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December 06, 2007
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Thursday
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Ziqa'ad 25, 1428
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An oracle to break the muted hush
An oracle to break the muted hush
One wonders why there are no fortunetellers in Islamabad? Have we no interest in our future or do we know already what lies in store for us? Is it that our tomorrows have been cast in the die of our yesterdays? If we do not look forward to surprises that await us round the bend, if the coming times have no exciting possibilities, if hopes and fears no longer stimulate our hearts, why and how do we manage to live?
Will this drab existence, asphyxiated by loss of hope, dulled by a daily dose of shocks, ever end? Shall I ever come to fortune and know many vicissitudes in life? Will calumny mar my reputation? Will my wife never run away? Have I no such questions in my mind? Do I ever look up and try to decipher the meaning in the autumn sky? Hopes are dupes and fears may be liars in the angular asymmetry of Islamabad. There’s a broody quiet, a menacing silence that rules the day but come evening, around the posh arcades of Jinnah Super a flashy parade of life is staged by our unruffled gentry which may as much be a sign of resilience against despair as of dogged desperation or perhaps like the legendary town of Brigadoon, in the Fifties Hollywood movie, that emerges from oblivion for a night every hundred years, this may be the evening of our life till dawn. To such dark moods have our stars beholden us. Our need to know is desperate in the muted hush. In such times it is natural to be looking for palmists and astrologers, diviners, soothsayers, oracular counsellors, readers of tea leaves in the cup, tarot card analysts, even naked drooling morons. But we have none. Are we a city without a future? Or have all our questions been answered.
Cassandra, whose beauty persuaded Apollo to confer upon her the gift of prophecy, upon her promising to comply with his desires; but when she had become possessed of the prophetic art, she refused to fulfil her promise. Thereupon Apollo ordained that no one should believe her prophecies. The Greek legend, the imaginative would surmise, is being relived in the Islamic Republic. Our Cassandra may be right but we are being told not to believe her. Whom shall we trust? Apollo himself? The most striking and most important aspect of the legendary god has been described as his interest in all matters affecting law and order, the establishment of cities, constitutions, codes of law and their interpretation, interests that our mortal and martial Apollo shares with the Greek model but which he disposes of according to his Pakistani genius. Nobody reads the tea leaves for him nor does he consult the configuration of signs in his horoscope.
Palms are read and tea leaves divined where calendars move forward and one sees a glimmer of light beyond. Why in the capital city where not only the individual’s but the nation’s destiny is made as the hours tick by palmists find no business and drawing horoscopes fetches no money because all oases in the desert have turned out to be mirages. Days retreat into the thick fog of yesteryears. There is a looming sense of fatalism that has made the lines of the hand meaningless and when the passing of the cane of command is staged to show the path of power the burlesque becomes tragic. Our fate has been determined. The moving finger has written in bold caps and stopped moving.
There is little left to be quizzed from destiny except small personal qualms and doubts like whether one would return in one piece from the mosque or the market or shall the family look for the body in the morgue or the Kohsar thana. The Napoleon’s Book of Fate that I inherited from my grandfather, a lawman, who after losing faith in the courts of his day laid much trust in the oracular pronouncements of this compendium regarding the outcome of cases he was pleading, is oftenest my guide too in matters beyond rational thought, when future poses intriguing possibilities and one is not ready to accept the inevitable. The diviner throws the dice and the answer to the query comes in cryptically worded statements to amaze and amuse the seeker. Seldom fully satisfying, the best news is barbed with premonitions and the worst padded in admonitions. Will my love be faithful to me in my absence, you ask. What maketh thee certain she hath been in thy presence, counters Napoleon. Will I ever find a treasure? Yes, but of what use will it be for an eternal loser?
After suffering through an interview with the ‘son of Rawalpindi’ that Dawn News inflicted on its viewers, perhaps for their amusement, in which the great statesman of this regime gave his earthy assessment of what was come to befall in the coming days, I picked up my moth-eaten Napoleon from the shelf and asked him: What is the aspect of the seasons, and what political changes are to take place. For once, I must say, Napoleon was sober. He came out with a good tiding. Quoth he: Where insolent oppression reigns, where tears water the soil, and where sighs fan the scanty harvest, the freed husbandman will sit under his fig-tree, revelling in the joys of abundance. Who the freed husbandman is? Another quandary for another throw of the dice!
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