The final post from the About tab, bringing to a close the intended establishment of credentials for the readers (yes, I am still delusional…)…
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The Personal…
Although I roamed the empty streets at night in the illustrious street-roaming traditions of numerous brilliant-yet-poor Urdu poets bemoaning unrequited loves, beloved abodes left behind in the trauma of Partition and the heavy-handedness of the State, the nagging feeling never quite went away: coming from a household well-off if not outright rich, having been unfortunate enough for loves, lusts and infatuations to all have been requited, a native of the region whose only brush with the Establishment had been the odd exchange of heated words with traffic sergeants more decrepit than debauched on the lookout for victims to fleece, I couldn’t possibly claim to be following any legendary footsteps irrespective of the miles I put in or the amount of smoke, legal or otherwise, I inhaled into overworked lungs. To underscore the point, I bought my Charas, later to be smoked through Benson & Hedges, at Rs. 200 for three cigarettes’ worth from a gay diplomat whose wife later ran away with another man, taking their five kids with her… I could almost feel Manto looking down disapprovingly, recalling how that movie star smoking 555’s refused to share one with him, insisting that Goldflakes were the way to go for wordsmiths down on their luck…
Islamabad wasn’t the Lahore that the Progressive Writers’ Movement and the Romantics shared in grudging harmony either, where in the dead of the night in the old city I never did visit, the ghosts of Mughal glory stared one in the face they said, gently mocking. In their stead, monstrosities which Robert Kaplan charitably called Mughal-Stalinist brooded over empty boulevards, bereft of any ghosts that would add character. The scars of Partition did not lie under the surface, ready to be scratched afresh, the blood composing another poem in the great Nasir Kazmi tradition. Instead, the raw wounds of bad governance and four military coups bled fully exposed, fuel not for heartrending poems but for biased BBC documentaries starring cricket captains-turned-mesiahs and soulless reports filed to foreign capitals by faceless diplomats from within fortified, equally faceless facades. We boasted no Ivory Towers imbued with the spirit of Professors Bokhari and Taseer, and beyond the horizon lay not Amritsar, the reminder of one part of our collective Balkanized soul we were so intent on ripping out, but another which we had embraced incompletely. In the Margallas that hinted at the grandeur of peaks yet more magnificent, in the scant snow that occasionally dusted them and in the faces of the Afghans in Peshawar Morr which they had virtually claimed as their own, there was the unmistakable whiff of Central Asia.
Rawalpindi, the twin estranged in spirit if not entirely in body, provided some solace if the mood demanded that solace be a piece of the Subcontinent proper that the poets had loved, complete with narrow alleys of poor cobblestone filled to the brim with The Great Unwashed, the smell of grilled food and petrol fumes and open drains enveloping the amorphous mass of passersby into an ineffable unity characterized by the mask of grim stoicism that everyone wore, hiding both the intensely personal pains of the heartbroken and the collective rage of the wronged. To no avail, for the hills are never too far away, and the recklessly-driven vans leaving for Peshawar and Mardan pass the Nicholson Memorial at the Margalla Pass twenty minutes later, where Khan Abdul Wali Khan once said Central Asia truly began. And looming large, pall-like, the overwhelming, overweening presence of the Jackboots, for whom this was headquarters, a launching pad for their periodic forays into the capital Mr. Bhutto said was tailor-made by that self-styled Field Marshal for coups to be orchestrated by his successors to the throne long after he was gone.
Not that these apparent drawbacks were worth losing any sleep over: there were matters of a more personal nature for nocturnal restlessness. The city they said always slept, that resembled a ghost town on Eids, bereft of the unarticulated camaraderie of the crowd so ineffably felt in cities with pasts, held enormous appeal to unrepentant loners, nostalgic lovers and urban hermits. And wasn’t the city the perfect embodiment not only of a brand new country but a brand new, unwieldy identity ignorant of a past that simply refused to let go? It felt like home to the dilettante historian in me, for wasn’t it, much like the country itself, the geographical, ideological and political manifestation of who I was? A (late) 20-something enduring a somewhat early mid-life crisis endeavoring (struggling?) to compose pretentious prose for posterity, conceited enough to believe that if he had not had the experience requisite for the task and the scars to show for it, he had, as his saving grace, inherited the soul of better men who have over the centuries grappled with the bittersweetness the soil had to offer. My country and hometown cultivate a similar conceit after all: suffering from maladies of a decidedly modern nature, undergoing mid-life crises of faith and ideology, yet fortified by the realization, deep down, that they had been sired by the upheavals unleashed from the bubbling cauldron of a turbulent past, inheriting the baggage, good and bad, that comes from such distinguished parentage, even if collective amnesia dictated that measured time started ticking along on that fateful day in August 1947. Central Asian and Indian at once, just as I was, the mighty Indus not too far away serving as the geographical embodiment of a divide that I had yet to synthesize into a harmonious whole in my mind. And that detached, pristine calm of the city that was both catalyst and conduit for meanderings physical, mental and spiritual, which hadn’t yet been smashed to smithereens by suicide bombers, had infused itself indelibly into my soul. In small town northeastern America, I strive to relive and recreate, as best as I can manage to, those times I know deep down cannot return.
And so, gentle readers who choose not to comment, this was the bittersweet home that I speak of, the backdrop against which played out the saga of the years I long for now. The actors, variously lost, estranged or dead, return for encores in my head and heart. Some, their faces blurred by time, emerge out of nowhere for cameos, but the ones in lead roles stalk me incessantly from behind doors and bookshelves, forever threatening to accost me but never quite doing so. Friends and foes, allies and enemies, ghosts that unremittingly haunt a heart all too willing to be haunted.
I wonder if L (not quite her real initial) has forgiven me for wooing her, successfully, and then walking away as has been my wont, or if F (not her real initial either, but she went by it), happily married for appearances’ sake, has moved on to conquests beyond me, contemptuous of the unknowing, cuckolded husband’s carefully cultivated tough guy exterior. What of the Z’s (for once, their real initials), one an aspiring writer-cum-Brigadier’s daughter whose contempt for the Bloody Civvie that I was came to the fore however hard she tried, to her enduring credit, to conquer it, the other illiterate but, as if to make up for it, incredibly bountifully endowed, the embodiments of a young loser’s infatuations and lusts? And last but not least, She Who I Won’t Name even by an assumed initial… Do they ever think of me?
Does that mad poet, a filterless Embassy Kings dangling from lips gone completely black, still plaster the walls with his labors of love? Does that elderly cobbler, who we all believed was a Sufi elder initiated into the divine secrets we thought we too were entitled to knowing by virtue of gatecrashing every Junoon concert that came to town, still hypnotize one with that piercing gaze that seemed to see straight through into one’s soul? The shopkeepers who sold me cigarettes, the taxi drivers who knew I was willing to chat simply by looking at me, the students studying under street lamps and the homeless engaged in futile struggles for warmth and comfort, who nodded as I went by… Will they recognize me if they saw me?
Do they still burn leaves every morning as November draws to a close? And in the evenings, does the mildly choking smell of Parachinar peanuts being roasted in those carts with wood-fired ovens still hang in the air? And do my people still gather in young winter nights when the sun has set, wrapped in Chadars, Pakols on heads, fortified by the little cups of the tea only ramshackle Khokhas can make, passing joints around, gently reminiscing about lost loves, dead parents, the youth that seems to be passing them by, and the dreams that continue to crumble before their eyes? Do they ever speak of me?
One day my time will come, and they will ship my mortal remains, freshly bathed and shrouded in white, in a plain wooden box across the oceans, my dependents duly paid the whopping $5000 my Life Insurance plan promises for Accidental Death and Dismemberment. What sort of bittersweetness will I be returning to, on that final journey? Will the Jackboots be in power again? Will the mullahs be roaming even freer than they do now? Will I be able to watch in whatever my new incarnation will be as the cortege makes its way to that final resting place? Friends and foes, allies and enemies, love interests and objects of hate, ghosts that have tormented me… will you all be there?
