Culture Jam

Sealed in a jar of one culture, flying from Pakistan to US seemed like a journey long in time and space. That was my own personal opinion and feeling. I had always felt an alien sense of nonbeing while flying from one city to the other, but hovering above from one continent to the next, was totally reducing my nonbeing to one round cipher. Even our national language Urdu, pronounced by the air hostess’ and charged with wired sophistication, was an echo strange and lonesome. Islands of clouds suspended in midair and the oceans thick with mists, were distant and phantasmagoric. And yet, when the plane landed at the Kennedy airport, the streams of light and color were cleaving through my Void to resuscitate the sense of Reality.

The plane had reached New York several hours late, and the connecting flight to Columbus had left hours ago. The PIA attendant at the American booth was haughtily indifferent to my plea of accommodation for the night, suggesting no alternative, but to wait for the morning flight. In a cauldron of panic, with not a dime to call my husband who was expecting me on the scheduled flight to Columbus, I was sucked back into the Void of Nonbeing. One friendly gentleman from the American Airline, noticing my plight, volunteered to help me with a generous smile. Half listening, half commiserating, this angelic person seemed to know the discourtesy and the miserliness of the PIA employees. For, even before I finished expounding my dilemma, he exclaimed.

"Oh, these Packys (meaning, from Pakistan) always mess up!" this gentleman was smiling again. Not even suspecting that I myself was from Pakistan.

So, my first day, rather evening in America, was an enlightening one, wrenching me out of my Void once again, and exposing me to the light of reality. I was welcomed into USA with the lamp of courtesy and friendliness. It was inconsequential that I could be the most hated of the Packys with no manners just like the taxi cab drivers, about whom I had vaguely heard polluting the New York air with their noisy imposition, and chewing on obscenities while driving.

A succession of years after my residency in America were a mingling of wonder and awakening. The zeal and bigotry of the Muslims were projected as the essence of Islam. Being a Muslim myself, and floating upstream in Cosmic Consciousness, I could feel the lava of distortion hurled by the zealous Muslims as purely Islamic. Love, Peace, Brotherhood, as preached by Prophet Muhammed, were phantoms of the past? Tyranny and injustice, practiced by the leaders of Islamic nations, were the poisoned arrows, darkening the western skies.
Why do Muslims kill and hijack?
Is your God Allah?
Do you believe in Jesus?
Does Allah tell Muslims to hate and fight?
A shower of questions like these which I could not help but imbibe, were falling limp over the Truth in Islam. Truth could not be expounded, it was Within Us All, seething with wonder at all Truths, distorted and maligned All?
A merciful shower in dewdrops of benign ignorance was coming my way too, which I could neither claim, nor avoid. But these dewdrop questions were a whiff of reprieve to my sense of dry humor and ideation.
"Do women in your country wear veils?" an oft-repeated question like this I could even smell in the air before it could land on me.
"No," I would answer laughingly.
"Do you have guns to fight wars?" a generic question just the same.
"No. We have plenty of rocks though. And we hurl them at the enemy across from the border," a silly response on my part.
"Do you have cars in your country?" this could never fail to throw me into fits of hilarity.
"No. We have carts. First, the wheels were octagonal, and the rides bumpy. With a little improvement, we have designed square wheels. On the way to progress, we are just discovering the invention of round wheels."
This sort of inquisition had taken place in a school where I had started teaching, or rather learning?
Nothing has changed much since I moved to America. And it feels more like home with all its glory and ugliness, not some fantastic dream out of the pages of the magazines.
The only change that hits with the rod of reality is that God of all religions is the same, assuming a different name, different guise, in different times. Love, Peace, Unity as One is the message of all Faiths, if we can strip them naked of lies and distortion.

Inside this dreamworld of reality and ambiguity, I live here in America with my family and friends. A small pack of Packys, protected by friendly faces and bright smiles of the Americans in their own quest toward Unity. The mists of hate, crime, cruelty surface here and there, but they too are the words from the encyclopedia of turbulent times in all its entirety. Timeless and inevitable.