[Reader-list] What should I do sir/madam?

[rehan ansari]

Dear Pratap, Dr Reyhan Chaudhry and others,

There was some talk earlier, with pratap and dr.
reyhan chaudhri about english, and i found myself
substituting "modern" for "english," throughout the
conversation. We heard voices in our head in Karachi
that learning English was going to make us Modern. 

Now pratap tells us that his jamia student's fathers
and mothers are dreaming about Pakistan. He is not
sure what their children can dream about. 

I can tell you their dreams if their parents had
indeed come to pakistan.

I am reading a writer who says the relationship
between those who walk the streets of a city like
Mumbai and those who built those streets is like the
relationship between descendants and their ancestors.
Of course, I am from Karachi, but the first time I
came to Bombay, and roamed in the Fort and Colaba
area, I felt I was walking in the city of my ancestor.
I could feel it as I turned street corners, sat in
Irani cafes or went into a cinema. A preposterous idea
grew in me even as I was engaging in ordinary, even
boring, activity, walking in the heat, failing in
cooling myself off with a Fanta in a café, watching a
bad film at The Regal. Karachi is to Bombay what a
potted plant is to the nursery it came from.

What madness to remember Elphinstone Street, Karachi
when walking towards Flora Fountain from whichever
direction! It was a slow madness, coming at me at the
pace at which I was walking. At that time I blamed the
afternoon heat and the boredom of my tourism. Everyone
walking these streets was there because they had to.
Just as I would not be found on the streets of Saddar,
Karachi unless I had work. 

I was pursuing, more truthfully I was being pursued,
by insanity: I felt I was back in Karachi encountering
a feeling from all those years of driving through
Saddar facades that Karachi will someday grow up. Or,
that it was supposed to grow up a certain way and
didn’t. 

The gloom of the evening. In the silhouette of Bombay
University I saw my school Karachi Grammar School, the
old building that has been around since 1847. Walking
listlessly, the school silhouette still visible, past
pavements full of books, much thumbed Harold Robbins,
arcane programming books, I came across a grey statue,
I had seen several in the day but had not paused to
read the print. In a city where I knew no one, no one
at all but where walking the streets brought me
ungrounded joy, I saw the name Dadabhai Naoroji. 

This then is my ancestor! Along with the rest of the
grey statues of Parsis the captains of commerce and
law, responsible for these streets, and whose hand I
could now see behind Karachi facades. Its not the dust
and fallen facades of Saddar, Karachi that this statue
was recalling, it was the Karachi in my mind, a city I
was trained to aspire to. 

I laughed, feebly: any ustaad of Jinnah is good enough
for me. 

Akbar S. Ahmed's feature film on Jinnah is not worth
speaking about but there is a documentary he has
produced in which there is generous use of footage of
Jinnah in Bombay: his Savile Row suits, two toned
brogues, snookeering at the club, all his friends
Parsi, and Ratti wearing sleeveless at receptions.
This documentary has now been shown several times on
PTV, including on Pakistan Day 14th August. Everyone
approves of this image of Jinnah, the posterchild of
Muslim modernity. It is young Jinnah, modernity
resplendent, the Savile Row image not
old-man-Jinnah-in-a-sherwani idea that hangs in the
disused National Assembly in Islamabad.

Ashis Nandy says the great journeys of the twentieth
century were of the mind, but I really do think that
for a Pakistani nothing, not even television, beats
walking Bombay streets, stumbling across Parsi
statues. I thought of my school, Karachi Grammar
School, ill afforded by my parents, an establishment
Macaulay, Naoroji and Jinnah would have approved of. I
thought of my father who went to a school in Jamia
Millia Islamia in Delhi, an other enterprise to make
modern the Muslim boy. All of this kaleidoscoping in
front of the suited booted statue that is father to
Jinnah's modernity! 

I recalled Rohinton Mistry's novel's title Such a Long
Journey and thought of the journey of Muslim boys and
could not associate it with destinations (villages,
cities, nations, schools, clubs, saddars, silicon
valleys) or self transformations. I could only feel
exhaustion. I could only associate with our journeys
the great, a great deal of, energy expended.

I'll end with a quote from the book Arcades Project,
by Walter Benjamin. He was walking in Paris. His ideas
speak to me, with an accent.

"Boredom is a warm gray fabric lined on the inside
with the most lustrous and colorful of silks. In this
fabric we wrap ourselves when we dream. We are at home
then in the arabesques of its lining. But the sleeper
looks bored and gray within his sheath. And when he
later wakes and wants to tell of what he dreams, he
communicates by and large only this boredom. For who
would be able at one stroke to turn the lining of time
to the outside? Yet to narrate dreams signifies
nothing else. And in no other way can one deal with
arcades structures in which we relive, as in a dream,
the life of our parents and grandparents, as the
embryo in the womb relives the life of animals.
Existence in these spaces flows then without accent,
like the events in a dream."

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