The Modern Bogeyman

Every day, in every way, things grow stranger. In America, a man dressed as Osama Bin laden is arrested on Halloween. In Britain, papers obsess about Madonna’s planned adopted of an African boy. In Norway, the head teacher of a school suggests boys be taught to urinate sitting down so as to avoid splashing. In India, the policeman investigating a bus robbery finds one of the suspects listed on the charge sheet for robbery, extortion and banditry is a three month old infant. And in Pakistan, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz says Belgium has a special significance to Pakistan, leaving most Pakistanis scratching their heads and going “Belgium…Belgium…isn’t that what you cough up when you have a really bad cold?”

Then there are the urban legends. Urban legends actually serve a useful purpose; by examining the myths and stories that resonate within a society, one can get a sense of the fears that loom largest within its people at that particular point in time. For example, nowadays it isn’t the one about the witch in the sari hitching rides in cars late at night and revealing feet turned backwards that is scaring gullible Karachiites, it’s the one about the suit with the briefcase. No no not the one about the inexperienced technocrat wreaking havoc on a disenfranchised populace, that other one about the woman and the flat tire.

This particular story, which has been doing the rounds of the internet via email forwards for some time now, was actually reprinted by a local daily recently. A woman at a mall is relieved when a well dressed young man with a briefcase appears to help her change her mysteriously flat tire. When he declines offer of payment and requests instead that she drop him to his car parked on the other side of the mall, she becomes suspicious. Saying she has forgotten one last errand, she alerts a security guard who returns to the car with her. The man is gone. His briefcase has been left behind. In it, the story goes, they find duct tape, weapons and assorted instruments of torture such as knives, pliers and a book of especially bad poetry.

Ok so there was no poetry.

The story suggests distrust of strangers is justified, and women in particular are vulnerable to killers, rapists, thieves etc everywhere. The recent spike in violent crimes rates ensures people ‘buy in’ to this story. Other urban legends currently doing the rounds in local society include the one about the car snatcher who lets the woman driving the car go unharmed after she kisses him. Then there is the urban legend about the drop in incidents of cell phone snatching, and also the one about free and fair elections.

While some myths can be debunked only through experience, others can be debunked by science. Take old chestnuts like ‘don’t swallow your chewing gum it’ll get stuck in your liver’ or ‘don’t swallow your chewing gum it’ll take seven years to be digested.” Parents everywhere will be disappointed to learn that, according to the live science website, both claims are patently false. Chewing gum, scientists say, is not significantly more difficult for digestive systems to break down than ordinary organic foodstuffs. They also point out that the Great Wall of China is not the only thing visible from space (astronauts can also wave to the Giza pyramids and certain airport runways), lightning does in fact strike the same place whenever it likes, and hair and fingernails don’t continue to grow after death but rather the body’s soft tissue retracts to reveal more of them.

Suited sadomasochists, persistent forces of nature, varied forms of organic degradation…our fascinations are becoming increasingly morbid. Instead of fearing nothing but God, we fear everything but God. What are some of the things that drive so many of us to this state of discontent, disquiet, disgust? Sadly, the only insights I can offer are my own.

Yesterday I saw somebody else’s son as I was pulling up at the teen talwar traffic light with my toddler strapped safely into a car seat in the back. Around six months old, the baby was sitting up but could not stand up. Placed at the base of the traffic light on the narrow wedge of concrete that marked the turn into Bath Island, he was trying to get a grip on the base of the metal pole to lever himself upright. Tiny as he was, his efforts resulted only in clumsy lurches to the right and left as his little hands kept slipping free. Each lurch brought him right to the edge, an inch or two from the drop to the road and the wheels that would kill him. Just when it seemed he would finally topple over, and the motorcyclist closest to him began to clench and unclench his fingers on the handlebars in the grip of the tension we were all feeling, a woman appeared from behind, swooped him up, and resumed begging.

Some time ago, my cleaning woman was walking back to her home in a slum behind Mai Kolachi. She stopped for a while to watch a few children trying to fish a floating doll out of the deep pond now covering an empty, excavated plot. It took her several minutes to realize it was a drowned child.

Walking into a grocery store a couple of days ago, I had to pull my eldest abruptly away as a boy came flying backwards and knocked over several stacked egg crates. Yolks, crates, albumen flew everywhere as the hefty, middle aged, store owner continued to push and pummel the boy. He was yelling something, but in my haste to get my own kid away from the scene I didn’t stop to catch it. If I tried to intercede I might be ignored, ridiculed, did my son need such an early object lesson in his parents’ actual powerlessness? When my shocked four year old asked me why the man had been hitting the boy, I told him it was because the boy had been stealing. Cheap domestic labour, disheveled Samad Bond junkie, pre-pubescent object of desire, sacrificial holy warrior, easily accessible punching bag for parent with poor impulse control…we ran from that boy’s predicament with the possible stories hanging uneasily in the air between us.


Years ago, in an obituary of Dutch nun Sister Gertrude, angel to the many disabled, infirm or orphaned adults and children abandoned at the cities Darul Sukun center, the roots of her devotion to the dispossessed, the abandoned, the vulnerable, were summarized by “whatever you do to the least of me, you do for me.” If that is too esoteric or alien for some, consider what is painted on the concrete cradle outside the Edhi center on one of the cities busiest roads; “do not kill”.

But perhaps the final words on the cost of the brutalization that economic inequality, intellectual poverty and myopic leadership have conspired to constantly subject us to should belong to one of its most notorious victims. Before self confessed ‘killer of hundred children’ Javed Iqbal (reportedly abused himself as a child) was found dead in his cell in suspicious circumstances, he had said he did what he did to bring attention to the miserable lives of children. “Our hearts”, Iqbal wrote in one diary, “have turned to stone.”

Whatever torments he might have suffered or witnessed, Javed Iqbal stopped being a victim the day he became an abuser. For the rest of us, where is the middle road?