Stranger to History

by Aatish Taseer

  ‘The army won’t let it come,’ he said. ‘They listen to what America says. When they wanted to fight the Russians, the army brought the Taleban and General Zia and it was all namaz and Allah Allah. Then they wanted the Taleban out and they brought Musharraf who knows nothing about these things. The Islamic movement is strong, and if there were free and fair elections, we would sweep into power. But there are bogus elections and ballot stuffing. In 1947, madrassas were only a few hundred and now there are twenty-five thousand. Isn’t religion growing? Do you see the attendance at religious events?’ In the past, religious parties had never swept the ballot boxes, but the politician was sure that the mood had changed.

  ‘People are becoming more Islamic-minded. When Muslims are being killed in Waziristan, won’t religion increase? Musharraf says, “Take Islamic culture out of textbooks,” and people say, “Fine, we’ll teach it at home.” Religion is growing because they’re trying to suppress it. They did away with the Taleban, which controlled the people very well, curbed crime, stopped opium, ended injustice, and it just made people turn more towards religion.’

  ‘How do you want religion in Pakistan to be?’

  ‘In everything.’

  ‘Shariah?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Saudi?’

  ‘No, that’s a kingdom.’

  ‘Iran?’

  ‘No, that’s something else.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Like in the time of the Prophet. An Islamic republic.’

  ‘But there was no republic then.’

  ‘Yes, but what is a republic, after all?’

  ‘A European concept coming out of ancient Greece.’

  ‘No. A republic,’ he said, ‘came from Islam.’

  What he had in mind was not really a political entity but a vision of a just society. He quoted a story I had heard many times now about the caliph Omar. In the story, the caliph is questioned publicly over why he uses more cloth in his dress than his fellow Muslims. Despite his high office, he is not offended by the query and explains that he has more cloth because his son has given him his share. Muslims liked the story for its message of equality and political accountability. But beyond these simplicities, when the young politician’s demands were boiled down to details, they bore a resemblance to a modern, Western-style republic, not a Taleban-style state.

  ‘We want to improve education. We want full education – maths, chemistry, economics. We want to improve hospital facilities, services, utilities. We are not allowed to present these things in the Assembly. We present them and they block us.’ But how could it happen in a deeper sense until men like the young politician stopped standing for the faith and stood instead for what they wanted? Wouldn’t the Islamic lens always distort the real priorities? Wouldn’t it be better to think of models in places where republics of this kind had been achieved, rather than the Prophet’s example? The reason it couldn’t work, this finding something in one place and recasting it in a palatable Islamic mould, was that the faith’s distortions were too many. Even now, in the country founded for the faith, the young politician was ready to blame foreign powers for the inefficiencies of the local legislature.

  ‘The Sind Assembly hasn’t passed a single law in three years!’ he cried. ‘It’s huge, with money and ministries, but the people have no relief. But ask us to find Osama bin Laden in Waziristan and we’re doing it. That’s why I think my government is in foreign hands. Because it is not a republic, it is not in our hands. One man, controlled by international powers, is controlling everything, a controlled and engineered democracy.

  ‘I have a constituency,’ he continued, ‘I want to get it medicine, but I can’t. There’s a board, but they don’t give us a vote on it. There’s no elected representative on it! People are corrupt, and in this country they make corruption files only to blackmail people, not to bring them to justice. The rate of commission for any government development project is thirty per cent. I was given five million for development in my constituency, but out of that the government contractor wants thirty per cent. That’s just the rate. My guy wants even more. He says, “Let’s speak in terms of fifty.”’

  In the end, the young politician came back to religion. He quoted the great slogan of the religious parties, the final logic of the secular state for Indian Muslims: ‘Pakistan ka matlab kya, la illa il allah. What is the meaning of Pakistan? There is no God but God.’

  The politician struck me as sincere and I felt that the corruption he saw around him drove him to the purities of faith. He offered to take me to the Assembly and we exchanged details. When I told him my name, he smiled and said, ‘Taseer. I’ll remember it. It was the name of a great Pakistani leader.’

  This mention of my father, like the one at the border when I first came to Pakistan, surprised me. I wouldn’t have thought the young politician would know of him. The respect people in Pakistan had for my father complicated my assessment of him. I felt a certain pride when ordinary people spoke of his courage in the Zia years, and when young executives looked up to him for the business empire he created at the age of fifty in a country where it wasn’t easy to rise on your own. But I didn’t know how I could let their opinions influence my own difficult relationship with him. I think it’s impossible to see your parents in any role other than the intense, personal one you need with them. My peace with my father couldn’t include knowledge of his success in public life. What good was he to me as a charismatic politician and businessman if he wasn’t willing to be my father?

  In his letter, my father had mentioned the ‘Pakistani ethos’. I had had it in mind all the time in Hyderabad, but how strange it was to think of that phrase now, in this desert city, where in the name of a Pakistani ethos the city’s harmony, still engraved in its buildings, had been carved into ghettoes of faction. Pakistanis offered their natural differences, differences in culture and language, as an explanation for the battle lines that had come up, but this was hardly an explanation when next door in India deeper differences had been bridged. Not only that, but in Sind too, where once great variety had been absorbed, bitter division was to be found in what was now relative homogeneity. And Sind, for centuries so diverse, its culture and worship formed from that diversity, was for the first time in its history no longer a place of confluence.

  As we walked down the stairs, Laxman scuttled up to me. ‘Now, he’s set.’ He meant the bureau chief, whom we were dropping off at the Press Club. The bureau chief had mentioned earlier that one of the political parties had called for a strike and the streets now were emptier than usual. It was early afternoon and the heat that had been building since the morning surpassed all expectations. The stillness of the trees, the knife-like edges of Urdu slogans on the walls, the near-solidity of shadows brought a phantasmagoric aspect to the day. The greenery of trees seemed sometimes to be red, and the whole scene was stained like a photographic negative. The heat pressed against my head and it took all my strength to get out of the car and thank the bureau chief for his help.

  I was leaving Hyderabad later that afternoon for a rally in another town. I had just said goodbye to the bureau chief and was turning away to get back into the car when, barely a few feet from me, there was a man wearing nothing but a fragment of cloth. It was his nakedness that made me look again, and when I did, I saw that sections of flesh had been torn from his legs, his arms and his chest. A blue polythene bag hung from his wrist. His frail, dark body trembled and shook and tears streamed down his small, bearded face. He wasn’t with anyone, he didn’t approach anyone, he just stood alone outside the Press Club, almost naked, covered with open wounds, looking up at the white sky with his glassy eyes, and weeping, not like a child but like a fully grown man, a deep broken groan from the depths of his wretched body.

  It was as complete an impasse as I had ever found myself in. I had turned away from all kinds of horror in my life, but this man, the extent of his injuries, the climate he stood in and the cry coming from his mouth made it
impossible to look away. Laxman and I ran up to him and yelled to the bureau chief, who turned and came back. The man could hardly speak, but he managed to tell the bureau chief that he had been burnt, and it was possible now to see that the wounds were broad swathes of burns. As the man tried to speak, a young man in a powder blue salwar kameez appeared. He said that a fire had broken out and the man had been burnt in it. He was taken to the civil hospital burns ward, but because he told the press he was not being treated properly, they had left him without treatment as punishment. ‘For twenty days,’ the young man said, ‘he has been lying without treatment.’

  ‘These stories happen every day, Aatish saab,’ the bureau chief said. ‘Best to leave it alone.’

  ‘How was he burnt? In a factory or house?’

  ‘In a garbage dump,’ the man said.

  ‘What was he doing there?’

  ‘He’s an addict.’

  ‘In Hyderabad,’ the bureau chief clarified, ‘garbage is disposed of by burning.’

  ‘Yes, but what was he doing in it?’

  ‘He’s an addict. He doesn’t feel anything,’ the chief said. ‘He was lying in the garbage when they burnt it. Don’t worry too much about these cases. They are a daily occurrence.’

  Pakistan had among the highest number of heroin addicts in the world and this, too, like so much else in Pakistan, had happened since 1979.

  ‘What’s he going to do?’

  ‘I’m treating him,’ the man in blue said.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Saeed.’

  ‘Who’s he?’ I asked the bureau chief.

  ‘A quack,’ the bureau chief replied, ‘In Pakistan, if you cannot afford a doctor, you go to a quack.’

  The man had run away from the hospital when it refused to treat him and Saeed found him. He seemed now to be using the burnt man to some end of his own. He had brought him to the Press Club in the hope of calling attention to the story. He seemed half amused, a little exhilarated. He asked me my full name and then, trying to form some religious judgement about me, asked why I wore the Sikh bangle on my wrist. I ignored him.

  It was a story full of ambiguity. Everyone seemed to have some incalculable motive; no one’s account was clear; the press, the hospital, the authorities, the quack were all implicated, but then there was the bare, inadmissible fact, the fact big enough to stop anyone in their path, of a man, half burnt to death, standing in the street sobbing in fifty-degree heat. I could hardly believe – after a cycle in feudal Sind, after the violence of the Mango King’s world, after Dickensian lawyers, informant journalists and bloodthirsty slogans – that this was my last vision, the most voiceless creature in this degraded chain. When this reality was seen against the exalted expectations for the religious homeland, it was possible to imagine that this was the darkness, the almost religious darkness, so potent a myth in the Muslim imagination, of a time when no man was left uncorrupt, and from whose depths, surely, a messiah was at hand.

  The Idea Country

  My father had written about India and Pakistan in his letter and now the publisher wanted me to write about continuities between the two. I felt I couldn’t. He said I was in a unique position to see them. And perhaps I was. But after my panorama in Sind, I felt that what remained common were remains; the countries had gone their own ways. He became irritated. Educated Pakistanis didn’t like to hear of the inroads the faith had made over the past fifty years. They pointed to the Sufi religion of Punjab and Sind, how so many people were as they had always been, hardworking, no veils, no beards. And they were right. But that Sufi faith, with its shrines and poetry and wide appeal, was not the religion that was gaining ground in Pakistan, but a more literal, streamlined faith. In many who didn’t have veils and beards, it had made its trespasses. The secular state for Indian Muslims had been muddied over the decades; democracy with dictatorship; Bhutto’s populism died with him; and after everything else had been allowed to fall away, the men who believed that Pakistan was created for faith would always have the force of logic on their side.

  The ‘Pakistani ethos’ was hard to pin down, but I could tell that the rejection of India was an important part of it. So it was not because continuties did not exist that I didn’t wish to write about them, but because their reassertion was not part of the Pakistani story. To write about them was to write about obscurity.

  If Iran found Islamic expression in a modern context through the Islamic Republic, so did Pakistan, but the nature of the republic, and even the impulses behind it, were very different. At first, it hadn’t been an Islamic republic at all, the ‘Islamic’ was added a decade later; it was a secular state for Indian Muslims. And, in the beginning, that was all: no Shariah, no clerics, no ban on alcohol; people remembered women on bicycles. It was as if a trust like Abdullah’s – that the Muslims he had never met possessed a certain basic identity – had been the impulse behind gathering the sub-continent’s various and disparate Muslims into a single state. That was Pakistan’s first religious battle: the cleansing of the population.

  Pakistan’s founders were not clerics and fanatics, but poets and secularists. It was from the most sophisticated Muslims of that time that the case for the country was made. The poet Iqbal, the country’s intellectual founder, was a contemporary of my grandfather. He actually wrote and performed my grandparents’ marriage ceremony. And yet among these genteel people an idea was expressed whose full ugliness, and violence, only became clear in the cruder, more basic articulations that followed. For me, until I saw the faith’s unspoken hold on my father’s notions of history and politics, and the chauvinism it could produce, the idea would almost have been too strange to understand. Though it was disguised as an economic argument, a fear of being swamped by money-minded Hindus, it was really just a refinement of what Abdullah had said to me half a century later in Istanbul, also now free of its diversity: ‘I think that Muslims have to be at the top, at the centre of the system. We have to determine all the things in the world, otherwise we won’t be free ourselves . . . A Christian may live with us here, but not like a Muslim. He may live here, but we have to be dominant.’

  Translated into political terms, he was saying that Muslims needed their own state. This had also been the demand for Pakistan. But despite its apparent political objective, the demand was less concrete than it seemed. Its impracticality, but also the frustration that arose from its failure, became clear when, in my last few days in Karachi, I met an Islamic ideologue.

  ‘When you see him,’ Salim, the reporter, said, ‘you would never expect him to be such an Islamist, but he’s a real hardliner.’ Salim was stocky and bearded, with tired eyes. He was a star reporter at the publisher’s paper and obsessed with the war on terror. The ideologue, he said, supplied some of the country’s fiercest religious groups with their philosophy. His description of an outwardly irreligious man, with political ideas that had all the force of religion, made me want to meet the ideologue.

  We arranged lunch at the Usmaniye restaurant in the outer reaches of Karachi, deep within the city of cement and corrugated-iron. Once we left the broken streets on the outskirts of Karachi, the road signs and pavements continued for some distance, then fell away in parts. At traffic-lights, a couple of black eunuchs dressed in pink, with cloudy eyes and yellow teeth begged for money. It was a big, treeless intersection full of open-backed trucks and scooters. The heat and the smoke made the outlines of the buildings tremble. On a grey cement wall, a colourful scrawl read, ‘Crush Israel’ and ‘Down with Denmark’. A boy salvaged pens and plastic bags from a mountain of hardened garbage at the centre of which there was a half-full dumpster. The flags of local parties appeared in clusters, reds, greens and a worn-out Pakistani People’s Party flag. It was Bhutto’s party, my father’s party, at times the great hope of Pakistani democracy, still popular, especially in Sind, and now awaiting another life.

  We passed another mountain of waste and compressed polythene, from which shreds of pink and blue fluttere
d in the hot breeze. Below it I saw a still body of black water, disturbed now and then by a mysterious sputtering of bead-like bubbles. Where there might have been rocks at the edge, there were hillocks of filth and little clumps of bright grass.

  The restaurant was cool and dimly lit, away from the roar of the street. The ideologue wore an olive green shirt. He was dark, clean-shaven and his eyes were sunken. He smoked many cigarettes.

  He didn’t want to talk about himself. ‘Nothing is personal in all of this. I don’t believe in personal opinion as far as religion is concerned. Nothing I say has to do with who I am or my own experience.’

  He had grown up in Karachi, born just before the first war with India in 1965. In 1971, he told me, ‘Pakistan became two pieces. I have very little memory of that time,’ he recalled, his thin lips pulling at the cigarette, ‘but I was aware that we didn’t cook three meals a day in our house. The good thing about our house, though, and many others was that we read a lot, two or three papers a day, literature, we discussed politics. I had read all of Premchand [the short-story writer] by the time I was ten. We might have been misguided, but the political motivation was there. At times it might have been wrong, but it was there, and this was without it being associated with any one political party. But now all that is gone.’

  The ideologue spoke some English, and refined Urdu. His intense, studious manner and nicotine-stained fingertips reminded me of an old-fashioned Marxist intellectual. But there was something missing about him – humanity, perhaps. He seemed hard and hollow.

  ‘Why is it gone?’

  ‘The people became disillusioned. We always thought Pakistan was made to be realised. This sense was lost, and with it, we lost many other things.’