LIFE
1
Once Upon a Life
IN DECEMBER 1980, at the age of nine, I moved back to Pakistan for the first time.
We touched down at Lahore, in those less security-conscious days when it was still a place where families strolled to the tarmac to greet deplaning passengers. Ronald Reagan had just beaten Jimmy Carter in the election for president of the United States, the Soviet Union was about to mark the first anniversary of its invasion of Afghanistan, racoon-eyed General Zia-ul-Haq was ensconced in Islamabad as Pakistan’s dictator, and I’d lost my Urdu.
It’s a funny thing to lose your first language. I was an early talker, chirping along in full sentences and paragraphs well before I turned two, and I have a scar to prove it. In the summer of 1973, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was campaigning to become prime minister of Pakistan, and I picked up the habit of climbing onto the dining table and holding forth in the manner of the speeches I’d heard him make on PTV: “When I become prime minister…”
One day someone tried to get hold of me and lower me to the ground. I made a run for it, dashed into thin air, fell, split open my head, and wound up with blood in my eye and stitches across my brow. (Z. A. Bhutto’s fate would, sadly, be similar.)
The following year I left Lahore, winging via Hong Kong and over the Pacific to San Francisco with my parents. In California we moved into one of many identical graduate student town houses on the Stanford University campus. Bands of kids ran around and chased butterflies and dashed through the tish-tish-tishing rotating water sprinklers, all barefoot, unsupervised. I slipped out to join them.
My mother heard crying and went to investigate. She saw me in tears at the door next to ours, gazing up at a perplexed neighbor, surrounded by jeering children. My mother took my hand and led me back home.
“Is he retarded?” one of my new playmates asked her.
“No,” she answered.
“Then why can’t he talk properly?”
“He can. He just doesn’t know English.”
After that I didn’t speak for a month. My parents worried, but they decided I probably just needed time to adjust. So they let me sit in front of our TV, do my drawings, and build precariously tall towers with my wooden blocks. And when I next spoke, much to their surprise, it was in English, in complete sentences, and with an American accent.
Over the next six years I didn’t speak a word of Urdu. I made friends, went for sleepovers, brought home tadpoles and frogs in jam jars, ran like the wind, played soccer, crashed out on unused beds at grad student parties, camped in tents in national parks, asked what that funny smell was at a spliff-heavy open-air Bob Marley concert, swam in the frigid Pacific, dressed in moccasins and beaded vests, and wrote my first stories — intergalactic space operas inspired by a slew of sci-fi movies and TV shows of the time: Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, Space Ghost, Star Blazers, Battle of the Planets.
Meanwhile, my dad did his PhD, my mom worked in the accounting department of an early Silicon Valley electronics firm, my little sister was born, and our battered second-hand Datsun clocked tens of thousands of miles.
I’d been so fluent in Urdu, and such a talker, that my parents never realized just how completely I’d forgotten the language until we arrived back in Pakistan.
I was thrown into a strange new (old) world of extended families, aunts and uncles, two dozen cousins, cricket, odd-tasting bread, still-odder-tasting milk, only one television channel — and even that on for only part of the day — and an almost complete absence of familiar consumer brands. Here in Lahore there were no Frosted Flakes, Twinkies, Nestlé Quik, Trapper Keepers, Nerf balls, Bactine, no No More Tears shampoo.
On my first day in Pakistan, I asked a cousin, “Are these people slaves?”
“No,” he explained. “They’re servants.”
I kept wanting to write to my friends in California but never managed to. What would I even say? Months passed and then it seemed too late. One night I looked up at the stars and thought these were the same stars people over there looked up at, and I cried. It was the only time. Pretty melodramatic stuff. But it passed.
Or maybe it didn’t, but it did subside. Besides, I made new friends, learned new sports, biked around town, found a place that sold model airplane kits, another that sold aquariums and tropical fish, and understood — after the first few bruises — that my cousins were actually like brothers and sisters, a classroom-sized clan always ready to chat and play and come unquestioningly to my defense against the outside world.
I liked my new existence, but I’d liked my old one, too, and I imagined places where the two could come together. I was a map buff, and for my tenth birthday my parents bought me an exquisite atlas. Pencil in hand, I would create new countries: nonexistent Pacific islands with snow-topped volcanoes and tightly packed contour lines, the French department of Alpes-Maritimes as an independent republic (I admired its shape), the Kathiawar peninsula separated from the mainland by a deep canal, a confederacy of midsized city-states scattered across a variety of continents.
I would write the almanac entries for these places, their histories and natural resources and climates and militaries and flora and fauna. And, importantly, their demographics: always mixed, with no clear majority, and significant immigrant groups of Lahori and San Franciscan descent.
This was the creative writing initially inspired by my return to Pakistan. (There was also some poetry, modeled on verses in Tolkien and in Bulfinch’s Mythology. “Do you know what a virgin actually is?” my dad asked me upon reading it. “Like a maiden?” I ventured.)
Most of my family and classmates in Lahore spoke English, so I didn’t need to fall silent this time. I just started picking up Urdu on the go. Eventually I could tell a joke and sing a song in it, flirt and fight, read a story and take an exam. I could speak it without a foreign accent. But my first language would be a second language for me from then on.
English fractured for me, too, coming in distinct Californian and Pakistani varieties. (Later, in adulthood, Mid-Atlantic and British English would be added to my mix.)
Sometimes, as a nine-year-old twice transported, the words I heard moved me in unexpected ways, like impressions of half-forgotten sunny afternoons, less than memories and therefore impossible to share.
I wonder now if that is partly why I write, to try.
(2011)
Art and the Other Pakistans
(The Ones That Don’t Make the Headlines)
LOOKING BACK, it’s obvious to me now that the Pakistan of my teens was bursting with art. I had a burly cousin who used to play (incongruously) with inks and watercolors in the afternoons when he got home from school. I had an aunt who was in the habit of telling over and over again the story of her random encounter with the famous artist Sadequain, an encounter that resulted in him executing what was surely his version of an autograph: a quick drawing depicting my aunt as a Nefertiti-necked goddess holding a flower above a line of calligraphy. I had seen the legendary painter Chughtai’s long-eyed ladies smiling out from drawing room walls, offering half-lidded innuendoes to easily flustered young men like me. And I had in the backdrop of my youth the Lahore Museum, the marvelous old city, the trucks and cinema billboards covered in bold, pelvis-thrusting iconography.
But at the time, art felt to me like something that belonged either to the past or to other places, because my teens were in the 1980s, and Pakistan in the 1980s had the misfortune of being governed by a mustachioed dictator with dark bags under his eyes and a fondness for dystopian social reengineering. General Zia-ul-Haq claimed to be acting in the name of Islam, and even though the history of Islam in our part of the world stretched back over a thousand years, we were told that our Islam wasn’t Islamic enough, indeed that we Muslims weren’t Muslim enough, and that he would make of our Pakistan the “land of the pure” that its name suggested — or ruin us all trying.
Under Zia, flogging, amputation, and stoning to death became statutory punishments. Acts disrespectful to symbols of Islam were criminalized. Public performances of dance by women were banned. News in Arabic, the language of the Koran but spoken by virtually no one in Pakistan, was given a prime-time slot on television. Thugs belonging to the student wings of religious parties seized control of many college campuses. Heroin and assault rifles flooded the streets, “blowback” from Pakistan’s alliance with the United States against the Soviets in Afghanistan. My parents reminisced about how much more liberal Lahore had been in their youth.
When General Zia was blown to bits shortly after my seventeenth birthday in 1988, he wasn’t mourned, at least not by anyone I knew. I left for college in the United States a year later. There I met people who were studying photography and sculpture, and I myself enrolled in classes on creative writing. Without thinking about it, I supposed an education in these “artistic” pursuits was something in which only affluent societies in the West could afford to invest, or, rather, that only the twin luxuries of material success and tolerance of free expression could provide the sort of soil in which an artistic education could thrive.
I was, of course, completely wrong. When I returned to Pakistan in 1993, I was working on what would become my first novel. I thought of writing as a transgressive act. I wrote at night, often from midnight to dawn, and in between writing sessions I would escape into the darkness with my friends. We drove around town in old Japanese cars, hung out on our rooftops, and searched for places beyond the reach of societal control or parental observation. Cheap local booze and even cheaper slabs of hash were the intoxicants of choice in that young urban scene, and avoiding the predations of the bribe-taking police was an alarming and amusing preoccupation.
Increasingly I found my wanderings taking me into the world of the National College of Arts. A couple of my friends were enrolled there, one studying architecture, another graphic design. Others were dating students: painters, printmakers. It was unlike anything I had ever seen. Students of all social classes, and from all parts of Pakistan, attended NCA. The place was a microcosm of Pakistan, but of a creative Pakistan, an alternative to the desiccated Pakistan General Zia had tried to ram down our throats. Here people who prayed five times a day and people who escaped from their hostels late at night to disappear on sexual adventures in the city could coexist. In the studios I saw calligraphy and nudes, work by students with purely formal concerns, and by others for whom art overlapped with politics. I was inspired. I wrote like crazy. I made friends I have kept for life.
Love comes to mind when I think of that time. There was a lot of it going on among the people I hung out with. But I was also falling in love with Pakistan. I have always had a stubborn affection for the land of my birth. When I went abroad for college, I thought I knew it pretty well. But it was my encounters with the denizens of the NCA universe after my return that reminded me that Pakistan is too vast a country to be known, that it is full of surprises, of kinks and twists, of unexpected titillations and empathic connections, of a diversity that can only be described as human. It was exciting and vital and real.
Or rather, they were exciting and vital and real — for my Pakistan had become plural. The art, and artists, I found at NCA ushered me into many more Pakistans: the nascent underground music scenes, the emerging film and television scenes, the scenes of writers like myself, and of course the scenes of other art and other artists, not just in Lahore but in Karachi and Islamabad and elsewhere, and not just in 1993 but in the rest of the nineties, the noughties, and now.
Just a few months ago I was in Amsterdam with two old friends from the Lahore art world. On a warm summer night we checked out some galleries and walked along the canals, whirring bicycles and shrooming teenagers passing us in the darkness. Nothing could have been more different from where we had all been fifteen years earlier. And nothing could have been more similar, either.
(2009)
When Updike Saved Me from Morrison (and Myself)
ONE DAY IN the spring of 1993, Toni Morrison took me out for lunch. It was my last semester at Princeton, and I was in her long-fiction creative writing workshop. I’d done two semesters of short story work with Joyce Carol Oates, and I hoped to be a novelist. So I was writing fast. I think we had to produce thirty or forty or fifty pages for Toni. I’d hit a hundred and was still going.
We sat and chatted and ate (what, I don’t remember, but it included fries). I told her I’d got into law school. I told her I was planning to take time off first, to head back to Pakistan and write. I told her I’d been cooking for myself that year. I told her I made a mean pasta and she ought to give it a try. Really? she said. Yeah, I said. I invited her down to the basement kitchen of Edwards Hall and told her she wouldn’t be disappointed.
To my surprise, she said she’d come. It better not be overboiled spaghetti in some sauce out of a can, she warned me. I smiled. Confident. As we left the restaurant she noticed a paperback hidden between notebooks and printouts in my hands. She asked me what it was. I told her it was Jazz. She asked if it was the first of hers I’d picked up. I confessed it was. She signed it for me. Then she said, Read Beloved, it’s good.
I still remember how she said it: good. Drawn-out. Beautiful and powerful, the way words she spoke often were. When she read our stuff out loud to us in class, it sounded like literature. So I picked up Beloved next. And she was right. It was good.
I thought I was pretty good myself back then. I thought the novel I was writing was good. I thought my cooking was good. I was twenty-one years old and didn’t know better, thank goodness. And luckily for me, Toni never showed up for that pasta.
Instead, I got a message on my answering machine from her assistant. Toni couldn’t make it that day, sadly. John Updike (I think it was Updike) had come to campus. I hadn’t yet read Updike but the name sounded familiar. I called back and said no problem.
It wasn’t until later that it occurred to me my cooking might not have been quite as good as I thought it was. My pasta was indeed spaghetti. It was probably overboiled. And while the sauce didn’t come out of a can, it did come out of a bottle. All I really did was add some hot chilis to it. And maybe a couple of other spices. But maybe not.
Why I was so proud of it, I can’t for the life of me recall.
As for the novel I was writing, I finished a draft for her class. Toni liked it enough to ask me to read from it at the annual end-of-year creative writing event. I still have a manuscript with several pages of her exquisitely fountain-penned suggestions on the reverse. I figured I was almost done.
It wasn’t ready for publication for another seven years.
(2009)
In Concert, No Touching
IT WAS WHEN I returned to Pakistan soon after college that a woman introduced me to the pleasures of sweat.
The scene was a religiously inspired, eternally ongoing Sufi dance/trance event. For the uninitiated reader, I would liken this to an open-air rave, but with free admission, and music generated solely by hand drums and bells on the anklets of long-haired male dancers, some of whom were in drag.
As with any rave, the audience included the sick in search of healing, couples desperate for fertility and not a few pot smokers puffing on joints that flavored the air like wands of tuberose.
I had come at ten-thirty because this was when Papu Sain unleashed the kinds of rhythms many believed could take you closer to God.
I was in need of sensual indulgence. At home, a combination of tradition, respect, and the unpopularity of contraceptives meant that any young man returning from college abroad might find himself self-reliant in the act of love to a degree unknown since his dimly recollected boys’ school past.
In my case it would be more honest to blame shyness and bumbling ineptitude. But whatever the cause, I found female companionship limited in those days to my family and the girlfriends of my more fortunate friends. This lack in my life was compounded by a general concealment of the female form itself, Lahore lagging behind New Jersey in the display of skin. Satellite television and imported magazines, with images of women for the most part physically rather unlike those around me, created an ache with no obvious cure in the region.
So I adapted. I developed a taste for subtlety, for the micro-ripples that are the tsunamis of a reduced-stimulus environment.
I learned to appreciate a smile, a brush of the hand. I studied eyes. I chose my words carefully and savored those I was given.
And it was with this, the heightened sensitivity born of necessity, that I found myself standing at Baba Shah Jamal only three feet from a woman my age. Her veil covered her throat and the rear hemisphere of her head like a motorcycle helmet with the visor up. Her clothing was as loose as love, enough to make a full body slim and a slender one curve. It swelled at her chest and hips.
I watched her pick her nose delicately with her thumb. She noticed my gaze, and we both turned to look ahead with the self-conscious expression of people whose attention is centered in their peripheral vision.
It was hot.
And together, we sweated.
I felt myself shiver as my pores opened, gaping fish mouths on a desert beach. Warmth issued from my body. Perspiration gathered in the close-cropped hair at the bottom of my scalp.
The unexpected fingernail of a trickle followed my spine, and my guts tightened, a quick exhalation at the shock. Her face had begun to shine. She wiped her mouth with her wrist. I felt another caress along my ribs, touching the damp flesh of my flank. My thoughts expanded into the air and condensed on her skin. A slow lick descended from my armpit.
Together, we surrendered to it, the wet stroking of our bodies building as we stood quietly apart. Beneath us men whirled in ecstasy. Shutting her eyes and looking up, she displayed the underside of her jaw in a mating dance as old as time, a peahen glancing coyly at the hip-flashing merengue of a peacock.
Thick drops slid down my belly like errant salmon roe.
I risked a smile at her with my eyes fixed on the scene below. A sly glance only half blocked by my nose revealed the side of her mouth responding, stretching out toward me in langorous recline.
There is a simple code about these things: your intentions must be honorable. To go any further, you should have love on your mind. We didn’t, so we didn’t.
But we sweated, and when she left without a word, I was not ungrateful.
(2001)
Once Upon a Life
IN DECEMBER 1980, at the age of nine, I moved back to Pakistan for the first time.
We touched down at Lahore, in those less security-conscious days when it was still a place where families strolled to the tarmac to greet deplaning passengers. Ronald Reagan had just beaten Jimmy Carter in the election for president of the United States, the Soviet Union was about to mark the first anniversary of its invasion of Afghanistan, racoon-eyed General Zia-ul-Haq was ensconced in Islamabad as Pakistan’s dictator, and I’d lost my Urdu.
It’s a funny thing to lose your first language. I was an early talker, chirping along in full sentences and paragraphs well before I turned two, and I have a scar to prove it. In the summer of 1973, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was campaigning to become prime minister of Pakistan, and I picked up the habit of climbing onto the dining table and holding forth in the manner of the speeches I’d heard him make on PTV: “When I become prime minister…”
One day someone tried to get hold of me and lower me to the ground. I made a run for it, dashed into thin air, fell, split open my head, and wound up with blood in my eye and stitches across my brow. (Z. A. Bhutto’s fate would, sadly, be similar.)
The following year I left Lahore, winging via Hong Kong and over the Pacific to San Francisco with my parents. In California we moved into one of many identical graduate student town houses on the Stanford University campus. Bands of kids ran around and chased butterflies and dashed through the tish-tish-tishing rotating water sprinklers, all barefoot, unsupervised. I slipped out to join them.
My mother heard crying and went to investigate. She saw me in tears at the door next to ours, gazing up at a perplexed neighbor, surrounded by jeering children. My mother took my hand and led me back home.
“Is he retarded?” one of my new playmates asked her.
“No,” she answered.
“Then why can’t he talk properly?”
“He can. He just doesn’t know English.”
After that I didn’t speak for a month. My parents worried, but they decided I probably just needed time to adjust. So they let me sit in front of our TV, do my drawings, and build precariously tall towers with my wooden blocks. And when I next spoke, much to their surprise, it was in English, in complete sentences, and with an American accent.
Over the next six years I didn’t speak a word of Urdu. I made friends, went for sleepovers, brought home tadpoles and frogs in jam jars, ran like the wind, played soccer, crashed out on unused beds at grad student parties, camped in tents in national parks, asked what that funny smell was at a spliff-heavy open-air Bob Marley concert, swam in the frigid Pacific, dressed in moccasins and beaded vests, and wrote my first stories — intergalactic space operas inspired by a slew of sci-fi movies and TV shows of the time: Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, Space Ghost, Star Blazers, Battle of the Planets.
Meanwhile, my dad did his PhD, my mom worked in the accounting department of an early Silicon Valley electronics firm, my little sister was born, and our battered second-hand Datsun clocked tens of thousands of miles.
I’d been so fluent in Urdu, and such a talker, that my parents never realized just how completely I’d forgotten the language until we arrived back in Pakistan.
I was thrown into a strange new (old) world of extended families, aunts and uncles, two dozen cousins, cricket, odd-tasting bread, still-odder-tasting milk, only one television channel — and even that on for only part of the day — and an almost complete absence of familiar consumer brands. Here in Lahore there were no Frosted Flakes, Twinkies, Nestlé Quik, Trapper Keepers, Nerf balls, Bactine, no No More Tears shampoo.
On my first day in Pakistan, I asked a cousin, “Are these people slaves?”
“No,” he explained. “They’re servants.”
I kept wanting to write to my friends in California but never managed to. What would I even say? Months passed and then it seemed too late. One night I looked up at the stars and thought these were the same stars people over there looked up at, and I cried. It was the only time. Pretty melodramatic stuff. But it passed.
Or maybe it didn’t, but it did subside. Besides, I made new friends, learned new sports, biked around town, found a place that sold model airplane kits, another that sold aquariums and tropical fish, and understood — after the first few bruises — that my cousins were actually like brothers and sisters, a classroom-sized clan always ready to chat and play and come unquestioningly to my defense against the outside world.
I liked my new existence, but I’d liked my old one, too, and I imagined places where the two could come together. I was a map buff, and for my tenth birthday my parents bought me an exquisite atlas. Pencil in hand, I would create new countries: nonexistent Pacific islands with snow-topped volcanoes and tightly packed contour lines, the French department of Alpes-Maritimes as an independent republic (I admired its shape), the Kathiawar peninsula separated from the mainland by a deep canal, a confederacy of midsized city-states scattered across a variety of continents.
I would write the almanac entries for these places, their histories and natural resources and climates and militaries and flora and fauna. And, importantly, their demographics: always mixed, with no clear majority, and significant immigrant groups of Lahori and San Franciscan descent.
This was the creative writing initially inspired by my return to Pakistan. (There was also some poetry, modeled on verses in Tolkien and in Bulfinch’s Mythology. “Do you know what a virgin actually is?” my dad asked me upon reading it. “Like a maiden?” I ventured.)
Most of my family and classmates in Lahore spoke English, so I didn’t need to fall silent this time. I just started picking up Urdu on the go. Eventually I could tell a joke and sing a song in it, flirt and fight, read a story and take an exam. I could speak it without a foreign accent. But my first language would be a second language for me from then on.
English fractured for me, too, coming in distinct Californian and Pakistani varieties. (Later, in adulthood, Mid-Atlantic and British English would be added to my mix.)
Sometimes, as a nine-year-old twice transported, the words I heard moved me in unexpected ways, like impressions of half-forgotten sunny afternoons, less than memories and therefore impossible to share.
I wonder now if that is partly why I write, to try.
(2011)
Art and the Other Pakistans
(The Ones That Don’t Make the Headlines)
LOOKING BACK, it’s obvious to me now that the Pakistan of my teens was bursting with art. I had a burly cousin who used to play (incongruously) with inks and watercolors in the afternoons when he got home from school. I had an aunt who was in the habit of telling over and over again the story of her random encounter with the famous artist Sadequain, an encounter that resulted in him executing what was surely his version of an autograph: a quick drawing depicting my aunt as a Nefertiti-necked goddess holding a flower above a line of calligraphy. I had seen the legendary painter Chughtai’s long-eyed ladies smiling out from drawing room walls, offering half-lidded innuendoes to easily flustered young men like me. And I had in the backdrop of my youth the Lahore Museum, the marvelous old city, the trucks and cinema billboards covered in bold, pelvis-thrusting iconography.
But at the time, art felt to me like something that belonged either to the past or to other places, because my teens were in the 1980s, and Pakistan in the 1980s had the misfortune of being governed by a mustachioed dictator with dark bags under his eyes and a fondness for dystopian social reengineering. General Zia-ul-Haq claimed to be acting in the name of Islam, and even though the history of Islam in our part of the world stretched back over a thousand years, we were told that our Islam wasn’t Islamic enough, indeed that we Muslims weren’t Muslim enough, and that he would make of our Pakistan the “land of the pure” that its name suggested — or ruin us all trying.
Under Zia, flogging, amputation, and stoning to death became statutory punishments. Acts disrespectful to symbols of Islam were criminalized. Public performances of dance by women were banned. News in Arabic, the language of the Koran but spoken by virtually no one in Pakistan, was given a prime-time slot on television. Thugs belonging to the student wings of religious parties seized control of many college campuses. Heroin and assault rifles flooded the streets, “blowback” from Pakistan’s alliance with the United States against the Soviets in Afghanistan. My parents reminisced about how much more liberal Lahore had been in their youth.
When General Zia was blown to bits shortly after my seventeenth birthday in 1988, he wasn’t mourned, at least not by anyone I knew. I left for college in the United States a year later. There I met people who were studying photography and sculpture, and I myself enrolled in classes on creative writing. Without thinking about it, I supposed an education in these “artistic” pursuits was something in which only affluent societies in the West could afford to invest, or, rather, that only the twin luxuries of material success and tolerance of free expression could provide the sort of soil in which an artistic education could thrive.
I was, of course, completely wrong. When I returned to Pakistan in 1993, I was working on what would become my first novel. I thought of writing as a transgressive act. I wrote at night, often from midnight to dawn, and in between writing sessions I would escape into the darkness with my friends. We drove around town in old Japanese cars, hung out on our rooftops, and searched for places beyond the reach of societal control or parental observation. Cheap local booze and even cheaper slabs of hash were the intoxicants of choice in that young urban scene, and avoiding the predations of the bribe-taking police was an alarming and amusing preoccupation.
Increasingly I found my wanderings taking me into the world of the National College of Arts. A couple of my friends were enrolled there, one studying architecture, another graphic design. Others were dating students: painters, printmakers. It was unlike anything I had ever seen. Students of all social classes, and from all parts of Pakistan, attended NCA. The place was a microcosm of Pakistan, but of a creative Pakistan, an alternative to the desiccated Pakistan General Zia had tried to ram down our throats. Here people who prayed five times a day and people who escaped from their hostels late at night to disappear on sexual adventures in the city could coexist. In the studios I saw calligraphy and nudes, work by students with purely formal concerns, and by others for whom art overlapped with politics. I was inspired. I wrote like crazy. I made friends I have kept for life.
Love comes to mind when I think of that time. There was a lot of it going on among the people I hung out with. But I was also falling in love with Pakistan. I have always had a stubborn affection for the land of my birth. When I went abroad for college, I thought I knew it pretty well. But it was my encounters with the denizens of the NCA universe after my return that reminded me that Pakistan is too vast a country to be known, that it is full of surprises, of kinks and twists, of unexpected titillations and empathic connections, of a diversity that can only be described as human. It was exciting and vital and real.
Or rather, they were exciting and vital and real — for my Pakistan had become plural. The art, and artists, I found at NCA ushered me into many more Pakistans: the nascent underground music scenes, the emerging film and television scenes, the scenes of writers like myself, and of course the scenes of other art and other artists, not just in Lahore but in Karachi and Islamabad and elsewhere, and not just in 1993 but in the rest of the nineties, the noughties, and now.
Just a few months ago I was in Amsterdam with two old friends from the Lahore art world. On a warm summer night we checked out some galleries and walked along the canals, whirring bicycles and shrooming teenagers passing us in the darkness. Nothing could have been more different from where we had all been fifteen years earlier. And nothing could have been more similar, either.
(2009)
When Updike Saved Me from Morrison (and Myself)
ONE DAY IN the spring of 1993, Toni Morrison took me out for lunch. It was my last semester at Princeton, and I was in her long-fiction creative writing workshop. I’d done two semesters of short story work with Joyce Carol Oates, and I hoped to be a novelist. So I was writing fast. I think we had to produce thirty or forty or fifty pages for Toni. I’d hit a hundred and was still going.
We sat and chatted and ate (what, I don’t remember, but it included fries). I told her I’d got into law school. I told her I was planning to take time off first, to head back to Pakistan and write. I told her I’d been cooking for myself that year. I told her I made a mean pasta and she ought to give it a try. Really? she said. Yeah, I said. I invited her down to the basement kitchen of Edwards Hall and told her she wouldn’t be disappointed.
To my surprise, she said she’d come. It better not be overboiled spaghetti in some sauce out of a can, she warned me. I smiled. Confident. As we left the restaurant she noticed a paperback hidden between notebooks and printouts in my hands. She asked me what it was. I told her it was Jazz. She asked if it was the first of hers I’d picked up. I confessed it was. She signed it for me. Then she said, Read Beloved, it’s good.
I still remember how she said it: good. Drawn-out. Beautiful and powerful, the way words she spoke often were. When she read our stuff out loud to us in class, it sounded like literature. So I picked up Beloved next. And she was right. It was good.
I thought I was pretty good myself back then. I thought the novel I was writing was good. I thought my cooking was good. I was twenty-one years old and didn’t know better, thank goodness. And luckily for me, Toni never showed up for that pasta.
Instead, I got a message on my answering machine from her assistant. Toni couldn’t make it that day, sadly. John Updike (I think it was Updike) had come to campus. I hadn’t yet read Updike but the name sounded familiar. I called back and said no problem.
It wasn’t until later that it occurred to me my cooking might not have been quite as good as I thought it was. My pasta was indeed spaghetti. It was probably overboiled. And while the sauce didn’t come out of a can, it did come out of a bottle. All I really did was add some hot chilis to it. And maybe a couple of other spices. But maybe not.
Why I was so proud of it, I can’t for the life of me recall.
As for the novel I was writing, I finished a draft for her class. Toni liked it enough to ask me to read from it at the annual end-of-year creative writing event. I still have a manuscript with several pages of her exquisitely fountain-penned suggestions on the reverse. I figured I was almost done.
It wasn’t ready for publication for another seven years.
(2009)
In Concert, No Touching
IT WAS WHEN I returned to Pakistan soon after college that a woman introduced me to the pleasures of sweat.
The scene was a religiously inspired, eternally ongoing Sufi dance/trance event. For the uninitiated reader, I would liken this to an open-air rave, but with free admission, and music generated solely by hand drums and bells on the anklets of long-haired male dancers, some of whom were in drag.
As with any rave, the audience included the sick in search of healing, couples desperate for fertility and not a few pot smokers puffing on joints that flavored the air like wands of tuberose.
I had come at ten-thirty because this was when Papu Sain unleashed the kinds of rhythms many believed could take you closer to God.
I was in need of sensual indulgence. At home, a combination of tradition, respect, and the unpopularity of contraceptives meant that any young man returning from college abroad might find himself self-reliant in the act of love to a degree unknown since his dimly recollected boys’ school past.
In my case it would be more honest to blame shyness and bumbling ineptitude. But whatever the cause, I found female companionship limited in those days to my family and the girlfriends of my more fortunate friends. This lack in my life was compounded by a general concealment of the female form itself, Lahore lagging behind New Jersey in the display of skin. Satellite television and imported magazines, with images of women for the most part physically rather unlike those around me, created an ache with no obvious cure in the region.
So I adapted. I developed a taste for subtlety, for the micro-ripples that are the tsunamis of a reduced-stimulus environment.
I learned to appreciate a smile, a brush of the hand. I studied eyes. I chose my words carefully and savored those I was given.
And it was with this, the heightened sensitivity born of necessity, that I found myself standing at Baba Shah Jamal only three feet from a woman my age. Her veil covered her throat and the rear hemisphere of her head like a motorcycle helmet with the visor up. Her clothing was as loose as love, enough to make a full body slim and a slender one curve. It swelled at her chest and hips.
I watched her pick her nose delicately with her thumb. She noticed my gaze, and we both turned to look ahead with the self-conscious expression of people whose attention is centered in their peripheral vision.
It was hot.
And together, we sweated.
I felt myself shiver as my pores opened, gaping fish mouths on a desert beach. Warmth issued from my body. Perspiration gathered in the close-cropped hair at the bottom of my scalp.
The unexpected fingernail of a trickle followed my spine, and my guts tightened, a quick exhalation at the shock. Her face had begun to shine. She wiped her mouth with her wrist. I felt another caress along my ribs, touching the damp flesh of my flank. My thoughts expanded into the air and condensed on her skin. A slow lick descended from my armpit.
Together, we surrendered to it, the wet stroking of our bodies building as we stood quietly apart. Beneath us men whirled in ecstasy. Shutting her eyes and looking up, she displayed the underside of her jaw in a mating dance as old as time, a peahen glancing coyly at the hip-flashing merengue of a peacock.
Thick drops slid down my belly like errant salmon roe.
I risked a smile at her with my eyes fixed on the scene below. A sly glance only half blocked by my nose revealed the side of her mouth responding, stretching out toward me in langorous recline.
There is a simple code about these things: your intentions must be honorable. To go any further, you should have love on your mind. We didn’t, so we didn’t.
But we sweated, and when she left without a word, I was not ungrateful.
(2001)
2
International Relations
THE PASSPORT I hand through the slit in her glass shield runs suspiciously backward, the right-hand cover its front, and above the curved swords of its Urdu lettering she reads, “Islamic Republic of Pakistan.” Words to make a visa officer tremble.
The scene is the Italian consulate in New York, the back entrance, a subterranean room staffed by three polite sentries. They are charged with the defense of a wall that runs around wealthy democracies, and their post is less tense than many because it lies inside the fortifications of an ally.
I am well dressed. A navy suit, pinstriped, three-buttoned. White shirt, blue tie, brown face, brown eyes. I shaved this morning but missed a patch beside my chin. The stubble there, though short, is dense. Fundamentalist stubble. Ayatollah, Hezbollah stubble. Fighting in the heights of Kashmir stubble. But just a hint.
In uncalloused hands, marred only by cuticles in need of a lesson, I hold my remaining documents: letter from employer, bank statement, proof of insurance, recent pay stub, airline ticket, hotel booking. A mother could arrange a marriage with less information than I am asked to present. My eyes are shadowed with stress or lack of sleep. I am sweating slightly, despite the coolness of this day, and my scalp glistens where the hair has forsaken it.
My smile is dishonest, the smile of a man who hopes his smile will make it easier for him, insincere as attempts at sincerity tend to be. She is almost friendly in return. We are both young, after all, healthy members of the same species and of breeding age.
There are only a hundred and one points to the inspection a Pakistani must pass to be deemed travel-worthy. I fail — because I have succeeded in the past. I have traveled to Italy too often.
Why so many trips over so short a period? she asks.
Love, I say. My girlfriend is Italian.
She pauses, not eager to do this. But she must: it is her duty. The wall is only as strong as its weakest gate.
Yes, that is a very good reason, she says. But I am afraid we will need proof: a notarized letter and a copy of her passport.
You need a letter from a woman confirming our relationship? I ask.
The visa officer is human. Humane. She blushes. I am afraid so, she says. But I will approve your application now so you do not have to make an extra trip. Just bring the letter with you when you come to pick up your visa. Please do not forget: you will be asked for it.
I know I am fortunate. She could, at her discretion, have turned me down. Other visa officers in other consulates regularly reject my kind for far less. Still, I am not pleased.
My colleagues in our business-casual office were amused that I wore a suit that day, but I was ashamed. It tacitly acknowledged an accusation I would have liked proudly to ignore. But what exactly is the accusation?
Race has become too clumsy a shorthand for the legal boundaries that divide liberal democracies such as the United States. Nationality, unless overcome by wealth, is a far more acceptable proxy. Nations deemed prone to poverty and violence are walled off to consume themselves, to fester. And nationality-based discrimination has taken its place alongside racial discrimination, denying both our common humanity and our unbelievably varied individuality as it frisks us at the border.
Here, in cosmopolitan New York, I am able to reside only at the sufferance of my employer, halfway through a six-year H-1B work visa, which binds the legality of my presence in the United States to my job. The Department of Labor and the INS are kept so understaffed that it currently takes several years for most green card applications to be processed. I could face eventual deportation even if I submit my petition today. Like much of the indentured work force, I feel insecure. I must produce notarized love letters at checkpoints. My category is not a desirable one.
But I do as I am told, and I am given my Italian visa.
I get into a cab and head back to my office. My driver looks like a terrorist: steady eyes, thick beard, the reserved watchfulness of the devout. A verse of the Koran dangles beneath his rearview. He could be my uncle.
Where are you coming from? he asks me in Urdu.
I was applying for a visa, I tell him.
You have had a hard morning, brother, he says, turning off the meter. This ride is on me.
(2000)
The Countdown
MY PARENTS WENT out for dinner in Islamabad the other night. They sat among tables of foreign journalists who chatted about the war they had come to cover. My mother was frightened. She told my sister to consider leaving Pakistan. My sister refused.
She just graduated from college in June, from NYU as a matter of fact, and she loves her job. She does not intend to give it up. She is working on a television promo for the South Asian Federation Games, due to be held soon in Islamabad. The games may now be canceled, but in her office people are still trying to stay on deadline and on budget.
My sister says you just have to be careful. Stay away from public places, avoid large gatherings. Because people say the country may tear itself in two. Recently, in the mosque near our house, there was a calm appeal to support the Afghans. They are desperately poor, it was said, running out of food and fuel for heat in the coming winter. Less temperate voices have called for civil war if the government supports America in an attack on Afghanistan. And the Taliban have moved troops to the border.
People in Pakistan were not awakened to the possibility of violence by a surprise attack that claimed the lives of thousands of unsuspecting innocents. Instead, they have been forced to watch it coming from far off on the horizon, as they read the news about New York and Washington and waited for the reverberations of these distant tragedies to reach them. In that period of mounting dread, there were polite phone calls between heads of state and orderly airport closings. The embassies and multinational corporations sent home dependents and nonessential personnel. Twenty-four-hour news stations showed the gathering of carrier battle groups, special forces, aviation fuel. People had time to see their lives changing.
Perhaps because she stays at home when my father and sister go to work, my mother now seems the most frightened of the three. She is normally a woman of impeccable poise, so I find it unsettling to hear her voice slip from steady on the phone. “We could go,” she says. “But what about your aunts and uncles and cousins? Not everyone can leave. So everyone stays.” She tells me she attended a peace rally and watched as a small group of bearded protesters passed by, accompanied by a much larger flock of journalists. “It was as if they were the Beatles,” she says. Despite everything, my mother has not lost her ability to be amused.
She watches television, still surprised that famous correspondents she has seen reporting from Bosnia and Somalia are now standing in front of buildings near the house. “I have complete sympathy for the Americans,” she says. “It is terrible, what happened. But now they are so angry. They talk about a war on terrorism. But they never seem to think what they do terrifies normal people here.”
I can remember seeing my father afraid only once, when I was in hospital as a child, before I underwent surgery for a vicious case of sinusitis. But having seen him then, I can imagine how he looks now — his lips a bit pale, more wrinkles in his forehead. “Nothing is happening,” he says. “The shops are empty. The streets are quiet. Even the police seem few and far between. But every night we turn on the television, and we see what is coming. We just have no idea what it will mean for us.”
Having no idea makes them nervous. An explosion brought my sister running from her bathroom. My parents reassured her the sound was only thunder. My sister, of course, claims she was not afraid. “The first few days, it was pretty bad,” she says. “But then a week passes and you say, I can’t wait forever. So you get on with it. I guess that must be a little bit like what people are doing in New York.”
She used to live on Thompson Street, only a few blocks from my place on Cornelia. “You know,” she considers, “I’m glad I’m not in New York now. When the attack happened, I almost wished I were there. I still felt more like a New Yorker than someone from Islamabad. But now I hear how scared my Pakistani friends are, the abuse they’re getting, and I’m glad I’m not there. I don’t want to remember New York that way.”
So my family waits, like many families in Pakistan, watching battle plans being discussed on television, ex-guerrillas being interviewed about the Afghan terrain, radical figures threatening bloodshed if Pakistan helps America. Meanwhile, the long summer has come to an end in Islamabad. The city is green and bougainvilleas are blooming. Fresh pomegranates are arriving from nearby orchards, along with grapes and apples. The fruit, which rarely makes the news, still makes people smile.
(2001)
A Home for Water Lilies
SINCE LEAVING MY birth city of Lahore at the age of eighteen, I had not lived in any one place for more than four years. So when I arrived in London in July 2001, I did not expect to stay long. The previous week, at my farewell and thirtieth birthday party in New York, I entrusted my battered pair of JBL speakers to a friend. I had purchased them on my first day of college, and had carried them from city to city like ancestral silver.
“Take good care of them,” I told him. “I’ll be back in twelve months.”
“You never know, buddy boy,” he said.
My friend, a Lahore-born nomad like myself, had a theory about us. We spoke Urdu, cooked mutter keema, danced the bhangra, regularly overslept; we had roots. And yet we drifted. So he called us water lilies, after a plant rooted not in dry earth but in ponds and streams. It was a rather unmacho sobriquet (unlike, say, “masters of the universe”) but accurate nonetheless.
I landed in London, like so many foreigners, looking for a London that did not exist. Or rather, I was looking for London to express in its whole something that was true only of tiny parts of it. Where were the thugs who would casually call me “Paki” to my face? Where were the accents of Higgins and Pickering? Where were the casks of warm beer, the weekend cricket matches?
The flat above mine was occupied by an American woman, the one below by a French-Italian couple. The waiters at the nearest café were eastern European; the manager at the off-license was Sri Lankan. The city was more white than New York, but ethnically it seemed similarly varied.
I was far from falling in love at first sight. No, London and I began by exchanging a reserved handshake. My chameleon skin was still tinged with the gunmetal hues of New York, and I found London more expensive, quiet, and slow. I missed the energy of my old abode, with its nocturnal howls and incessant exhortations to strive for extreme and rapid success.
Then things changed. The 9/11 attacks placed great strain on the hyphen bridging that identity called Muslim-American. As a man not known for frequenting mosques, and not possessing a US passport, I should not have felt it. But I did, deeply. It seemed two halves of myself were suddenly at war.
For a time, my fiction floundered in the face of world events, so I turned to journalism and essays instead. I wrote a piece for a US publication about the fears of my parents and sister in Pakistan as the US prepared to attack Afghanistan. The paper deleted a paragraph on reasons for the anger felt toward America in many Muslim-majority countries. A similar piece I wrote for a British newspaper was published unedited and in its entirety.
This was my first experience of what I would come to recognize as growing American self-censorship. It was also the first time I became aware of the relative openness of the British press. I began to read more and more of what was being printed in London; I was surprised and impressed. As a writer, I found the atmosphere in London liberating, not just because of what I was reading, but because of the debates I overheard at the office and at neighboring tables in restaurants. My fiction began to flow again. When the end of my one-year work assignment in London arrived, I arranged to have it extended indefinitely.
The longer I stayed, the more London grew on me. I discovered the Ain’t Nothing But… blues bar on Kingly Street, the Lahore Kebab House in the East End. In the late winter of my second year, I marched with a million people to Hyde Park to protest against the impending invasion of Iraq. Looking around me, especially at grandparents with their grandchildren, I found myself thinking: “I am one of them. I am a Londoner.”
This was a disturbing thought, given my predilection for wandering, so I quickly pushed it away. Intellectually and politically, I had found much to admire in London. And yes, I could have a good time. But my heart was still closed; Lahore had been my first love and New York my most passionate affair. London and I, I thought, were destined to be just friends.
Then, one August afternoon in my third London year, London introduced me to my wife. I met her outside a pub in Maida Vale. She and I had been born on the same street in Lahore. We were strangers. We chatted in the sun beside the canal, agreed to meet for dinner. A week later, she returned to Lahore.
We dated long-distance, an exciting and near-bankrupting experience of transcontinental flights, prepaid calling cards, and garbled Internet telephony. Two years later we were married.
London taught me the pleasures of being a husband. Restaurants, museums, cinemas, pizza delivery, late-night video-on-demand: these things acquired entirely new romantic hues. We went for hour-long walks at midnight, gave directions to tourists. We found we could always get a table, even on a crowded night, at the Churchill Arms.
And so, after five years of living here, I find myself beginning to commit to London in completely unexpected ways. For the first time in my life, I am looking to buy a flat. Not because I dream of getting rich off my investment, but because I dream of staying.
The friend who has my old JBL speakers has now moved from New York, via Vancouver, to Amsterdam. I have never asked for the speakers back, but I often tell him that he ought to give this city a try.
There is something magical about London. It can coax a water lily to tie its roots to land.
(2006)
International Relations
THE PASSPORT I hand through the slit in her glass shield runs suspiciously backward, the right-hand cover its front, and above the curved swords of its Urdu lettering she reads, “Islamic Republic of Pakistan.” Words to make a visa officer tremble.
The scene is the Italian consulate in New York, the back entrance, a subterranean room staffed by three polite sentries. They are charged with the defense of a wall that runs around wealthy democracies, and their post is less tense than many because it lies inside the fortifications of an ally.
I am well dressed. A navy suit, pinstriped, three-buttoned. White shirt, blue tie, brown face, brown eyes. I shaved this morning but missed a patch beside my chin. The stubble there, though short, is dense. Fundamentalist stubble. Ayatollah, Hezbollah stubble. Fighting in the heights of Kashmir stubble. But just a hint.
In uncalloused hands, marred only by cuticles in need of a lesson, I hold my remaining documents: letter from employer, bank statement, proof of insurance, recent pay stub, airline ticket, hotel booking. A mother could arrange a marriage with less information than I am asked to present. My eyes are shadowed with stress or lack of sleep. I am sweating slightly, despite the coolness of this day, and my scalp glistens where the hair has forsaken it.
My smile is dishonest, the smile of a man who hopes his smile will make it easier for him, insincere as attempts at sincerity tend to be. She is almost friendly in return. We are both young, after all, healthy members of the same species and of breeding age.
There are only a hundred and one points to the inspection a Pakistani must pass to be deemed travel-worthy. I fail — because I have succeeded in the past. I have traveled to Italy too often.
Why so many trips over so short a period? she asks.
Love, I say. My girlfriend is Italian.
She pauses, not eager to do this. But she must: it is her duty. The wall is only as strong as its weakest gate.
Yes, that is a very good reason, she says. But I am afraid we will need proof: a notarized letter and a copy of her passport.
You need a letter from a woman confirming our relationship? I ask.
The visa officer is human. Humane. She blushes. I am afraid so, she says. But I will approve your application now so you do not have to make an extra trip. Just bring the letter with you when you come to pick up your visa. Please do not forget: you will be asked for it.
I know I am fortunate. She could, at her discretion, have turned me down. Other visa officers in other consulates regularly reject my kind for far less. Still, I am not pleased.
My colleagues in our business-casual office were amused that I wore a suit that day, but I was ashamed. It tacitly acknowledged an accusation I would have liked proudly to ignore. But what exactly is the accusation?
Race has become too clumsy a shorthand for the legal boundaries that divide liberal democracies such as the United States. Nationality, unless overcome by wealth, is a far more acceptable proxy. Nations deemed prone to poverty and violence are walled off to consume themselves, to fester. And nationality-based discrimination has taken its place alongside racial discrimination, denying both our common humanity and our unbelievably varied individuality as it frisks us at the border.
Here, in cosmopolitan New York, I am able to reside only at the sufferance of my employer, halfway through a six-year H-1B work visa, which binds the legality of my presence in the United States to my job. The Department of Labor and the INS are kept so understaffed that it currently takes several years for most green card applications to be processed. I could face eventual deportation even if I submit my petition today. Like much of the indentured work force, I feel insecure. I must produce notarized love letters at checkpoints. My category is not a desirable one.
But I do as I am told, and I am given my Italian visa.
I get into a cab and head back to my office. My driver looks like a terrorist: steady eyes, thick beard, the reserved watchfulness of the devout. A verse of the Koran dangles beneath his rearview. He could be my uncle.
Where are you coming from? he asks me in Urdu.
I was applying for a visa, I tell him.
You have had a hard morning, brother, he says, turning off the meter. This ride is on me.
(2000)
The Countdown
MY PARENTS WENT out for dinner in Islamabad the other night. They sat among tables of foreign journalists who chatted about the war they had come to cover. My mother was frightened. She told my sister to consider leaving Pakistan. My sister refused.
She just graduated from college in June, from NYU as a matter of fact, and she loves her job. She does not intend to give it up. She is working on a television promo for the South Asian Federation Games, due to be held soon in Islamabad. The games may now be canceled, but in her office people are still trying to stay on deadline and on budget.
My sister says you just have to be careful. Stay away from public places, avoid large gatherings. Because people say the country may tear itself in two. Recently, in the mosque near our house, there was a calm appeal to support the Afghans. They are desperately poor, it was said, running out of food and fuel for heat in the coming winter. Less temperate voices have called for civil war if the government supports America in an attack on Afghanistan. And the Taliban have moved troops to the border.
People in Pakistan were not awakened to the possibility of violence by a surprise attack that claimed the lives of thousands of unsuspecting innocents. Instead, they have been forced to watch it coming from far off on the horizon, as they read the news about New York and Washington and waited for the reverberations of these distant tragedies to reach them. In that period of mounting dread, there were polite phone calls between heads of state and orderly airport closings. The embassies and multinational corporations sent home dependents and nonessential personnel. Twenty-four-hour news stations showed the gathering of carrier battle groups, special forces, aviation fuel. People had time to see their lives changing.
Perhaps because she stays at home when my father and sister go to work, my mother now seems the most frightened of the three. She is normally a woman of impeccable poise, so I find it unsettling to hear her voice slip from steady on the phone. “We could go,” she says. “But what about your aunts and uncles and cousins? Not everyone can leave. So everyone stays.” She tells me she attended a peace rally and watched as a small group of bearded protesters passed by, accompanied by a much larger flock of journalists. “It was as if they were the Beatles,” she says. Despite everything, my mother has not lost her ability to be amused.
She watches television, still surprised that famous correspondents she has seen reporting from Bosnia and Somalia are now standing in front of buildings near the house. “I have complete sympathy for the Americans,” she says. “It is terrible, what happened. But now they are so angry. They talk about a war on terrorism. But they never seem to think what they do terrifies normal people here.”
I can remember seeing my father afraid only once, when I was in hospital as a child, before I underwent surgery for a vicious case of sinusitis. But having seen him then, I can imagine how he looks now — his lips a bit pale, more wrinkles in his forehead. “Nothing is happening,” he says. “The shops are empty. The streets are quiet. Even the police seem few and far between. But every night we turn on the television, and we see what is coming. We just have no idea what it will mean for us.”
Having no idea makes them nervous. An explosion brought my sister running from her bathroom. My parents reassured her the sound was only thunder. My sister, of course, claims she was not afraid. “The first few days, it was pretty bad,” she says. “But then a week passes and you say, I can’t wait forever. So you get on with it. I guess that must be a little bit like what people are doing in New York.”
She used to live on Thompson Street, only a few blocks from my place on Cornelia. “You know,” she considers, “I’m glad I’m not in New York now. When the attack happened, I almost wished I were there. I still felt more like a New Yorker than someone from Islamabad. But now I hear how scared my Pakistani friends are, the abuse they’re getting, and I’m glad I’m not there. I don’t want to remember New York that way.”
So my family waits, like many families in Pakistan, watching battle plans being discussed on television, ex-guerrillas being interviewed about the Afghan terrain, radical figures threatening bloodshed if Pakistan helps America. Meanwhile, the long summer has come to an end in Islamabad. The city is green and bougainvilleas are blooming. Fresh pomegranates are arriving from nearby orchards, along with grapes and apples. The fruit, which rarely makes the news, still makes people smile.
(2001)
A Home for Water Lilies
SINCE LEAVING MY birth city of Lahore at the age of eighteen, I had not lived in any one place for more than four years. So when I arrived in London in July 2001, I did not expect to stay long. The previous week, at my farewell and thirtieth birthday party in New York, I entrusted my battered pair of JBL speakers to a friend. I had purchased them on my first day of college, and had carried them from city to city like ancestral silver.
“Take good care of them,” I told him. “I’ll be back in twelve months.”
“You never know, buddy boy,” he said.
My friend, a Lahore-born nomad like myself, had a theory about us. We spoke Urdu, cooked mutter keema, danced the bhangra, regularly overslept; we had roots. And yet we drifted. So he called us water lilies, after a plant rooted not in dry earth but in ponds and streams. It was a rather unmacho sobriquet (unlike, say, “masters of the universe”) but accurate nonetheless.
I landed in London, like so many foreigners, looking for a London that did not exist. Or rather, I was looking for London to express in its whole something that was true only of tiny parts of it. Where were the thugs who would casually call me “Paki” to my face? Where were the accents of Higgins and Pickering? Where were the casks of warm beer, the weekend cricket matches?
The flat above mine was occupied by an American woman, the one below by a French-Italian couple. The waiters at the nearest café were eastern European; the manager at the off-license was Sri Lankan. The city was more white than New York, but ethnically it seemed similarly varied.
I was far from falling in love at first sight. No, London and I began by exchanging a reserved handshake. My chameleon skin was still tinged with the gunmetal hues of New York, and I found London more expensive, quiet, and slow. I missed the energy of my old abode, with its nocturnal howls and incessant exhortations to strive for extreme and rapid success.
Then things changed. The 9/11 attacks placed great strain on the hyphen bridging that identity called Muslim-American. As a man not known for frequenting mosques, and not possessing a US passport, I should not have felt it. But I did, deeply. It seemed two halves of myself were suddenly at war.
For a time, my fiction floundered in the face of world events, so I turned to journalism and essays instead. I wrote a piece for a US publication about the fears of my parents and sister in Pakistan as the US prepared to attack Afghanistan. The paper deleted a paragraph on reasons for the anger felt toward America in many Muslim-majority countries. A similar piece I wrote for a British newspaper was published unedited and in its entirety.
This was my first experience of what I would come to recognize as growing American self-censorship. It was also the first time I became aware of the relative openness of the British press. I began to read more and more of what was being printed in London; I was surprised and impressed. As a writer, I found the atmosphere in London liberating, not just because of what I was reading, but because of the debates I overheard at the office and at neighboring tables in restaurants. My fiction began to flow again. When the end of my one-year work assignment in London arrived, I arranged to have it extended indefinitely.
The longer I stayed, the more London grew on me. I discovered the Ain’t Nothing But… blues bar on Kingly Street, the Lahore Kebab House in the East End. In the late winter of my second year, I marched with a million people to Hyde Park to protest against the impending invasion of Iraq. Looking around me, especially at grandparents with their grandchildren, I found myself thinking: “I am one of them. I am a Londoner.”
This was a disturbing thought, given my predilection for wandering, so I quickly pushed it away. Intellectually and politically, I had found much to admire in London. And yes, I could have a good time. But my heart was still closed; Lahore had been my first love and New York my most passionate affair. London and I, I thought, were destined to be just friends.
Then, one August afternoon in my third London year, London introduced me to my wife. I met her outside a pub in Maida Vale. She and I had been born on the same street in Lahore. We were strangers. We chatted in the sun beside the canal, agreed to meet for dinner. A week later, she returned to Lahore.
We dated long-distance, an exciting and near-bankrupting experience of transcontinental flights, prepaid calling cards, and garbled Internet telephony. Two years later we were married.
London taught me the pleasures of being a husband. Restaurants, museums, cinemas, pizza delivery, late-night video-on-demand: these things acquired entirely new romantic hues. We went for hour-long walks at midnight, gave directions to tourists. We found we could always get a table, even on a crowded night, at the Churchill Arms.
And so, after five years of living here, I find myself beginning to commit to London in completely unexpected ways. For the first time in my life, I am looking to buy a flat. Not because I dream of getting rich off my investment, but because I dream of staying.
The friend who has my old JBL speakers has now moved from New York, via Vancouver, to Amsterdam. I have never asked for the speakers back, but I often tell him that he ought to give this city a try.
There is something magical about London. It can coax a water lily to tie its roots to land.
(2006)
3
Down the Tube
LAST JUNE, on a hot day in London — hot enough to remind me of Lahore — I got on the Tube and found myself in a crowded carriage with one empty seat. Nobody moved to take it, which seemed strange because several people were standing. Then I noticed the fellow in the next seat over. He was, I guessed, of Pakistani origin, with intense eyes, a prayer cap, a loose kurta, and the kind of mustacheless beard that tabloids associate with Muslim fundamentalists. He could have been my cousin.
Look at this racial profiling, I thought to myself. Here’s this fellow, perfectly harmless, and everyone’s staying clear like he’s planning to kill them. And then they wonder why Muslims in Britain feel ostracized.
I took the seat, gave the fellow a smile that meant, “Hello there, brother, we’re on the same side,” and opened my copy of The Economist. And that would have been that.
Except that it wasn’t, because once the doors slammed shut and the train jerked forward, he said, disconcertingly loudly, “Why do Arabs get all the credit?”
I wasn’t sure what to make of his question, so I said, “Excuse me?”
He jabbed his finger at the cover of my magazine. It carried a photograph of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, by reputation a particularly nasty Jordanian militant, killed a few days previously in Iraq.
“Why do Arabs,” he said again, almost shouting, “get all the credit?”
I observed that he had earphones on, the small fit-in-your-ear iPod variety, and also that people had started staring at us.
“I’m not sure I know what you mean, friend,” I said, forcing another smile onto my face. Then I added, “I’m from Pakistan myself.”
I added this because I wanted to make sure he understood the connection between us. I also added it because he was acting a little oddly and I figured that if he actually was a terrorist he might be less likely to blow himself to smithereens if he thought he was sitting next to another Muslim.
His eyes began to leap from me to the magazine, to the window, to me again. Over and over. It occurred to me that we were getting rather close to the first anniversary of the 7/7 bombings. Didn’t terrorists have a thing about anniversaries?
“And where are you from?” I said coaxingly. Distract him. Keep him talking. Establish a rapport.
“I’m in the security business. Get it? The security business. My own company. And I like music. I bought a system for ten thousand pounds.”
Okay, then. This fellow clearly wasn’t flying on all four engines. And he was nervous. He was sweating like a Swede in the Sahara. And what was that? Yes, he had a bulge under his kurta. Like a money belt. A very, very large money belt.
Play for time. “I’m a bit of a music fanatic myself,” I said. I winced inwardly at my unfortunate use of the word “fanatic,” then went on. “I have this old Carver power amp. Bought it way back in ’93 or ’94. Just the sweetest sound.”
He took his earphones off, slowly, and glared at me. I watched his every move. I wasn’t the only one. And I got the feeling that we had a few eavesdroppers as well. Like that woman reading Jamie Oliver upside down.
Then he said, “I’m on medication, did you know that?”
“Er, no. Are you… all right now?”
“STOP TALKING TO ME!”
Now we had everyone’s attention. “Sure. Okay. Sorry.”
He put his earphones on again. I observed him, James Bond — like, out of the corner of my eye. I wondered how he would trigger the explosives. Would he raise his arm, relying on a hidden detonator built into his sleeve? Or would he have to reach under his kurta and press a button on the bomb itself?
I readied myself for action. I ran kung-fu moves through my mind, super-slow, at Matrix special-effects speed. I would have to grab him, pin his arms to his sides, and hold on while squealing like a schoolgirl for help.
He looked at his watch. So did I. Five o’clock. And not just five o’clock. Exactly, to the second, five o’clock. This was it.
The train started to slow. We were pulling into a station. My station. Just a few more moments. Maybe I would make it.
Nothing happened. We arrived, the doors opened, and he and I simultaneously rose and exited onto the platform. I stood and watched him walk away, wondering if I should say something. He was perhaps the most suspicious person I had ever seen in my life.
But remembering my own experience of “random” searches and multihour detentions at immigration lounges around the world, I thought of what might happen to the fellow if I mentioned him to the authorities. He would be stopped. He would act strangely. Even if he was completely innocent, which he probably was, he might well resist being questioned. And then, through no fault of his own, he might find himself under arrest.
I couldn’t set in motion that sequence of events. So I did nothing, and I hoped I would not discover on the television later that evening that my inaction had made possible a slaughter.
Stepping into the open air, I found my friend, who was visiting me from Pakistan, and told him the story of what had just happened.
He laughed. “You’re just paranoid, yaar,” he said. “You’ve been living here too long.”
(2006)
On Fatherhood
I NEVER REALLY THOUGHT of myself as a baby person. Children I liked. Children you could talk to, hang out with. My own inner child was alive and well. But babies, the larval, pre-talking, pre-walking form of humanity, had little appeal to me. Yes, babies could look cute. But I’d been in enough relationships to know looks only go so far, particularly when they’re packaged with a high-maintenance need for constant attention.
Then I had one. My baby daughter was born last year. Her name is Dina. About thirty minutes after she arrived in the world, her mother, my wife, was taken off for post-labor surgery. My mother-in-law, traumatized after witnessing her child give birth, was recovering her composure in the hospital courtyard, chain-smoking cigarettes between rounds of prayer. So the nurse handed Dina to me. And then we were alone.
Dina was swaddled in white, lightly streaked in dried blood and other bodily fluids. She weighed seven and a half pounds. About the same as a small dumbbell. But she wasn’t as dense as a dumbbell, so she was bigger, maybe two-thirds the size of a two-liter bottle of soda. She rested in the crook of my arm. I did my best not to move.
Dina breathed. I breathed. We were silent. Then she started to cry. It wasn’t a powerful sound. It was a small, quiet sound. It made me think of lungs that had been squeezed on their way through the birth canal, little wet lungs only just introduced to air.
I had no idea what to do. I couldn’t lactate, so feeding her wasn’t an option. I didn’t know if I was holding her properly, whether I should be rocking her or keeping her still. But I felt her cry in my arms and I wanted to comfort her.
I talked to her. I told her who she was and who I was. I told her where her mother had gone and that she should be back soon. I told her it must be strange for her to go from being a sea creature to a land creature so suddenly. I told her I loved her, surprised as I said it that even though I’d known her less than an hour, it was true.
She stopped crying. I spoke some more. Then I fell quiet. Minutes passed. She cried again. I spoke again. She stopped. The cycle repeated itself. It seemed shocking each time. She cried, and I doubted if my speaking to her would make a difference, but again and again it did.
Later my wife told me that Dina probably found my voice soothing because she’d spent months hearing it in the womb. So when I spoke, it was something familiar, and it reassured her. That was a reasonable enough explanation. But ever since that second half hour of her life, I felt Dina and I shared a bond. She had bumped me out of the center of my world.
I’d become a baby person, and it felt good, better than what had come before.
(2010)
It Had to Be a Sign
MY WIFE, Zahra, and I recently decided to move back to Pakistan. Many friends in London seem puzzled by our decision. That is understandable. Pakistan plays a recurring role as villain in the horror subindustry within the news business. It is, we are constantly told, a place where car bombs go off in crowded markets, beheadings get recorded in grainy video, and nuclear weapons are assembled in frightening proximity to violent extremists.
August 14 is Pakistan’s independence day. This year it also marked the birth of our daughter, Dina. (It was a close thing. Nineteen hours later and she would have been born on India’s independence day. For a novelist, the symbolism would have been considerably more tricky. Fortunately Dina was in no mood to dally.)
Childbirth changed my perception of my wife. She was now the bloodied special forces soldier who had fought and risked everything for our family. I was the supportive spouse tasked with cheering her victory, celebrating her homecoming, and easing her convalescence. So I gave her a respectful few hours before suggesting that we uproot our lives and move across continents to a city thousands of miles away.
If we were waiting for a sign from the universe that now was the time to return to our native Lahore, I told her, then Dina’s arrival was surely it.
Zahra regarded me steadily from her hospital bed. She said she was unaware that we had been waiting for such a sign. I promptly agreed to her suggestion that we defer the conversation for a month.
This period allowed me to reflect. London had been good to me. It was eight years since I’d arrived, intending to stay one year, and I was still here. I’d met my wife in London. I’d written and published my second novel in London. I’d had my first child in London. London had given me friends, family, and — after two decades of part-time fiction writing — the ability to make a living from prose.
Like many Bush-era self-exiles from the United States, I found that London combined much of what first attracted me to New York with a freedom America seemed to have lost in the paranoid years after 9/11. The international border at Heathrow felt more permeable than the one at JFK; the London broadsheets were more open to dissenting voices and more resistant to patriotic self-censorship than newspapers in the US; and the naturalization process in the land of Buckingham Palace was — much to my surprise — considerably less tortuous than in the land of the Statue of Liberty.
Of course the UK had problems. Race relations was one. As a Pakistani friend who had also arrived here from America once pointed out to me: Dude, in this place we are the African Americans. Another was the strange support for institutionalized aristocracies — including, to my mind, such related phenomena as the monarchy, a tax system of unequal benefits for the “non-domiciled” resident rich, and an economic model dependent on a financial services industry whose participants privatize the profits of risks borne publicly.
All in all, however, the UK was a home in which I thrived, and London was a wonderful and quite amazing city.
But my heart remained stubbornly attached to Pakistan. I wore a green wig to the Twenty2 °Cricket World Cup final at Lord’s last summer. And although I left Lahore at eighteen to study abroad, the city of my birth never lost its grip on me. I continued to go there often, usually for two or three monthlong trips every year and a couple of yearlong stays each decade.
Above all, I never believed in the role Pakistan plays as a villain on news shows. The Pakistan I knew was the out-of-character Pakistan, Pakistan without its makeup and plastic fangs, a working actor with worn-out shoes, a close family, and a hearty laugh.
Yes, these are troubled times for the country. Friends of mine in Lahore tell me their children have not gone to school in three weeks because of fears of a Beslan-style terrorist atrocity. The university where my sister teaches has been installing shatterproof window film. Hundreds of people have been killed in attacks on Pakistan’s cities since the army launched its operation in Waziristan last month.
But there are reasons to be positive, too. After a long history of backing religious militants, the state and army may finally be getting serious about taking them on. The Swat valley was successfully wrested from Taliban control this summer. The Waziristan offensive is said to be proceeding well. Pakistani public opinion has hardened against the extremists, and at the same time an increasingly independent media and judiciary are amplifying popular demands for a redistribution of resources to the poor. It is possible that out of the current uncertainty and bloodshed a more equitable and tolerant Pakistan will be born.
So when, a month after Dina’s arrival, Zahra and I again discussed Pakistan, we decided to go. Given the peripatetic nature of my life so far, I don’t know how long we’ll stay there. Maybe a year, maybe ten, maybe forever.
But I do know this. When it comes to where we hope Pakistan is heading, we are voting with our feet.
(2009)
Down the Tube
LAST JUNE, on a hot day in London — hot enough to remind me of Lahore — I got on the Tube and found myself in a crowded carriage with one empty seat. Nobody moved to take it, which seemed strange because several people were standing. Then I noticed the fellow in the next seat over. He was, I guessed, of Pakistani origin, with intense eyes, a prayer cap, a loose kurta, and the kind of mustacheless beard that tabloids associate with Muslim fundamentalists. He could have been my cousin.
Look at this racial profiling, I thought to myself. Here’s this fellow, perfectly harmless, and everyone’s staying clear like he’s planning to kill them. And then they wonder why Muslims in Britain feel ostracized.
I took the seat, gave the fellow a smile that meant, “Hello there, brother, we’re on the same side,” and opened my copy of The Economist. And that would have been that.
Except that it wasn’t, because once the doors slammed shut and the train jerked forward, he said, disconcertingly loudly, “Why do Arabs get all the credit?”
I wasn’t sure what to make of his question, so I said, “Excuse me?”
He jabbed his finger at the cover of my magazine. It carried a photograph of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, by reputation a particularly nasty Jordanian militant, killed a few days previously in Iraq.
“Why do Arabs,” he said again, almost shouting, “get all the credit?”
I observed that he had earphones on, the small fit-in-your-ear iPod variety, and also that people had started staring at us.
“I’m not sure I know what you mean, friend,” I said, forcing another smile onto my face. Then I added, “I’m from Pakistan myself.”
I added this because I wanted to make sure he understood the connection between us. I also added it because he was acting a little oddly and I figured that if he actually was a terrorist he might be less likely to blow himself to smithereens if he thought he was sitting next to another Muslim.
His eyes began to leap from me to the magazine, to the window, to me again. Over and over. It occurred to me that we were getting rather close to the first anniversary of the 7/7 bombings. Didn’t terrorists have a thing about anniversaries?
“And where are you from?” I said coaxingly. Distract him. Keep him talking. Establish a rapport.
“I’m in the security business. Get it? The security business. My own company. And I like music. I bought a system for ten thousand pounds.”
Okay, then. This fellow clearly wasn’t flying on all four engines. And he was nervous. He was sweating like a Swede in the Sahara. And what was that? Yes, he had a bulge under his kurta. Like a money belt. A very, very large money belt.
Play for time. “I’m a bit of a music fanatic myself,” I said. I winced inwardly at my unfortunate use of the word “fanatic,” then went on. “I have this old Carver power amp. Bought it way back in ’93 or ’94. Just the sweetest sound.”
He took his earphones off, slowly, and glared at me. I watched his every move. I wasn’t the only one. And I got the feeling that we had a few eavesdroppers as well. Like that woman reading Jamie Oliver upside down.
Then he said, “I’m on medication, did you know that?”
“Er, no. Are you… all right now?”
“STOP TALKING TO ME!”
Now we had everyone’s attention. “Sure. Okay. Sorry.”
He put his earphones on again. I observed him, James Bond — like, out of the corner of my eye. I wondered how he would trigger the explosives. Would he raise his arm, relying on a hidden detonator built into his sleeve? Or would he have to reach under his kurta and press a button on the bomb itself?
I readied myself for action. I ran kung-fu moves through my mind, super-slow, at Matrix special-effects speed. I would have to grab him, pin his arms to his sides, and hold on while squealing like a schoolgirl for help.
He looked at his watch. So did I. Five o’clock. And not just five o’clock. Exactly, to the second, five o’clock. This was it.
The train started to slow. We were pulling into a station. My station. Just a few more moments. Maybe I would make it.
Nothing happened. We arrived, the doors opened, and he and I simultaneously rose and exited onto the platform. I stood and watched him walk away, wondering if I should say something. He was perhaps the most suspicious person I had ever seen in my life.
But remembering my own experience of “random” searches and multihour detentions at immigration lounges around the world, I thought of what might happen to the fellow if I mentioned him to the authorities. He would be stopped. He would act strangely. Even if he was completely innocent, which he probably was, he might well resist being questioned. And then, through no fault of his own, he might find himself under arrest.
I couldn’t set in motion that sequence of events. So I did nothing, and I hoped I would not discover on the television later that evening that my inaction had made possible a slaughter.
Stepping into the open air, I found my friend, who was visiting me from Pakistan, and told him the story of what had just happened.
He laughed. “You’re just paranoid, yaar,” he said. “You’ve been living here too long.”
(2006)
On Fatherhood
I NEVER REALLY THOUGHT of myself as a baby person. Children I liked. Children you could talk to, hang out with. My own inner child was alive and well. But babies, the larval, pre-talking, pre-walking form of humanity, had little appeal to me. Yes, babies could look cute. But I’d been in enough relationships to know looks only go so far, particularly when they’re packaged with a high-maintenance need for constant attention.
Then I had one. My baby daughter was born last year. Her name is Dina. About thirty minutes after she arrived in the world, her mother, my wife, was taken off for post-labor surgery. My mother-in-law, traumatized after witnessing her child give birth, was recovering her composure in the hospital courtyard, chain-smoking cigarettes between rounds of prayer. So the nurse handed Dina to me. And then we were alone.
Dina was swaddled in white, lightly streaked in dried blood and other bodily fluids. She weighed seven and a half pounds. About the same as a small dumbbell. But she wasn’t as dense as a dumbbell, so she was bigger, maybe two-thirds the size of a two-liter bottle of soda. She rested in the crook of my arm. I did my best not to move.
Dina breathed. I breathed. We were silent. Then she started to cry. It wasn’t a powerful sound. It was a small, quiet sound. It made me think of lungs that had been squeezed on their way through the birth canal, little wet lungs only just introduced to air.
I had no idea what to do. I couldn’t lactate, so feeding her wasn’t an option. I didn’t know if I was holding her properly, whether I should be rocking her or keeping her still. But I felt her cry in my arms and I wanted to comfort her.
I talked to her. I told her who she was and who I was. I told her where her mother had gone and that she should be back soon. I told her it must be strange for her to go from being a sea creature to a land creature so suddenly. I told her I loved her, surprised as I said it that even though I’d known her less than an hour, it was true.
She stopped crying. I spoke some more. Then I fell quiet. Minutes passed. She cried again. I spoke again. She stopped. The cycle repeated itself. It seemed shocking each time. She cried, and I doubted if my speaking to her would make a difference, but again and again it did.
Later my wife told me that Dina probably found my voice soothing because she’d spent months hearing it in the womb. So when I spoke, it was something familiar, and it reassured her. That was a reasonable enough explanation. But ever since that second half hour of her life, I felt Dina and I shared a bond. She had bumped me out of the center of my world.
I’d become a baby person, and it felt good, better than what had come before.
(2010)
It Had to Be a Sign
MY WIFE, Zahra, and I recently decided to move back to Pakistan. Many friends in London seem puzzled by our decision. That is understandable. Pakistan plays a recurring role as villain in the horror subindustry within the news business. It is, we are constantly told, a place where car bombs go off in crowded markets, beheadings get recorded in grainy video, and nuclear weapons are assembled in frightening proximity to violent extremists.
August 14 is Pakistan’s independence day. This year it also marked the birth of our daughter, Dina. (It was a close thing. Nineteen hours later and she would have been born on India’s independence day. For a novelist, the symbolism would have been considerably more tricky. Fortunately Dina was in no mood to dally.)
Childbirth changed my perception of my wife. She was now the bloodied special forces soldier who had fought and risked everything for our family. I was the supportive spouse tasked with cheering her victory, celebrating her homecoming, and easing her convalescence. So I gave her a respectful few hours before suggesting that we uproot our lives and move across continents to a city thousands of miles away.
If we were waiting for a sign from the universe that now was the time to return to our native Lahore, I told her, then Dina’s arrival was surely it.
Zahra regarded me steadily from her hospital bed. She said she was unaware that we had been waiting for such a sign. I promptly agreed to her suggestion that we defer the conversation for a month.
This period allowed me to reflect. London had been good to me. It was eight years since I’d arrived, intending to stay one year, and I was still here. I’d met my wife in London. I’d written and published my second novel in London. I’d had my first child in London. London had given me friends, family, and — after two decades of part-time fiction writing — the ability to make a living from prose.
Like many Bush-era self-exiles from the United States, I found that London combined much of what first attracted me to New York with a freedom America seemed to have lost in the paranoid years after 9/11. The international border at Heathrow felt more permeable than the one at JFK; the London broadsheets were more open to dissenting voices and more resistant to patriotic self-censorship than newspapers in the US; and the naturalization process in the land of Buckingham Palace was — much to my surprise — considerably less tortuous than in the land of the Statue of Liberty.
Of course the UK had problems. Race relations was one. As a Pakistani friend who had also arrived here from America once pointed out to me: Dude, in this place we are the African Americans. Another was the strange support for institutionalized aristocracies — including, to my mind, such related phenomena as the monarchy, a tax system of unequal benefits for the “non-domiciled” resident rich, and an economic model dependent on a financial services industry whose participants privatize the profits of risks borne publicly.
All in all, however, the UK was a home in which I thrived, and London was a wonderful and quite amazing city.
But my heart remained stubbornly attached to Pakistan. I wore a green wig to the Twenty2 °Cricket World Cup final at Lord’s last summer. And although I left Lahore at eighteen to study abroad, the city of my birth never lost its grip on me. I continued to go there often, usually for two or three monthlong trips every year and a couple of yearlong stays each decade.
Above all, I never believed in the role Pakistan plays as a villain on news shows. The Pakistan I knew was the out-of-character Pakistan, Pakistan without its makeup and plastic fangs, a working actor with worn-out shoes, a close family, and a hearty laugh.
Yes, these are troubled times for the country. Friends of mine in Lahore tell me their children have not gone to school in three weeks because of fears of a Beslan-style terrorist atrocity. The university where my sister teaches has been installing shatterproof window film. Hundreds of people have been killed in attacks on Pakistan’s cities since the army launched its operation in Waziristan last month.
But there are reasons to be positive, too. After a long history of backing religious militants, the state and army may finally be getting serious about taking them on. The Swat valley was successfully wrested from Taliban control this summer. The Waziristan offensive is said to be proceeding well. Pakistani public opinion has hardened against the extremists, and at the same time an increasingly independent media and judiciary are amplifying popular demands for a redistribution of resources to the poor. It is possible that out of the current uncertainty and bloodshed a more equitable and tolerant Pakistan will be born.
So when, a month after Dina’s arrival, Zahra and I again discussed Pakistan, we decided to go. Given the peripatetic nature of my life so far, I don’t know how long we’ll stay there. Maybe a year, maybe ten, maybe forever.
But I do know this. When it comes to where we hope Pakistan is heading, we are voting with our feet.
(2009)
4
Avatar in Lahore
ON THE DAY I went to see Avatar I finally got a haircut. I don’t have much hair, but still I usually have myself cropped every three weeks. This time six had gone by, and I was looking scraggly.
It was January 2010, a month since I’d moved back to Lahore after several years in London and before that several more in New York. The week I arrived a pair of bombs went off in Moon Market, killing 42 people and injuring 135.
For a few days people avoided markets and banks and restaurants and other crowded places if they could. Then things more or less went back to normal. There were 8 million people in Lahore before the bombing. There were 8 million people in Lahore after the bombing.
I held off on going for a haircut. Maybe I was too busy settling in.
My barber wasn’t in Moon Market. He was in Main Market. Main Market differs by two letters from Moon Market. Main Market is four kilometers away from Moon Market. Main Market is also larger and more densely packed than Moon Market.
The front of my barber’s shop is a big glass window with some fading posters on it. On the narrow street outside are rows of parked motorcycles and cars. Bombs in Pakistan are sometimes left in motorcycles and cars. A bomb outside my barber’s shop would turn that big glass window into shrapnel.
Eventually my wife pointed out that my hair really needed attention. So I went for my haircut. I hadn’t seen my barber in years.
“Hot or cold?” he asked me.
“What do you mean?” I said. What the hell was a hot haircut? Or a cold one for that matter?
“Hot or cold?” he repeated, a little surprised.
I realized he was offering me tea or a soft drink. “Neither,” I said, shaking my head. “Sorry, I’ve been away awhile.”
He cut my hair. Then he gave me a scalp massage. Then he gave me a shoulder massage. He was good. I thought of staying longer. I looked at the big glass pane of the window and the cars and motorcycles parked outside. I paid him and left.
I’d had a number of missions since moving to Lahore. I’d had to get us a new fridge and sort out the strange smell coming from one of our bathroom drains and shepherd the cardboard boxes of our belongings through customs at the dry port. But my top priority had been getting broadband. I’d succeeded remarkably easily.
Now when I went online at home, thanks to a 1,999-rupee (roughly $23) monthly contract, I flowed at 2 Mbps through a Pakistan Telecommunications Limited ADSL telephone line, down to Karachi, offshore to the SEA-ME-WE-3, SEA-ME-WE-4, and I-ME-WE, a trio of optical fiber underwater cables that handle the bulk of data moving between South Asia and the Middle East and Europe, and thence to any server or router I needed to access on the planet.
Out in the cyber universe, my Internet persona could continue to live pretty much the same life it had lived when my physical existence was in London or New York. It could visit the same websites, follow the same news, correspond with the same friends and agents and publishers. This pleased me.
I’d been able to watch a streaming high-definition trailer for Avatar before going to see it that night.
When we arrived at the cinema, barricades meant that no one could park outside. We had to leave our car in a vacant plot down the road. A police jeep was stationed near the entrance. Security guards manned a metal detector. Inside, each bathroom had a guard as well. Other than that, it was like going to a modern Hollywood-dependent cinema anywhere. There was sweet and salty popcorn, there were hot dogs and nachos, there were M&M’s and Coke.
The cinema was not configured for 3-D. But the screen was large and the surround-sound system was powerful, so the 2-D experience was still impressive.
The audience cheered as a race of exotically named, technologically disadvantaged, religiously inclined, dark-skinned (well, blue) people fought a marauding, resource-hungry, heavily armed force of seemingly American marines whose leader roared of the need to “fight terror with terror.”
A friend leaned over to me when it was done. “Is James Cameron secretly Pakistani?” he asked.
We stepped outside. Some people smoked cigarettes. Others smoked joints. Then we drove home. I passed an army checkpoint on my way. At an intersection a digital billboard was running a news ticker with the number of deaths from the latest drone attack.
The main character in Avatar is a marine who goes online to inhabit a hybrid body that looks like the dark-skinned enemy. I wanted to get home to go online and explore his fictional universe further. I also wanted to get home because the streets were oddly deserted. A winter fog had descended, making it difficult to see ahead.
(2010)
Don’t Angry Me
PASSING THROUGH THE Qatar airport, I thought I glimpsed, on the horizontally scrolling news ticker of a red-liveried news channel that was probably BBC, the information that an American ambassador had been killed. My first thought was, Where? My second, related, was, I hope not in Pakistan.
After reconfirming that my four-month-old son was securely strapped to my chest, I fished out my BlackBerry. Like many online Pakistanis, I have a group of friends I turn to for breaking news, political commentary, and gallows humor. My circle, mostly aged forty or thereabouts, favors the decidedly uncool (to which a chart of RIM’s plummeting share price will, sadly, attest) medium of BlackBerry Messenger — BBM — for this purpose.
Responses to my BBM query were more or less instantaneous. “Not sure you read that right, bud.” “Nope. Nothing on CNN.” And then: “Wait. Ambassador down. Benghazi. Libya.”
Libya. Surprising. I powered off my phone for the flight to Lahore. When I powered it up again, waiting my turn at the X-ray scanners with which customs officers prevent alcohol from being smuggled into Pakistan (the war on booze being approximately as successful in our country as the war on drugs is in the US), there were already several BBM messages suggesting that the ambassador’s killing was related to the film Innocence of Muslims.
The following day, on BBM, Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere, I came across numerous claims that we would soon see antifilm protests raging across Pakistan; questions about what was wrong with, variously, the Americans, the Libyans, us Pakistanis, Muslims, and the people who run YouTube; and jokes too offensive to too many varied sensibilities to consider reproducing here, although some were, in my admittedly idiosyncratic estimation, really quite good.
I also received more than the usual quantity of chain-SMS messages that day, and — in addition to the standard advertisements for English-language training courses, dengue-thwarting mosquito nets, energy-efficient air conditioners, and pay-by-text Koranic guidance — there were two that caught my eye.
The first read precisely as follows:
ALLAHU AKBAR!!!! The cinema in America that was going to play the film of the Prophet today at noon. An earthquake hit that area that caused the building to split into two pieces. The Americans are so shocked at the miracle, that they didn’t allow full media coverage on the topic and that’s why you didn’t hear about it on the news today! Share this around and let people know that ALLAH is protecting the Prophet!!! PASS THIS MESSAGE ON! Please don’t let this stop at your phone!
The second message called for a Pakistani boycott of Google, claiming (correctly) that Google owned YouTube, and also (correctly) that YouTube hosted video footage of the anti-Islam film, and, further, that Google earned five billion dollars in revenues in Pakistan (surely incorrect, despite the oft-reported statistic that we Pakistanis are among the world leaders in online searches for porn; Google’s total global revenues are in the neighborhood of forty billion) and therefore that a Pakistani boycott would bring Google to its knees.
Whatever the merits of these bottom-up, user-driven responses to the affront, it was soon apparent that neither the Pakistani state nor opportunistic Pakistani fringe politicians, who lurk in the nether region where the plankton mist of perceived persecution meets the vent of ready violence, would allow this moment to be left to the conscience of mere individuals.
The state’s reactions were immediately apparent. YouTube was blocked. The Internet throttled to a crawl. I have three broadband providers for my home, a bit obsessive, admittedly, but even in regular times the reliability of each leaves something to be desired. My cable modem promptly died. No Internet traffic could make its way in or (as far as I could tell) out. My DSL link was barely alive, operating at a speed that brought to mind the “boing boing” sound of an old dial-up connection. My WiMAX setup, normally the least fleet-footed of my three, the backup for my backup, dipped to about a quarter of its promised bandwidth, which, given the circumstances, wasn’t bad. Unfortunately for me and my fellow Pakistani Web surfers, the state’s online response also included, in a scattergun attempt to block specific IP addresses that might link to the film, the erection of a national firewall that denied access to what seemed like half the Web.
Fringe politicians were not far behind. Perhaps smarting from the recent Rimsha Masih fiasco — in which they had championed the execution of a fourteen-year-old mentally disabled Christian girl for the crime of blasphemy, only to be roundly rebuffed by a rare confluence of sane elements within Pakistan’s legal system, media, civil society, and clergy, who collectively revealed that she had been framed by a property-coveting local mullah — they were eager to fan the momentarily sputtering violently righteous religious flame.
The protests they instigated gathered force. Two people had already died. In today’s Pakistan, tragically, this is not uncommon. But there was a sense that things would intensify. Like weather channels giddy on the news of a menacing tropical depression, the local media reported an increase in emotional wind speed. Shouting politicians announced the formation of a telltale eye at the center of an anti-anti-Islam-film hurricane. It would, all agreed, make landfall on Friday, after the weekly communal prayer.
This also happened to be my three-year-old daughter’s first week of school. She cried every morning as we dropped her off, apparently a sign of healthy attachment, though easily misconstrued (by me) as an indication that some great barbarism was being perpetrated.
So I was upset when the government declared Friday a public holiday, and not just any public holiday — Pakistan’s (and possibly the world’s) first Love the Prophet Day. The last thing my daughter needed was a three-day weekend just as she was beginning to settle in.
Views here were split. Some commentators lambasted the supposedly liberal, supposedly left-of-center Pakistan Peoples Party — led government for ceding space to extremists, for in effect declaring Love Burning and Looting and Pillaging Day, for not having the gumption to stand up and say that no matter how offensive the film, no one had the right (or indeed any reason) to kill one’s fellow Pakistanis over it, to destroy public property, as would certainly happen, or to bring anarchy onto our streets. Surely the real problem that needed to be addressed was one of faulty logic, what might be termed a “someone has made a hateful film in America so now I ought to get shot by a Pakistani police officer” fallacy.
Others thought that the government had acted wisely, or at least shrewdly, in getting ahead of the curve, possibly co-opting the mounting indignation and reducing the potential for confrontation.
Still others thought that the government was a bunch of American/Zionist/Indian lackeys no matter what public holidays they declared, and that they deserved to burn in hell along with the filmmakers and, presumably, anyone else who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time on Friday.
My daughter was pleased that she would have a “day off”—after a life total of four days on.
The hurricane approached. People began their preparations. We did our grocery shopping on Thursday evening (the streets were packed; the traffic was terrible). My driver, a Christian, asked if he could stay home from work (the answer was yes). The birthday party of one of my daughter’s classmates was canceled.
I woke up at seven a.m. on Friday. It was quiet. It isn’t always quiet at our house. We can usually hear rumbling trucks and sputtering rickshaws and sometimes the shrieks of motorcycle daredevils as they race by, pulling wheelies. When the Sri Lankan cricket team was attacked in 2009, the automatic-weapon fire was clearly audible here. When bombs were going off more regularly a couple of years ago, the blast wave of one of them was powerful enough to rattle the windows.
Today there were birds chirping. And my phone had no signal. The government had turned off mobile-telephone networks as a precaution. (Mobiles are occasionally used as detonators for explosives and, more commonly, for communications among militants during their operations.)
Fortunately BBM works over Wi-Fi, and those of us in my chat group who had functioning Internet at home (about half of us) were able to keep each other abreast of the latest developments. One reported that a sign saying “Death to Sam and Terry” had gone up on Lahore’s main British-era thoroughfare, the Mall. I could guess who Sam was: Sam Bacile, a pseudonym of the hated filmmaker. But who, I asked, was Terry? “Florida preacher,” came the response. “Koran-burning day.”
The hurricane hit. On my TV set, Pakistan was aflame. E-mails from friends abroad asked after my well-being. I went out for a drive in the afternoon and things in my neighborhood were utterly calm — disconcertingly so, for mine is normally a bustling area to which the word “calm” does not usually apply. This reinforced the idea that Pakistan is a big country. A hundred and eighty million people is a lot of people. Pitched battles between protesters and police can be going on in one place, barriers made of shipping containers can be breached by mobs in another, and cinemas can be burned to the ground in a third — all of which did occur that day — and yet, in most locales, with the naked eye, you will see none of this.
Phone service was restored that night. Blogging, text messaging, op-ed-page comment posting, etc., resumed in earnest on Saturday. By most accounts, approximately twenty people had been killed across the country: rioters, police, a TV cameraman, bystanders. Among my Lahori friends there was an air of sadness, depression. Others were more proactive, like the five thousand students who signed up to coordinate cleanup efforts in Islamabad, Lahore, and Karachi through their dedicated Facebook page and the Twitter hashtag #Project CleanUpForPeace.
One friend sent, via BBM, a picture he had just taken of a rickshaw with these words written, in English, on the back of its fabric-covered cabin: “Don’t Angry Me.”
It was probably a reference to a popular Bollywood film. But I was reminded of the Gadsden flags I had seen flying, years ago, on a trip to South Carolina: bright yellow, with a rattlesnake and a warning, “Don’t Tread on Me.” Who knows, maybe the rickshaw driver had come back home from the United States after 9/11. Or maybe he’d stumbled upon that slogan, popular during the American revolution, on Google. Or maybe he’d even caught it in a clip, on a slow-buffering visit to YouTube, fluttering in the crisp breeze of freedom.
(2012)
Personal and Political Intertwined
WHEN I WAS writing my first novel, Moth Smoke, I tried to use imagery to reveal the mental state of the main character. It doesn’t rain because a character is sad, of course, but a sad character, or so my thinking went, is more likely to notice the rain — and therefore, while narrating, to comment upon it.
My next novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, was in many ways quite different from its predecessor, but it, too, asserted a link between interior and exterior worlds. The notion that the personal and the political are inescapably intertwined was one I continued to hold strongly.
It was early in the process of working on my third novel that I moved back to Lahore, where I had grown up. The year was 2009. I had spent much of the 1990s in New York, writing about the Lahore of Moth Smoke. I had spent much of the 2000s in London, writing about the New York of The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Now, I thought, I would try my hand at living in a country and writing about it at the same time.
So, as I ruminate on the not-yet-four years I have spent in Pakistan, on how the country has changed and evolved over this time, I find myself questioning my impressions. How much, I wonder, is the Pakistan that I see actually a reflection of my own life? How much of what I imagine to be its changes are in reality merely echoes of my own moods, my emotions?
Pakistan has just seen the first elected civilian government in its history complete a full five-year term. Its raucous press is increasingly assertive, as is its rather idiosyncratic Supreme Court. The army has mostly stood back, choosing not to intervene (yet) as it has so many times in the past. These are all promising developments.
The economy, however, has deteriorated since I returned. The rupee has plunged against the dollar, inflation continues to tug the prices of foodstuffs ever higher, and power shortages have reached the point where often we have electricity for no more than one hour of every two.
Law and order is bad. An insurrection rages in Balochistan. Killings of Shias across the country are getting worse. Ahmadis, Hindus, Christians, and other religious minorities are frequently targeted by violent bigots. A liberal governor of my province, Punjab, was assassinated. The houses of hundreds of Christians in my home city of Lahore were burned by a mob. I meet more and more Pakistanis abroad who say the persecution has grown so bad they would never consider returning.
But on university campuses, I meet thousands — literally thousands — of students who are bright, keen, and eager to learn. They seem to be reading novels. At least half of them are — unprecedentedly for Pakistan — female. I was told last year that there are more students enrolled in universities in Pakistan today than the total number who graduated in the five decades following independence in 1947.
I’m amazed by the talent of young musicians I hear at underground jam sessions, of young artists I see displaying their work. I’m encouraged by the young writers I meet. And the young readers. At the first-ever Lahore Literary Festival, held in February, the turnout was said to be twenty-five thousand. It was breathtaking. I can think of perhaps no public occasion in my twenty years as a novelist that I have enjoyed more than the talk I gave there.
Things in the country around me these past few years have been mixed. Much is horrible, much is beautiful, and much is in between.
Whether I see things accurately, though, I do not know. My own life has had its share of highs and lows, and like a character in one of my books, it may well be that the environment I perceive around me is but an echo of what I feel within. (Or equally, perhaps, the reverse might be true.)
I have, after two decades of mono-generational London and New York living, been reintroduced to a multigenerational daily existence. My wife and I live with our two children in an apartment above my parents’ house. Three generations at one address, as was the case when I was a child.
There is wonder in this, at seeing, for example, my daughter playing with her grandfather in the garden each morning before he goes off to teach at his university and she goes off to study at her nursery school. There is melancholy, too, in watching a generation of my aunts and uncles age, their numbers exceeding those of my generation, the cousins still living in Lahore.
Ours is a large extended family: my mother is one of nine, my father one of four. Every so often one of us is robbed, or taken to hospital, or forced to depend on others for economic survival. And we are, by far, better off than most.
Yet there is wisdom here, and love, and a measure of peace that descends between the times of upheaval. I have been planting trees along the perimeter of our house. For shade, and to keep the crowding city somewhat at bay.
(2013)
Avatar in Lahore
ON THE DAY I went to see Avatar I finally got a haircut. I don’t have much hair, but still I usually have myself cropped every three weeks. This time six had gone by, and I was looking scraggly.
It was January 2010, a month since I’d moved back to Lahore after several years in London and before that several more in New York. The week I arrived a pair of bombs went off in Moon Market, killing 42 people and injuring 135.
For a few days people avoided markets and banks and restaurants and other crowded places if they could. Then things more or less went back to normal. There were 8 million people in Lahore before the bombing. There were 8 million people in Lahore after the bombing.
I held off on going for a haircut. Maybe I was too busy settling in.
My barber wasn’t in Moon Market. He was in Main Market. Main Market differs by two letters from Moon Market. Main Market is four kilometers away from Moon Market. Main Market is also larger and more densely packed than Moon Market.
The front of my barber’s shop is a big glass window with some fading posters on it. On the narrow street outside are rows of parked motorcycles and cars. Bombs in Pakistan are sometimes left in motorcycles and cars. A bomb outside my barber’s shop would turn that big glass window into shrapnel.
Eventually my wife pointed out that my hair really needed attention. So I went for my haircut. I hadn’t seen my barber in years.
“Hot or cold?” he asked me.
“What do you mean?” I said. What the hell was a hot haircut? Or a cold one for that matter?
“Hot or cold?” he repeated, a little surprised.
I realized he was offering me tea or a soft drink. “Neither,” I said, shaking my head. “Sorry, I’ve been away awhile.”
He cut my hair. Then he gave me a scalp massage. Then he gave me a shoulder massage. He was good. I thought of staying longer. I looked at the big glass pane of the window and the cars and motorcycles parked outside. I paid him and left.
I’d had a number of missions since moving to Lahore. I’d had to get us a new fridge and sort out the strange smell coming from one of our bathroom drains and shepherd the cardboard boxes of our belongings through customs at the dry port. But my top priority had been getting broadband. I’d succeeded remarkably easily.
Now when I went online at home, thanks to a 1,999-rupee (roughly $23) monthly contract, I flowed at 2 Mbps through a Pakistan Telecommunications Limited ADSL telephone line, down to Karachi, offshore to the SEA-ME-WE-3, SEA-ME-WE-4, and I-ME-WE, a trio of optical fiber underwater cables that handle the bulk of data moving between South Asia and the Middle East and Europe, and thence to any server or router I needed to access on the planet.
Out in the cyber universe, my Internet persona could continue to live pretty much the same life it had lived when my physical existence was in London or New York. It could visit the same websites, follow the same news, correspond with the same friends and agents and publishers. This pleased me.
I’d been able to watch a streaming high-definition trailer for Avatar before going to see it that night.
When we arrived at the cinema, barricades meant that no one could park outside. We had to leave our car in a vacant plot down the road. A police jeep was stationed near the entrance. Security guards manned a metal detector. Inside, each bathroom had a guard as well. Other than that, it was like going to a modern Hollywood-dependent cinema anywhere. There was sweet and salty popcorn, there were hot dogs and nachos, there were M&M’s and Coke.
The cinema was not configured for 3-D. But the screen was large and the surround-sound system was powerful, so the 2-D experience was still impressive.
The audience cheered as a race of exotically named, technologically disadvantaged, religiously inclined, dark-skinned (well, blue) people fought a marauding, resource-hungry, heavily armed force of seemingly American marines whose leader roared of the need to “fight terror with terror.”
A friend leaned over to me when it was done. “Is James Cameron secretly Pakistani?” he asked.
We stepped outside. Some people smoked cigarettes. Others smoked joints. Then we drove home. I passed an army checkpoint on my way. At an intersection a digital billboard was running a news ticker with the number of deaths from the latest drone attack.
The main character in Avatar is a marine who goes online to inhabit a hybrid body that looks like the dark-skinned enemy. I wanted to get home to go online and explore his fictional universe further. I also wanted to get home because the streets were oddly deserted. A winter fog had descended, making it difficult to see ahead.
(2010)
Don’t Angry Me
PASSING THROUGH THE Qatar airport, I thought I glimpsed, on the horizontally scrolling news ticker of a red-liveried news channel that was probably BBC, the information that an American ambassador had been killed. My first thought was, Where? My second, related, was, I hope not in Pakistan.
After reconfirming that my four-month-old son was securely strapped to my chest, I fished out my BlackBerry. Like many online Pakistanis, I have a group of friends I turn to for breaking news, political commentary, and gallows humor. My circle, mostly aged forty or thereabouts, favors the decidedly uncool (to which a chart of RIM’s plummeting share price will, sadly, attest) medium of BlackBerry Messenger — BBM — for this purpose.
Responses to my BBM query were more or less instantaneous. “Not sure you read that right, bud.” “Nope. Nothing on CNN.” And then: “Wait. Ambassador down. Benghazi. Libya.”
Libya. Surprising. I powered off my phone for the flight to Lahore. When I powered it up again, waiting my turn at the X-ray scanners with which customs officers prevent alcohol from being smuggled into Pakistan (the war on booze being approximately as successful in our country as the war on drugs is in the US), there were already several BBM messages suggesting that the ambassador’s killing was related to the film Innocence of Muslims.
The following day, on BBM, Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere, I came across numerous claims that we would soon see antifilm protests raging across Pakistan; questions about what was wrong with, variously, the Americans, the Libyans, us Pakistanis, Muslims, and the people who run YouTube; and jokes too offensive to too many varied sensibilities to consider reproducing here, although some were, in my admittedly idiosyncratic estimation, really quite good.
I also received more than the usual quantity of chain-SMS messages that day, and — in addition to the standard advertisements for English-language training courses, dengue-thwarting mosquito nets, energy-efficient air conditioners, and pay-by-text Koranic guidance — there were two that caught my eye.
The first read precisely as follows:
ALLAHU AKBAR!!!! The cinema in America that was going to play the film of the Prophet today at noon. An earthquake hit that area that caused the building to split into two pieces. The Americans are so shocked at the miracle, that they didn’t allow full media coverage on the topic and that’s why you didn’t hear about it on the news today! Share this around and let people know that ALLAH is protecting the Prophet!!! PASS THIS MESSAGE ON! Please don’t let this stop at your phone!
The second message called for a Pakistani boycott of Google, claiming (correctly) that Google owned YouTube, and also (correctly) that YouTube hosted video footage of the anti-Islam film, and, further, that Google earned five billion dollars in revenues in Pakistan (surely incorrect, despite the oft-reported statistic that we Pakistanis are among the world leaders in online searches for porn; Google’s total global revenues are in the neighborhood of forty billion) and therefore that a Pakistani boycott would bring Google to its knees.
Whatever the merits of these bottom-up, user-driven responses to the affront, it was soon apparent that neither the Pakistani state nor opportunistic Pakistani fringe politicians, who lurk in the nether region where the plankton mist of perceived persecution meets the vent of ready violence, would allow this moment to be left to the conscience of mere individuals.
The state’s reactions were immediately apparent. YouTube was blocked. The Internet throttled to a crawl. I have three broadband providers for my home, a bit obsessive, admittedly, but even in regular times the reliability of each leaves something to be desired. My cable modem promptly died. No Internet traffic could make its way in or (as far as I could tell) out. My DSL link was barely alive, operating at a speed that brought to mind the “boing boing” sound of an old dial-up connection. My WiMAX setup, normally the least fleet-footed of my three, the backup for my backup, dipped to about a quarter of its promised bandwidth, which, given the circumstances, wasn’t bad. Unfortunately for me and my fellow Pakistani Web surfers, the state’s online response also included, in a scattergun attempt to block specific IP addresses that might link to the film, the erection of a national firewall that denied access to what seemed like half the Web.
Fringe politicians were not far behind. Perhaps smarting from the recent Rimsha Masih fiasco — in which they had championed the execution of a fourteen-year-old mentally disabled Christian girl for the crime of blasphemy, only to be roundly rebuffed by a rare confluence of sane elements within Pakistan’s legal system, media, civil society, and clergy, who collectively revealed that she had been framed by a property-coveting local mullah — they were eager to fan the momentarily sputtering violently righteous religious flame.
The protests they instigated gathered force. Two people had already died. In today’s Pakistan, tragically, this is not uncommon. But there was a sense that things would intensify. Like weather channels giddy on the news of a menacing tropical depression, the local media reported an increase in emotional wind speed. Shouting politicians announced the formation of a telltale eye at the center of an anti-anti-Islam-film hurricane. It would, all agreed, make landfall on Friday, after the weekly communal prayer.
This also happened to be my three-year-old daughter’s first week of school. She cried every morning as we dropped her off, apparently a sign of healthy attachment, though easily misconstrued (by me) as an indication that some great barbarism was being perpetrated.
So I was upset when the government declared Friday a public holiday, and not just any public holiday — Pakistan’s (and possibly the world’s) first Love the Prophet Day. The last thing my daughter needed was a three-day weekend just as she was beginning to settle in.
Views here were split. Some commentators lambasted the supposedly liberal, supposedly left-of-center Pakistan Peoples Party — led government for ceding space to extremists, for in effect declaring Love Burning and Looting and Pillaging Day, for not having the gumption to stand up and say that no matter how offensive the film, no one had the right (or indeed any reason) to kill one’s fellow Pakistanis over it, to destroy public property, as would certainly happen, or to bring anarchy onto our streets. Surely the real problem that needed to be addressed was one of faulty logic, what might be termed a “someone has made a hateful film in America so now I ought to get shot by a Pakistani police officer” fallacy.
Others thought that the government had acted wisely, or at least shrewdly, in getting ahead of the curve, possibly co-opting the mounting indignation and reducing the potential for confrontation.
Still others thought that the government was a bunch of American/Zionist/Indian lackeys no matter what public holidays they declared, and that they deserved to burn in hell along with the filmmakers and, presumably, anyone else who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time on Friday.
My daughter was pleased that she would have a “day off”—after a life total of four days on.
The hurricane approached. People began their preparations. We did our grocery shopping on Thursday evening (the streets were packed; the traffic was terrible). My driver, a Christian, asked if he could stay home from work (the answer was yes). The birthday party of one of my daughter’s classmates was canceled.
I woke up at seven a.m. on Friday. It was quiet. It isn’t always quiet at our house. We can usually hear rumbling trucks and sputtering rickshaws and sometimes the shrieks of motorcycle daredevils as they race by, pulling wheelies. When the Sri Lankan cricket team was attacked in 2009, the automatic-weapon fire was clearly audible here. When bombs were going off more regularly a couple of years ago, the blast wave of one of them was powerful enough to rattle the windows.
Today there were birds chirping. And my phone had no signal. The government had turned off mobile-telephone networks as a precaution. (Mobiles are occasionally used as detonators for explosives and, more commonly, for communications among militants during their operations.)
Fortunately BBM works over Wi-Fi, and those of us in my chat group who had functioning Internet at home (about half of us) were able to keep each other abreast of the latest developments. One reported that a sign saying “Death to Sam and Terry” had gone up on Lahore’s main British-era thoroughfare, the Mall. I could guess who Sam was: Sam Bacile, a pseudonym of the hated filmmaker. But who, I asked, was Terry? “Florida preacher,” came the response. “Koran-burning day.”
The hurricane hit. On my TV set, Pakistan was aflame. E-mails from friends abroad asked after my well-being. I went out for a drive in the afternoon and things in my neighborhood were utterly calm — disconcertingly so, for mine is normally a bustling area to which the word “calm” does not usually apply. This reinforced the idea that Pakistan is a big country. A hundred and eighty million people is a lot of people. Pitched battles between protesters and police can be going on in one place, barriers made of shipping containers can be breached by mobs in another, and cinemas can be burned to the ground in a third — all of which did occur that day — and yet, in most locales, with the naked eye, you will see none of this.
Phone service was restored that night. Blogging, text messaging, op-ed-page comment posting, etc., resumed in earnest on Saturday. By most accounts, approximately twenty people had been killed across the country: rioters, police, a TV cameraman, bystanders. Among my Lahori friends there was an air of sadness, depression. Others were more proactive, like the five thousand students who signed up to coordinate cleanup efforts in Islamabad, Lahore, and Karachi through their dedicated Facebook page and the Twitter hashtag #Project CleanUpForPeace.
One friend sent, via BBM, a picture he had just taken of a rickshaw with these words written, in English, on the back of its fabric-covered cabin: “Don’t Angry Me.”
It was probably a reference to a popular Bollywood film. But I was reminded of the Gadsden flags I had seen flying, years ago, on a trip to South Carolina: bright yellow, with a rattlesnake and a warning, “Don’t Tread on Me.” Who knows, maybe the rickshaw driver had come back home from the United States after 9/11. Or maybe he’d stumbled upon that slogan, popular during the American revolution, on Google. Or maybe he’d even caught it in a clip, on a slow-buffering visit to YouTube, fluttering in the crisp breeze of freedom.
(2012)
Personal and Political Intertwined
WHEN I WAS writing my first novel, Moth Smoke, I tried to use imagery to reveal the mental state of the main character. It doesn’t rain because a character is sad, of course, but a sad character, or so my thinking went, is more likely to notice the rain — and therefore, while narrating, to comment upon it.
My next novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, was in many ways quite different from its predecessor, but it, too, asserted a link between interior and exterior worlds. The notion that the personal and the political are inescapably intertwined was one I continued to hold strongly.
It was early in the process of working on my third novel that I moved back to Lahore, where I had grown up. The year was 2009. I had spent much of the 1990s in New York, writing about the Lahore of Moth Smoke. I had spent much of the 2000s in London, writing about the New York of The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Now, I thought, I would try my hand at living in a country and writing about it at the same time.
So, as I ruminate on the not-yet-four years I have spent in Pakistan, on how the country has changed and evolved over this time, I find myself questioning my impressions. How much, I wonder, is the Pakistan that I see actually a reflection of my own life? How much of what I imagine to be its changes are in reality merely echoes of my own moods, my emotions?
Pakistan has just seen the first elected civilian government in its history complete a full five-year term. Its raucous press is increasingly assertive, as is its rather idiosyncratic Supreme Court. The army has mostly stood back, choosing not to intervene (yet) as it has so many times in the past. These are all promising developments.
The economy, however, has deteriorated since I returned. The rupee has plunged against the dollar, inflation continues to tug the prices of foodstuffs ever higher, and power shortages have reached the point where often we have electricity for no more than one hour of every two.
Law and order is bad. An insurrection rages in Balochistan. Killings of Shias across the country are getting worse. Ahmadis, Hindus, Christians, and other religious minorities are frequently targeted by violent bigots. A liberal governor of my province, Punjab, was assassinated. The houses of hundreds of Christians in my home city of Lahore were burned by a mob. I meet more and more Pakistanis abroad who say the persecution has grown so bad they would never consider returning.
But on university campuses, I meet thousands — literally thousands — of students who are bright, keen, and eager to learn. They seem to be reading novels. At least half of them are — unprecedentedly for Pakistan — female. I was told last year that there are more students enrolled in universities in Pakistan today than the total number who graduated in the five decades following independence in 1947.
I’m amazed by the talent of young musicians I hear at underground jam sessions, of young artists I see displaying their work. I’m encouraged by the young writers I meet. And the young readers. At the first-ever Lahore Literary Festival, held in February, the turnout was said to be twenty-five thousand. It was breathtaking. I can think of perhaps no public occasion in my twenty years as a novelist that I have enjoyed more than the talk I gave there.
Things in the country around me these past few years have been mixed. Much is horrible, much is beautiful, and much is in between.
Whether I see things accurately, though, I do not know. My own life has had its share of highs and lows, and like a character in one of my books, it may well be that the environment I perceive around me is but an echo of what I feel within. (Or equally, perhaps, the reverse might be true.)
I have, after two decades of mono-generational London and New York living, been reintroduced to a multigenerational daily existence. My wife and I live with our two children in an apartment above my parents’ house. Three generations at one address, as was the case when I was a child.
There is wonder in this, at seeing, for example, my daughter playing with her grandfather in the garden each morning before he goes off to teach at his university and she goes off to study at her nursery school. There is melancholy, too, in watching a generation of my aunts and uncles age, their numbers exceeding those of my generation, the cousins still living in Lahore.
Ours is a large extended family: my mother is one of nine, my father one of four. Every so often one of us is robbed, or taken to hospital, or forced to depend on others for economic survival. And we are, by far, better off than most.
Yet there is wisdom here, and love, and a measure of peace that descends between the times of upheaval. I have been planting trees along the perimeter of our house. For shade, and to keep the crowding city somewhat at bay.
(2013)
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