Bereaved

My grief for Benazir is akin to my grief for the inmates of the Lal Masjid Madressah – I did not agree with either’s politics but it’s impossible not to feel for the way they were killed. Whether it was the bullets in her neck that ultimately proved fatal or the lever of the sun roof collapsing on her head, she is dead and the religious right was behind it. While Karachi and most of Sindh burns to mourn her, there is a fatalistic resignation among people that peace will return once wounds begin to heal. What I find most troublesome is the statement of power that the religious right has made to the US by taking down one of the West’s fair-haired girls and to Musharraf by doing it in his garrisoned city, so close to the capital. Two possibly ensuing scenarios are: 1> the religious right will take over Pakistan in due course and make life hell for a primarily culture-driven Islam-observing Pakistani people; 2> whether preemptively or to reclaim the power promised by nukes, the US will step in and Pakistani people will suffer the same fate as the ordinary Afghans and Iraqis ruled by their respectively “oppressive” governments. Like citizens of felled countries, we bide our time until fate unfolds what is in store for us.

Postscript: A few months later I reflect on how Fundophobic I have become over time. Her murder was the work of the agencies and Fundos, the convenient scapegoat.

Eid visiting

Taayi describes her daughter-in-law as the classic Akbari from Deputy Nazir Ahmed’s novel, “Ghazala defies me in everything, she goes out into the street with wide-eyed wonder like a maidservant to watch the traditional slaughter of animals for Eid-ul Azha, she’s lazy and sleeps till noon…” The list goes on for half an hour with frequent repetition. Although Ghazala’s fictive counterpart, Akbari, was married to a thorough gentleman, Ghazala’s husband has grown up on Indian films and soap operas. In his wife has found his first partner who makes a king out of him by baring her flesh and soul to him. He holds her hand in public and eats off the same plate as her at weddings without a care for culturally acceptable codes of decency.

Taayi’s world is uncomfortably fascinating from a distanced vantage and driving through very congested lanes of Azizabad lined with MQM flags and tinsel kites (the election icon for MQM), I wonder if all those couples standing at nihari and mithai vendors have similar lives. The women clad in ubayas or shalwar kameez all cover their hair with diaphonous gorgette scarves that slip off their heads at the most timely instances to denude their tantalizing golden and silver jewelry. Bright lipsticks and long slivers of jet-black eye-liner coyly speak to their husbands over their Eid outing. Most of the men sport moustaches but not beards. Their eyes scan the crowd with the license of masculinity that entrusts them to fend off any unwanted gazes at their womenfolk. The responsibility of course comes with the fringe benefit of surreptitiously surveying other desirable women in the populace.

Shielded from this reality by the rolled up car window, I reflect on how these women’s ideas of a successful relationship compare to mine. They have all made their men believe that they are priviledged to have them for their wives.  The dynamics do not lead to the man and woman growing together and becoming better people unto themselves and for each other.  They do however lead the woman to feel cherished and have her say in the things that matter most to her.

In retrospect I believe I imbibed the idealism coded into Akbari’s antithesis and younger sister, Asghari, who married an irresponsible man and transformed him through her sincerity, her education and true love into a better man.  A friend once said to me, “you like bad boys”.  I laughed it off at the time but I see the verity of his words.  The caveat is that I don’t like them for their “badness” but the possibility of them being transformed into good men.  Yet even in my messianic heroism, I want to ultimately be with a good man who feels priviledged to have me, who doesn’t hold my hand or eat off my plate in public but walks with me with an aura that binds me to him.  Another Eid without a significant other.  C’est la vie.

Decompressing

I realized yesterday how burdensome it had been to have bottled all that for the last few months. The end had been clear much before yesterday but the articulation of it seems to have liberated me from the uncertainty that kept binding me to an illusory past. I’m trying to fill the emptiness that surrounds me. The effort brings on inexplicable anxiety but accomplishing every little feat is affirming. I’m yet to go into full battle-mode to make my way through this but I’m beginning to accept that this paralyzed state over a horrible mistake is graver than the mistake itself. I have to return to life. I may not be able to erase memories but I can bury them deep under so many new ones that they are unable to raise their impeding tentacles to the surface of my consciousness. I’m not brooding anymore but I am still frozen, waiting to thaw out.

 

 

Epilogue:

Someone held my hand so tightly once that they left their lines imprinted on mine. Our lines remained enmeshed till the end of the drive, then faded as we returned to our realities.

November

Drawn out to maximum tensile strength in a sound proof chamber, the body hovers in timeless vaccuum. The automaton veneer struggles to keep up with the expectations of the mundane routine. Within the shell, the core unawakened by anti-depressants responds only, and that too silently, to the missed calls on the cell phone and text messages rare. Beeps and uncommunicative silence alternate like soutures, pricking and piercing the sentient surface to pull broken skin back together. Between cognition and impulse, long conversations surpass. The inertia prolongs and persists, obediently, quietly and yet restlessly. Prodded by memory: satiate then bereft, the intertwining of faith and unbridled lack thereof, the manacles of circumstance, defenseless vulnerability, soaring so high and then forsaken unwillingly but compliantly in a bottle marked, “obsession”. Can time be forgiven for eight months of resistance, of illusion, of God and godlessness?