Mian Ahsan Ilahi died several days after I visited him in Pakistan, and our country was left that much the poorer.
Now I am getting ready to return to my country after having lived in London for eleven years under the pretext of working at an international finance company. And now all his apprehensions have come true, and all his complaints have borne out.
In hindsight, the past decade was one of loss on all fronts — personal, literary, professional, political, and national. Everything lost and nothing gained. And yet one clear benefit of travelling and spending time away from your country is that your love for it and its people not only grows but becomes both undemanding and unconditional.
Sojourne did I through contre far and wide
Your pulchritude shined too brihte in my eie.4
The problem with living so far from home is that each bit of news (and each rumour) makes your heart pound and your blood run fast. The biggest problem with rumours from Pakistan is that they turn out to be true. Living like this for ten years or so means that if you’re the sensitive sort, your spirits jump up and down like the lines on a seismograph during an earthquake. The lifeblood of politics? For us, it’s molten lava.
All day and night my insides boil like a volcano.
When a country’s leaders are self-interested, scholars overly political, ordinary people frightened and resigned to their ruler’s will, intellectuals sycophantic, and institutions hollow (as for us who are in business, well, ‘no one’s innocent here’), then the road to dictatorship opens up, and a tyrant starts casting angry, sideward glances your way. Look at any Third World country. Dictators don’t just appear out of nowhere. They’re ushered in; they’re called for — and with them comes Doomsday (Type 1 Calamity). They kick the Bedouins out of camp like yesterday’s camels. Then the Bedouins start bickering with one another and go off in search of some unattainable and, in fact, non-existent rarity. They set their minds on finding a camel (a sucker) more stupid and more obedient than they are, so they can hop on and ride back to camp, and then, once there, curse out their old master (i.e. the old, too savvy camel). In fact, it’s true that no one’s more sincere than a dictator insomuch as a dictator thinks that no one can love his country and its people more than he does, and no one can help it as much as he can. He truly believes that not only does he know the pain of the country but that he also has its cure. Moreover, he thinks that from him alone springs the universe, and that he alone is the fountainhead of righteousness. It logically follows that his every command is tantamount to a heavenly decree.
Don’t blame me, blame God
There’s no doubt that he knows how to resolve to his satisfaction the specious problems that he (dis)ingenuously creates. You might say that like the person in charge of coming up with crosswords for a newspaper, he jots down all the possible solutions and then through his own brand of doublecross reverse-engineering comes up with the problems.
Hopped up on his absolute power and incontrovertible opinion, he addresses his nation as though its citizens were Stone Age savages: God has appointed him to raise them from the darkness and bring them into his non-divine rule — to make them human and then to make them civilized. But at the same time as he’s miming to the sycophantic mirror, he can’t see the very large writing right there on the wall. In fact, absolutism comes from egotism. You wait on pins and needles trying to please a despot’s every whim. On his rigged balance of justice (crafted by his own hands), a despot sets his sword on this side for a time and then on that side in order to make things look even.
Each man styles justice to his own taste
Instead of a government you ought to call it a puppet show. ‘If anything’s wrong, don’t shoot the messenger,’ (i.e. me). But Mirza Abdul Wadud Baig, who always supports a new government with every ounce of conviction, and then, when it has run its course, always criticizes it with the same amount of conviction, well, he used to say (grabbing his ears in a show of piety), ‘God forbid, but when I say auzo billah-i-minashshaitanir rajim [‘I seek refuge in God from Satan, the accursed one’], I think that “rajim” really means “this very regime.” God forbid! God forbid!’
As state affairs gradually become dominated by pomp and circumstance, as well as a lust for power, then the dictator begins to treat his rivals as heretics, and the critics of his coterie of brown nosers as traitors and blasphemers. And for those who refuse to rush to kiss his iron hand, he is pleased to announce that God’s country is closed to them — never will they enjoy the shade of its trees, or the moonlight of its night sky. He feeds rich biryani cooked in his own royal kitchen to ‘God’s disciples’ (i.e. poets), instructs them on what their duties are, and then parses the meaning of the word ‘disloyalty.’ He knows quite well that when it comes to the fields of literature and journalism, there is a cabal more useful than that of the moment’s opportunists, and that is the epistemological spin doctors. He compels them to confirm that censorship doesn’t exist under his rule. That is, people can write their encomiums to him in whichever metre and with whichever rhyme scheme they like! Censorship? What censorship? It doesn’t even matter if your paean has no sign of any skill — balance, intellectual depth, metre — just so long as it’s full of praise. As per orders, a new trash-heap of odes—
Each day a new ode with a new first line.
As any age passes, so too does this one. And yet some folks have become so scared and so used to worshipping the reigning sun that even when that sun sets, they’re still bent in prayer because you never know when the sun might rise up or from where. Sometimes you’re trying to force someone to stand up straight when you realize they can’t — their joints have lost their flexibility, and now, hobbled and hunched over, they go through the motions of living.
These naives fall flat when now it’s time to stand up.
Whether it’s Argentina or Dubai, Turkey or Bangladesh, Iraq or Egypt or Syria, you can find this sort of drama being enacted in practically every Third World country — just with changes of set, dialogue, and costume, contingent upon time and place.
***
These ten sketches — more like montages in their structure, flow and ornateness, and more like a novel in their breadth and scope — are the bitter distillation of Zia’s Lost Decade. Only five are included in this book. After the French Revolution, someone asked Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès what noble work they could thank him for, and the three words he offered have become part of historical legend, ‘J’ai vécu.’ Meaning, I survived. But I don’t know if I could save myself even from myself. In this book, you will discover here and there the hints of what eleven years of living away from my home and my friends did to my spirit. At the same time, London is a very interesting place, and its only defect is that it’s located in the wrong place. But there are little things. Like how the weather is always overcast and foggy. You can’t make out whether it’s morning or evening, and so everyone has to wear watches that indicate a.m. and p.m. It almost seems like the weather is out to get you. The houses are so small and hot that it feels like each room is an enormous heating pad wrapped around you. In the words of the English Poet Laureate Philip Larkin,
Nowhere to go but indoors!
On the plus side of things, you can’t find a people more polite, liberal, and patient than the British. Discussing religion, politics, and sex at social gatherings is considered the worst manners and a breach of etiquette — except at the pub. For delicate topics and serious discussions, the British first get drunk.