I looked up to see the traffic light changing from green to red again and I slammed on the accelerator, almost colliding with a bus which had replica nuclear missiles attached to its roof at jaunty angles.
There was one moment when I could have changed course and found my way back to those friends — and their mothers. It was the end of my first year at university in London — my mother had been gone two years by then, and my newly found method of coping with her absence was excess, which meant drugs, drink, men, or any combination of the above. That lasted most of the university year until Beema and fifteen-year-old Rabia arrived in London at the beginning of Rabia’s summer holidays and refused to say anything disapproving at all for two weeks; the weight of their forbearance finally became too much for me and I broke down in tears and promised a reformation of character. The first step was finding a way to pass my exams — which I did, after weeks of dedicated studying which surprised me with the exhilaration it brought to my life. One of my most vivid memories of that year is of walking through Bloomsbury in the rain, after my last exam, repeating one phrase over and over: for peace comes dropping slow. The rain seemed to change its tempo as I whispered those words, each drop hesitating in its arrow-straight descent from sky to my outstretched palm. I, too, am of the sky, I said aloud. My mother named me.
I looked across the street then, and saw my former best friend sitting at one end of a long table in a pub, with a group of students celebrating the end of the exams. I had been avoiding her through the year, but right then if she had turned around and there had been anything at all except indifference in her eyes I would have broken down in tears, and told her of every fear that had made me so cruel. But she didn’t turn, and the rain became a torrent, so I returned to halls and ate baked beans out of a can. It was all so obviously pathetic that I told myself I’d laugh about it one day.
‘Still waiting for the day,’ I said, driving past a police checkpoint that was absurdly blocking an entire lane of a busy road, without bothering to see if a policeman was flagging me down.
Who would I be now if she had stayed? How did I become this person, this quiz show researcher without real friends? I was the girl who could be anything — that’s what my teachers used to say, and I believed them. I just never realized that ‘anything’ could include this.
What have I done to my life, Mama, in your name?
There was a slight tremor running along the back of my hand. It would be so easy to drift into the utter self-absorption of misery.
Absorption. Something or the other absorbs neutrons and then fission occurs, after which…
Aasmaani! There was my mother’s voice. Are you thinking of nuclear weapons as the more cheerful alternative to thinking about me?
No one could ever make me laugh in more unexpected moments. Things I — and everyone else I knew — might find funny, she’d often deem outrageous, such as when Ronald Reagan insisted on referring to Pakistan’s military-picked Prime Minister, Junejo, as Huneho during the latter’s state visit to the US. ‘Cowboys running the world, and treating us like vassals whose names aren’t even worthy of learning to pronounce’, she fumed, and refused to see the joke. But on another occasion, a typo in a warrant for her arrest reduced her to tears of laughter. ‘Aasmaani, look,’ she said, as I clung on to her arm, terrified by the policeman at her doorstep. She handed me the warrant. ‘I stand accused of having “beached the law”.’ I laughed all the way to the police van with her, entirely caught up in picturing the law as a giant whale and my mother as Jonah, the magnetism of her personality throwing off the compass that allowed the whale to navigate away from shore.
I was still thinking about that when I parked the car in my designated spot outside the STD office and got out, ducking my head in greeting at a group of co-workers who were standing around their cars. The ducked head, if executed properly, serves as polite salutation carrying with it the barest suggestion that you’re really just nodding to yourself over some remembered incident and are not making overtures of friendship. It keeps both offence and familiarity at bay.
As the police van had driven away with my mother inside, and it occurred to me to be frightened, the Poet appeared from next door; when I told him what had happened, he said, ‘Run, look up “breach” in the dictionary.’
So I did, and beneath ‘to fail to obey or preserve something, for example, the law or a trust’ I found ‘to leap above the surface of the water (refers to whales)’. That was all the proof I needed that there was order in the world, and that — this followed naturally — my mother would come back soon. She did, that evening. All they wanted was to keep her locked up during a protest rally.
You had your moments, Mama, I’ll give you that. In those — what was it? — ten years out of the first seventeen of my life when you weren’t absent in one way or the other, you had your moments.
I pushed open the front door to the studio and walked in. On the ground floor, life was as chaotic as usual, with people calling out to one another through open office doors, and a steady stream of employees walking from kitchenette to photocopier to downstairs studio to upstairs offices. I stopped next to a group of men and women of mixed ages standing under the television mounted above our heads, watching STD’s repeat broadcast of its mid-morning music video programme.
‘But why is she sitting under an umbrella at the beach like it’s the French Riviera instead of Karachi?’ one said. ‘Put her on an old shawl surrounded by kinoo peels, that’s more like it.’
‘You just go watch your MTV if all you can do with the local stuff is complain.’
‘Oh, baba, I’m saying the local stuff should try less harder to be like MTV.’
‘O-ay, listen. You really planning to boycott American goods when they attack Iraq?’
‘Hanh, well, we have to feel like we’re doing something, right?’
‘OK, but does that mean boycotting movies and music as well? I mean, what if they attack before the new Lord of the Rings?’
‘No, no, no problem. We get that on pirated videos and DVDs. So when you buy those you’re just helping local industry. Same with music. And computer software.’
‘Great, great.’
‘Yeah, great, but there’s one problem remaining. Petrol pumps. Between work, home, supermarket, sabziwallah, and my parents’ house, there’s only Shell and Caltex pumps. What do I do about that?’
A moment of silence. ‘Well… you have to be realistic, after all. You need the car. The car needs petrol. What to do?’
‘I’ll tell you what to do. You want to piss off the Americans, there’s only one thing to do. Vote in the fundos. I swear next election, I’m doing that. Last time I was tempted, next time I will, for sure.’
‘You just shut up and go sit in your corner. You vote in the fundos, they’ll do nothing about the petrol pumps, and just ban all your precious music videos and put us women in burkhas.’
‘And anyway, the Americans like it these days if you piss them off. You piss them off, they bomb you.’
‘Seriously! But listen, yaar, you think the mullahs are going to join this government?’
‘God forbid. If they do, who knows what killjoy laws they’ll try and pass. Remember in the eighties how boring life got with all that pretend-Islamization?’
Boring? What I wouldn’t have given for some boredom in the 1980s. It was all prison and protest and exile and upheaval around me. Strange, how I was almost nostalgic for that. The battle-lines were so clearly drawn then with the military and the religious groups firmly allied, neatly bundling together all that the progressive democratic forces fought against. Now it was all in disarray, the religious right talking democracy better than anyone else and insisting, unwaveringly (admirably, I would say, if I didn’t recall their political track record), on the removal of the military from power while all the other political parties tiptoed around the matter or see-sawed back and forth; and, on the other side of the equation, the President-General who had been the first head of state in my lifetime to talk unequivocally against extremism was tripping over his own feet in an attempt to create a democratic façade for a government in which the military remained the final authority and the only veto power. All those sacrifices, all those battles — and this is what we had come to. It wasn’t a tragic waste — those lives, that passion; it wasn’t tragic, just farcical.