Roshanara Begum in Lahore Karachi ISLAAMABAD

Yaar, main issay kiya kahon?

Is ko main nay latest email yeh bheja:

Hello heroine, how's life treating you?

You meet me out of Guilt.

Save it for Sex your guilt

Can't you meet me for Pleasure

As in it's a pleasure to meet You…

I am on late nite FM 100 telling this story, in a sexy and sensible voice.

She responded!

Said I could tempt a nun!

So you think I can tempt a nun..

I would think I am great shakes if I tempted non nuns, some non-celibate into deliriousness.

Whats the fun in exciting a virgin, or a nouveau virgin?

Maza to hay is main to have a red blooded active thing I can trade trade secrets with.

Ok this email I did not send her.

Here's another one:

Roshanara, yaar, you should have been an opening batsman. So gracefully you leave alone balls outside the off stump.

Do you go through nights when all you can wrap yourself around is Outlook Express?

Khudaya.

Saano ek pl chaaen na aa-way

Sajna teray b'na

tum tu mujhe kahin ka na chooro gi

tumhe andaaza hai ke tumhari

baatoon ne

mujhe heatstroke de diya?

("hamari" technically,

magar mujhe tumhara qasoor lagta hai)

chakra kar mein bistar pe gira aur

I hallucinated people measuring your height in your room,

Nobody could get it right

you grew and shrunk in imperceptible moments.

And your emotion filled my head and flooded my room

and I thought if mine too

lets loose

My room will pop like a balloon and we'll be scattered out there with the frangipanni

and flower me wanted knowledge of where your hips began.

tum tu mujhe kahin ka na chooro gi

I 'll be a sightless, heedless beggar who'll swear there is sin without

Guilt

I did send this.

Yaar, jo wounds hehn wo ek aur hi nature kay hehn. They will not heal. Perhaps forgotten from time to time. She reminds me of the women who are no longer here, the girls I grew up with who have vanished from Pakistan, eternally doing Phds in the U.S

But as far as this woman is concerned she is the greatest show for me in Lahore, Karachi, Islamabad. Her angst, her taste and humour are so winning I have kept a lot of other pots and pans on the back burner. Which would have come to the fore eventually, and to the boil in a relationship.

So I do feel relief. I know that in the enthusiasm of the first, being in a relationship with the last woman of my generation, I would have gone ahead to do things I would not otherwise.



Sari Umr Nahin Bhole Gi Wo Boeing Ki Flight

Scene One

The Airport Terminal

(stage directions)

Feel the feelings upon entering the Islamabad Airport terminal. You see yourself walk past the first security check where they leaf through your ticket. They give you a moment to take in the long perspective. Ticket counters to the right, and people-- families-- sitting on the left of the room. This is not the lounge so why are people sitting here, you cannot help thinking. Incomplete information on the signs on top of the counters (three counters signifying a Lahore flight, and you have the vague feeling that these are not referring to the same flight), the white washed walls, vague stains on the wall, on the counters, on the people.

Roshanara is on the same flight. She is ahead of me on the line. Scene Two opens up in my mind. She says. He says.

Roshanara: meri zindagi ek train ka safar hai. Station ata hai aur main khush hojati hoon kay station aagiya. But just as I am about to get off dabbay kay andar say ek haath ata hai aur mujhe wapis khench leta hai. Aur phir train chalna shrooh hojati hai.

Him: kabhi aisa nahin huwa kay koi station pay tumhara intezaar kar raha ho? Tum utro wo tumhay uthaiy aur tangay pay bitha kar lejayay?

Scene 3

She is before me in line, and her turn is up. She reaches out for my ticket.

Roshanara: saath bethna hai, ya should we sit at opposite ends of the aircraft?

Him: hmm, hahn yeh bhi ho sakta hai key hamei couple samajh kar approach karney waley approach na karey.

R: hahn we should not sit together. We must give all appearances of being single.

We go through the security physical. I pass through, and as I step up on the escalator that will take me to the lounge I turn around to see her being frisked by lady security.

She comes up behind me and we both see the lounge coming into view. Everybody sitting in the waiting lounge is a family. Everywhere units of two shalwar kameezes leading three children.

"Lets play a game," she says. "What if the person we are supposed to meet in this life is on this flight. And we have the time from now to when we land in Lahore to recognize them."

Announcer's voice: The flight to Lahore PK 303--- is now delayed…

Scene 4

(Inside the Boeing)

Him: Do you know who Roshanara was?

Roshanara: Alexander's Roxanne. When I was 10 I learnt about her. She was waiting for Alexander to find her, her astrologers had told her that a world conqueror would come and take her away.

Him: I was thinking about the Mughal Princesses Roshanara and Jehanara, Jehangir's daughters. I have often wondered if people who name their daughters Roshanara and Jehanara know who they are naming them after.

Roshanara: What do you mean?

Him: Orgies at Chaburgi. Chaburgi in Lahore, that's near where you work. It's a pleasure garden built by Roshanara. She used to have orgies there. Jehanara used to have bigger orgies, since she was the senior princess. She commissioned Chandni Chowk. She was the father's favourite. Used to have sex with him.

I had spoken till I was out of breath.

Roshanara: What are you looking for?

Him: What am I looking for?

Roshanara: In a woman.

Her eyes were on her lap where her hands were twisting her boarding card.

Him, looking straight down the length of the aisle: (aside) Say: "You;" say: "yes." (To her). I am more and more confident about who I like.

Roshanara (happily): Me too.



But yaar, that evening i was done in by a social scientist! Who was less social and more scientist (She is an economist.)

She formed a theory about me, and then combed through everything she could

recall iffy about me, and heard over the grapevine, and ran a correlation.

Last couple of weeks she had been dropping these in conversation:

"You are bohemian"--

Me thinking: but but I'll write the nouveav handbook for you darlin'. Call me Mohd. Butt Buttoise.

"In my childhood my father could afford trips to Karachi and Murree for the family…"

What decade are you in sis, let's talk London, New York!

"I've heard your mother dotes on you--"

Hell, i've threatened to give up my

Pakistani citizenship so that i don't inherit anything from her.

"I want to move to the US--"

Mom, where have you kept my green card!

"Me sick of chauvinistic men-- "

Honey, I'm hardly a man, hold my hand. It is so soft, people think I'm a boy/man. I correct them: no no, I'm a woman-man.

"I like powerful men, me want to be Roxanna to Alexander-"

Oh jeez, why don't I be Roxanne to your Alexander, after all you are a man identified woman ("If I were a man I would," she has said several times)

So I went over to her place, more mausoleum and less house. Y'know how this elite is. Marble, pillars, chairs and sofas: I bet when 16th century bourgeoise Florentines had nightmares what they conjured up was late 20th century Lahore, Karachi, Islamabad elite drawing rooms.

ek corrupt baap ki beti has got my motors running.

A log fire. She invited me to sit before it. There she sat with the most unforgiving body language.

Keep in mind that she is a fierce development type, an economist-with-a-cause, and has found one and doing very well with it. She is washing the sins of patriarchy.

I saw a film at a film festival that reminded me of you, I tell her. The story is inspired by Ragiv Gandhi's assassin, a young woman who strapped on bombs, went up to him at a rally.

So here's the story: prepubescent girls from willing families (families that feel aggrieved by the actions of the State) are taken away to terrorist training camps, the assumption being that single-minded girls make the best assassins. In the camps they are inculcated with a cause and a training that becomes her lifestyle.

She responded aggressively: but what about their desires?

Me (unruffled, knowing that this is my last chance to be on top this evening.): most of the girls are sent on suicide missions before they turn 13. But one girl, trained as a sniper, has survived to become a woman. Your point is exactly the point of the film: the heroine's non-Euclidean desires get in the way of her life's straight-line geometry as assassin. But the brilliance of the film is in the direction and cinematography. She spends most of her time fighting in a forest, and the forest is full of booby traps planted by State soldiers. And most of the time the camera is on her eyes as her eyes work to spot the wires of the booby traps. As the movie progresses we (the audience) recognize in her close ups that her hair, that's always in her eyes, are also trip wires.

I don't get it she said. Send me the story as an email.

She is as full of trip wires as the hair on her head.

And that's when I said kiss me you fool.

(any resemblance to the undying is perfectly fictitious)