Tunnel Vision

by Shandana Minhas

  What had I had with Omar exactly? Others felt we were ‘serious’ about each other, but then sometimes others felt accidentally standing next to each other in a line meant a couple was serious about each other. I didn’t really think we were. In a place like KU, it was believed you had to really feel strongly about someone or something to ‘make an exhibition’ of it and invite the ire of KU’s many (self-appointed) moral guardians. These geysers of negativity roamed the campus at will, annoying faculty, students and outsiders with equal cheek. And well they might, no one ever stopped them, not even the Rangers. A security force falling somewhere between the police and the army, brought into Karachi during the 90s to quell ethnic disturbances, the Rangers had never left but had since occupied a lot of public property and were pretty much detested by all. But in their defence, the Rangers must have been terribly busy occupying sports centres, community clubs and other public spaces.

  While people often wondered who or what let politics and academics mix with such volatility on local campuses most of them never wondered that aloud. Omar did though. That was why I was initially drawn to him.

  A group of us had been lounging in a vacant classroom between lectures. The common room had long before been appropriated as the ‘head office’ of a student political group. We wanted to play charades but didn’t because the last time, a fundo group had barged in as Kulsoom was miming Dances With Wolves, and accused us of obscenity. We couldn’t play cards because that would be ‘unIslamic,’ so we were chatting idly, debating whether our playing antakshari would be deemed unIslamic, anti-Pakistan or just vulgar. There were twelve of us.

  A man with a ripped sleeve and blood seeping from a head wound lurched in and collapsed. Shouts echoed in the distance and the tinkle of breaking glass was recognizable in the gaps.

  ‘Another fight,’ Kulsoom sighed.

  ‘We should leave now,’ the other girls began gathering their things.

  ‘What about him?’ I bent to examine the unconscious man. He looked familiar, even through the blood on his face. ‘He’s hurt quite badly.’

  ‘Leave him,’ snapped one of the girls, ‘let’s move out.’

  ‘We can’t just let him bleed on the floor.’

  ‘He probably brought it upon himself. Only a fool tackles the Jamaatis.’

  ‘What makes you think he’s not a Jamaati himself? Maybe he tackled the APMSO?’

  ‘Is his shalwar two inches above his ankles?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then he’s not a Jamaati. Come on,’ Kulsoom barked. The sound of running feet seemed closer.

  ‘I think I know him,’ I didn’t want to move, ‘he’s in my psychology class. He lent me his notes once.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean you owe him anything.’

  ‘It does.’

  ‘Fine. It’s your decision. We’re leaving,’ the other girls swept out of the room, three boys in their wake. Omar remained behind. We looked at each other.

  ‘I’m in your psychology class, you know,’ he said.

  ‘Have you ever offered me your notes?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, then you don’t count.’

  ‘You’ve never looked like you needed them. What do you want me to do?’

  ‘I don’t just want to leave him here. We don’t have time to take him to the infirmary or even another part of the campus, and we can’t carry him between the two of us.’

  ‘I know,’ Omar said.

  We heard the sound of running feet and knew it was too late to call anyone, or go anywhere. We dragged the supine body behind the last row of desks and darted back to the front. Suddenly we both were afraid. It was evident on his face, and I could feel it pouring from my sweat glands. Pond’s perfumed talc, I hoped, had better keep its promise.

  KU couples (the technical definition of a couple in more extreme circles being boy and girl past puberty not related to each other inhabiting same ten feet of space) were often roughed up by the resident Thought Police, which expressed its concern for the decline in our youth’s moral values through physical (for the man) and verbal (for the woman) abuse.Their masters regularly let these pit bulls off the leash, an ingenious way of nurturing and dissipating their aggression so that it could be summoned at will when required. They hadn’t gained admission to this highly competitive academic environment for their grey matter, but because of informal quotas, meekly accepted by successive administrations. They didn’t have the brains to put two and two together, one plus one was well within their reach; it added up to ‘inappropriate western-influenced obscenity’. Of course, they couldn’t spell most of that.

  When the holier than thou political activists charged into the classroom, they found Omar and me sitting rigidly at adjacent desks.

  ‘Look at this,’ said a man with a beard and a prayer cap topping his stick-like frame, ‘these two are all alone in here.’

  ‘You! Get up!’ One of the others barked at Omar.

  ‘Why?’ Omar replied lazily, his casual tone belying his knees knocking together under the desk.

  ‘Why? Because I say so.’

  ‘And who are you exactly?’

  ‘I’m the person who’ll smash your skull if you don’t get up right now!’

  ‘In that case,’ Omar rose, ‘I’ll get up. I shall probably need my skull and its contents at some point in the near future, this being an institute of higher learning, though of course one wouldn’t realize that from conversing with you.’

  ‘A smart one huh? We’ll get to that in a minute. Who is this girl?’

  ‘Why don’t you ask me?’ I piped up. My voice didn’t shake at all.

  ‘Tell your girlfriend there’s only one kind of woman other than your mother or your sister you can address directly. If she’s admitting she’s that kind of woman, she’ll be treated that way.’

  ‘Who she is is no concern of yours. We’re not bothering anyone, so why don’t you leave us alone.’

  ‘Leave you alone to do what?’ A new voice. ‘You haven’t told us why you two are sitting together all alone.’

  ‘In an empty classroom with no one around.’

  ‘Her with no dupatta on her head.’

  ‘At desks that are right next to each other though the others are all empty.’

  ‘Are you on a date?’

  ‘On a date? This is a Muslim country. We don’t date in Pakistan.’

  ‘The right answer. So you must have been caught doing this before.’

  ‘If you’re saying we’re guilty of sitting in a classroom and waiting for a professor to come and educate us, then yes, we’re guilty,’ I spoke again despite Omar’s slight shake of the head, ‘I’m sure that’s a crime that you’ve never committed.’

  ‘Another one with a quick tongue. Is the rest of you as fast?’

  This time I took Omar’s advice and kept my mouth shut. This mob was still undecided about what to do with us, thrown off a little by our refusal to be easily cowed.We didn’t want them thinking about anything else in that room but us; student group turf wars often claimed fatalities and the man hidden behind the desks was already badly injured.

  ‘What is your relationship with her?’

  ‘She’s like my sister,’ Omar replied.

  ‘Like your sister? Do you have the same mother?’

  ‘The same father?’

  ‘Blood relatives at all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So you have no formal relationship with her at all.’

  ‘We’re classmates.’

  ‘Have you not read the posters and the pamphlets we distributed about the code of conduct for interaction between men and women?’

  ‘I must have missed those. Were they handed out as part of a professor’s lecture notes or did they fall down from the sky?’

  ‘We’re liking your attitude less and less. If you’d read the literature, you would know that both of you are in clear violation of the code.’

  ‘This is an Islamic Republic.’

 
‘You’re not in Europe or America.’

  ‘She is not my girlfriend. We’re not on a date. We simply happened to be in the room at the same time.’

  ‘You’re insulting us all by questioning our authority and spreading obscenity. In this country we think of the betterment of society.’

  ‘If you’re so opposed to Satanic influences why are you carrying a bottle of Coke?’ Omar flung back at him. It seemed to take only a millionth of a second for the rabid stick insect to swing the bottle high and smash it against Omar’s head. I screamed. They seemed to like it.

  They all waded in. Kicking, punching, swinging hockey sticks, looking oddly happy. I tried to pull one off Omar, lying on the floor in the foetal position as they kicked him. We had overestimated our ability to control the situation, they were going to kill him.

  ‘Get off!’ The one whose sleeve I was vainly pulling flung me off.

  Then a swarm of grey flowed into the room as the Rangers waded into the melee, and Kulsoom and Amna appeared and helped me to my feet and out of there; two of the other guys had managed to drag Omar out and were carrying him to a car.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Kulsoom put an arm around me, ‘but you and Omar both owe me money. I had to bribe the Rangers to intervene. Omar’s bleeding a lot but he’s not badly hurt. He’ll be all right.You’ll be all right.’

  But nothing was all right.

  Omar had to have twenty-one stitches and was out of commission for six weeks. Fractured elbow. Broken ribs. I visited him several times in the hospital and later at home with a friend of mine. When he came back to class, we really began to actively seek out each other’s company.

  The man we had tried to save died in hospital later that week. He never came out of the coma. There was a scene at his funeral, activists of his student group wanted to carry him to the graveyard in a procession, shouting slogans against the faction that killed him, but his father would not let them. Someone torched his car in protest.

  Which hospital were student casualties taken to, I wondered, who made sure they were admitted by putting up money till their families got there?

  THERE IS NO LIFE WITHOUT WIFE

  GRAFFITI

  ~

  When Omar rejoined college full time he enjoyed a degree of notoriety that had unexpected benefits. Professors knew who he was and seemed unusually responsive to his needs. Rival political factions courted him; having demonstrated his ability to take a good beating he had shown he had the stuff of which good activists are made. Most importantly, women began giving him the eye (not the evil eye, the other one). Despite countless repetition, no one believed we had been trying to save the man who died.

  ‘Your boyfriend stood up for your reputation. That’s so romantic. Why are you trying to diminish him by spreading this silly story,’ one dye-job said to me at lunch one day, ‘are you afraid we’ll try to steal him?’

  Eventually we gave up trying to explain. Drawn together by an experience we couldn’t share with most people, we spent more and more time together talking about it. Love was not even a minor blip on our radar screens. If we both subconsciously realized this proximity would inevitably lead to something else, we gave no indication of it to each other.

  Proximity equals intimacy. How well we had internalized that. Films, movies, novels, law even, you didn’t bother spending time with someone of the opposite sex unless you were looking for something. Omar and I began joking about it. It was a good sign. The first few weeks after the incident, neither one of us had felt capable of laughing at anything.

  ‘I hear we’re engaged,’ he remarked as he drove me home one day.

  ‘I hear we got engaged but then we broke it off.’

  ‘Oh. Why?’

  ‘Because you felt you couldn’t trust me, and that I had been seen with other men.’

  ‘Were these men I know?’

  ‘No idea. Though it would make sense, considering how horrible I am according to the rumours, if it was your best friend.’

  ‘I feel like you’re my best friend.’

  I hadn’t known what to say so had simply kept silent, looking out the window at the hill in the distance instead.

  ‘I do, you know,’ he had continued, ‘I feel like I can be more honest with you than I can with anyone else.’

  I felt like I owed him something, a response, a deep feeling, like I was indebted to him because it was all my fault he got beaten up. That was perhaps all I felt for him.That, and desire. But neither counted for much so I didn’t say that aloud.

  ‘Why is honesty so highly rated?’ I managed.

  ‘Because it’s all about trust, and being honest is the easiest way to build trust’

  ‘Why do people keep harping on building trust? What’s so important about having good relationships with your women and fathers and brothers and lovers? It’s not like they’ll be there for each other forever, you know, they die.’

  ‘There’s nothing else we could have done for him Ayesha. He was already half-dead.’

  ‘What if we had taken him to the infirmary instead of leaving him hidden?’

  ‘Taken him to the infirmary how? Even if we had managed to get past the mullahs, who would’ve torn him apart on the spot, the infirmary isn’t equipped for emergencies like those.You know that.’

  ‘You’re getting sick of talking about it, aren’t you?’

  ‘No I’m not. We can talk about it as much as you like if it makes you feel better.’

  Omar had been the one to get twenty-one stitches but I was the one who still felt like an open wound. It wasn’t that it had not affected him as deeply; it had. He just seemed to be getting over it faster. Men. Short attention span.

  ‘Do you think it was strange for his parents having their child leave home one day and never come back?’

  ‘Of course it must have been strange!’

  ‘No I mean, did they accept it immediately or did they think it was all some sort of hoax?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Hmmm.’

  ‘Ayesha?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What happened to your father? You talk about your mother but never about him. Why?’

  My father, who had left home one day and never come back. Left Ammi, left me, left Adil. Left traces of his presence imprinted on our retinas so that even with eyes shut we could not stop seeing him.

  ‘I don’t really know what to say about him,’ I told Omar, ‘when I was seventeen he disappeared.’

  ‘Disappeared. You mean he passed away?’

  ‘He left home for work. We haven’t seen him since. Ammi thinks he’s dead.’

  ‘What about you? What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t think about it.’

  The lie fell easily from my lips. I knew then that Omar was definitely not the one for me. If he had been, wouldn’t I have told him the truth, or at least wanted to? That I thought about it all the time, when I wasn’t thinking about dead students. That my mother seemed to have become clinically insane. That my life had been on a downward spiral since my father disappeared. That I didn’t think he was dead, just hiding. That somehow it was all my fault and accordingly, I didn’t have the right to get any sympathy for it.

  GANJU PATEL TERI KHOPRI MAIN TEL,

  MAROONGA DANDA NIKLAYGA ANDA

  KIDS’ RHYME

  ~

  Adil was practically a baby when Abba disappeared. Ammi’s disintegration, Adil’s need, had crowded out my reaction. It was a big house, as houses go, more than adequate for the four of us until that day. Once that day was over there would never again be enough room for me.

  Chotay Mamu moved in with us after Abba went AWOL. The considerate thing to do was to give him one of the three bedrooms and move Adil in with me. But Ammi wandered around in a manic rage for weeks, not cooking, cleaning, washing, or showing any interest (for the first and only time) in what or whether Adil had eaten. She ripped the bedroom she shared with my father to shreds, searching for some clue to his abse
nce. A letter, a note about a meeting, political leaflets, any indication of some other engagement. She found nothing. She didn’t help me gather up the clothes scattered on the floor and replace them in the old teak wardrobe in the corner, or Adil in his futile attempts to cage the feathers in the pillows again. When Mamu took the table drawer she had broken, took it outside and began hammering it together again, she emitted a high-pitched wailing sound, flew out to him, grabbed the hammer and threw it over the wall. The top of a neighbour’s head appeared, looking suitably angry, but he retreated after one look at her face. Ammi’s face was difficult to look at in those days.

  My mother was a beautiful woman before she turned into a heartless harridan. Tall for a Hyderabadi woman, about five seven, with fair, flawless skin, almond-shaped hazel eyes and hair as glossy as that of the best sacrificial goats. What always set her apart though, was her posture. Not for her the premature stoop of the average Pakistani woman anxious to avoid drawing attention to her breasts. Her shoulders were broad, angular not rounded, and she didn’t walk as much as undulate regally across the room. I had my father’s dark skin and height ‘more Dravidian than Aryan’, as he used to tease me, but my bearing I took from my mother. I had no choice really. Every time she caught me stooping she would pinch the soft flesh at the underside of my upper arm. By my late teens, the walk had become second nature to me.

  That day her beauty made her anger romantic rather than frightening. She had railed at Mamu, demanding to know how he could use her husband’s tools without her permission, her glossy hair rose around her face in the evening breeze, so that she seemed like some dark, exotic flower; a vengeful rose in full bloom.

  ‘I’m sorry Di, I’m sorry,’ Mamu whimpered before her.

  ‘You know how he hates other people touching his tools.’