Stranger to History

by Aatish Taseer

  I felt unexplained tenderness for my brother. My father and he had always had a complicated relationship, often related to my father’s disapproval of the women he dated. I sensed damage in my brother, the kind that can sometimes occur in children whose parents have been too powerful or too successful. After years of being my father’s heir, of being told who to marry and who not to marry, groomed at the best schools and universities in Europe, he was about to find himself, at the age of thirty-five, beginning life alone in a country where connections and influence were everything. He had known about me for many years before that first trip to Pakistan, and perhaps because of our troubled relationships with our father, we shared a special connection.

  After Iran, and my sudden arrival in Pakistan, I was happy to rest for a few days. I felt the delayed strain of my night flight from Iran, of connections made and hours lost. I wanted to put off travelling, calling my father, and even thinking too much about Pakistan. But on that first evening, I had a foretaste, among educated Pakistanis, of a great double-edged tension. As India came up again and again, in big and small ways, sometimes through caste references, sometimes through Bollywood, I was reminded, as I had been unexpectedly four years before at the border, that I was a stranger in Pakistan.

  The evening I arrived, my brother was holding a business meeting. It was for his own pet project, a half-hour comedy show that dealt with the week’s news called The Cutting Edge. Those present were the two hosts, an attractive single mother in her thirties and a paunchy, older man who was the star of the show. There was also a young, pretty girl, with an American accent, whom everyone called ‘Princess’, and a dark, effeminate man, who was just sitting in. The targets for the satire beyond what was in the news were Bush and Islamic fundamentalism; the General was liked and spared.

  That day there had been a news item about a study by an American think tank that placed Pakistan at nine in the top ten failed nations of the world. The study was based on a number of indexes ranging from ‘chronic and sustained human flight’, to ‘criminalisation and delegitimisation of the state’, to ‘progressive deterioration of public services’ and ‘rise of factionalised élite’. The year before, according to the same report, Pakistan had been at number thirty-four. The group now worked out how to tear apart the report on the show.

  ‘We want to be number one,’ the dark, effeminate man cooed. ‘I hate competition.’

  Another asked where India was in the list.

  The effeminate man rolled his eyes and his gapped teeth closed over his lower lip. ‘Why can’t we just accept that they are a better, greater country?’ Everyone looked at me and laughed.

  ‘Is it my imagination,’ my brother said, ‘or are there just many more ugly people in India?’

  ‘Yes!’ the effeminate man hissed. A short discussion began about how ugly Indians were, especially in the south. I listened for a while, then mentioned that some of India’s best-looking models and actors come from the south.

  ‘Well turned-out,’ the effeminate man said archly. ‘Not beautiful.’ Then suddenly, he thought I’d taken offence, and said how much he loved India and that he was there recently. ‘But I really gave it to them for running after the Americans,’ he added, lifting his limp wrists to his chest and making the sound of a dog panting. He was referring to the nuclear deal that America and India were working out.

  The next news item was about a threat from fundamentalist groups, saying they planned to host parties for young, liberal people in order to bomb them.

  ‘They’re hitting us where it hurts,’ the attractive presenter said.

  ‘We’ve been to these parties,’ my brother nodded. ‘This is serious.’

  They decided it was so serious they wouldn’t satirise it. At most they would say, ‘Islamabad, you needn’t worry, but Karachi and Lahore, beware.’

  The next news item said that ten Americans had been killed in Afghanistan. ‘I know this is politically incorrect,’ my brother said, ‘but yesssss!’

  There was some stray laughter, then the group set to work on how to satirise the American ‘occupations’ of Iraq and Afghanistan. The middle-aged presenter said they had to keep up a sustained campaign against George Bush. A song was devised. It was a spoof of ‘This Land’. ‘This land is my land, this land is not your land . . . from Iraq to Guantánamo Bay,’ or somesuch variation.

  My brother said that the programme was creating a sensation. He was very pleased that many of the jokes were too sophisticated for the censors to catch, jokes such as the attractive host yelling, ‘It’s coming, it’s coming, it’s coming, I’m coming!’ and faking an orgasm on television.

  ‘But you really have to do it properly,’ someone said. ‘Can you go through with it?’

  The female presenter smiled uneasily and nodded, like a great actress agreeing to do all that was necessary for a part.

  Many of the show’s jokes were too sophisticated for me to catch, some mismatch of what the show’s creators had picked up at university in Britain and America. My brother hoped the programme would be shown in other places. Apparently, networks in India had expressed interest. He asked me what I thought. I told him it wouldn’t work. It would be difficult to air a show that so many people wouldn’t understand.

  ‘Yes, but what about your small niche audience?’ my brother asked.

  ‘It’s not as influential as it is here.’

  When everyone had gone, the servant brought up a few beers and I sat for a while with my brother. In Karachi, there had recently been bombs. There were often bombs in Karachi, but this was more serious. A suicide-bomber had come into a prayer meeting of a Sunni political group on the Prophet’s birthday and, along with himself, blew up the group’s leadership and nearly sixty other people. The tensions the bombing brought to the surface revealed divisions and sub-divisions of denomination, language and sect that were hard even for Pakistanis to follow. There was not just the Sunni–Shia divide, but identities within identities, and corresponding political parties. And then, of course, there was the perpetual tension between the old inhabitants of Sind and the Muhajjir, the Muslim immigrants from India, who came in 1947 to realise the dream of a homeland for Indian Muslims.

  ‘It’s a different religion,’ my brother said of Shiism, ‘make no mistake. It’s linked to a state, like Israel, and Iran can draw the loyalty of Shias worldwide, over and above the loyalty to the country their passport says they’re from. They say they have seventy thousand Shias in Pakistan, armed and ready to strike US interests, which include Pakistan. If they don’t have seventy thousand, they at least have a thousand! And that will cause chaos in Pakistan.’

  The post-9/11 climate affected him more than I thought. It came out as excitement at Pakistan having become an international story, and instead of encouraging reflection into the reasons for the country’s new fame, it brought out a kind of exhibitionism.

  ‘There’s a feeling of total civilisational defeat,’ he said.

  ‘What civilisation do you have in mind?’

  ‘European, non-European, Christian, non-Christian, Caucasian, non-Caucasian,’ my brother answered.

  ‘It’s interesting that you don’t think of your civilisation as Indian,’ I said, now feeling directly, as I had with my father, that the ‘Civilisation of Faith’ stood between me and someone I felt culturally close to.

  ‘Yes, that is very interesting. There has been a complete rejection of the sub-continent.’

  ‘But do you consider it your own, a part of your history?’

  ‘No, we don’t own it,’ he answered. ‘I’ll tell you. No matter how much education a Pakistani gets, his mindset is fixed at the age of ten or eleven. If you write in your exams that the devious – you have to write devious,’ he said, noticing my surprise at his use of the word, ‘– that the devious Hindu did this and did that, then you pass.’ Not religious himself, but perhaps questioning his own convictions, my brother continued, ‘At a certain time in Europe, learning and education were
in the hands of the religious orders. Perhaps here, too, some kind of renaissance could begin with education in the hands of the religious orders.’

  A renaissance! The revival of the great Islamic past in Pakistan. It was the country’s present darkness, what my brother said earlier, ‘the feeling of total civilisational defeat’, the contents of the American think tank’s report, that made him dream of renaissance. In his excitement, he forgot what constituted the kind of renaissance he was thinking of. He forgot the industry of those European monks all those centuries ago, translating books from Arabic into the European languages. I’d been to enough madrassas in my life, in enough places, to know that the majority not only ignored books outside the Islamic past, they ignored the Islamic thinkers too; they taught only one Book. Pakistan, the country founded for the faith, never part of the tradition of high Islam, always, culturally, an adjunct of Persia and Arabia, the country that today supplied the oil-rich sections of that world with its menial labour, was alone left to believe in a great Islamic future. And with that belief came always the unsaid horror of India.

  Karachi was a British city and hardly older than a hundred and fifty years. Until the 1960s, it was one of the cleanest, pleasantest cities in the sub-continent to live in, a city whose older inhabitants remembered the streets being washed in the mornings. But immigration, and the transfer of the capital from Karachi to Islamabad, initiated its decline, leaving it today riddled with armed crime, sectarian strife and its old British streets in ruins. In the most crowded sections, cluttered with mean, bright little billboards, chemists, ‘footwear’ shops, electrical appliances and mangled nests of wires, there were the remains of the city’s finest buildings.

  Behind one pale yellow façade, exquisite with sleeping columns, little raking cornices, blackened dentil ornaments and balustrades, the actual building had fallen away. Through the mask-like façade’s semi-circular windows, it was possible today to see the white open Karachi sky. In the street of elegant buildings, domes and clock towers were barely hanging on, and in many the second storey was sealed with splintering sheets of plywood. Scattered across the old British city were Karachi’s squat administrative buildings and hotels, many with 1970s patterned concrete screens in front of them so that they looked as if they had no distinct levels or windows.

  The Sind Club was in this part of the city, and women were not allowed into its billiards room and bar, not for Islamic reasons but for old-fashioned colonial ones. Uniformed bearers glided through the high-ceilinged room, bright where light escaped from low shades over green felt tables. They brought members the Scotch and soda that the club kept for them under lock and key. There were hunting trophies on the walls, a smell of kebabs in the air, and from the lights in the garden, I could see waterfalls of red bougainvillaea. I’d gone there with my brother a few evenings after I arrived. We sat outside with some businessmen at a round table under a portico of sturdy arches.

  ‘I saw you the other day at the airport,’ one stout man in a silky shirt said to another sitting next to him.

  ‘I wasn’t there,’ the other, taller, more sober, replied.

  ‘You were boarding a first-class flight to Dubai.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You were complaining about your air miles and saying you had nine hundred million in your account.’ The man who had initiated the conversation, seeing the confusion on the other’s face, guffawed, ‘It’s a joke, man!’ Then he became confidential and they began to discuss a deal. I heard him say, ‘You approached me about it when I was drunk, but if you’re serious you can have it for thirteen million.’

  On certain nights of the week, the club went a little further and organised a dance called Casablanca. In a darkened room, a disco light threw red, green and pink patterns on the walls. Waiters in white, with red fezes, moved quickly through the room, serving girls in little black dresses and paunchy men in fussy shirts. Through a glass partition close to the ceiling, it was possible to see a library of sorts, not a great library, but like something you’d find in a school, deepening my sense of being at a middle-school dance. A Bollywood hit song played several times over, filling the dance-floor each time.

  A cousin I had recently met yelled over the music, ‘She assaulted him three times. One time she tore his shirt and twisted his Bulgari cufflinks. Her family are choodas!’ She was talking about her brother and his wife, but what interested me was her use of ‘chooda’, which was used like the word ‘nigger’, to mean low-caste. But in Islam there was no caste. My cousin, who used the world freely, as did my brothers, grew up with it. It had resonance all over Pakistan, but many people used it without knowing where it came from or that it denoted caste. It was part of an unacknowledged carryover from India. It was like the song that brought everyone to the dance-floor.

  But these commonalities, these memories of plural India, were not always easy for Pakistanis to take on. They were a hazy reminder of what had been lost. Pakistan’s assertion of Islamic identity was not the theocracy of Iran. It was through purifying its population of non-Muslims, conducting the transfers of people, of which my maternal great-grandmother had been a part, that the new state realised its aims. But India, on the other side, was still as it had been, still plural, not symmetrically Hindu and with as many, if not more, Muslims than Pakistan. And there was no escaping the strangeness of that.

  The Bombay film industry was a powerful reminder of composite India. It was full of Muslim stars and the Hindustani language it kept alive was replete with Urdu words. Though the films were officially banned in Pakistan, ‘unofficially’, my brother’s dark, effeminate friend explained, ‘Hindi films are released on Fridays in India and the same night – the same night! – via piracy, they release in Karachi!’ It meant that Pakistanis had a view of India every day in their homes. The reverse was not true. Pakistan’s once significant film industry had sunk. The cause of its demise was like a roll call of the country’s tragedies: the loss of half its audience when East Pakistan broke away to become Bangladesh, Bhutto’s economic nationalisation in the 1970s and Zia’s Islamic censorship in the 1980s.

  ‘We used to have fifteen hundred cinemas,’ my brother’s friend moaned, ‘and now we have some two hundred.’

  He was worried about the tighter hold of religion in Pakistan. ‘In Punjab and Sind,’ he said, ‘our Sufi culture will save us, but I worry about the North West Frontier Province and Balochistan. They could flood us. Otherwise, we are deeply immersed in our Sufi culture. And also our diversity will save us.’

  ‘Are you religious?’

  ‘It depends by whose definition.’

  ‘By your own?’

  ‘Well, I say my prayers and pray to Allah that I win the lottery. People say that that’s gambling, but I say, ‘Hey, thank Allah.’ Then as if remembering what he had said earlier, he added, ‘I think it’s because they’re LMC and there’s a lot of guilt.’ ‘LMC’ meant lower-middle class and it was a term rich Pakistanis used often to mean a rising section of the country that was also more religious. The remark was at once flippant, an aspect of his bitter wit, and significant. ‘Guilt,’ he went on, ‘is the reason people are turning to religion. Many rich people made their money by illegal means and now they feel guilty.’

  Corruption in Pakistan was something one always heard about, but I had never thought of it before as something for the religious imagination to seize on. Later, I would meet many admirable young people who made these kinds of connections.

  ‘Your mother is a Sikh,’ the effeminate man continued, ‘but do you know that sixty per cent of the Guru Granth Sahib was written by Baba Farid?’

  Farid was a twelfth-century Sufi teacher and his writings are included in the Sikh holy book, but the figure was an exaggeration. ‘The tolerance!’ the effeminate man hissed. ‘The tolerance! That period should have had a renaissance, and it’s all because of the white man, all because of him.’

  The white man doesn’t mean well for us. Nearly six decades after the ‘white
man’ left, this weak refrain was all that could be found by way of self-examination. But it was not enough to blame the white man. It didn’t explain why the white man’s world should have posed such an affront to Muslim India and not to non-Muslim India. With my special feeling for undivided India, I would have liked nothing more than for the period he described to have a ‘renaissance’ – how strange it was to hear the word twice in such a short time from different people – but how could it when even men like my brother dreamed of Islamic renaissances in madrassas?

  The party came to an end. Men in blue and brown safari suits, seeming like chaperones, appeared and oversaw the winding up. The girls in black dresses and their short, paunchy men, the country’s ‘factionalised élite’, staggered out. The waiters in white became scarcer, then appeared with dishcloths, and were bald under the fezes they now carried in their hands. A small sadness, as at the end of a children’s birthday party, prevailed. And finally, just before everyone was gone, bent, old women, in white cotton salwar kameez, their faces tired at this late hour, came out with plastic dustpans and little brooms to sweep up the broken glasses and cigarette butts, the remains of Casablanca.

  Soon after arriving in Karachi, I called my stepmother. She was warm and welcoming, as always, and said that, despite the heat, Sind’s interior was very romantic. It was where I was intending to travel before I made my way up to Lahore. After we talked of the small regional towns and the important shrines I would visit, she said, ‘Call Abba.’

  ‘I will.’ Then I squirmed.

  ‘No, call him,’ she stressed.

  I thought up a few conversation points that would see us through the first few minutes of stilted conversation and called him. He was quiet but not unfriendly. I told him about Iran and my planned travels in Pakistan.

  When I received my father’s letter the year before, I knew nothing of Pakistan and even less about Islam. I wanted now, through travelling in Pakistan, to answer the second challenge his letter had posed, even though the two seemed in important ways to coalesce: of understanding ‘the Pakistani ethos’. In the month in which I would travel, moving from south to north, I wanted to understand my unfamiliarity in Pakistan. I felt that this would help me understand the differences that had come up between my father and myself. My upbringing in India, together with seven months of travel in the Islamic world, formed a kind of Venn diagram, a problem in set theory, in which Pakistan, carved out of India in 1947 for the faith, was a common set between India and Islam.