Daily Times

One thing we do not value, as a people, is reflection. Always surrounded by others — our lives intimately enmeshed with those around us in a claustrophobic embrace that is by no means a universal norm across other societies — there is never any time, and more importantly, inclination to think about who we are, how we have come to be the people and society that we are today, and where we are headed. This holds true for both our individual personal lives as well as for our collective persona. The iconic image of Iqbal lost in thought seems utterly misplaced in the country he conjured up so many years ago.

But even for a people as averse to reflection as modern-day Pakistanis, there are times of the year when one is forced to ponder over things and look back at all that has come to pass, sometimes in horror, sometimes in delight. For me personally, one such time is the yearly pilgrimage to the ancestral village. This Eid I took my two young sons to meet their genealogically close but culturally distant cousins in the wistful hope that the twain shall indeed continue to meet.

While the young ones ran around the green fields marvelling at the animals in the ‘zoo’, I spent time in the ancestral graveyard. Neither morbidly inclined, nor particularly partial to opium of any variety — either of the kind consumed by individuals or the type prescribed for the masses — I find graveyards places where time stands still, allowing those still here to come together with the dear departed of a different time and age. The fourth dimension is nowhere as palpable as in an old-time graveyard. It really forces you to look back and reflect on the journey you and others before you have travelled.

After the journey down memory lane, it was time for the long arduous journey back to Lahore. I do believe that one thing that unites us as a nation is our startling disregard for the rules and dangers of traffic. That road rage is not a much bigger problem in this country is a testament to our penchant for punishment and abuse at the hands of our fellow men — a fact noted all too well by our political and bureaucratic rulers.

But I digress, if only slightly. Actually a funny thing happened on the way. With the young dead tired and asleep, I dipped deep into the box full of scratched CDs and, somehow, ended up putting on a CD of Mian Mohammad Baksh’s classic Saif-ul-Malook.

Arguably the most famous collection of Punjabi poetry after Heer Ranjha, the sufi saint Mian Mohammad Bakhsh’s epic poem is commonly known, after the main protagonist, as Saif-ul-Malook but its formal title is Safar-ul-Ishq (Journey of Love). It chronicles the journey of Egyptian prince Saif-ul-Malook to win the heart of the fairy princess Badar-ul-Jamal. More than just another romantic tale, it is the sufi wisdom dispersed throughout the book that has sustained the work’s popularity among the masses in Punjab and Kashmir with hundreds of couplets from the poem being used as proverbs.

What moved me most as I sped away from the land my elders and their contemporaries retrieved from the clutches of the desert many scores of years ago were the Saif-ul-Malook passages about the impermanence of all that surrounds us. My ancestors were poor people who came down from the green and rocky cradle of an ancient civilisation to try their luck amidst the desolate sand dunes of southern Punjab and they literally rolled back the desert with bare hands. They were tough men and women imbued with that frontier spirit who once felt that they could take on anything nature could throw at them.

They are long gone now and when they went, they took nothing with them except perhaps the occasional prayer or two of the generations that would follow. Now they are nothing more than an invisible wrinkle on the immensity of time. Having personally experienced the gradual but inevitable loss of so many people and things one valued so much — parents, youth, the company of friends who were once so dear — I was particularly struck by these lines from Saiful-ul-Malook:

“Sada na baghe bul bul bolay, sada na mauj baharan,

Sada na maa pay, husn, jawani, sada na sohbat yaraan.”

(Not forever will the nightingale sing in the orchard, nor are the joys of spring eternal,

Nor forever last parents, beauty, youth or the company of cherished friends.)

Time sweeps all that lies before it. Here today, gone tomorrow.

If the material possessions are so impermanent and the worldly glory so fleeting, then why this all-pervasive materialistic greed which has come to define our present day society? So smug we sit in our self-presumed importance and infallibility, yet time is going to render all possessions and powers meaningless in the end. Perhaps because we never stop and think, take out a moment to quietly reflect, we remain oblivious to the futility of it all, hurtling at breakneck speed down the rat race alley. Heaven forbid anyone mistake a Pakistani for the infidel Hare Krishna, but maybe the time has come to stop and smell the roses. Perhaps Imran Khan, our latest knight on a white horse leading the anti-corruption crusade, needs to organise not another dharna (sit-in), but call for a day of national reflection including an All-Parties Retreat. No loud speeches. No accusations; no threats. Just a reality check. Alas! This may be too much to ask for in a country where a politician would not know what an existential dilemma is if he ran into one.

One place to start this long overdue soul-searching would be to reflect on the recent spot-fixing scandal. The shock being expressed all around our blessed land at the conviction of our three cricket stars, well, shocks me. The world may be surprised and disgusted, but can we feign innocence, living as we do in a culture where we breathe dishonesty and corruption every moment of our lives?

Our national cricketers are just like other young men in our society — raised in an atmosphere where breaking the law not only fails to attract sanction any longer but where doing so has now become the morally and socially acceptable norm. Be it a traffic signal, boarding a bus, getting a job, paying the utilities or other taxes or any other facet of our lives, it is now considered morally permissible, and even socially expected, to jump the queue, lie, break rules and be outrightly dishonest, if one can get away with it.

In a country where every patwar khana (revenue office), every police station and virtually every other government agency is mired in corruption; where food is adulterated and where hospital staff replace life saving drugs with fake substitutes; where drug barons publish liberal newspapers and where journalists peddle influence and where lawyers are hired merely to facilitate exchange of money; where key politicians and bureaucrats routinely receive kickbacks and where all the accountability bureaus can never convict anyone significant and then make it stick, could we really expect our cricketers to be nice honest young men standing tall as pillars of virtue? The lady doth protest too much, methinks. This is the time to stop feigning innocence. This is the time to reflect.

The writer can be reached at outofboxguy@gmail.com