Tunnel Vision (11 page)

‘
You
'
re a coward.
'

‘
Who wouldn
'
t be afraid of you?
'
The coup de grace was delivered with a loving smile. Despite myself, I was delighted to have a sparring partner who could keep me guessing. Time to reclaim the pole position though … by changing tracks altogether.

‘
Saad …
'

‘
Huh?
'

‘
Ammi thinks Abba was buried by the Edhi foundation.They handle all the unclaimed bodies. The bodies are photographed from the neck up, assigned a number, and buried in an unmarked grave.They have two massive graveyards full of unclaimed bodies. The graves have tin plates with the numbers on them. There
'
s an album, many albums actually, with the photos and numbers. If you
'
re looking for someone, that
'
s where you have to go.
'

He reached out and squeezed my hand.

‘
In this light you look just like Adil.
'

‘
Are you sure you aren
'
t a Pathan?
'

NICE GIRLS DON
'
T SHAVE

TAGLINE TO
'
90S AD FOR HAIR REMOVAL CREAM

~

A
nother halt. Another traffic jam. All the main roads were clogged with cars, motorcycles, buses, rickshaws and donkey carts. Clogged was the right word. If roads were a city
'
s arteries, Karachi
'
s arteries had a minimum of 98 per cent blockage. An emergency bypass, or two, was required, depending on how much money the patient could conjure up. And that was the story of the Lyari Expressway and the Northern Bypass for you.

I supposed I should be grateful that whatever force was keeping me tied to my body had mercifully cut the cord of actual physical sensation. I was growing more depressed by the second, but at least my broken body wasn
'
t feeling the pain of jolts from the bumps in whichever road we were now on. It had rained recently, and in parts of Karachi, even where affluence tended to serve as a crude but effective sunscreen, the drops had flayed the tar skin to reveal the stone bones underneath.

It seemed terribly important that I tell someone the weather now followed a 7-day cycle imposed by humans, it being more likely to rain on the weekend than a weekday. It seemed as important as anything else on my mind at that moment. Drifting slowly but inexorably towards mental dissipation, I clutched at the nearest solid object, which happened to be Adil.

*

By the time he moved to middle school, Ammi had decided to withdraw Adil from the all boys
'
convent because she said he
'
d begun behaving strangely and the school must be doing things to his head. Where else would he have found inspiration for hiding on the roof and locking the door so his own mother couldn
'
t get in? Strange indeed. Hoping the attempt to put some distance between himself and his mother was an aberration on his part, she put him in a public school with a slightly more diverse student body. As it turned out, the move was very good for Adil and opened the door to a new, delightful kind of strangeness previously not experienced in our household.

Everyone wanted to be a VJ or an anchor or a producer now that the mushrooming of private channels made it a viable profession, but when Adil first displayed an interest in production, PTV was the only channel on local television. He might have slipped right into the pre-set career trajectory with a minimum of fuss if it hadn
'
t been for the film club at his new school. Because of the aforementioned diversity of economic backgrounds of his fellow students, the members of the film club feasted on all manner of cine and tele tidbits, courtesy of a rented VCR and battered but hardy VHS tapes. Adil loved photography (there was a photography club too), detested sport, excelled at art and remained definitely mediocre in math, his father
'
s principal skill according to Ammi. Once it became apparent that he thought of films and photography as more than a hobby, Ammi conveniently forgot all the justifications for a
‘
practical
'
education she had used to bludgeon me into doing a BSc and calmly accepted her only son
'
s
‘
Sufi soul
'
.

‘
Sufi soul? What happened to “if it doesn
'
t have numbers, it doesn
'
t have a future?”
'

‘
That was different. You were different. It
'
s all about temperament.
'

‘
You keep telling me I
'
m angry and hypersensitive and Adil is calm and rational. Doesn
'
t that mean I
'
m the one with the artistic temperament?
'

‘
No, it means you are the one with the bottomless need for attention and Adil is the one who understands he shouldn
'
t waste his busy mother
'
s time with childish demands.
'

That was true. He didn
'
t, but only because his every need was anticipated and fulfilled before it was even realized. Me, I had to struggle, even if I was the primary breadwinner, the sole breadwinner in fact, till the time Adil graduated and got a job and began contributing as well. If this was the respect the sole breadwinner got, no wonder my father left home one day and never came back. I often felt like doing that myself, and stopped myself only because I knew my mother would never step in to take my place.

My mother
'
s aversion to working outside the house came from more than laziness or buses plagued with lecherous men. She had come, she was fond of telling us, from a moneyed family in Hyderabad. She was raised to be a homemaker. It was the ultimate responsibility, an honour and a privilege; even her education was simply meant to add value to the home she created by making her a better mother and a better informed wife capable of witty repartee and intellectual conversation with her husband. It had always been like that for the women of her family.

And what about me, Ammi, I would think, what about this particular woman of your family?

She was overly fond of endless verbal re-runs of the time the ghaddar Indian government invaded and annexed her beloved state after it expressed a preference for independence.
‘
All the well-off people left,
'
she would say,
‘
all those who could anyway.
'

‘
What do you mean “could?”
'
Adil often fell asleep during her trips into nostalgia, but despite the fact that I knew what she would say before she said it, I used to let Ammi tell her tale as many times as she wanted. At least she wasn
'
t yelling at me.

‘
Those with aged, ailing parents stayed behind to look after them, naturally. And those who had no money or means for the journey stayed too.
'

‘
So only the rich and the orphans left?
'

‘
Not only the rich, you silly girl, wealthy in another sense. The artists, the intellectuals, the highly-educated, people like that cannot abide overlords.
'

I
'
d bite back the comments about local intelligentsia that came to mind and nudge her on.

‘
What about the British then?
'

‘
That was different. Why must you ask so many questions? Anyway, your nana was a very learned man. He raised us himself after your nani passed away, bless her soul. He used to take us to college with him. I would sit in his classroom while he lectured. He was head of the history department, you know. He used to have such interesting visitors in his study sometimes. They would talk about politics, Gandhiji, Jinnah Sahib, it was a pleasure just hearing them talk. I made tea for his guests sometimes, using the burners in the chemistry department.
'

‘
You make good tea.
'

‘
Yes I do. Practice, you know. Your father also loved my tea.
'

It was a pity, I
'
d think, that he didn
'
t love you.

BUS PYAR CHAHIYAY

BACK OF RICKSHAW

~

I
t was hard to love my mother. I loved her, she was my mother, but I frequently wished she wasn
'
t. When I was a kid, I would wish the cleaning woman was my mother. She was kind to me. It was different for Adil, she spoilt him and considered his mere existence a tribute to the perfection and greatness of God. It was like she
'
d sublimated the sense of inferiority that was her entitlement in a patriarchal culture in a sort of giddy worship of the male she
'
d given birth to. Her worth, her self, her daughter, none of it mattered next to the near flawless (to presume utter flawlessness would be to blaspheme of course) male being that had sprung from her loins. It was that which defined her. It was that which sustained her.

I, on the other hand, was a perpetual work in progress, in my mother
'
s eyes; a gaudy, ungainly canvas badly in need of some masterstrokes. Was her disdain for me a manifestation of her self image? Her shaky mental state? Did her phobias and obsessions merit a deeper examination? For a long time I simply thought of her as odd. I should have been smarter.

When my mother ventured out of the house to visit graveyards she would take with her one small brocade purse of saunf, one small water bottle with boiled, cooled water and a diary in which she kept a record of her search for my father
'
s remains. It was an entirely pointless search. The city killed people as fast as it bred them. Car, bus and train accidents, disease, addiction, starvation, murder, suicide, fire, gang wars, police encounters, every day the pavements belched forth more corpses.

The government had given up trying to cope with unclaimed bodies a while ago and turned a blind eye to the graveyards bursting at the seams and the hospital morgues overflowing into hallways. And private enterprise showed no interest in picking up the slack. Independent foundations and welfare trusts began picking up the unidentified remains and keeping them in cold storage, but only for a few days. The turnover was so high, the heat so unforgiving, that the quicker they were buried, the better. Most of the unclaimed bodies used to be buried at the Mewa Shah graveyard, but when the earth began to spit them back up without the catalysts of rain or quake (Karachi is on a fault-line, you know), they began using the Mochko graveyard instead. The procedure was the same for all corpses, victim or aggressor. Wash. Wrap in shroud after photographing face and assigning number. Put in ground. Place the plate bearing number to mark site. Stick photo and number in the album of the forgotten. The same tired maulvi presiding over each burial. Was he paid by the hour or the body, were the photographs Polaroids or part of a roll of film? These were the questions I wanted to ask my mother after each excursion, but never did. My interest, I knew, would somehow make her quest profane.

The Mochko site alone kept my mother occupied for nearly a year. There were so many albums. New ones were constantly being added.There was no system, she would complain, of keeping track of which album she had already been over. Sometimes she would be halfway through an album and she would recognize a face and realize she had already been over that one. She couldn
'
t do more than one album a week, it was too horrible, all those pictures of dead people.

‘
Why don
'
t you go chronologically?
'
Adil had suggested once,
‘
just clear them year by year.
'

‘
But they
'
re not stacked that way,
'
she
'
d reply.
‘
The current ones are in a pile in the front room but the old ones are just jammed together in a store at the back in no particular order. The keeper says if the family hasn
'
t shown up to check in three months, chances are they
'
ll never show up.
'

‘
Well there must be some way you can mark them. Make a dot on the corner or something,
'
I
'
d suggested, wanting to save her some of the exhaustion of this ritual.

‘
How can you say that? You have no respect for the dead.
'

And there was my place in her hierarchy of esteem, right at the bottom beneath the piles of faceless, dead people. We should have been friends, comrades, partners in sufferance but sometimes she seemed to hate me. Was it me, or was it simply the need to oppress someone the way she felt she had been oppressed?

I went through it, and so should you! The classic Pakistani mother-daughter relationship in a nutshell.

CHAL DIL MERAY, CHOR YEH PHERAY, DUNIYA JHOOTI, LOG LOOTERAY

LYRICS OF ALI ZAFAR SONG

~

W
e were stationary again. Had we moved at all since the last stop? If I remained like this, comatose, would I spend all my time thinking about the past? It was logical, it wasn
'
t as if I had much of a future. Then again, had I had one before? And where was God in all of this? I felt I should be thinking of Him more, but then I felt, well, I didn
'
t really want to be thinking about Him and if I pretended to He
'
d know because He was omnipotent and and … God was just confusing. Best left to people able to think only in black and white. Good. Bad. Muslim. Non-Muslim. Lots of lip service, little practical application.