Up sh*ts creak without a paddle, nahin nahin, the road to AIESEC!

What is it about sleepless nights and freaky dreams? I know that you’re not supposed to tell, but the sheer absurdity of some make me challenge them to come true. Take last nights jaunt for instance: there we were in all our glory in the middle of four hundred Indians surrounded by malevolent chanting and the sinister drum rolls. As the image faded, I felt myself being drawn to a certain light in the sky. It turned out to be a disco ball. A disco ball, you say? Reflecting light off the ball revealed a creepy milieu. Hundred upon hundreds, dancing or rather jiving in very unsettling zombie like behavior to the music of ‘Kala Chashma’. The disco image fades and I feel a hand on my shoulder, I turned around. It’s a woman, which you can tell. No point in trying to recognize the face, I know who it is, its Sawati all right (an ‘interesting’ Indian female I met at the camp). What in the world is she doing in my dream? Get the hell out! She gestures over my shoulder, as if to look the other way, cautiously I turn, only to look straight into nothing, nothing but darkness. She comes up close behind me and begins to regale me with exactly how she does what she does so well. On cue, and mercifully so, I drift back into sleep….

Dream two is somewhat more fulfilling; I’m a superhero with as yet undefined superpowers, but judging from my cockiness they has to be something special. It is short-lived though, as my own sporadic machine-gun-fire snoring and the pervading chill in the room wakes me up. In a drugged haze, I remember somewhat that I have an ‘optional quiz’ this morning. Oh bugger.

But where are my manners? A brief re-cap is in order. This dream that I’m talking about, well.. it has something to do with this conference I attended recently in India. The conference was humbly titled AIESEC. What’s AIESEC you say? Well to be honest, I’m still really not quite sure. All I could figure out was that it’s some kind of student exchange cum Indian idol thing. I could jump right into the first day of the conference and start blabbing about how good it was and how much it changed my life, but no, it won’t be fair to me, because I want you go through every single nauseating and irritable bowel syndrome feeling possible. So I’m going to make sure that you, yes you, follow every single horrifying day of the week proceeding to the conference.

In case of boredom please press ALT + F4.

Chapter 1 – Idiots guide to being bitch slapped in 3 weeks.

August 20th 2004, cycling through my inbox, I glanced at an unread email. Sender Alia, subject urgent. It had been some time since I had last heard from her. I had met and befriended Alia (an Indian), at a peace conference in Singapore some three years ago. The email explained that AIESEC, a global internee exchange program, wanted to extend Pakistan into its 84th participating nation. And that it was up to me to arrange for a group of Pakistani students to go participate in India. Not a problem, except for the very fine print at the bottom of the email (just like one of those end clauses in automobile advertisements) that read, ‘conference starts September 18th’. Heart pounding, pulse racing, I quickly dispatched a return email. I vaguely remember the wording that went into email, but the subject read something like “what the f**k?” and the email body included words like what, how, who, when followed by a lot of swear words, I’m sure you can very well imagine, if not then here’s and example. “How the f**k am I supposed to tell people, convince them, baffle them with bullsh**, apply for visa and arrange transportation in three and a half weeks???” you get what I mean.

Reply email from her suggests that I should do my best and hope it works out, if it doesn’t well there’s always next year. Unhun, sahi. Burdened with quizzes, I courageously accepted the challenge. First order of business, to send out invitations to as many people possible. I hoped I would get good responses from posting a message on orkut (online friends network). Orkut holds around forty thousand Pakistani students and guess how many replies I receive? Nine! Freakin nine! Another bloody masla, now I have to talk to people face to face and write separate emails to people, I don’t have time for that. So unwittingly I’m writing around hundred emails a day, I figure by now I must have carpal tunnel syndrome from typing the ass off my fingers. Finally after two weeks of tormenting quizzes and emails I came up with eleven names to send to the people heading AIESEC. Initially I had around 20 people who wanted to come, but after around a week or so they decided otherwise. But what I don’t get is why take the initiative just for the sake of tormenting the other person? For example, there was this particular female, I don’t remember her name, but her actions speak louder than words. She initially was so hyped about the whole idea. She kept sending me mails to find out more about aiesec and kept me posted on what she was doing and wanted to know what I was up to. Finally when the time came to collect information for the visa, she says “no I can’t come, my father’s in the army and yada yada”, well you should have thought of that before you planned to attend a conference in India. I called her up and asked her if her passport mentioned that her father was in the army, and she said no, well then technically she should have nothing to worry about. But nooOoo, she still does, she’s worried about missing her classes and not getting a good GPA, goddamnit, that’s not my problem, you should have thought of this before. Spent god knows of much of my precious time in trying to persuade her to come, hell I don’t even know if she was hot? And listen to this, I had to actually talk to parents to convince them to send their children, heck that’s not my job. If you want to go, then it’s up to you to persuade your parents into letting you go out into the cruel, cruel world, not me! Damn this. My parents on the other hand didn’t even know I was going to India, I brought it up two days before I left and they were like, “this is what I want you to bring me” , that’s how parents should be like. And next time, next time, well there’s not going to be another ‘next time’. End of story.

Well getting back to the subject now, I called up a meeting. The selected eleven were supposed to come to pizza hut on Saturday the 11th, exactly one week before we should be in India. I hope the severity of the situation sinks in, if not, then let me clarify, I’m supposed to hand over the passports and the visa forms to the embassy by Monday morning and hope to get them back by Friday so we can leave for India Saturday morning. That gives me around what, five days to get the visas. Let me remind you, this is Pakistan, India is our ‘enemy’, visa procedures are a nightmare, most people have been waiting for their visas for months, and I’m supposed to have all eleven passports stamped and ready within five days! Hell, venom extraction from a cobra would be easier. But wait, it gets worse.

So let’s see where we are now, I’m in possession of all the passports and the visa forms, but there’s a slight problem, I’m supposed to receive invites from the people in India by Saturday, the invites are supposed to be attached to the forms when applying for visa. They said they’d fax it by Saturday night. Saturday goes by, and so does Sunday, Monday I’m scratching myself with tension. Monday evening and still no faxes. Calling India is another problem, god only knows (or my dad) the phone bill I racked up. Monday night I’m calling up the guys in India, screaming my head off, and begging them to send the invites. And finally Monday night or rather Tuesday morning the fax machine comes alive. But the cruelty does not end here. For one, the machine runs out of paper, and two the faxes are all wrong. No signatures, no stamps and a hoard of cover letters I don’t need. I called the guys up in India again, this time with a tone of utmost disgust. I hoped it didn’t show. I explained to them, how utterly useless the cover letters were and how completely incapable they were in sending eleven signed and stamped copies. Immediately the machine starts pumping out pages upon pages. Next I receive a call from them saying, that I have to check up on this guy in Karachi who’s going to help me get the visas sooner, otherwise known as a ‘sifarish’. Amin Hashwani, hotel industry tycoon, real player, and this guy is rolling in dough, and dough gets you a lot of contacts, and he sure as hell has them. I called him up only to hear his secretary tell me what to do. I’m supposed to send the passports with the visa forms to Islamabad and deposit them at the Marriot Hotel and wait for further news. I comply. The forms are sent to Islamabad, express delivery, they reach Tuesday night. A cousin of mine rushes to pick them up and drops them off at the designated place. Hashwani’s secretary assures me that the package will be delivered to the embassy first thing Wednesday morning. Let’s not get our hopes too high too soon.

After three days of irregular bowel movements, my fears finally subside. Tuesday night I sleep like a baby. Wednesday brings new challenges, how am I supposed to take this bunch of kids to India? No one is ready to pay for the air fare, no one wants to go by train, and the buses are all booked. Final decision being that the buses would be a better option, but what to do, because all the seats were already booked? Hence my dad’s theorem comes into action. He firmly believes that you can get anything out of anyone once you make him a friend. Putting this theorem into action I meet up with the guy who’s in charge of the whole India-pak bus service. It takes a sh** load of time, but I found out that we both have the same hometown. And viola, talking in my native language, we reached a significant level of friendship. I ask him if he can arrange for eleven tickets, and he says yeah he can, next he added that I was lucky as they had two buses running the same day. Score one for dad.

Unfortunately nothing new on the visa scene, Hashwani’s secretary calls me up and says that the passports were deposited at the embassy on Wednesday morning. He tells me not to worry as he’s done this before and all will go well. Wednesday night no news on passports, Thursday morning, still nothing, by Thursday night, I’m sh**ting bricks. So not giving it a second thought I jumped on the next bus and left for Islamabad. On the way I received another phone call from the secretary and he tells me to pick up a chit from the hotel confirming the delivery of passports. As soon as I reach Islamabad a cousin of mine picks me up and we head straight to the Marriott. Reaching there the desk clerk hands me the chit, for a second I thought I had the wrong piece of paper. The paper read ‘passport received date: 16th September’, that was f**king today! Just to make sure I asked the desk clerk when the package was handed to the embassy and he said ‘just today’, if only I had a battle axe then.

There is something afoot, something vital, something profound, something great and terrible, and I’m all alone. There is nothing to do now but allow this moment, pregnant with tension, to pass, and I do so expectantly, eagerly, exultantly; maturity is no messiah I know, it’s a burden at best but when you’re going around in circles for so long the best thing to do is make a clean break.

It’s a strange, strange thing when you’re in so much crap (or Up Sh**’s Creek Without a Paddle, as a friend of mine puts it) that you know there’s no possible way for you to get out of it, but then at the same time you have this insane knowledge (confidence?) that you’ll come through someway, somehow.

What’s the use of kicking oneself over something Amin Hashwani’s management couldn’t do? Had dinner and then went off to sleep. So came Friday. Do or die day, tomorrow morning the buses leave for India. Woke drenched in sweat. The chit said, “Passport dispatch counter will open at three in the afternoon”, so I had time to kill. Checked my mail, prayed more than 6 or 7 times, the usual. 2pm I take a bus to the embassy and reach there only to be greeted by at least two hundred more people waiting to collect their passports.

Outside the counter is a police blockade, and only whose number is on the list can pass through. As if things couldn’t get any worse, my number was not on the list. As they say in French, I was “La F**ked”. Tension brewing, I called up the secretary up, he tells me that I’m at the wrong counter and I should be at the one on the other side of the compound. Half running half jogging, I finally reach the “other” counter. The guy there doesn’t even wants to listen to me. In time I coax him to check if he had my eleven passports, twenty minutes later he opens the counter hatch and plainly says “no”, end of conversation. Another frantic call later I’m back at the main counter, the secretary regrettable announcing that he had made a mistake. God damn, don’t I have enough tension already? I’m going to sue if I get an ulcer. Well he starts making amends now; he calls up the embassy and tells them that I’m outside. He then calls me up and tells me to wait for a few minutes. At that moment there was a very real sense of something about to happen. It’s the part of the movie where the violins and sinister stringed instrument sounds are reaching a slow, foreboding crescendo, tipping the crest and diving back down, themselves too scared to know what terrible fate lies ahead. The loud speaker suddenly springs into action, my name is blasted out. Running, yes running, no funny comments please, I reached the police blockade only to be told to leave my mobile with someone. The police wala doesn’t want to take responsibility for it and nor does anyone else. Now you just can’t hand your mobile to anyone, that’s just insane, now at this critical moment losing my mobile would mean that’s it over Hissam, you’re not going to India. Trusting in God, I gave my mobile to a single 80 year old guy who said he’d take care of it. Fearing the worst, I take one last look at my baby and never look back. At the counter I hand over the slip, only to be told to wait, 5 minutes later the guy pops open the chute and hands me the slip back, says passports were not ready. This is one of those moments where one could either piss in his pants or snatch the nearest Ak47 and go on a massive killing spree. Running back outside, I look desperately for the guy with my mobile. I don’t find the guy, he finds me. He comes over and hands it to me. I could have kissed him then, If only the world had more people like him. Calling up that bitch secretary, almost in tears I start screaming at him, only to be told to calm down and take it easy. The secretary then asks his boss, yes the big boss, Amin Hashwani himself, to call up the embassy. Fifteen or twenty minutes later I get a call from him to wait because something was about to happen. In an instant the embassy doors spring open and I’m told to report inside. Again I’m supposed to leave my mobile with someone, this time one of the police walas generously accepts to keep it safe for me. It was all just a little too good to be true. Taking my first step inside, I’m accosted by two plainclothes CID officers, they order me to stop without a reason, naturally being the stubborn asshole I am, I pay no heed and walk straight through the door, only to be grabbed, actually gabbed by three or four guys. Being a healthy two hundred pounds or so, and the blood of a commando (my dad was an SSG) they were no match for me, scrawny middle aged men, I grabbed hold of one guys arm and twisted it, he screamed like a little girl. I told him to tell me what he wanted and I would let him go. Almost in tears the guy pleads that he just wants to ask me some questions, well then why didn’t he say so before? Letting him go I told him go ahead and ask me whatever he wants. He asks me the usual stuff, what’s your pops name, where do you live, why are you here, and yada yada. After that was over I finally got a chance to go inside, the passage leads to a very stunning lounge, it has all these huge paintings from India, a big screen TV showing images from the Taj Mahal, but best of all, air-conditioning. Let me tell you something, these Indians, they never, ever open the door into the embassy, I’m one of the prevailed few who have been inside. This guy comes into the lounge and looks at me for a second and then asks, “are you Hissam?” And I’m like, yes, he tells me to wait for a few minutes. Another guy, and then another guy, and they all have the same question in mind, “are you Hissam?” Damn I was popular. Well eventually after 45 minutes or so the original guy comes out and beckons me to sit next to the only table in the room. He sits at the head. He hands me the 11 passports, a stamp, 11 stickers and a pen and tells me to get to work. Now this was funny. He says he has to work and said he’ll check on me in 15 minutes. After like half an hour, this guy comes back in and asks me if I’m finished, I was about nearly done, so he starts checking them and approving them with his signature. As a parting gift he gives me some advice, he says, “too close, a little too close”. The nightmare was over. I was out of there in a flash, grabbed my mobile and first called up the secretary and thanked him for all his help. God bless him.

Point being Khuda neh once again mujhe bacha liya, and when the chips are down and the Hissam Theorem is in full effect and there is nothing that can be done, something always can. I guess He’s spoiling me by being lenient, but He knows best. And Inshallah this is the last time dammit!

It was time to start making calls. 11 passports in hand, I’m absolutely euphoric. Alphabetically I start calling, Adeel went shopping, Aima & Amber didn’t sound very happy, Batool was jumping with joy, Sohaib’s parents were like “our sons going to India, when did that happen?” Its 7:00 pm in Islamabad. Now only two things remained the payment for the bus tickets, packing, faxing copies of the visa forms to the bus people, eating, and getting back to Lahore before 4 am the next day, that’s not two things! F**k!

My cousin picks me up and we head straight to the nearest fax machine. Unfortunately the bus people don’t have a fax machine, and neither do I, so all the faxes are sent to Adeel’s place, who was still out shopping. I receive a call from Aima and Amber (sisters), saying that they’re very sorry but they can’t make it. F**k off! That’s not something you say 9 hours before leaving! I frantically call up my dad and tell him not to pay for the two girls tickets. So we’re down to 9 nine now. My dad picks up the faxes and takes them to the bus walas, while I’m still stuck here in Islamabad trying to get back to Lahore. Around 8 pm I reach the Daewoo express bus terminal, only to be told that all the buses are booked and I’ll be put on the waiting list, my number? 147. And only one other bus leaving that day. So have to settle for second class then, franticly we search for some other means of transport. Finally found the perfect bus, “Niazi Express”, it’ll start at 10pm and will probably reach Lahore by 2:30 am Saturday morning, and hour and a half short before the India-pak bus leaves. So have an hour to kill, ran to the nearest burger shop and wolfed down everything. Said aloha to my cousin and so I was finally on my way back.

Didn’t sleep a wink on the bus, more from tension than anything else. My mind was going through worst case seniors, what if the bus broke down? What if we were abducted by aliens? It didn’t look good. Praying and praying and praying, i finally manage to reach Lahore. My dad was there to pick me up from the station (chowk yateem khana – 40 mins from my house), and he tells me that I need to get the passports photocopied including the visas. What? At 2:30 am in the morning? We start searching for photocopy wala, and guess what? We did find one! God only knows how that was possible, but we did! Reached home at around 3, found out mom had already packed everything, except for a few “essentials”. Took a bath, shaved, loaded the car, next went to pick up Nida from Lums and then straight to the bus station. The time? 4 am on the dot. But the journey had just begun.

The feeling of accomplishment engulfed me. And in such small victories do I find solace and conserve my strength, for there’s a long while yet to go. Here’s to us, the new generation X. It was time for the nine of us to accept whatever destinies await us, for better or for worse.