Tunnel Vision

by Shandana Minhas

  My brother’s knowledge of Pakistani cinema, what was left of it, had improved thousand-fold once he’d joined Globe. Like its (very recent) predecessors Discus, ARYAN, Prime and even Roz, AapKiTV filled the void created by the lack of production education and the subsequent mediocrity of most programming by promoting the hell out of pop culture. Films that no aspiring burger would be caught dead watching, pop stars with fans that numbered in the hundreds not the millions (like Alamgir had, what happened to him?), models and actresses who had reached a certain plateau in their careers, AapKiTV embraced them all. Was this creature with bovine sight one of them?

  ‘We met on a shoot,’ Adil had gushed. How else? I had thought. Would it be too much to hope she’d been a producer or even a writer and not the token eye-candy required to make the show marketable?

  ‘She wasn’t the presenter,’ he had continued as I heaved an internal sigh of relief, ‘in fact she has one of the most difficult jobs of all. She’s the make-up artist.’

  Hysterical laughter welled within me but I dammed it. The least I could do was listen. Actually that was all I could do but hopefully my forced inertia was only temporary.

  ‘She was doing Fariq’s make-up, you know the one who sang that song? What was it? Ah yes, “Oooh I love you janeman, janeman, Ooooh our love is so much fun janeman.”’

  For the first time I wished I were dead.

  ‘Anyway, Fariq asked for her specifically. He’s very finnicky about his styling because he has very bad skin and he says a crucial ingredient in his album’s success is his look, so he likes to make sure he’s always looking good. Of course he’s short too, but you know many of them are and I fixed that problem with the eyes wide shut arms wide open shot you hate so much. So, this girl Farah, isn’t that a beautiful name? Have you ever heard a name so melodious?’

  Only about a million times. There were men called Farah too if I wasn’t mistaken. Or was that Kaukab? I looked at the orderly and realized I was thinking of Zarin.

  ‘So this girl Farah shows up half an hour late. That’s okay because we weren’t ready anyway. Shoots always run a couple of hours late. She was very apologetic, explained she had a bride to do and couldn’t get away till she was completely ready because you can’t trust such an important job to a trainee. I had no problem, because it gave me some extra time to get the lighting right, but Fariq just lost it. He’d been getting irritable anyway because the chota hadn’t found the Diet Coke and Kitkat he wanted but brought him Pakola and Cadbury’s Twist instead. And he just totally started yelling at Farah. “you’re late, there’s no excuse, unprofessional, what do I pay you for?” He just got more and more rude with every sentence. She tried to cut in a couple of times, we heard her tell him they’d worked together for two years and this was the first time she’d been late, but he just wouldn’t listen. The rest of us were getting very uncomfortable, I mean yeah so some women are just eye candy but there’s no excuse for being so abusive to them verbally, is there? Especially not in a public place. I told him to calm down and he turned on me.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ Adil did a very good impression of Fariq, ‘Don’t you know who I am? One call from me, and you’ll be out of a job. And as for this randi …’ but that was as far as he got because Farah stepped up and slapped him.’ Adil chortled with glee.

  ‘The best part is the camera was rolling and we have it on tape. Fariq went for her when she slapped him but the light boy caught his arm. Then I told him if he didn’t calm down, we would air that footage so his little girl fans could see what he was actually like. Of course the boss would never have agreed, but Fariq didn’t know that. He straightened out in no time. Apologized to me, he even let Farah do his make-up after all. He doesn’t know it, but she highlighted the shadows under his eyes.’

  ‘Fariq doesn’t wear make-up,’ Zarin Khan blurted from the corner, ‘his skin is just like that.’

  ‘I’m sorry but he does. It doesn’t take anything away from his singing though and that’s what you like him for, isn’t it?’ Adil said comfortingly.

  But poor Zarin wouldn’t be consoled. When he helped unload me from the ambulance and handed me over to the waiting team he still looked like he’d swallowed a lemon whole.

  So that was Adil’s idea of a dream girl, was it? A big-eyed make-up artist, stylist as they were beginning to call themselves, who worked in showbiz and slapped men who crossed the line.

  Ammi would probably hang herself from the Millat fan in the drawing room (it was the only one with enough space beneath it to swing without breaking anything). I hoped my state would help Adil hold his silence just a little longer. Ammi had had enough shocks for one day.

  *

  As I was rolled through the doors, Adil lapsed into silence. Ammi glanced tight-lipped as our little procession marched past and through another door marked Critical Care. She was waiting by the triage counter with Mumani and Mamu. The couple was going through papers, he had his glasses on, and she was frowning. Then the door swung shut behind me and I began to take an interest in my new surroundings. Dr Shafiq’s solemn mien had suggested I was going to be here a long time or no time at all, and either way I wanted to mark my exits. Sure they said it was the best hospital in town, but you just never knew.

  I knew, like just about everyone else who could read, that it attracted a diverse group of would-be doctors every academic year, and competition was fierce for both faculty and undergraduate positions. There was also a school of nursing, residences, and a soccer pitch at the back. I knew about the soccer bit, because my ex-significant other once had a game against the AKU here. Omar. I wondered what had happened to him as AKU swallowed me whole. The last time I had been here, it was with him.

  YAHAN PAY PISHAB KARNA MANA HAI

  WALL CHALKING ACROSS KARACHI

  ~

  Against my better judgement, I had come to cheer Omar on in the season’s first soccer game. It was the first and last time I ever accompanied Omar to a game; I felt more like an accessory than a person, something else he’d pulled out of his sports kit.The other girlfriends had also seemed younger than me. I didn’t think they were, necessarily, they just seemed younger. Giggly. Giddy, almost. I had an overpowering urge to force them to sit down every time they bounced up in celebration out of concern that they might tip over from sheer excitement and suffer serious head injuries. I often felt that way. Older than my peers (not concerned about random head injuries). Older than peers, friends, professors, enemies, parents and siblings.

  After the game that day, the AKU winning side had been gracious enough to spring for tea at the hospital cafeteria. Now in my opinion, all that hoopla about the AKU’s hygiene and staff and nurses and world class doctors and stuff is just hoopla. The real reason we’re so impressed by it is its cafeteria. Other hospitals have canteens that are dark, dingy, makeshift affairs. Food service is often contracted out; most hospital canteens have the most rudimentary food preparation facilities. The AKU cafeteria, however, with its glass-fronted display, its self-service, its menu options, it’s just so, well, foreign. And so humbled are we by this evidence of a foreign (presumably white, everyone knows black people are inferior to us) hand, that the most committed bill-queue jumpers can be seen lining up meekly for tea and a samosa at the AKU cafeteria.

  I, of course, wouldn’t be standing in any lines this time around, but I hoped Ammi went a couple of times. It would be interesting to see her reaction.

  Most local college canteens are pretty bad too. Omar and I had spent many hours lurking by the KU canteen, eating tons of famous little aloo samosas and interminable cups of milky tea.The Institute of Business Acumen canteen was also quite rudimentary and Lahore School of Management Sciences, it was rumoured at the time, was getting a killer cafeteria. Then again, LSMS was and is privately funded and administered. Not like KU, with its politics and its poverty and its rabid zealots seeking to make it dangerous for ethnicities and genders to mix. They’ll never be able to stop that mixing altogether
though; they might just be fuelling it. It adds a certain thrill to flirting. Omar and I, for example, had been oddly excited by the element of danger. Sometimes I’d think I liked him simply because I was not supposed to. Ammi of course hated him.

  ‘Do you have any idea how you’ve shamed me?’ she had screamed after she saw him dropping me home one day. ‘It’s bad enough that you’re consorting with a boy, but now you’re parading your behaviour on our street where the neighbours can see you!’

  ‘The neighbours don’t care,’ I had retorted, stung by her words.What was wrong with her?

  ‘According to you, nobody cares. Well, they do care, who do you think told me? How do you think I knew to keep a lookout for you?’

  ‘I’m sorry you wasted your time then. All I did was get a ride home. That’s nothing to be ashamed of and nothing to hide.’

  ‘So you’re saying you have no relationship with that boy?’

  ‘I’m saying it’s none of the neighbours’ business.’

  ‘But it is my business. Do you or do you not have a friendship with that boy?’

  ‘Of course I’m friends with him, you think I’d let a complete stranger drop me home?’

  ‘Judging from what I saw today, you talking and laughing with him out in the open, who knows what you’ll let a complete stranger do?’

  At that I had gone into my room and locked the door behind me. She had banged on it a couple of times and stood outside screaming, but a lifetime with her senseless rage had taught me how to tune it out. There was just my room, my things and somewhere, my father and me. In the image of him I’d call up to banish the reality outside, he was happy. I wished he could have been happy with us, but the root cause of his gentle sadness who battered at my door just had not let him.

  In a way, I had been practising for this coma all my life. The sense of alienation, isolation, being apart somehow, had been with me as long as I could remember. It didn’t matter terribly if no one could hear me now because no one ever could. Omar had tried and failed, Saad had managed with ease but didn’t seem to want the job. Going into a coma was almost like going home.

  I sounded like the dog on TV saying, ‘Oh me oh my oh no!’

  QAZI AA RAHA HAI

  GRAFFITI

  ~

  The Emergency room could play host to up to six cases at a time, each with their own little curtained off cubicle, complete with standard accessories of IV pole, syringe tube, crash cart and bed cranks. The room wasn’t exactly teeming with people. Slow day maybe. I bet the outside was though.

  The few times I had come into the hospital from the other side to visit someone or (twice) for Ammi’s appointment at a clinic, the AKUH grounds had been a mass of humanity. Outpatients. Staff. Nurses. Visitors demonstrating our national ability to make a mela out of practically anything.The picnic tables in the courtyard were all full, their planks submerged under a lake of brightly coloured humanity. Old people rubbed their bellies in contentment, toddlers ducked and weaved through a forest of legs. There were even trashcans and, wonder of wonders, people walking all of five feet to deposit trash in them. It had been reassuring to be in a hospital that subtly encouraged people, through its own example, to do the right thing, in most others you could do pretty much as you wanted.

  Dr Shafiq swept in, a couple of other white coats in his wake, and in no time at all I was packed off for a CT scan. As my new bed swept past the seating area outside the ward I wanted to wave to my family, now huddled around Mamu on a sofa, no doubt debating which one of my kidneys to sell to pay for the cost of my admittance here.

  The scan room was on the same floor. The machine crouched in the centre of the room. It looked like a child’s idea of a space capsule. A man in a white coat was visible behind the curved partitioned off area on the left. The technician probably. The collar was removed from my neck, I was placed onto the lip protruding from the machine, and my attendants withdrew. I grew nervous. What if the technician put me in and then forgot all about me? What if there was a match and he got cable on one of his little screens and it turned into a cliffhanger? What if the scan revealed terrible, irreversible damage to the one thing I had cherished more than anything else in my life, the little space between my brain and my skull? What if what if …

  But he didn’t forget about me, and the fact that I wasn’t in my body at all but able to hover some distance above, behind or next to it meant I missed what was probably the worst part of the whole thing, the feeling that I was a cookie on a tray being pushed into an oven set at 350 degrees. In what seemed to be a very short time (I actually grew concerned, was it true what my mother had been saying about the actual size of my brain all these years?)

  I was taken back to the emergency section, but this time wheeled into a section on the right. Adil was allowed to peep in on me, but otherwise I was left alone (strangers didn’t count) and able to observe my surroundings.

  It was a clean room with the four beds being the familiar focal point of a work in metal, machine and flesh. No cockroaches in sight, I was happy to note.

  I suddenly thought of the tension in the little group holding its vigil outside. I understood all too well. I had some money in a savings account, but there was no way Ammi or Adil could access it. Ammi herself had next to nothing. Government employees below the upper grades, like my father, were entitled to miniscule pensions. If we had any proof of my father’s death, my mother would have been entitled to less than two thousand rupees a month. Since we didn’t, that was a moot point. I didn’t know how much money Adil had access to, but it was obvious we were again dependent on Mamu and Mumani’s generosity. I could only hope that Ammi was being gracious. Regardless of what she had been brought up to believe, she didn’t have a right to her brother’s money that superceded that of his wife. I didn’t want to be thinking of this. There was nothing I could contribute to solve the problem, so I resolved to focus on something closer to me, me.

  Dr Shafiq was muttering to his assistant as he examined my limp form. He seemed to be poking me at random, like a bored toddler with an animal, but I assumed there was a rationale behind it. One of his male assistants was duly making notations on a form held before him on a clipboard.

  ‘Aur Ayesha Bibi,’ Dr Shafiq stopped and looked right at my passive, eyeless, face. In repose I manifested a primness I could never have managed when awake, or was that how I always looked? ‘How is everything with you? Any problems other than the fact that your limbs seem to be frozen?’

  His assistant chuckled, ‘That’s why family isn’t allowed in here, isn’t it sir? So they don’t hear anything that will shock them.’

  ‘There’s nothing shocking about talking to a patient. But sadly some doctors don’t like to do it. I guess they feel it undermines the authority people sometimes expect from their doctors.’

  ‘But don’t you think reserve can be a good thing for a doctor, sir.’

  ‘Why do you think that?’

  ‘Because then they don’t have to answer stupid questions.’

  ‘I wish that applied to interns and consultants too,’ Dr Shafiq said in a carefully neutral tone. His assistant’s face blanched.

  ‘Sorry sir,’ he stammered, ‘I was just repeating something I’ve heard the other senior doctors say.’

  ‘Senior doctors, young man,’ Dr Shafiq’s tone softened, ‘are a very strange lot. They develop a morbid humour that cannot be understood, and should not be replicated out of the context of experience. In simpler language so a fool like you can understand, don’t talk like a senior doctor till you are a senior doctor.’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘Now let’s see you take some blood samples, and I want you to pretend she’s awake and looking at it. It’s disgusting how badly the most routine procedures are performed.’

  ‘Is it true that neurosurgery is the most lucrative specialization sir?’

  ‘No.’

  The intern looked disappointed.

  ‘It’s one of the most lucrative.’


  The intern cheered up.

  ‘I want to be a neurosurgeon very badly,’ he blurted.

  ‘Because you think you’ll make lots of money?’

  ‘Well that too, but also because women find it interesting.’

  ‘Which women?’

  ‘The nurses.’

  ‘Ah, the nurses. Have you been eyeing the nursing school classes again?’

  ‘No sir, no, and that was all a mistake.’

  ‘I’m sure it was, nevertheless, I want you to stop what you’re doing and listen to me very carefully for a minute.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ the man straightened and turned to face him.

  ‘Go tell the family that one of them can come in for a minute, but that there are other patients in this ward and they need to be considerate of peace and quiet when moving in and out. Then, and this is the most important bit …’

  The intern cocked his head alertly, ‘Go to Dr Rukhsana, and tell her I’ve sent you and that Dr Shafiq says he’ll quit if you aren’t reassigned to someone with a higher tolerance for idiots.’

  Dr Shafiq turned back to me.

  ‘Go now,’ he commanded over his shoulder.

  The door opened and closed.

  ‘There there Ayesha Bibi,’ he patted my arm comfortingly, ‘all offensive people have been removed from your presence. Now you just focus on coming back to us.’

  Astral me began to develop a crush on the nice doctor. Like Princess Di did. Men with authority, they got me every time.

  GOD LOVES YOU, EVERYONE ELSE THINKS YOU’RE AN ASSHOLE

  SLOGAN ON T-SHIRT IN KARACHI’S ZAINAB MARKET

  ~

  Did I seem a little jaded? There really hadn’t been that many men in my life. Not men I cared for anyway. Then again, what made one jaded, love or the absence of it? Apart from platonic loves like Abbu, Adil, my uncles, the Baba at the KU canteen who called me daughter and reheated my tea for me, I hadn’t really cared for many men. Not deeply, not the way I felt for Saad. What I’d had with Omar paled in comparison.