Daily Times

Shahaan is a lovely child, innocent, roly-poly and contagiously likeable. His big, hazel, crystalline eyes, laced with long lashes, fascinate you with their clarity, sparkling intelligence and childish charm. A fair, round face, pudgy cheeks and a thick flock of jet-black hair are simply hypnotic. He was visiting Malaysia with his mother, and I am told, he became an instant celebrity because of his irresistible good looks. He is just about six years of age, bright as the Pole Star, always securing above 98 percent marks. This time around, he secured a sweeping 100 percent in the March examinations, which pleased his single mother and grandparents immensely. What was more striking in his school report was the remark, “He shows maturity beyond his years.” That rang an alarm bell they had feared since long. His awfully fickle-minded father had summarily divorced his mother, Dr Summan, twice during their rocky, ill fated and finally failed seven years of adversarial marital disunion.

Dr Chengez’s capriciousness, bursts of explosive temper, devastating lack of self-esteem and an obsessive urge to ‘prove himself’ created an unfortunate environment of fear, friction and belligerence in a domestic space, just the much-protected space where a child looks for affection, comfort and the cool shelter of his parents, and not red-hot ambers and shooting sparks. The sad result is painful blisters and burns all over his soft little soul, a soul that cannot even tell what pains and why, and who cut him and with what? Who does not even understand why his father has thrown his mother and him out of his house and brought another woman in. He cannot even wonder legibly why he cannot go and get his toys from his room, and why his father just turned away when he called him in a shop the other day. He is perplexed, his little mind confused and his clear heart at a loss. He sometimes says, “Mama, my toys must be crying there alone; there must be nobody to feed them and put them to bed.” He had this adorable habit of putting them to bed, one by one, before going to sleep for the night.

Dr Chengez seems to have undertaken a systematic destruction of this loveable little angel’s persona, chopping it up bit by bit, limb after limb. Frighteningly, the trusting child does not even know why he is being amputated in this ghastly manner. One shudders to imagine what he would be when he grows up. Not that his father ever showed any affection when they were together, but whenever the child saw his grouchy father around, he would wonder why he was angry all the time. He never played smilingly with the child or joined in his play with toys. He never saw him helping his mother with little chores, like holding the feeding bottle to him, while she fussed around doing something else, or help lull him to sleep if she was stuck with something more demanding. He would keep a disdainful distance from these little fatherly gestures as a matter of malicious male ego and a fetid notion of tribal male superiority.

All this brutality came possibly from how he was brought up. Those who have not been fortunate enough to receive affection invariably fail to give it too and those brought up on alms and charity continue to be beggars mostly. Chengez never received any tenderness from his equally frigid father, who despised hugging his children even when they were toddlers. He considered it below his twisted sense of tribal dignity, and that they might soil his clothes for prayers. It is surprising how men of little worth find evil ways to bolster their pathetic self-esteem, never realising the size and scope of emotional damage it can inflict upon others, particularly their immediate family. They will never understand that there is a difference between raising children and baby vipers. On top of everything else, Chengez’s father was a self-appointed and highly opinionated sectarian, in the habit of being instantly judgmental about others’ beliefs and their aptness for a guaranteed place in hell. That added to the toxin already floating around in that crazy household.

Astonishingly, these men and women seemed to have fossilised mentally in 2500 BC, where they pegged their nomad tents under the shadows of their inglorious Mesopotamian ancestor; the infamous Nimrod. However, they never seem to have forgotten to burn the hapless and the weak like Abraham alive, whether physically or morally. These are the same delirious people, whose height of romance and chivalry is a poor Sassi dying of thirst in the desert while her unworthy paramour Punnoo deserted her in the middle of the night and never looked back. Their folklore is full of stories of female homicide, with not a shred of remorse. Most often, immediate and distant social values shape one’s reflexes and responses. No wonder, Chengez showed the same sub-racial traits and that too in abundance.

It may purely be chance. It could well have deep, historic roots. One is not quite sure. The brave Mukhtaran Mai suffered in our world; the shaming, collective humiliation at the hands of a crazy clan of the same people; and the latest bout of insanity is that the media also reported cannibals residing in the same morally barren area. These incidents might appear isolated but they never stand alone. There is always a background that relates to immediate causes and deep psychological behaviour patterns. Immediate causes can be addressed but embedded psychic disorders are difficult to eradicate as they become entrenched due to cultural, social and perhaps, religious practices spread over generations. That says why these people from the Jurassic ages never formed a civilisational structure or a kingdom anywhere in the world, once uprooted from their home territory, despite their antiquity and roots going back to Babylon. There has to be something genetically wrong, which only an anthropologist could untangle. I might have drifted a bit but a perspective check was in order.

(To be continued)

The writer is a retired brigadier of the Pakistan Army and can be reached at clay.potter@hotmail.com