Pakistain Day announced itself on March 23rd with the Pakistain Phallic Parade in Islamabad, the closest I'll ever get to watch Trump Presents: Ms. Pakistain (golden idea, someone get on that). The experience was instructive, if only to say: "Oh look! That's the Education budget. It's two down from the armored Health budget on a wheel. What lovely colors they chose!"
| Missiles and torpedoes of undeniably genital proportions made their way down the national runway, and I had to remind myself that it's not the size of one's apocalyptic machine that counts but rather its placement re: India |
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I was watching the parade mainly to avoid watching cricket, though I am told we won a cup and that's always a nice thing to know on your national day. But I was interested in the parade because I wanted to see what we had come up with to celebrate Pakistain in all its g(l)ory. It doesn't surprise me that I felt dull and insipid afterwards. Mile upon mile of technology devoted to mass killing, but not a light bulb or luminary in sight. Can you even launch a nuclear weapon, I asked myself only half-rhetorically, when you don't have electricity? Imagine the embarrassment: "Ignition in 3... 2...1... umm, Jeddah, we have a problem!"
| Can you even launch a nuclear weapon, I asked myself only half-rhetorically, when you don't have electricity? |
Ten months after returning to Pakistain, I can feel the alienation leaking from my words. Having voluntarily removed the gleaming robes of my expensive liberal arts education, I am slowly putting on the grey tweed of Acceptance. Routinely depressed but rarely inspired, I am wrestling with what happens to a person when their own country becomes hostile to their very existence. Take banking. I tried to take out money the other day from one ATM, then another, then another, all without success. In the end I was blithely informed that the particular branch of my account had "no light", and therefore my money was inaccessible. "For how long?" I asked. "No idea," I was told. I can legally and arbitrarily be cut off from my account anywhere, at anytime, because the generator in an office in the nether regions of Hell has decided to go off.
And these are the small things.
I believe in freedom of speech, even for liberal fascists. I believe a state cannot use an exclusionary religious identity as the only one for its obviously heterogenous people and expect to prosper. I believe banning liquor here was a strange and (in light of the wedding season, for the very rich as well as the very poor) wildly ineffective idea. I believe that the more we resemble Saudi, the worse our lives will be. (They may be tolerated by the world at present, but they have enough oil to last them another 100 years.) I believe Pakistain's "minorities" have no real space left here. Why are my beliefs any less credible for public discussion than those of the Red Mosque holy man, who was recently awarded land for building a school? This man wants Shariah in Pakistain. I don't. Yet we both hold Pak passports (I swear to God: if even he has a Canadian passport I am going to kill someone.)
So when does one stop fighting? I could say: when the news shows footage from an Imran Khan
... aka
Taliban Khan, who ain't the brightest knife in the national drawer...
rally where supporters abscond en masse with mounds of plastic chairs. Or I could say: when you read that the ex-wife of a prominent Khar man killed herself because she has been living for twelve years with acid burns inflicted by His (Feudal) Lordship, a crime for which he was never punished. But then you keep watching the news and you hear that Abdus Sattar Edhi has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize and you think: hey, things are looking up here...
So where was his parade on Pakistain Day?