They tape my mouth shut and pin me flat on my stomach. One of them gets behind me and pulls my head up by the hair. It feels sexual the way he does it. I wonder if my wife is still alive and if she’s going to sleep with another man after I’m gone. How many men is she going to sleep with? I hope she doesn’t. I hope she’s still alive. I can see the long knife in his hand. He’s speaking into the camera. I don’t want to watch. I shut my eyes. I want to do something to make my heart explode so I can be gone now. I don’t want to stay.
Then I hear it. I hear the sound of my blood rushing out and I open my eyes to see it on the floor like ink and I watch as I end before I am empty.
GRANTA
POP IDOLS
Kamila Shamsie
Before Youth Culture
In 1987 I had a lot in common with many other fourteen-year-olds. I watched the Brat Pack/John Hughes films, repeatedly; I knew the Top 10 of the UK chart by heart; I cut out pictures of Rob Lowe, Madonna, a-ha from teen magazines and stuck them on my bedroom walls; I regarded the perfect ‘mixed tape’ as a pinnacle of teenaged achievement and gave thanks for not living in the dark days of LPs. But in doing all these things I merely affirmed what every adolescent growing up, like me, in Karachi could tell you – youth culture was Foreign. The privileged among us could visit it, but none of us could live there.
Instead, we lived in the Kalashnikov culture. Through most of the eighties, Karachi’s port served as a conduit for the arms sent by the US and its allies to the Afghan mujahideen, and a great many of those weapons were siphoned off before the trucks with their gun cargo even started the journey from the port to the mountainous north. By the mid-eighties, Karachi, my city, a once-peaceful seaside metropolis, had turned into a battleground for criminal gangs, drug dealers, ethnic groups, religious sects, political parties – all armed. Street kids sold paper masks of Sylvester Stallone as Rambo; East met West in its adulation of the gun and its hatred of the godless Soviets.
In those days, schools were often closed because of ‘trouble in the city’; my school instituted drills to contend with bombs and riots, rather than fire. Even cricket grounds – those rare arenas where exuberance still survived – weren’t unaffected; all through 1986 and for most of 1987, there was hardly any international cricket played at Karachi’s National Stadium because of security concerns. The exception in 1986 was a Pakistan v. West Indies Test match. Still, my parents refused to allow me to attend. They were worried there might be ‘trouble’. This was the refrain of my adolescence. My parents and their friends constantly had to make decisions about how to balance concern for their children’s safety against the desire to allow life to appear as normal for us as possible. Like all teenagers, though, we wanted to go somewhere – and public spaces, other than the beach, held little appeal.
As a result, ‘going for a drive’ became an end unto itself. A group of us would pile into a car and we’d just drive, listening to mixed tapes with music from the UK and the US, singing along to every song. Sometimes these were tapes one of us had recorded straight off the radio while on a summer holiday in London, and we’d soon memorize all the truncated clips of jingles and radio patter as well as the songs. ‘Capital Radio! Playing all over London!’ we’d chant while navigating our way through Karachi’s streets. ‘There are tailbacks on the M25 …’ We always travelled in groups. You heard stories about the police stopping cars that had only a boy and girl in them and demanding proof that the pair were married, turning threatening and offering an option of arrest or payment of a bribe when the necessary paperwork wasn’t forthcoming. There weren’t any laws against driving in a car with someone of the opposite gender, but there were laws against adultery – and the police treated ‘sex’ as synonymous with ‘driving’ for the purposes of lining their pockets.
That was life as we knew and accepted it. Then one day in 1987 I turned on the lone, state-run TV channel to find four attractive young Pakistani men, wearing jeans and black leather jackets, strumming guitars, driving through the hills on motorbikes and in an open-top jeep, singing a pop song. And just like that, Youth Culture landed in living rooms all over Pakistan.
Islamization
It didn’t really happen ‘just like that’, of course. Nothing ever does. There are various contenders for Pakistan’s first pop song, but everyone seems to agree what the first pop video was. It came to our screens in 1981. I was eight when a brother-and-sister duo, Nazia and Zoheb Hassan, released the single ‘Disco Deewane’ (‘Disco Crazy’). I was too young then to know that something altogether new had arrived in the form of the ‘Disco Deewane’ video with its dream sequences, dancers in short, white space-age dresses and Nazia’s sensual pout. I do remember being mildly embarrassed that a pair of Pakistanis were trying to ‘do an Abba’. Somewhere I had acquired the notion that pop music belonged to another part of the world; if the term ‘wannabe’ had existed then I would have agreed that it applied to Nazia and Zoheb – and everyone who loved their music; never mind that the song played in my head as incessantly as anything Abba ever produced.
I’m fairly sure that I wouldn’t have been so dismissive of the idea of Pakistani pop videos if I had been born just a few years earlier, and could recall the Karachi of the early seventies, which had no shortage of glamour and East–West trendiness: nightclubs; locally made films with beautiful stars and catchy songs; shalwar kameez fashions inspired by Pierre Cardin (who designed the flight attendants’ uniform for Pakistan International Airlines); popular bands who played covers of UK and US hits at fashionable spots in town. It’s true, a good part of this world was known only to a tiny section of Karachi society, but I grew up in that tiny section and yet, even so, by the start of the eighties, stories of that glamorous milieu seemed a million miles away from the reality around me.
The reason for this dissonance was the dramatic shift that took place in Pakistan’s cultural life between the early seventies and early eighties. The shift had a name – ‘Islamization’ – and a face – heavy-lidded, oily-haired, pencil-moustached. That face belonged to Pakistan’s military dictator, Zia ul-Haq, ally of the Saudis and the Americans. As the alliance with the Americans brought guns into Karachi, so the alliance with the Saudis brought a vast increase in the number of Wahhabi mosques and madrasas: these preached a puritanical version of religion at odds with the Sufism that had traditionally been the dominant expression of Islam in much of the subcontinent. Fear of the growing influence of political, Wahhabi-inspired Islam formed a steady thrum through my childhood, and early on I learned that one of the most derogatory and dismissive terms that could be used against another person was ‘fundo’ (as in ‘fundamentalist’).
By the time I was watching Nazia and Zoheb on TV, I already knew Zia ul-Haq stood for almost all that was awful in the world; he had placed my uncle, a pro-democracy politician, under house arrest. What I didn’t know then was that the video of ‘Disco Deewane’, at which I was turning up my nose, was coming under attack by Zia’s allies on the religious right; they had decided it was un-Islamic for a man and woman to dance together, as Nazia and Zoheb did in the video, even if they were siblings.
These were the early days of Islamization, when the censors were confused about what was permissible. A few years later, the process of Islamization was sufficiently advanced that a video such as ‘Disco Deewane’ would have no chance of airing. Although Nazia and Zoheb continued to release albums, the censorship laws and official attitudes towards pop meant they never gave concerts, received limited airtime on PTV, never released another video with the energy and sensuality of ‘Disco Deewane’, and were seen as a leftover from the days before Zia’s soulless rule sucked the life out of Pakistan’s youth culture. Or, from the point of view of my historically amnesiac adolescent world, by the mid-eighties, when pop music really started to matter to me, they were already dinosaurs from another era.
BB (Benazir Bhutto; Battle of the Bands)
But I was soon to learn that some dinosaurs can roar
their way out of seeming extinction in a single moment. The person who taught me this was thirty-three-year-old Benazir Bhutto. As long as I could remember she had been the pro-democracy politician under arrest, house arrest or exile. Pakistan was Zia ul-Haq to me, after all; how could someone who spoke of replacing not just the man but the entire system ever be of relevance? Imagine then how my world must have turned on its head in April 1986 when Benazir returned to Pakistan a free woman, for the first time in eight years, and a million people took to the streets of Lahore to welcome her home.
Benazir’s triumphant return was one of several watershed political moments that marked my young life. My earliest ever recollection is of my father showing me his thumb, with a black mark on it, and explaining that he’d just been to the polling booth, and that the black mark, indelible ink, was to guard against anyone attempting to cast more than one vote. I was three and a half then, and the start of Zia ul-Haq’s dictatorship was just months away. I remember the day Benazir’s father was hanged, the day women’s rights activists marched on Islamabad to protest against misogynistic laws and were set upon by baton-wielding police, the day Zia held a referendum to extend his rule. So, the return of Benazir, after a decade of soul-wearying, dictatorial, oppressive political news was electrifying. For me, this is how it happened: at one moment she was far away, then she was in our midst and nothing was quite the same as before.
It seemed just that way with pop music, too. In the mid-eighties, in Lahore and Karachi (and in other pockets of urban Pakistan), groups of students came together in each other’s homes for jam sessions; the names of some of those students are instantly recognizable to anyone following the rise of Pakistani pop in the eighties and nineties: Aamir Zaki in Karachi, Salman Ahmad in Lahore, Junaid Jamshed in Rawalpindi. In 1986, Lahore’s Al-Hamra auditorium hosted its first ‘Battle of the Bands’, and the underground music scene cast off its subterranean nature. Some of the loudest cheers were reserved for a Rawalpindi-based group called the Vital Signs. But down south, in my home town, we paid little attention to ‘the provinces’ and so the Vital Signs remained completely unknown to me until that day in 1987 when I turned on the TV and saw the four young men singing in an open-top jeep.
The Vital Signs
Watching the video of ‘Dil Dil Pakistan’ (‘Heart, Heart, Pakistan’ or ‘My Heart Beats for Pakistan’) today, I’m struck by the void that must have existed to make pretty boys singing patriotic pop appear subversive. In a bid to circumvent growing restrictions, TV producer Shoaib Mansoor had the idea of getting a pop song past the censors by wrapping it up in nationalism. Vital Signs and ‘Dil Dil Pakistan’ was the result. The video, with its guitar-strumming, denim-clad twenty-something males, premiered on Independence Day – 14 August – 1987 and millions of Pakistanis, including my fourteen-year-old self, fell over in rapture.
Our reaction clearly wasn’t to do with their dance moves. The Vital Signs boys of 1987 seem ill at ease, their gyrations arrhythmic, their posture self-conscious. This is particularly true of the lead singer, Junaid Jamshed, but still, I was in love. They were clean-cut, good-looking and, most shockingly, they were nearby. They were Pakistani after all; one day you might turn a corner and run into one of them. This scenario started to seem even more thrillingly possible the day gossip raced through the schoolyard, telling us that one of the boys at school – a boy I knew! – was Junaid Jamshed’s cousin.
The first concert I ever attended was Vital Signs playing at a swanky Karachi hotel. It’s a safe guess that some of the girls present hadn’t told their parents where they were really going that evening. Mine was a co-ed school, and while all the boys and girls were entirely at ease in each other’s company, many of the girls had restrictions placed on them by their parents about co-ed socializing outside school hours. Almost no one’s parents were classified as fundo, but many were ‘conservative’ – the latter having more to do with ideas of social acceptability and ‘reputation’ than religious strictures.
The concert took place in a function room, one used for conferences, small receptions or evenings of classical music. I had doubtless been in that room many times for tedious weddings, but I don’t suppose I’d ever entered it in jeans before – and that alone must have made the room feel different, unexpected. There was a makeshift stage placed at one end and neat rows of chairs set out for the audience by organizers who obviously had no idea what a pop concert was all about. But we did, we Karachi adolescents. We’d watched pirated recordings of Hollywood teen movies, and Top of the Pops, and we knew that when a pop group started singing no one sat down and politely swayed in time to the music. So, as soon as the band came on, all of us climbed atop our chairs and started dancing. ‘You guys are great,’ Jamshed said in surprised delight, before breaking into Def Leppard’s ‘Pour Some Sugar on Me’. I recall telling myself: Remember this. I had never before come so close to touching the Hollywood version of Teenaged Life.
By 1988, a slightly reconfigured Vital Signs, having replaced one of its original band members with the guitarist Salman Ahmad, was in the process of recording a debut album when a plane exploded in the sky, killing Zia ul-Haq and allowing Pakistanis to take to the ballot box to declare what we wanted for our nation after eleven years of military rule and so-called Islamization. The answer was clear: no to the religious parties; yes to the thirty-five-year-old woman.
Democracy and Status Quo
Given the state of Pakistan today, it is impossible to remember the heady days at the end of 1988 without tasting ashes. Elation was in the air, and it had a soundtrack. At parties my friends and I continued to dance to the UK’s Top 40, but the songs that ensured everyone crowded on to the dance floor were ‘Dil Dil Pakistan’ and the election songs of both Benazir’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and the Karachi-based Muhajir Qaumi Movement (MQM). There was little concern for political affiliation. At one such party I recall a young Englishman looking perplexed as Karachi’s teens gyrated to a song with the chorus Jeay jeay jeay Bhutto Benazir (‘Long live Benazir’). ‘I can’t imagine a group of schoolkids in London dancing to a “Long Live Maggie” number,’ he said, and I pitied him and all the English teenagers for not knowing what it was like to see the dawn of democracy.
A few months into the tenure of the Bhutto government, with the new head of state’s approval, Pakistan TV organized and recorded a concert called Music ’89. Nazia and Zoheb Hassan hosted, fittingly; but the event also passed the baton to a new generation, including Vital Signs and the hot new talent, the Jupiters, fronted by Ali Azmat. Tens of millions of people tuned in and religio-fascists fulminated from every pulpit. Benazir, as she would go on to do time and again, gave in to the demands of the religious right and, despite its huge success, the tapes of Music ’89 were removed from the PTV library.
One of the most distinguishing features of the Bhutto government was the prevalence of the status quo precisely where there was the most urgent need for change. Islamization was no longer the government’s spoken objective, but all the madrasas, jihadi groups and reactionary preachers continued as if nothing had changed, with the support of the army and intelligence services. Benazir’s supporters argued that she had no room to manoeuvre given all the forces ranged against her; her detractors said her only real interest was in clinging on to power. Either way, the great social transformation we had expected to see, that Return to Before, never happened.
Even worse, many of the changes begun by Zia ul-Haq gained momentum. Almost all of rural Pakistan continued to hold fast to Sufi Islam, but the cities, where there was no deep affiliation to a particular religious tradition, became, perversely, more susceptible to the reactionaries. There were signs that a reactionary Islam, which entwined itself with world events, had made its mark on several of my schoolfellows – the male athlete who didn’t want to run in shorts on the school’s sports day because Islam demanded modesty in dress; the close friend of mine who held up a picture of Salman Rushdie in the months just after the fatwa and s
aid, ‘He even looks like the Devil!’; and, most notably, the other friend who told me, in 1991, that Saddam would win the war against the Americans. When I pressed him for his reasons, given the disparity in the two nations’ armies, he shrugged and made some cryptic comment about Saddam having a ‘greater’ weapon. Chemical? I asked, and it was only when he continued to look straight at me, without expression, that I realized what he was thinking. ‘Allah?’ I said, and he raised both shoulders and dropped them – a gesture that told me I may not believe it, but it was so.
Everyone I knew at school had been closely following the Gulf War, though much of that had to do with the excitement of CNN broadcasting into our homes for the first time – after a lifetime of state-controlled TV, we were all hungry for images from around the world. At seventeen I knew certain basic political truths, even if they were never directly articulated on CNN: America had turned its back on Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal; the Gulf War was about oil; the same America that had embraced the religio-military dictatorship of General Zia was now turning frosty towards the new democratic government and imposing sanctions on the nation. None of this got in the way of the draw of America as a destination for my friends and myself – most of us, including the boy who predicted Saddam’s righteous victory, were headed there for university. We knew that America was a wonderful place, if you were in it. There was no struggle to reconcile my conflicting views. I’d always known it was a country that produced both Rambo and Laura Ingalls Wilder.
B005OWFTDW EBOK Page 17