by Saba Imtiaz
I croak out for coffee. The house is dark and silent. Even my father has abandoned me. I cannot find the will to live anymore. Sit down on the floor.
Bad idea.
Three trips to the bathroom later, having barfed up about two bottles of red wine, I feel marginally better. Wish I had a round-the-clock nurse on weekends who could help me get out of my clothes and bathe me. I cannot do this on my own.
Oh fuck. What time is it?
Try to find my cell phone. It isn’t in my handbag, or next to my pillow. Cannot drag myself to the living room to use the landline, which, in a fit of sentimentality, is now connected using my mother’s old rotary phone that looks right out of a 1970s Bollywood film, glitzy gold dials and massive earpiece and all. ‘I didn’t even like it the first time round,’ my father had said as I tried to dial the number for KFC, missing the 3 every time.
My cell phone begins beeping from under the bed.
Text from Saad: ‘Did you get home okay. My flight’s at 4, breakfast before?’ I think about texting him back but am so annoyed that of the two days my best friend’s spent in the city, he’s only managed to carve out the time for one lousy breakfast with me, that I ignore it altogether.
Text from an unknown number: ‘Slept well?’
I hope it’s Jamie, and feel the beginnings of butterflies in my stomach (though that could also just be nausea). I ignore it. I have no idea who this person is. The last time I responded to one of these texts, thinking it was Zara on a new number, I got about fifty texts asking for my name.
The phone rings. Same number.
I answer the phone and don’t say anything. Ninety-nine per cent of the time, it’s usually a random guy who will yell ‘Hello’ before he realizes his credit is running out.
‘Hi,’ says a very American voice.
Jamie wants to meet me for brunch but I’m due to cover the second day of the litfest. I think about Samya with a y, Saad’s smug face and about how long I’ve been single and the last time I’d been kissed, let alone had sex (Hasan, two days before we broke up, Kamran rang halfway through). I ask Jamie if he’d like to meet for dinner but he’s off to Islamabad that afternoon. He says he’ll be back in town soon but I doubt I’ll hear from him then, or ever.
CHAPTER 4
Tuesday, March 15, 2012
Headline of the day: ‘Agencies having fun with bugged phone conversations’
11 a.m.: We still haven’t been paid, so I am going on strike. I’m not quite prepared to go camp outside the office yet, mostly because my attempts to get other people to go on strike with me have been met with by looks of disbelief and comments such as ‘if I stop working, Kamran won’t pay me at all and I’ll get fired’. So this strike is basically in my head since telling Kamran that perhaps he shouldn’t have spent our salaries on bulletproof cars for his family, is a guaranteed way of losing one’s job.
‘Really, Ayesha?’ Kamran said, when I asked him last week about payday. ‘You of all people shouldn’t complain. After all, you don’t have to pay rent or repay any debts. And how can you not have any money?’
‘Because I don’t,’ I said, trying not to snatch his limited edition Moleskine and hit him on the head with it. ‘And it’s really not your concern whether I have to pay rent or not—for the record, I do—and I can’t afford to come into work any longer.’
‘So go home,’ Kamran said.
Kamran studiously ignored me and just kept staring at his computer. I walked out of the office and straight to the smoking area. After I’d gulped down a cup of tea and smoked five cigarettes, I hysterically called Saad who told me to calm down and go home. He also mentioned that just like with Nina the year before, he had broken up with Samya in the car on the way to the airport. God bless Saad, he did know how to make me smile. I went back to my PC and searched for jobs on LinkedIn all day.
Kamran called me in the next day to say he had meant ‘go home’ as a joke.
Not only are we not being paid but Kamran has instructed the IT department to block Facebook in the newsroom except during lunch hour. Instead of decamping to the cafeteria, everyone is in the office between 1 and 2 p.m., skiving off at 3 to eat leftover biryani. I scour through the Jaish-e-Mohammad’s newspaper, saving articles in the event that Kamran ever approves my request to go to Bahawalpur to cover the group. I should probably get Zara to go to Bahawalpur and then casually mention it to Kamran, who will send me on the next flight and book me into whatever Bahawalpur’s version of a five star hotel is in order to one-up the Morning News.
I walk into the reporters’ room, which has the permanent air of mourners at a funeral. Everyone wears white kurtas, and there’s the constant remembrance of better times: when we used to get paid on the first of the month, when Kamran genuinely cared about the paper, when political parties actually respected print journalists. The room isn’t much bigger than my kitchen, yet somehow it manages to hold seven desks and eight computers, which means there are always two people fighting over the use of one.
The computers are perpetually being shipped off to IT for repairs, except IT’s approach to fixing them is to ask us ‘have you tried rebooting it?’ or hitting the CPU with the back of a shoe. That last tactic has worked twice on my own computer.
‘Why don’t you ask Kamran when we’re getting paid?’ says the crime reporter, Shahrukh, who I’m convinced mugs people when he gets off work. ‘I had to buy this 7-Up on credit from the cafeteria today.’
I tell him the sob story of last week. ‘Why don’t we slash Kamran’s car tyres?’ he remarks. ‘I know a guy who can…’ I can tell he’s about to brag about all the target killers he has on speed dial when his phone rings. He says hello, listens for a minute and then hangs up.
‘Finally! The cops have found that guy who killed his mother and chopped off her head.’
Sania, the chief political correspondent, groans. ‘Enough Shahrukh. I just ate.’
‘Oh, hi Ayesha,’ she says, as if she’s just noticed me. Sania and I used to be friends, but then Kamran promoted her to chief political correspondent after she scored an interview with President Zardari—the first he’d ever given to the paper—and she refused to cover anything less than briefings with top officials or high profile interviews. She also swapped her kurtas for saris, and now spends her mornings walking around our basement office saying ‘yah, but you know, General sahib says the Supreme Court isn’t going to crack down this time’ and ‘no, no, of course I’ll have dinner with you and the prime minister, though we really must get him to stop offering me a job!’ She’s on political talk shows two nights of the week, flipping her hair and laughing coquettishly at the anchors.
Which means that I got stuck covering the pressers and rallies. ‘You know I can always talk to the finance minister, he’s great friends with Kamran’s dad.’ Trust her to namedrop. ‘And aren’t you supposed to be at a presser?’
1 p.m.: Zara and I are crouched in a corner at a press conference, where one of the TPI leaders is answering questions based on how attractive he finds the reporters. At least this was our running theory, because the heavily made up, buxom talk show hosts were the only ones who’d been able to get a word in.
‘Welcome to the Pakistan elections!’ squeals a reporter as she finishes recording her take.
As the Pakistan Peoples Party has reminded us nearly every day since Benazir was killed, democracy is the best revenge. Kamran has put me on a rotating schedule of covering press conferences. Democracy has so far only given me insomnia, a raging stomach ache, and paranoia. I haven’t slept properly in three weeks. The elections are still a full two months away but every morning I wake up gasping for breath, scared the country has been taken over by politicians who find a foreign conspiracy in everything.
I haven’t heard from Jamie since he left for Islamabad. I’d followed him on Twitter and added him on Facebook, but beyond a couple of tweets here and there, there was nothing to report. One retweet does not a relationship make.
&nb
sp; The only bearable thing about this presser is that it’s happening at the politician’s house and we are seated in a garden and not inside one of the oppressive rooms in the Karachi Press Club or in a political party office, trying to figure out which chairs might collapse and worrying about rats. Without fail, every press conference in Karachi starts at least an hour late, and is usually taken over by cameramen trying to get reporters to scribble something in their notebooks so they have stock footage to use after. Zara once wrote ‘Fuck off’ on hers, which only her parents noticed when they saw the broadcast.
I’d asked for a cup of tea before the presser started, only to be told that the political party’s policy was to not serve tea before press conferences because reporters tended to leave right after drinking it.
‘This would be a great drinking game,’ I say, an hour into the politician’s repetitive, long-winded speech, which for all the verbiage hadn’t yielded any actual information. ‘We could do a shot every time he says “tabdeeli”, “inquilab”, or “change”.’
‘Or every time he condemns violence, without actually proposing a plan to do anything about it,’ Zara says. ‘We GET IT.’
‘Yaar ab bas bhi karo,’ moans Akbar, one of the cameramen. ‘I have three more assignments after this and the channel isn’t sending a replacement. When is this asshole going to stop talking?’
Zara stays back to try and get an interview. I don’t have the heart to sit around and wait for him to deign to respond to questions. The last time I interviewed him he spent twenty minutes complaining about how rude Kamran had been to him at a dinner party in Islamabad.
I try to leave but the entrance is blocked by a troupe of dholwalas and dancing party workers. ‘Someone’s nomination papers have been accepted,’ mutters Akbar. The election is a few months away, and the filing of nomination papers—a ridiculous process involving candidates being questioned on their income statements and the minutiae of Islam—was underway at the court. The dancers have managed to disrupt the rockery in the garden and knock over most of the perfectly glossy potted plants. The politician’s wife, drowning in what seems to be an eight-metre kaftan, has just stepped outside to inspect the damage done to her house. She’s either not concerned about the cost, or has just had a Botox shot, because her face hasn’t registered a reaction.
My phone beeps. Sania.
‘Are you done with the presser?’
‘Yep.’
‘Ok. I’m off to interview the prime minister, so you need to get yourself to the press club. There’s a protest at 3 p.m. Sipah-e-Sahaba.’
I’m about to tell Sania that it would take me an hour to get to the press club. It’s the 15th and I haven’t been paid yet, so am down to three hundred rupees. How am I going to get to work if I don’t have money to pay for a rickshaw? Sania has already hung up.
Akbar agrees to take me to the protest and says he’ll drop in himself for a bit. I have saved two hundred rupees on rickshaw fare, hurrah, though there is no such thing as a free ride. Akbar decides mid-route that he needs to buy beer, pick up his sister, and drop off his laundry. It’s almost 3.30 p.m. when we finally get to the press club, where Akbar double parks in front of the van of a news channel that fired him.
Thank goodness protests, like everything else in Pakistan, don’t start on time.
Unlike Akbar and hundreds of other journalists who consider the club their refuge, I find it terribly depressing. It’s a gorgeous old colonial building with walls that have been layered with so many posters that if I started peeling them off they’d eventually take me back twenty years. The remnants of Pakistan’s history—including a series of posters documenting Nawaz Sharif’s hairline—receding, transplant, and back to receding—are found on the press club’s walls. Graffiti from 2007 calling on PPP activists to greet Benazir Bhutto on her return from exile, and Jamaatud-Dawa posters from 2009 calling for war against India. But to me it’s a reminder of where journalism has gone terribly wrong in recent times, with press unions cozying up to politicians for free plots rather than actually doing any advocacy work.
The street outside the press club is permanently full of protestors, sitting in fraying tents, with half torn banners asking for the government to reinstate their jobs or railing against the police for having bumped off a suspect in the middle of the night. I feel for my friend Mikaal who works in the building next door and had to invest in noise-cancelling headphones because of the chanting. Sometimes a TV crew will show up to record their misery, or a government official will stop in on their way home to pay lip service, but otherwise these protestors just stay here—in pouring rain or stifling humidity—until they too, like everyone in Karachi, give up and go home.
Today, there are about a hundred young men neatly lined up in queues, chanting ‘death to Shias’. The Sipahe-Sahaba is one of the vilest groups the country has ever known and specializes in propaganda against Shias, but Kamran decided one day that we would cover every single group ahead of the elections. Because this is a narrow road, the stage is set up in the back of a pick-up van, with a young kid leading the chants on a megaphone. It’s a portable rally—they could just as easily drive the van to another destination and set up there—a tactic I feel could work quite well for other things as well, such as weddings. We’d never have to go out, the bride and groom could just go from neighbourhood to neighbourhood. I make a mental note to suggest this to my event manager friends.
The van’s driver suddenly decides he’d like to move forward five feet and revs up, and the young kid nearly lurches off the van. The chanting stops as one of the party’s leaders takes the mic to start talking. I hoist myself up on one of the concrete barriers nearby to be able to see him properly and transcribe his speech. ‘Excuse me,’ mutters a protestor standing next to me. ‘Bibi, can you get off from there. Your feet are touching one of our posters.’ I look down to see the concrete slab has been covered with Sipah-e-Sahaba paraphernalia. Crap. This kind of stuff gets people lynched by mobs screaming blasphemy. I jump off and walk to the other end, where there are a bunch of milkshake, bun kebab and paan stalls, whose workers go about chopping and peeling without batting an eye at the noise. Perhaps they all have hearing loss, or they’ve just learnt to tune out the noise. I wonder how I can acquire the same skill and learn to ignore Kamran.
I spot the press club’s resident spy—who works for the police’s intelligence branch—lounging next to the bun kebab stall. When I tell people I have a spy on my speed dial, they conjure images of a James Bond-esque character, authoritatively telling the bartender that he’d like his martini shaken not stirred and jumping out of helicopters. The only thing this spy has ever had shaken is a milkshake, which he’s currently sipping noisily. When I first met him, he was hanging around in the anti-terrorism court pretending to be a reporter. He would have gotten away with it, but the court staffers knew all of the reporters who were authorized to be there. I never saw him in court again, but when I found him months later at the press club, he told me that had been his first week in the field and he’d been told he could blend in if he chain-smoked and had a notebook. That was probably the best advice he could get, though I would’ve added wear a kurta and carry five standard-issue Piano pens to the list. ‘How many people do you think there are?’ he asks, making space for me to sit on the bench he’s managed to appropriate from the bun kebab stall.
‘A hundred?’
‘I’m going to say about a hundred and fifty,’ he says, scribbling in his notebook. ‘Our formula is to ask about five people and calculate the average so we know how many people attended. The spokesperson is claiming five hundred—is he blind? How does he think this lane can even fit that many?’
I shrug.
‘These people, everyday, the same nonsense. Pakistan has become a garbage dump. Everyone can throw their trash here. No one in the police even reads these briefings I send. Maybe I should get transferred to another area.’ He drains the rest of his milkshake. ‘Don’t you need to go talk to thes
e people?’
I adjust the dupatta on my head, get off the bench and walk to the Sipah-e-Sahaba spokesperson and introduce myself. He’s a potbellied man in his forties, who, if rumours on the religious party circuit are to be believed, has ordered the killings of at least twenty Shias in the past year. Despite the reputation, he refuses to make eye contact with me because I’m a woman, so I’m directing my questions to the ground.
‘Ji, my name is Ayesha and I work for the Daily News.’
‘Oh, yes, Ayesha bibi,’ he says, eyes fixed on the ground. ‘I know who you are. I keep reading your tweets.’
‘Oh.’
‘Yes, we have a very active social media team that looks at all of the things being said about us online,’ he says.
I cut him off before he starts to analyse my tweets, which as far as I can last recall, were bitching about the literature festival and the state of tea being served at the last presser.
‘I believe your group is banned.’
‘No.’
‘So the list of banned organizations you’re on is wrong?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you planning on having more protests?’
‘Yes.’
‘Will you be contesting the elections?’
‘Yes. Insha Allah.’
He clearly doesn’t want to chat and hands me a press release. ‘Oh, wait,’ he says, ‘What’s your number?’ I write it out and hand it to him and head back inside the press club. There are about fifty journalists sitting in the courtyard, all crowded around tables in their little cliques. The political reporters for Urdu TV channels are the elite, so they get the best space, the biggest table, and the most food. The Urdu newspaper reporters form huddles based on their beats, the cameramen have occupied three tables for their equipment while the wire photographers sit on the periphery. Even though the wire agency correspondents are fiercely competitive, the photographers always travel in a pack because they feel they work better as a team and get more access. One of them, Karam Ali, once went off the radar for a week and returned with a heartbreaking photo essay on temples being destroyed on the outskirts of Karachi. He was given the cold shoulder for a week. Akbar waves me over to his table and pushes a cup of tea forward. ‘Yaar, manhoos gora aya hua hai aur uske saath Lyari jana hai.’