I really liked this article, a refreshing change from all the depressing news. Nicely written if you give it a chance.
http://www.chowk.com
http://63.194.130.82/cgi-bin/show_article.cgi?aid=00000145&channel=gulberg&start=0&end=9&chapter=1&page=1
On The Other Hand
by Tahnoon Pasha
All this while Chowkaholics have talked about Pakistanis. We know now that Pakistanis are an almost irredeemable set of criminals. A bigoted, sexist, small-minded, vicious, corrupt, venal, lazy, self centred, and ignorant people with a raging lust for blood.
I have spent five of my twenty-nine years in Pakistan, when I was packed off by my parents to university to get an education and some “culture”. They were the best years of my life.
Oh, I spent the odd holiday fortnight in Pakistan every few years. They were inevitably spent at the home of a maiden aunt who swallowed lemons every morning as a sovereign against the awful possibility of a wayward smile. She would lock all the comestibles in a room called “The store” which we believed to me a portal to a magic kingdom. I am absolutely certain that there were things in there which hadn’t been moved since 1952 when she moved in. The key was always tucked into the front of her blouse and probably led to all sorts of Freudian associations in my mind. I still can’t look at a comely set of breasts without thinking of the smell of sacks of rice and ageing bottles of jam.
My companions were the most loathsome and hideous gaggle of cousins. They had lost a parent when they were young, and so we had to be very nice to them. They knew all about this, of course and developed into the snottiest bunch of supercilious twits imaginable. I’ll give you an example. Once when I was very young we were regaled on arrival about the hot topic of the moment. Zeenat Aman had acted in some movie which had her stand under a waterfall in a fairly skimpy outfit and all her rampant glory was visible. I couldn’t understand the language, but was always willing to examine the feminine form for “scientific” purposes. I couldn’t though. Overwhelmed by strange thoughts of dried cereals I was forced to stagger from the room. These same cousins insisted on dropping names which meant nothing to me but which they expected me to act suitably awed about.
Under the circumstances it is a miracle that I haven’t been permanently soured on the place.
I went to study in Pakistan much against my wishes. My father had a firm grip on the purse strings and showed no signs of expiring early and leaving me with a fat legacy. I got to Karachi worried about the hygiene, unable to speak the language, and convinced that I was the only person in the benighted dusty nation with a brain. I expected to find peasants and dull-witted fools. In short I was arrogant, conceited, and so full of myself that its a wonder I didn’t explode and splatter myself over two municipal districts.
Not a very likeable picture is it? And yet I found a people willing to welcome me and make allowances for an obnoxious prat. I had a few problems I’ll admit. I didn’t know that you had to be more than a Pakistani. People would ask me “What are you?” and weren’t terribly satisfied with the answer “err.. a Pakistani?”. It took me some time to discover that I was a “Mohajir” and even longer to determine that I was also half Pathan. Thing is, once I had it sorted out and could glibly reel off a list of antecedents, no-one cared.
My first friend was a Punjabi from Quetta. I had settled into the hostel and found myself a few weeks into the semester with a test on Sociology in seven hours, a clear mind unfettered by thought and no textbook. I had returned from the home of the selfsame cousins who, grown into kindly souls, let me use their bathroom because I couldn’t figure out the strange holes that passed for loos at the hostel. At one in the morning, I was knocking on his door and asking to borrow his copy of the book. Rather than beating me about the head with a large stick, (my preferred reaction when woken early from slumber for anything short of a fire) he was immensely courteous and let me borrow the book as well as giving me helpful hints about how far we had gotten in class and which chapters were likely to be on the test.
We got to know each other as one does after such intimate contact and found we shared a passion for speculative physics, women and general avarice. He introduced me to his best friends from Quetta, Pathans who studied across the road at NED. They were an incredibly tough looking bunch with beards, moustaches and an inevitable pistol tucked away somewhere. Incredibly, when we met, we got on. I have had plenty of rousing conversations with them sitting at tiny tea stalls smoking and listening to tales about life in Baluchistan. Of course there are bad apples in every barrel, but by and large no-one treated me like an outsider. They were bigots no doubt, but they had warm and open spirits which would not cavil at welcoming a stranger.
There were lots of other friends of every creed and from every province. People who were selflessly there with no thought for themselves whenever I was in need of assistance or a friend. I am still in touch with some of them, and they are the closest friends I have ever made. We have shared love and laughter, sorrow, paucity and plenitude; that makes a bond. We talked as students do, about the state of the world and our place in it, we argued and solved the problems of the universe, sitting in front of cigarette khokas on Tariq Road, at little nihari shops and lassi vendors in PECHS, or perched on the sea wall at Clifton. One of those friends took the trouble to find me after much time and distance had separated us and it is partly because of her that I am writing this right now. We are a loyal, hospitable and friendly people.
Why Pakistan is so special for me is also because the first girl I ever kissed and meant it was here. Sometimes when several of us would go out for a drive somewhere and she would lean forward and rest her arm on the front seat, you could smell the sunshine on her skin. I’ve never experienced that since, and truth be told I sort of miss it.
What was it all of these people had in common? They cared. They were passionate, feeling people, all of them believed in something, and believed hard. Pakistanis do that, it is our gift and our curse. Not the behaviour of small minds.
Pakistanis are also a cheerful people until it gets beaten out of them. I would occasionally go jogging when a frenzied desire for fitness overcame me. I am a fat man. As I joggled pendulously down the side roads, wheezing and red faced, all of the neighbourhood children would come out and run alongside, laughing hysterically. Since I found nothing remotely amusing about the spectacle I am forced to conclude that the pleasure was occasioned by an inherent surfeit of good feeling in they possessed.
There was a cigarette vendor around the corner from where I moved after I left the hostel. As a student I was perpetually short of funds. Sometimes chronically so. This kind man would let me have cigarettes on credit. There was one time that the tab ran up to five hundred rupees. He never once turned me away, and would remonstrate in the gentlest of tones till I paid him. It is only recently that it occurred to me that this was about a quarter of his monthly takings that this wonderful soul was being so generous with. You cannot tell me that Pakistanis are ungenerous.
We used to take ourselves to the beach on occasion with funny fags which of course we never inhaled. Once, while sitting around passing them around we saw a group of Makrani fishermen swimming out with a net and collecting one they had spread earlier. We strolled over and got to talking with them. They took us around the corner to their home and had us, perfect strangers sit down to lunch with them! Since this consisted of some of the fish they had just pulled from the sea it was indescribably delicious and a complete revelation. These were a poor and humble people but utterly unselfconscious. We were introduced to their beautiful and shy children and talked of what they wanted from life. We walked away, replete and with the realisation that like us they wanted nothing more than a fulfilling life. I haven’t found that kind of warmth in travelling all over the world.
I am writing this onto a forum created by a pair of Pakistanis where it may be read by physicists and doctors of medicine, engineers, businessmen and poets. These are not an ignorant people. They are found in every walk of life, capable and respected. These too, are Pakistanis.
There isn’t a lot of point to this. I just wanted to share my memories of a beautiful place and a kind and wonderful people with all of you. They get a lot of bad press, and I sometimes wonder if there aren’t people who worry whether that is all that Pakistan is. There is sorrow, poverty and misery but in the final analysis there is the greatest potential I have ever encountered. I am honoured to consider myself a Pakistani.