Sentiments and Smiles Long Overdue . . .

… So went the dedication on the book, scribbled hurriedly during the long, but thankfully air-conditioned taxi ride to Faridabad; assorted pastries, books and (concerned) grimace in tow. Meeting people on their return home after a most unexpected hospital tryst (severe cigarette-induced-asthma-induced uneasiness) can be as unnerving as it may initially seem relieving (seeing people AT the hospital instead calls for feigning a braver façade). The patient being an old flame/flicker makes extra demands on composure and dignity; you have to make sure you seem neither too distant nor too vested, concerned and not paranoid; friendly, but not too familiar. For the long months that Atlas Shrugged sat pretty on my bookshelf, waiting to be added to the Ayn Rand-obsessed ex’s collection; I wondered if I indulged him too much. An off-the-cuff mention of his fascination for the Fountainhead, and off I went picking the next in the Rand collection, determined to pass it on to him as testimony of (the times of) my pure joy at his presence in my life, even as he changed status from (ambiguously) potential/prospective/current to (unequivocally) “ex”. It was our first planned meeting since the telephone breakup two years ago, and the opportunity to finally pass on the fondly picked-up book didn’t in any way lessen the concern at this latest deterioration in health.

Fortunately, he was in much better condition than I had imagined (he’d shaved earlier in the day, and I certainly had as well), leaving little to inquire about medicine courses, the recovery regimen and so on. Small talk ensued . . . some salvation something party, haircuts in Delhi salons, facebook photographs, Istanbul, the Delhi – Faridabad commute . . . The high-maintenance pet forced digressions from time to time. With a dog like that who needs a cat, I muttered under my breath, surprisingly to no offence taken. Between the half-smiles and generous servings of cut fruit and jeera-sprinkled nimbu-pani, I made myself at home. Is a knee on the bed too familiar, or should I sit straight and very “I-have-only-come-to-inquire-about-your-health”? Knee is ok, I decide, suddenly feeling less uptight. Am tempted to help myself to the get-well-soon chocolate I brought him, but desist.

Short visit it had to be, and when his friends who called were told that he was “busy with people who have come over to see me only” and therefore couldn’t “meet before late in the night dude”, I sensed it was time to leave. Exchanging pleasantries and half hugs (fearful that my Punjabi hug-instinct doesn’t get the better of a recovering, feeble body), I made a dash for the taxi.

The long drive back home was spent in sombre contemplation of the months spent waiting and hoping for a full-circle moment, when walls would break and faith be reposed. Is the archetype of the respected and “good friends now” ex a self-indulgent fabrication? Are the causes that brought about the end of a bond once shared and cherished ever sandpapered away, enough to establish a new sense of normality? Does caution linger on after heartbreak and an unfed ego, much like antibodies do after a draining viral attack?

I thought about the long month of recovery following my road accident outside Jaipur this time last year, much of which was spent wondering if the ex’s perfunctory-seeming (seeming = give him benefit of doubt) chat-window enquiry of my health would be followed with a more personal phone call? Was this my moment of benevolent retribution? Of demonstrable magnanimity?

Truth be told, my lasting impression of this meeting remains the first sight of him walking to receive me at his gate, reassuring that he is well, and shall recover soon. The relief I felt then, and the detached anger later at seeing him scramble for cigarettes in his bag confirms that my intentions, in a very convoluted way, were pure. Was I overboard with attention/affection/get-well-soon mementos when their absence wouldn’t arguably being noticed? After all, magnanimity can go full circle, and sometimes lead you to question if it is prompted by pettiness. I don’t know if my gesture was too strong or unnecessary, but anything less would seem too contrived and curbed. Restraint has been a problem area for me, I’ve been told; but I wonder why to make exceptions in behavior for those relationships that leave me more high-strung than others? Perhaps for a rational self-preservation self-interest; or simply because I am capable of it; or even because tweaking one’s natural behaviour for someone else is sometimes less about ceding ground as it is about accommodating? But that, for another day.

Regardless of what he may have made of the “with smiles and sentiments long overdue” dedication in the book (to stroke his ego with impressions of my lingering and unexplained fondness for him), unlike the Atlas on the cover, I surely felt a great burden off my shoulders. It wasn’t the book, so much as the power ceded to him to affirm or reject, which is the bigger burden I have found to have let gone of. When that attachment is chiseled away, the disappointments don’t matter; and neither do the strands of vindication. Good sense and pure instinct prevail, and to the extent that they are not strained by over-examining, life goes on.

Khuda ke Liye . . . In the Name of God

The auspicious beginning, the shubharamabha (my sanskrit's been brushed up since returning from Orissa!), with the name of God, indeed in the Name of God.

I wonder if it was the appeal of something as exotic as a Pakistani film (most we're told are bad, but I've always liked Pakistani plays we'd watch on video cassettes rented from the "video parlours" as they were called back in the day) or its theme of the clash of moderate and extremist versions of Islam that caught my attention. Filled with an uncharacteristic enthusiasm for the cinema halls, I coaxed and cajoled the (whom I thought to be) faithful for company, only to encounter apathy and disinterest. Finally, a more pliant friend agreed, so off I went to the Patel Nagar Satyam Cinema, deliberately trying to find the auto ride novel, brushing off traces of last years memories of daily trips to those Ridge-lined parts of town.

Awful acting, a melodrama of extreme happenings, almost deliberate irony and a porous story line, Khuda Ke Liye still manages to disturb and confront all at once. A story that brings together the mixed realities of the Pakistan that stretches from Lahore to London, and New York to the NWFP, through the geographical setting of the lives it chronicles and caricatures underlines the complexities of understanding this country as its stands today. By attempting to spread the canvas wide enough to capture them all, Khuda Ke Liye immediately forces the outsider to look in not at the image that suits him best to associate with, but the entirety of a society coming to grips with its situation in a vortex of contradictions; on a terrain marked by the fault lines demarcating moderation and extremism. Where the movie disappoints is in its treatment of the two, failing to talk about the complexities, and what makes one traverse the buffer space between the two realms. One sees the younger brother's tilt towards the more extremist and militant manifestation of Islam, without even the slightest insight into what caused an otherwise yuppie musician to seek acceptance and validation in dogma. On the other hand, a most exceptional circumstance is created to show how moderate Muslims, as the older Mansoor represents, bear the brutal brunt of stereotyping and prejudice. Skewed patriarchy is shown to magnify itself in the micro-culture mentality, demonstrating the simultaneous westernisation and fossilization of the country's Diaspora. The valiant defense of moderation in Islam and its compatibility with modern times and its freedoms seems text-bookish, trite and undeserving of the eye-opener value it was shown, and certainly hoped to create. Haven't we heard the moderate middle pronouncements too often to believe them by now, forgive our prejudices and focus instead on what keeps them alive? Isn't there too much of an almost apologetic justification, and very little confrontation of the larger forces and issues that sustain a militant order in the name of God?

The eloquent Naseruddin Shah may have at best well-researched and aptly referenced his rebuttal of fundamentalist interpretations of Islam, but is there anything new in what he says? Haven't our long-standing shared traditions of Sufism, interviews of Benazir and the mumblings of the Pakistani intelligentsia time and again established not the case, but the fact of Islam's liberal outlook? The film fails, again, to focus on the causes for the survival of those who preside over a system that keeps the extremist lobby alive, active and accommodated. This is in fact again conveniently (and of course correctly in part) deflected to the America-sponsored arming of the Afghan Mujahideen to counter the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The film refuses to draw attention to the politics that create space for the extremist forces to rule the roost. Surely enough the censor sword, if not a bullet… oops sun-roof wound is potential threat enough to anyone who seeks to tread this space!

The film has its gripping moments. The baseless and open-ended persecution of Mansoor by American intelligence agents, however extreme an example, compelled you to question the preoccupation with America as the fitting democratic model one must aspire to be. The interrogating officer's mocking Mansoor for having the temerity to suggest he could only read but not understand Arabic (a fact very understandable and known to many of us with close enough exposure to sub-continental Muslim cultural practice) came to me as a poignant reminder of the west's occasional inability to comprehend matters outside their familiar rationality. The contradictions of assimilating in a foreign culture while still hoping to keep the umbilical cord intact are no more stark than when the young Sarmad says that his (Lahore-based) parents would never consent to his deceitful marriage with his cousin (ensured to maintain her purity as a Muslim, lest she marry her British Christian lover) which he had hatched along with his Londoner uncle. The instant and matter-of-fact suggestion of the Pashtun women to let Mariam run away when the men were gone, knowing (unlike the obstinate menfolk) that she was not cut out for their kind of life, nor could come around to, was as amusing as unexpected. On a lighter note, the musician brothers, through their jamming and their songs reminded me why on many a long night spent in cold England, the Karachi crowd was often much more engaging,and entertaining than some Bombay bores, for instance ;-)