Sparc Event

“Taleem Child Labour kay khilaaf aik mo’ssar hathyar hai” was the theme of the city-wide speech and poster competition organized by SPARC – Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child.  Perhaps because the email sent to me stated the theme as “Education is a tool to end Child Labour” and perhaps because the venue of the event was the Defence Library, I had not imagined it to be a government school event where the lingua franca was to be Urdu.  So I walked cluelessly in to the sea of blue and white uniforms with hair cut short and without a dupatta to be hit in the gut with a tidal rush of guilt.  I could see how I would be perceived: a flaky aunty who watches from a safe distance and doesn’t get her hands dirty.  Horrid!

For some reason I had not realized how many government schools there are in Karachi.  Perhaps because I’ve been so enmeshed in the upper echelon of private schools lately that in my mind, government schools had just ceased to exist.  That was when I realized why it was imperative for this event to be a government school affair.  The children who went to these schools were maids’ children, drivers’ children, gardeners’ children, watchmen’s children.  They were children who were likely to have to leave school halfway to help their parents with their financial responsibilities.  They were likely to live in neighbourhoods where they may be friends with children who go to mechanics’ workshops and bricklayers’ kilns instead of going to school.  I understood then that SPARC had it right: through this exercise, it was seeking to educate and empower the very children who were susceptible to abuse instead of going the elitist NGO route of raising awareness among the unaffected affluent circles.

The event made me think that my time spent on the other side of town is straining my ties with reality.  This may be the bane of the middle class, we apparently have no time for causes because “my first responsibility is to ensure my children get the very best in life and hence I must be consumed ensuring that is the case.  Everyone struggles; if they struggle, I do too, what’s the difference?”  How does one transcend the cycle?

I am professedly Marxist: I believe in abolishing class privilege and yet I can’t forgo the comforts of my privilege.  I hate shopping at Tariq Road and am the first to rub my status in the face of the “low life rat’s ass of an accountant” at the office who dares think he can hit on me.  Hypocritical and horrid!  I think it’s more complicated than that though.  Gender is the additional variable which prevents me from forgoing class distinction simply because as one goes lower down on the socio-economic ladder, gender imbalance increases and roles become more defined.  I could make myself live on meagre rations but I could not never stand to be reduced to the lower middle income bracket’s definition of being a woman.  What does that make me though?  Intellectually Marxist and practically elitist?

Metaphor

The cybernetic oxymoron pumped with self-induced helium risks falling flat on its face.  Will it bleed painfully when it perishes?  Or is perish quite the word?   Like most products of the post-human age it has had a life without existence.  Can it then perish without being?  The endless nothingness that hovers between me and you, you and me, me and him, him and her, her and you — is it the same nothingness of emptiness?  It is a full nothingness, full of tender touches and gluttonous orgasms.  It is full, brimming with the fullness of your person, my person, his person, her person.  It is so very full of the impersonalities of our persons.  It is a labrynthine negation that looks for an affirmation of the self through the hyperself, knowing all the while that the hyperself is a construct reconstructed to infinity.  Their numbers increase through multiplication and division, growing by the droves becoming many of each and one of many and they seek comfort in togetherness, happily unremembering the nothingness of the space in between. 

Reviewing…

The mogra and rose bushes are in full bloom. The love birds are enjoying their new cage which, according to Foofy, has all the characteristics of a jungle gym.

Some adolescents tried following me home and we ended up racing cars all the way to Cantt station.  Spring fever, I suppose.

I’m three weeks away to completing my project and moving on with my life, even though I have no idea what I’m  moving on to.

I finished “A Case of Exploding Mangoes” and I can tell now why it was so well received abroad:  it mocked one of the most disliked rulers in the country’s history; its humour was local but much of its presentation was not; its hero had more of Top Gun’s maverick in him than a Chitrali Sher Khan; it professed an unabashed homosexual relationship within the strictly regimented, conservative space of the military establishment of a country which is constitutionally Islamic.  Sure, it had all the ingredients to make it a winner.

One of the most cutting things anyone has said to me in life:

“Don’t be a spinster before your time is up.”

eh!

If the purple dragon ensconced in my bed could actually breathe fire, I’d stick my head in its mouth.  Come to think of it, unworked-for fatigue and precariously hinged frustration tolerance would probably follow me there too!

Another English language channel

So I was thinking the other day, why don’t I watch Dawn News?  From Convent School where speaking in Urdu was largely forbidden except during the Urdu class to a home where my American-University-educated mother encouraged speaking and thinking in English, Urdu has been my second language despite my Pakistani nationality.  Now I am not about to take the post colonial lens on this and lament the inadequacy of my Urdu because of some latent, inbred cultural complex.  I honestly don’t think that the limitations of language have ever made me less patriotic than the next person.  What I do find curious though is that despite being a Pakistani who routinely reads an English newspaper, I am not at all drawn to a channel that spews news in English and just while I am contemplating this indifference, Express launches a competitor.

I think a good chunk of my antipathy has to do with all the pseudo British and American accents that go across the board.  If the English language channel caters to the English speaking Pakistani then why does it not talk in the native dialect of English?  If however it is operating as do outsourced call centers and requires to really communicate with the Western world then why is its programming directed at a niche Pakistani market where all the men and women pointedly exude their affluence?  For example, why is it not possible for the women anchors to be wearing shalwars instead of capris and still be talking in English?  It appears as though only the super affluent in this city prefer communicating in English when in reality there is a good section of middle class Karachiites who do too but neither are they represented and nor are they targeted.  Documentaries too take on a very sanitized, outsider look at local happenings.  This is clearly not akin to al-Jazeera’s philosophy which seeks to speak to the West in its own language and debunk its hegemony through counteractive devices.  This is more a case of ’sell to the market which will yield the more profitable returns’: use the sweatshop base and generate income in foreign currency.

So if one of these was not enough, we now have another one to grace the idiot box.

Foofy’s experiment

watching: one hundred thousand little legs
scale the wall of the jam jar
squirming onto the dried up twig
and leaves so many
and peas so many
laid by a little hand of nine odd years
to make a caterpillar’s forest.

when will they ball themselves up
into cocoons of waiting?
sighs the fog of breath on the glass between them,
longing to grow wings of her very own.

i watch her watching and wonder
if we too, are caterpillars in a jam jar
or are we, perhaps,
little girls
being watched watching
and longing to grow wings?

Disenchanted

Blearily fumbling back and forth and yet … Slumber beckons and the will impales itself on the threshold of mismatched frequencies.  Cycle interrupted.  Again and again and again.  Leave.  Be gone!

Maniacal laughter resounds in the crevices of brains minced neath the butcher’s knife.  Who are you?  State your business!   Take heart, your Diaphanous Frailty!  There’s much time yet, I promise.  Hush!  Hush now for she’s on her way with tresses long, splayed over purple nipples.

A spark in the dim fuzziness, the sear of a scarlet blade and rivers course, unbridled.  Over?  Already?

This one’s for U

It so happens that when I’m least pulled together, I run into U.  Because this is either a textual encounter via our cell phones or a virtual one, he can not sense the sadness or agitation on my end and often goes off in his usual chirpiness.  It does surprise me though that despite all these years, he still can not pick from the tenor of my replies that I’m out of sorts.   It usually takes my telling him in explicit words that I’m upset, confessing which in any case takes a lot out of me, for him to be receptive to the fact that something’s amiss.  Once he knows that though, he always wants to know what the matter is.  He has gradually learnt however to let me be sometimes.  For a good long while though, until I learnt to recognize that he is not so in sync with my insides to know my distress and to learn to accept my vulnerability to him by asking for some space, most of our bad arguments ensued in such moments.  It was largely my inability to cope with my own grief or stress and to admit my lack of composure to him that made me go on the aggressive.

After this realization there were times when I allowed myself that window of vulnerability with him and U, being wired the way he is, tried to logically reason me out of my distress which sometimes came across as him trivializing my situation or tried to distract me with other things.  All the while I have known that he was sincere in wanting to help and yet neither of the two approaches worked for me.  I ended up more irritable or sadder by the end of the conversation.  I grew to understand that U could not comfort me when I was losing it.  I accept this inadequacy in our “relationship” because he is a friend and to expect beyond his capacity is unfair in the platonic dimension.  I deal with it by way of avoiding him when I’m out of it so I do not damage my ties with him.

A couple of days ago my plans of avoidance weren’t quite so successful because when I found my way to what I thought was the quietest, loneliest corner, guess who was already there?  U.  I demanded some space but I don’t think that kind of straightforwardness is very palatable for U.  I think he construes it as a rejection of his sincerity for which he is off sulking somewhere in his closet.  I’m sorry that it is the case because I can’t help the fact that when I’m emotionally ravaged, I either need to be with someone who understands the particular wiring of my brain or be entirely alone to wait it out till the phase passes.  It’s not the kind of wiring that I can explain either.  I don’t like hurting him but I can’t help being me.  I hope he’ll come around to figuring that out and accepting that between the two of us, we are certainly more than fair weather friends but on dark, cloudy days, we are more likely to and better off spending time apart.

Confessions of brit_bastards_need_a_lyf

I was 23 and falling out of love after 2 years of waiting for someone.  The object of affection had been a British Pakistani and hence the nick: brit_bastards_need_a_lyf.  For the next two years Brit, as she became known in Yahoo chat rooms, made a lot of friends who she never saw and never met but who were a lot of fun and very helpful at times. In another two years that phase too reached its expected end.  Today, yet another 3 years down, I logged on to the Msngr and lo and behold, Bmw was online!

Bmw was one of Brit’s brood of 17-18 year old children.  He’s a big guy now, married with a four month old and has done his Brit mama proud. Funny, he confessed he had a crush on me once. lol.

Irshs, the most prized child, had got married during those first two years of knowing him.  He was the sweetest kid I’ve ever known.  He was the only one who had my phone no. and half our conversations were either venting his frustration over not being able to get thru to some girl or other or him trying to convince me to fly with him to Washington to see ashiq and propose marriage to him.

Then there was Sid and he was another little darling.  Unlike the other two who were in the US, sid was in some rural area of punjab.  He had a twin sister and his father was a religious man.  Sid was always super respectful even in his humour.

And Sheri!  How could I forget Sheri, who had a crush on Brit and got quite obsessive about it.  He was in Lahore at the time but ultimately ended up in the UK to study I think.

Shenni, the youngest of the gang, and a bit of a pain at 15.  Ashiq and Brit bailed shonu out of many an unholy brawl with some punjabi moron or other belting out vituperative.

Of course the father of the brood was the promiscuous ashiq himself.  Long conversations, for hours and hours on end, cheap Indian music and online snooker…ashiq was Burhan all over again — a seasoned player who let you think you were his best friend but was always really a lone operator.   Brit was quite taken up with ashiq for a while, the thought of it still makes me smile.  Good looking guy and total harami but there was something quite genuine in his friendship and he did look out for Brit on days when Brit was utterly morose. He’s probably married with two kids of his own by now.

There’s no way of writing about these people with literary finesse.  In fact, because they existed in a dimension of phonetic truncations, no upper case and devious smileys, it’s hard to express the unexpected sincerity of these virtual connections in proper english.  I almost feel the need to go into the chat dialectic to convey who they were in their complete three-dimensional humanness.

Brit no longer exists.  She became Foxy and then Foxy became detached from Msngr.  Perhaps they too have evolved into alter egos and ultimately disconnected but hugs to each of them who made the years 2004-2006 liveable in that tiny yellow room with no airconditioning and no television, and sometimes a week on end of grilled cheese sandwiches.