Mohatta Palace, Karachi

Miss Fatima Jinnah lived her last years in Mohatta Palace. She died there. Or may be assassinated. No one knows. She was fine a day before as she attended a wedding ceremony. Her dead body was found the next day. Her body was taken by state machinery immediately. Her last rituals were done by the state and her family wasn’t allowed.

She was buried in haste. People tried to protest at the clandestine burial activities, to which they were beaten up by the security.

Her death is a mystery even today. Just like her book which was not allowed to be published.

And that, Mohatta Palace, was her last home. She died here. But there is nothing related to her. No furniture or any item of her usage. Nothing. As if she never lived here. Or never even existed. It was literally saddening to visit this place.

She used to live on 1st floor. How many times she would have looked from those windows? To the eternal downfall of the state for which she gave her complete life.

While sitting on the bench in front of stairs, I could see her. Going upstairs. Tired and broken. In white saree. And suddenly she turns and looks down at me and I couldn’t stare in eyes.

Mohtarma Fatima Jinnah was the first Opposition Leader of Pakistan. Her success could have been the initiation of civil rule in the country. But she was labeled. Disgraced. Humiliated. Perhaps murdered too.

And with her, went down all our hopes of a democratic state.

Apna Time Ayega

A 15 year old boy – thief – was caught red-handed by a mob in Karachi. Tortured. Traumatized. Recorded. Beaten. Interviewed. Murdered.

Your soul leaving your body, inch by inch. An inch each hit. Gradually. Bit by bit.

What’s next to ecstasy? Pain. Death. Hell. Nothingness. A whole light year from pain to death. Inch by inch.

Hell!

‘You thief! You will serve in hell.”
‘Huh! I just arrived from one.’

Mob justice. Mashal Khan. The Christian couple of Kot Radha Kishan. The brothers from Sialkot. Blasphemy cases. Mob injustice.

Scum of the earth.

His shirt had a quote: Apna time aye ga. Aya. Uska time aya. Everyone is seeing his video. It is everywhere. Uska time aa gaya. He’s famous now. The face of death.

Everyone is sad after watching this unbelievable incident. Apparently. Rapists are sad. Child molesters are sad. Abductors are sad. Thieves are sad. Looters are sad. Killers are sad. Kafir kafir khailne walay are sad. Sab ko maar do kehne walay are sad. The whole country – scum of the earth – is sad.

You don’t dare talk justice here. The murderer of 444 killers – Rao Anwar – is still free. The blood of the unfortunate family of Sahiwal massacre is forgotten. The mastermind of APS massacre – Ehsan Ullah Ehsan – is fine as well.

Don’t you dare abuse the abused ones by “justice” here.

Another boy was killed too, a few days back, in Gujranwala. His arms and legs were broken by a mob. His body was dumped in waste. This one didn’t get much limelight. Maybe because he wasn’t wearing “Apna waqt ayega”.

Khair,

Tum sab ka bhi time aye ga. Aj uska kal tumhara.

This is hell. From here to nothingness is all there’s left to go.

Talking Dead Bodies

A military plane is flying. Late at night. Carrying 2 lieutenant colonels with 3 juniors. It crashes. Over a populated city. Over homes. Killing 13. Injuring many. Turning homes into ashes.

5 martyred.
13 dead.
12 wounded.

Media covers it. Everyone tells the names and ranks of the soldiers. No one mentions the names and jobs of the civilians. Bloody civilians!

Chief attends the funeral. Media covers it with pride. As if it’s a war. It is a war. For nationalism. Against nationalists.

‘Dushman ka mu torr dain gay!’
‘But there was no dushman up in the air.’
‘Traitor!’
‘Taak main betha tha…’

“Hey! You! Saki Nama! Bloody asshole, you didn’t speak last time, right?”

I don’t speak for those who are being spoken about by everyone sir.
I speak for mutilated dead bodies.
I speak for unidentified graves.
I speak for the farmers of Okara.
I speak for the poor against giant land mafias.
I speak for missing people.
I speak for minorities.
I speak for 444 encounters of Rao.

“You telling me you don’t give a fuck? You telling me that??”

I give selective fucks. Like you. I speak when I want to. And no, I don’t speak on every single dead body. It stinks.

“Bloody civilian!”

Bastard!

“Aye!”

5 martyred.
13 dead.
12 wounded.
220 million duffers!

Top Gun: 1986 to 2019

I wasn’t even born when “Top Gun” was released in 1986. Tom Cruise became a global star and Air Force Planes became a sensation for both men and women. The inverted plane maneuver is still one hell of a scene to watch.

It’s 2019. Trailer of “Top Gun: Maverick” has been released. Tom Cruise is the lead cast again. It looks promising though one shouldn’t bet against classics like that. But that isn’t the point.

In those 30+ years, while Cruise remained the lead cast / hero on screen, we went through the whole cycle of life. From Azaan in ears to passing through never-ending midlife crises.

Some of us got fat. Some went bald. White hair. Decaying skin. Decomposing. Some are unhappily married while others went through divorce happily.

Anyway, we hope, with our flop lives, that this movie will be a hit. We, the crowd, don’t like our stars to fail though our stars – our other stars – rarely align themselves.

“I’m going to need a beer to put these flames out.”

P.S. This one is for you. Not me. Because I ain’t bulky or bald.

Random Numbness

Let’s see it this way. Why there is no justice in Pakistan? Or, why over 10 children are being sexually abused daily in Pakistan?

Because everything revolves around sex and greed here. From top to bottom. From topless. To bottomless.

A Judge recently got exposed after his video went viral. He was busy making money. But he says he was threatened by “manipulated, immoral video”. You know what that is? Our expertise.

NAB is busy in losing cases abroad and Intelligence is busy collecting “who is sleeping with who” videos / pictures. You know. For future manipulations. Like the Judge said. Easy stuff to get things done.

“I am a Prostitute of Grade-18. And you?”
“A pimp! With over a decade of experience.”
“Good to know.”
“Pleasure is all mine.”

When all the Forces, Agencies and Intelligence got the assignment to catch the rapist in Kasur last year, they all got exposed. Unskilled. Apart from forensics, everyone was clueless. Even today, many people in Kasur believe that the hanged person was just a scapegoat. Who knows!

But his profile matched a rape suspect. Mullah and Madrassah stuff. Right? Let’s not go to that side.

Again but… nobody asked this: How would pimps catch a rapist? Is there a precedent?

Precedents.

Every political party going against the others. Elites playing the cards. Dramas. Suspense. Courts. Trials. Imprisonment. Bail. Someone in. Someone out. Same episodes. Again and again. Haven’t you seen all this in 1960s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and so on? It is same.
Defaming the opponents.
Opponents joining opponents.
Formation of new opponents.
Opponents in power.
Touche!

Those who had ministries during military regime have the ministries in the ‘democracy’ now. Isn’t it fucked-up?

The fight for justice is always between rich and poor. Zalim and mazloom.
It isn’t against one monarch to another. It isn’t between Bani Gala and Jati Umra.
It isn’t between pimps.

Perverted nationalism. Perverted nation.
Drug addicts, sex-offenders, and greedy families are ruling us.

Over 1.8 million pending cases in courts. In front of ready-to-be-sold pimps. Being represented by a mafia of lawyers (read liars) who can beat the hell of a judge on any given day. Based on reports submitted by police which can abuse you as soon as you walk into a station.

Have you been in a court in Pakistan? Brothels are better, trust me.

You can get any document attested for Rs.5-10 per page. Magistrate for bail is easily available for crimes like murder or rape or both. Fake witnesses roam around the court-rooms to be hired by anyone. They will give statement, under oath, regarding anything. If you want to prolong your case, you can prolong it for years without a hearing. If you want instant justice, you can bribe the judge directly. Everything is managed by Readers who sit on left and right side of the judge.

Behave!
It’s Honorable judge.
You have to stand when they enter the court room.
You sit when they sit.
And you spit when they do justice.

In the end, we expect justice for our kids from these pimps in pimp-rooms.

Welcome to the Child Abuse Capital of the World!
Please use precautions.
We just found AIDS is rampant in our kids.
Thank you!

Nostalgic Descriptivism

“Denoting” is a philosophy by Bertrand Russell. Descriptivism.

Let’s improvise: “Nostalgic Descriptivism”.

Monsoon Rains. Dampness. The whisper of wet leaves. The grass adorned with tiny water droplets.

Was it the monsoon or the dampness? Was it the person or the feeling? Was it the place or the weather?

Was it specific? Or random?

Random it was!

Isn’t descriptivism random too?

Take an example: Who is the poet who died in Kasur, loved to be called Arain over Shah, and was called “infidel” by the Mullahs of his time? This whole description is for Bulleh Shah precisely.

But what if you don’t know Bulleh Shah? This whole descriptivism is random then. Baseless. Meaningless. Is that what defines Bulleh Shah? What if he had been born in a different city? Like Narowal, to be called Faiz?

What is nostalgic descriptivism? Bertrand Russell didn’t talk about it.

Is it the person? Or the weather? Or the dampness? Or the rain?

For instance: Does it matter if she was from Lahore or Islamabad?

Does it matter if her name was not this but that?

Does it matter if she lied happily or didn’t lie unhappily?

No it doesn’t. None of the facts matter.

What matters is the time. Descriptive time. The time which is gone but rewinds. Again and again. Whenever the description matches, it hits your memory. It invites nostalgia. It gives you the same feeling and dampness. Without the presence of anyone. No presence is needed.

And I don’t know how to describe further.

By the way, next time you read descriptivism, remember I described “nostalgic descriptivism” for the first time.

For you!

Until next time…

Romanticizing Duffers in Paris

The business is same. 7 million tourists per year. To visit the steel tower. Why? Because movies say so. Celebrities keep that tower in the background of their pictures. Instagram. Models love to pose in front of it. It sells. And with that, Paris too. And consumers, the tourists, keep on coming like herd of sheep. Duffers!

It’s same elsewhere too. In Amsterdam, they have Red Light District. Tourists come even if they don’t want to fuck. They come. They spend. They visit. They roam. They spend a year’s savings in couple of days. But they don’t fuck. Yet they get fucked. Only they don’t know about it.

Well, why not enjoy the free stuff? Like sports on TV. Or do you want to be part of crowd to stand in queues for tickets, then fighting to enter, then finding the seat, then seeing the game with a binocular in one hand and selfie stick in other; posing for the world of social media which is waiting desperately for this particular duffer to illuminate their timelines.

Like. Like. Like. Heart. Love. Wow. For the ego. For self-confidence. For rest of the duffers to see the response on this duffer. Like mine. I will like yours.

Quid Pro Quo.

Even after following all their advertisements, we are tracked. Like inventory of Walmart.

Those who didn’t fit to the prescribed model of advertisements and monopoly and brands and trends; were out-casted. They were labeled. Traitors. Anti-nationals. Like Snowden. Like Assange.

And Assange is arrested. The founder of WikiLeaks is finally taken. The man who showed us a ray of hope in this ugly world of Orwell’s 1984, has disappeared.

Anyway,

Guess what? This sells too. Such words and books are cool. Also accepted and widely read. Writing about duffers has a market. A market of duffers. Not niche now. Every duffer believes he isn’t referred here. That’s his friend and everyone else. Not him. And that works. In writing. On laptop. In a hotel near Eiffel Tower.

Likes. Yikes!

Walli – The 6th Transaction

Pain resides over love. Love breeds around it.

Like a vine; wrapping itself round the massive and un-yielding tree of pain. Twisting, covering, inch by inch –  hiding the tree itself.

And the people passing by fully enjoy the breathtaking view of the vine. Experiencing it. Smelling it. Touching it. Without knowing what it encloses. Without seeing what lies beneath.

 

The last breath is never easy just like the first breath; however, for Wali, the trauma of breaths has been different. His first breaths were as conscious as the last ones. Always. He always knew the purpose, the journey, the struggle; yet failure was destined for him. The pursuit remained not for a decade or a life but for lives along with echoes of requests in parallel universe.

Yet here he is again at the Gate of Transactions with God, with the same request and the same vehemence in his eyes, to ask to pass the same journey again. Just like a moth to a flame, he has to burn. He has to die. It is his destiny. And perhaps the purpose too.

The Gate of Transactions is unlike any of the other gates. It is a combination of the physical and metaphysical dimensions. Time exists in the physical dimension and there is no limit to the time you can traverse. However, contact remains elusive; bound by a silent command. The command of ‘Kun’

This is Walli’s 6th transaction with the hope that it will be the last one. He may not have had any eminence in his four lives in the world, yet he has the royalty to be here for a conversation.

God loves to give chances. He loves to give hope. He will easily grant you another life. But He will sternly refuse any assistance. He will not reply to the old-wretched-soul of Walli. He won’t look. He doesn’t need to look.

He knows. Everything.

“Here I am again, at the mercy of You and Your creations of time and life and hope.”

God knows.

“I need to go back again. I need to start again. I need another chance. Another life. Like Adam.”

God knows.

“O Dear Lord! Grant me another chance. Send me back. Forgive me but I don’t want the eternity of heaven. I need the life of the world.”

God knows.

“I have failed but my failure is not mine alone. I am limited. I am restricted. I am confined. In a body. In a soul. I deserve another chance.”

God has always known.

Time continues to race. At the edge of chance, his heart – barely able to beat – slows down. He looks up at God, silently imploring with his eyes as words fail him.

“Please!”

The Guardian of the Gate approaches Walli to escort him. He has had his chance. He has had his meeting. He has had his failure. It was meant to fail. Requests, pleadings and lives are turned to ash like that.

Un-Kun-ed.

“The vine is nothing without the tree. It lives, breeds and produces because of the strength of the tree. Pain and love go hand-in-hand like your parallel lives.” Pointing to the gate, he says, “Please leave.”

The gate closes behind his back with a clang.

Each prayer accepted and each wish resigned.

“Is this it,” he wonders.

This is it.

“KUN!” comes the Commandment and the universe echoes it for the sixth time.

… follows a conscious gasp somewhere near a small hut near a cold river passing through a cold desert.

Walli – In The Name of M.

There was a problem. He was sure what to write but he was not sure how.

Should he write about her as M.? He talked about her as M.

With time, and with a never-ending state of separation, he started to talk about her a little openly. Daughter. His daughter.

And then, with the continuation of the separation, he talked a little more. Revealed a little more.

MARYAM. Maryam.

His M. His daughter. His Maryam.

Even before she was born, there was a connection. There was a strong connection through dreams. Through light. Through beautifully alone sleepless nights.

But of course there were some prerequisites to be fulfilled to meet her in reality. A marriage. A marriage destined to be doomed from the beginning.

Anyway,

She arrived on a beautiful sunny day. On April 9th 2014. Lahore.

That was the day he realized why the Prophet Muhammad SAW used to stand up for His daughter. With utmost love and respect.

Like the trials of all the philosophies before they were theorized by the great scholars of different times, this story was to be trialed as well.

He had to drink the poisonous water like Socrates.

He had to be insulted in the city like Mansur Al Haj.

He had to bear the crumbling pain in his brain-eating-itself like Nietzsche.

He had to witness the strange eyes of his own people like Hussain.

He had to be killed again and again so as to be given life every time to rise through the stages of suffering until the final resurrection.

Like the Divine Comedy of Dante. From inferno to purgatory to heaven…

However, the inferno isn’t ending since forever. The tunnel ahead looks dark up to infinity.

But even in the inferno, dreams are not forbidden. You can call them nightmares but they are the only meeting points for him and his daughter.

August 6th 2014 was the day of separation. December 14th 2015 was the re-union day. 496 days. In the Family Court.

These 496 days were the longest time period that he had had to survive. And he survived. With dreams. With nightmares. With hope. With struggle. The court allowed him 4 hours twice a month. A total of 8 hours a month. This was considered as a big relief as every lawyer told him.

Women must have been victims of patriarchy outside the court. But inside the court, particularly in family courts, men are the biggest victims you can imagine. Fathers have to struggle for months and years for the first glimpse of their kids. Thousands of Rupees are spent monthly to make the meetings possible. Bribery and begging is compulsory as well. Sometimes, fathers are beaten up too and there is no one to rescue them.

His meetings, visitations to be precise, continued for 6 months. Then the same old story was repeated and he was deprived of that too.

The story of separation started in the same tunnel of darkness.

He heard a lot of love stories. He saw them. People waiting hours to get a glimpse of their loved ones. People waiting to meet. People waiting to be united. Waiting and waiting and waiting. He never faced such waits all his life. Maybe he was needed to be taught how to wait for a loved one.

He is waiting. And he is doing it pretty well.

Everything that has a beginning has an end. This shall end too. He will see. We shall see.

While drinking the poisoned hemlock, Socrates saw his face in the reflection of the water for one last time. The dark incurious eyes. The face without any expression of sorrow or joy. The clean forehead with some wrinkles. His uncombed hair. His last reflection. Just before sipping the hemlock, his lips smiled a little. Everyone around who hurt him all his life were going to die and be forgotten in the ashes of history while he was going to live forever. Just before sipping the eternal grief and pain of his life, he was relieved of all his pains.

And that is when the tunnel is going to take a dangerous and darkest turn towards the perpetual happiness.

 

In the Name of Zainabs – Our Daughters

There was a Zainab before. A blind girl.

In the times of Zia.

She was raped. Gang-raped.

But as she was blind and couldn’t identify the culprits, she was stoned.

Stoned to death for adultery.

The so-called “sharia” by Zia was imposed.

Just walk through the corridors of government or private organizations and you will find corruption at every corner of this country. Employees at lower grades are as corrupt as employees at top hierarchy.

Clerks are the ones that keep the pain alive. Employees in the field are the ones keeping the bribe system blooming. Shopkeepers, section officers, businessmen… almost everyone is corrupt. We have to verify a zillion times before making any purchase in this country.

Our kids, our generation, the innocent beings, are also not safe from our corruption. We feed them with impure milk. We raise them with bigotry and complexes. We trust strangers for their development. We send them to unsafe madrassahs and schools. We use them for our gains.

Most of the people, when asked about their kids, reply that they will help them in old age. That is it. Selfishness.

Lower the income bracket, higher the number of pregnancies. The only flourishing indicator of this country. And then they are left to face the miseries of life. Which is why they get into the wrong hands.
A Basic Health Unit (BHU) is given a minimum target of 60 deliveries per month. If less, an inquiry is held. Such is the ugly state of our “population control”.

Anyway, there is a question. Questions. What to do? How to keep our kids safe? Apparently the best solution is to take contraceptives. Let the kids stay in the heavens. But our selfish nature will not allow us to do that. Then what to do?

Schools are not safe. Madrassahs are not safe. Streets are not safe. Even relatives are not safe. What to do? There is no answer. There is only selfishness and misery. And misery will prevail for long. Because we see, we shout, and we become normal. Until we are jolted again.

Young Zainab’s father said that the head of JIT should be a Muslim. His consciousness is amazing. The rapist and killer of his daughter would most probably be a Muslim. The men behind child sexual abuse scandal of (2006-2014) were also Muslims. The state should be rid of this religion card by now. Our security, our existence, and our future is as stake; but we keep this card alive for personal benefits.

People are angry. There are episodes of anger.
Political parties are playing their political card.
Religious parties are playing their game.
The father of the unfortunate Zainab is also speaking in favour of the religious card.
Everyone is playing except those who are beyond the tags of conservative, liberal, Muslim, and non-Muslim “clichés”.