Pujjo still hates Ismailis

Pujjo hated Ismailis. The reason was simple they had a huge vote bank & rarely made use of it. He had many friends amongst them, who claimed to support the party but voting was not their cup of tea. Pujjo realized the reason but could not articulate it in words, so in round about ways he would explain something which was quite simple, they were too damn smug in their middle class affluence & minority seclusion. During the campaign days of election 93 he came to the harsh conclusion that the only thing which could change their voting pattern is a good sound thrashing from the mullahs for their not being Muslim enough.

As for the campaign, things really warmed up when a supposed ‘tiger’ which looked more like a cross between a dog & a zebra was taken away from Manzoora, the local subzi wala, by force. Our first instinct was to make a public bonfire of it, see it go up in flames, raise a few slogans & go back home .Pujjo realizing the whole thing would last only fifteen minutes thought otherwise. He had gotten his hand on a piece of wood & made arrangements for three different pigments. The cabinet maker was commissioned under duress to turn the piece of wood into an arrow. Our esteemed khalo, the mohalla artist was requested to paint the arrow & write two lines of poetry of his choice but sympathetic to our cause. The first request he refused citing a lack of time but everyone knew he regarded the job below him, so Pujjo did it himself & after the paint had dried the words of Iqbal were rendered beautifully on the now tri colored arrow by khalo.

The next day between Asr & Maghrib, with a cool Karachi breeze blowing, the supposed white Bengal tiger was hoisted between two poles which were erected a few years back for a PMT (pole mounted transformer) which never arrived. The arrow, which was huge in comparison, after great difficulty with ropes running to almost all the adjacent buildings, was up with its point between the hind legs & tail of our tiger; some left over red paint was also used on this part of the beast’s anatomy to complete the effect. There it was, ten days before the election, our hope, regarding its out come.

Pujjo worked a lot for both the provincial assembly (PA) & national assembly (NA) candidates. He disliked the provincial candidate but was sure he would win with two factors favoring him ,one ,he was a Ismaili & one of the biggest Jamat khana fell in this constituency ,second & the major factor MQM was boycotting the election. As for the NA candidate, Pujjo liked him for the very reasons ,he claimed that would cost him the elections; he was not Ismaili, he drank a lot & made no secret of it (although it was obvious he couldn’t hide it ) & most important of all the man had some dignity & a little bit of what one could call a conscience, this did not serve him well ,a man of fifty four at least, he had received the party ticket for the first time, that too after the original candidate died suddenly three months before the election . The deceased was no starlet, he had contested from this area in many elections for various public offices & except for a stint during Ayub’s basic democracy had always lost. The party itself did not pay much attention to the constituency, considering it a lost cause.

Pujjo was well aware of the party’s disregard for the constituency but he was a ‘jiyala’, so he toiled for a candidate he disliked & a candidate who had little prospect of wining. Pujjo was proud of many things, of this being the only Party office in the city which was not closed & defended during the language riots; of him loosing the function of his right ring finger when he grasped a knife in one of the many fights he had fought for the party’s student wing. Though he was not enrolled in any college & could barely read Urdu, he had been a valued member of the student wing. The party was not unkind to him, the first time it came to power, Pujjo was given employment. He was made a bank guard, but within two weeks he had slapped a middle aged clerk for the dual offence of touching his dense, curly beard & calling him ‘mullah’. That single slap made things much easier for him, the bank manager worked out a time table, which required him to come in once every month to collect his pay, but Pujjo would go once every week, just so people didn’t forget him.

Back to the campaign, it became livelier after the tiger & the arrow went up. Tiny flags were every where, more posters came in, huge banners were put up, Pujjo being a failed electrician got hold of tiny lights, ‘qumqumay’ he called them repeating the word over & over enjoying the sound of it, a curious ting happened, there were red, green & white ‘qumqumay’, we had ended up with the colors of our toughest rival but nobody noticed except Pujjo himself but he said it made no difference because MQM was not part of the race. On our little street there was no opposition campaign except for Manzoora , the subzi wala (whom three years later a prime minister would recognize as the ‘aalo wala’ & ask how is vegetables were doing not him but his vegetables, but still, that was a proud moment for Manzoora. Weeks later he received a Honda 70 as a gift & days later it was stolen & remains missing to this day ), Pujjo wanted to end the Manzoora campaign by use of violence ,but Manzoora had been born here ,his grandfather was the original subzi wala, known to all as ‘haji baji wala’,& here in lay the difficulty ,Manzoora was too much a part of the mohallah or para as we called it , to be abused for a such a small thing as the election, so Pujjo let him exercise his right of free speech & association.

Both our candidates did their rounds of all the ‘paras’, went through all their narrow streets followed by a small crowd. Standing beside heaps of stinking garbage & promising to get rid of it ,balancing on bricks as they crossed little streams of sewage ,telling people ,if elected they would make sure rain or shine the streets will be dry as bone, free of the over flowing filth. Pujjo was fond of saying going through the arithmetic para over & over again was essential for a decent campaign. His arithmetic para went
Para ikum para
Para doni baloch para
Para theia patel para
Para chowk gadha para
Para punjay Sindhi para
& so on till twelve.
All politics is local as so many newspaper columnist repeat, but no one was petty enough or rather foolish enough to demand employment for a son or a nephew in exchange for the ten or twelve votes he held. They asked for mundane yet important things , their courtyard be cemented ,the long over due PMT ,so their appliances could be safe from the ever fluctuating voltage , a more constant water supply, which was worst then the voltage ,less drugs on the street. As usual they were asking too much, in case of victory they would probably get their cemented courtyard & easily available attestation for the various government forms ,attached photo copies & especially identity card applications ( this had become a problem after the retirement of our only attestation grade government office). Many had gotten their I.D cards because of the election ,forms were filled for them ,attestations done & card s delivered to their door steps with no hassle.

Election day came first for the National assembly, our ‘shamayana’ was up in front of the four polling stations , with which we were concerned .From our para in our hand we had 850 voters & roughly 1200 votes ; because of the four polling stations almost every women could at least vote twice & if the job of removing the permanent ink was not done to perfection leading to some being caught they were let off without much hassle ,as for the holes on their I.D cards they had too many from previous elections, although sometimes this would also lead to a loss of precious votes. With men it was difficult & the consequences of getting caught were too high, but still a few did exercise their right of a second vote.

All things considered our shamayana was the gayest of all & the most professional; there were veterans of previous elections who knew the voters list, as if by heart, they could get a voter’s number by just asking their name & address. Numbers written on small chits for voters to take inside the station, tea passing around , hired Suzuki vans bringing in voters & transporting them back, arguments , asking the voters to encourage others to come out, by mid day the voting was in full swing & it would die down to a trickle within one hour.

Pujjo was right on the national assembly election day, which MQM had boycotted the Ismailis didn’t show up & it cost us dearly (Voting habits was the only thing which made Pujjo despise the Ismailis).

In the intervening day before the provincial election, our nemesis realized its folly & decided to jump in that was enough to shatter our hopes. The Ismailis did turn up for the provincial election with Pujjo cursing them & telling them it was useless. Some protested that casting votes in a MQM boycotted election was risky business, to which Pujjo would reply no election is without risk so why were they risking their necks now adding that he was happy that MQM was back in the race ensuring their Ismaili would not win. Things were getting out of hand so a bitter Pujjo was taken to a different polling station, one where few Ismailis would come to cast their vote.

Pujjo was right our national assembly candidate lost by a very narrow margin to Manzoora’s man. Our provincial candidate lost by a huge one although he had more votes then our NA candidate& this when a provincial constituency is much smaller.

Thus stream of sewage still flow, the garbage heap gets bigger & bigger ,the court yards still remain ‘kacha’.The two poles of the PMT remain empty except for a dangling tiger with red streaks between its hind legs & tail. The arrow was removed so it can be used some other day.

Pujjo did fear for his job during the days of rampant privatization when the tiger was back on the throne for its second run, but somehow he managed to hang on. Eventually he lost his job in the second year of our benevolent dictator. It did not affect him much for according to Pujjo he had it coming. His mother welcomed the news, she never took a penny from him considering it haram; with two other boys in U.A.E she could afford the luxury of haram & halal. With the ‘Golden hand shake’ Pujjo bought two taxis & started his Bird Farm. Things are not as good as they used to be, the taxis keep breaking down & the birds, when they are in good shape the market is in a bad one & when the market turns around they start dropping dead .

The arrow never went up again & recently sawed into pieces, it became part of one of Pujjo’s many bird cages. Pujjo says the bird of that particular cage have worked best for him. As for the tiger nobody bothered to remove it, the weather did the job, first the red streaks faded, then the black stripes & finally one day without anyone realizing it the tiger disappeared.

This year the party again lost with Pujjo still voting for it. He couldn’t answer why? For this time it was not ideology or loyalty. Perhaps it was because the birds of a tricolor cage had been good to him.

Pujjo thinks a lot about haram & halal these days, even likes being called mullah, he went to Raiwind last year. Yes Pujjo still hates Ismailis but the reason seems quite different, for now he does not discuss their voting practices but their daily practices.