The bars of Wanchai

Islamabad diary
It was quite a hit movie in the old days, ‘The World of Suzie Wong’, starring that most classy of actors, William Holden, and the newly arrived Nancy Kwan. And if I remember correctly it was filmed mostly on location in Wanchai, the part of Hong Kong where you have bars and nightclubs and where tourists and lost souls come for solace or a thrill of excitement.
We all seek nirvana in our own ways. Yogis climb the mountains to contemplate the infinite. Siddartha went into the forests for enlightenment. The disillusioned if they happen to be in this end-of-empire city head for the watering holes of Wanchai. As a nightclub destination I would place Wanchai above anything on offer in, say, Dubai or even Bangkok. It has more class and style and there is a feel of history about it as there is very little of in the other places.
Nightclubs can be seedy affairs. In today’s culture they can also be very noisy affairs. But if they have the right tone, and the glamour is understated, and the girls and the drinks are just right – and the music is not too loud – they can do things to your heart, and they can bring on nostalgia for faded things, lost love and time gone by…like Rick’s place in the film Casablanca, the nightclub in Marlene Dietrich’s Blue Angel, where the sad professor loses his heart and soul and ends up as a tragic figure, or the nightclub in that old Indian film, Shagoon, where the hero sits all disconsolate at the bar while the lady at the piano sings, “tum apna ranj o gham, apni pareshani mujhe dey do” (sung by Jagjit Kaur, the music composed by Khayyam who was married to Jagjit Kaur).
Escape is one of the newest nightclubs in Wanchai and we happened to go there…after spending the earlier part of the evening at our hotel. We got talking and as happens with Pakistanis we talked about – what else but – Pakistan: were things going to improve, what did the future hold? When it comes to morbidity is there anyone our equal?
Imagine four or five of us sitting not in some dry joint in Islamabad or Karachi but in the heart of Kowloon, Hong Kong’s old quarter, with a virtual beauty parade on in the streets outside but as we filled and refilled our glasses we talked not of poetry and music but of Pakistani politics. Call it morbidity or the triumph of the imagination but there it is.
In the Russian novels of the 19th century you come across enlightened souls forever discussing reform and the national condition. Our situation is about the same…minus of course the novels. Talk, passionate and endless talk but, alas, no Turgenev or Dostoyevsky.
Yes, we’ve had our poets and great ones too but they spoke for a slightly different age when things were relatively simple – black and white, democracy and dictatorship, and therefore easier to choose sides. Ayub and Zia and even Musharraf – those were not very complicated times. It’s a bit different now, questions such as democracy settled, or seemingly settled, but fresh anxieties arising.
There was no Daesh then, no destruction of Iraq and Syria, no migrant wave from one side of the Mediterranean pressing upon the shores of Europe. Back then if any philosopher got worked up about the state of the world his worry was about the possibility of nuclear war and the destruction of the planet.
Today’s anxieties are not that stark but they are more complicated. The cold war world was so much easier to understand. There was Nato on one side and the Warsaw Pact on the other and you chose to be with this camp or that. Or third world leaders, mostly those given to flights of fancy, had the choice of remaining in between and wallowing in the luxury of high-blown oratory.
The Nassers, the Nehrus, the Sukarnos were all given to oratory and woolly ideas. They all ended up in disillusionment – Nasser after defeat at Israeli hands in the 1967 war, Nehru after India’s defeat against China in 1962, and Sukarno after the attempted communist takeover, brutally crushed by the army, in 1966. Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia was different, his feet on the ground. But then he had led the Yugoslav partisans against the Nazis in the Second World War. He had been through a harsh school of reality.
They used to call this region, from Lebanon to Pakistan, an arc of instability. It was a figure of speech then but it is more real now, with countries being torn apart and small wars happening here and there, all at the same time. And far from anyone having a handle on these events, there is little understanding of what is happening. Not only that the centre cannot hold, there is no centre that can do the holding. And Tony Blair delivers a belated apology, in a roundabout way: “Of course you can’t say that those of us who removed Saddam in 2003 bear no responsibility for the situation in 2015.”
By way of justification he says that the intelligence on which they acted was faulty, which is nonsense. The Iraq invasion was never about faulty intelligence or weapons of mass destruction. It was about neo-imperialist ambitions – they gave it a title, neo-conservatism – to alter the reality of the Middle East, and it all went horribly wrong because all the assumptions on which this drive was based proved to be wrong. Iraq as a functioning country was destroyed. And the western powers have tried to do the same with Syria.
But in our hotel room we talked not of the Middle East but Pakistan. As we went on, someone wiser than the rest of us said that if we kept at our glasses and the ice like this we might as well stay here. We hurriedly got up to head for Wanchai.
Our host, a Pakistani long resident in Hong Kong, knew his way about. Soon we were coming down the steps of a dimly-lit place with live music playing in the far corner. There was a circular bar in the centre around which sat or stood a fair number of very smart and elegant ladies, all waiting to be invited to your table. I was to learn later that several were from Colombia, and ladies from there, as the initiated would know, are smashers.
Hong Kong is a place to enjoy if your pockets are well-lined. I had of course taken money with me but my Chakwali friends would have none of it and insisted on paying for everything. I therefore changed not a dollar of my own. And they took me around, beyond the frontier to the Chinese city of Shenzhen which has a lively club scene of its own but less polished than Hong Kong, and up the mountains which surround Hong Kong where the trees are lovingly kept and where breaking even a tiny branch is a thing unheard of.
For all its urbanisation Hong Kong is very green, not a spot of open space to be seen without trees or vegetation of some sort in it. I was amazed to see terraces cut into the rocks lining the road from the airport and trees planted on the terraces.
And Hong Kong for all its density of population is not like the sprawl of our cities. It goes up, with skyscrapers everywhere but covering or occupying relatively little ground. Compare this to our craze for residential colonies spreading and devouring valuable agricultural land. It is a disaster. Nadeem Ul Haque, former chief of the planning commission, is right. The Pakistani trend of horizontal spread is wrong. Our cities should go up.
And I’ve come away convinced that cities need infrastructure, overhead bridges and flyovers, and signal-free corridors. That is the way forward. But Hong Kong is an example that while doing all this you don’t have to rip up the environment…and you don’t have to make things ugly.
Email: bhagwal63@gmail.com