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KARACHI: I have made peace with the fact that it is futile to subscribe to your telecom’s service to block unwanted numbers. It is beyond certain that cell-phone stalkers and cloggers will find a way to creep into one’s device from one number or another, at whatever time they desire. Until recently, I had saved their numbers under the ‘Ignore IDs’, but stopped the practice when I had a brief, and truly hopeless, conversation with ‘Ignore 6’.
“Ignore 6: ‘Today is International Chocolates Day. Send your friend/hubby/wife/ chocolates … white for friendship/dark for loved one/milk for yada yada … so what will you send me?’”
It had been a long day and the barrage of text messages from his end had not made it any easier, so I broke the rule-is-to-never-reply and gave what I considered was a suitable one-word retort: ‘Joota.’
Prompt came Ignore 6’s reply: ‘Hush Puppies ya Bata?’ —”
It was one of those moments where one is unsure of the appropriate reaction: should I laugh or should I cry? I realised that I could no longer keep up with the ‘Namrud Mobaloils’. To take on these absolutely idle men of Pakistan waiting to pounce on an opportunity to ‘connect’ and get back in ‘kind’, I would need the acerbic humour and intelligent wit of Dr Fouzia Saeed of AASHA.
Dr Saeed has been caricaturing the namrud of my life and other typical every-day harassers since 2008 for the NGO’s annual calendar. Be it the ‘Hocha Boss’ – the guy who makes advances and threatens of repercussion if he’s rebuffed; ‘Khurchoo’ – the guy who has to scratch his body parts in front of women; or ‘Keido Bhaiyya’ – the guy who likes playing the brother and controls your life, every depiction of hers is relatable and by the end of it you’ll be grinning from ear to ear.
However, many people are still unaware of the calendar’s existence since it is solely distributed to select signatories, parliamentarians and members of the civil society and never sold to the public. While the depictions can always be viewed on the website, do look out for the calendar because it is a worthy collectible, more so as the 2011 calendar is its last print.
The idea behind the project was to turn the tables of the debate on harassment, shifting the focus from the victim to the harasser. “Our workshops were not working out. It was tough getting people to talk about the harasser. It was always what the victim was wearing, where she was and how she was behaving,” Dr Saeed elaborates. “I had originally intended to make a television series and had sketched full-fledged characters, each with its own intricacies,” she adds.
So detailed were the characters that Dr Saeed would spend hours telling ace painter and illustrator Sabir Nazar each’s life story, from the beard to waist size to the way he stood. “I would say, ‘Sabir, make sure Hero Harjai doesn’t have a belly.’ He is the hero who has never grown up from his college days and thinks girls will fall for him at the drop of a hat. Sabir did a wonderful job.”
Late last year though, AASHA decided to pull the curtain on the project as Dr Saeed felt the need to move on: “I told them that we are not doing any more of these and suggested we print the best. The campaigning had been effective and we had gotten the bill turned into law.”
So after three years, 36 characters and the harassment bill finally turned into law, the final edition features the following 12 depictions according to an online vote: Tharki Baba, Hocha Boss, Churan Chatto, Ustad Lucha, Keechar Teacher, Chichar Jameel, Khudai Thekaydaar, Lelu Likhari, Khurchoo, Khabees on Wheels, Namrud Mobaloil and Guide Julabi.
Surely Dr Saeed is not going to lay her brilliant taxonomy skills to rest – so what’s next? “I would like to take on the sexual harassment law, there are so many facets that need to be highlighted. I was going to do it this year but did not because the harassment illustrations were too popular,” she says. And going by what she has produced for the last three years, it would be worth looking out for her take on the long overdue law.
Nadia Jajja is a journalist associated with a political monthly magazine.
