Aboard the Democracy Train Page 2

  Despite my father’s skeptical distance from the Ismaili community and his irreverent attitude toward organized religion, it had a profound influence on us. To begin with, my paternal grandfather was a religious elder within the Ismaili community. The Aga Khans, who lead the Ismailis, intermarried with Europeans and lived in the West. This would make our family even more open to Western influence.

  My maternal grandparents were Sindhi landowners in a small village, Jhirk, a dusty landscape from which they moved to Hyderabad city in Sindh. My grandfather, an honorary magistrate under the ruling British, represented the giant banking and mercantile firm, David Sassoon & Company, in India – which traded with Europe. Although my grandfather wore Western clothes – a suit, bow tie and hat – his life’s work showed that his heart lay with his own people.

  In the early twentieth century, the British handed over hundreds of acres of fertile agricultural land some 200 km north of Karachi, along the Hyderabad-Mirpurkhas road to Aga Khan 111, Sultan Mohammed Shah. The Aga Khan entrusted the land to my grandfather, who in turn gave it to members of the Ismaili community to become tenant landlords and plant fruit and vegetables in a community known as Sultanabad.

  Today, in the center of Sultanabad the Ismaili prayer house, the Jamatkhana, has preserved my grandfather’s memory. A photograph depicts him in felt hat and bow tie, his soft, unsmiling eyes exuding concern. Thousands of people from all over Sindh gather every year for majlis (prayer services) to pay tribute to the work he created for the community.

  My two eldest siblings, Samir and Naseem were born in Karachi before 1947, when it was still a part of British India and had a population of only 400,000 people. But despite top careers in the US, both returned to Pakistan and immersed themselves in professions that also contributed to nation-building. My middle sister, Nargis devoted herself to running a recycling business in Karachi.

  My middle brother, Pervez, a nuclear science professor, travels the world on invitation to speak his forthright mind on global issues – prominently nuclear disarmament and world peace.

  At the end of the day, we inherited a severely stressed infrastructure. It would only whet our appetite to work for change. Even while I lived in America and visited it scores of times, my head always carried a map of home, family and the people with whom I grew up, along with the prospect of bringing about positive change.

  Western Education vs. Culture

  My parents enrolled us in British schools in Karachi – then open only to a privileged few – in order to prepare us for further education in the West. It was the education that only the ruling classes of Pakistan – ambassadors, diplomats, politicians, army personnel and feudal lords – were able to afford for their children.

  Indeed, British education was meant to groom future rulers of Pakistan. The best-known political family in Pakistan, headed by late Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and the daughter who succeeded him, Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, were educated in these schools.

  My parents sent me and my two sisters to St Joseph’s Convent School for girls in Karachi. My school’s aloof, imposing marble cathedral and statue of Jesus erected next to severe sandstone buildings bore a stark contrast to the unruly traffic and enormous crowds that gradually grew around it.

  St Joseph’s Convent School was then run by Catholic nuns, many of whom were British. Each morning, we gathered in our starched gray frocks in front of Christ’s statue and chanted the Catholic prayer: “In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost – Amen.” Our school anthem, “Honor and Glory to Our School,” sparked my imagination as our voices rose in crescendo:

  Here we are taught the Golden Lesson

  How to sift out wrong from right

  How to bear our crosses bravely

  And to keep our goal in sight.

  From the start, I knew that I would have a different life compared to my female friends who, in a Pakistani context, were primed for arranged marriages and motherhood. Being a voracious reader of Jane Austen’s novels, I found a striking similarity between her nineteenth-century characters and my schoolmates. While my peers gorged on romantic novels by Georgette Heyer, being girls, they were subject to enormous cultural pressures.

  A Kashmiri girl friend of mine with a radiant white complexion, luminous brown eyes and soft brown hair was the first to be coaxed into an arranged marriage. Her family had received a proposal from an older, rich businessman. The problem was that – like other women in this traditional Muslim society – she had never met her husband-to-be.

  My friend was in tears as her mother agreed to the match. Still, she’d philosophize to our group that the marriage would finally make her free. To me, her ideas seemed absurd and I was characteristically blunt within our inner circle of friends: “Listen, your husband isn’t someone you can lock away in a box and forget for life.”

  Twenty years later, when I ran into my childhood friend at a gas station, I recognized her – older and more sober – with her head covered. She knew I worked as a journalist and it didn’t surprise her. “You’re not the sort of person to sit still,” she told me as a backhanded compliment.

  Apart from bringing up her two daughters, my old friend was increasingly devoted to caring for her ailing husband. Our lives were poles apart: I had set my sights on great challenges, while she now prepared for the marriage of her own 18-year-old daughter.

  Karachi Loses its Religious Diversity

  My father spent 32 years of his life in the Karachi that was part of British-ruled India. It nurtured his tolerance to other religions. As the captain of a multi-religious cricket team, he had spent a carefree childhood playing with Hindu, Christian and Zorastrian friends. There was a picture of him on the wall – the only cocky Muslim youth in a white cap – heading a team of Hindu players. At the back stood my father’s teacher, K. D. Advani, the father of Indian politician, L. K. Advani.

  As India’s Muslims prepared to migrate to the newly created Pakistan, my father’s Hindu friends in Garden East handed the keys of their palatial homes over to him. “They begged me to occupy their homes or buy it for a song,” he told us.

  But, skeptical that Pakistan would survive and apprehensive of taking advantage of their tragic circumstances, my father declined. Instead, he ardently clung to the hope that his Hindu friends might return to Pakistan some day.

  That, as history shows, was a foregone conclusion. Even the first address by the founder of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, to Pakistan’s first constituent assembly in 1947 – often quoted by secularists – could not convince non-Muslims to stay in the newly-created Pakistan. In it, Jinnah had said:

  You may belong to any religion or caste or creed; that has nothing to do with the business of the State. You will find that in course of time Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State.

  The partition of India triggered the biggest massacres between Muslims and Hindus in recent history. It convinced millions of Hindus to flee the newly-created Pakistan. Fearful that Muslim refugees would retaliate in return for the massacre of Muslims in India, our Hindu neighbors in Karachi left in a hurry.

  The newer Muslim arrivals from India took over vacant homes in Sindh and Karachi as “evacuee property.” False and exaggerated property claims by the newer arrivals became the order of the day as Pakistan – rapidly turning into a majority Muslim state – split on the basis of ethnic affiliations and groups lobbied to bend practices in their favor.

  It left non-Muslims the most vulnerable and afraid. In the ‘60s, Christians evacuated our Garden East neighborhood in droves. Our British neighbor, Daddy Paterson was long gone. The Pereiras sold their picture-perfect bungalow down the road, across from St Lawrence School, and left. Our neighbors, Anthony and Norbert, who lived in humble quarters next to our bungalow, vanished too. Apparently they were fearful that Pakistan – which translate
d as “Land of the Pure” – would treat non-Muslims as second-class citizens.

  One evening, I saw my father pause momentarily from his favorite pastime of watering the plants in the badminton court. He had straightened his back to peer over the boundary wall at our neighbor, Frankie as the young man poked around his garden. Frankie and his sister, Coral had inherited the bungalow from their grandmother – the last of the palatial houses owned by Christians in our neighborhood.

  My father asked in a tone, which to me sounded friendly: “So Frankie, when are you selling your house?”

  Our neighbor apparently misunderstood the intent of the question when he replied belligerently, “When are you selling your house?”

  “Oh, I have no intention of going anywhere,” my father replied.

  That was the word my father kept until his death in 1997. He had been deeply saddened by the exodus of his Hindu friends. Now, the flight of large numbers of Christians convinced him that the neighborhood was changing for good. It was a taste of things to come.

  India’s Migrants Flood Karachi

  The most wide-ranging transformation of Karachi began outside our privileged enclave as the Mohajirs settled in concentric circles around the heart of Karachi. They had arrived in a region where everyone already had their own ethnic identity – Sindhis, Baloch, Pashtuns and Punjabis. Even though the term, “Mohajir ” means refugee, the newcomers would use the term in contradistinction, to assert themselves politically as a fifth identity.

  As Urdu-speakers flooded Karachi, my Sindhi parents prepared to become an ethnic minority. Indeed, by the 1960s, Karachi had become a predominantly Mohajir city and Urdu was ingrained into the lingua franca. Like more privileged families, we grew up multi-lingual: speaking the English left to us in colonial legacy, Urdu – due to the newer arrivals from India – and understanding Sindhi because our parents spoke it.

  By the 1970s, Mohajirs faced their fiercest contest for jobs from the two ethnic groups – Punjabis and Pashtuns – who had arrived from other parts of Pakistan to look for work in the industrial port-city of Karachi. Faced with shrinking space, the newer arrivals took shortcuts to get electricity, water, sewerage and paved roads. It became the norm to bribe utility companies and government officials to secure illegal connections and permits. The rule of law went out of the door.

  As population pressures grew, corruption took on an entirely new meaning. My father came under pressure from the get-rich-quick businessmen to mix dirt and rubble into the goat hair he exported overseas to make carpets. This was the last straw for my father, who was, in any case, more inclined to humanitarian pursuits. Being a fierce crusader against corruption, he threatened to take customs inspectors to the police – forgetting that they, too, had become part of the rotting social fabric.

  From my bedroom, I heard the litany of complaints from the Balochi women workers who cleaned the wool and goat hair in his musty godowns in run-down Lyari. The entreaties of the women laborers floated in the air:

  “Sir, raise our pay, we can’t support our children with such meager wages.”

  It was enough to make my father melt. He had the women workers served with tea and biscuits and promised to raise their pay until they went home thoroughly satisfied. My mother despaired that he would never make a successful businessman. Still, with her gentle and humane nature, she too reconciled with caring for people rather than profits.

  The poor Sindhi and Balochi workers, who toiled for my father’s business in Lyari, were a solid voting bloc for Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and later Benazir Bhutto because of their Pakistan Peoples Party’s catchy populist slogans of “Roti, Kapra aur Makan” (Food, Clothing and Shelter).

  Faced with the maxim, “If you can’t beat them, join them,” my father bowed out of the rat race. He closed down his business and devoted the rest of his life to running over a dozen charitable institutions in an honorary capacity. At the same time, he became the honorary secretary general of the Karachi Theosophical Society – which upholds the lofty motto: “Brotherhood of Man regardless of Caste, Creed, Color or Sex,” and “There is No Religion Higher than Truth.”

  Come late evenings, I would sit with my father by our hundred-year-old leafy banyan tree and discuss what constituted “Ultimate Reality.” These conversations stayed with me and hugely inspired me in my journalistic endeavors.

  Political Challenges of the 1970s

  The Mohajirs posed the first serious political challenge to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto after he became president and first civilian chief martial law administrator in December 1971. That was shortly after Pakistan’s eastern wing seceded and became Bangladesh. In 1972, Bhutto’s bill to make Sindhi the official language of Sindh triggered language riots in Karachi. It would force Bhutto to back off and amend the Language Bill to deem both Sindhi and Urdu as the official languages of the province.

  In 1973 when Bhutto became prime minister, he rewarded Sindhis from the underserved rural areas of Sindh by appointing them in Karachi’s administrative set-up. But simmering ethnic tensions surfaced, as seen in the symbolic shoe thrown at him as he addressed crowds in the predominantly Mohajir settlement of Liaquatabad.

  Ethnic and religious opposition to Bhutto fused in the Jamaat-i-Islami to which Mohajirs were largely attracted. The Jamaat argued that millions of Muslims had left India to create Pakistan as an Islamic state. For them, the socially liberal Bhutto – brought up under British rule, educated in Berkely and influenced by the Sindhis’ easy-going mystical interpretation of Islam – imbibed all that was wrong about Pakistan. Indeed, Bhutto’s lifestyle showed that he really didn’t care whether women walked the streets without a veil or whether the hotels served alcohol.

  Under pressure, Bhutto began his dance to appease the Islamic fundamentalist lobby. The PPP government stopped hotels in Karachi from serving alcohol, banned discotheques and imposed censorship on movies. In 1974, the Bhutto government passed a parliamentary amendment, which declared Ahmadis to be non-Muslims. Although Bhutto made these moves out of political expediency, it was the beginning of religious intolerance.

  The Islamization drive ushered by Bhutto began to change the cosmopolitan nature of Karachi. The government’s plans to use a peculiar triangular-shaped building along the Arabian Sea to serve as a Casino, which would attract Arab wealth, were shelved. The evening newspapers stopped publishing photographs of women snapped at diplomatic parties and the blue flashing neon sign of a woman with gyrating hips in the Zardari-owned Bambino cinema went blank.

  Growing up as a young woman in Karachi, I felt constraints on my freedom. It was not only the more conservative migrants from India, organized in the Jamaat-i-Islami, who changed the freewheeling atmosphere. The traditional Muslim communities from the rural hinterlands had also brought their notions about a woman’s place.

  I was in my teens when my family told me that I should stop wearing frocks and skirts and adopt the Muslim shalwar kameez (baggy trousers and tunic) with its accompanying veil, called the dupatta.

  It was a bolt from the blue. In my rebellious heart I knew that no matter what I wore, the newcomers’ eyes would follow my movements. The freedom that I had experienced growing up was all of a sudden challenged by a Karachi transformed beyond my imagination.

  Karachi was changing but so was I. I found the martial arts a perfect sport to blow off some steam. At 14 years of age, I enrolled in a judo and karate class, where I released my pent-up anger on a punch bag. My friend Salma – who later moved to New York and married an American Jew, Mark Goldstein – arrived daily in her dinky car to pick me up for our training at the National Sports and Coaching Centre.

  There, the two of us, wearing our white Karate uniforms, were among a handful of girls who trained to fight with men. I was a wildfire of energy, who trained to execute roundhouse kicks and ferocious punches. We were taught to fight men in sparring matches that mirrored real-life situations.

  Four years of Judo and Karate taught me to walk confidently amidst cr
owds of people. I lost physical fear – a sense that haunts all women. One day, as I walked in the crowded Empress Market in Karachi, I felt someone grab the end of my long, baggy tunic. Each time I looked back, the hand disappeared. It was trying my patience and I could feel my anger rising. When my stalker’s hand appeared for the third time, I reached out from the crowd, grabbed him by his collar and executed a swift pseudo-chop taught by my Japanese-trained instructor.

  My stalker’s cry rent the air. “I didn’t do anything.” But at that moment, the faceless young man who had tried to blend in with the crowd had no supporters. Instead, the people who gathered around applauded me for doing the “right thing.”

  Knowing the “Real Pakistan”

  My adulthood coincided with a deep interest in politics. Burgeoning population and rising poverty, coupled with my father’s decision to devote his time to helping the poor and the disabled, inevitably drove me and my siblings to seek justice for the oppressed.

  As a college student in Karachi’s Sir Syed Girl’s College, I was sufficiently influenced by my older sister to join the left-wing National Students Federation. I led the English Debating Society in debates throughout the city, carrying out ideological exchanges with the Islami Jamiat-i-Talaba – the student wing of the Jamaat-i-Islami.

  My experiences with the left did not stop me from being critical of then prime minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto – whose rule was nothing short of paradoxical. On the one hand he invited workers to organize, while on the other he ordered his administration to crack down on trade unions and professional bodies.