Yesterday at work, the guy I shadow for my fieldwork had his office filled with applicants. Two of them were PPP workers there to get leases for the houses of an area they represented. As things go, you can’t just come in an get your work done – even if you are from the party in power at the centre- you have to wait, chat, there needs to be time made for building up to the issue even if you have been coming every single day for 3 months. The official will get to you in his own sweet time; there is no queue. While they were passing the hour of courtship at the altar of bureaucracy, we got into a conversation about …well… Pakistan and its current state (What else?) and one of them riled me no end with his insistent and consistent diagnosis as “the lack of education” engendering intolerance; corruption etc etc. At first I thought he meant education is the sense of tarbiyat or shaour but not, he meant training. He was specifically talking about vocational education as the harbinger of tolerance and morality and an end to corruption. It went on and on and needless to say I disagreed with his generalization of an entire populace as an amoral blunt minded herd and the notion that someone earning 7,000 rupees a month with a family to support and entrusted with the paper work of a piece of land valued at 60 million would ONLY in Pakistan try and take a cut for passing the paperwork on in the system. In those circumstances, if you’re smart you’d take a cut whichever country you were in. It’s not bribery, it’s common sense. Why should the those at the lower end of inequality carry the burden of ‘Islamic’ values of honesty, transparency and accountability?
So the guy took great exception to me saying that the nature of bribery I had seen in the office was alright. Which was basically a kind of market rate depending on the client i.e. you looked at the area of the plot being leased; the financial circumstances of the owner and then charged the unwritten, undocumented fee. Widows were never charged anything; not even the service charges legitimately owed the organization. The amount of bribe offered to facilitate the process of file varied from 200 rupees to 3000 in the field workers and from 5000 to the around 60, 0000 at the higher echoleons of the organization.
At this point of the discussion the man asked me if it was true that I was from the same University as their revered Quaid, Benazir Bhutto and I said yes. And could not resist taking a dig at him saying “Look at Bilawal, he’s so educated, at on the best universities in the country and he can’t speak Urdu and is clearly being forced into this field.” Three of them started in an uproar, how can you say that, he WILL come back and he WILL serve us. I told them about how seconds after Zardari said Lyari will be Bilawal’s constituency in the next elections, the latter immediately tweeted something to the effect “I was born in Lyari, I drew my first breath there and I love it. I will not be standing in the next elections.”
The eyes of the most aggressive of the PPP guys welled with tears that totally threw me off. His voice trembled as he said “That’s not true. He will come back.” I stopped and said “Yes I’m probably wrong. He will come back.” I just could not make myself go on in the face of his fierce, unthinking – what I would like to call blunt minded – loyalty because it was so precious to him.
Today I was meant to meet a fieldworker who has stood me up at various times and I just could not follow the fieldwork ethic of “always at their convenience” (which I have been pretty good at for 2 months to be honest) and ditched him for once.
So I didn’t go to work today and instead felt slow and heavy and hot. There was no internet and the cable operators were also having problems “at the backend”. I ended up forgoing the shalwar for a wrap made of my dupatta and felt so much lighter for it. I stared at the fan and listened to the Friday sermons echoing like voices from the third skies from the multiple mosques in the neighbourhood making trips only to the phone to follow up on internet/cable complaints and to the kitchen for frequent cups of tea. I imagine this is what a house gecko’s day feels like. Minus cable and internet signal problems. Unlike ants. We found a line of them stolidly covering a tomato on the kitchen counter. I told Mama to leave the ants we crushed with our hands as a lesson to further interlopers and she said there is no point “Because a dead ant cannot signal”. It seemed to me profoundly sad that the ants would not recognize their own dead as anymore than a rolling pin lying on the counter. But not sad enough to stop with tossing them off the counter.
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