Daily Times

Spring break brought me back to the city of lights to find the buzz word in town was kidnap. Karachi seemed plagued with the thought of this omnipotent mystery jeep carrying an army of rapists, rapists who were deemed above the law. The citizens of Karachi were afraid and more vigilant than I have ever seen them; traffic at night was attenuated and private security seemed most trigger happy.

In fact, the word security has been redefined. When your greatest fear is your adjacent fellow citizen, the number of cars that support pseud police and government number plates should not come as a surprise. These fake titles serve as an easy way to eschew the police and earn regard from the other devils under the sky of Pakistan. Shahzeb’s death and the sordid state of litigation in this land of the pure have raised the flag of plunder for the powerful. When captured murderers laugh on way to trial, the leeway their free contemporaries own in the streets does make the heart go round the merry in despondence.

In his gory death, Shahzeb became the conscience of this nation and then many an evil and many a saint jumped his posthumous bandwagon of justice. The world, even those outside the confines of purity, now follows this murder trial with anxious curiosity as to where does the value of life begin and the leash on justice end, in our loveable homeland. The stakes really are termed as high when the honourable judges of the state get to decide the better meaning of equity, with the books of law that are so often termed as black and blind. Indeed, equity and sentiment are very hard to balance, when limelight is imposed from a public vantage. So much for the judge.

Then it was at the vantage point to the Karachi port waters (namely the old and esoteric Karachi Yacht Club at Manora) did I find the very chirpy pilot, Johnny Sadiq. Much intrigued by his thick accent yet not-so domestic demeanor, I could only but inquire whether he was native to Pakistan. Little did I know that his past was directly determined by Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

Pakistan must have been close to birth for Jinnah; in his visits to England he greatly urged young professionals to come back and build his prospective country. Many an altruist followed and amongst them was a doctor, Sadiq Sr who took heed of Jinnah’s plea and returned to this chance, this second chance of a country that was a new start to life for all. People in those times were scrupulous and honesty stood as a public desire. Fascinating it was to find that there used to be only one dishonest trader at Kemari and everyone knew who he was; public acquittal for this trader was inspired only by the exorbitant medical expenses his ailing wife incurred.

Our partition was bought with a million deaths and in that it found perseverance, the will and spirit that we cannot even imagine, simply not imagined today. When the common rate for medical treatment was 32 rupees, Britain-trained Sadiq Sr used to charge just five; he spent his life to build a country that our lives are spent in an attempt to tear apart. “We had better rulers back then, people cared… When my father died in 1970, more than 2,000 poor people attended his funeral and then we just stopped counting”, Johnny recounted with a smile.

As this old relic walk down to his sails, he had little notion that his words left behind a genuine wisp of old Pakistan (and that I would be writing a column on him). After hearing my aforementioned musings at 10 Mary Road, Amina Jilani did quote (wondrously so) L P Hartley, “The past is a foreign country… they do things differently there.” But does this difference imply a sense of letting go, and moving on? Is the concept of Pakistan (as it originally stood) completely beyond recall? Have the generations lost purpose or did they never inculcate it in the first place?

Even Imran Khan’s 23rd March posters of ‘Naya Pakistan’ sent me on a very different trail. As my friends planned to set the tsunami change in stone, I held much darker observations; here they were trying to establish change, building new horizons but what of the ones we have abandoned for so long? What really does Naya Pakistan entail and how far is it from the concept of the original Pakistan?

In fact, what really permitted us to lose the spirit of partition is the question that we should be asking our own selves. It was certainly not the accomplishment of ends or realisation of any dream but merely oblivion that time forced upon us; blame the directed history textbooks or bemoan the dearth of oral history but blame really doesn’t matter now. Shame does.

The past is a foreign country… Jilani was right.

The writer is studying at the Lahore University of Management Sciences and can be reached at k.alizubair@hotmail.com