Tunnel Vision (10 page)

My car could be a candidate, I reflected. It could be up there with all the other mangled and twisted metal. I was really quite excited about my potential brush with fame.

I decided I liked thinking about fame and victory and destruction better than I liked thinking about my accident or my father. Or Saad. Actually, I wasn
'
t sure I wanted to be thinking at all. Maybe praying would be a better idea.When had I last prayed? I looked to the single spire rising from FTC
'
s domed mosque for inspiration, but all I drew from it was fodder for my patriarchal architecture theory. Do Talwar.Teen Talwar. Tower. Phallic symbols enshrined as public monuments, concrete and metal testimonials to the quest for a permanent erection so many of our men seemed sworn to. If I did pray after all, I was going to pray for an end to this worship of trivial male ideals.

Who was I kidding? Dying would be the only way I could conceivably escape from the reality of being a woman here.We did most of the work at home, excelled at whatever professions we entered, consistently outperformed men in most academic fields where we were
‘
allowed
'
participation, yet my gender was as casually dismissed as a servant after a massage.

The irony was, I had never been closer to the local female ideal as I was now. In a coma, reduced to the sum of my biological functions, with none of the inconvenient audible interference of the brain or the ego, I was THE perfect woman. Pretty. Pliant. Docile. Accepting. If I could figure out a way to occasionally move my limbs and crack a grimace of a smile they
'
re be a line of men stretching around the block eager to marry me.

Why did every avenue of thought I explored end in a morass of negativity? I wondered what had happened to the burn victim. Her husband had probably set her on fire, with the help of his mother. One held her down as the other poured, watched side by side as she burned. Dangerous people, these mummy
'
s boys. And of course, these mummys. Insane, almost. Or in my case, really. But I didn
'
t want to think about my mother
'
s mental health or lack thereof at that point.

The ambulance moved forward, or rather inched forward. Traffic on Karachi
'
s busiest thoroughfares was heavy at all times except late night or iftar time in Ramadan, and we seemed to have hit rush hour. The siren wailed above us, and I wished again the driver would turn it off. What if someone got irritated and decided to set fire to the ambulance? Like the time during the last anti-war protest when the crowd got particularly feisty and set fire to ambulances and then pelted the incoming fire trucks with stones? We didn
'
t have the courage to pelt the motorcades that condemned us to wilting in the hot summer sun, but we had no issues picking on the people who were trying to help us. It was the lead in the air, I decided, and in the water. It had made us all crazy. Crazy.

I chose to ignore the fact that Ammi appeared to have been certifiably insane way before she imbibed enough Karachi water or breathed enough of its air for the city to accept the blame like the passive whore that it was.

Did I already mention that I
'
ve never met a whore?

ALLAH AAP KI JORI SALAMAT RAKHAY

POPULAR BEGGAR LINE

~

E
very Saturday my mother did the rounds of graveyards. Since the early nineties, she had visited every graveyard in Karachi several times over, except of course the Parsi tower of the dead. Or was it tower of silence? I had no clue.Who cared about the Parsis since they
'
d all moved abroad and stopped investing in quality education and healthcare for the general populace? Not I. Give me an Agha Khani any day, they were just so … so … polite. I
'
d heard a rumour once that the Parsi colony used to have a sign that said
‘
no dogs or Muslims
'
. Good for them.

She
'
d even done a round of Gora Qabristan, right next to where I had had my accident. Armed only with a photograph of my father, his name, and the will to find him, she must have spoken to every burier of bones and guardian of the dead in the city. Her husband, she became convinced after the umpteenth fruitless cemetery visit, had been murdered and his body dumped.

The police did little to discourage her interpretation and could offer no plausible alternative. One particularly heinous sub-inspector rewarded us for fifteen cups of extra sweet tea and a fifty-rupee note per visit by suggesting my father
'
s corpse probably rotted in an unmarked grave. Devoid of any form of identification, when and if his remains had been discovered they would have been handed over to some foundation or the other for burial. They were the ones who did that sort of thing.

When one cemetery visit turned into two and two into three and it eventually became apparent that Ammi had become a cemetery addict, I was embarrassed. Embarrassed by her need to know. It seemed vulgar, obscene, uncalled for. Why couldn
'
t she just accept and mourn like a normal person? It was months before I could think about her behaviour without getting agitated, and years before I could talk about it with anyone other than Adil. Since I
'
d spent most of my life watching people react with disapproval to who I was, I was miserly with information. That changed a little when Saad came along.

It came up in a roundabout way. Saad and I had fallen into the rhythm of long drives after work, spending the little time we had before I had to be home chatting about society, politics, this and that, all the silly things two emotionally constipated people used to disguise how they actually felt about each other. That day we
'
d been talking about Edhi.

‘
If Edhi stood for election, he
'
d be a shoo in,
'
Saad had said as part of his proposal that in the next election, if there ever was one, everyone who
'
d ever stood for parliament in the past be automatically disqualified and incentive to run offered to anyone who
'
d ever displayed leadership qualities in tandem with an utter and complete lack of ambition.We enjoyed talking about politics. We inevitably disagreed. Disagreement was exciting. It made us tingly, aware of each other in a strangely physical way. Maybe it wasn
'
t so strange or unfamiliar to Saad, he
'
d been to college abroad after all, and we all knew what gori women were like, but it was definitely strange to me. I hid my response behind argument, as I usually did.

‘
He would never stand for elections,
'
I
'
d replied,
‘
he
'
s a humanitarian. Why would he enter that one arena that will finally make him lose all respect for humanity?
'

‘
You see it as respect?
'
Saad mused,
‘
Don
'
t you think it
'
s just a little contemptuous, the way his foundation has almost become a secret government? Always trying to fix our problems, help people, do the real government
'
s job so we never have quite enough reason to get mad to the point where we demand change.
'

‘
Now that I think about it, you
'
re right. How dare he try to fix our problems and help people? Ignorant, mean Edhi. They should send him to one of his houses immediately.
'
Saad
'
s theory seemed to have a couple of holes in it.

‘
I wasn
'
t being flippant,
'
he looked wounded,
‘
I just really wonder whether there will truly be any deep social change till we have a state of complete anarchy and people finally say “enough, good governance now or else
'
'
!
'

‘
You seem to have missed one little point when formalizing your analysis, which is perfectly understandable since you live in the bubble of the privileged.
'

‘
What
'
s that Ms Oh-I-Don
'
t-Live-In-Defence?
'
Saad was nettled by my suggestion that he was one of the idle rich.
‘
How can you say that?
'
he would moan,
‘
you of all people know how hard I have to work.
'

And he did have to work quite hard, but I had struggled enough to enjoy his discomfiture. At the end of the day, he had never had to worry about utility bills, providing for his aged mother and ensuring his younger brother had the best education possible. We
'
d never had to significantly worry about housing because when my parents had moved from India, Nana had sent them the money he had got from selling his property there to buy the house in D
'
Silva Town, but that was really the only thing we
'
d never had to worry significantly about. And sometimes when the neighbourhood flared into ethnic conflict, we had to up the housing worry from not-significant to very-significant. Saad had always had options, a fact I was all too happy to remind him of.

‘
You
'
ve missed the fact that there is near total anarchy. I know you know that Karachi is a lawless place, but I don
'
t think you
'
ve really experienced it. No one had to teach you that if you get burgled, don
'
t waste your time on the police because they probably did it. If someone sends you a book from abroad, the post office will sell it and you
'
ll see it at the Frere Hall book bazaar. Remember, KESC is your enemy, and never, ever stop the car for that poor kid with the spilled fruit or the mother with the heavily bandaged baby because it
'
s a scam and the red blood is actually Mercurochrome.
'

He didn
'
t respond. Was it possible that I was boring him? I asked if I was, hating myself for asking.

‘
No, you
'
re not boring me, I
'
m just not sure this is worth talking about.
'

‘
I wasn
'
t aware there was a standard of conversation to which we had to conform. I thought we just liked to talk to each other. Is there a helpful pamphlet I can read to get a better idea of these rules, or should I just wing it?
'

‘
You really shouldn
'
t take everything so personally, you know, what
'
s the point of getting so worked up about the little things?
'

‘
So worked up? It
'
s not as if I was yelling.
'

‘
You are now,
'
he said primly.

Sometimes I wanted to slap his well-bred, hair-free face. Shake him out of what I considered complacency and he considered peace of mind. Drag him down to where the rest of us thrashed in pointless exertion against crooked games. I retreated into silence.

‘
So Najma and Babar really liked you.
'
We
'
d had dinner with his friends the night before.
‘
They think you
'
re interesting.
'

What an interesting word; interesting. What did it mean? Najma and Babar were old friends of his. Throughout dinner, Chinese at the Avari since I refused to waste another fifteen minutes battling traffic on the way to Zamzama, I
'
d felt they were judging me, leaning into me with their bland, stylized personas, as if they couldn
'
t decide which was fishier, the entrée or me. Several times over the course of the rather heated conversation (they thought an Islamic revolution was coming – I thought Jewish and Christian fundamentalists were bringing it) I
'
d thought Najma was trying to get a look at my shoes. My sensible, flat, all terrain shoes. She herself sported strapped, chic stilettos, ideal for climbing the marble staircases on which she was probably draped regularly. Aargh. I was probably just imagining it.

‘
They said you were pretty too.
'

‘
Should I be flattered?
'

‘
Yes.
'

‘
Because I
'
m interesting or because I
'
m pretty?
'

‘
Mainly the first, but also the second.
'

‘
What about you?
'

‘
What about me?
'

‘
Do you like me because I
'
m pretty or because I
'
m interesting?
'

‘
Don
'
t ask silly questions. This car is a silly question free zone.
'

‘
No really I want to know, why do you like me? Is it the pretty or the interesting that makes you call me at night?
'

‘
Neither, it
'
s the sexy sound of your younger brother
'
s hello.
'

I grinned. He grinned. I wished we could be stupid together for a long time.

‘
Mainly the first but also the second,
'
he continued,
‘
no, mainly the second, but also the first No, no, an equal influence of both reasons.
'