms, drew his breath, and led the viewership of Pangea Day in one great, international laugh. And then, if only for thirty seconds or so, Dr Kataria’s crazy dream came true: the live stream cut to masses in London, Rwanda, and Mumbai, united in laughter. Alone in my crummy Brooklyn apartment, the room lit only by the glow of my laptop, I was laughing too.

  STEFAN MERRILL BLOCK is the author of two novels, The Story of Forgetting and The Storm at the Door. An international bestseller, The Story of Forgetting won Best First Fiction at the Rome International Festival of Literature, the Ovid Prize from the Romanian Writer’s Union, the Merck Serono Literature Prize, and the Fiction Award from The Writers’ League of Texas. Stefan’s stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, NPR’s Radiolab, Granta, The Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. Stefan grew up in Plano, Texas, and lives in Brooklyn.

  Nothing Happened

  JACK LIVINGS

  In 2010, I flew to Lahore to help a publisher set up a Pakistani edition of the news magazine where I worked. My flight arrived at Allama Iqbal International Airport around midnight, and a customs officer ushered me into an office adjacent to the international arrivals hall. Inside were two paper-strewn desks, some chairs, a small couch, and sheaves of paper tacked to the walls – incoming flight manifestos, wanted posters, handwritten notes in Urdu and English. I had shown up with a letter of introduction but no visa, and the officer told me to have a seat and wait while he sorted me out. After a while, a clutch of timorous young men shuffled in, sat, and shifted nervously in their chairs until another officer retrieved them. By their silence I gathered they were in some kind of trouble. I was there long enough to begin to wonder if I was in some sort of trouble too.

  I have a funny relationship with airports. I started flying alone when I was six years old, done up in a blue blazer and clip-on tie, plastic wings pinned to my lapel that designated me an Unaccompanied Minor. I’d like to say the get-up was my mother’s idea, but I was the one who maintained the sharp part in my hair and kept my shirt tucked in. Of course, I didn’t always dress like that. At home, I was a normal kid: my jeans had holes in the knees and I spent a fair amount of my time traipsing around in the woods.

  But I had learned early the transformative powers of travel. My parents were divorced, and I would leave South Carolina, where I was my mother’s son, and arrive the next day in Frankfurt or Zurich my father’s son. Perhaps that’s why airports always felt to me like neutral ground, where I was no-one’s child, and why even today I feel as though I exist in a quantum state when I’m passing through one, both myself and not myself. This belief that I’m not myself is a form of protection, I think, like the jacket and tie I wore as a boy to pretend I was older. An older boy – a man – wouldn’t have been homesick or afraid of flying by himself. Whatever unrest I feel when traveling is mitigated by my belief that it’s not me doing the traveling. It’s someone else.

  I was doing the usual identity calculus, then, wondering who the customs officer thought I was, and who I wanted to be. The letter I carried had been signed by the scion of a powerful Pakistani family – he was the publisher of the magazine I was there to advise – and I’d assumed his name would smooth my way. But the officer had been gone for a long time. I wondered if he’d seen through me. The letter stated that I was a journalist. By all appearances, I was. My employer was a news magazine, my business card had the appropriate job title, but there was an existential problem at work because I was not, strictly speaking, a journalist.

  The man who’d hired me years earlier called it para-journalism, the mix of diplomacy and editorial work I practised. I was not a correspondent or a beat reporter. I was a desk jockey, an administrative lackey, a liaison between our overseas editions and the American home base. To call what I did journalism was to insult the people I worked with who ran into war zones armed with only a laptop and a satphone.

  Eventually the customs officer returned with my passport and papers for me to fill out. I was relieved to see that he looked bored. He asked if I had brought a spare passport photo. I said no, and he frowned, but seemed to accept this as just another example of the incompetence I’d already displayed by showing up without a visa.

  About half an hour later I was on my way to the hotel in downtown Lahore. It was bordered by a big lawn and hidden from the busy Mall Road behind fencing, barbed wire, and a stand of trees. In order to enter the driveway, our minivan had to execute a 180 off the main road and enter a narrow chute formed by concrete pylons. We were stopped by armed security staff who swept mirrors under the chassis, opened the back hatch, peered under the hood, shot flashlights into the cabin space, and then waved us forward to the front gate. Behind a hydraulic crash barrier, a crossbar extended across the driveway. On either end of the barrier were two yellow smiley faces. We were checked again, then waved forward. The barrier descended into the pavement, the crossbar rose. More armed security guards flanked the driveway within. The hotel itself was a gray modern fortress.

  I spent the week ferrying back and forth between the hotel and the new magazine’s offices, where I was set up in an air-conditioned room with a desk and a couch. The building had backup generators to cope with the electrical load shedding that cut power in Lahore a couple of times a day. From my desk I could see trees, a bus depot, and haze. Crows swooped in and out of the trees. An employee in a white shalwar kameez delivered Nescafe every hour or so. I worked on my laptop and met with journalists. Once or twice a day my mobile phone rang, showing a Pakistani number, and when I answered, the voice on the other end said, ‘Joe?’ In the office it was generally agreed upon that those calls were from one of the national intelligence services. ‘They’re just checking up on you’, my Pakistani colleagues said.

  ‘You’re joking’, I said.

  They smiled and shrugged. ‘Maybe it’s just a wrong number’, someone suggested.

  At the end of the week I was offered a tour of the Lahore Fort, a Mughal-era edifice in the city’s northwest. That Friday afternoon, I said goodbye to the reporters and editors and got into the back of the publisher’s car, a chauffeured BMW. The publisher stayed at the office, but sent along a reporter to accompany me. We went first to a high-ranking government official’s office. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing there, but I suspect this audience was the publisher’s way of paying for the tours that were to come later in the afternoon. The official complained to me about what he had deemed to be unfair coverage of Pakistan by the US edition of the magazine. He was still castigating me ten minutes later when the power went off. The office fell into darkness and he kept right on talking. I could hear my chaperone, the Pakistani reporter, shifting in her seat, sighing loudly and, when she could take no more, she began to take the official to task for his political failures. They went at each other in the dark for some time, and when the argument lulled I took the opportunity to thank the official for his time. We all walked toward the light of the door, shook hands, and a couple of army guards escorted us back to the car.

  In the parking lot, a couple of more cars joined us, and then a police escort. We pulled out into the street, and motorcycle cops raced ahead to block intersections. We blew through red lights while rush hour traffic piled up on either side. If the reporter was impressed by our little caravan’s display of authority, she didn’t show it. She seemed not to notice at all, in fact, so deep was she into a diatribe about the rotten state of her country’s government. She wasn’t wrong – the government was a corrupt, feudal system presided over by a handful of elites who, for instance, granted police escorts to visiting American para-journalists.

  We were making good time, and I’l
l admit I was enjoying myself a little. At that moment, was I not the embodiment of an American imperialist? Did I even care? I was in a motorcade, speeding unencumbered through a city of 7 million people, the sharp end of the spear of American empire. So be it. Then we ran into a protest.

  In 2010, Pakistan’s state of siege was its defining characteristic. In late May of that year, two Ahmadi mosques in Lahore had been bombed. Conservative estimates put the death toll at ninety-five people. Hardly a day in June passed without reports of a new terror attack somewhere in the country. The heads of police stations were targeted. Suicide bombers blew themselves up in markets. Militants ambushed Pakistani army patrols. Convoys were shot up. Vanloads of masked men opened fire on police stations. A group of Taliban had stormed a hospital, guns blazing, seeking to free a comrade who had been wounded carrying out an attack days earlier.

  On 1 July, two weeks before I arrived in the country, a pair of suicide bombers killed fifty people and injured two-hundred more gathered at a Sufi shrine within Lahore’s Data Darbar complex.

  The driver braked smoothly, and we slowed to a roll as we caught up to the motorcycles. The car was surrounded by people. We pushed a little ways into the crowd and stopped. Not even the motorcycles, sirens blasting, could get through. The crowd, all men wearing shalwar kameezes, carrying signs, chanting, streamed around the car, which rocked as though we’d driven into a swift river.

  ‘Where are we?’ I asked the reporter.

  She was craning her neck, trying to see through the windscreen past the crowd, exhaling with annoyance. It wouldn’t have surprised me if she’d thrown open the door, climbed onto the roof, and yelled at the protesters to get out of the way. Back at the official’s office it seemed that only the dark and the enormous depth of his desk kept her from physically assaulting him. I took some comfort from the knowledge that she could clear the crowd herself, if called upon to do so.

  ‘So, where are we?’ I asked again.

  She mumbled something I couldn’t hear.

  ‘Sorry?’ I said.

  ‘Data Darbar’, she said.

  Yes. Up ahead, to my left, the two minarets, elegant, slender as a pair of arrows, stood against the sky. The crowd churned around the car. I slid down in my seat. It was a nice seat, cream-colored leather, engineered to be supportive, yet supple to the touch. The seatbelt was a wonder of delicate pressure – it moved with me, allowing my midsection to descend through the lap belt with little resistance. Though I am just over six feet tall, there was plenty of room for my legs, and with my eyes now just even with the base of the window, I noticed for the first time a copy of Esquire in the pocket affixed to the back of the driver’s seat. Tom Cruise was smiling over the lip of the pocket. I could hardly tell the car was running. Even the climate controls keeping the cabin cool and dry were nearly silent. The chants from the protesters were muffled by sound-dampening window assemblies.

  At no point during the week had I been afraid, despite everything I thought I knew about anti-American sentiment in Pakistan. One afternoon after work, I’d strolled over to the zoo and hadn’t been regarded by the other visitors with kindness or unkindness as much I’d been disregarded entirely. I watched some children jab a long stick into a tiger’s cage. The tiger swiped at the stick and the kids got into a fight over who got to hold it. I’d left the zoo and walked to a shopping area, where small storefronts were thrown open to the sidewalk, the merchants sitting just inside, out of the sun. Sports Shop, upon closer examination, was a dimly lit recess with floor-to-ceiling shelves bearing a couple of dusty soccer balls next to some cricket balls. I’d gone to a bookstore where Stephanie Meyer’s vampire series took up most of the real estate on the English-language shelves. I’d crossed the Mall Road via an overpass, swarms of Honda CR-120 motorcycles buzzing beneath. On the other side of the road, I’d wandered back toward the zoo. In a store window, a sign read, No Guns Allowed Inside. It was the silhouette of an AK-47 that bore the circle and diagonal line. Not a soul spoke to me anywhere.

  In the back of a German car, however, with a police escort, stuck in a protest at the site of a terrorist attack, I was a little worried. Again I was confronted with the question of who I was pretending to be. More to the point, what did I look like from the outside? That’s what mattered. The reporter huffed and fell back into her seat, looked over at me where I was cowering like a frightened rabbit, and resumed her monologue on the government’s ills. Maybe it’s just another Friday afternoon in Lahore, I thought.

  The police escort began to make some headway and we inched along behind them, eventually slipping out of the protest and resuming our campaign to snarl traffic all the way to the Lahore Fort. And that was that.

  We arrived just as the site was closing to the public. It was late afternoon, still light, still stiflingly hot, and we were met by a photographer who would document the visit in excruciating detail. I was pushed to the front of our little covey by a businessman, a friend of the publisher’s, and this man – let’s call him Sam – stayed on my elbow for the next two hours, steering me in front of the camera, retrieving me when I lagged behind to check out something interesting. No matter what I did to evade him, he’d laugh and pull me back into frame.

  It was dark by the time the tour ended, and Sam led us to a table and some chairs that had been set up on a lawn just outside the fort. We sat, about seven of us, and hot tea was brought out. About thirty feet away was the entrance to the dungeon where Salman Taseer had been locked up for opposing Zia-ul-Haq, the military dictator who ruled the country from 1977 to 1987. By 2010, Zia was long dead in a suspicious plane crash and Taseer was governor of Punjab Province. In January 2011, Taseer would be assassinated by his own bodyguard.

  Sam mercifully sat at the opposite end of the table, and a friend of his took the seat across from me. He owned a business that he claimed could deliver seeds anywhere in the country in forty-eight hours. The day before, as we were barreling down a main thoroughfare just outside city limits, the van I was riding in had to swerve around a dead horse in the road. Its cart had been pulled to the curb so as not to completely obstruct traffic. I had the feeling that if this businessman could deliver anything in this country in two days, he was destined to become very rich. He was wearing a suit and tie, and gave considered answers to my elementary questions about agriculture in Pakistan. He asked about my family, told me about his, and explained thoroughly but without drifting into dullness, the nuances of his business. And then he began to talk to me about American foreign policy and what the US owed Pakistan for its help fighting terrorism.

  ‘You cannot expect us to fight the war by ourselves’, he said. ‘And you cannot simply send aid money. It vanishes. It all goes to Dubai.’

  ‘What’s in Dubai?’

  ‘The politicians’ bank accounts’, he said.

  ‘Ok,’ I said.

  ‘You should write about this for your magazine’, he said.

  ‘I’m more of an editor’, I said.

  ‘America must send tangible things’, he said. ‘Weapons, food, tanks, planes. This business of sending money is a guaranteed failure.’

  ‘I see’, I said.

  ‘Look at the British. Look at what they left behind! A railway system. An education system. Tangible good deeds. Why does America believe it can solve all its problems with money?’

  If he’d been less gentlemanly, I might have asked if the legacy of British colonization, partition, and the subsequent sixty years of political strife, had been an even trade for trains that run on time. But he was right, of course, to put these questions to me. In 1982, Zia-ul-Haq took a break from tossing political opponents in the dungeon to fly to Washington, where he met with President Reagan in the Oval Office. The US had been elbows-deep in Pakistan’s governance, going back to the 1960s. The country was a protectorate of the United States, first as an outpost against communism, more recently against Islamic fundamentalism. As a citizen of the United States, I was therefore worthy of blame.
r />   ‘I see’, I said again.

  And then he began to talk about India.

  Earlier in the week I’d gone to Wahga, a border outpost along the Grand Trunk Road, an artery that ran from Afghanistan, through Pakistan and India, to Bangladesh. At sundown, Pakistan and India’s respective armies performed a military ceremony culminating in the slamming shut of a massive gate, severing the connection between the two countries for the night. It was a bit like the flag ceremony at a NASCAR event: bombastic, militaristic, an orgy of patriotism performed before scores of screaming fans.

  When we arrived at Wahga, our driver pulled into a shady lot next to a guesthouse. I slid open the door and was hit with a powerful smell. It was unquestionably organic, decomposition of some kind. Rotting flesh, I’d thought. It was the scent of dead deer I’d found in the woods when I was a boy, a smell that set off alarms in the central nervous system.

  The driver was unfazed, and I didn’t want to cause offense, but after we’d walked a little ways toward the border, I had to ask: ‘What was that smell?’

  ‘India’, he said.

  ‘I see, I see’, I said. I mulled this while we walked some more.

  ‘India’, I said.

  ‘Yes, India, this smell’, he said, as if conveying tragic knowledge. He went on: ‘They drive their cotton across the border but because it is Indian, it must be quarantined at customs, and then it rains, and the cotton becomes wet, and then you have this smell.’

  ‘Ah, okay’, I said.

  In my brief time in Pakistan, I’d heard India blamed for everything from droughts to floods to electrical load shedding. Blaming India for its smelly cotton was the most logical defamation yet.

  Now the seed-dealer across from me had invoked the name of the great scapegoat.

  ‘India’, he said, ‘is funding most of the terrorism within Pakistan. It’s a known fact.’