shaa'er ka jashn e salgirah hai, sharaab la
mansab, khitaab, rutba, unhein kya nahi mila
bas naqs hai toh itna k mamdooh ne koi
misraa kisi kitaab k shayaa'n nahi likha
And now, a draft of my thank you note to the Daily Times:
"Dear DT! If your subs are going to go fuckin' nuts on editing a submission, at least pass their masterwork by the original author before publishing it for the whole fucking world to see. You've defaced this piece beyond recognition. Everybody who's reading this is thinking this Multani boy doesn't even know jack about basic tenses, much less stringing together a decent sentence. It's moolah ffs, not mullah!! Moolah means money. How does mullah even make sense where your bachas have inserted it? Piece-of-shit editing! And screw you for ruining my most heartfelt rant yet. Love."
Salute to my forebears who acquitted themselves with honor, nobility and an uncompromising respect for humanity in a time when the entire world seemed to be going to hell. Dada, Nana Jan, Nano, Addi Amma, thank you for teaching me what it means to be a decent human being, above everything else.
Amid the
swirling horrors of an unabated spate of child abductions, child pornography
rings, incessant child sexual abuse, rape and murder, and numerous other
excesses against society’s most defenseless members a mere fraction of which
get reported, one would imagine that the country would be preparing to go to
war in the protection of its future, i.e. our children.[1]
Parliament (and provincial assemblies) would be scrambling to debate the merits
of current legislation, pushing through more effective laws and holding the
state apparatus to account on implementation. The media, with their monopoly on
national opinion-making, would bring their massive influence to bear on making
the plight of the child the no. 1 burning issue in the public’s collective attention.
Society at large would engage in mass soul-searching to identify and root out
the causes, circumstances and societal contradictions that pave the way for our
children being brutalized, physically and psychologically.
What we have
instead is a spokesperson for the party-in-power appearing on prime-time TV to
correct facts: only 132, and not 700 or more, children are missing without a
trace from Lahore since the beginning of 2016. And that somehow makes
everything better. Senior police officials conclude that most missing children
are runaways from home and not really kidnapped. But surely, there are at least
a few that have been abducted in broad daylight without as much as a ransom
call or note. There are rumors of an organ-harvesting network in operation. If
that is true, it is surely being abetted by qualified medical workers and
customs and police officials. What is the breadth and intensity of the
investigation if the default setting is: he ran away from home? If the glorious
guardians of our national consciousness, the Parliament and other law-making
bodies, cannot convene to consider, e.g. how a Criminal Procedure Code given by
our colonial masters in 1898 is still valid today; why laws made for Child
Protection in recent years have remained largely toothless especially in the
context of federal legislation and provincial execution; why children-specific
bills are needed based on scientific studies investigating whether things like
rape, emotional and physical trauma and being exploited have different
long-term physical and psychological impact on adults and children; and, how do
you even define a child in this class-, sect- and caste-crazed society, let
them at least sit together and decide upon an arbitrary national threshold of
tolerability for abducted/raped children. 132 is good enough. Heaven forbid if
it were ever to be 133.[2][3][4]
The apathy
of our power elites (media included) towards anything other than the high-drama
of political power-play is nothing out of the ordinary. While the elite
unabashedly exhibits callous disregard, the people seem to suffer from mass
denial bordering on self-delusion. A standard refrain is, especially in the
context of child sexual abuse, that when the phenomenon is rampant in
‘developed’ Western nations, how can Pakistan be expected to eradicate it. This
line especially hurts when coming from good-hearted, well-meaning people. My
only question to such people is, isn’t the decadent West only just materially advantaged
while we, as a nation, have always prided ourselves on being more spiritually
and morally upright? Isn’t the basic premise for our entire national existence
the religion of Islam? Nothing is more symptomatic of a diseased soul than
raping, seducing, or otherwise molesting, a child. Shouldn’t our superior
spiritual strengths have ensured the minimal incidence of such vile crimes in
our society vis-Ã -vis the immoral West that is going to hell anyway despite its
material advantages? Or should we admit that there is also a disease within our
souls that begs to be treated with all the scientific and spiritual remedies
available to us in the 21st century.
For
perspective, my reading of history leads me to believe, that pederasty, i.e. a
sexual preference for young boys, is not as much a legacy of our Hindu
heritage, blamed as it is for most social ills in present-day Pakistan, as it
is of our cherished Arabian-Persian-Turkic tradition. While ancient Hinduism is
rife with the abominable tradition of child marriages, objective accounts from
Mughal, Ottoman, Abbasid and Persian courts and the life-stories of notable
rulers, warriors, poets and even revered saints point to a vast history of
pederasty in this region. Countries like Afghanistan are also still grappling
with the ramifications of this widely and openly practiced phenomenon, locally
known as ‘Bacha Baazi’.[5][6]
Interestingly, boys who have been thus exploited are culturally expected to go
on and inflict the same upon others as they themselves grow into adulthood.
This forms a vicious chain that is unending across generations. From a six-year
old boy hanging dead after being sodomized on the second floor of a mosque to
the largely-forgotten depredations of the Kasur and Swat child pornography
rings to the hastily-hushed and hardly ever investigated rumors surrounding our
religious seminaries to the regular nuggets on the periphery of the daily news,
it is about time we wake up to this hideous reality, this inherited malaise
that afflicts us. This is not to say, of course, that girl-children are any safer
in Pakistan. Data suggests that no child-type is safe from sexual predators in
our country; rich or poor, boy or girl, disabled or orphaned, housed or
homeless.[7]
In 2007,
Iranian President Ahmedinejad made an international mockery of himself by
claiming that there were no homosexuals in his country.[8]
By turning a blind eye to how children in Pakistan are suffering just because
the fire has not come home yet, many of us stand to make similar fools of
ourselves, especially in the realms of conscience. Not everything from Javed
Iqbal, serial rapist and murderer of over a 100 children in Lahore in the 90s,
to the current, uninhibited row of unexplained kidnappings, is an anomalous
stain on the beautiful face of our country that will go away by itself. Only
after mustering the courage to recognize the issue can the urgently needed conversation
on how elitism, socioeconomic stratification, wage disequilibrium, systemic
governance failures, notions of shame and honor, clerical irresponsibility, broken
and displaced families, absence of a social security net, dysfunctional gender
attitudes and educational systems, and the lack of a sense of collective social
responsibility towards children, all feed into leaving our children so
vulnerable to exploitation.[9]
And this conversation needs to occur at all echelons of society. Comparisons
with other countries or arguing over incidence figures represent a defeatist,
self-serving policy that undermines an unambiguous, absolutely uncompromising
attitude that any self-respecting people should have as to the protection of
their children.
We, in the
present-day, are custodians of our future in the form children that we are
bringing up. Children are the weakest members of society, needing an external
voice to articulate their needs and protect their human rights as they lack the
intellectual and physical capacity themselves. No code of human decency,
religious or secular, looks kindly upon a people who stand in brazen disregard
of the plight of the weakest among them. More poignantly, no society that
remains in denial about gross injustice within itself has any right to harbor
any self-gratifying notions of grandeur, material or spiritual.
There is something sweet about firsts that never fails to charm. I remember when I was turning this paper in for publication, I thought I'd be elated when it finally got carried. Strangely, now that the moment has arrived, all I feel is this quiet satisfaction. And the relief that now I can safely forget about it after lunch!!
So, without much ado, my first ever formal publication as carried in the Summer 2016 edition of the Heinz Journal of Public Policy:
Shades of hesitant conversation, and fiery eyes, angry, yet
sad: I don’t want to lose sight of these visions in the dark night of penitence
that has come upon me. So listen, listen to this feeble voice, before the
vulgar waves of the oceans separating us drown it out. My life begins in death;
wailing, sobbing, trying to find for itself a face in a mirror of horrors. Radiant
visages, muted, motionless, lie concealed in their unreachable homes of impenetrable
darkness, shimmering away their eternal grace. I try and steal their glow, just
to find my own way. But I do not always succeed. I stumble, I fall. Silver-tongued
wraiths appear to me in friendly forms, leading me astray with dishonest
enticements. I follow blindly; I let greed and desire be my guides. Until I
reach a crossroads where all the world is hostile to me, and I myself am my
biggest enemy. I fight these demons, individually, and all at once. I fight
them with all I’ve got. I fight them until my sanity dangles by a hair from the
edge of oblivion. It is a bitter fight; it is an unending fight. It is a fight
that leads me to unfamiliar places; places where nobody recognizes me, and I
struggle to recognize myself. It becomes a strange imprisonment where polite
nods and soft smiles define the parameters of my solitary confinement; it
becomes a strange exile where amidst the cacophony of a thousand voices, there
is every opportunity to carry on uninterrupted conversations with the self. I
crane my neck above the crowd to try and steal a peek at the familiarity left
so far behind. I see brilliant flashes of color and light; I see two souls
fusing; I hear the music of joyful celebration. But the odes to love and
happiness that the flute sings reach my ears only as tunes of lament and
mourning. They evoke times that were simple, and magical; unchanging and
absolute. Times when we did not have to scour a thousand strangers’ faces in hopes
of finding a faint glimmer of lost familiarity. But remember, you: the
custodian of my blood; the keeper of my soul. I will come back for it; I will
come back to them. And you. And you will have the power to decide whether when
I look my soul in the eyes again, it stares back at me with a stranger’s empty
gaze, or embraces me with the warm ease of a long lost friend. Be just, you; be
merciful. A weary pilgrim come home deserves not to be castaway as driftwood on
the seas of self-loathing and regret; a broken man deserves a chance to be one
again with fragments of his soul.
It’s like this. You go get something, seemingly out of the
ordinary, actually, not so much, and the world trips over itself showering
praise. Amid the thunderous applause however, you yourself do not know what
to make of your achievement. So you flounder about, doing one thing, then
another, recklessly exercising the only tangible element of your personality: a
bloated ego. And one day, without even knowing it, you fall in line, a line of
sheep more like, mindlessly trying to do what every Bum, Dick and Hairy in the
world is doing. But then you fail, completely, miserably, falling flat and hard
on your face. And you just can’t deal with that. So it becomes a silent
obsession, gnawing away at the back of your mind as your body feigns patrician
swagger, eating away at your soul as it sinks deeper in the quicksand of its
own poverty. Your ego becomes the stone wall behind which you yourself are the
guinea pig in the experiments of your own psyche.
In time, you find distractions. You drown yourself in indulgences that often
have your entrails hanging at your mouth. You tumble down culs-de-sac of love,
always mistaking the heat of the moment for a promise of a lifetime. You delude
yourself into believing that you, of all people, have a handle on the Truth.
And despite all that, the fixation remains, biding its time in some remote
corner of your brain, awaiting the perfect moment to grasp you by the nape. And
then it happens. You are weighed, measured and found wanting in comparison to
wild, alien enticements. Your sun-burnt patch of irises does not match up to
the red and the gold of the other side. And just like that, a dormant ambition
becomes a burning need screaming for gratification.
You align your entire existence in aid of your self-centered motives. You let
life take its course, ordained by higher powers, acquiesced in by you. But
secretly, you load every dice in your favor. In the public eye, you are the
epitome of blissful sangfroid. In private, you’re a madman with a grudge, an
insecure freak dying to prove yourself. You work hard, you plug all holes, and
this time, you don’t take yourself prisoner. And you have it. The world once
again is up in clamorous applause. Accolades filter in from far and wide. You
are king of your world one more time. And just as before, there is emptiness,
cluelessness, but mixed with unconscionable amounts of guilt. For in your
journey from crest to trough to crest again on the sinusoid that is your life, you
have created nodes, old and new, that are the basis of all that you are. Tears
glisten in some innocent, unsuspecting eyes and endear all the world’s tears to
you. Silenced voices lecture you on sanity, and you hear them better than the
noise around you. Faces forever interred in darkness are your beacons to the
meaning of life, and you prefer those visages to the light of day.
Hindsight constructs a reality that is impossible to disengage from. The Truth
now appears different from what it used to be. The Truth now redefines your conceptions
of priority. The Truth demands confrontation with all your well-concealed
dualities. The Truth resides in a life-force far greater, far more valuable
than yours. The Truth, however, retains its surreal volatility. The Truth, nonetheless,
must be listened to.
It was a happy place; happiness built on the foundations of unconditional
faith and kept by the power of love. It was a place where the heart learned the
wisdom of love, and the mind romanced every shade of the truth; where the timid
soul borrowed courage from the legends of the greats, and the wayward wits
sought direction in showers of dazzling light. It was a place where music
permeated the very being, and like the cheeky bard at a Khan’s court, the
spirit sang merrily without fear or regret; a place where color infused life’s
every beautiful face, and the miraculous downpours of the monsoon made the
bright shine brighter. It was a monument to eternal love, white, like the
purity that reigned at its core, and red, like the smoldering embers of separation
which kindled this love. It was where the wounded heart returned for solace and
sanctuary, and all that was ever broken could be mended with sagely words exchanged
softly, intimately; where the habit of giving was extolled over the pious
virtue of remaining constantly expectant; where the summer was the coolest time
of the year, and the winter beneficent in the warm glow of companionship. It
was a place that stood out like an island of serenity amidst a swollen river of
noxious decay.
He was the unquestioned master of this unlikely bastion of blessed living. He
had built it up from naught, snatching away his birthright from the fangs of
injustice. Upon his command the spring spread its cornucopia of color; the
furrow of his regal brow deterred autumn from stealing away the greenery of his
fief. His code of honor defined life; his sense of order set the plane of
existence. He spoke with the cumulative wisdom of ages; he laughed that
infectious laugh which never failed to fill his universe with mirth. He spoke
and the world was mesmerized; he spoke and the most subdued of listeners got swept
away in conversation. But carefully, respectfully, for no one high or low dared
raise their voice to his. For his was a voice, like a clap of thunder;
resonating across time through the halls and chambers; echoing far beyond the
perimeters of his keep. That voice preserved the labors of his love; that voice
daunted the ugliness from breaking in. Once alone was there a breach. Feeble in
body, yet steadfast in spirit, he stood like a colossus in the face of a pygmy
assault, compelling the enemy to retreat with shame in the eye and muffled
apology on the tongue. That was to be his last stand. Not long after, that
majestic voice would only be heard in the echoes it left behind.
His strength was not his alone. It was derived from a quieter, subtler presence
behind him; a slender hand the touch of which was the sturdiness of his back,
even in that final moment of truth; a soft voice that spoke to his limitless
reserves of courage. She was the burning beacon of progress that lit up a
firmament darkened by the absence of a single guiding light, and the suffocating
shadow of small-mindedness and petty intrigue. She emerged on the horizon like a
lone star that leads lost travelers in the wilderness of self-deceit to the
oases of enlightenment. She was the force behind his passion to invent a whole
new system of circumstances. Hers was the measured speech, the voice of reason,
which tempered his fiery spirit; hers was the calm intellect, the moral
compass, channeling the authority that emanated from him into charting new
courses. She was his perfect complement, in a way that only two people from two
different worlds can be. She upheld the faith and became equal partners in the
lifelong task of creating wonders and keeping malevolence at bay. If he was the
sculptor of an alternate destiny, hers was the image that it was to be cast in.
After his towering persona was consigned to the fading canvasses of memory, she
held their world together with a forcefulness that was undoubtedly his bequest,
and an arsenal of love that was entirely her very own. She, with her inimitable
clarity of vision, always differentiating between the material and the
spiritual, cherished valuing the soul over pricing its utility. As the
years went by and enervation restricted movement, her place of genuflection to
faith was the center of gravity around which all those specks of dust whom she
had given life, orbited. She welcomed every new pulse of life with a kind of
spontaneous joy that it would not probably deserve for many more years still.
Her face lit up at the sight of every young tot, someone who would never really
know her and who would only piece together her life, and his, from what his
father or mother tell him; and yet, someone who would be living proof of her triumph.
And when the time came for her to return to dust, she wore that same celestial
light on her face that would overwhelm the darkness in her final abode, just as
it had done in the realm of the mundane.
Now, one might ask, what of that world that they had so painstakingly created?
That haven of peace and happiness? For all one can say, measuring the strength
of love like that is actually a question for posterity. Right now, every silent,
lifeless object, every inch of stone and concrete, every piece of wood and
cloth, every plant and every tree, screams out the name of a life that used to
be. And for those within earshot, that just means a lot of secret tears in
solitary nooks and darkened crannies, where many more memories lie in wait.
