Stranger to History

by Aatish Taseer

  And here there was a deeper irony. It was thought that the faith, as the basis of Pakistan, would trump all other identities. It didn’t matter what kind of Muslim you were, what language you spoke or even if you lived at the other end of India. As long as you were Muslim, Islam would bridge the differences. It reminded me of the faith Abdullah, in Istanbul, placed in all the Muslims of the world he hadn’t met. ‘You mentioned the conflict between Islamic countries,’ he had said, ‘but I’m trying to say that to be a Muslim is a very different experience from any other, no matter where you are. To be Muslim is to be above history.’ But history did matter, not just the faith’s encased and symbolic history, but history as realised in language and culture. It was a distortion of faith that all this didn’t matter, and in Pakistan people seemed to fall back on regional, linguistic and denominational differences.

  Laxman, now determined to exercise his minority privileges, insisted I join him for a beer. On the way to his house, we drove through a gated urban colony, with run-down buildings, open drains and walls covered with slogans. ‘“Sunnis, when will you awake?”’ Laxman read, in a fearful whisper, as if the words leapt off the walls at him. It was a reference to the bombing in Karachi and, Laxman thought, a call to arms. As we left the quiet, concrete colony, domestic scenes overhead and hatred on the walls, Laxman hissed, ‘See? See? It’s boiling. If something doesn’t happen, it’ll rip.’

  That night at Laxman’s house, the bureau chief called, wanting to know my father’s name. That made me nervous. My father was well-known in Pakistan and I would have preferred to travel with a degree of anonymity; I had done well so far. Laxman gave it to him, then put down the phone and gave me his hunted-minority look. His room was filled with fake flowers, dusty stuffed toys, calendars and pink curtains. His bed was of a black and gold laminate, and a fake vine of maple leaves in autumnal colours drooped over one corner. A drinks trolley, still in its plastic covering of years, came in.

  ‘What is it, Laxman? Why did he want to know?’

  ‘Nothing, Aatish. God is great.’ I noticed as we fled the men who’d marked our car that he had said, ‘God is great.’ It seemed he always did when trouble lay ahead.

  ‘Laxman?’

  ‘No, it’s just that this is the time that the ISI [Pakistani Intelligence] come round to his office. He’s their man. He does their drafting and translation.’

  ‘What? Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘It was only when he called that it came into my mind. But, don’t worry, Aatish, God is great.’

  ‘Please, let’s leave God out of this for a minute. I really don’t want to be stuck in an interrogation room again.’ I told him about Iran.

  ‘Is it possible they have informed him?’ he asked, taking pleasure, I thought, in the world turning out to be just as shadowy as he imagined it.

  ‘I don’t know. Listen, I hate this sort of thing. I needn’t have met him. Why didn’t you warn me?’

  Two doubts circulated in my head: the first was that perhaps Laxman wasn’t trustworthy, the second was how the bureau chief could have informed Pakistan’s intelligence services about me when I was a guest of his boss, the publisher. I felt I was being brought in line with the level of suspicion that people in Hyderabad felt for one another.

  ‘I’ll tell you what, then,’ Laxman said. ‘Don’t stay in the hotel tonight. We won’t meet him tomorrow. We’ll leave for Sehwan Sharif [a shrine] and come back in a day or so when things have calmed down.’

  ‘No, Laxman. That’s not how I want to work. Either it’s safe for me or it’s not.’

  ‘It’s safe. God is great.’

  I said I was calling the publisher, half expecting Laxman to admit he was being alarmist, but he said, ‘Good idea.’ I tried a few numbers, then finally had the man on the phone. He listened to what I had to say and then, with a protective growl, said, ‘Give me Laxman.’

  I handed over the receiver. They spoke for a few minutes and hung up. Laxman tittered with excitement at the scene unfolding.

  A few minutes later the publisher called back. ‘Remember that you’re a British national, that you have done nothing wrong and have nothing to worry about. I have spoken to him [the bureau chief] and have told him in a chilling, but indirect, way that you are my friend and he’d better take care of you.’

  ‘I can’t face another interrogation.’

  ‘It’s a minor inconvenience!’ the publisher bellowed.

  ‘Should I see him tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes, yes. It’s fine.’

  Laxman was in a state of high excitement. ‘See?’ he said. ‘See how disloyal these people are who only want money despite how well saab keeps them? Us minorities are much more loyal.’

  I liked the bureau chief and could only think that in his way he had warned me. I thought he spoke from the heart when he said, ‘The frustration is terrible.’ And it was the most basic frustration of how to survive and earn an honest living, free of coercion and fear. In calling the publisher I’d put a counterweight to the fear the intelligence men would have exerted on the bureau chief, the fear of losing his job, and the smaller man had come into line. It was so easy to slip into the interplay of corruption and power that made the society work and I, who felt quite righteous when I arrived, was less full of high sentence when I left.

  * The next morning in the Indus Hotel’s breakfast room, a boy on television sang in a shrill voice about the rule of God and never uttering a lie. He was in his early teens and wore a red tunic and a black turban. He smiled as he sang, his hands opening and closing to the beat of his own moral tunes. There was something grotesquely compelling about him. I drank a cup of unusually good coffee and waited for Laxman.

  We were such an unlikely pairing, Laxman and I: a Pakistani Hindu showing an Indian, with Pakistani origins, Pakistan. It was as if the publisher, with his feeling for undivided India, was having a joke. But it was not an insignificant joke. I think that because Laxman was my guide, I felt closer to Sind’s multireligious past and, also, to its decay. I found it interesting that Laxman’s distrust of others was not along religious lines but cultural ones. He was suspicious, as were Sindi Muslims, of the non-Sindi; he had close relationships with Sindi Muslims. (And I think even his problem with the bureau chief boiled down to him being Punjabi.) In his like-mindedness to his Muslim counterparts, Laxman was like a living relic of what had been Sind’s composite culture.

  He appeared a few minutes later in high spirits; he was taking me to a wedding. I tried to resist, citing the meeting with the bureau chief, but Laxman was insistent and said we’d meet him after the wedding.

  I’m not sure how I was able to tell any longer – and maybe it was only because I’d left an air-conditioned room – but when I stepped out on to Cool Street that morning, I was sure it was the hottest day so far. It was barely nine and white vapour sucked the colour out of the day.

  The heat in this treeless desert city was made worse by the kind of work people did, work which involved vats of boiling oil and colourfully painted blowtorches. Men came out of their industrial cubby-holes to water the searing streets. No sooner had the water touched the grey-white surface, robbed for a moment of wobbling mirages, than it vanished and the hypnotic heat returned. The earth at the roadside was so dry that the water skittered over the surface like mercury, and it was a few moments before the tension around the dust-covered drops broke. Skeletons of buses lay bent and mangled in unclaimed plots of destroyed earth and the backs of old trucks, propped up on stocky, wooden beams, were used for storage.

  The drive to the wedding took us past the full destruction that had come to Hyderabad. In front of a pink sandstone colonial mansion, once the lord mayor’s residence, there was a blue and green sign that read ‘Govt. Khadija Girls H/S School’. The building’s stained-glass windows were broken, their old shutters fell from their frames like dead skin, and many were boarded up. The balcony railings were rusted over, the sunken pillars cracked, and even the decorative u
rn on the left side of the building had fallen over and smashed in two.

  In another area, the buildings once belonged to Hindu merchants. One had an especially fine façade, on which the Hindu name of Hassaram Vishindas 1924 still remained. It stood on a hairpin bend and had what was once a semicircular balcony. A wall of unplastered bricks now rose from the balcony’s balustrade and the space was divided into little rooms.

  ‘Is anyone living there?’

  ‘No. Now they’re just muhajjirs,’ Laxman said.

  ‘Maybe, but are they living there?’

  ‘Yes, and they have their shops below.’

  Further on, whole streets of pale town-houses were deserted, entire neighbourhoods abandoned. It was amazing to see how, even after six decades, the city’s once effortless harmony had not been regained. As if mourning the wholeness of its society, the breaking up of its diverse, interlocking components, the city retreated into ghettos. The muhajjir s, who had left behind diversities of their own, felt the worth they knew in other societies – a usefulness formed over centuries – extinguished in the one they came to. The disappointment would have been immense: to have begun with the idea of the religious homeland and to have ended with the divisions between the old and new Muslims deepening into walls, political parties and militias. My mother’s family were the equivalent of muhajjir s in India – they had come as refugees from the Pakistani side, just as the people here had come from the Indian side – but in India there was no equivalent grouping: the concept didn’t exist.

  The muhajjirs in Hyderabad were holed up, as if in a communal sulk, in the fort I remembered from the lithographs. They lived in a warren of tight, winding streets among the ramparts where Laxman was too scared to go. The fort’s red-brick walls were falling away, its crenellations crumbling, and the windows of people’s homes had been broken into its walls. Outside, in the heat, a market had sprung up next to an open cesspool, with a giant slab of concrete lying in it. A polio victim sat in a wooden cart under a blue tarpaulin. Gearboxes, grey car seats, lubricants and the greasy coils of suspension springs baked in the sun near him.

  Next to a particularly beautiful yellow house, with gables and a balcony of high pointed arches, the wedding preparations were under way. A rectangular section of the street, crowded with donkey carts, sacks of cement and yellow phone booths, had been tented off. No one had arrived yet, but a woman of the house welcomed us in a state of high excitement. ‘The big function is tonight,’ she said. ‘There’ll be dancing and singing, you watch. Yes, yes, the whole society will come! We won’t sleep, it’ll go on all night! We don’t even have to tell people, they will come on their own.’

  With this, she rushed off. I was introduced to a bearded old man in blue, with a skullcap and a prayer mark so high on his head that I wondered how he was able to touch it to the floor. It turned out that he was the father of the groom. He knew Laxman as the man from the newspaper and must have thought I was a journalist because he began to grumble to me about the government: ‘Ask me why they have forbidden us to serve food at our weddings.’

  ‘Have they?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just like that.’

  ‘No reason?’

  ‘No reason.’

  ‘They must have said something.’

  ‘No, and they’ve also banned the loudspeaker at the mosque, even when there’s a visitor from out of town.’

  ‘They’ve banned singing and dancing too,’ Laxman said.

  ‘No,’ the man interrupted, ‘that’s allowed, but we can only serve one dish at the wedding.’

  ‘They want to discourage all this extra spending,’ Laxman said.

  Though Pakistanis denied it, in places like Iran where laws of this kind existed, the practical justification was only a cover for a deeper Islamic desire to rid the marriage ceremony of all things that were cultural and not strictly Islamic. I couldn’t see why else, in this lawless region where the state could not be relied on to bring basic governance, it would bother to make sure that ordinary people followed hospitality guidelines for weddings.

  Laxman went off looking for food, and the old man turned to me with a gleam in his eyes. ‘I shouldn’t say this,’ he said, with a crooked smile, ‘but my son works at the paper. His position there is not permanent. Do you think you could help him become permanent? He’s been there seven or eight years and his position is still temporary.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ I said, not wanting to disappoint the man on his son’s wedding day.

  We were still talking when the son arrived. He was dark and heavy, with a thick, black beard and a prayer mark that was just a dot. I saw these marks with a feeling of dread now, as if everywhere one looked people were catching a terrible new disease. All the trainers in my brother’s gym had them. In seven months in the Muslim world, I had seen the prayer callous, with its rough, thick texture only once, in Syria, and now in Pakistan every other man had one. He was speaking on his mobile phone and continued to do so as he told us that we were to make our way to a mosque across the street for the wedding.

  A small gathering of men left the tented area and walked to the white marble mosque. It was crowded, with a pungent smell and fluorescent and tinted glass lights. There were other worshippers too, some with red, hennaed beards. Laxman tried to make me wear a plastic skullcap for those who didn’t have their own, but when I saw him in his red shirt and white plastic cap, looking so foolish, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I sat down next to the old man, and as we watched the bustle at the front of the mosque, he said, ‘There was a time when the priest came to the house. Our weddings used to last seven days, but today many of the traditions are dying out. There’s only one day for the wedding and we have to come to the mosque for the ceremony. When I was little, weddings took place with great festivity. They’re forgetting how to get married!’

  The old man put it well. This was the loss of history that was not just in books, but real and felt. The weddings he described were like weddings I knew in India; often the only difference between religions was the ceremony, which was the shortest part of the occasion. It was easy to imagine, as with the Sufi shrine, how weddings would have been an event for people of all faiths. There would have been a special feeling of goodwill at attending the wedding of someone from another faith, yet of the same culture. There was no cultural familiarity for me now: it was only a Muslim wedding. The dumbing-down of the wedding to its bare Islamic essentials was part of the rejection of India as a cultural entity, part of the rejection of the composite culture, which left only the bare bones of religion. The old man was religious, but he missed his culture. That culture, like the Sufi religion of Sind and the city of Hyderabad, had relied on its diversity. The sudden fact of homogeneity in a composite culture was a shock, like imagining London or New York stripped of their diversity. It affected values, and the assumption of homogeneity in my father’s house – the jibes against Hindus, Jews, gays, blacks and Americans, the language untempered by just the awareness of others – was more alien to me than anything else.

  In my confusion, I kept expecting a bejewelled bride in red to appear so I was little surprised when the father indicated that his son, after signing a few documents, had become married while sitting next to another man who was also getting married.

  We walked back to the rectangular tent and the women beat kitchen utensils and sang songs about their brother’s happiness. When they saw that the groom was lagging behind on his mobile phone they stopped, and started again a few minutes later. Many more people arrived and men who looked like blacksmiths, in greasy vests and beards, brought in great metal pots of steaming food.

  The attorney general drove up in an air-conditioned car, opened his window and shook the groom’s hand. Laxman ran up to him to introduce me as a journalist from London. He smiled, gave me his card and then the tinted windows went up. We had to go too; we were meant to meet the bureau chief. I looked into the tent before leaving. Large, listl
ess men, with hot faces, were standing by a row of blue tables, putting away great mouthfuls of rice and chicken.

  When we arrived at the newspaper offices, the bureau chief wanted me to meet someone who had just stepped out of the office to prayer. I felt some tension from the night before pass between us, then he said, ‘I don’t know if I should be telling you this, but only twice in the twenty years that I’ve been working here has saab called me. But he called yesterday and he said, “What you do for him, you’ll be doing for me.” So, you have asked for the moon and I will move heaven and earth.’

  I was embarrassed to see the dignified old man put in this position, but Laxman’s face gleamed with satisfaction. The awkwardness in the room ended with the appearance of a tall, fair man, with a thick, black moustache and a prayer mark.

  The man, in his early forties, was a member of Sind’s legislative assembly. He had made his way up in Pakistani politics through channels that were now closed. He began his career in the student unions in 1971, the year East Pakistan was lost. ‘That time was good.’ He smiled. ‘Student life was very good. We were getting a lot of talent, but then Zia banned the student unions and their leaders. All the good politicians you see now, who aren’t scared of the army, came up during that time.’ The student unions, like the film industry, never recovered. They were one of those fragile organisations that take decades to build but only months to smother. And in 1979, the year Bhutto was executed, the year before my parents met, the young politician who in all likelihood would have joined a large, secular party, like the People’s Party, joined a religious one instead. Though his aspiration for Pakistan was the most basic, nonreligious desire for good government, he felt that only Islam could bring true democracy.