Stranger to History (29 page)
He was worried about the tighter hold of religion in Pakistan. ‘In Punjab and Sind,’ he said, ‘our Sufi culture will save us, but I worry about the North West Frontier Province and Balochistan. They could flood us. Otherwise, we are deeply immersed in our Sufi culture. And also our diversity will save us.’
‘Are you religious?’
‘It depends by whose definition.’
‘By your own?’
‘Well, I say my prayers and pray to Allah that I win the lottery. People say that that’s gambling, but I say, ‘Hey, thank Allah.’ Then as if remembering what he had said earlier, he added, ‘I think it’s because they’re LMC and there’s a lot of guilt.’ ‘LMC’ meant lower-middle class and it was a term rich Pakistanis used often to mean a rising section of the country that was also more religious. The remark was at once flippant, an aspect of his bitter wit, and significant. ‘Guilt,’ he went on, ‘is the reason people are turning to religion. Many rich people made their money by illegal means and now they feel guilty.’
Corruption in Pakistan was something one always heard about, but I had never thought of it before as something for the religious imagination to seize on. Later, I would meet many admirable young people who made these kinds of connections.
‘Your mother is a Sikh,’ the effeminate man continued, ‘but do you know that sixty per cent of the
Guru Granth Sahib
was written by Baba Farid?’
Farid was a twelfth-century Sufi teacher and his writings are included in the Sikh holy book, but the figure was an exaggeration. ‘The tolerance!’ the effeminate man hissed. ‘The tolerance! That period should have had a renaissance, and it’s all because of the white man, all because of him.’
The white man doesn’t mean well for us. Nearly six decades after the ‘white man’ left, this weak refrain was all that could be found by way of self-examination. But it was not enough to blame the white man. It didn’t explain why the white man’s world should have posed such an affront to Muslim India and not to non-Muslim India. With my special feeling for undivided India, I would have liked nothing more than for the period he described to have a ‘renaissance’ – how strange it was to hear the word twice in such a short time from different people – but how could it when even men like my brother dreamed of Islamic renaissances in
madrassa
s?
The party came to an end. Men in blue and brown safari suits, seeming like chaperones, appeared and oversaw the winding up. The girls in black dresses and their short, paunchy men, the country’s ‘factionalised élite’, staggered out. The waiters in white became scarcer, then appeared with dishcloths, and were bald under the fezes they now carried in their hands. A small sadness, as at the end of a children’s birthday party, prevailed. And finally, just before everyone was gone, bent, old women, in white cotton
salwar kameez
, their faces tired at this late hour, came out with plastic dustpans and little brooms to sweep up the broken glasses and cigarette butts, the remains of Casablanca.
Soon after arriving in Karachi, I called my stepmother. She was warm and welcoming, as always, and said that, despite the heat, Sind’s interior was very romantic. It was where I was intending to travel before I made my way up to Lahore. After we talked of the small regional towns and the important shrines I would visit, she said, ‘Call Abba.’
‘I will.’ Then I squirmed.
‘No, call him,’ she stressed.
I thought up a few conversation points that would see us through the first few minutes of stilted conversation and called him. He was quiet but not unfriendly. I told him about Iran and my planned travels in Pakistan.
When I received my father’s letter the year before, I knew nothing of Pakistan and even less about Islam. I wanted now, through travelling in Pakistan, to answer the second challenge his letter had posed, even though the two seemed in important ways to coalesce: of understanding ‘the Pakistani ethos’. In the month in which I would travel, moving from south to north, I wanted to understand my unfamiliarity in Pakistan. I felt that this would help me understand the differences that had come up between my father and myself. My upbringing in India, together with seven months of travel in the Islamic world, formed a kind of Venn diagram, a problem in set theory, in which Pakistan, carved out of India in 1947 for the faith, was a common set between India and Islam.
My father listened to my travel plans, but there were no questions or comments. Before he hung up, he said, ‘Call if you need anything.’ And that was all.
Four years after our first meeting – and one, since the letter, spent in silence – I felt the thinness of our relationship.
T
hat summer of 2002, I crossed the border and my mother’s friend’s son met me on the other side. I could make him out, standing by his car, in tight jeans and a close-fitting shirt. He had gelled hair and reflective sunglasses.
We drove away from the border in his air-conditioned car. The country that opened up, of mud chimneys, canals full of bathing children and small, congested neighbourhoods, with bright-coloured Urdu writing on the walls, might have been a Muslim neighbourhood in India. It seemed so familiar that one expected the diversity of the Indian scene to reveal itself. And when it didn’t, it was unsettling. It really was an India for Muslims only.
The other feature of the landscape that troubled the eye was the absence of women. On the other side of the border, women had been riding bicycles – some in Punjab, with long plaits, had been on scooters and mopeds – but here, in crowded places, I could see thousands of men, many dressed like the officials at the border in
salwar kameez
, the same macho ease about them, but few women. When women did appear, they were either with other women, moving purposefully, as if with little time to spare, or with their men on an outing. There were no women waiting at bus stops, on their way to work, or canoodling with men in parks, or leisurely enjoying the weather. Their presence, slight as it was, seemed to be a matter of permission.
As the car entered the sections of Lahore built since Partition, I saw a strong resemblance to Delhi: dusty greenery, lazy flyovers passing from one quiet residential neighbourhood to another, the diffused sense of the city.
I was to stay with Nuscie, a friend of both my mother and my father. She lived in a large, whitewashed house off a main road. It was run the way houses in regional towns in India ran, with many servants, food at all times, long afternoons and family coming and going. Nuscie turned out to be a warm, hospitable woman with a keen sense of intrigue. She had fair skin, bright green eyes, and the lines on her face seemed to come as much from laughter and mischief as age. And like her greying hair, they emphasised her once considerable beauty. She had met my mother through my father and they remained friends despite my parents’ separation. She had always wanted me to meet him, and took me in knowing that he would be furious with her for helping me to do exactly that.
‘Would you like me to call him first?’ Nuscie asked, sipping tea, her eyes dancing with excitement.
‘No, no, no, Nuscie, you mustn’t. It’s very important that an element of surprise works in my favour or he’ll have time to back out.’
‘Yes, of course, that’s what I was thinking.’
I had cast aside earlier notions of just turning up at my father’s house and introducing myself. It was totally impractical: there would be too many servants, guests and family to achieve the result I had fantasised about. In all likelihood, even if I was let into a room in which my father was, it would be full of people where my only line of introduction would be a stammered ‘I’m Aatish Taseer.’ I also found fault with my plan to meet my father on my own terms, anonymously, at a dinner party. I imagined we would spend many minutes talking, before he discovered I was his son. Absurd though they seemed, now that I was really in Lahore, these were some of the bizarre, cinematic ways that, as a child, I imagined our first meeting to be like.
Finally, against my imagination and with the dread of failure still in me, I realised I would have to telephone my father again. The thought of it aroused the worst feelings of disappointment in me. I had a superstitious fear that the bad luck from the time before would work against me. But I could see no way round it. No sooner had I decided on this course of action than, again, the foreignness of the place descended on me. Here I was, having travelled for fourteen hours to arrive at a near-stranger’s house to make one telephone call that could end in anti-climax.
Once I resolved to do it, instinct told me to get on with it, as quickly, and with as little interference, as possible.
I excused myself and asked permission to go to my room.
‘Yes, of course. You must be tired. Have a rest. Tonight we can go to the old city for dinner. There’s a lovely little place there.’
I was not in the least bit tired; I was terrified. With meat patties and tea as the only weight holding down my body, I left the room. No sooner had I let the door close behind me than my eyes raced in search of a telephone, as if it were the antidote to my desperation. I went over the lines I had prepared, not caring any longer for their meaning but only that I was able to say them without my voice wavering. ‘I can understand . . . why you may not . . .’ I mouthed, as I saw the bright red instrument. I had written the number on a small chit, and held it now, tightly pressed between two fingers. I found the phone in a quiet corner between the drawing room and the kitchen. I was too restless to sit so I stood, leaning against the doorway, yawning with nerves. I dialled the number, and again, as I had years ago in my housemistress’ apartment, hoped that there would be no answer.
The number this time, procured from Nuscie, was for a mobile phone. I took advantage of the personal access the technology afforded and began to talk mechanically as soon as I heard a voice.
‘Hello, Salmaan. This is Aatish Taseer. I am in Lahore now and would like to see you.’
There was a brief silence and my father, as if his response had been years in the making, said, ‘What would be the objective?’
I was grateful for the sting it caused. It gave me the indignation I needed. As long as I didn’t give in to rudeness and insensitivity, I would retain the higher ground. It didn’t feel like a tender reunion with my long-lost father but a contest, a Saturn and Jupiter fight to the finish.
‘I can understand,’ I started slowly, ‘why you may not,’ no waver, ‘want to see me, but it is important to me that I see you, if only for a short time.’
He said nothing.
‘Will this be possible?’ I asked, in a still steadier voice.
‘I’ll have to think about it,’ my father said. ‘There are many things to consider.’ He hung up.
I had failed to secure a meeting with my father. The anti-climax I was warned of had come and it felt worse than I imagined. I thought of my mother’s words, ‘Just remember, he’ll always let you down,’ and felt a kind of dread at having to face the other people in the house.
But that night my half-sister intervened. I bumped into her at a ‘GT’ – short in Lahore for a get-together – to which Nuscie’s son had taken me. We spotted each other among a handful of attractive young people, dancing close together in a small, dimly lit, drawing room. I had met her once before in London. It was in 2000 after she sent me an email, having discovered that I was at college with a friend of hers. We met a few months later and liked each other very much. But my father was enraged when he found out. And as my sister was moving back to Pakistan to work for him, she couldn’t afford to be on his bad side. We hadn’t spoken since.
But seeing me now, unexpectedly in Lahore, she was full of warmth and affection. She said we would see each other over the next few days, even if we had to meet secretly. I told her of my conversation with our father; she said she would help, but couldn’t tell how he would react.
Then, two days after my arrival, my sister called to say that my father had agreed to meet me. She would pick me up the next morning and take me to him.
I met my father, for the first time in my memory, at his low, red-brick house in the cantonment area of Lahore. It had a large lawn, and a Land Cruiser brooded outside the front door. My sister led the way in, but disappeared almost immediately, with a smile and a supportive wave. I stopped at a large pencil portrait of my father as a young man. It gave me my first real sense of being in his house. It seemed to have hung there for years and it emphasised my absence from his life. To see the old yellowing portrait, which had been made at roughly the same time as my pictures of him had been taken, was to know that he had lived and that I had been elsewhere.
