That though remains insignificant, because the Mall Road, she remains the same everyday. Holding, and very proud of its immaculate carpeted road, the buildings of the colonial past, the red brick-ed, the GPO, the High Court, the NCA and the Oriental College. Between all of them, it holds that elongated nozzle, the gun Zam-zama that weighs tons, and stands on a two wooden wheels, around which pigeons gather in the morning and are unruffled by the passing traffic that is always late for work. Someone once asked her, what does she make of a gun and pigeons, holding together? And she answered, I have bigger regrets, no body never comes to look at me, neither the adults, nor the kids, who grow into adults.

But mornings in Lahore are not only about the work, the guns, the kids and schools, but about the food too, and probably the most, the juicy, the desi-ghee dripping Halwa Poori, the poori light as a balloon, halwa sweet as the honey, the fried Nihari, the Murgh Chanay and the Sri Pai. It’s about those bulging stomachs that fail even to hide in those white crisp Kurta Shalwars. If you have the will, go close, and listen to that contented burp. And even fart. After which everyone laughs, and the life goes on.

But before all of that, a ball is bowled at the outskirts of Lahore where exists a Badshahi Mosque beside a Minar e Pakistan, and beneath them the ground that holds for itself the name Minto Park, the place where it all started, or so the story books say, and between those fast balls, super heroes are born, some amongst whom rule the world, and others end up driving that same motorcycle , lost in the horde.

Fuck you, he cries when he hits the table on his way to the washroom. And then retracts, comes back to the table, and knocks it again with his knee, and calls now, Mommy, Mommy… His arms waving, his hands fluttering, he presses his eyelids, closed, hard, and then comes the tears, may be, the artificial ones.

Cinderella, he told himself last night, were perhaps more real than the fantasies he created. But did Cinderella create one for herself, too? Do they always end up like this? Even if she had created one too?

Questions.

Middle aged, he has lived everything a man of his age can. He is bald from the front, his tummy bulging out, his car an old Suzuki IFX, that 800 CC from the 80′s, which when it comes to fitness comes only close to PIA planes. And can occasionally beat them.

But still its a car. Like PIA, still has the planes.

Like, a fantasy, still is, only a fantasy.

You can call him a next door Sheikh-chilli, a man who plans too much, and does little. Or you can call him, the next Steve Jobs. Depends on how you see the glass. As for himself, he has declared to himself that he has changed. That his biggest mistake was to put his own self in the fantasies he created. That, they always failed, that he always persisted. That they always failed. That they failed. Again and again and again.

That they were always in the future.

His is a new one today, one in the present. That it will fail again is a fait accompli. That fantasies are bubbles, wherever they are, shining, cute, beautiful, round, brilliant, but bubbles nonetheless.

Lets talk about the submissive woman first. Have you watched Hamsafar yet? Yes, or no, whatever be the answer, you should go through this post by the brilliant @oil_is_opium. What she essentially talks about is the underlying patriarchal tone of the drama, something which enforces the stereotypes.

But there is something that she perhaps missed. That is the submissiveness of the female lead, Khirad. With using sentences like, ‘meri khuwahish hay k mein ashar jaysi chahtay hain ban jaon, jo unki pasand usko apni pasand bana lun…’ ‘i wish i can be the way ashar wants me to be, make his choices mine’, the character reinforces the common discourse across middle class Pakistani women, that is, the girl must compromise, that the girl must be submissive, innocent, and naive. Precisely the kind of girl who is brought up around so many corners of Lahore. And perhaps that is the reason why such a large number of women are so insanely following  it. It fits into their perception of things.

Maat:

Its way better a serial as compared to Hamsafar when it comes to acting. But let me talk about the lead characters here. Saman and Aiman, the two sisters. Saman is this bitch who is on to destroy the every damned fabric of family life there can be for money’s sake. She is selfish, she is vile, she is all hatred.

Aiman, on the other hand is this girl who is super naive, who is ready to stay home, who wears a dupatta, who is very cautious, and yes, one who is very naive.

You already know that the vile bitch will be screwed in the end, and the naive sister will get a super good rishta and will settle down at a nice place.What you sow, so shall you reap.

And that takes me down the memory lane, back to the late 90′s, the first and the last character of a woman of a different kind I can remember in a  serial that is probably considered one of the best in Pakistan’s drama serial history. It is Alpha Bravo Chalie, and the character is Shehnaz.

She was smart, she was intelligent, and oh she was confident, and of course not naive. Precisely the kind of woman who must be portrayed on TV to create an alternative discourse. I don’t know if this will happen. But I sure hope for the sake of women here, it does.

I am Aliya. I was born into many of those almost-marked villages in the northern Punjab where when the monsoon lashes in the mid July and August, our mud houses are as scary as your cement ones during an earthquake. Often when the train passes by our house, during the winters, I often wonder at the kind of stories that these people make up who stand in the doors of this fast moving machine. And that if they do think that if we are  dream within a dream, or that may be that they do agree that it is impossible to count stars, that they are so many. Just like us.

Us. We are seven. I am probably in the fourth or the fifth. I know Abba knows about it, and so does Maa, but you know, when there are so many, even the parents like to forget. After all amidst the where-is-the-food for today, the less you remember the better. Aliya thinks Abba often forgets to have food. I don’t know, well… but sometimes we all pretend that we forgot to have food.

….

This is my new home. Abba was advised by a dear friend that we should be sent to Lahore to be maids at rich houses. He said that the rich particularly prefer lil girls, oh no not because of some pedophilia tendencies, but because they submit so easily. I mean you see that they can be awed. That the career for them is now here, and the first step in that is to ‘shut the fuck up‘.

So I do, do that. Heh. But you know, when Alizeh, and Ali, Baji’s children went to this place, super sexy Cafe Ayalanto in Lahore, at the M.M.Alam Road in Lahore, I could easily make up that the meaty stuff that were having for dinner tasted a thousand times better than the saag and makai ki rooti amma would cook for us once in a … life time? But hey, everyone talks about saag and makai ki roti here, that somehow it’s directly from the heaven. What the fuck do they know of delicious and juicy that meat loaf tasted with that green sauce and vegetables, while I looked at it, pretending that I am caring for Alizeh and Ali.

Alizeh and Ali had a pizza though. I wish we were at home. They must have shared it with me. Here, though they are afraid. You know once when Baji found Ali passing a chips from Lays to me, she had scolded Ali and Alizeh both, and warned them, that I may forget my auqat. Auqat, the word, you know has no parallels in English. But Alizeh is nice. I like her bed. When Baji is not at home in the mornings, I do sneak into her bed to lie on that pink bedsheet, under the pink blanket. Pink is a beautiful color. I don’t know but I like it, really.

Did you ever think that do I ever think that if I can be like them? Like Alizeh and Ali. Oh, I love their uniforms. Especially the way Alizeh is often made to tie her dupatta across her chest. She tells me she does it when she runs so that the dupatta doesn’t interfere. Duh, I know it already. But I will like to run. Yeah. For sure.

As for the question, I don’t know, but I do think that God made us like this for a reason. After all, tell me, batao batao, if I were not here, who would have flushed that toilet everyday??

…

In 2025, when his paper was published in Nature, titled ‘Transferring of Human Consciousness from Brain onto a Computer’, he had ended up in whirlpool of controversy. Atheists, and Theists were all up for him, against him. For those atheists who turned up to meet him or interview him, they were deeply disappointed by his long beard, his strict schedule regarding Namaz timings. For the theists who turned up, they reviled him for publishing and even involving himself in such a research. To both of them, he explained without being able to explain the secular nature of science, that it doesn’t belong to any belief, that it exists for its own reasons. And on both accounts he lost.

And then his age-old colleagues at Cambridge, and students too would press him on the question of evolution. He would answer again the same way, that science is not supposed to answer those questions about his beliefs. That his training as a scientist doesn’t let him doubt evolution.  Some would call him an escapist, some would even doubt his credentials.

But when he proved that you can transfer the whole of human conscious, the memories, the feelings, the emotions from the brain onto computer, and then to place them back on a human brain, scientists across the world were stunned. MIT and Berkley went so far ahead as to announce special prizes for anyone who will debunk that paper. Tat prize went unclaimed. But twenty years down the road, another prize did come his way. The Nobel Prize.

For five years as a doctoral student at Cambridge he had argued that the recent techniques in order to thwart aging won’t work. That the prospect of surgery on a human body time and again won’t leave it in working condition. That you can only add patches to a certain extent. That if you are so insistent upon developing human organs in laboratory, why not engineer a human body in entirety? But those were early days.

And then he ended up publishing his research. And the whole paradigm of research in biotechnology changed to his argument. Lets engineer a human body, a replica of a living being, exact one, in muscles and shape in the laboratory, of whatever age, then try to transfer the whole consciousness of the original being into that lifeless, conscious-less body. After all, what else knows but the brain? No patches, no surgery, no nothing.

But this very night, the day before he becomes the first human being to undergo that treatment, his exact replica there, of the same age he chose for himself, his whole edifice of love going to be razed down. For a moment, he turns to curse himself, then his research. In a fleeting moment, he even takes out his revolver to shot himself. But then puts it in back. Suicide, He won’t let me go.

He has been a winner all his life. Achievements and more of them had always followed him. But then his belief in the absolute will of his beloved, his God, was much more than his own genius. And thus every other night before a big news awaited for him, he would go and cry on the Jai Namaz asking for forgiveness, imploring for success. Complimenting that with last lines, ‘And oh Allah, you know the better. So even if it doesn’t turn out to be good, I know you have better in stock for me.’ And now when he sits down and tries to find peace by turning to Nafl prayers, he fails to find calm. He starts with four. Goes to ten. Twenty, fifty. Hundred. Concentrate, he yells to himself. Push the forehead harder against the floor. Rub it. Find that feeling.

And yet never in his life, he had encountered this feeling of nothingness when he had put his forehead on to the ground for Sajda.  And every time he did that, it was a moment of annihilation, a moment of immense satisfaction, a moment when a current ran through his  body in awe of the sincerity of his own Sajda. Is there a void out there? What do I make of ‘… kul -e- nafs – zaiqul- mout…’  ‘… every living being has to taste death…’?

I want to talk to you, he whispers. In other times, a whisper was enough, always. And today, it seems as numb as that Sajda. Push your head against the floor as hard as you can, and he has failed. Call Him as loud as you can, he fails again. A love lost.

Back when he was eighteen, back when he had just shaved for the first time, back when it were only two weeks he had got the acceptance letter from Cambridge, back when the parathay of Amma were the greatest delight, back when he was still young, this same song of Nusrat’s ‘Kisi day yaar na bichray‘ was the last song he had listened to before he came to Lahore to attend Raiwand congregation.

Forty eight years later, the same song plays in the room, the music dissolving in the curtains, the carpet, in the scenery, in the coffee, and in his ears. The room smelling of it.

‘Dunya Wichray

Par kisay da yaar na wichray’

‘May he lose the world

But not his beloved’

He storms into his cupboard holding his academic credentials, the awards, and the Nobel. There by the Nobel lies his original paper, in his own hand writing, that first floated this idea.

He knows it doesn’t matter. That there are hundreds of thousands of copies available.

Of the void. Of the love.

That refuses to refuse.

While the paper burns slowly in his hands.

… End …

My Abba was a Grade eight or nine officer in the Punjab Agricultural Department, my Amma a teacher at a federal government school. In a way, even before they started their lives together, and even before we were up and ready for our schooling, things had started to go bad in terms of finances. And then one day, we were supposed to be admitted in the schools.

The first one was I. I still remember my dad took me all around the city, to Cathedral, to Saint Anthony and probably Crescent too, but in the end settled at a totally new school in Sant Nagar, Lahore. Reasons of course were financial. Anyway, I studied there for the next ten years, and it wasn’t really a bad place.  I mean to be frank, some of the guys that graduated from there have ended up at the best places of higher education  in Pakistan. It was above those every-other private school down the street that you often encounter in the middle and lower middle class areas of Lahore but surely less than the likes of Crescent, or Saint Anthony or even Cathedral.

Move twenty years down, fast forward to 2011, and here are my young cousins ready to go to schools and they are admitted at the same place owing to its relatively less fees and supposedly quality education. But sadly, things have changed for the worse in terms of quality education. What do they do next?

They really can’t do nothing. Can they have their children be admitted at Cathedral, or Crescent or DPS or Saint Anthony? Can they ever think about Aitchison or Convent or Beacon House or LGS? Same goes for Military Colleges at Hassan Abdal, Petaro, Jehlum and Lower Topa.  With fees amounting to Rs. 5000 and more per month, it is beyond their means and many others to have their kids get quality education. Is there any chance that anyone of them, considering that the only choice left for those kids is third class private schools at every corner in Lahore, is going to attend medical colleges or engineering schools? May be someone of you will try to give me an example of someone who graduated from one of these and went to do Electrical Engineering at UET, Lahore or NUST or attended King Edward, but if you are even thinking of that, stop it right there. A kid reaching to one of these good schools in years speaks of nothing if the rest of the class fails to achieve hardly anything in their academic lives. In the end, even before starting their lives, they have been left behind in this brutally competitive world.

And it isn’t as if this ends there, and the next generation perhaps will have better prospects. Frankly, if history tells me anything, government schools are hopeless, and they will remain so*. So to expect these schools, down the street filled with teachers, of the kinds who had failed at everything else in life and finally resort to teach, will offer anything to the kids attending them beyond rote-learning, and hatred is simply preposterous.

And let me not even try to explain the gap these kids have with those whose only aspiration post their 12th grade exam is to study at a full scholarship in US. Blah, I found that something like this happens too when I started attending the university. A totally different universe that was there, then.

* I know about Danish Schools in Punjab.

This story though is not only about him, or the roads, or the lights. And you can only understand once you peek into Muaz’s room and try to empathize with him. Bloody monster teachers with their bloody exams every three months, Allah Mian, please postpone exam. And wohooo, here you have it, Allah Mian has responded and he is back… Do you think the exam will be postponed? Do you think his teacher will be shot? Muaz is having those little cute dreams that if he talks about them, his parents will end up laughing sheepishly. But ye know, and even if don’t know, he who sits in Isloo thinks the same.

You have doubt? Ask her, beaten by her husbands, oops, beaten by her husband. I slip, I can you know. Anyway, beaten by her boyfriends too. Sometimes, you ask, in those beside-Naala, in those places where a girl never gets to a school, she has a boyfriend and when she gets angry, oooh, no breakup!, they all get together and pray that they be dead, boyfriends and husbands. La la la. Just like that.

Up and down, he runs, jumps, and goes down, bullets flying beside him, damn, ye know, trust me you think it’s like her wife just changed her prayer drive, but then DHUZ! gone, dead, mar gaya salla. Malik Sahab, is the new peer Sahab! No, not because he was so right, but because he knew that wives can alter their minds and, and instead asks for death. La la la. Just like that.

Subah paper ho ga? Phir aa gaya, phir laray ga?

Or

Exam in the morning? He is back, he will argue again?

And here the solution: Malik Sahab: postpone all the exams, kill all the males!

La la la. Just like that.

So today at Sehri, I was sitting with all of the bunch. And suddenly, owing to my questioning, one of the students asked me, ‘Are you an Ahmadi?’ Dumbfounded, I looked at him. Not that I hadn’t expected that question to be thrown around. I do ask a lot of questions, and generally don’t follow the rituals. Thus, the question seemed entirely expected.

But while that did rattle me a little, and of course it will after the slaying of Salman Taseer, the second question that came at me was even more awesome: So what do you think is a better belief? Ahmadi one or the Muslim one?

The answer you know I was supposed to give. Or at least was expected to. Anyway, I pulled myself and said plainly that dude, none is better or worse to me. And that if you were born and bred up in an Ahmadi family, may be you could have understood why you shouldn’t judge anyone based on their beliefs. Of course, I never expected that guy to understand that. Simple as that. This guy belongs to a minority ethnic community.

And this doesn’t go alone. In 2010, when Ahmadis were brutally massacred in Lahore, a conversation regarding Ahmadi killings was initiated at one of the lists I had joined. And guess what? Shias and Sunnis were equal in pouring the scorn over the dead. I specifically mention Shias because they are one of the many persecuted communities in Pakistan but when it came to manifesting bigotry, they didn’t really relent.

Anyway, while I was trying to make a point regarding Ahmadis’ beliefs, and why they must not be judged for them, a Shia senior who was up in arms against Ahmadis and really respected me came up and said to me, ‘Salman, I am sorry. I never knew you were an Ahmadi.’

That, my friend is what the state has finally ended up yielding for you, at least at the universities. If you end up questioning the conventional wisdom regarding minorities, you are a part of them. Because frankly, a Muslim just can’t do that. To stand up for an Ahmadi’s right to belief is impossible for a Muslim. Plus, the bigotry lies across Pakistanis regardless of their sects and ethnicity.

So, thus I am tempted to ask, how many of these future leaders of Pakistan, these engineers and doctors and CSP officers and Army men really think otherwise?

Don’t know. But based on a wild guess, dude, we are screwed.

In those depths of the oceans, where the storms that endanger your existence never reach through, where the sun fails, and where there is no life, I was born to sea dust, an orphaned one.  Standing up, and looking around, we were born in huge numbers. Infinite, to be precise.

And when the ocean roared above us, and when a thousand years passed, a millennium, we died enmasse and we were born enmasse. Like you, we were consumed. Unlike you, we were consumed by water. It was a lover’s call. Repelling, for a thousand years. Accepting, a whole generation, in a moment.

The way of the oceans.

Ocean, I was told remained our God for ages. It is with whom we learned to live, and to love and finally to die. Death, the word I first heard when my existence had already passed 500 years. An absurd, useless living. Without purpose, and meaning. And yet, I and others continued to move through. But then others expected the ocean to come back to them, love them, and annihilate them. This was a strange living, I tell you. Everyone wished to be loved so that they could die, the moment it came upon them.

And I? I was different. Love, remained different for me. Love, was to be lived. Not to be touched. And left. Craving.

Castigated and left out, I travelled across the seas. From Atlantic to Indian, to Pacific to Arabian. This was a search of meaning. An attempt to justify the existence, which made no sense without love.

And then one day, the King called me home. I went back. With this faint hope that may be I will be accepted. With my eccentricities. But instead, he offered me a book. A page with a smile that spoke of caution and said that here I hand over to you the greatest secret of the Ocean. We were told of a one like you, that will come. And you have.

And the book wasn’t a book either. It was a page. And in the centre, it read, ‘Go, fall in love with a human. Go touch that human. And become immortal.’

To love. To touch. To be immortal. And the greatest secret of the ocean.

And thus I roamed, again. From this to there. To here to there. Passing by Columbus’ ship in the atlantic, to a sneak peak at a rather observant Darwin, the search had started. But to love required time, and conversations.

So to say.

So to say.

The task thus enormous. But I had my reasons to be hopeful. Who had thought that I will be even here. With the greatest secret of the ocean disclosed to me. Me.

And then one day, I decided to stay at a sea-shore, until or unless I fell in love. Long stay. And ages passed. A tiny droplet of sand dust on a shore. Amongst so many like him.

Amongst the ‘legged mermaids’.

Or whatever it was.

And then one day, she came around. How do you classify beauty, humans?Curves? Lips? Conversations? Or smile?

I don’t know. I took my way, and listened to her speak. There and then. Again and again.

Just speak.

There and then.

She was five when I first saw her. Seven when I listened to her the first time. Sixteen when I first noticed her smile. Twenty when I saw her cry.

Thats when I fell in love with her.

And when her tears fell upon my existence, no shoulders here, I wished I had been a human.

There and then.

Time to touch her then? To consume my love? To be immortal? But, how my dearest, how?

She will die. She, only a mortal.

I touch. I, immortal. And then to live forever. Of pain, and suffering. Of longing and craving. Of stories unfinished. Of tales that will hurt.

Human. Sea dust. Sea dust. Human.

Mortal. Immortal. Mortal. Immortal.

On that day, when I moved toward her, locked at her feet, an urge out of curiosity, an urge out of temptation to be immortal. What more? What less? I don’t know. I don’t want to know, either.

The fleeting touch on her was accompanied by those lifeless, monotonous waves that continue to strike the shore everyday, every night. Only that it was different.

I died. And the greatest secret of the ocean: a lie.

“It all has to do with changing demographics in Karachi. The changing voting patterns. How? Well, it goes like this.

Karachi is part of Sindh, the jewel of Sindh. And before partition majority here were Sindhis. Then migrants from India came in abundance and settled here, to be later called Muhajirs, the Urdu word for migrants. And they settled in huge numbers here ending up replacing Sindhis as the largest ethnic community in Karachi. Consider this analogy: Huge numbers of people from Chandigarh start to migrate to Kerala and totally replace the natives as the majority population.

But that demographic change never got that ugly. Why? Because the state never armed any group. Though largely migrants were despised throughout the country. My chacha tells me that only after 84, people stopped calling us Muhajirs as Bhaiyay, a mocking title.

In 84, MQM was formed. A party representing Muhajirs. And because of majority of Urdu speaking in Karachi, it used to bag the most number of seats in parliament. Plus it was heavily armed. ISI formed it to counter Bhutto’s PPPP vote bank in Karachi.

Now, after the recent operations against militants across northern Pakistan, huge numbers of Pakhtuns or Pashtuns or Pathans whatever you may call them started to migrate to Karachi from northwest Pakistan signalling another demographic shift in Karachi.

And MQM won’t let that happen. Because it eats on their votes. So they harass them, kill them. And the Pashtuns don’t sit back either. They kill, and harass them too.

But everyone hates MQM, and there are valid reasons too for that. They are violent, seriously violent. So even if they do something small, it is exaggerated as hell. And they don’t usually engage in small things.

This whole thing now happened because of a spat between PPPP and MQM, because of two seats in the Azad Jammu and Kashmir assembly, the Pakistani part of Kashmir. They were coalition partners one day. PPPP screwed MQM by postponing elections at two seats in Kashmir. MQM pulled out of coalition at center. And PPPP said, dudes we are sick of you guys. Let us teach you a lesson. And the lesson is here: another conflagration.“