Loud and Soft

Khadija Hassan
Jan 8, 2004
Nurterer and Narcissist

Cross a nurturer with a narcissist and you will very likely find yourself in the presence of one Shoaib Hashmi, comedian, educator, father – not necessarily in that order. Not that he needs an introduction. Cross a nurturer with a narcissist and you will very likely find yourself in the presence of one Shoaib Hashmi, comedian, educator, father – not necessarily in that order. Not that he needs an introduction. There are certain features that give its cultural face. There is the Ajoka theatre, NCA, Alhamra and the Arts Council and there is Iqbal and Ahmed .

And where there is there is Shoaib Hashmi, son-in-, perhaps not extraordinaire, but present and booming. In tracing these mis-gendered roots (I have blatantly axed off Salima Hashmi “yes, yes, the mother doesn’t matter, I have already been forgotten”, she shrugs) I confront the man who seems to be the voice of - curt but cultured, impatient but enduring – and his daughter, -loving Mira.

They are ambivalent about this interview, “What kind of a theme is ‘fathers and daughters’?” Shoaib scolds. Mira shrugs. I assure them that it is a good one - especially with him as the loud patriarch and Mira as the soft spoken, almost whispering off spring.

Shoaib Hashmi is well known for his comedic stint with the now vintage PTV productions of Such Gup and Taal Matol. Since his graduation from College , he has held one job as an insurance agent, which he whimsically took and whimsically cast off, “without taking my paycheck, mind you”, in order to teach Economics and Mathematics at his alma mater in the 1960’s - kudos to him for sticking with it despite his whimsical nature.

More recently, he was approached by the School of Economics to teach the curriculum requirement of Urban Studies, a subject whose objective being unclear for the local LSE wallahs was developed by him to spread the phirnay ka chaska that is so dear a part of him, “They didn’t know what to do with it”, he says. “So I asked them, chaska daal doon?” They complied and he has happily taken it upon himself to create some street-roaming pucca Lahoris. To balance the act he also teaches our budding saRRak-chhap economists Pakistani in Urdu, which thankfully is not restricted to post writings, but includes the Sufi poets, Ghalib, and Iqbal to mention a few.

Of all the subjects he teaches Mathematics is shockingly his favorite. I find his choice shocking not because of any personal hatred for the subject (in fact I quite like it), but because of the kind of man he seems to be. He breezes in and out of his work/living area where I sit and chat with his daughter, swivels on the office chair like an excitable boy, runs out and comes back clasping terribly nostalgic white Bata badminton shoes and proceeds to put on his socks. Somehow, mathematicians appear to be a breed of people very different from this jaunty humorist. They lack not just a sense of , but entire personalities.

Shoaib Hashmi, on the other hand, has many personalities. Not multiple, but many. The thought of the mathematician conveys images of catatonic professors overseeing catatonic students caught in a stuporific obsession with solving equations and learning the logics that establish long-known conclusions.

The sight of Shoaib Hashmi is anything but that of the catatonic professor. And the fact that his choices as a fresh graduate of the College were capriciously driven (“someone-said-take-the-insurance-job-I-did-someone-sa id-quit-it-and-teach-economics-I-did-someone-said-come-teach -math-I-did-someone-suggests-I-do”) doesn’t exactly give him the stance of the distinguished logician. But something in his manner compensates for his professional impulsiveness.

Like the queens Alice faces in Through the Looking-Glass, who appear obnoxiously overbearing and yet preserve a very real authority, Shoaib Hashmi also likes to unabashedly unnerve his subjects. I light-heartedly ask him if he likes to torture poetry. He looks at me first quizzically, then mortified and asks me if I would like a cup of tea! His questions are very to the tune of “What’s one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one?’ If we lose count he may well smilingly smugly declare that we do not know how to add. But beneath the practiced smugness there is a benevolent teacher who is driven by the desire to simply teach.

He may roar like a lion or the axe-happy red queen, but he has the heart of a gentle goat. I think this because his daughter, Mira Hashmi is positively enchanting. She could well be the Alice wandering in her father’s strange wonderland, but she is much more than that.

Mira is a quiet young woman. With a BFA from Concordia University in Film Production, she teaches the same at Beaconhouse University’s new program in Theatre, and Film Studies, while she gestates over the kind of films she wishes to make. Though she is not clear about exactly what kind of movie she wishes to make on either genre or agenda, she is sure that she does eventually wish to make several.

As with any other young mind starting out in in a creative capacity she has some bones to pick with the . There is the lament that “there is no official initiative to jumpstart commercial cinema” and the feeling that there should be. The censors, as always (and justifiably so) are the bane of the filmmaker’s existence, as they do not work according to any specified always making decisions on impulse and so allowing here what they would snip off there.

Perhaps this is why Mira chooses to teach first. She says that “ first should help to establish the infrastructure required to develop a new industrial base for Pakistani cinema. With trained professionals running the show, the landscape of the film and television industry should be easier to negotiate in the next ten years.” So even though Mira may not know what she wants to make (or may not want to tell us) we can that she is not interested in presenting shoddy work purely for commercial value, as most filmmakers in are currently doing.

Mira says that her interest in cinema is “natural”. She did not choose to study filmmaking because of a pushy parent or as a result of a whim. She “knew” that this was what she wanted to do and so she went on to do it. She loves and her choice is based on something just as simple as that. Favorites include the Hitchcock classics, which she admires for their direction. She mentions “The Wizard of Oz” with a twinkle in her eye, half-expecting one to respond with the ‘Ah Yes!’ of mutual agreement. Closer to home, she likes the of Guru Dutt and Satyajit Ray.

Shoaib looks at her questioningly but she defends her choices with the ahead-of-their-times argument He concedes. Asked about recent good that represent landmark developments in cinema to her mind, she cites the Bollywood hit Dil Chahta Hai and the Pakistani Yeh Dil Aap ka Hua. What puts her right up there for me, however, is her fondness for Buffy The Vampire Slayer marathons (those of you who scoff, go buy the DVD’s and watch them season wise – if you don’t get hooked then what can I say, go rent Casablanca and cry to the excruciatingly clichéd here’s-looking-at-you-kid ending and then rewind and start over again).

Her preferences are not limited to the story or the horror flick. The choices cover a broad spectrum of cinema and that is just as well if she is to be the future of our film industry. I’m certainly up to my ears in spastic -stories which continue their overkill of the ideas of carpe diem and zaalim samaaj, and to me a filmmaker who seems to accept as a part of life (and not its’ be-all) also seems to hold the promise of producing/directing other-than--stories.

Her father prefers the caustic play-on-words British of Yes, Prime Minister, is absolutely cynical about today’s (he huffs and puffs the occasional “what is this Buffy-crap you kids watch today”) and especially those that are being produced within the sub-continent save for their (to him, film is an form right up there with Ghalib and Shakespeare), loves the classics in film, and , in short is a man of the 1960’s whose tastes remain in the past.

Though I appreciate the classic movie for its contributions to cinematic history and understand that some of it has certain value, I can’t understand the tendency that many people have of willfully restricting their entertainment to the shows of the past especially when theatre, television and cinema have come so very far in pace, in technique and in character and story development. So it is just as well that Mira has varied tastes and favorites that don’t spring solely from an age that is past.

Despite differing tastes and attitudes that fit the definition of the generation gap like a glove, the father and daughter have a very easygoing relationship. They can share conversations without having to use their mental censors with each other, which is a rare and commendable quality in the Pakistani father-daughter bond. I asked Mira how her father reacted when she decided to participate in the local production of Eve Ensler’s in-your-face Vagina Monologues. I got a not-a-big-deal headshake followed by the now very Hashmi shrug.

Sharing feelings, however, is a different story. Mira says that they “are not prone to talking about emotions in western style shrink-and-couch discussions”. She feels that these are “not necessary”. Where feelings are concerned she very consciously prescribes to the actions-speak-louder-than-words school of thought. So, father and daughter do not express thoughts and dissect words till the feeling is replaced by its’ definition. For her, their is plain to see and perhaps they think it wiser to keep an unspoken affection than to cherish its’ verbalization. From what I saw if there is difference in opinion or value between them, they seem to always agree to disagree. On the face of it, I didn’t see much that problematizes their relationship.

Shoaib remembers with fondness, his daughter’s material requests and happily speaks of the name-confusions he sifted through to bring that smile on her face (She wanted a Donald Duck toy and insisted upon calling it Bugs Bunny. He floundered in the toy store trying to decipher the demand in exasperation). Mira wistfully mentions their mountain trips, despite the carsickness, in the cold fall weather. This location of their separate loves for each other is indicative perhaps of the lapse to which the father-daughter is universally vulnerable.

The father, cradling a daughter who came after a long long wait (Mira is the first girl in two generations in Shoaib’s ), wishes to grant her every wish, overseeing her like the King oversees his princess in any fairytale. To show his he buys her everything – sometimes even her - with all of his riches. The daughter, enthralled by her vision of a super heroic father, only wishes to be near him and seeks him out away from the interruptions of daily life in the of mountains within the comfort of the picnic. For a daughter, material requests are incidental (but Catch 22: they are also necessary), and it is in fact the attention that really matters.

The way a daughter treats her father is how she’ll treat her man, or so they say. So understanding the relationship of girl and patriarch usually foretells how well her will work out. Building on this notion, is the idea that if in the father-daughter construct, the relationship qualifies as a sentimental romance the daughter who fails to be subservient to her father in any sphere, or who bypasses his authority in any manner fails to be a daughter any longer. Somehow this hypothesis is left dangling in the equation between Shoaib and Mira. To the extent of the manner in which Mira speaks of her father or husband, the first notion seems to hold.

She is similarly delicate in recounting how she met her husband as she is when for her childhood mountain trips with her father at the wheel. But even though she strikes one as soft bordering on meek, she is bold in the professional choices she makes, as in her decision to participate in the production of the Vagina Monologues at the HRCP, and in her personal choices, where she chose to marry her husband of her own free will, without seeking paternal approval, even though he may well have bought him for her had she asked.

As a girl who remembers a dynamic father in the winding confusions of Naran and Chhangla Gali, and who strolls through the labyrinthine streets of Shahalmi in nippy fall with a chaskay-baz father eating fresh gulab jaman and sharing viewpoints, she falls into the category of the sentimental daughter. Their relationship automatically becomes romanticized, no matter how they may resist talking about its romance. And she may well share the same sentimentality in her . But how she chooses to live defies the romance that such sentimentality beckons.

As far as Freud goes, Mira fails to be a daughter, for she has bypassed her father’s authority by not incorporating his will in her decision to marry. But even though Shoaib feigns furious flashes and flares and exclaims with impugnation that he had to hear of his daughter’s decision to marry from friends-of-friends, there is the understanding in him that this is his daughter, and he cannot possibly drown his affections by his roaring. And if I understood him well then even his roaring is simply produced as .

Shoaib and Mira Hashmi are two individuals belonging to Pakistani who represent the past and the future respectively. Their relationship with each other shapes their ideas and ultimately our entertainment. Shoaib Hashmi has delivered us well in the past, as his plays have come to define the very essence of Pakistani comedy, and he continues working on developing the literary talents of students here in . Mira Hashmi, on the other hand, represents a promise. And something in her manner suggests that she will certainly deliver.