Art kee Aulad

It was 2002, I just checked with Kyla and yes, it was 2002 that we went driving around Islamabad (the city we both grew up in) just taking pictures of things, places, strangenesses, the margallas, trekkers running down the hill and onto margalla road, a strange telephone booth on a tree, several small police station like places in the middle of green belts, foreigners walking their dogs, locals not walking their dogs. We stood at the roundabout in front of the presidency, looked at the constitution avenue and all the buildings, took more pictures, of things in the grass, of the sky and the lamp posts and of whatever we bloody well pleased and no one stopped us, no one even turned to look at us really. And we drove around some more, it was a good day, the weather was Islamabad weather at its loveliest, I don’t remember what month it was, but it was lovely. We sat at Fatima Jinnah fountain  in E-7 and talked and laughed and took some more pictures.

Then three years later, I think, I needed some pictures for a monument design project for a site in the middle of the steps in front of the presidency (where the parade used to happen) and I was just going to go shoot some and I was told that I need an N.O.C. or something akin to a signed, attested, stamped permission letter from someone important or else I could be arrested or they might take my camera away at least. Basically, bad things could happen to me.

Three years later, I guess we’re in 2008 at this point in the story, I can’t so much as drive that close to even the round about in front of the presidency. Now one just turns right or left a signal before the stretch of road where the parade “used to” happen, where there are wide steps on both sides of the road, where earlier people would come and sit in the evenings, where there is a round about that says GIVE WAY in the foreground and the presidency and the parliament house rest all white and somber and serious looking in the background. So we just turn right or left at the signal before all this and look at the barriers and the barbed wire sitting there, saying stay away, looking as ugly as they are meant to be. And I have forgotten what it was like to be able to drive to just wherever. I suppose just like the generation before us have forgotten what it felt like to have low boundary walls in their houses and gates that were open all day long.

And yesterday the Marriott was blown up. And today we’re looking at television footage and cctv footage and images of what seems like hellish scenes from some film. It’s unbelievable. Maham reminded me of when we went there last, it was to pick up sandwiches and use the loo before going for a play at the National Gallery right behind. The oldest hotel in the city, we’ve all attended numerous weddings, exhibitions, dinners, iftaris and other things there and it hit me today, the scale of what has happened there. Kyla said something like a building from my childhood is finished. We drove to somewhere else today and things seemed ok. Then i got home and saw another image of the crater and the devastation suddenly registered.

From the days of driving around taking candid snapshots to this, it took only 6 years and the world changed. Is this how a city becomes a picture of death and destruction right before your eyes. Is this the point from where it just gets worse? Who were the people who died yesterday? Some just went for iftari, some were there just doing their jobs, standing  guard, opening the doors, saying salam, checking people in, shaking hands, making conversation, getting up to leave, walking out, parking a car, closing a door. And it ended in a second.

Both Kyla and I can’t find the pictures we took that day in 2002. I had taken some out and separated them for something then and I put them somewhere where I just can’t find them anymore. And Kyla says she doesn’t know where hers are. I don’t even know why I’m looking for them, what I’m hoping to find. With every bomb blast, it seems that we are nearing some point of no return. For some the devastation has already reached their lives. The ones we love came home safe last night. It seems unearthly, what happened in my city yesterday and its making no sense, the scale of it, the target, no matter what they are saying on tv, in all the discussions and the reviews, it just doesn’t make sense. Or is this just how cities and countries change forever?

Its terrible terrible heat. Two days ago it rained and the air became light and cool and we all got fooled into thinking “Aray! Khizaan kee aamad aamad hai”. And then, the heat. Its the sun. Relentless, ozone ripping bright yellow hot sun rays strike you as you, unsuspectingly walk out the door. They strike you and you run back indoors and you realize that you’re already covered from top to bottom in tiny beads of sweat. One minute longer and it would’ve melted off the first layer of the first layer of your skin.

Islamabad.

August 2008.

Its hot and the weather is all mixed up and it seems like Zardari is going to be our next president.

I’ve returned with bag and baggage (boriaa bistar that is) and its hot and sticky. The weather widget says humidity is 44% here today and temperature average is 37 degrees. Yuck! Apparently its better than Lahore but whatever!

I drove to Islamabad and am not planning to write a motorway travelogue, but man, does it get boring and sleepy. I had two full mugs of real strong espresso, and still needed a 500ml pepsi at the end of it - all this after a full night of sleep before. Sadaf slept most of the way, but then she had two weeks of sleep to catch up on while Bashir chaperoned us on the dangerous drive up to the capital in her car. It was really dangerous, specially at 10 in the morning! Mainly, but, the issue was that we both had to bring our cars home for the summer, hence the twisted arrangement. However, I am thankful for I am now home with everything, car, books, drawings and clothes.

Its lizard galore in the house, they seem to be enjoying the weather enough to mate around and give babies like nobody’s business. The ants are super busy also, one just bit me. Blood is the new summer beverage it seems. Faaez is taking revenge for us all however, he follows them around and squishes them on every opportunity. Load shedding is happening very on schedule, 6 hours per day, we have UPS so life goes on. The internet is working right now on it along with one fan in the room. The neighbours next door seem to be having much more difficulty dealing with the heat as is evident from the combined noise of their generator and an AC on the wall adjacent to this room in our house.

So far thats it. Its sleepy summer in the sleepy city. The weather in the house is very erratic however and I will not get into descriptions of that at all. All I will say is that at the moment its somewhere around 25 degrees average, not too hot and not too cold. Hoping it gets breezy and pleasant enough to make pakoray shakoray soon, I’m sitting in the drawing room connected to Wateen cable internet since I don’t have a connection in my room yet, watching the comings and goings from the main door of the Abbasi household. Waiting.

There was a dust storm this morning and I drove through the roads of Lahore at 7, traffic was already getting thick with the first of the day’s first errand-runners and there I was, lone ranger, driving through the dust storm, the potential “storm” that was “looming” over the city. Of course we take ourselves too seriously too much of the time. And so I got home very quickly and hid inside as leaves and dust made their way into the house from under doorways and mesh windows. Then the sun came out and the storm didn’t seem so threatening anymore. It was just another day and I was couped up at home while the rest of the world ran about their business.

There was a wedding last weekend. There was a show the weekend before that. I trekked across the border for the show and trekked back for the wedding. Well, I didn’t trek, I flew. Three very fast weeks flew by and now seem like three months. I had visas and they asked me only at the custom’s counter here why I was going and it was not an official question, some woman in red, with her dubatta on her head asked me as she ran her fingers through my luggage. Other than that, no questions asked. Exit stamp. Entry stamp. Welcome to India. Actually they didn’t even say that. One man looked up from his glasses that rested on the bridge of his nose, another looked down from his and scribbled something on my tripple-copy-carbon-paper layered disembarkation form and said go go. And I walked fast fast to fall into the arms of my beloved: Delhi, India. On my way out I also bought an Indian sim in my name and gave some polite airtel strangers one copy of my passport and one passport sized picture of me, red shirt and white dubatta, hair open and ears showing on a white background.

One night in agressive, scowling and Lahore like Delhi and then another flight, Southbound, first time for me. It was a three hour long flight with bad food. A guy sitting to the left of us, hogging the window seat that we had requested and hadn’t gotten, spent the three hours working on the rubiks cube he had brought along. He didn’t finish it. I watched his hands, catching the light from the window, in the middle of long drawn and long overdue conversations with Anup. They were complex but really nice conversations as was the visual of the hands struggling with the yellow, red, green squares. Thankfully it was real life and not a movie where the visual would be a very obvious metaphor to the audio of the conversation. So it was only God being cheesy, not the director.

Kochi was green, a green that was so green I felt it was penetrating my pupils and settling somewhere in the recesses of my small intestine. And we drove into a drizzled city in a silver maruti, driven by mine truly.

Lahore. This is my third city.

I grew up in Islamabad but I always felt like it was a place that belonged to someone else and I was just brought there. The funny thing is that I was brought there when I was a week old. That’s when the family moved from Pindi to Islamabad. I never realized that the history of a family, however recent, can be so heavy, till recently during some really long and difficult discussions with my parents, regarding something else entirely. I’m not implying that being brought from Pindi to Islamabad when I was a week old has anything to do with my feeling alienated from the place I grew up in and didn’t leave till I was 19. The point about family history was just a random thought that appeared just now. But anyhow, about Islamabad, growing up, I always felt that I was outside, looking in. Part of it might be that I have lived a very protected life where every place you go to is planned, everything you see, accounted for in relation to something that has been planned for you. For example, I never went exploring. The street that we lived in, in the first house that I have clear memories of, led to a million places. It wasn’t a street that ended. It continued all the way to the other side of the sector and it had all these other streets that stemmed from it. The closest stem was a street that cut accross it, three houses from us. To the left, this ended in a forest and to the right it ended into a wall, with a little gali that led to the E-7 market. That’s how far I ever went, and never alone. It was always with Bhai, at least he would be there even if no one else was. We ofcourse wouldn’t dare to go into the forest, it was dense and dark and deep. If I go now to check this, I’m sure I’ll find out that it wasn’t very deep at all. But of course as a child, we were told not to go there for these reasons and I believed all of them. There weren’t any girls in the street except one, and she was older so we couldn’t be friends. Other than that, every house had boys only so Bhai used to have lots of company. What I mostly remember is them playing cricket in the stem to the right, the street that ended in a wall, or running around or bicycling all over.

Bhai was too busy playing with his friends, so I learned how to ride the bicycle on my own once I received an “MX” from my Dadi’s brother. I was upset with Bhai but also proud of myself. Then I would challenge everyone to race down the slope (cousins who would come to visit) and once I was winning but was in such high speed turning into the house, that I crashed into the side of the gate instead. That hurt.

Now Islamabad is a grid I understand and love to drive through. Straight roads, too many of them, so you can get from point A to B through so many parallel roads that it begins to feel absurd. Now they have made more roads that cross all the old roads perpendicularly. So at any given point, if you change your mind going on one, you can cut across to another one parallel to it, so that you are winding your way across the city, in rectangular turns. Why would one do that though could be a question to ask. Well one answer would be to vary your distance from the Margallas. The other could be simply, “Let’s check out the new road man!”. For me, at times, it’s simply that I’m here for a day and I’d like to spend some time “in” the city, even if just driving through it.

I hated Karachi when I got there, it made no sense to me. Six months down however, I was hooked. It was the first time I fell in love with a place. For the next six years, every time I went to Islamabad, I hated everything about it. I had never fit it and suddenly it made sense why. I hated the people, the pace, the closeness, the close-mindedness, the grass, the trees, the grid..everything! And the only thing that made me leave Karachi was the idea that I was going to be back in six months.

But I stayed. I stayed in Islamabad for two years and slowly I left Karachi where it was, in Karachi. And slowly I grew fond of Islamabad, I got to know it for the first time and I realized that I cannot get away from the fact that this is home. I wasn’t planning to leave but then something came up in an entirely new city, Lahore.

I hated Lahore when I got here. Karachi had still been familiar, it was the place that cousins lived in, it was seaview and North Nazimabad, it was PECHS, St. Joseph’s and St. Michaels, it was Snoopy’s and Kaarsaaz, even before I got there. But Lahore, Lahore was one big lump of city, full of gaddha garis and Nawaz Sharif. I knew nothing else about it. I didn’t want to know anything about it. And then suddenly I was here and I was forced to try and understand it.

I used to bore Huma with my stories of “what I saw in Lahore today from the back of a rickshaw” and she used to say, “Write these things down, its all still new to you and you’re observing with very different eyes, you’re seeing a lot more than people who live here”. Wise Huma. Lazy and disbelieving me. Of course I didn’t write them down. I wrote a few posts about it, so that’s still there and I do discover things in those writings, that I didn’t remember otherwise. The “eye fascinated with newness” did disappear, Lahore did become too familiar, till very recently I started “seeing” things again. I came back after 7 months of staying away. Then, I’ve also now started going to the campus that’s out of the city, so it’s me venturing out in a direction every day that I would go to maybe, twice in a year or thrice at the most. And new things are appearing.

Its been ten years now since I started living this nomadic existence, however limited my nomadic life may have been to just the three major cities of the country. But its amounting to something or its giving rise to something in my mind, its coming together as some ideas that at the moment are confused but also very exciting. I’m more interested than ever in how cities live and breathe and grow and how people survive them and survive in them, how they make them and are made by them, but I’m also growing more and more aware of how this network of existence is impossible to trace or map out and that is what is most rich with fantasy and all kinds of unknown possibilities.

I left from David’s place at 4:00 pm. The streets are busy, half-holiday like. I slowly drove home. Imran was saying that what has happened because of these results is that people must’ve gotten some relief, some reassurance that their say has some value, this empowers the people somewhat.

Its strange this thing called Democracy.

It is February 2008, the setting is modern day Pakistan. I find myself in the middle of strangely surreal events.We are sitting here celebrating the appearance of PML-N and PPP as two definite majorities in the National Assembly! We are actually rejoicing and feeling hopeful again about the fact that the two parties who played musical chairs from 1988 to 1999 with National interests, come back into very obvious, shared power. We are distracted because we are deliriously happy that the PML-Q is facing an obvious safaaya (wipe-out) (as Geo puts it) and it seems that the elections were, all in all, not rigged.

At the same time, the MMA has lost in the NWFP to the ANP. That is something else to celebrate.

The results are still coming in, its 4 at night and various channels are showing discussions side by side, about what this could all mean. Some are even touching upon the next big shark of a dilemma,”What now?” War on Terror and Washington are two W’s that are being repeated over and over again.

It was a terrible year, 2007. A lot of people lost their lives, for no good reason. This is a visibly battered and bruised country now. Its unsafe apparently so that not many diplomats are living here. Yet there are 700 international journalists in Islamabad alone at the moment. There are observers too. There are mediators and other such people who have been called in as well. So basically, everyone’s watching.

Tomorrow morning we will find out what the repercussions will be really. The streets were empty at 9 30 tonight, because no one knew how this day was going to be, how it would start and how it would end. One still can’t imagine what Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday will be like. We are couped up in our homes, spending these days like any other National holiday - a whole series of Sundays. So tomorrow morning will also be one of sleeping in and a late, slow breakfast while final results are discussed over newspaper and whatever is being said on TV.

Till then, (and as the newsman on Geo said before leaving us tonight) mujhay aur Sitara ko ijaazat deejiyay.

Allah Hafiz.

I returned from Karachi yesterday. It’s raining again. Tonight its raining here and there.

I reached Karachi on the 26th and was happily doing my stuff, full-speed Karachi style. I was on my third task of the day (meeting three dear friends for a late lunch) when suddenly everyone’s phones went mad. Driving down Saba Avenue we got one call saying there had been a blast in a PPP rally in Hyderabad, an attack of course on Benazir Bhutto. No other details. The next call came by Khayaban-e-Nishat - Benazir Bhutto killed, in Pindi, outside Liaqat Bagh. Everyone knew within minutes. The city went mad. I was close to home but Marium was far away from home in Nazimabad, Naveed far far away from Shah Faisal Colony and the people in the office next door, were sitting there wondering how they were going to get to Gulshan, Drig Road and Sadr. Within five minutes of the news breaking, Karachi was out on the roads, not to express shock and anger but to, simply, get home. Bhai and Amna left from Mariam’s nikah immediately, only to be stuck on Shahra-e-Faisal for the next 5 hours, along with Sharlene in her own car, Sara Khalid in theirs and Afsheen and her husband in theirs, all at various spots. Marium’s dad was stuck somewhere else. Soon enough, mobile signals started losing strength and we started hearing news of riots starting all over the city. One call informed us they were shooting at cars on Shahrae-Faisal, apart from burning tyres and breaking windows etc. etc. Panicked, I called Amna who said they were still on Shahra-e-Faisal and near the end of it. It took them almost two hours after that. Marium decided to stay at Kanwal’s, Naveed and I headed to Aysha’s and Faizan went home. We took a good half hour to go to our respective decided safe-houses for the night, each being 5 minutes from where we were. The streets were dark, the few cars that were around were driving with caution and Umer opened the gate for us as we reached to take us in. Aysha had reached from her office already, she had seen the signal at Shamsheer burn, tyres being thrown across the road next to the Standard Chartered building on Hafiz. We all sat there tense till our respective loved ones reached home. Bhai and Amna reached home at 1 o’clock after two stops, one at chacha’s and one at Sara’s since the last turn to Amna’s brought them face to face with the mob breaking car windows and setting them on fire, so they had to turn. They needed to get home because the baby was with Amna’s mother. The night was silent after 12 30. They made the last two minute journey with their hearts in their mouths, everything was absolutely dark and there was glass lying everywhere on the road.

They next four days were spent at home. Nobody got out, only the ones who’s job it was to burn and break more things, buildings, cars, anything and everything they wanted to burn and break. We all watched on TV, heard about other cities being broken and burned. The international media went nuts. Today I read an article in the Economist on the most dangerour place in the world: Pakistan. On day 5, January 1st, we were all out, doing our thing. The streets were the same, the businesses were back in business, the stock market had risen again, the petrol pumps were pumping gas, the doctors were doctoring again, it all seemed normal, as if nothing had happened, except once in a while you’d see a burnt building, a burnt car, some broken glass, that would make you look up at the building with the hole in the window. Battered and bruised. Once again, poor Karachi took the worst beating.

(to be continued)

“Its going to be alright”, she said for the hundredth time.

The rain.
It started last night and its been raining since.

Islamabad.
It’s Fajr.
Rain sounds.
Maulvi songs.
Morning.
Thank god.