Yaadish Bakhair: Zari Gul

Zari Gul of Spinzer Beauty, Liaquat Market, Quetta

Yaadish Bakhair: Zari Gul

"People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within." 

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

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One of my better childhood memories of growing up in Quetta is of Eid days. While it meant all those things that usually excite a child on these two traditional Muslim occasions celebrated across the Islamic world twice a year---new clothes, new shoes, Eidi money from elders, going to the fairgrounds with friends, eating specially prepared food and all---it was also associated with some faces, the faces of much loved people many of whom are no longer with us. This post is about one such person whose presence in my life is not just limited to the two Eid festivals, but it is impossible to think of Eid without thinking of Zari Gul.

Zari Gul was a good friend of my father's. He was not just a friend. In fact, he was more like a brother to him and a dear uncle to all us kids. He belonged to an old Ghilzai Pashtun family of Quetta. A few years older than my father, their friendship stretched way back before I was even born, at least six decades old. The eldest brother of three, he was a well-known businessman and socialite in the city with his main office, or shop, situated in the city’s old Liaquat Market. Called Spinzer Beauty, it started as an electronics store, one of the oldest in the city ---the first double-sized store on the right hand side as we enter the market from the main Liaquat Bazaar--- but over the years it became a kind of headquarter for all his commercial and social, and sometimes political, undertakings.

My father tells me that they first met in the early 1960s. My father used to run a wholesale business dealing with grains, sugar, open tea leaves and ghee in Qandhari Bazaar. It was called Shirkat e Biradaraan (brothers). It all started then. Over the years, they became not only good business partners in the many business projects they ran together, from clothes and crockery (dinner sets) to dried nuts and food grains, from electronics and car showrooms to big government contracts, but they also became very good friends. Zari Gul, always meticulously dressed with his fine wool Karakul cap and glittering, bulky Seiko 5 and Rado watches, was then a small trader in goods that were mostly brought into the city from Iran and Afghanistan and sold in the small arcade style Quetta markets of which Liaquat Market was one of the oldest and the largest. In the beginning, he had his shop near the old fire brigade, off main Liaquat Bazaar. Then he used to deal in cloth, especially the Iranian synthetic mixed fabric popularly known as “summer” in those days. This particular fabric was known for its all-weather toughness and ease of maintenance when it came to washing and ironing. It was very popular in Punjab and Sindh.

One of the first lots of this fabric was introduced in Quetta by some friends of my father who were Anglo-Indians. Many of the Anglo-Indians---Tony and Andrew were the most well-known in the city and with whom my father had gone to school, as had many other Quettawaal then----were mostly employed by the provincial police department in those days, particularly by its traffic branch. It was either Tony or Andrew who was then stationed in Dalbandin and who brought the first big load of “summer” to my father and asked him to store it in one of his godowns. These godowns were located on a backstreet of Qandhari Bazaar, around the old chakla. I think they were either on Alibhoy Street or on Thana Road. To digress a bit, those godowns my father had bought at a discounted price from none other than Jamshed Marker. But that story for another day.

My father often recalls this episode of the Iranian “summer” fabric and his meeting with Zari Gul with much relish and he never tires of telling it to us. This is how he often tells it,

“One bright sunny day in summer, Tony arrived in his old jeepster at the Qandhari Bazaar shop and took out a 30-yard bolt (a ‘taan’ in the vernacular) of the Iranian fabric. He said he had truckloads of the stuff. He was not sure what to do with it, not sure if anyone would be interested in buying the stuff. I was also unsure but I took all the fabric and dumped it in the godown. Tony disappeared and almost a month passed. One day, Haji Taj Muhammad, who was also one of the tea merchants in the city, and a neighbor, came to me. I showed him the fabric and asked him if anyone would be interested. He promptly said ‘Zari Gul. Give it to him’. And that is how I met Zari Gul for the first time.”

The Iranian ‘summer’ became a cause and catalyst for the start of a beautiful relationship that would last many, many Quetta summers, would continue and grow in strength for more than six decades.

Zari Gul was a big fan of cinema, especially of the old western and action movies that were regular fare at the iconic but now defunct Regal Cinema in those years. My father tells me that for more than 15 years Zari Gul would buy four tickets for his three friends and himself for every new movie, and that often meant once a week. The four were, my father, Noor Muhammad Sarraf, the Lehri sajji wala (Aslam?? his name escapes him now) and Zari Gul. He would take us kids to the movies as well. I watched many memorable movies with him and my father, movies with such Hollywood luminaries of the day in them: Jack Palance, Gregory Peck, Kirk Douglas, Gary Cooper, Sean Connery, Paul Newman, Humphrey Bogart, Steve McQueen, James Dean, Yul Bryner, Charles Bronson, to name a few.

Bibi Nani, Bolan.
Zari Gul (second from left), my father. Rozie second from right.

Zari Gul, alongwith Dr. Afzal Butt, Ghulam Hussain, Safar Ali and Gullai and sometimes others like Rozie (Zari Gul’s relative and also a good friend of my father’s) and Noor Muhammad were regular guests at our house on Eid days. For my father, Eid meant visiting the graveyard, offering fatiha early in the morning and then spending the rest of the day with his friends. For us kids also Eid was incomplete without Zari Gul's visit. They, the friends, would visit our house just before lunch and would stay till late in the evening, often watching Hollywood movies and sometimes playing cards or just chatting and joking while sipping tea. A very social creature, Zari Gul also loved good food and good company, just as he loved fine clothes and expensive watches, very unlike my father who still does not care much for what he wears and eats. His special request was always for the salty mutton dish (namkeen gosht cooked in salt and black pepper or in garam masala only) that my mother used to make for them. That particular dish would always be placed in front of him and he would do the honors of serving it to others. I remember this clearly because I was the one who would usually do the running back and forth, from the kitchen to the guest room, or to the mehmaan khana, first serving the dishes and then clearing the dastar khwan.

Zari Gul (wedding ??)

After I left Quetta, Zari Gul and friends continued with the tradition of the Eid day gathering at our place, but over time, especially when some in the group passed away and when the many vicissitudes of life started taking their toll on others, the gatherings became less regular with fewer and fewer members. I would make sure to visit him whenever I was in Quetta, but every time I met him and witnessed the same Zari Gul with his warm and smiling face, I also sensed in him a kind of aloofness or, to use a better word, an unease or even anxiety that seemed to be always growing and eating him from inside. I knew some of the causes for that state of distress which mostly had to do with the many business projects--- especially in real estate and construction--- he had got himself involved in. This information mostly came to me from my father and his other friends, but because I had moved away from Quetta and was not in touch with him on a regular basis like in the old days, I was not privy to the whole problem. Things went downhill for him from thereon.

Zari Gul with friends.

Sometime later, after my last meeting with him during his difficult and anxiety-laden years, the news of his death reached me through my father. He did not use so many words, but just said to me, "Zari Gul is gone!" and then went quiet. And I knew very well then what that silence meant. We both knew, he more than I. In that sad silence were buried more than five decades of friendship, many years of brotherly and fatherly love, of caring and generosity, of innocence, loyalty, simplicity and sincerity that were the traditional values embodied by not only men like Zari Gul, but they represented and meant old Quetta itself. They were values and virtues that cut across all barriers of language, ethnicity, religion or sect. The ugly, dividing walls, the rigid fences of bigotry, that have now been erected with the bricks of distortions and the mortar of hypocrisy did not exist then. These are the pathological distortions and corruption of all that once was true, good and beautiful in old Quetta.

Eid day comes every year and I usually make the salty--peppery mutton dish for my family, for my wife and daughters. As we sit to eat, I silently recall the old days in Quetta, the gathering of my father’s friends at our house, the cooking and the eating, the B-grade western and action movies on the Panasonic VCR, the black and green tea, the bandaar and loud laughter of men coming from the guest room and, above all, the happy face of Zari Gul enjoying his favorite dish with his good friends on Eid day. I whisper his name and smile as I chew on the salty meat.

Yaadish Bakhair. Khuda Biyamurza marhoom Zari Gul ra.

For more, please click:

A Lament, On Solitude

Regal Cinema, Quetta

Quetta, City of Karezes

Harf e Dervaish (Urdu)

Quetta: the cars

First post

Illuminations 3

Indians: the barbarians at the gate

Illustration by ABRO.

Indians: the barbarians at the gate

“All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

                              Herman Goering, Nazi leader and war criminal

“Propaganda must therefore always be essential and repetitious. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”

                                     Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister

"Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence." 

                                                                      Alexander Solzhenitsyn

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“It’s the Indians. The Indians did it.”, enlightens me a chucklehead---an old friend actually---and rather condescendingly, while I was discussing with him the disappearance and brutal murder of hundreds, if not thousands, of Baloch activists, students and journalists and the slaughter of Hazara coal miners in Mach, Balochistan some years ago. Such is the power of pernicious propaganda and indoctrination in a country like Pakistan where it is especially employed in its peripheral regions, for example, in the internally colonized “province” of Balochistan against its exploited and forgotten people who try to raise their legitimate voices of protest.

And now, some context.

In the late 1980s, when the country was under military occupation, or martial law (yes, again!), a somewhat funny but also very telling little anecdote used to do the rounds on the college and university campuses (there was no social media then, no Facebook and Twitter!). An official of the provincial board of education, some director or supervisor type, visited a far flung corner of that exploited, god-forsaken province to check how things were going at primary schools. It was one of the routine evaluation visits where the visiting dignitary would check on teachers and the schools and then report to the directorate of education or the concerned ministry for any needed “further action”, a notorious euphemism which in reality means either criminal procrastination or complete, and equally criminal, inaction and abandonment. So, this high-muckamuck visited a primary school, walked into a dilapidated classroom, randomly picked a student and put a question to him. He asked the little one who the man on the front wall was, pointing at the framed picture of Jinnah, the Quaid e Azam, or the great leader and the founder of Pakistan. In Pakistan, most, if not all, official buildings have a framed picture of Jinnah on the front wall in the rooms. Jinnah is sometimes accompanied by Muhammad Iqbal, the national philosopher-poet and another leader of the independence movement. I am not sure if it is required by law or just a convention and/or custom. Anyway, the boy turned his head and looked in the direction of his finger. After looking at the picture for a few seconds, he turned back to the official and said this in Pashto: “Da sarai Punjabai dee!” (English: “That man is a Punjabi” or “He is a Punjabi”).

I said a funny and telling anecdote above.

For those who have an honest inkling of the grotesquely turbulent seven-decade history of the country, all the way from the assassination of Liaqat Ali Khan to the racist plunder and rape of the Bengalis in 1971 forcing them to part ways, from the many murderous misadventures in Balochistan with tanks and gunship helicopters and the disappearance and merciless slaughtering of its legitimately protesting people, to all the unceasing crimes and wanton corruption of its filthy civil and military elites the majority of whom have names like Sharif, Bajwa, Kayani, Janjua, Khwaja, Raja, Rana, Dar, Cheema, Chatta and Chaudhry, there is something more than mere ignorance or childish buffoonery in the anecdote. The devil worshippers with pornographically totalitarian mindsets who make up the main characters of that sordid history of the country, people who always proclaim to be the absolute owners and overlords of the country to the exclusion of everybody else, it is their fascistic, vulgar faces appearing 24/7, all year around, in the mass media, on TV screens, in the newspapers and textbooks that inundate the consciousness of the illiterate and semi-literate populace forcing them to view the world like that child did. The child’s answer, therefore, can and will be interpreted differently by some, thus rendering the anecdote telling, thought provoking, sad and even alarming: he must have reasoned that anybody who is somebody in his country, who is important enough to be in an elevated photo frame on the front wall of his classroom, above the head and above the desk of his teacher, must be a Punjabi.

For the rest, it is an amusing tale at best and the faulty opinion of a misinformed and even tragically propagandized child at worst. This, after all, is the usual ploy of the culpability evading oppressors at the Center for whom the shameless name-calling and blaming of the victims in the peripheries always supersedes self-analysis, critical thinking, or being accountable and taking responsibility.

The Nazi supremo, Joseph Goebbels, the Fuhrer’s right hand man and his chief of propaganda, once said: “Let me control the media, and I will turn any nation into a herd of pigs.” While this nefariously powerful role of the mass media, especially now that it is in its hellish digital format, can equally be witnessed in a country like Pakistan as well, the problem there is much deeper, much more systematic and goes far beyond the blameworthy nature of mass media. To keep the arguments short and clear since this is a mere blogpost and not a proper academic investigation into this important issue, let’s give that Nazi propaganda formula a twist here. In the context of Pakistan, we can, therefore, modify Goebbels and say: “Let me control the textbooks, especially Pakistan Studies, history & geography (social studies), and Islamiat textbooks, and I will turn this nation into a murderous herd of jingoistic vandals, into bloodthirsty fatwa-baaz pigs!”. And that is exactly what the criminal rulers---civil and military, secular liberal fundamentalists and religious fundamentalists alike---have done to the country in the past few decades. They have turned a good chunk of the country’s 250 million people, mostly the unemployed and unemployable urban youth and the majority of the illiterate masses, into murderous vigilantes who constantly fume at the mouth, who roam the streets killing and lynching anyone who differs with their uncritically imbibed reductionist and simplistic narratives. They do so without any fear or remorse. Turn on the TV, join a social media group or forum, or pick up any newspaper in the country and you will read and hear without fail one of the following, often in ugly, shrill voices: “Traitor!” “Indian agent!”. “Kafir!”. “Yehudi agent!” “RAW agent!” “CIA agent!” “Terrorist!”

Traditionally, labeling others---from other provinces and parts of the country, or mostly the non-Punjabis, that is----with these ugly epithets has been the wont and prerogative of the Punjabi rulers and even of the Punjabi intelligentsia of the country, the greedy, usurping cadres of the only province that really matters. From Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and his family and kin in NWFP (now KP), to G.M Seyyed, Rasool Bakhsh Palejo and others in Sindh, to Marris, Bugtis, Mengals and Achakzais in Balochistan----not to mention the Bengalis of East Pakistan until 1971 who, after getting fed up with the chauvinism of the criminal ruling gangs then, finally said enough was enough and parted ways with them-----nobody has been spared by the ruling cabal, always dominantly Punjabi. This vile and incorrigible clique of bigots always claim to be authentic patriots--- true-blue patriots by default, genuine Pakistanis!---no matter what they say and do. The many glaring contradictions in what they say and what they do, their heinous deeds spread over half a century, all of which are so clearly visible to the rest of the world, none of that bothers them at all! Perennially brazen-faced and undignified, these brutal maskharas pretend to be infallible loyalists. As my friend Sardar Kharkaftar of Helsinki says, tongue-in-cheek, ‘there seems to be a by-now not-so-invisible “P” formula in action, a kind of originally hidden assumption, even a secret contract which goes something like this: P for Punjab, P for patriotism and P for Pakistan; everybody else’s patriotism is fake and suspect!’  Let me borrow from the great Charles Mills (the author of The Racial Contract), but for a different context here, to try to put the Sardar's point in a different way without taking anything away from it. What both of them (Prof. Mills and Sardar Kharkaftar) are saying is that there seems to be an invisible contract at the highest levels of state and society in Pakistan, a kind of ethnocentric contract to which some or even many well-meaning Punjabis are not conscious signatories but from which they, nevertheless, benefit and have been benefitting all these decades. Privilege is often invisible to those who have it, as the saying goes; Punjabi chauvinism is "invisible" because it is ubiquitous. It is, however, visible, in plain sight for those who have eyes to see and who have critical minds to comprehend.

No wonder that some critical observers now insist that in the absence of a radical, a sweeping, revolutionary change, sooner or later there will be three more Bangladeshs and that it is not a question of “if” but only of “when”.

TRAITOR! 
What a loss and waste---of sweet and juicy mangoes--- in the skies over Bahawalpur in 1988!

It may seem curious, at least to the uninitiated, this rage and hatred of the Punjabi against India and the Indians. While it is true that hatred of India is part and parcel of being a Pakistani, a main pillar that supports the carefully constructed notion of Pakistani identity ----thanks to the cradle-to-grave propaganda of the state to which every citizen is forcefully exposed, especially through its mediocre and almost dysfunctional education system----no other nationality has this kind of deep hatred for India and Indians as the Punjabi has. There are many explanations for this anomaly, most of them based on history and psychology. For this writer, the most sensible analysis has been put forward by the Indian political psychologist and "street fighting intellectual" Ashis Nandy in many of his works, but particularly in two of his books titled The Intimate Enemy and The Savage Freud. According to him, this hatred---on either side of the border---is because of a rejection of the former self by the subject. Or, to be precise, the rejection of that part of the self that it now exclusively sees in the "other". The Punjabi in Pakistan and the North Indians on the other side of the border share this hatred equally; they are one another's "intimate enemies". Nandy is basically repeating, or reformulating in a new context, an old wisdom of the South Asian region that the most profound kind of hatreds are almost always reserved for those one knows and knows "intimately". Observe, and especially contrast, the attitudes of the majority of South Indians and the non-Punjabi nationalities in Pakistan toward one another and one will begin to understand the argument. For decades, the ruling criminal cabals of Pakistan, mostly the booted bloodsuckers from the largest province, have justified their ethnocidal violence especially in the peripheral regions of the country---Balochistan and the Northern parts--- with this offering of the Indian bogeyman---the familiar "Indian agent", "traitor" or "foreign hand" nonsense. The masses have often fallen for this vile propaganda and have believed them wholesale, none more so than the people of the Punjab, especially its "educated" and professional classes. But such is the nature of this irrational hatred for India and Indians that the Punjabi will not hesitate to fall line, hook and sinker for this pernicious manufactured conceit even when the victim is one his own.

Back to the textbooks. In Pakistan, the worst---actually, the most effective---example of propagandist indoctrination through textbooks, right from primary school to higher, university education, happened in the 11 year tyrannical rule of that mustachioed Jalandhari troglodyte, the fawji dictator Zia-ul-Haq. So deeply damaging his toxic propaganda tactics have been over the years that most of what is wrong, what is clearly harmful and outright evil in contemporary Pakistani society, especially the organized hypocrisy and the pervasive, systemic bigotry that now plague every strata of society, can be traced back to him. In particular, the education policies implemented via the thoroughly ideological textbooks manufactured during the reign of this deranged, fork-tongued fanatic in uniform and boots have done the most harm. For sure, not everything was perfect before this double-talking, Janus-faced bigot and his kangaroo courts with their compromised and accomplice judges with the help of whom all he murdered the civilian ruler of the country and usurped power, but anybody old enough to remember the years before 1977 can attest to the verity of what I am saying here. The period between 1977 and 1988 may well be called the darkest in the country's history. Pakistanis were exposed to evil like never before and many of them, because of their naivety or innocence, and because of their ignorance of modern instrumental, amoral politics actually embraced that evil to their and their society's detriment. The textbooks taught, still do in many parts of the country, intolerance and bigotry, especially in the name of a religion distorted by a particular, reformist interpretation which was imported from the middle eastern Gulf countries in the late 1970s and mid 1980s and institutionalized throughout Pakistani society with the lavish help of petro-dollars doled out by the Arab ideologues of that violent, head-chopping, self-blowing modern cult. They, the texts most of which were put together and printed in the USA, inculcated a culture of intellectual passivity, indolence, mediocrity of the worst kind and of outright cruelty. The textbooks, especially the revisionist history books, further confused the already muddled sense of identity of many Pakistanis, making them hate that most ineluctable aspect of their self---- the South Asian Muslim identity: compassion, beauty, wisdom and other similar virtues that make up any authentic religious identity were banished and they were replaced by a strict, wooden and blanched religious legalism that “faithfully” resembled the barren and harsh landscape of Najd in the Gulf from where most of these violently literalist and fundamentalist interpretations of the religion were first imported into the country. The culture of fatwa-baazi, of calling others “traitor”, "kafir" and “Indian/Yehudi agent” for example, also took deep root during this dark period of military dictatorship. But there is always a kind of cosmic justice, a compensatory mechanism in life. A decade or two ago, the “traitor” and “Indian agent” were almost always someone from outside Punjab, a non-Punjabi. Now, that sickening and abusive practice of name calling has become more democratic in a sense and even sacred names like Sharif and Bajwa are now being labeled with these ugly epithets---in my humble opinion, this time very rightly so. What goes around, comes around, as the saying goes. Moral: what you do to others, you eventually end up doing the same to yourself.

I started this blogpost with that rather dumb and chauvinist friend of mine providing me with that all-rounder, all-mighty explanation for the evil that is, has been all these years, done in a place like Balochistan by the criminal, booted vampires and their accomplice civilian mafiosi poodles, namely, "Indians did it, India is behind it..." or some such bumper sticker nonsense that the murderous security state has thoroughly fed these "educated" imbeciles for decades through its atrocious education system, its dumbing down textbooks churned out by semi-literate clowns pretending to be "historians", a la Nasim Hijazi and buffoons of his ilk. Every time I hear this kind of humbug in the way of argument or justificatory explanation for khaki violence in the peripheries, I think of the stupidest of the animals---the sheep---in George Orwell's brilliant satire Animal Farm, who never tire of bleating, "four legs good, two legs bad!" In fact, one needs to read Orwell's Animal Farm to understand contemporary Pakistan. Although written in a different time and place and satirizing a different fascistic and totalitarian ideology and its genocidal ideologues, it is the best go-to book to comprehend the sorry reality of contemporary Pakistan. For example, in chapter 3 of the book, Squealer the pig, the fast-talking and eloquent PR pig for the vanguard elite (the pigs in general and their leader Napoleon in particular) explains, and tries to justify the monopolization of the resources by the pigs, here the stealing of the best food (apples and milk), in this way: 

"Comrades!" he cried. "You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege? Many of us actually dislike milk and apples. I dislike them myself. Our sole object in taking these things is to preserve our health. Milk and apples (this has been proved by Science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig. We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organization of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples. Do you know what would happen if we pigs failed in our duty? Jones would come back! Yes, Jones would come back! Surely, comrades," cried Squealer almost pleadingly, skipping from side to side and whisking his tail, "surely there is no one among you who wants to see Jones come back?" 

Now replace Squealer with one of those khaki duffers (ISPR) who often makes a fool of himself in front of TV cameras by repeatedly enlightening the bamboozled Pakistani awam that they are "apolitical" beasts, or that they have "nothing to do with politics" and that whatever they (the pigs) do is for the good of the awam (all the other animals of the Animal Farm). Apples and milk (all the resources) are what they have been criminally stealing from the people for more than seven decades. Jones is, of course, India and Indians---or "traitors" from the rest of the country outside Punjab---that menacing "foreign hand" or "foreign agent", the feared bogeyman. Fear is, has always been, the uniformed pigs' prime tool of control and manipulation: "Let us keep sucking your blood dry and don't you dare criticize or object, because if you don't let us plunder and loot, India and Indians will come! And surely there is no one among you who wants to see Indians come for you!" Excellent book, a book for our dark times.

For more, click: The Hollow Men

Harf e Dervaish (Urdu) Harf e Dervaish (Urdu post)

A Lament for Quetta: A Lament for Quetta

On Belief: On Belief

On Simplicity: Simple People

Quetta: Hazara ethnic cleansing

Propaganda and Language

Overqualified and underqualified in Balochistan