Mushtaq said, “There was a great charm and fervor in those days for being a liberated people, to be in our own country, Pakistan.”
I said, “Why did you think it was your own country?”
“Because my family voted and worked for Pakistan. I don’t know whether our elders knew the meaning of Pakistan or the two-nation theory.” The theory that the Hindus and Muslims were two separate nations. “But emotionally they were attached to the idea of Pakistan.”
The family was supported by Mushtaq’s elder brother. He had got a job with a foreign company as a salesman. The family was living in a small rented two-room house near the Central Jail. It was a one-story brick house with a concrete roof. The kitchen and bathroom were in the verandah. All the other houses in the area were like that. The plots were tiny. Some were eighty square yards and some were ninety; none was more than a hundred and twenty. It was more crowded than Banaras, and new people were coming all the time. But in that little house they were very happy. They thought that there were good days ahead.
The story Mushtaq now began to tell was like a story of immigrant success after early hardship. His brother, who had carried the burden of the family for some years, stopped supporting him when he was thirteen. But Mushtaq was now able to look after himself. He began to do part-time typing and clerical jobs. He got the jobs through the newspapers and employment exchanges. He found he could make eighty rupees a month, about two dollars. It was more than enough. He joined a private school, Sindh Muslim College. The fees were fourteen rupees a month, about thirty-five cents; the bus fare to the college was an anna, about a fifth of a penny. After those expenses, and after he had bought his books and treated himself to a little of this and a touch of that, Mushtaq found he could hand over fifty or sixty rupees to his father, who was retired and earning nothing.
He didn’t mind the struggle. Karachi had a pleasant climate and it was a place of opportunity. The mohajirs were practicing the bazaar skills they had brought and year by year they were establishing themselves. With all his hardships Mushtaq, too, began to move ahead, though at his own pace. When he was twenty he joined a teachers’ training college. He got his teaching degree three years later; and while he was teaching at a secondary school he enrolled at the University of Karachi as a “casual” student. He got his master’s in English literature when he was twenty-seven.
It had taken time, but he had got there. There had been a special price, though. He hadn’t married. He said that this was because no one in his family had assisted him. It was a real problem for people like Mushtaq. In the mohajir culture marriages were generally arranged. There was no one in the new country, the new setup, to find a wife for him; and as a young man, still close to the old ways, he wouldn’t have known how, he wouldn’t have had the brazenness, to go about finding a wife for himself.
But he was not unhappy. He had left his brother’s house now (his parents had died) and he was living in rented rooms in Central District. (This was the area where we were talking.) He had become a lecturer in a college of commerce and economics. He was getting five to six hundred rupees a month, twelve to fifteen dollars, and he was paying only a third of that in rent. So he had money to spend and he was very happy. He loved going to coffee houses and chatting with mohajirs and Bengalis, who were coffee-house people.
Then things began to go wrong. In the 1960s the capital shifted in a phased way from Karachi to the new city of Islamabad. This meant that more government jobs were going to go to people in the north. Mushtaq thought that the people in the north, Punjabis, Pathans, were socially and culturally not like mohajirs; they were “alien.” And then in 1971 Bangladesh seceded. That was an agony for Mushtaq; the Pakistan of 1947, for which his family had given up India, had ceased to exist.
“Many of the Bengali friends who used to sit and talk with us in the coffee houses left. A major part of our culture had been lost. The Bengalis were the pioneers in the freedom movement, and one comes to the conclusion that one is forsaken and betrayed.”
The tense had changed in that last sentence, and the language had become strange, as though spoken by another man. It was like a fracture in his story. And the success he had appeared to be speaking of became something else.
I said, “It was too emotional, then, that idea that you were coming to a land of your own.”
“I began to feel that.”
The words undammed his grief. The Muslims who had stayed behind in India were now better off, he said; they had laws and members of parliament and ministers. I said it wasn’t quite like that. I said that once the call for Pakistan had been made, partition had to come; if there had been no partition all the energy of the state would have gone into holding itself together. (And I thought, but didn’t say, that if there had been no partition all the cities of the subcontinent would have been like Karachi.) He didn’t listen; behind his blank, and now tremulous, face he was too deep in his own life and calamity.
I said, “You made a career here. You couldn’t have done that in the other place.”
And now, having spoken before of his career rather formally, as a series of steps up, he began to talk of the terrors he had been living with as a teacher.
“I first became aware of the MQM in 1982. In their ‘chalkings’ on the walls of the college and the schools and buildings. It went on, chalkings and counter-chalkings. There were two groups in the college. Leaders of those groups would come to me and ask me to leave the class, so that the students could go out and take part in rallies or protests. They were about eighteen to twenty years old. They used threatening, abusive language, in Urdu. They were lower middle class. The issues were that the fees were too high, or a sympathy strike for a student killed in Punjab. I was horrified. I felt insecurity. I went to the principal. He was a man of forty-five or fifty. A tall man, a man of science. A mohajir. He was helpless. He said, ‘Let us complain to the next higher authority.’
“In 1985 a local leader of the party, a man of about thirty or thirty-five, visited the principal’s office. He was well dressed, educated, a graduate perhaps. I was sitting in the principal’s office. I had a chat with that gentleman. It started when he asked me to give support to his organization. I asked him, ‘What do you want?’ He said, ‘I want your help in the conduct of the examination.’ I understood what he meant. He wanted my connivance in the examination hall, letting the boys do what they like. He wanted freedom for the boys to copy and cheat. I said, ‘No. I will perform my duty.’ The principal was just listening. The meeting lasted fifteen minutes. Two or three days later I received a sort of threat. A boy in the verandah told me, ‘You have not acted well. You may be facing bad consequences.’ ”
I asked about the boy.
“Lower-middle-class boy. Nineteen. Families residing in Orangi.” A mohajir slum with a population of about a million and a quarter. “I said to him, ‘I will face the consequences.’ ”
Nusrat, who had been with us all the time, and mediating when he saw the need, said in his very special innocent-brutal style, “He is naïve. He is teaching literature to students who are unreceptive, undeserving, and he doesn’t know what’s gone wrong in his own life. This is one way in which you can suffer without even knowing the cause of suffering.”
Mushtaq had suffered acutely at his school for the last ten years. Ironically, they were the years of his marriage. Marriage had come to him when he was forty-three.
He said, “I leave the house mentally disturbed, remain in the college mentally disturbed, and then come back to the house with the same disturbance.”
“Something happens on the way back? The students wait for you?”
“Sometimes on the streets I come across students creating disturbance.”
“What sort of disturbance?”
“Burning buses, hijacking buses. Near the college. From 1987 to 1988 the MQM did those outrages. Groups of fifty or a hundred.”
“Have they lost interest in education?”
“Definitely.”
“A humiliation for you?”
“As a teacher I am not treated …” He didn’t finish the sentence. “Misbehaving, not attending my class. That has degraded me as a teacher. Two weeks back two students came to the college for submitting their examination. The students of a rival group gave them a good beating. With sticks. No weapon at that time. When I saw them I was scared.”
I said, “What would you like to do now?”
“I would like to teach them.”
I was bewildered. “You’ve just said they are thugs.”
But Mushtaq was only saying that he wished the world were arranged in such a way that he could actually teach his students. And when I asked again what he wanted to do now, in the world as it was, he said, “I feel now I want to leave the profession. I am fifty-seven years old.” By my calculations he was fifty-four. “I’ve been in the profession for twenty-nine years. That is the tragic aspect of my life.”
“A life in vain?”
“It may be called that, because I haven’t achieved anything.”
His faith was still the one clear point in his life. He had done the pilgrimage; he had the beard of the hajji. He was wearing shalwar-kameez; on him, with his white beard, it looked like a kind of sacrificial religious dress.
Nusrat had lived through hard times before. I had first met him in 1979, at the time of the Islamizing terror of General Zia. Nusrat, a devout man, had tried to meet the fanatics halfway, but had had little stumbles. And one careless day he got into serious trouble. He was working for the Morning News. It was Mohurram, the Shia mourning month. He thought it was a good idea to run a feature piece from Arab News about the granddaughter of Ali, the Shia hero. The piece was flattering about the woman’s looks and artistic attainments. But the Shias were outraged; to them it was insulting and heretical even to say that Ali’s granddaughter was good-looking. There was talk of taking out a procession of forty thousand and burning down the Morning News. For three days the paper was closed down. Nusrat himself was in danger; he could have been set upon at any time. Some months after this incident I passed through Karachi again. Nusrat had turned gray.
When we said good-bye he said, “Can you arrange for me to go to a place where I can read and write and study for five years? Because in five years, if you see me again, I may have become a cement-dealer or an exporter of ready-made garments.”
That, spoken at a bad time, showed his style. And, in fact, he had become a public relations man for an oil company, and done well. The oil-drilling business was not affected by the troubles. But life in the city had been a day-to-day anxiety and Nusrat had developed a heart condition. His gray hair had gone white and short and thin; he was still under fifty. He had loved the Karachi winter and he used to like wearing a tweed jacket for it. Now he was in a loose cotton tunic that made him look frail.
He said, “I will tell you how the ethnic infighting affected me when I was almost dying in hospital in June 1990. I was in CCU, coronary care unit. That is where you are rushed to in an emergency; that is where you live or die.
“Karachi had infighting on a bloody scale. MQM was in power in the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation. In the CCU the air conditioner wasn’t working, and this was in the middle of June. There was a shortage of medicines. The telephone exchange was blown up one night, and there was a clash between doctors and outsiders, presumably from a political party, PPP or MQM, who wanted everybody to go on strike. And I was there in that condition in the CCU. My fifth day.
“I was very close to the window lying on a cot. You want to hear about the cot? The cot had a foam mattress, and because the air conditioner wasn’t working and there was no ventilation, I asked them to remove the mattress. Of course, they were reluctant, but they finally removed it. They said the cot would be hard steel, but I said I wouldn’t mind. The next morning the doctor said to me that the head of the Institute was on a surprise visit, and he wouldn’t be happy to see the foam mattress removed from the cot and lying in the cubicle. I was very angry. I said, ‘I know the director’s AC is working, and he has no health problem. I want to see the director when he comes, and deal with him suitably.’
“We asked the attendants to open the window. We were on the first floor, and the risk was—so they said—that a bullet could come and hit us. I said, ‘The glass is not bulletproof?’ June is suffocating in the heat.
“One day there was firing outside. I got up from my bed with all the gadgetry they had put on me, and sneaked a few steps to have a quick look at what was happening downstairs. I later realized the risk I had taken, both with regard to the bullet and having got up suddenly—which I wasn’t supposed to do.
“One day I saw some attendants crying in a cubicle at about eleven P.M. I knew at this time that people were dying in this ward, and that some of the people I had seen had been taken away. In this case the attendant and the family, three people in all, were faced with the problem of taking the body from the hospital to Orangi, where there had been trouble for days on end and pitched battles were being fought. It was an area that was closed down at night by the local authorities. Then the ambulance wasn’t willing to risk the journey.
“Orangi was about fifteen miles away. The family was lower middle class and had to depend on public transport. Some young men in the CCU were volunteering to help. The attendants of the deceased included a young girl. I was upset and angry, not just at the state of the city and its repeated closures, but was apprehensive about what could happen to the young girl at that time of night. I was conscious of the fact that kidnapping for ransom and kidnapping for ostensibly no reason was common at that time.
“I kept telling my attendants, who were pleading with me to rest and sleep, to please do something for the safety of the young girl. I said, ‘Why don’t you take the body in the morning?’ Someone reminded me that in the heat of June bodies decay quicker. There was little that I could do.
“I don’t know what happened. I must have gone off to sleep. I can’t explain this, but despite all this, I was happy in that hospital because of the friends I had made, and because the man treating me was an old school friend.”
Ehsan was part of the mohajir movement in the mid-1980s. It was a middle-class, intellectual movement at that time—it had developed out of an older student movement—and Ehsan knew three or four of the “ideologues,” to use his word. He thought them very intelligent. They had intense discussions in private houses, and they would get worked up in an almost religious way about the injustices done to the community and their city, Karachi. It wasn’t like the charging up at the Friday prayers, Ehsan said, when I put the suggestion to him; it was more like the Shias fighting for their rights.
The movement had first to defeat the religious parties in the universities. University politics mattered in Pakistan because, with military rule, it was often the only political life that was allowed. And the defeat of the religious parties by the mohajir student movement was ironical; because it was the faith that had driven the mohajirs to Pakistan, and because it was in those religious parties that the first generation of mohajirs had felt most at home. But that was long ago; later generations had grown to understand what lay beyond the faith.
The war against the religious parties had been fought with guns; both sides had at different times, and for different reasons, been encouraged and armed by the government. In Ehsan’s college there were four or five recognized mohajir fighters; people from other colleges would give support when it was needed. Ehsan was very friendly with two of the fighters. They were both from educated families, and Ehsan thought that the most important thing about them was that they were “extremely alienated.” They took the ideological training very seriously and were ready to die for the cause.
Ehsan was studying science with one of the fighters, and every day after classes they used to go to the friend’s family house. The friend, the fighter, was about five foot eight and fat, very physical, Ehsan said, with big, thick hands which Ehsan thought were the han
ds of an aggressive man.
The father of the family was a high-ranking government servant, and the family house was a big government house, a thousand-square-yard house. (Mushtaq’s family, when they came to Pakistan in 1949, had lived in an eighty-square-yard house.) The father had built an enormous study for his five children; there were encyclopedias and religious books and science books. They were a middle-class family that believed in education, and they were far better off than most other people in the movement. Ehsan’s friend was not as good at studies as his brothers; but all the four boys were active in the MQM.
Ehsan was in the house one day, at about sunset, with the friend and one of the brothers, when there was a lot of firing outside with AK-47s and all kinds of guns. Ehsan was by now used to gunfire, but this was excessive. What surprised him, though, was when the mother of the family brought out an AK-47 and gave it to her fighter son, Ehsan’s friend. He went to the roof of the house—it was a single-story house—and took up position and returned the fire. The battle went on for five or ten minutes; to Ehsan it seemed much longer. Ehsan had seen his friend using guns at the college; the friend would make a joke of it and say that Ehsan was chicken. But Ehsan had no idea that the mother was so involved in the movement. She was a big strong lady in shalwar-kameez, not good-looking, but very affectionate and always ready to offer food to her sons’ friends. He hadn’t associated her with guns, and he didn’t even know there was a gun in the house.
Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples Page 45