THE UNBEARABLE WHITENSS OF SEEING

Just like almost everyone, Sohail khan has also been hit by the rising prices and energy crisis in the country. He likes to read the newspaper every morning and takes his tea and news with a pinch of salt. But today a sugary news item reads that the government has decided to distribute free energy saving bulbs that give out white light and are twisted in their make up. They go round and round and are not bulbous like the normal bulbs. He has seen these white energy savers in the hospitals and offices. They are kind of new in the market. They even save more energy than the tube lights that are quite rampant generally in the night life of the country.

Sohail khan has picked up the energy saver bulbs from his local Utility store for free and has installed them through out his household. Now everything is white inside whenever it is black out. White light is strange, thinks Sohail khan because this is the first time he is looking at his family members in a new light.

Lately his wife seems to be depressed and irritated when he comes home in the evening. The children look ugly, cold and withdrawn. Sohail khan himself feels a shift in his moods. He can’t even enjoy the black and white words in his books, that he so likes to read after dinner. Even bulbul the pet bird in the cage seems confused and has changed its tune. It now mostly sings whites instead of blues.

Sohail khan talks about this predicament with his friend who is a wise man and owns an electric store on the corner. The wise friend sits him down and tells him in earnest that the whole country is generally moving in the same direction. And that the moods of the nation are generally in proportion with the laws of inflation and the lack of political will on the part of the common man.

But Soahil khan, as he stumbles home in the dark knows too well that the wise man is just bending the broken root. Meanwhile in his shop, the wise man as he hands out energy savers to his long line of customers, shouts out loud. “My friends, my mortal nothings, spread out the word; for it has been ordained that the white is the new order in the concretes of the black night.”

They say this is how they will tackle the energy problem in the country; this is how the country will save electricity until the new dams are built and this is exactly how the nation will prosper in their new found unbearable whiteness of seeing.

Wajahat Malik
zygotepoet@hotmail.com

CAPITAL HILL AFTERNOON

It was a beautiful fall day in Islamabad, the sun was shining and a gentle breeze was murmuring through the trees.  It was also the tenth of Muharram and a sectarian strife was in full swing as Sunni and Shia mobs battled out their religious differences on the streets of Rawalpindi.  Let them fight it out and I will go for a hike, I thought to myself and stepped onto a hiking trail in Margalla hills that leads up to Pir Sohawa where a few illegally built restaurants do thriving business especially on public holidays.

A few days earlier during a raging party a few of us decided to take advantage of the good weather and go for a hike in the hills during Ashura holidays.  “You will see beautiful birds, all kinds of wild animals and a wide variety of trees and exotic plants during the hike”.  I motivated my friends to get their blood warm for the excursion but alas on the day of the hike, I was the only one who wanted to connect with nature and soothe my urban soul.  It turned out my friends were not really interested in gawking at the birds in the trees but were more into checking out the birds of another kind.

I took trail 2 from the far north end of Margalla road and was happily walking along my way, feeling the freedom of hills in my hair when I noticed a very thin and a very long snake soaking up the sun by the trail side. I stopped to take a long look at this beautiful creature. It was light grey with bold yellow stripes and it moved slightly when it sensed an intruder in its space. Snakes normally creep me out but that day I just stood there and marvelled at its good looks.

Then a thought went through my head as I continued along my way.  It is a perfect day for the snakes to crawl out of their holes and warm their cold blooded bodies and who knows I might encounter more on this hike. It was an unsettling thought so I shrugged it out of my mind and steered my thoughts towards this gorgeous woman that I am trying to woo without any luck. And then as I started getting breathless on the steep trail, my mind started wandering all over the place.

There is a bloody sectarian riot in Rawalpindi and people are dying as I walk.  What if there was trouble in Islamabad, would I be out here hiking in the hills. Should I ask her out for dinner or send her flowers instead and why can’t I see any monkeys hanging out on that rocky face jutting out of the hill, normally there are dozens. I need new trekking shoes and why are there less people on the trail today.

 And then I jumped out of my head when I came across an elderly couple walking down the hill, I thought about salaaming them but then I decided otherwise as they didn’t look that friendly.  Last time when I salamed a woman on this trail, she glared menacingly back at me, nearly wiping me out of my trekking shoes. Before this unpleasant incident, I used to salam everyone who came across me on this hiking trail but now I am super wary and don’t salam everyone and anyone. It is sad but I don’t like getting dirty looks. Like the other day at a television station after a business meeting I shook hands with a few people but when I extended my hand to this woman, she didn’t take it. Instead she coldly told me, she doesn’t shake hands with men. I was rudely surprised and embarrassed.

After a steady steep section on the trail I came to a clearing from where I could see the whole city down below in one glance and it was a beautiful sight. I could see Rawal lake in the distance and the Shalimar cricket ground down below. It wasn’t a clear and crisp day as a thin blanket of haze hung over the city.

As I moved up through the singing pine trees and rounded a corner I came face to face with a family of monkeys lounging right there on the trail. I stopped dead in my tracks as I noticed a couple of baby monkeys frolicking around and two big mama and papa monkeys watching over them. The big monkeys started grunting menacingly at my sight. This is no good I thought to myself and backed up a little hoping the monkeys will move away into the bushes and let me pass but nothing happened. The monkeys kept their ground and looked aggressive. I slowly reached for a stick on the ground and on an impulse started addressing the monkeys in my mother tongue that is Hindko. I loudly told the monkeys that I come in peace and mean no harm to them or their kids. That I am just a hiker hopping along my way and they should just move away to a side and let me pass. Incredulously the monkeys listened to me intently, collected their babies and disappeared into the bushes. I heaved a sigh of relief and continued onwards.

It takes about two and a half hours for novice hikers to reach Pir Sohawa from the parking lot down below but experienced hikers can do it in hour and half. I had covered half the distance when I decided to take a break and gulp down some water. I was disgusted at the rubbish lying around the benches where I sat down to rest. People who litter always amaze me, is it the faulty upbringing, new money, general insensitivity, lack of education or what? Please ask yourself that.

After a brief rest and rehydration I moved along the trail that had now eased off and zig zagged through a maze of high bushes and forked off in two directions. I stopped to figure out which one to take. One looked like a well beaten track while the other looked a bit steeper and less used. So naturally I took the road less travelled and trudged along, keeping an eye out for the snakes when suddenly this long big brown serpent dashed out of nowhere and crossed the path right in front of me. Sensing my presence it stopped for a split second in the middle of the trail and then with the speed of lightening slithered down into the bushes. A surge of fear and adrenalin rushed through me as I took a big gulp of air and quickened my pace to get away from that spot.

What is going on? Two snakes sightings in the span of an hour.  Darn this good weather, it brings out all kinds of creepies and crawlies out of their holes. As the adrenalin eased off, I suddenly felt hungry and looked forward to another half an hour of hiking and then lunch at Monal restaurant. The last bit up to the top of the mountain was steep, tiring and hot as I was climbing on the fire trail rather than taking the easier track that wound around the mountain with lesser gradient.

When I finally reached the top of the mountain and looked at the restaurants down below my heart sank and I nearly lost my appetite as the place was crawling with hoards of coners (irresponsible tourists). I didn’t feel like going down and eating with that teeming mass of humanity for some strange reason. I felt like sitting in a quite café, eating and reading my book. So I took trail 5 on my way back down, looking forward to a grilled fish and this time for the fluttering birds of another kind.

MY TALE OF A LITERATURE FESTIVAL

So this is how it happened. I got an invitation from an organization called Khayyal to participate in the arts and literature festival that they were organizing on November 2^nd 2013.  I was thrilled to have been invited as a guest speaker at a literature festival for the first time. I was supposed to sit with a couple of other prominent travel writers and talk about the health of travel and tourism in the country. The theme of our talk was wanderings in Pakistan.

To  wander is my second nature so I decided to hop on a Daewoo bus bound for Lahore and crash at a friend’s house for a couple of days. But lo and behold, a week before the festival, I got a call from Khayyal. “We have arranged your stay at Gymkhana Club and you will be flying to Lahore from Islamabad and back.” Ayesha Husain chimed on the phone. I felt very special and very literary and boarded the plane a couple of days before the festival was to start. I wanted to party and connect with a lot of friends down in Lahore that I hadn’t seen in a while.

I had never stayed at Gymkhana club in Lahore. It was palatial, ostentatious and very colonial in its environment and make up. When I wanted to have tea in their Veranda restaurant and gawk at the golf players, they politely refused to serve me as I was wearing casual clothes and sporting my mountain flip flops. I profusely thanked them and headed out to revel in the age old embrace and hospitality of the boisterous masses on the streets of a living Lahore.

His name is Julian; he is a French man and a good old friend of mine. He has been living off and on in Pakistan for about ten years working for some international NGO. But Julian is also a playful babe and a man of letters.  He speaks fluent Urdu and Punjabi complete with a colloquial flair and has penned four novels in Urdu language that have been published and widely acclaimed in Pakistan. Julian was in town so off we went to meet the literati of Lahore.

Julian wanted to visit Nasir Kazmi’s grave in Mominpura but I wanted to visit the living and soon to be dead writers, so we took a rickshaw to Intizar Husain’s house. Intizar Husain is considered to be the  living legend of Urdu literature and was recently nominated for the Booker Prize.

There we sat in Intizar sahib’s bedroom with Zahid Dar the cute poet in his late seventies who had just recovered from Dengue fever but was still chain smoking Morven Gold cigarettes and not saying much, just listening intently and absorbing the usual flavour of the evening. Then there was Ikram Ullah sahib, the writer of the novel Gurg e Shab that was banned in General Zia ul Haq’s time and is still banned in the province of Punjab. Ikram Ullah sahib was passionately explaining to us the reason de tre of Pakistan as envisaged by Mohammad Ali Jinnah. “He didn’t want a secular Pakistan; rather he was exploiting religion to carve out this country. I have personally heard a few of his speeches. I was there and I know what he was trying to sell to the masses”.

Meanwhile Intizar Sahib smiled, drank his tea, played the role of a generous host and explained his own reasons for migration to Pakistan and how the theme of migration played a major role in his earlier writings and novels like “Basti”.

I had always wanted to meet Akhtar Mamunka, a successful tour operator, a painter and a prolific writer of travel books and articles. His travelogues like “Paris 205 Kilometre” and “The Final Frontier” are iconic for people interested in travel, women and general bohemian wisdom. So I called Akhtar Mamunka and he invited me over to his house for drinks and dinner. Surrounded by his paintings and books Akhtar sat in his shalwar Kamiz still looking young and handsome for his 71 years.

We mostly talked about his travelling experiences over the years and his wandering hippie days in the seventies when he travelled overland to Switzerland from Pakistan four times to be with his Swiss girlfriend. “Paris 205 Kilometres was the product of those four trips that I made on the hippie trail. Those were different times my friend, the times of freedom and free love”.  Akhtar reminisced with a far off look in his eyes.

The man was inspiring and I had a few drinks in me so I called up one of the organizers of the festival and asked her if I could invite Akhtar Mamunka next day to be one of the speakers on our panel. What an amazing woman. She said I could totally invite him that is exactly what I did. Akhtar graciously accepted the offer and as I was leaving, he put a friendly hand on my shoulder and quipped. “But I want full protocol as I was literally invited at the eleventh hour to speak at the festival”.

I was visiting Lahore after a long while so I let my hair down that night and next thing I know I was still up and buzzing at six am after having consumed a lot of drinks and tonics. I reached Alhamra at the mall at eleven am where the festival was taking place. It was a beautiful fall day in Lahore and I was terribly hung over.

The festival was immaculately organized and managed by the Khayyal people who were extremely hospitable, efficient and intellectually thoughtful. I was impressed by the fact that for the first time someone has considered travel writing as part of literature and invited travel writers to share their views and experiences at a literature festival.

There were artisans displaying their crafts, musicians singing and people gorging food in the open lawns of Alhamra. There were people all over the place, milling about, socializing on their way to listen to the musicians, speakers or performers of their choice. There were events happening simultaneously in two auditoriums. I stepped into one and listened to Mekkal Hassan band. Their music appeased by jangled nerves and then I made my way to the canteen for a cup of tea where I ran into Sarmad Sehbai, Julian and few other literary hangar ons. Sarmad in his signature bohemian mood sweared at ninety miles per hour and regaled us with spicy stories from his life. There was one in which he compared Oscar Wilde’s “Weeping Prince” with Faiz Ahmed Faiz and we all laughed except one woman in the group who made a face and left the raucous company.

Then it was our turn to speak at the travel panel. Akhtar Mamunka had walked into hall one and taken a seat next to me. Salman Rashid was standing around looking agitated and bored. I had never met Tahir Jahangir before nor read his work but we compared notes and it turned out we had a common friend in Mansehra.  Our moderator, Mr Masood Hassan whose columns I read in the newspaper and who I thought was a middle aged man turned out to be an elderly gentleman. It was hillarious as we sat down and he looked at me and said, “After going through your profile I thought you were an old fellow”.

We all took our chairs in front of the audience and the talk began. I spoke about the death of tourism in Pakistan and so did Salman Rashid. Tahir Jahangir and Akhtar Mamunka had good things to say about the future of tourism industry in the country. Later on I changed my tune as well and sang along with the choir, while Salman Rashid who had looked sad and indifferent throughout the whole affair I guess had had +enough and left in the middle of the talk. Someone remarked that he had an attitude problem but I said he had to be somewhere as the session started thirty minutes late.

After my session I socialized like crazy and ran into many interesting and beautiful people like my good friend Nighat Chaudry who had a classical dance performance at the festival that evening. We planned on hanging out afterwards and that is how a bunch of us ended up at Sarmad Sehbahi house in the evening.  And then you can well imagine how the night progressed afterwards.