Exiles' return
Mohammed Hanif
The National
September 19. 2008
http://www.thenational.ae/article/20080919/REVIEW/556358457/1008
When Mohammed Hanif left
Mohammed Hanif's first novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, was on the long list for this year's Man Booker prize and is long listed for the Guardian First Book award.
Two weeks ago, after 12 years in
As I drove out of
On my visits to
For political leaders, the traditional selling points are usually their bravery in the face of adversity, commitment to their cause and above all their undying love for the poor.
Is Zardari intelligent because he's still alive? Or because Benazir is dead? Or is he intelligent because only a man of intelligence could go from being the most maligned politician in the history of
I wondered, as I drove under the banner: what does the very intelligent Mr Zardari see when he surveys his new subjects? After twelve years of living in
To find the answer, perhaps, we must go back to a 21-year-old picture. A famous picture. A picture taken on the day. She married him.
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Twenty-one years ago on the day Benazir Bhutto married Asif Zardari, one of my friends – a part-time journalist and full-time dreamer – was so heart-broken that he left
She married a minor feudal from interior Sindh that nobody had heard of. When the reporters went looking for background material on Asif Zardari, all they found was an improvised discothèque in his
But despite this rather thin CV, within a year of his marriage Zardari became the First Husband. It was not long before he began to star in so many of his own real and invented scandals that the heart-broken ones couldn't suppress their self-righteous grins. Didn't they all say so?
But on the eve of December 17, 1987 Benazir Bhutto's wedding was the biggest party
After Benazir Bhutto's first government was dismissed on corruption charges, Asif Zardari told a reporter that it seemed like his fate to live in the Prime Minister's House or in prison. Nobody could have predicted it better. His last stint in jail lasted for more than eight years, during which time he was not convicted on a single charge. He showed such reckless fortitude during these years that even his sworn enemies panicked and started making demands for his release. Benazir Bhutto called him the Mandela of Pakistan, even as the press speculated on their imminent divorce.
It was quite obvious that he was occasionally tortured and transferred from prison to prison. In one bizarre episode he was rushed to the hospital after being injured and later accused by authorities of trying to commit suicide by biting his own tongue. Some of his political enemies – who were either in General Pervez Musharraf's government, busy allotting bits of the country's wealth to themselves, or sulking in cushy exiles in Jeddah or
While I was hunting haplessly for a house in
The Zardari who took office a few weeks ago looked beaten by age, weathered like those Pakistani politicians who have spent long terms in prison. His moustache was humble, his pin striped suit nondescript and there was no fancy headgear, just slicked-back, greying hair. But he had that happy widower's smile, which seemed to be saying: Look at me now. What are you going to accuse me of now? Of being a popularly elected leader?
Intelligent, indeed.
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Every pundit in
Perhaps with the Americans Zardari can try the argument presented to me by one man who wanted to sell me a three-bedroom house in Defence. In the middle of the usual haggling over the price, our discussion suddenly degenerated into a state-of-the-nation talk. "These are the worst times," he admitted, "but give it another six months, and it will improve.
"The army will come in and clean up this mess. And the Americans can't go on pushing us into a corner. We are a nuclear power, yaar," he concluded triumphantly, "you are getting a cheap deal."
I have not read much real estate literature, but surely this was the first time a nuclear device was mentioned to close a property sale.
If I was Zardari – sitting now in the house I had craved all my life – I would add a line to my to-do list: to deal with the rise of the religious entertainers – who call themselves scholars.
In
I do worry about the preachers.
A large part of
I grew up during the time of General Zia, the first evangelist to occupy the Presidency in
Driving my son to his new school one day, I listen to a woman talking with a posh Urdu accent on a local FM radio. With generous smattering of English, she is trying to persuade me to dress properly. "When you prepare for a party, how much do we fuss over a dress? You select a piece, then you find something matching, then you have second thoughts. All because you want to look your best at the party. You want to flatter your host. And do you prepare like this when you know that one day very soon you are going to go to the ultimate party, where your host will be Allah?"
The speech, we are told, is brought to us by al Huda Trust, which has a posh address in Defence Housing Authority and its own website.
An hour later my wife and I are walking in a park, and we are overtaken by two ladies dressed from head to toe in black, one covering her face, the other only covering her head. But every time they pass us they glance towards my Bermuda shorts and my wife's uncovered head. They look at us sympathetically, the look that the saved ones give to the damned. They are power walking, and they seem quite competitive. If they can't save our souls they can at least beat us at walking.
"What is this obsession with fitness if they want to go around dressed like that?" my wife mutters.
Later I run into a cousin, a mother of two who is wearing jeans and a shirt, and who asks our opinion about her new hairdo. She is fasting, I am not. She slips in the injunction that for every fast that you miss because of some unavoidable reason, you have to feed 60 poor people. I wonder if that is the reason that the streets in the affluent areas of
My cousin quotes some more rules for fasting: situations in which one is allowed not to fast, along with some more injunctions for lapsed ones like myself. When are you going to start wearing the hijab? I ask her jokingly. Probably never, she says. "The Book tells us only to wear something loose, not to draw attention, not to wear anything tight. There are so many rapes, abductions. We must not provoke."
How do you know all this religious stuff? I ask her.
"I have read it in books," she says in a nonchalant way as if it is the most normal thing for her to pore over religious texts to decide the length of the hem of her skirt or the size of her blouse.
"Where does it say?" I challenge her. "In the Quran. I have read it myself." She starts another mini-lecture, which ends with these words: "The point is that Allah doesn't want a woman to draw attention to her bosom." People in
A good bit of news comes the next day: the MQM expels
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Governments in
These days MQM is run from an office in Edgware, outside of
In a recent address – delivered by telephone – to an audience of party members from the affluent areas of Defence and
As a friend who was present at the address later told me, "I sat there and listened and tried to imagine a girl from Defence flooring Mullah Omar with a karate chop."
When I left
Today they still sit in front of the TV, but now they shake their heads at the atrocities in the tribal areas before switching the channel to watch some evangelist dispense half-baked theological rationales for those same atrocities, and agree with all their hearts. They fear the Taliban but they want the Taliban to keep up the good fight – as long as they don't bring it to
My own house hunt takes me deeper into Defence, and I can't help but notice that there are many more houses than a few years ago – and many more that are empty. After every house we visit, I ask the estate agent why the owner is selling this house. The most common reply is that they are moving to
As I travel around town, I see more and more of these banners proclaiming that Benazir is alive and Zardari is intelligent. I cannot stop wondering what could possibly connect these two slogans? Is it her death – or her afterlife? – that makes him intelligent? Perhaps it is just one of those cut-rate tributes where they have tried to cram two slogans onto one banner. More realistically, it seems to me to imply that we must respect Zardari's intelligence, because he has used Benazir's tragic death to advance her political mission. One way or another, respect is due: it is no small achievement for a man as maligned as Asif Zardari to rise to the presidency.
Maybe we don't like him but we should acknowledge that he is cunning; we should pay tribute to his ability to survive the dungeons, his ability to ignore thousands of stories published by the international media, none of which fails to call him "Mister 10 Per Cent".
There. I have said it. I was hoping to write this piece without bringing up the half-clever slur that has haunted Mr Zardari since the beginning of his public life. But then I got my new mobile phone and like millions of other mobile phone users I received a joke in my inbox: "He has gone from being Mr 10 Per Cent to Mr 100 Per Cent." The thing about cartoons is that even when they come dressed in sombre suits, people find something to laugh about.
Zardari's intelligence, if we can call it that, has landed him in the house of his dreams. But what will it do against the march of the Taliban or the radical preachers polluting the airwaves? I begin to wonder if we should all heed the advice of Altaf Hussein and take up martial arts.
Zardari has been accused of many things – but never of having a political philosophy. I saw him recently on television – in an interview filmed after he was released from jail about two years ago. Then he parroted some clichés about Sindhi Sufi poetry and world peace. I am a great admirer of Sindhi Sufi poetry, but I doubt Zardari would get very far reciting it to one of the thousands of evangelists unleashed on this hapless nation. If he gets an invitation to
Because if Zardari had read Sindhi Sufi poetry – or, for that matter, Punjabi, or Pushto, Sufi poetry, he would know that it is full of more warnings about mullahs than all the CIA's country reports lined end-to-end. Zardari's deep love for Sufi poetry hasn't prevented him from cozying up with the oiliest mullah in
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Asif Zardari may or may not pass his intelligence test, but like him, I also have a vested interest in making my own new arrangement with
Since arriving I have been walking a lot in the parks, and one day, I stumbled upon a new one, delightfully named
Under the tree the woman sat with her back to the man. They were very close. She had her hair spread out, and the man was gently brushing it, occasionally pausing to check for lice.
How realistic, I thought. How practicalistic. In fact, how intelligent. I must come here more often, I told myself.
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Sign the Petition : Release the Arrested University Teachers Immediately : An Appeal to the Caretaker Government of Bangladesh
http://www.mukto-mona.com/human_rights/university_teachers_arrest.htm
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Daily Star publishes an interview with Mukto-Mona
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MM site is blocked in Islamic countries such as UAE. Members of those theocratic states, kindly use any proxy (such as http://proxy.org/) to access mukto-mona.
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Mukto-Mona Celebrates 5th Anniversary
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http://www.mukto-mona.com/Special_Event_/Earth_day2006/index.htm
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Kansat Uprising : A Special Page from Mukto-Mona
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MM Project : Grand assembly of local freedom fighters at Raumari
http://www.mukto-mona.com/project/Roumari/freedom_fighters_union300306.htm
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German Bangla Radio Interviews Mukto-Mona Members:
http://www.mukto-mona.com/Special_Event_/Darwin_day/german_radio/
Mukto-Mona Celebrates Darwin Day:
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-Beatrice Hall [pseudonym: S.G. Tallentyre], 190
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