Revolution in the Westerlies

The bright red spit congeals on the walls as a saturated ocean breeze flows through the naked streets before me.
The essences of last night remain, in the smells, in the forms that the smoke from burning garbage breeds. I look into
the smoke and a savanna ensues; the kill is completed and the forest is burnt to ashes. Not even the vultures remain.
In the corners, obscured by the graffiti crammed walls, decaying men sleep under ragged sheets. This bareness is
rare in these streets, an anomaly in its gaudily clothed identity.

I ride my bicycle down the street, peering both ways as I cross narrow lanes on both sides of this path I ride on. A
plastic bag scurries across the street, old newspapers follow and the remaining refuse observes; suspended in the
saturated pool of gutter water that extends along the pavements and unable to move. The day breaks in the distant
horizon, I seem to head right for it. But no one is awake to pay respects to the newly privileged sun-god; Karachi
sleeps on into the morning, veiling her most beautiful hours.

The prodigious son of a devout nation, Karachi sleeps late into the night. I lay on my bed, my eyes wide open,
listening to the sounds of the city that raised me. A woman screams, a night watchman blows his whistle as he orbits
my house, a machine gun howls into the desert sky, a woman screams, car tires shriek against the road, more guns
join in; a concerto develops, caped by the sound of the Aazaan. Another Aazaan joins in. And a few more. Slightly
displaced in time from each other, they create an eerie echo, the effect of which is compounded by the handful of
worshipers that take to the streets en route to their creator. They walk like zombies, in clusters, each unaware of his
neighbor. Thoughts of sleep, the blazing heat of the coming day, are on their minds. Their act is automatic, a habit
bound by superstition. And they trudge on, eyes on the ground, towards a goal, towards an act, towards the day.
The people of Karachi seek a concrete definition with ruthless thrust. Failures are common, branded with a wave of
a hand. The genetic code imparts knowledge of success: there is no question about its sanctity. On either side
remains of artists, writers, dreamers, iconoclasts, fat women, thin women, teachers hang from crosses of social
rejection. These are the black sheep, the object of disdain, individuals who curse their mothers with an uphill
diplomatic battle to find a companion.

My mother is in a large room overlooking the yellow Karachi summer. I am glad we are here because there is a
balcony that lets me venture out on the perimeter of the building, be at one with the warm sky. A burning wind blows
and my mother lets out a scream. An arms extends from inside, grabs me while I gaze at the tiny people on the
street below. My brother is on his way to this world and I have to leave the room. In the meantime, I am taught the
skill of walking while swinging my arms. I walk the street for a long time. I recognize a monstrous marketplace at
the periphery of my travels. From here, Karachi is supplied with its grocery. The stalls boast the fruits, the
vegetables that nourish the city; the merchants stand by them, aware of the magnitude of their task. Housewives
beg, plead, beseech and implore for a discount. But the rations are not about profit anymore. They’re about pride,
about the chance to elevate a task to the fullest. When the future holds a static vision of fruit stalls, loading expensive
cars with cheap wares, living and dying in disease-ridden ghettos, the sky is an affordable psychiatrist.
My brother is in my grandmother’s lap. The surroundings are fluid. All eyes are on him. My mother looks much
thinner. When they place him in a cot in my room and retreat to their rooms, I sneak inside to peek a look at him. He
looks light enough to pick up. And I do. His scream startles me and I drop him on the ground and run. I lock myself
in the bathroom and wait.

We have an impressive surplus of servants. At first, they seem to possess the magical quality of doing things for
others all the time. I place my legs on a comfortable chair and demand a sandwich and a drink. They want, need,
crave, my approval. A guilt remains but it is easier to face it than do my own work. Sometimes, I wonder why, being
humans, they do not understand the concept of equality. The steps of inferiority are deeply entrenched into the social
system of Pakistan, with the blond British man commanding the zenith of this pyramid. While other colonies of the
British Empire have distanced themselves from the culture of their old rulers, Pakistan marches on, blindly, into an
archaic culture. The vision of mindless followers emerges, who alternate between corrupt leaders, whose only
answer is the power of God before their powerlessness. Those who realize this, probe their religion, for them the
remaining artifact of definition. But instead a cryptic book emerges, written in Arabic, translated by foolish and
uninformed men. We are a people drowning: the Quran has become a fragile straw we cling onto. We have no
vision; we are rats climbing on top each other, alarming each other by putting on a façade of something we are not.
The beauty of the human mind will remain untapped as long as we progress under borrowed opinions, as long as we
view ideas as dangerous and as long as we live in fear.

Sitting across from me, my aunt boasts of her son finishing the Quran. She comes bearing gifts. My Grandmother
glances at me from the corner of her eye. She quickly disregards questions regarding how much I have read. Not
much, I think to myself. There is only so much gibberish you can read. But the wisdom of the elders comes down
unsympathetically and permeates my afternoons with a symbol of Islamic learning. He is portly, bearded and wears a
skull cap. My brother sits besides me, staring at his chapter of the Quran. We stare in unison, watch the oceans of
characters flowing over the crispy new pages, the dense words, like thorn bushes that epitomize a sense of
continuity; a religion that replaces everything, that is hypnotic in its sound, feverish in its apocalypse, complete in its
dictum. It’s hard to find God when you have to. And we didn’t, especially the Mullah called in to teach us. Instead,
Omar and I partook in daily races to finish our lesson. As our teacher dug for gold in his nose, we skipped lines,
sometimes pages, just to reach that celebrated goal, that nirvana, that pedestal that we aspired to as normal Muslim
boys.

Outside, sprawled the desert, by no means a wasteland, peopled by the people of the country that descended upon
the city like locusts with gleaming crops in sight. They fed off each other, hard-core capitalists to the core. Or rather,
opportunists, if you can discern the difference, looking for the nuggets of gold in the city that bid farewell to the
brackish Indus as it emptied into the sea. Karachi was the New York that could not be sustained by the main land,
could not survive her politicians who lobbied for her abortion as she grew. She was on track during the opening of
the sprint, but faltered as her ideas, her evolving, rich philosophies were branded heathen and burnt. She did not fly
too close to the Sun, her hubris was buried by those turban-clad fools, her truth on the left of her and her future on
the right. Where her angels would have laid.

Quiet, determined; a renaissance man, he lay on the sweet sand and stared at the Indian Ocean spread out before
him. Tiny ships dotted the horizon; he observed this vastness and made it a backdrop to the images that replayed in
his mind continuously. A new surgical method was emerging in his mind. And another materialized during lunch with
his family. The table talk was like a dream, voices entered into his ears from obscurity. They were five children,
three in medical school, one studying to be an artist and another in MIT. But he had left them to their own, left a trail
of fatherly advice so thin that they would spend the rest of their lives looking for it. His purpose lay in the operation
theatre where he was a God, a lightening bolt that descended upon death and powdered it. He read and his eyes
reproduced that knowledge in his fingertips; the fingertips that quivered for a scalpel even when he lay in a coma, in
limbo, waiting for death to forgive him for loving life. On that bed, he re-thought his life, the legacy he had left, the
city he had saved, the children he had begotten. (To be continued)...