What word?

The other day a well muscled, broad shouldered, taciturn woman with a squint shoved me into a chair and tried to rip my ankles out of their sockets. Then she whacked my soles with stones before turning me around and digging her elbows into my shoulders. When she was done I gave her five hundred rupees and promised I’d be back soon. It was my very first foot massage, and I was really quite excited. If the rest of my intimacy issues resolved themselves as quickly as the one about strangers and touching had, one day soon I could well be making eye contact during conversations.

On my way out of the mall my companion and I chatted idly about the pleasure principle; the id wants what it wants and no amount of rationalization will make it stop wanting so one should simply scratch the itch. I felt I had gained an insight into the male psyche, an object lesson in the convenience of simply paying for pleasure rather than luring/cajoling/begging someone into giving it to you. She felt she wanted ice cream.

I felt Pakistani women had been trained to deny themselves most avenues of pleasure, except possibly food, and that too only when men’s appetites had been sated. She still felt she wanted ice cream. I didn’t join her because the food I’d inhaled at lunch still sat in my stomach like it was a waiting room for my intestine and the bowels weren’t done with their last patient, but in the car on the way home I coveted her cones.

To distract myself from the way the ice cream would feel on my lips if I hijacked her scoops and tossed her skinny arse out of the window, I stared intently out of the window at the city streets outside. Poverty, injustice, deprivation, despair, hypocrisy…I turned to lose myself again in the snowy peaks of a dairy product but she’d already finished it.

“What?” She raised an inquiring eyebrow.

“I want to move to Lahore,” I replied. There was a moment of shocked silence as we both considered the enormity of what I had just said.

“You don’t like Lahore.”

“I didn’t. I think I might like it now.”

I tried to tell her all the ways in which its warmth, its creature comforts, its choice of horizontal over vertical, made Lahore suddenly seem inviting rather than alien to me, but she shrugged and began rooting through her purse, possibly looking for a kernel of common sense to toss my way. She’d been to college in Lahore and said there was no way you could compare it favorably to its bigger, coastal cousin. Sure it had all those old buildings and greenery and stuff, and ties to our real cultural heritage, but what good could that do you at the end of the day?

I nodded sadly. Culture. Who wanted something you grew in a petri dish? Then I remembered reading the government was soon going to announce a new cultural policy. Or it already had. I wondered if Ali G was in it. He should have been, if he wasn’t. He poked holes in the ideologues of western civilization. He propagated fantasies in which man was god and woman was slave. He wore expensive jewelry. And his name was Ali. Could there be a better role model for confused Pakistani Muslim males?

“Hey so if we had a culture does that mean we’d have to give up the bits we’ve taken from other peoples?”

“Don’t see why, I mean its not like anyone’s got a divine right to explore the human condition.”

“Are you sure?” I was confused. “Only I saw a man on TV the other day and he was talking about how some people have more divine rights than others.”

“Are you sure he said divine and not supine?”

“Umm…”

“Or lupine, vulpine, asinine…”

“Never mind.” I rushed to change the subject. I didn’t want to reveal I hadn’t been paying attention to what I saw on TV. TV is all the rage nowadays. Everyone wants to be on it. If they can’t actually be on it they watch DVD’s on it. Like Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911. It was pirated and sold even before the end credits had rolled, stacked openly in stores right up there with the latest studio blockbuster. Everyone’s talking about the startling revelations he makes on it, about the way Bushes and Bin Ladins were snuggle buddies. Sure the Guardian editorials and articles from the independent press local English dailies have been printing for months made the same point months ago, without all the saggy middle I might add (and I’m talking about the movie not the man), but you just cant believe everything you read. Pixels, though, pixels don’t lie.

“So did you hear about the new Safari park? It has animals and birds too. And you can look at them from a coach!” Would she be able to see through my clever ploy?

“Who cares? I’m not a kid.”

“That’s just perfect because if you were you’d be too young to go.”

“Parks like that are for kids silly.”

I wondered how to break it to her. There had been two incidents involving kids and parks in the news in the last couple of weeks. One was a story about a child who died when a ride operator started the ride before he was safely fastened in and sent him flying. The other was a story about a child who had been grievously wounded when he’d gotten so excited about a kiddy train he’d darted onto the tracks and been hit by it. Parks in Karachi were no place for children nowadays, everyone knew that. It was almost as bad as putting Pakistani children through a system of education that developed rational thought. They started thinking for themselves and got all uppity. Then reality set in after graduation and they got all depressed. Uppity, depressed, uppity, depressed, uppity, depressed…

“Why are you looking so constipated?” I had forgotten that my companion was my friend.

“I read the line ‘cynicism is the suicide of the heart’ in a book of Sufi sayings the other day, was just thinking about it.”

“Was it like a Sufi manual?”

“What’s a Sufi manual?”

“You know, how to be a Sufi in ten easy steps.”

“I think there were more than ten…”

“Too bad. Why does everything have to be so long drawn out nowadays?”

“Dunno.”

Sitting in the back seat of our cheap-labour propelled car, engine idling beneath adjacent banners that exhorted Jihad against infidels and conspicuous consumption, we waited in companionable silence for the light to change.

“Hey you know this new cultural policy?”

“Yeah.”

“You think we’ll finally embrace dance?”

“I know lots of people who embrace dancers…”

“Seriously…”

& #8220;You mean apart from at weddings and mujra’s and raves and corporate shindigs and that thingy with the curved swords that men do?”

“Yeah.”

“I have no clue.”

“Scary isn’t it?”

“We’re not supposed to be scared of anything except Allah.”

Neither of us wanted to probe further into that can of worms so, clueless by choice, we went off to eat some more.