Don’t Shoot the Messenger

On the plane back from smiling Thailand, where the average Buddhist’s kindness and consideration makes most Thais far better Muslims than people here could ever hope to be, the Pakistani man in the seat ahead of me looked back to see who was behind him. Having visually established a frazzled looking mother of two, one toddler squalling on her lap and another squirming on the adjacent seat, he pushed the recline button, and having further diminished the already measly space available, spent the rest of the flight snoozing like a malicious version of Dopey, while baby and I recreated WWE Smackdown.

At Quaid-I-Azam international airport, some local travelers took the unprecedented step of getting organized, forming one orderly queue before the open immigration counters. The person at the head of the line would move automatically to the counter that became available, as it’s done in international airports around the world. It worked for about ten minutes. Then a well-dressed man with two children strode determinedly forward and plunked his bags and two children adjacent to the person at the top of the line, forming another one. People appealed to his civic sense, his patriotism, his obvious education, his (against all evidence to the contrary) better judgment, and even the example that he was setting for his children. But he would not submit to The Line. “This is the way the system works,” he declared. For five minutes he stood by himself, waiting for a counter to open. Then others began to scuttle into formation behind him, and the snake of self-interest slithered into its loathsome, familiar shape before our very eyes.

Post immigration, the large ‘No Smoking’ sign looming next to the first baggage claim area was partially obscured by a large airport official looming indolently in front of it, smoke from his lit cigarette punctuating the directive above him. By now practically foaming at the mouth, I started to move menacingly towards him but was restrained by a superior sounding husband who, I might add, had already vented his frustration by shouting “Sir! You are an idiot!” at the line jumper encountered earlier. “Kya faida?” he asked gently, focused more on the toddlers’ lack of bladder control than the sheer injustice of it all. That’s the problem with the New Man. He never wants to beat people up anymore.

Finally, the memory of the glorious nine days of our first ever family vacation curdling like milk in the face of ugly details, we staggered out of the airport building bleary eyed, exhausted, searching for our ride. As I looked around my task was made harder by the fact that accidental eye contact would be taken as tacit encouragement by the gawkers that had immediately honed in on me. Ten minutes back in the old homeland, and I was already on the defensive. Having belted the children in, I paused outside the car to wince in anguish as someone drove a trolley over my foot. And that’s when it happened. For the first time in my life, a life lived (with the exception of a year or two) in willful thrall to the trials and triumphs of existence in Pakistan, a thought rose unbidden from my mind and, elbowing restraint aside with the ferocity of an MPA at an airport lounge, burst from my lips in a moment of glorious release. “I hate this country! ”

Afterwards, I toyed briefly with the idea of finding that airport official and bumming a smoke off him.

On the way home, I noted that Karachi’s thieves seemed to have upped their game a notch. Forget cars and phones, entire roads seemed to be missing. Deep, hastily gouged trenches filled with sewage lay where they had been. Then I realized it had rained while we were away, and the trenches were the CDGK’s answer to the city’s flawed and inadequate drainage system. As our car entered the locality in which we live, we realized abruptly why it was called Bath Island and why it might as well have been called Bath Tub. Even our apartment’s name, M Castle, finally made sense. We seemed to have acquired a moat. A lake dotted with the odd island or two of human waste congealed across the road, the parking lot, the bottom stair, and there was no ferry service in sight. An image of the clear blue ocean lapping pristine white sand as I lazed on a beach in Phuket with laughing children frolicking around me whimpered softy to itself and fled forever as I carried the youngest through calf deep swamp water and yelled at the eldest to stop giving himself mild electric shocks by repeatedly pressing our damp doorbell.

By the time I got home, my subconscious mind had reconstructed the dam necessary for stress free day-to-day survival here. I hadn’t meant it. I couldn’t have. I loved this place. I had refused opportunities to leave it and judged others who had taken them. It was the kids probably, that’s why I had said it. Everyone knew priorities changed once you had the little b******. And if anyone suggested I had simply had enough of being a second class citizen in a warped, lawless society that often seemed to hold together just to spite those who said it couldn’t, if anyone said that, well I’d scoff at their lack of vision and pity their sense of alienation. That’s what I would do. Right after I went to the bathroom. The loo at the airport had had no toilet paper.

After depositing bags and boys and finding emergency lights as the electricity kept playing hide and seek, I headed into the bathroom. I splashed water on my face in the dark. The light came back on. The water was green. Sewage had contaminated the building’s underground tank.

As I got around to unpacking I began whispering ‘ I hate this country I hate this country I hate this country’ to myself, doing a little luddi to it once I really got into the swing of things.

“Mama why are you saying that?” It was the three year old.
“Saying what?”
“I hate this country.”
“I’m not saying that!”
“Then what are you saying?”
“How dare you affront me?”
“What does that mean?”
“Good question. Go ask your father.”

As he headed off to begin the Pakistani inquisition, I wanted to take my children (and possibly my husband, he makes a mean omelet) and flee before my bitterness became a second skin rather than a flippant mask. I wanted to protect them from the unpleasantness of scenes like the one at the airport, the flotsam of garbage that had blanketed the city on the morning of August 15th, the needless deaths by electrocution that occurred during monsoon season, the double hazards of unsanitary conditions and poor healthcare, the eardrum piercing honking of cars hemmed in by increasingly frequent traffic jams...did it really make sense to continuously invest belief into an enterprise that paid no dividends? Could a slaphappy PR job keep at bay the thought that it was called a ‘soft’ image because you had to be soft in the head to believe it?

“Mama will you tell me a story before I go to bed?”
“Ok.”

So I told him the one about a talking cat that found itself in the middle of a flood and, inflating two of the garbage bags that whirled around it, used its improvised floating devices to get to safety with navigational help from the dragonflies fluttering overhead. The other one forming in my head, about two donkeys considering whether idealism should bow to practicality when considering futures other than your own, I shall keep for later. When, and if, there is a sequel with a happy ending, I shall let him read them both. Until then, here’s to finally understanding why Pakistani parents have split personalities!