Alone with one’s prejudices

Islamabad diary

The beliefs I grew up with lie exhausted if not dead. The world has moved on. We grew up in a different world and this world, the one around us, has altogether different landmarks.

Guys like me, fed on a diet of half-baked and little-understood Bolshevism, pined for some kind of a socialist utopia. ‘The East was Red’ was one of our favourite slogans and we stirred to such symbols as Che Guevara’s cigar-chomping photographs. Imperialism was a term much in vogue in our discussions and images of the Vietnam War moved us greatly – which should give you an idea of how antiquated and long-gone-by that world was.

With those beliefs gone all that people of my type are left with are their prejudices…quirky humours, old-fashioned likes and dislikes. I hate the mayhem on our roads caused by the proliferation of motor cars. And Centaurus shopping – to which my daughter dragged me the other evening because she wanted to get something from the Mango store there – comes close to my vision of hell.

My vision of hell is not of hell-fire. It is of a place choked by motorcars, rickshaws and motorbikes, the air thick with exhaust fumes and of pavements run over by cheap merchandise. Some weeks ago I walked down Shah Alam Market in Lahore. Wrestled through would be the more apt description. Before that I had driven through Brandreth Road where the merchants park their cars three abreast in front of their shops. Imagine what is left of the road. That road and Shah Alam Market in rush hour would be anyone’s idea of hell. All our inner cities are now like that.

Bhabra Bazar in Rawalpindi is where I occasionally go to pick up the odd candlestick, silver serving dishes, brass lamps…things like that. From there I walked to City Saddar Road and back. It was a nightmare, a walk through the suburbia of hell.

Our inner cities, the old quarters of all our cities from Peshawar to Multan, and from there to inner Sindh, could have been so vibrant, so full of colour and life. We have destroyed them, utterly. And given them over to the unchallenged rule of the Qingchi rickshaw and the Chinese-made motorbike, on which three passengers or four or even five is the norm.

Our cities large and small are spreading horizontally, devouring agricultural land. Look at advertising…the biggest ads are of housing colonies and apartment blocks. Looking at them you could be forgiven for thinking that the only happening enterprise in Pakistan is real estate…or the next best thing, shaadi or wedding halls.

Look at Islamabad. The only place in that growing expanse of a capital, its sides now bursting and spreading in all directions, is one tiny market, Kohsaar Market. There you have two or three places where you can have a cup of coffee…and sit outside a la Paris or something similar. No place to sit outside in Super Market, none whatsoever in Jinnah Super Market.

Incidentally, look at our felicity with names. Here we have a poetic tradition rich with ghazal and song, but when it comes to naming the markets of the capital our collective imagination soars no higher than super, etc. And the capital’s Avenue des Champs-Elysees is called Blue Area and the road in it is – you’ve guessed it – Jinnah Avenue.

In Pakistan we only have Jinnah this or Iqbal that, which I think denotes some kind of a psychological problem. Somewhere lodged in our sub-conscious is the lurking thought that to go beyond these hallowed names is to stray into subversive and potentially dangerous territory. So to keep on the patriotic high ground we stick to these sacred names…or in Islamabad stick to what can only be called CDA-speak or CDA poetry: super, Jinnah super, Blue Area (CDA being the Capital Development Authority which has done more to disfigure the capital than any natural calamity).

There is not a single tea-house in all the gardens of Lahore…not inside them and not outside. So for time-pass – a delightful Urdu-English phrase – what does one do? At what inn of my choice do I take mine ease when you don’t have inns of any kind? In places of the cafes which once dotted the Mall you now have shoe-shops and second-rate garment shops, upper end ones now located in Defence or along M M Alam Road.

Lahore has some kind of a foot fetish. If this is what has happened to the Mall, Heera Mandi is now awash with small shops selling khusas and other native footwear. Anyone looking to discover the magic of old is only likely to discover more footwear, the bazaar no longer alive to the sound of the harmonium or the beat of the tabla, of nautch girls going about their routine.

There was a piece recently in another English paper about the Hyderabad bazaar. We were posted in Thano Bulla Khan in the 1970 elections and one evening several of us army officers came for an evening of song at that bazaar which was then at its prime, as Heera Mandi used to be before morality won a Pyrrhic victory over it – that being a victory won at too great a cost.

Morality, or its spurious form, may have won in Heera Mandi. But Heera Mandi exacted its revenge by uprooting itself from there and spreading all over the city. If the divinely-favoured want to celebrate this as their victory let them do so. As for the Hyderabad bazaar I wonder what it’s like today.

Musharraf’s sin was not anything he did to the constitution. Let his mind rest easy on that count. What we have done to our inner cities and are doing to the environment is much worse than anything done by anyone to that document created to be abused, the constitution.

His biggest failing was not to roll back the frontiers of prohibition which he could have easily done. In his first two years he was master of all he surveyed and had the power to do as he wished. But he let the opportunity slip by, allowing the country to remain in the hypocritical limbo in which it exists –F alstaffian deviation all there but performed, as so much else in the Republic, much like the dance of the seven veils.

Jam Sadiq Ali was truer to his salt and he should have been Pakistan’s patron saint. Saint Jam…even sounds good. In the centre of his drawing room in Karachi there used to stand a tea-trolley with crystal glasses, bucket of ice, water and soda bottles…plus of course the usual tribute to Scotland. The bearer would ask you not for tea or coffee, thanda or garam, but only whether you wanted your glass spiked with water or soda. He was then Sindh chief minister and it was all done openly with not a trace of the usual humbug.

And he was instrumental in giving permission to a chain of outlets in Karachi and the rest of the province for the sale of the forbidden stuff, for the benefit of non-Muslims of course. And it had to be a military commander, Gen Usmani, who cut down on the number of these outlets.

Something happens to many military men as they get along in years. They are not ones to deny themselves one, two or half a dozen residential plots here and there. But they become devout as they get older. Civilians are hypocrites too but military hypocrisy in our context has had more devastating consequences.

Anyway, Happy New Year. We must make the best of our circumstances. The law or what we have made of it won’t change to suit our inclinations. Let us then have the courage to subvert the more foolish things we have piled on our statute books.

Some of us would have celebrated the coming of the new year. Most Pakistanis, the vast majority, would have gone to bed as usual, the new year holding absolutely no meaning for them. There are many divides in this country and this is one of them. Even simple pleasures in this country are subject to class differences. The good things of life are for the well-off. For the rest there is always the siren call of the devout brigade.

Email: bhagwal63@gmail.com