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

[anupam chakravartty]

indeed very poignant. thanks for sharing.

 "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" -- shocking ..i didnt know there existed a theory
of this sort too.

-anupam


On 6/9/09, Kshmendra Kaul <kshmendra2005 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> 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
>
>
>
>
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