Daily Times

Marriage functions in Pakistan are unbeatable delectations. If, on one hand, they are a go-pro event for ladies to flaunt their best attires, they equally offer the best spectacles to men who mostly drop in for food.

With some rare cultural attributes, this part of the world are blessed with, I am having this privilege to draw an amazing correlation between how our “Democracy” and “Marriage events” work almost tantamount. To do this, firstly, you got to keep revisiting in your mind the former reigns as our standpoint, to which I’d bring my case study alongside later. I assume, walking through the whole marriage event would do far better than virtually discussing it in here. So let’s kick it off with the virtual reality stated below.

It starts right away from the moment when an ornamented invitation card surfaces. The familiar French expression “RSVP”, répondez s’il Vous plait, indirectly implies the awkward practice of communicating with inviters whether or not you plan to attend the party. In technically more aggressive connotation, it simply refers to: “better fall in line or fall by the wayside.”

Now, move on!

You go put on a nice party cloth, drive up the venue, walk through the compound like a city mayor, be seated like an MP and mask up a cheeky non-refundable grin on your face as if you’ve always been a carefree soul coming off any la-la land. It goes without saying that you’re pretty much that same inquisitive junkie, from the inside, who is anticipating spicy cuisines testing his forbearance and patience. In such events, timing is the key. Being a man, if you arrive early, you lose. If you arrive in the nick of the moment, you win. So in this regard, you’re pretty good to go today, on time, so wait and see!

To kill time, cell phone browsing is a winner. You scroll your inbox to see if any shared item is worth your consolatory moments. By the way, these virtual entanglements aren’t distracting you from your focus; you now know those dodgy crossovers premarking the pavements for a swift outreach to the food table. In this phase of a marriage function, sneaking up to a vital strategic position is wisdom in its most primitive and pure form.

Our democracy is no different from our events because we are the anchors in both of them: we come, we lurk, we ambush, we eat and we disappear.

Guests have been kept at bay from the food table and as time advances, the moments of anxiety agitate minds. People are getting too “nosy” as the aroma wildly wrinkles spirally into their nostrils as if dancing in the aisles. The attendees have already started straightening up torsos while stretching their necks around, vigilantly, to see where the waiters (food-caterers) might pop out from.

Men are ravenous creatures, you’re no different, dude. What are you even thinking? Let me guess it: “a lamb fearfully yelling in the dark only to be bogged down later and got venomous teeth to be skinned in, the heavy downpour of rice, a belly dance of a grilled fowl?” Well, any mentioning of Hyenas gazing at a meaty zebra on savannah would be too overboard I recon and might leave a bad taste in the mouth, so let’s move on.

The time has come. With that “cheetah stance,” you are all good to pounce on the antelope, food in our case, to grab the “first-ever bite of your life” before it would be stolen by any other fella.

There you are: waiters coming along and roaming around, containers shuttering off and the soaps being decanted. The pandemonium crowd have started looking like a tamed herd of sheep ready to discharge from a fence. The high-strung kids have been called out by their parents while the upheaval seems bound to happen in the next few moments.

A wicked-looking man, precisely a bald version of William James’ playing Dr Norman in Spiderman, announces: “Khana Kha Len.”

Pause! Life stops at will.

Some fireworks and the next moment, you find yourself proceeding in a fleet of desperate food lovers winding their ways towards the food corner. They are moving like a group of warships organized as a tactical unit. They’re popping out of nowhere, in millions, proliferating and exponentially growing. These staff members, who are refilling food, are being ambushed by some expert stealers, who stalk them and swoop down to snatch chicken pieces before even they put them down on the table for a “general public display.”

While people are devouring food and some scenes are too sensitive to be mentioned here, there are some interesting corners where fine lines have morphed into roaring oily contours, tout ensemble. Let’s talk about that corporate corner to start with.

Here, a group of white collars are engaged in an imposed discussion by their immediate line manager. Most of them want to cut loose and act the other way, the non-official way, but they are trapped. One of them gets the last straw eventually and breaks free, like a floating fish escaping Piranha’s canine, under the immense drive of food-related-sentiments. The next moment is special: he roars like an unsung hero and starts taking long strides to catch the “diminishing meatballs.” This exemplary display of dare serves enough preludes for fellow companions to follow suit. They run berserk. The boss, who is left behind, dejected and rejected, thinks if he were a priest he would write the last words for his subordinates.

Just a stone’s throw away, another duo comes about between two middle-aged men apparently dressing up formally. This is a classic epitome of a business-class duel as you see them running for a lonesome roasted lamb leg. They’re aggressively pulling out their gimmicks and sales tenets to grab that one “run-for-life” moment. The last laugh is due, it’s just a matter of time who is going to pay a 2.5 per cent bid bond by 5 p.m.

A panoramic look around reveals the rest of the corners with people drenched in custards, sauces and puddings while some of them are still probing the dessert plates with same sized spoons. Men are found sauntering around the tuck shops for cigarettes after gulping tons of sweets. Tables are empty; plates with food are half-done and rather marooned. You see piles of wasted food, filthy napkins and chairs turned turtle. The flowers have been strewn all around like trash, squandered, crushed and cursed.

The food saga is concluded. You listen to the sarcastic laughs, political discourses, unrefined humour and gradually. all of them disperse: life seems grounded, the hall gets isolated and the lone security officer looks even lonesome than ever.

You are standing gutted with your eyeballs stuck in disbelief. It seems like an annihilated town, invaded. Out of nowhere, you burst into laughter, unexpectedly, you got the analogy, right? Our democracy is no different to our events because we are the anchors of both of them, we come, we lurk, we ambush, we eat and we disappear. Our democracy is not even democracy in the first place; it is a placebo effect we’ve been fed with. Our instincts have become scavenger’s instincts because we have become equally apathetic. Our blames are not even blames, before our leaders, we are to be blamed first, because they are us and we are them, full stop!

The writer is based in Islamabad. He can be reached at mbilal.isbpk@gmail.com, FB/mbilal.16