Tunnel Vision

by Shandana Minhas

  ‘And then if things go well, the week after we can come and meet your mother.’

  ‘What if things don’t go well?’ I had no intention of letting ‘things’ ever get to the stage but perversely, I inserted another note of discord in a conversation I should be letting run as smoothly, painlessly, as possible, ‘what if your mother doesn’t like me? Then, will it be the end for us?’

  ‘You should know me better than that, Ayesha. If, God forbid, that does happen we’ll just back off and wait a while and then try again later. I’ll bring her around soon, see if I don’t. What’s important is that we stick together.’

  ‘Ah, so you are anticipating trouble?’ I was evil. Plain, simple, unadulterated bad. Omar was good, kind, pure, interested. I was about to break the proverbial bottle over his head and yet I was somehow making all of it his fault. If I broke up with him now, he’d walk away thinking he’d said or done something tonight to offend me. Nothing could be further from the truth. He was saying all the right things. I just didn’t want to hear them. Sick, twisted, cold-hearted, frigid freak that I was.

  ‘You deserve better than me,’ there was a catch in my voice, but I wasn’t feeling bad for him right then. I was feeling bad for poor little sick me, beset by these awful empathic voices clamouring ‘Change, Escape, Peace,’ threatening to beach the boat I had rowed so far out into my personal ocean of negativity. Why couldn’t they just leave me alone?

  ‘No, it’s me who isn’t good enough for you,’ Omar said earnestly, ‘I know I’m young, I’m too impulsive, I don’t plan but give me a chance and I’ll show you what I’m capable of, I know I can be better than this, and you’re the only one who makes me want to be. Please Ayesha, just meet her.’

  A man saying ‘change me’. A marriage that meant trading up. Deep, enduring like, if not love. And here I was thinking wistfully of why we never had relationships between equals, why it was always ‘you deserve more’ and ‘I’m not good enough’. Even our dramas and films, our celluloid dreams, were all about critical imbalances and the loves that harmonized them. Rich girl, poor boy. Rich boy, poor girl. Angry father-in-law and vengeful mother-in-law, inspector and criminal, man and goat …

  ‘Ayesha, what are you thinking? Tell me!’ It was still late night. I was still in Omar’s car. He was still talking. It wasn’t over. I gathered my thoughts, preparing to hurl them all at once.

  ‘Look, if you need more time to think about it, that’s fine. We’re graduating in two weeks and I was hoping we could share some good news with our friends, give them one last treat at the canteen before we leave, but that’s okay. There’ll be plenty of time for that later. You’re tired. I’m sorry. I’ll just drop you home and we can talk about it later,’ Omar touched the key in the ignition. I reached out and touched the hand on the brake.

  ‘No,’ my voice didn’t sound that way, did it? Neutral, almost robotic, as if I had no gender. Appropriate though, ‘No, I need to finish this now.’

  ‘Please don’t.’

  ‘I wanted to tell you we were over and then you started with the “meet my mother” thing and I got sidetracked and said all kinds of silly things, made you believe you had really hurt me when, actually Omar, all I really want to say to you is I don’t want to meet your mother. I don’t even want to meet you any more. It’s over.’

  ‘Don’t say that Ayesha. It’s just starting.’

  ‘Well then we’re not talking about the same thing because as far as I’m concerned this is it for us. We graduate, we part. The end.’

  ‘Is it something I said? Something I did? Something I didn’t do? Tell me what it is and I’ll do it.’

  ‘No Omar, there’s nothing you can do about it, it’s just that I’m not ready for a commitment.’

  ‘Then we’ll wait another year, I’m sorry I pushed it, I was just excited.’

  ‘But I know I don’t want any commitment from you.’

  ‘Is there someone else?’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘Are you not attracted to me?’

  ‘You know I am,’ and I was. But when was attraction ever a recipe for a successful marriage? My parents had been attracted to each other, touching, glancing, brushing almost constantly, but where had it taken them? No wonder desire wasn’t a factor in Pakistani romances, it just led to chaos, jealousy and unwanted pregnancies. That’s why pretty women ended up with bald men and screen heroes looked like stage rejects. We just weren’t prepared to deal with love and lust together. I was no different, whatever Omar might think.

  ‘Then what is it?’

  ‘I don’t love you,’ the words seemed to take on a life of their own, growing like ravenous children feeding on the tension between us, ballooning till they filled the silence, the car, the world. Reducing the headlights that had appeared in the rear view mirror into insignificant details.

  ‘But you might one day!’ his devotion was touching, in an academic way. I wasn’t really touched, just curious. Was this the whimper of a heartsick lover or the mission statement of a future stalker? Just last month a student at another college had killed his girlfriend before killing himself after she turned down his proposal.

  ‘I doubt it, Omar.’ To emphasize my disinterest, I began checking my nails for signs of vitamin B deficiency. Omar lowered his head onto the steering wheel. A helmeted head popped through his open window and said, ‘Do you have a nikahnama?’

  That’s when Omar burst into tears.

  DRIVER KI ZINDAGI BHI AJAB KHEL HAI, MAUT SAY BACH GAYA TO CENTRAL JAIL HAI

  BACK OF BUS

  ~

  The policeman at his window drew back in surprise, then asked for a nikahnama again. It only made Omar cry louder. Helpless, he had appealed to me across Omar’s bent head.

  ‘What happened Bibi?’

  ‘Yes Omar,’ I’d remarked conversationally, ‘why are you crying?’

  Euphoria had been skipping through my veins suddenly, a perverse, heady delight that swept reason and compassion away. Omar had eventually managed some semblance of calm, handed the anxious policeman two hundred rupees and driven me home in silence. In the two weeks left on campus, he studiously avoided me, walked right by me at convocation and for all practical purposes ceased to exist for me in life beyond KU boundaries. I heard about him occasionally, from mutual friends, but he never got in touch. Neither had I. Yet here he was, a mursheed to my paralysed pir.

  ‘He worships you, you know,’ Kulsoom had said as he’d walked by the week after we’d broken up, a study in upright, male stoicism.

  ‘I can tell by the way he’s crawling after me on his knees begging me to take him back.’

  ‘Apparently yesterday Imtiaz asked him to tell, now that you weren’t together, how far the two of you had gone.’

  ‘Did he say as far as all the knowledge in China? ‘Cause that’s what I would have said.’

  ‘He said if Imtiaz asked him again he’d break all his fingers. And if anyone else asked him or he heard they asked someone else he’d do the same to them.’

  ‘But his fingers didn’t ask the question! I would have threatened to break his mouth.’

  ‘It’s romantic.’

  ‘Why do men always want to break things anyway?’

  ‘You’re a fool.’

  ‘Then part me from my money and go buy us some samosas.’ I waved twenty rupees in her face.

  Imtiaz walked by as I waited alone for her to come back. I winked at him. He walked faster.

  ‘So how far did you go?’ Kulsoom came back with extra chaat masala in her free hand, and we enjoyed a regrettably brief silence while we sprinkled and swallowed before she dived back into the inquisition.

  ‘You know all this interest in sex is really quite unhealthy.’

  ‘Probably. So?’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Is that why you broke up?’

  ‘Look, we Pakistanis have got a great strategy when it comes to sex. We’re obviously having it,’ I waved a hand towards the street
children hollering over the boundary wall, the couples canoodling under trees, the men walking hand in hand down the street, ‘but we don’t talk about it. Because talking about it is when the problems start. Why do you want to upset the apple cart?’

  ‘Thinking of apples always makes me sad.’

  ‘You’re a sad woman Kulsoom.’

  Truth.

  ‘So you’re not going to tell then?’

  I looked at her till she looked away.

  ‘I’m only asking because Uzma,’ she pointed to a hijabi sitting under a tree reading a book of Omar Khayyam’s poetry, ‘wanted to know if Omar was any good.’

  ‘Does she know God is omnipotent?’

  ‘Don’t know. Shall I go and ask her?’

  ‘Tell her he’s phenomenal. Tell her it was almost a spiritual experience.’

  ‘Tauba tauba!’

  ‘Hey I’m just trying to bring her closer to God!’

  The day before graduation I went looking for Omar. I spotted him in the cafeteria through the portholes in the door. As I entered I noticed he wasn’t alone; Uzma was having tea with him. He looked up, I thought hopefully, as I walked towards him, then away as I walked past.

  I looked the Omar in my hospital room in the eye and said what I had meant to say to him that day.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay, Ayesha,’ he smiled at me before he disappeared, ‘Uzma had the perfect line and length for a middle order mutt like me.’

  KYA DEKH RAHAY HO?

  BACK OF RICKSHAW

  ~

  Adil came in not a second later, wearing what seemed to be a borrowed smile. This time a nurse came with him to check my drip and the readings on the electronica. The angry janitor was nowhere in sight. I guessed my head-trip was over. It had been educational, to say the least

  ‘I spoke to Mamu. He’s with Ammi. She’s fine, he says, she went to her room and lay down and seems to have fallen asleep. He said her door was open and he could see her from the telephone table.’

  The bed was the socket, she the plug. Recharging.

  ‘Then I called Farah just to check, you know? I was worried that she was worried, I generally message her at least forty times a day and today I’ve hardly messaged at all.’

  ‘She said she might stop by later to see you. I’ve wanted you two to meet for ages, though I wish it didn’t have to be like this,’ his baby fat wobbled like jelly on the edge of a moving plate, ‘but we don’t get to choose these things, do we? We don’t get to choose the hows and whys of our lives, or the whens!’ For a second the mask of perpetual cheer slipped, exposing the sad bones beneath, ‘We don’t get to decide when the people we love leave us.’

  As if to illustrate his point, the horse and cattle show that was admitting a person to AKU bustled in again. This time it was an elderly man on the gurney, a harried-looking woman bustling after him like a tired sparrow desperate for feed. He was taken into the cubicle next to mine. His wife, if that’s who she was, stood in one corner wringing her hands. Her man looked terrible, listless and grey, already a ghost. Both Adil and I watched in morbid fascination as he was docked into the glassed-in cubicle next to mine like a battered aircraft returning to its carrier after yet another dogfight. Medicine really was the science of denial.

  I’d often felt grubby about the exploitative nature of the industry I worked for, wanting to shower at the end of the day, wash off some of the guilt by association. We didn’t understand one hundredth of what we claimed to, yet we continued to market our ‘cutting edge’ knowledge. Slapping a patch on gangrenous wounds, sending people right back out to fight another day, the bravado with which we insisted that man could transcend anything physical reality threw at him, it was strange ultra-conservatives didn’t get after us. Though of course they were too busy hollering about the decline in the urban woman’s morals to worry about non-issues like pharmaceutical malpractice. And the PR department had our defence all ready should anyone question the ‘experimental’ nature of some of our products. That’s why we were Ashraful Makhlooqat, wasn’t it, because the brain elevated the body beyond the reach of tribulations that affected other animals. I admired other animals more than I did my own species. Other animals were civilized enough to cull their weak, their old, and their infirm. We liked to let them suffer because it made us feel better about ourselves.

  At least we don’t let our elderly die alone. If only cultural superiority were that simple. We were like an old facçde on a movie set, all gracious living and clean curtains from the front, termites and beams in danger of imminent collapse at the back. Sure we kept our elderly relatives at home with us, sometimes. As unpaid domestics, or doorstops if wheelchair bound. Then there were all those old people deposited at the gates of charity homes every year by children claiming they were mentally ill. The parents cried and denied it. The children ignored them and left after signing papers saying the parents were not to be released to anyone else on any condition.

  And sometimes after retirement the elderly became the dominant beasts at home, terrorizing errant sons and new daughters-in-law with equal abandon, demanding observance of archaic rituals that had obviously brought them nothing but heartache and bitterness.

  Were we culturally superior to others? Who cared? It wasn’t about superiority as much as it was about equality. All societies were equally fragmented, all people were equally conflicted. All candidates for euthanasia were deserving of it.

  On the plus side, we weren’t invading other countries and killing innocents. Perhaps later? When we got strong enough to avoid blatant retribution.

  I was learning a funny thing about mood swings. If you went into a coma, they went with you. Would I have them even in the afterlife, would they condemn me to a yoyo existence beyond the grave, sole occupant of the bullet elevator between heaven and hell? Would even death not be able to stop me turning into my mother? No wonder I wasn’t frightened of it.

  Someone was frightened though. The old woman with the patient in the cubicle next door was standing at the foot of his bed as people bustled around him, gazing at him as if she felt a blink would make him disappear, closing her eyes would negate his existence. What was it like to be married for decades, I wondered, did it exhilarate, infuriate? Did love ebb or flow? Did they still have anything to talk about? Did they even talk any more or just meticulously observe each other, alert for signs of physical collapse? Would I ever know first-hand? Did I even want to risk losing the strong will, self awareness, ambition and clarity education, opportunity and exposure had gifted me at the altar of juvenile dreams?

  Okay, maybe I’d missed out on the clarity.

  Society had created a new kind of Pakistani woman, but failed to evolve around her. What if I scratched Saad’s surface and found just good old Primitive Man? Did I want to find out first-hand how there were many hooris but no shahzada gulfams?

  Watching the old woman standing petrified at the foot of the bed as if pouring all her will into her mate, I did want to. I wanted to matter to somebody other than my blood relatives. I wanted to matter, to anybody, for reasons that had to do with my self and not with the blood that ran in my veins. I wanted to be first on some other soul’s list of priorities, like that old man was to that old woman.

  The woman seemed oblivious to the storm around her. Body rigid, eyes fixed on his closed lids, lips moving soundlessly, the fingers of her right hand reached out and stroked his foot, skin touching skin in supplication. Stay. Be. Live. For me. When had I last seen such tenderness? Abba brushing Ammi’s hair. When had I last felt it for myself? Saad brushing mine, in the charged privacy of a guest room at Najma’s house. When had I last dispensed it, this electrical current of love frying synapses in the beloved’s brain, overloading his circuits with need?

  The worst thing about anger was the way it killed the softness, wiped out all that was inviting and sinuous till there was nothing but planes and angles. As a kid I was different. Kinder. Now I was a surface upon which emotional
bungee jumping would most certainly prove fatal. No wonder Saad had disappeared, he must be finding it hard to cope with the thing I had become.

  I started thinking about the Betinate episode, the last time I had proactively tried to change anything. Would I have done the same if I found myself in the same position today?

  PHIR MILANGAY PYARAY

  BACK OF RICKSHAW

  ~

  Betinate, and its rather abrupt withdrawal from the market was a watershed for Raja Pharmaceuticals. Like any good foot-soldiers, we in sales were aware that ‘ours was not to reason why, ours but to do or die’, but whenever I was given a new product I had taken to doing web searches to find out all I could about it in addition to the practically unreadable literature that was given to us. A salesman would be good at his job only if he believed, albeit temporarily, in what he was selling. And some of the sales teams had postgraduate degrees. They were doing a crummy job through no fault of their own. If I could provide them with extra information that could help them make a sale, why not? People who had spent that much time struggling to meet the costs of higher education deserved to be treated better than glorified peons delegated the task of ferrying literature from source to buyer. And morale had gone up after I had initiated weekly staff meetings to talk about new products. Some of the old guard had voiced objections to my ‘airy fairy’ approach, but they just resented the bite it took out of their leisure time.

  Betinate was a widely prescribed cough syrup, manufactured and distributed by my company, under licence from an international pharma giant. It was one of those drugs that move with the times, having been in vogue even when I was a kid, the company constantly updated its advertising and packaging, so each new tier of buyers felt it was contemporary, even recently developed. That wasn’t true, of course, little had changed about Betinate in the decades it had been around in Pakistan, except its name. I knew that. I was comfortable with that. What I wasn’t comfortable with was a discovery I made while web surfing one day. Browsing through bulletin boards and forums centred around pharmaceutical products in the hopes of discovering some undiscovered positive aspects of Betinate that might help us update its marketing, I came across a recent posting about its status in most European countries. Banned, in light of studies that suggested it facilitated the development of certain inherited conditions. I did a more thorough search.