Faith No More

Last week I decided to make a documentary about my mothers’ side of the family. A motley crew of Catholics, Hindus, Muslims and agnostics, over the years its antics and experiences have lent impetus to my imagination and fuel to the rage that often threatens to derail me. A tribal Pathan Nana that converted to Christianity to get access to education and then had to spend years hiding from vengeful brothers baying for his blood, a learned Mamu who wandered into the army and became one of the first to map Siachen, a kleptomaniac aunt the kids had to hide their toys from, a mother who stopped going to church so her Muslim children would not face taunts of karanta…I understood some time ago that I was drawn to storytelling because I had so many stories to tell.

Ideally, I would have liked to write a novel about these people. But, as I confided to my mother, “I’ll have to wait till you all die so I don’t offend anyone.” Then I watched the documentaries featured at the fifth international Kara film festival 2005, and realized the form had evolved to become the perfect vehicle for subjects that demanded intimacy while preserving distance. And what better way to start the project than shooting the traditional family Christmas lunch, when the aforementioned Catholics, Hindus, Muslims, agnostics gathered in my khala’s house in Karachi for turkey, shandys, chai, presents and gossip?

So off I trundled to my uncle and aunts house to ask if I had their permission to shoot. Sure, but what was it about? About the family’s interfaith nature in an intolerant society and the toll it had taken on it, I replied. About the way the way their financial and emotional profiles had been shaped by it. About why, of the ten born to those of many faiths that had chosen to live, love and loathe here, only two from my generation remained in Pakistan while the others had left. Basically, I gestured, I think its time we all talked about the elephants in the room.

There was a brief pause as everyone looked around. Over the years my uncle and aunt have harbored dogs, cats, birds, fish, fowl, snakes, mongooses, monkeys and various form of insect life, so it was entirely possible that someone had smuggled a pachyderm (or two) in. Then I explained that I meant God, and prejudice, and everyone heaved a sigh of relief. That wasn’t quite as complicated as arranging super sized meals. God? God was simple. Faith, whichever one you happened to be born into, meant trying to be a good person. Prejudice and discrimination were the weapons of the ignorant and deprived. Sure, I agreed, we all knew that. But lots of other people around us didn’t seem so sure. Maybe if we shared our experiences…

Over the next couple of days other relatives also agreed to be interviewed. The learned Mamu, who had one especially juicy story about the time he was Musharraf’s instructor at Kahuta, responded to my surprise at his willingness with “I think now we’re too old to have time to think things through.” I laughed, hung up, found a director of photography and started making notes for the shoot. I still needed to take permission from Kuku Mamu, the former champion hockey player turned wheeler dealer post-near fatal stabbing (oh the stories) but he hadn’t been well and I knew he never needed an excuse to ‘chorofy’ so I wasn’t too pushed about it. When I did speak to him on Tuesday, it was only to add my voice to the chorus demanding he go to the hospital to get the dialysis he had been postponing for weeks. “You haven’t even seen the baby”, I told him, “so you better be up and about tomorrow and I’ll bring him over. Will you go to the hospital today?”

“Promise” he said. And he did. But I never did go over the next day, or the day after, and by Thursday I was so caught up in visions of prawn curry and interviews by the tree on Sunday I had forgotten all about it.

Kuku Mamu died early Friday morning, two days before Christmas. He had finally had his dialysis the day before. At 2 am he went to the bathroom in his hospital room. The attendant found him collapsed on the floor some time later. His heart had failed.

My Mamu’s death left me temporarily speechless. The jester in the pack permanently silenced? It was only when we buried him that I really believed it.

As we followed the hearse into Gora Qabristan later that day, past graves in various stages of ornamentation and decay, through the loud filmi music blaring from a house in the shantytown that flanked it, past the boys playing cricket in one corner of it, it was hard to believe that he was inside a black box with gold piping. I remembered how he’d plopped a white prayer cap on his bald head, gone to a garage sale as a pious Muslim and won concessions as Haji Sahib. I thought of how he’d once told adolescent me his wife was mean to kids because he’d sent her four foot eleven frame to get meat from the freezer and she’d toppled in and been locked into it accidentally for a day which was why her brain was perpetually frozen.

“This cant be happening,” I said to a cousin. She squeezed my arm. We kept walking.

At the grave there was a delay while the gravedigger widened the hole. The coffin measurements had been provided to him in the morning, but he had never gotten around to checking whether the grave was wide enough. The coffin was put on another gravestone while he set to it. Once he was done, the priest said a prayer over the grave. Everyone gathered around him, and the hole, waiting with bowed head. Mamu’s coffin lay forgotten ten feet behind us. When I noticed, I went to keep him company. There were two nuns there. They asked me whose daughter I was.

“Mary’s”, aunt Lisa prompted from my elbow. There were respectful nods. Being Mary’s child obviously carried weight here. It had never done so in the playground, the grammar school (unless Mary was white in which case it was ok), the coffee party, the meat market…my mother had even once suggested I tell people her name was Marium.

The coffin was opened to allow the loved ones a final look at the body. He looked like he was resting. A little pale perhaps, but resting. I hoped he would not wake into a nightmare. He had been active in church related welfare activities, as evidenced by the clots of nuns scattered here and there through the mourners, but he had also been active in several not so holy enterprises. And then there were the stories.

The one that stood out for me was one he had told me as a child to explain how the religious bigot saw only what he wanted too see. Once, he had said, we had a gang of workmen digging up the driveway. Boomer the giant Alsatian had been blockaded onto the roof so he would not make a meal of them. Boomer drooled prodigiously that hot summer day as he stood at the edge of the roof and looked down at the men. One of them, I remember Mamu telling me in Urdu, had turned to him and said ‘Khuda ki shaan dekho, not a cloud in the sky and yet He manages to make it rain to keep the faithful cool.’

Would he be penalized for his humour? I hoped God remembered that he had been awfully kind to children and animals. Like his two younger sisters (both of whom he taught to ride bicycles and cheat at marbles, how many brothers can claim that?) he had an almost preternatural affinity for dogs, and they for him. Once when he was walking outside his then home in Clifton a tough looking stray dog took followed him home and lay outside his door whining till Mamu came out and petted him. The mongrel took that as a sign of acceptance and spent every night there from that point on, growling at everyone who approached save Mamu. This made things a little complicated since he lived on the first floor of a residential apartment complex.

When the grave was ready the DD coffin (I chuckled over how appropriate the label was for someone of his girth) was lowered into it. I whispered the Fateha next to my father. After another prayer we picked up clods of mud and tossed them onto the coffin. The earth swallowed Alexander Khan. Flowers covered him.

When I think about my Mamu now I smile rather than cry. The sense of closure derived from attending the funeral makes me wonder why my own faith does not allow women to attend funerals. So I have been taught anyway. That it is the lessons we are taught rather than the people we are born to be that too often controls what we eventually become is something I know my Mamu believed.

To the man who taught me the difference between little sins and big ones…RIP