by Meena Menon
The regular pilgrimage to the external publicity office began the day after I arrived, and in the evening the prime minister was to make his first official address to the nation. I thought I would file a story for the paper, though I was advised to take it easy and not rush into filing it. My Urdu was never good and Sharif’s speech didn’t make it easy for me. A contact helped me with the speech and translation, and bingo, I had my first story out. There was no dearth of stories to be filed and no time for rest, not even on Sunday—that’s when something always happened. If I was at home, the TV would be on all the time till past midnight when the deadline was over. I would switch it on first thing in the morning, while also checking for any updates on Twitter as well as on newspaper websites. A thick bunch of newspapers would be delivered every morning, along with several magazines, and I had to plod through them. I loved Friday Times and some of the magazines, but Sundays were particularly daunting with fat glamour supplements full of women wearing outrageous clothes—each one worse than the other. Off-the-shoulder, diaphanous, ethereal and utterly unwearable. There would be pages of glazed-over socialites posing for pictures at some party or the other. Even the covers would be ultra-glamorous, with heavily made-up, racoon-eyed women dressed in bizarre costumes, provoking me into giggling fits in the morning. I wish I had kept some of these glossies, they were as unreal as the capital.
Thankfully, I was spared spooks outside my house and for three months no one followed me, or so I thought. We had to wait a week for our goods coming from Mumbai and I had to go to the customs office at the airport. The official had to okay the consignment and he wanted to ‘see my face’. Soon the house was a sea of cardboard cartons, and while my husband and Sajida helped, every evening I would have to unpack my own things and keep them in order. There was plenty of room, though things tend to expand with the available space and soon all the wardrobes and kitchen shelves were full. Even my silver and junk jewellery which I had packed arrived intact. Not so while returning when I hastily put everything into the cartons, and then found out some valuables were missing, including a thick silver necklace and a lovely silver-and-marcasite butterfly-shaped ring. A friend and I had gone to shop and when I saw the ring, I liked it so much, but didn’t have enough money. The salesman from Swat said I could take it and give the money later. He said he couldn’t guarantee it would remain if I left it at the shop. I was so happy; I took it and gave him the money after a few days. But I seem to have no luck with jewellery. I had dropped a gold ring in a taxi in Islamabad one day, but managed to get it back.
It was the winter that I was dreading, coming from a city which was once a cluster of islands in the sea. I had to buy a fat duvet which I later used in Delhi where it was also a boon. There were a bunch of heaters in the basement which I had to get inspected and okayed for use. They were all gas heaters and would warm the large rooms in minutes. I was petrified of using gas as I had read horror stories of people sleeping with closed windows and dying of the fumes. I never left the heater on at night and once when the bedroom was being warmed, something happened and there was a fire; luckily, I saw it in time and managed to douse it, but the walls were blackened and the smell of smoke stayed in the house for days. The cold marble floors were freezing and getting from one room to the other was a challenge. I had to install a small heater for Sajida in the kitchen, since it was too cold to work there otherwise.
Permit versus bank account
The other joke about Islamabad is that it is not really a part of Pakistan, and one of my friends explained that it was an unreal façade to the country. One email from Karachi in response to my farewell article said Islamabad was considered to be fifteen kilometres away from the country! It’s a place where getting a liquor permit is easier than opening a bank account if you are a non-Muslim that is, and the services sector can sometimes shock you with its courtesy and efficiency. They replaced a wireless router on a Sunday without complaining and repaired my phone for free. Contrary to popular belief, Fridays were only a half-day holiday, or with time off for prayers at 1 p.m.; the official weekly holiday was Sunday (though shops or tradespeople sometimes closed on Fridays and worked Sundays). The Indian and Pakistani business communities have been asking for banking norms to be eased, and while that is taking time, it was a revelation for me that the liquor permit which I decided to get as a test, was a cinch. The irony was not lost on a Pakistani minister who has been campaigning for MFN (most favoured nation) status to be fully realized with India and has been working to improve banking norms. When I told him the permit was so easy, he joked that this must be headline news! The excise department office was near my house and all one had to do was fill out a form. I was asked to return with my passport in three days and was handed the licence for six units of alcohol per month for six months after which it had to be renewed. It was that simple, no questions asked, and the officer only looked up once to check me out before signing the sheet of paper. If he was surprised I was a woman, he didn’t show it. There were two or three five-star hotels which sold Murree products, the only legally available liquor, but it was the best really in terms of beer. There was every vodka flavour imaginable and even whisky. Sadly, Irish cream had stopped being manufactured as it didn’t have many takers in a country where hard liquor was the norm. I had to regretfully leave behind several cases of beer. Most days, there were no stocks of beer and the black market thrived. Bootleggers would deliver the required brands at your doorstep for a price, though I didn’t need to use them. Funnily I found that Pakistanis favoured imported beer like Carlsberg or Heineken when their own country made such excellent stuff.
Prohibition and calling liquor ‘haram’ had not reduced its popularity and the well-concealed shop would be thronging with men, many waiting outside for the rush to clear. The entrance is innocuously located next to a laundry at the back of the hotel, where the burly security guards would leer at me because they knew where I was going. One of them asked for money but I pretended not to understand. The salesmen were very nice; I only saw one other woman once, and she was white; otherwise, the boxy room was always full of policemen, security guards or bootleggers.
Opening a bank account, on the other hand, took over a month and I almost ran out of money. No bank was willing to let an Indian open an account. One foreign bank openly said that there was no question of letting an Indian journalist open an account. The only place we (Snehesh and I) managed to open one was where a guy sweet-talked us into opening the account without telling us we could withdraw money only in Pakistani rupees. We really fell for his oily charm and talk of Bollywood. So my salary had to be sent back and the account closed till finally we asked the Indian high commission to intervene so that we could open an account in the ‘diplomatic enclave’ and operate it outside since entering the enclave entailed security clearance two hours in advance. Finally, after a month of dithering, my bank account was opened, and there was a branch near my house. The staff couldn’t have been nicer!
Unreal city—power issues
It was the low, thundering sound that puzzled me at first. There was an inverter in the house, so I didn’t realize that power cuts were as often as every alternate hour when I got there in August 2013. The rumbling came on often and I connected the two—it was the powerful diesel generators kicking off in the bungalows with several rooms, each with their obligatory air conditioners. It is not uncommon to have a large drawing room with three or more ACs. Everything seemed large and lavish in Islamabad, an unreal city with its massive houses and exaggerated emphasis on lawns and gardens. The regular power failures were at least real.
Not many had inverters even though diesel generators were prohibitive. I was told it could cost PKR 6000 a day for an average house. While I didn’t notice any neighbours on one side, there were a few men who lived in a large house and they spoke noisily all the time. When there was power, I could hear the sound of multiple ACs, and I wondered about the point of keeping them all going in an empty house. I did have som
e conspiracy theories! My friends back home couldn’t believe there was such an acute power shortage. I also learnt that the Tatas were once keen on building a power plant near the border and supplying electricity, but the army vetoed it.
Outside the soft, grassy lawns of a big hotel, I saw women and children picking up twigs and bundling them up. They were from a nearby village. It is not uncommon in Islamabad to see people carrying bundles of wood or twigs on their heads or men breaking branches in the leafy parks for the much-needed fuel supplies. The long, snaking queues of vehicles would choke traffic and the wait for that elusive CNG could be endless and frustrating. Gas powers both cooking and vehicles, and there is an acute shortage. The last sixty-five years of the country’s history only totted up a capacity of 17,000 MW. With stagnant power generation for nearly a decade and excessive reliance on independent power producers, Pakistan, according to the National Power Policy 2013, faced a yawning supply–demand gap of up to 4500–5500 MW. In summer, load-shedding could cross twelve hours across the country, and while the rich have inverters or diesel generators, the poor shivered through the harsh winter by wood fires. Acute gas shortages meant that gas would only be available for cooking and not heating in the freezing winter. That year in 2013, for three months there was no gas for CNG vehicles. In June 2016, the country had achieved a record 17,350 MW of power generation but that didn’t curb power cuts.
After the new Nawaz Sharif government took over in 2013, it placed increasing power generation on an equal footing with combating terrorism. The country’s fuel-import bill in 2013 was hovering at $15 billion per annum. The policy said that the inefficiencies were costing the taxpayers additional PKR 2.70 per unit over and above the cost of generation at PKR 12, and the water and power ministry had estimated the true cost of delivering a unit of electricity to the end consumer at greater than PKR 15.60. The Economic Survey of Pakistan said that in 2011–12 about $4.8 billion or 2 per cent of the GDP was lost due to power sector outages. The textile industry had taken a beating and some of the factories moved out.
One of the big questions then was the completion of the Iran–Pakistan pipeline, and Iran was dead set on fining Pakistan for not completing its share of the pipeline. I wrote about an SDPI report,5 which said that the gas purchase agreement and pricing should be renegotiated or else the project could be a death sentence for the country’s economy. The report said the price of the gas under the Iran–Pakistan pipeline project is linked to crude oil prices, and it was unfortunate that the country blatantly ignored the energy dynamics and its pricing while going for this deal. The SDPI report started a debate about gas pricing and whether the pipeline was at all feasible. I interviewed Petroleum Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi who said that till the US sanctions on Iran were lifted, it would be financially difficult to build Pakistan’s share of the pipeline. I did a few stories on the pipeline which was of great importance and there was also talk of sourcing gas from India. While Pakistani officials did go for meetings in India, the gas price was still too high. The Iran pipeline has hope now after the US sanctions have been lifted, and China has offered to build the Pakistan section of the pipeline, originally called the ‘peace pipeline’ since India was a part of it.
Apart from making stopgap payments to tide over circular debt, the government did embark on a much-needed capacity expansion programme. The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN) is working on a twenty-five-year energy plan to add 21,000 MW electricity to the national grid in the next eight years. Like India, Pakistan has turned to nuclear energy, and its Nuclear Energy Vision 2050 envisages nuclear power generation of about 40,000 MW by the year 2050. It was during an earlier tenure of Sharif that the contract for Pakistan’s first nuclear power plant at Chashma—of Chinese origin—was signed. Two huge nuclear power plants were coming up in Karachi, but as one journalist I spoke to said, the people in that violent city had more worrying things on their mind.
Different strokes
After the teeming streets of Mumbai, to walk on real pavements without trampling someone or stepping over vendors was a joy, much as I support the hawkers. That was the other thing about the city—it was so planned that you couldn’t just stop anywhere and buy things from random roadside shops like I was used to in Mumbai. Everything had its own place. Dedicated fitness freaks preferred the open spaces, including a large, round cricket ground for their walks against the scenic backdrop of the Margalla Hills. Driving past it one day, a puzzled Aurangzeb asked me why people went round and round the same place, and we laughed a lot over that. The Fatima Jinnah park in sector F-9 was a large, rambling place to walk, and in the evening people sometimes drove cars or bikes around which was unfortunate. Still it was lovely with four tall imposing gated entrances, plenty of trees and shrubs and careful landscaping.
The city had a quiet air about it; though its markets were full of people, sometimes there were very few women around in the not-so posh places. The air was crisp and unpolluted, except for some dust storms, and the traffic was usually smooth. You got to most places within fifteen minutes or so and that took a while for me to get used to. There was no need to leave hours in advance, and the airport was one of the farthest places, Chaklala air base, a forty-minute drive from the city at the most.
What was different from my own country was the attire of the men. Most of them wore the loose salwar kameez, popularized by Bhutto who wore it to proclaim his identity with the working class, and later by General Zia-ul-Haq in his Islamization drive, and that set them apart from Indians. There weren’t too many women in saris either, and long, flowing kurtas with cigarette pants or the loose palazzos as they are called, were the style statement of that time. Few women wore the burqa; they just covered their heads with a dupatta or shawl. Once I was surprised to see posters put up all over the city: ‘A woman modestly dressed is like a pearl in its shell, I love Hijab.’ I couldn’t see who had put them up from the car.
Many things seemed different. When we wanted to make a spare set of keys for the house, Venkat went to get one made from a key maker near the petrol pump close by. He asked for the address and also a copy of Venkat’s passport. In India you could so easily get a duplicate set made without all this fuss! Another time he went to a hardware shop to buy hammers and screws, and he refused to accept a plastic bag since he had, as we usually do, taken a cloth bag. The shopkeeper said you can’t be from here since people ask for a plastic bag even if they want to buy a tiny screw. Venkat said he was from India and the shopkeeper said no wonder!
Islamabad was a sea change from Karachi and Hyderabad, the two cities I visited in 2011 (as part of an exchange programme between the Mumbai and Karachi Press Clubs). Friends from Karachi called the capital a cold and soulless city. What was striking and quite different were the paintings on trucks, which is now a popular art form in Pakistan. On the drive to Hyderabad, truck drivers were happy to pose for pictures in front of their large and brilliantly coloured vehicles festooned with black balls of wool to keep off the nazar (bad eye). My particular favourite is a large pheasant-like bird, probably a monal, in pastel hues (the book cover photo). In Islamabad I met this lovely artist from Lahore who made expensive but exquisite truck art on metal. But the flashy colours are best seen on enamel which is available everywhere. At Lok Virsa (on the outskirts of Islamabad), I found the garish truck art painted on to everything that can be imagined—lanterns, kettles, plates, mugs—only that you couldn’t let water touch it, said the old man from Rawalpindi who was selling them.
After the sedate pace of life in Islamabad, its wide streets and lush gardens ringed by the Margalla Hills, I realized what set Karachi apart is perhaps its sense of uncertainty and bustle, its all-night eating joints, a vibrant art scene, and a liberal press and student community. Coming from Mumbai, a city with a high rate of crime and criminal gangs, I was horrified at the daylight robberies and killings, and I was told even the rich who clustered together in Clifton or Defence Colony areas, own cheap mobiles. People are robbed a
t gunpoint, and if your car is held up, it makes sense to give up the keys and walk away. Suicide bombers targeted the shrine of Abdullah Shah Ghazi, the patron saint of Karachi, while we were there—the police chased them to an open piece of land near a popular seaside restaurant where they blew themselves up. We had eaten at that very restaurant the night before! I read that the shrine was now being walled off and pushed to obscurity for some exclusive modern complex which was being built for Karachi’s elite.
Karachi was not a safe city and we were advised not to travel alone or carry expensive mobiles or money, and the only time we escaped vigilance was when we went off on our own to buy some books and shop around. We stayed at PILER, the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (on the outskirts of Karachi in the sleepy locality of Gulshan-e-Maymar). The organization is led by the left-wing Karamat Ali and the redoubtable B.M. Kutty, a fellow Malayali, who migrated to Pakistan. My early morning walk became a security problem, with friend and journalist Jatin Desai who was chaperoning us and a policeman riding up beside me on a bike as I was chatting with a young boy on his way to work in a bakery. I was given a stern warning never to walk alone again. The stout policeman with a bushy moustache said he had to keep an eye on me and so I could only walk within fifty feet of his sight. He clearly disapproved of women walking.
