North and South

The rain is flaky today, very gentle and feather like. It's like looking inside a mill, flakes of cotton drifting.Last night though, it sounded like monsoon. Very very Okara, lying in on springy charpoys in the verandah and drifting through sleep lulled by the rain dripping off leaves in the courtyard.

11th May

This is to make sure I don't have to live with the black stain of not writing publicly for almost a year. In typical Luminite fashion, it is done at the nth minute, the 11th of May.

Bruch at Trinity with Mette and Corwin and Broad Street was blocked off with "churches of Oxford" uniting to show love for the city and Jesus. Mette said first off, "I must apologize for my religion" while the man spoke of Peter's gospels and bones of dinosaurs. Pata nahi kiya link hai? It is odd. I thought the climax of Christianity was Christmas carolling. Everything else secondary. Clearly the convents have much to work on.

Have spent better part of two hours of struggling with waxing on own legs. It is disheartening enough to put one off LBDs.

The 12th of May just does not seem a year ago. This is aging, remembering the past better than the present. Not looking forward to the future, only hoping it will a lot more same like the past. I think it happens at undergraduate, where the mass of memories reaches critical mass and then, whoooosh, look back more than you look forward. I've had trouble living in the present anyway. Pain, physical activity and books. The only time I actually feel like I'm not kernel less. I don't suppose books count acutally.

Lastly: complete befogglement at the existence of fainting goats. I mean seriously??? Taking one for the team, not even team, for another species! Forever though the image of fainting goats will be associated with Vic's impersonation of a goat going down with a salute. Lol.

3:05 pm on 12th May in Karachi

On Friday, we knew it was a holiday tomorrow, what with the government saying they may clamp emergency and MQM and the Chief Justice’s supporters asserting they would all take out a procession of clashing wills and agendas. I think most of us were all set to see modernity and humanity fail on Saturday because Karachi is notorious for both. But I don’t think anyone was prepared for this level of failure or perhaps no one was prepared for this kind of vivid, visual reporting, live, minute by minute.

At 12 pm at a late breakfast, I lost appetite when they said firing had started on the main artery of the city, Shahra-e-Faisal, my favorite road in the city, claimed 8 lives. At 2:30 pm the count was 14 and at 2:45 pm. the count was 15. It’s 3:01 pm now, but it continues. I’ve never had “war reporting” done, ten minutes from my home. I wonder if it was this bad in 1995 but we didn’t have local television channels working from Dubai, so perhaps that’s why we didn’t see images, like the bus driver staggering, bloodied, in the aisle of his bus with a bullet lodged in his throat.

The mythical youths with the guns, that I never saw, but suspected of gunning my uncle in 1995, I can see now. They’re wielding guns without any mark of identity but wearing caps and out of fashion yellow T-shirts with black stripes. Walking amongst burning vehicles with a confidence that flies in the face of the terror on the little boy’s face who is running for cover under the Baloch Colony Bridge.

Karachi is a city where people like Lieutant Vimes often identify where they are not by the name of the road but by the number and quality of potholes on it. I cannot tell you, how crippling it is to be able to name the landmarks of violence.

The same protest was conducted in other parts of the city-in Lahore and Islamabad with no incidence of violence. The extra element in Karachi has only been the MQM. Be that as it may, the Chief Justice has refused to take the helicopter from the airport to the High Court and has also refused to go back. That is how celebrities are made I suppose aaj kal, just on the brunt of their egos; famous for being famous.

4th Fulbright Alumni Conference, Islamabad

I really didn’t want to go but I figured my guls will be there so I may as well. Quite unexpectedly had a blast with friends and blew over 4 grand on books from Saeed Book Bank plus a few admirers are not bad for one’s rapidly plunging self-esteem. And it made you feel good that Fulbright was willing to splurge so much moneees on you, hotel and air ticket and all. They gave us Indian-type patchwork orientation bags, very pretty most of them, except mine looked like it had been made from leftover bras.

The first day of the conference had 2 speakers I actually listened to. One was Dr. Jonathon who spoke at length about the Indus civilization and outlined interesting stuff I didn’t know before
a) The Khyber Pass is always made out to be a passageway for the influx of news ideas into this region, however a lot of development was parallel and the pass was a significant avenue for exporting ideas. Hence, the idea that writing trickled from Mesopotamia here is incorrect as historically writing developed in both regions almost simultaneously.
b) The Indus civilization was one of those rare kinds that did not maintain an army at all, nor was it ruled by a monarchy. Walls were made more for economic divisions than anything else. (I wanted to but didn’t get the chance to ask him more about the system of elders, was it consociational, elected or what?) The two main reasons for the decline of the civilization were i) drying up of the river and ii) inability to enforce economic strength through armed power. Makes sense in a theoretical way (a system of governing can’t go on without having an army to enforce the writ of state) but he didn’t really have the time to make the connections clear.
c) And the bangles that Thar women wear were in those times (maybe they are still?) a “conflict avoidance strategy” i.e. the length and material of bangles would indicate whether you were unmarried or not so no one would hit on you. We should really have an alternative in the modern world. Nothing short of being visibly knocked up seems to act as a deterrent at times.

Dr. Fran o’ Neal made a presentation on how, after a long time, American culture is breaking out of the legacy of George Washington so that public opinion is having an influence on foreign policy. Washington started off with how America should just not bother to dabble with international affairs because all other countries were so incredibly messy and as silly as it may sound I don’t think I really understood the impact of that stance until this presentation. (Okay I’m going to try and put in words without sounding dismissive about Americans in general). Essentially I guess, government policy and its subsequent implementation seeped into American culture, thinking and schooling. And when the government did start interfering in international affairs, it did pots of rhetoric to ensure minimal civilian involvement. So to date, perhaps, what the world knows as American stupidity and ignorance isn’t so much a deliberate blockage of information on part of individuals as much as it is a cultural heritage. Similar to how Pakistani children are taught to think of India as an enemy. That said however, there is always a point where Pakistani children do move away from hating India out of habit to either hating it from structural/ancestral reasons or just liking it. To make such a break is the onus of every individual for which, at a certain age, culture provides no excuse. Some lessons in school/college will always tell you how there are more than two sides to a story and after that ignorance is a choice made.

Hoodhboy went on about himself quite a bit (though I was not unimpressed by the fact that he made an illegal transmitter that covered half of Karachi at the age of 17) and then launched into anti-Musharraff talk (thoroughly enjoyable) ending with how the Lal Masjid mullahs (who I SAW guarding the barricade at one am when we were returning from a coffee rendezvous) said Quaid-e-Azam University was a brothel and all the women who go there were prostitutes and how one mullah went on an illegal FM bandwidth to state “I don’t recommend it but if anyone throws acid on their faces (the women), I won’t be able to stop them.”

The next post on Fulbright I promise childun will not be preachy but will be about how the entire auditorium was lectured on sex.

Humid thinking

There is this one book called Endgame that starts off with a list of premises about how people operate in the now-and-here, the ‘landscape of despair’. My vacation felt a lot like that; I think I have lost the ability to live out of suitcases. There needs to be a point to everything now.

After returning from a vacation that was the antichrist of the Sunday saints, my reporting heads request that I not take lunch breaks to help them meet a few of their deadlines (kicked me in Achilles’ heel they did) and all this parallel to a field study being conducted in Sindh. Quite a vent post this is turning out to be but I’m so tired of all this traveling in the field and heat; scared to face a mirror because it might just throwJabba the Hut back at me plus Lucy is leaving after this venture for biggest brokerage house in Pakistan where I told her she would be miserable. I’m not exactly the sort of person people call up first to share good news with, particularly if they know I may be upset. I’m going to be working up a red misery without her.

Books children should never have to read: Charlotte’s Web, The Moffats and Oliver Twist (the book may as well have ended where Sikes killed Nancy).

Had terrible S and H withdrawal symptoms today.

o If anyone knows of any funding sources for graduate programs at Cambridge and Oxford please let us know (other than the ones the Universities offers themselves).

o Also if anyone knows of anything fun in Larkana (like a dhamal or something, please let me know). We’re hopefully covering shopping in Khairpur unless Lucy decides to react to heat and nose bleed over entire plans. I have offered to perform surgery. I feel qualified with my intake of Scrubs and Grey’s Anatomy.

Article plus report

Ali says my house might have been stoned for this if it had been written in slightly less obtuse manner: Ex Cultur Robur

My first report, quite the donor driven but I do like the section on the dilemma of the civil society. Report is on documenting education innovations piloted by NGOs (the parochial definition of civil society we work with here).

At this very moment in Karachi

Raining since morning. I don't think there are many countries where it's so exciting to wake up to a grey sinkwater sky. I'm sure the people in those apartments aren't very happy. Rain as a class phenomena- how about that:P Ali said when he went to the women's expo thing here, he was depressed thinking that maybe beauty amongst women was also distributed along class lines. I'm going to stop now. My second cup of tea has not happened.

The third picture is the bark of a cheekoo tree. It's one of the few fruits I can't stand. Trust my parents to have a whole tree full of the bugger planted inside. It's like how today in the morning Mama and I woke up on the warpath. So while I'm frying pancakes she decides to cook some vegetable concoction at the same time on one of the adjacent stove points. Most strange medley of smells. It was hilarious. Our civilized no man's land point was the tea boiling on the central stove.

Articles

1. The Year of Magical Thinking

I’m risking a grandiose generalization when I say that a great love for literature, for reading literature, is borne of a loneliness of some kind. It is a corpus of comfort, a forever waiting shoulder to cry on. When circumstances are irresolvable, reaching the last chapter of a book is a tidy knot of reassurance in the day.

Joan Didion does the same when her husband and writing companion of forty years, John Gregory Dunne, passes away suddenly in December 2003. Her first articulation of grief is in 2004 but it was still a long way from the realization of the book under review “The Year of Magical Thinking”.

She notes in the text that “In time of trouble, I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature.” She does that, in a manner that combines a personal narration with an electric study of the phenomenon that affects everyone at some point in their lives - grief.

Grief stands in contrast to sadness and even loneliness. “Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of ‘waves’.”

The book is a documentation of those ‘waves’ of grief, in the aftermath of John’s death even while her daughter Quintana lies in the ICU with her own future hanging in balance. The title refers to the year after John’s death which she spent in hoping for his return. Anyone who at this point, thinks the book will be a morbid read, heavily plied with tones of emotional collapse is obviously not familiar with Didion’s style of writing.

I have to admit that I am biased. Joan Didion and Carol Shields are my favorite female authors this side of the century. Both are very different stylistically but equally incisive. While Shields brings the sublime into the mundane for me, Didion’s forte is the personal-essay form of writing (which I hope is not a dying art). Didion is not an exhibitionist for the sake of a personal narration. Her minimalist, spare style of writing removes the book from a melancholy genre and takes it to the level of a love story if anything. She revisits the houses they have bought, the drives, meals and fights they shared to highlight her present views of the differences and compatibilities between the couple.

The anatomy of grief has rarely been so well handled. Didion has compartmentalized it admirably as she follows the yellow brick road of information about bereavement. It is almost as if understanding the nuances of how grief happens, will lessen her pain. There are cultural observations on death amongst many other psychiatric readings of how grief is typically handled. One of them notes how in Western countries at present, death is a phenomenon that has to be effaced as soon as possible. It’s a factor of shame to mourn publicly, (a stark contrast to Pakistan’s culture and rituals of death) because it flied on the face of the ethical duty of today i.e. to live life to the fullest.

This is probably the culture Didion opposes and subverts in the form of this book, a form of expression that is as public as one get with grief. It is a hands-on manual to grief. There is no ginger, hesitant treatment of an event that has left her subtracted. (As an aside, surprisingly for Pakistan where display of public reaction to death is valued, there seems to be little emphasis on the effects on individual psyche.) Didion speaks on self-pity and how in this era, you can no longer say one person leaves your world empty because that would be “construed as unnatural, a failure to manage the situation.” It seems however, that is exactly what needs to be done to move with the change.

As an affirmation of a life after a death, I think Didion’s approach works. The book is the realization of that pain in a calmly intelligent portrayal of grief that ends on anything but a futile note.


2. Mongol Expansion

Books I buy

Kung-fu & Grey's Anatomy

Poppet calls and does her usual routine of pretending she is from the Fulbright and telling me they’re sending me to China (I may as well go to the Sorbonne in Abu Dhabi then honestly)and then moving on to tell me that she spied a hard-on on her Kung Fu instructor when he was demonstrating a kick for her and it was so gross and she immediately thought of me. Imagine that. She looks at a hard-on and she thinks of ME. How comforting. My purve quotient is clearly higher than I thought. Either way, she said it was mostly gross because it was so little. I advised her to get a second opinion Kung Fu fighter, what if this instructor is actually leaving out a couple of moves of defense so that when he attacks her she is harmless?. This by the way is also the same instructor occasionally texts her asking her non-essentials like “Where are you?” Decidedly creepy. Poppet tells me she thinks he means well. This is her social sciences mentality where nothing is ever linear. I am so glad I had a background in the sciences before I went into SS because hey that way I know phone-stalking and ‘means well’ are mutually exclusive phenomena. *massively rolls her eyes*

“Stop turning him on then. I mean what do you do?”
“I guess I should cut back on practicing around the pole now”

Grey’s Anatomy has replaced the man & mean gul to come home to in my life. One would think that juxtaposing life and death situations with personal emotional crises would trivialize personal issues. But surprisingly it doesn’t, makes them as significant and poignant. Or maybe it’s just the stellar soundtrack, bleeds a whole symphony of colors in my head. I personally endorse Meredith Grey’s manners of getting over crises- shutting your system off except for mechanical functions, going with the most obvious things in your face and looking as miserable as you feel. The bottle of tequila helps. McSteamy has a hair of head that is prancing around wheedling “touch me touch me” much in manner of naked chicken dancing for doggies and catties. Cha-cha-cha. Rowr.

This city by the sea

Rolled bed sheets are easier to pack than flattened ones. One on each side of the suitcase and they definitely need some fabric softener when you get there. Plus the whorl of the sheets has room in the center for toothbrushes that are cheaper than those in Boston. I don’t know where and when she will wear the shalwar kamizes but she was determined to pack them anyway over a copy of Kaliat-e-Iqbal. This is where she will live

She found it on CraigsList, that surprisingly also has a Karachi page but no display for it. Apparently on another such site, someone for Islamabad had posted that the wanted “a temporary plot in exchange for two goats.”

There was also
“So much underwear yaar, such few occasions to wear it” (General female obsession with expensive, funky lingerie especially thongs and especially amongst my friends. My mother gingerly refers to the stuff as “Hollywood crap”.)
&
It was mildly like packing for a siege. Pouches of ketchup, tea bags (she doesn’t like the Boston taste), medicines, biscuits, vitamins, yaddih yaddih yah. Everything imaginable. I should have suggested a Catholic Archbishop for good measure. Or an armed militia. They come in so handy nowadays.
&
Ever since our occasionally pooled driver hired his own driver, he’s become crankier. Habib is one those mavericks who is into everything, he was introduced to the household as a “lab boy” (borrowed from the university’s chemistry lab for chauffeuring purposes), had that maddening, stubborn look to him so unique to the peddlers of our informal economy who know you may have fuckloads of money but also children who can’t drive. Was not a boy from anywhere. Perhaps an ex-kabadi wrestler. Speaks still in grunts, drives excrutiatingly slowly after you tell him this century would be a good destination. Instance: Saturday classes, we are going to school from a sleepover, piled pell mell in the car, heart-thumpingly late and he trundles along Shahra-e-Faisal. Outside the glass, we can see motocyclists, scooters and occassionally cyclists flying past us on Shahra-e-Faisal. The car never recovered from the humiliation and had to be sold.

Great conversations, cups of tea, pedicures and identity thefts.

And then she tells ME, that Karachi has lost me. Her departure does not this time have the reassuring tag of “college term.” She will start work. The route planned is Boston via Cyprus right through Monogolia “because it lies on the way”.

(For those who may be having problems with blogger postings, Teeth Maestro has given me the life saving link to kproxy.com)

?: something

M says:
i went to a jazz concert yesterday where the drummer i could see had just come to pakistan to get laid
M says:
like the shoda sort
M says:
who probably stomped to the center of the stage with his drums and pouted until the troupe let him be
M says:
today i found out he well over 40
M says:
also do you know bree (From desperate housewives) is 44 years old?
A says:
lol
M says:
and she just had twins
A says:
tis your future!
M says:
peoplel like her give me hope
M says:
i know. i was thinking. fuck, he seems like me
A says:
LOL
M says:
i had gross moment of self-realization
A says:
poor child
M says:
i felt bad about it and then i felt good about feeling bad
A says:
nahiin! you shall get laid wherever you are and not need to travel a continent!
M says:
so i dont think im going to change much
M says:
but keep your hopes up
M says:
Lol
M says:
Inshallah
A says:
lol
A says:
what a thing to go inshallah for
M says:
same to you same to you
A says:
bolt o' lightening heading your way yo
M says:
listen nothing is too small or too perverted for God to be invoked
M says:
I look to Him for everything
M says:
more importantly o tart o mine
A says:
ji?
M says:
im beginning to think Satan may just be a marginalized narrative
A says:
hahahahaha
A says:
TOO EARLY IN THE MORNING FOR THIS
A says:
moments of profundity acceptable only after noon pliss
M says:
NO na
M says:
listen
A says:
AUGH!
A says:
she eees going to expand!
M says:
you're a terrible friend
M says:
kay terriblay in Spanish
M says:
now i cant tell you my thesis on faith
A says:
are you high?
M says:
no man.
M says:
its bloody ten in the morning
A says:
how much chai have youhad?
A says:
huh huh?
M says:
2 cups only
A says:
first of all, its eleven
M says:
okay whatever. i was rounding off 10:59 backwards
A says:
second of all, ARE YOU AT THE SLEAZY DRUMMERS HOUSE GETTING HIGH?
M says:
you're such a stikcler
M says:
I WAS NOT
M says:
he was too sleazy for me
M says:
there was a vietnemese guitarist along
M says:
and our poor pakistani table player was getting marginalized till the fourth piece where finally we heard his beat
A says:
bechara
A says:
only 26 he was
M says:
imagine how crushed his self-esteem must be on the morning after

Phrasebook Shia-ism

Lucy has finally hit upon a scholarship option but she needs to prove that she is a native leader, yes very much in those “native leader” terms and I’m helping her look the most bhooka nanga (i.e. hungry naked people) out of all the bhooka nangas who will be applying. In the course of Mission: Bapu Lucy, it becomes clear that while Pakistani banks in a fantabulous display of locust mentality are showering loans for all types of cars, education expenses warrant a frosty amount of money.

Yesterday at M&M’s place I saw the video recording of that sand-weathered Shia ritual of matam, of mourning. M&M’s family are ritualistically, Shia’s by the book, the entire family gathers at the family seat in Jhelum to commemorate Ashura where they lead the whole procession from dawn till evening to their house. I was introduced to the concept of the zul juna (the horse that Husayn rode into battle) and the shibli( the likeness of his grave I think) and though I still don’t understand the significance, I saw the zanjir ka matam and somehow it didn’t look as ominous as it had always sounded, nor did it look as bloody as the mourning in Iraq. I think a lot of it was because only a fraction of the procession was lamenting by hitting themselves with chains, and that was mostly made up of the M&M clan. However, the sheer number of the people constituting the procession was overwhelming, there were guardrails demarcating the area between the procession and the Sunni observers, I guess, to ensure they did not hinder the flow. I can’t help it and I realize that being part of a discipline of study weds you to it, making you think of everything from that front, but my thoughts on the procession had more to do with “wow, what an avenue for mobilization and revolt” than the atrocious massacre that occurred at Kerbala. Mosques are pallid platforms of social gatherings compared to these processions where history is interwoven with current events to agitate emotions. The revolution overturning the Shah of Iran started from the front of a procession like this and although it sounds dangerous, the idea of people harnessing themselves to a roiling mass, the potential in this event as a collectivization front is enormous.

A minority knows of its own existence much much before the majority has an inkling of self-awareness. In grade eight I found out I was a Sunni and even if it didn't matter to me, it did matter to the Shia girl who asked me.Thankfully, my family was not the of the virulent orthodox kinds that brought children up with ludicrous myths about Shia rituals, the reason I think I wasn't aware of the distinction was because no one brought it up. A. told me the other day that when he was young, his friends used to come up and ask him if he really practiced occult witchcraft stuff (I will not mention specifics because it just reflects bad taste and a gauche paradigm) at their majlis. M&M underwent public schooling during Zia's time and he said there were times he walked into class and his name would be scrawled on the blackboard with various obscenities. Obviously at some level humanism took a real punch from parenting.Historically I'm not sure where the split comes in apart from the debate that H. Ali should have succeeded H.Muhammad in the rule of the Khilafat. However Sunni faith is comparatively more ahistorical than the Shia faith and historical sources are not a strong part of the regular teachings we undergo. Faith wise I am told, the Shia faith does not believe in predestination while the Sunni faith does. Politically it may have made sense to use predestination to justify Kerbala (Sunni front that is) but I don't see how it is tenable to regard predestination as the singular absolver of all things in this world. After all, across faiths, God "knowing" what you will do, does not in any way interfere with your decision of what to do. I mean I KNOW your hand will burn if you put it in the fire but my knowing (and keeping my mouth shut) has nothing to do with your decision to extend it into the fire or not.

Woolf: From the death of the moth etc.

Outwardly, what is simpler than to write books? Outwardly, what obstacles are there for a woman rather than for a man? Inwardly, I think, the case is very different; she has still many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome. Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against. And if this is so in literature, the freest of all professions for women, how is it in the new professions which you are now for the first time entering?
...
Even when the path is nominally open—when there is nothing to prevent a woman from being a doctor, a lawyer, a civil servant—there are many phantoms and obstacles, as I believe, looming in her way. To discuss and define them is I think of great value and importance; for thus only can the labour be shared, the difficulties be solved. But besides this, it is necessary also to discuss the ends and the aims for which we are fighting, for which we are doing battle with these formidable obstacles. Those aims cannot be taken for granted; they must be perpetually questioned and examined. The whole position, as I see it—here in this hall surrounded by women practising for the first time in history I know not how many different professions—is one of extraordinary interest and importance. You have won rooms of your own in the house hitherto exclusively owned by men. You are able, though not without great labour and effort, to pay the rent. You are earning your five hundred pounds a year. But this freedom is only a beginning—the room is your own, but it is still bare. It has to be furnished; it has to be decorated; it has to be shared. How are you going to furnish it, how are you going to decorate it? With whom are you going to share it, and upon what terms?

Painted into a corner

The prick that is G., the office boy at my office is consistently forgetting any requests for tea, has thrice in a row forgotten to get our lunch, starving us till we were mere scrapworks of flesh. I begin to feel a most politically incorrect kinship for Robert Moses who said that though he loved the public, he hated the bastard, filthy people who made it up. Robert Moses was great public works architect bulldozing through America in the post-depression period. He made expressways that reduced the Bronx to what it is today and left the Jews wondering how one Jew could do this to another.

I would switch to wordpress or something more conducive if I wasn’t in love with my fishy template and I cannot go through the hassle of aligning this template on a new blogging format. Even though blogger has blocked my access to comments, won’t let me delete spam comments, given in to a general Google hegemony that seems to be taking over most of the world, I guess I’m too lazy to resist. I suppose I am a slight Luddite. I don’t do Orkut, or Facebook or Skype. I do occasionally log on to confirm internal alerts about who has broken up with whom. Of all the sixth senses in all the world, I had to have one about break ups.

In blog news: Humay and Sam's URL has changed. They're smart and have moved to wordpress. Ahmed has started blogging again and I've addded a motley collection of Virginia Woolf's essays. Blog title is mild referral to how I felt about blogging for quite a while. It's a winter syndrome always and is initiated by wedding/winter holiday fatigue followed by great urge to reinvent. I gave in last year, this year I desist.

Into the eye, the cauldron of evenings

Wedding number one kicks off with daily washes and sketches of people whose intimate details are handed out heaps per minute. Last night mum offered a swatch of two years of a girl present, who, I whispered to Mama, looked endangered to me. You know, the slim tall type with eyes too large and liquid to reflect intelligence but dripping Austen in every gesture, in the double shaded lace edging her clothes, the one you can’t help smiling with. She was married to some long distance relative, whose immediate family flew from the U.S.A for the event, were put up and hosted by the girl’s family for two weeks. Once the ceremony was over the husband and family left with most of the gifts (which I think is upper class euphemism for dowry) given by the bride’s family and most of the bride’s stuff, things she had made and collected for her wedding, so that when she would follow later-once her immigration papers had been processed- she would travel light. A few days after their departure the bride receives a sheaf of papers divorcing her from the man. Just like that. Easy peezy. I cannot begin to imagine the horror in that house at that point. I’m sure this is illegal; there must be a law angle to it. Later on they discover, the man had a wife and two children in U.S.A already. There must be a unique hell, on par with those built for murderers, for all those complicit in carrying something out like this. What brings the bile to my mouth in this scenario is that in all those weeks of planning and thinking and doing, at no point did any one member of that family feel enough remorse to stay their sleight of hand. Bambi thankfully (remember Austen) is engaged now to a cousin. I’m not sure if it is a mark of maturity or conformity that I no longer turn cat eyes on people who dare to suggest that girls like Bambi have through a second engagement found a new lease on life. Mostly because I know, even at LUMS, a bulky 50% of the female population gives primacy to a good marriage and family and it is not because of lack of opportunity for a number of them.

My judgment pendulums about the weave of wedding gatherings, very much I think overcome by the apparition of these faces in a crowd, there are points when I despair,a tar kind, the kind you can only feel in an Urdu class where the younger Ms. Siddiqui monotones aquatically, while you are guillotined each second limping towards release. In the adult world one will rarely come across sensations that parallel the awfulness of child landscapes. Another one of them is the itch of knowing there are untold worlds rustling in some drawer while you work on inexplicably gnarly algebra. In the adult routine it’s never that bad, because you always have the illusion of choices. To a child consequences are as big a reality as taxes but to an adult the eventual consequence is what decides the choice. I left the seminar on Literature and Social Change the minute I got a waft of J’s talk, he was going to speak on what he had got up thinking that morning and not on what K and I had hammered out for him. I chose instead of run around the grounds with Hamza. At one point, I saw him squatting down in his pratty khakhis on the lawn. It looked fairly suspicious from afar, I walked over and he looks up crinkling his eyes in a grin as black as the sin of Hades, his mouth crammed with the fertilizer lying on the lawn. I give children +25 points for entertainment value and –30 for wearing diapers that make their bum stick out like Daffy Duck.

POSTSCRIPT I have work in 3 hours but I must state at once how much I LOATHE mehndis where I am expected to sit sterile, by the dance floor, because our side is such a wuss and watch the other side dance their booty off.I only go to weddings because of the dances, I just haven't reached that stage of exhibitionism where I can do solos and I'm sure it's against some international human right law to come away from a function feeling like THIS: starved of dancing, feeling like withdrawal symptoms will kick in very soon.Tonight I miss LUMS with angst, one I could only counter by sending Minchka (one of my dutiful dance partners)anguished texts in triplicate, I miss the weekends of dancing, of coming back to the dorm with party dresses soaked in sweat and kathi smoke albeit second hand(alcohol I see sense in, drugs I don't).*cwies*I know it sounds trivial but it isn't.*cwies some more*

Flunkie Bush

Keith Ellison is a Muslim? Hmmmm.

Journalist asked Bush how he was expecting to work with Pelosi, when just yesterday she had called him a liar, a nitwit and dangerous. Bush replied he had been in politics for many years and he knows where campaigning ends and governing begins. He may be underestimating the coherence of goals here; the Democrat leadership has come to control the House of Representatives on a mandate of changing the direction in Iraq. Political expediency aside, I doubt if the insinuation that the war will be handed on to subsequent presidents will go down well with anyone. And I take great umbrage at his general lumping of moi into "the enemy". Seriously, practically yes, it makes the greatest sense to dispense with the individual and deal with the collectivities (much like post Pearl Habour incarceration of Hawaiin Japanese just because they were Japs; effeciency has no morality) because it is most efficient but you can at least watch the rhetoric.At least.

Waxing Women and Police

It’s disconcerting to have a one-day weekend. The torpor of the week barely takes you over before Sunday night starts nudging and elbowing in. I’ve spent the day marinating in a stew of DVDs and books. One of the breaks made was for the waxing woman, apparently on Waxing Planet the ice-breaking questions are “Why aren’t you married?”, “What do you tell your father when I come?” and “Don’t you think it’s sad to have only one sibling?”. In the end I had to put on Fawlty Towers and pretended there was nothing more magnetic in the world than John Cleese. I’m sure it gave her time to think of what she will tell other customers about my body. Ugh. I just feel vile about them sometimes, for instance when they will bring along apprentices and set them to work simultaneously on, for example, completely hypothetically speaking, the legs. And oh the pain. My neurons go berserk trying to find a focal point for the sensations; the atrocity reduces the mind to stardust. All men and all boys in all age ranges are peculiarly inquisitive about the exact process that occurs behind closed doors, the secrets of that ritual whose remains they stumble upon: a large sheet on the floor, tattoos of talcum powder, dollops of sticky honey colored goo, butter knives, cups of tea rimmed brown and wads of cloth strips. Not to mention a girlfriend/sibling/wife acting queenly. It is in their number one item on Things to Ask God, followed closely by item number 2: how does a halter neck stay up and what EXACTLY does it look like. My question to them I guess would be why they get so furious if they are smacked on the head?

If you think about it Waxing Women are rich material for literary abuse: it is the best way to rob a house in stealth, no woman would ever deny her waxer an entrance; it is the best way for investigating a potential match (this I speak of from experience, have heard of many waxing women who act as informers, to be fair, in an entirely benign sense at times); if there was anything like CSI in Pakistan, waxing women would be prime corroborators. However there is nothing like CSI in Pakistan. I have doubts about the existence of a truly sober police force even. When H’s sister was getting married, his house was robbed a day before the wedding. The police van came careering around the corner and out jumped our resplendent men armed with lean-mean bamboo sticks, because guns are so passé, dahling. The police officiously powdered the whole house with what H says smelt suspiciously like baby powder because it was flying like dust everywhere. Everything in the house was covered within an inch of its life with powder and policemen, but they couldn’t locate any external or for that matter any internal prints. Except for the cat, they found the cat’s prints. It turns out even if they had, it wouldn’t have done any good because apparently we don’t have a fingerprint database. I’m hoping that’s just a rumor.

Week landmarks

Humay on getting off at the airport in Colombo, Sri Lanka: "It was weird at first but then I saw the army around and felt right at home."

Asad: "I was at a work meeting at Espresso"

Sam, as I wax lyrical on mean guls: "Oh my God, how many of YOU are there??!!" (said with expression of farmer scared rabbits are taking over the world)

Karen Armstrong does Karachi

Is it prescriptively weak for a historical analysis to posit the discovery of compassion within oneself as the engineering marvel of inter-faith issues? I haven’t read enough of Armstrong to know the finer points of her narrative, but putting forward compassion as the sine qua non of religion was muddling because all I could think of was how exactly one brought about, for example, a compassionate foreign policy. The nearest term to compassion in mainstream understanding is tolerance and that seems largely contextualized within a multicultural social discourse. Tolerance when shored up next to compassion draws a picture of an uneasily jostling crowd of people bearing placards of their respective religions, some unobtrusively elbowing others to makes space and others standing cautiously on tip toes to make room. It just does not imply the expansiveness of “compassion”. The Danish cartoons and the hair tearing over the veil in France has been noted by many as an indication that tolerance in the hegemonic discourse largely means “if you take on our colors, THEN we will absorb you.” (Tangentially, at times when I get sick of people whining about security checks at airports, the most obvious solution seems to me to be not to go there. If you are aware this is what they’re doing by law then once you enter that country you agree to placing yourself under that law’s jurisdiction so the room for whining doesn’t really exist anymore, if one has chosen to go despite finding the third degree treatment obnoxious and unfair.) I don’t disagree with the points Armstrong made in her lecture, notably, that all religions essentially were about dispensing with the ego, I think at some point she brought in yoga but at that point of the speech I was blizzarded with gusts of sleep so…so much for that. Most of my confusion as to the direction Armstrong was taking I think stemmed from the de-emphasis on the construction feat required to link the secularists with people who practiced different faiths. Secularism to the extent that Turkey took it- laicism- is a dogma on its own and in the Venn diagram of civilizations, I got the feeling Karen was treating the secularists as people outside the set, which seems largely impracticable because even if most of the world’s population subscribes to one form of personal faith or the other, the bruises are likely to rise not because “my religion is better than yours” but “religion is not a part of this discussion” on discussions of political economy etcetera. Reductionist as it may sound, in the public space I consider religion little more than a political resource. Karen was wont to reinforce her lecture throughout with the sentence “What the world needs now…” and the Care Bears in my head would sway tipsily from side to side PTV style and chorus is “LUV is-sweet LUV” while poor Karen finished off with the inevitable “compassion”. There are too many people in my head, looking for myself is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Also I think the fact that the auditorium (I have no idea about the composition of the auditoriums who received the lecture through screening) audience comprised mostly of women, heavily make up ones at that. At some point in between all the perfumed saliva they were pasting on each others cheeks I felt a great urge to dance an Indian number on stage so they would get their Klein and Prada’s worth of entertainment. And they were all kitty party aunties I will insist, a fact that clearly came across in the Q&A session where I was habitually cringing as people asked questions the poor woman had already answered in her lecture. There were very few men (unless you count the ones who had less hair on their head than I have teeth), which just goes to show there are no eligible men in Karachi who are motivated by the fact that for once, there is a talk instead of a coffee shop opening in the city. S (sitting next to me) said they had all flown to the States. Am more determined than ever to follow suit for Masters and achieve matrimony in the U.S of A. Found it extremely entertaining that people were getting pirated copies of Karen’s book autographed by her, she was signing books she would never get a royalty for, tis a cruel cruel world.

Karen said something interesting about Greek theologians whose claim was that any statement concerning God, should be a) paradoxical (should resist human definition) and b) it should lead to silence. Now as I write this, I have an uncontrollable urge to laugh because when M gets drunk, that’s exactly how he behaves. He talks about God, says paradoxical things and then inevitably falls silent. I’ve completely sidetracked from the thought stream the Greek theologians tumbled into. O vell, will put it in comments section when I remember.

I am now known as Mrs. Hamza at work because almost-two-year old boy of one of our colleagues has a heart warming crush on me. I love wandering around with him in my lap to meetings and Fascist sprees, he lends an anchor to my agitations that keeps them from spiraling out of control, which are careering into a new twilight given the fact that Khamba and I are both dealing with two consultancies at one time where the research core is something the firms cannot decide on. Also have not mentioned new addition in my life- tis Historian (hehe Heman the Historian:P) Khamba who I am eternally grateful for that hand on the shoulder that enables me to maintain a professional smile.