Ranchor Line ka Firangi

There Lives within the flame of love
A kind of wick or snuff that will abate it
And nothing is at a like goodness still
For goodness, growing to plurisy
Dies in his own too much.....

In Ranchor Line at night there is a kind of numb darkness that enshrouds the streets. On every corner and footpaths, scores of men sit and discuss life and shrills of laughter or the disquiet of loud words is heard almost incessantly. This continues late into the night and people seem a million miles away from the travails of the working day. For the lower classes, the night is the only relief from their inferior station in life.

Kaleem used to sit outside his house late into the night, staring at the skies and passionately reciting the lines of his favourite play from Shakespeare. Everyone in the street nicknamed him firangi because of his undying passion for the old bard. Regardless to say that no one really understood kaleem, yet admired his theatricals as he grew up on those streets. As a child he was forced to become a hafiz yet he couldn’t stand the dullness of the Arabic rote, which is traditionally done without any reference to the meaning. Instead whilst working on his father’s book shop in Urdu Bazaar his passion for literature was flamed and as he progressed from learning the English language to English literature fairly quickly, his father allowed him to pursue his passion as long as he did his share of hours at the family business. So that’s how farangi grew up, the Morning was spent in the government school, the afternoon and late evening were spent amidst the books relentlessly absorbing each and every word that sprung off those bastion of literature. At 14 he was a sort of a scholar of literature and all these years allowed him to pursue his first love, Shakespeare, in intensity which is unnatural for people his age and specially his social strata. He submitted literary criticisms to the newspapers under pseudo names and assumed identities. No one could believe that Kaleem was a kid living in the slums of Ranchor line.

I got to know kaleem much later in his life, as he juggled a job working for my father and studying at a local college. Although a good few years his junior, we became close friends and confidantes. Through out school I remember dreading Kaleem’s high standard in essay writing which he judged my work on and chastised me on my mistakes, in fact it is fair to say that his standards were higher than the teachers at the elite private school. I still remember Kaleem, all animated as Romeo in our hallway reciting his favourite piece just before the hero drinks the poison. Or his brilliantly funny and animated recital of Richard as he walks straddling on the battlefield crying “ My Kingdom for thy horse”.

Operation cleanup is now a forgotten event in the history of Karachi. It began on the onset of an army major being killed by the gangs of MQM. It was a flexing of political muscle that went too far and with BB’s vengeance laden agenda and armies contempt of Muhajirism, Operation cleanup began. Kaleem had an elder brother who was basically a vagabond of sorts and spent his life in and out of jail due to drug abuse. He was at the time of Operation Cleanup a unit leader for the MQM and successfully ravaged the local community to extract monthly bhattas. For the uninitiated these bhattas are basic protection money that people have to pay to be protected against the beatings, damage and their general wellbeing from the very people who collect these bhattas. Anyways, Operation Clean up began and the leaders of this Jammat jumped boats to greener pastures and left all those average people in the slums who supported it’s rise to power hapless and with thousands of them on the dreaded hitlist of the Pak Army.

Kaleem hid in our house for two months as the posh locations of the city were untouched by the wave of this violent cleansing exercise. Why did kaleem come onto the list, well, he was the brother of the famous gang leader of his area and Pak Army made it a rule to extinguish everyone and anyone who remotely appeared Hindustani, or so I hear. One night however, there was a phone call at our house that Kaleem’s dad had suffered a mild heart attack. He left almost immediately for his house and did not listen to my family’s advice to not go. We didn’t hear anything for a week. One morning I woke up to my mother’s sobbing and my dad’s lowered head. There was a newspaper, a picture of a house, a dead body a few feet away from that house and the news item ran as such. “One of the MQM gang members was shot 3 days ago and no one was allowed to come out of their houses to collect the body”. It was kaleem in his trademark Jeans and white Joggers, that’s all I could see before I broke down. His grieving family told us later that they could see kaleem’s body a few meters from the door for 3 whole days. His dad could not move due to his condition and when one of the sisters tried to step out, the bunkered Pak Army Jawans warned and fired a warning shot simultaneously.

I remember Kaleem talking about how he was writing a memoir of sorts dedicated to the bard and exploring the different themes in Shakespeare works. Years later visiting his house I asked the question, did he keep any journals or files anywhere. His mother confirmed he did and he use to write well into the night and this habit continued right upto his death. But this is not where it ends folks, the tragedy of kaleem farangi, twists and turns into one irony after another. Only a year ago before my trip, Kaleem’s room was cleared out to accommodate some family guests. Kaleem’s entire collection of manuscripts, old books and huge literary collection which included his own work and memoir, were sold for a few rupees to a “tin dabbay wala”, these were the exact words. The parents stared at me as though they wanted to know if they had made a mistake, I remember I had tears in my eyes and all I could remember were kaleem’s shining eyes on the day he told me that he will soon publish a book of his own through his Urdu Bazaar contacts. Those precious notes of a young man with a rather peculiar dream were probably used somewhere in Ranchor Line to wrap up paans for the local people. Life comes with a strange combination of shades, mostly cruel and mostly ironic, almost always in a vicious cycle with the added dose of contempt.

And so ends the story of Kaleem Firangi and it can be safely assumed that ranchor line does not echo of Shakespeare anymore. That there will be no one as brilliant and as convincing as Richard III in that part of town, one can only wonder what he was reciting whilst he laid there dying in front of his house, alas this is to you kaleem.

There would have been a time for such a word
Tommorow, and tommorow and tommorow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty Death....Out, Out brief candle.
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more.