[Reader-list] "Jemima Khan's broken country"

[Kshmendra Kaul]

A very well written article with some saddening and some delightful imagery
 
Kshmendra
 
 
>From The Sunday Times
June 7, 2009


"Jemima Khan's broken country"
(In Pakistan, refugee children live with the trauma of having witnessed beheadings, yet she still finds much to beguile her)
EXTRACTS:
 
- Ten men are lined up and each one is filmed talking inaudibly to camera. The first man is pinned to the ground by four others. His throat is slit like a goat at Eid and his head held aloft by his hair. The Urdu subtitle reads: “This is what happens to spies.” It's a Taliban home video — to jaunty music — of serial beheadings. There are plenty of these doing the rounds nowadays. 
 
- Before I leave, Imran’s chowkidar (watchman) tells me that the newspapers in Pakistan are all funded by Yehudis (Jews). His Kalashnikov-toting commando — it’s the first time Imran has felt the need to have security — nods, adding that there are no Taliban. They are a fabrication by Jews and Hindus to destabilise Pakistan. He adjusts his belt of bullets. 
 
- Pakistan pulsates with conspiracy theories. One, which has made it into the local newspapers, is that the Taliban when caught and stripped were revealed to have been “intact, not Muslims”, a euphemism for uncircumcised. (Pakistanis are big on euphemisms.) Their beards were stuck on with glue. “Foreign elements” (India) are suspected. 
 
- Two children are fighting over coloured crayons when I arrive. A girl with blistered burns on her face from the sun shouts at a small boy who turns out to be her brother: “If you don’t give them back to me I’ll tell the Taliban and they’ll cut your throat.” 
 
- According to the teacher in the camp, every child has witnessed public beheadings. Eight-year-old Amina explains quietly from behind her teacher how she saw her uncle’s stomach gouged out by the Taliban. Another girl’s mother was shot for not being in purdah. And another was shot at with her family when she was walking outside during the curfew. Seven-year-old Bisma, I’m told, has seen all the male members of her family hanged in what has become known as Bloody Square. She doesn’t speak. 
 
- The children are equally afraid of the army. There’s a joke going round: “What’s worse than being ruled by the Taliban? Being saved by the Pakistani army.” When the chief minister landed in a helicopter next to the camp a few days ago, I’m told, the children fled screaming in terror to their tents. 
 
- A boy called Salman hands me a precisely drawn and signed picture of a Kalashnikov. A shy eight-year-old girl sitting cross-legged next to him, with her grubby green dupatta half obscuring her smile, offers me hers of a helicopter shelling a village. “That’s my house,” she says, pointing to some scribbled rubble.
 
- Their schools and homes have been destroyed. All have had relatives killed. An orphanage in Mingora was caught in the crossfire when soldiers based themselves on the roof of the building with 200 children trapped inside. 
 
- There’s certainly support for the Taliban in the camps. They represent, for many, an opposing force to an army that “drones” (it's now a verb here) its own people. America’s war on terror, supported by the Pakistani army, is unanimously viewed here as a war on Islam. Newborn twins have been named Sufi Mohammad and Fazlullah after the two militant leaders in Swat. 
 
- You need only to read Salman Rushdie’s Shame to understand how important honour (izzat) and reputation are — although I shouldn’t really write that. The last time I admitted to having read Rushdie (for my university dissertation on post-colonial literature), I had a thousand placard-waving beards outside my door and adverts in the papers, calling me an apostate and demanding that my citizenship be revoked. 
 
- Like everyone here he likes to opine: where Pakistan has gone wrong, where politicians have gone wrong, where the interpreters of Islam have gone wrong, where Imran has gone wrong and, by the end of our stay, where I’ve gone wrong. He also loves to eat, usually after midnight. 
 
- JP, a film-maker friend, is here to research a film about Pakistan. We head for tea with Iqbal Hussein, who paints dancing girls from the red-light district for a living. His mother was a prostitute. 
 
- As we arrive he is packing up his paints. His models, two gypsy sisters, one clutching a baby, are sitting quietly motionless on a mattress in a dark, windowless back room in his studio. Every half an hour in Pakistan there’s “load shedding”, when the electricity cuts out. 
 
- We sit in candlelight in the thick, still heat and the girls sing classical songs, using upturned metal cups as instruments. Chewing betel nut, they giggle and reveal red-stained teeth. We cheer and clap and chuck rupees in appreciation. 
 
-  He shows me a video on his mobile phone of his five-year-old son performing qawwali. He has been training the child since he was two. The little boy sits cross-legged on a chintzy sofa, raises his tiny palms to heaven imploringly, closes his eyes and starts to sing, smashing his hands back down on make-believe tublas and throwing his head back in mock ecstasy with all the passion and panache of his ancestors. 
 
- She tells us that Indians are all “cry babies” and Muslims would do better to be cry babies, too, and that way gain equal levels of sympathy abroad. I like her forthrightness. She says things others wouldn’t dare to say here, albeit euphemistically. 
 
- Pakistani actresses and models have traditionally emerged from the red-light area. They must have “friends”, she adds for good measure. Dosti (friendship) is a euphemism for client, while shadi (marriage) means sex with a client. 
 
- The airport was the first glimpse I had of Pakistan all those years ago. It’s the country I feel I grew up in and was a part of, arriving at 20 and emerging a decade later a more questioning and conflicted person. I am still maddened by its faults but I bristle and become defensive if others criticise. 
 
- As we’re jostled along towards the check-in area, I think about Pakistani society. It is an endless contradiction — hostile and hospitable, euphemistic and unambiguous, spiritual and prescriptive, aggressor and victim. Nothing sums up its topsy-turvy nature quite like the Heera Mandi in Lahore, one of the most conservative cities, where the prostitutes wear burqas and girls with honour dress like Wags. 
 
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6446446.ece?token=null&offset=0&page=1