Visiting New York still causes fear and shame: DATELINE WASHINGTON
I LOOKED back. There it was, the hollow that once rose into the sky, the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Nobody else in the van seemed to notice: the Guyanese driver talked into his cellphone and another New Yorker dozed off.
It was past midnight and we were returning to Queens after a late dinner in Manhattan.
The man next to me asked his friend if it was OK to smoke in the van. Two others were already chalking out plans for the next day.
Several months have already passed since the city shuddered under its worst-ever disaster. Unaffected by the madness of those who tried to derail this mother of all cities, New York is surging ahead to new horizons.
It had no time for the likes of me. I was still reluctant to plunge into the mainstream, as I always did when I visited New York before 9/11. I felt ashamed of the tragedy brought about by a group of people who looked like me and believed in the same God.
But New York had no time for my guilt or shame.
Earlier in the day, coming into Manhattan from Queens on the A train, I avoided eye contact with other passengers and hid behind a newspaper. I soon realized my mistake — it was an Urdu-language newspaper. Although few in
New York would know what Urdu was, many could distinctly see its Arabic script and identify me as one of “them.” So I hastily folded back the newspaper and looked around me.
I saw a copy of the New York Post and picked it up. I felt safe behind its Latin script.
A girl walked in, wearing a hijab. She looked around and sat next to me. I said, “Salaam.” She smiled but did not respond. Was she nervous or was it me who was being hypersensitive? I don’t know.
The train slid under the streets of Manhattan. A large group of Americans — mostly white men — entered, somehow increasing my guilt. Some of them stood right in front of me. I looked for the Muslim girl. She had already gone. I was nervous.
The train passed through the stations where it once disgorged workers into the World Trade Center. I felt dizzy, as if something inside me had broken. I was deformed. Incomplete.
I had this feeling again later at a bar. A girl was dancing like a cobra, a golden cobra. She moved her body to an invisible flute. Snake charmers waited on her, with their baskets wide open. But she slipped away, sinuously, and kept dancing with her eyes fixed on the invisible flute.
A man rose and held her in both his hands. She smiled and slipped out of his grip. I looked outside at a pale winter moon dwarfed by the neon lights.
Somebody came over and introduced himself. We talked about the weather, about why the winter was so mild this year. He changed the subject, but before he moves to the inevitable — Sept 11 and its aftermath — I excused myself.
I went to the window and gazed at the moon, it was still pale and weak. A dog looked at it but did not howl. I wish he had. I would have felt better. But he suppressed his howl, looked at the moon again and walked away. I sighed but did not scream. I had wanted to scream for a long time, but I have held my silence.
Tension twisted me. I wanted to hold something. But all faces, all images were lost in the haze as I stretched my arms.
Shadows danced on the wall. Broad, bold shadows leapt in rhythmic chaos. They whispered to each other and laughed; a full-throated laughter filled the room, prickling my skin with fear.
I tried to flee, to the comfort of past images. I sought refuge in narrow, warm streets. Familiar smells of closed rooms, sweat and herbs meander in the streets, getting stronger as the heat increases. I saw people pushing, shouting, laughing and jostling.
The muezzin called evening prayers. A soothing shadow slipped down the minarets. The sun slid from the sky as the night dropped from the clouds.
The streets were not deserted, but filled with the faithful smell of summer evenings.
People moved around, laughing and shouting. I reached for them, trying to coax them into my existence. But they flowed through my hands and fingers like water.
The mist licked my fingers and the wall-dancing shadows scared me. I reached again, only to embrace the cold, slithering mist.
The longing never ends. I walk like a lost soul through images wandering in my mind. Sometimes they seem familiar. Sometimes they drift through my mind like strangers.
Time passes and the strangers wander from my mind to my soul, becoming a part of me, of my identity. And the confusion continues.
Sometimes I see myself in a valley full of both familiar and strange images. I see people, buildings and trees slowly emerging out of the mist. I see cars, buses and trains. An aeroplane flies over my head.
The familiar sight sends a shudder through my spine. I look out the window again. The pale, blue moon is still there, hanging helplessly in the sky. The dog has gone. The golden cobra dances no more.
I am afraid to go out and face the hollow that once was the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
The pitfalls of being typecast: MEDIA REVIEW
HE BECAME famous after his role of a bumbling fool in the hit comedy series on PTV, Guest House. Afzal Khan, aka John (or was it meant to be ‘Jan’?) Rambo was the sweeper-cum-wisecrack in one of PTV’s more memorable comedy productions. In fact, it’s one of those few shows — other than of course the incomparable Fifty-Fifty — that one can watch again and again and still end up laughing each time.
Well, Mr Khan was recently interviewed on Prime Entertainment show and was asked why he appeared in so few movies these days.
The man seems quite witty and spoke in a way that suggested that he was deeply upset by the way producers had treated him. “The problem, jee, is that everyone thinks of me in a comic role, the audience because they keep seeing me in such movies, and producers and directors because they keep casting me in such roles. It’s quite a problem breaking out of this mould but I think I will be able to, quite soon, especially if those who make movies realize the mistake of typecasting actors for a particular type of role,” the actor said in the interview. Afzal Khan then went on to criticize the current crop of leading men in Lollywood saying it was sad to see that a handful of not-so-talented actors were monopolizing the Pakistani film industry.
Some of his observations about Pakistani films were not only quite true but the way he spoke about them was quite hilarious. Here is one about the tendency in most of our movies to have the heroine dancing away during a song in a lush meadow but with the hero, quite inexplicably, making a very angry face and walking away in a huff (a colleague rightly pointed out that men like Sultan Rahi made a livelihood by exactly these kind of antics during their acting careers). His exact line: ‘Ub dekhein Pakistani filmon mein hee sirif yeh hota hai kay heroine dance kur rahee hai aur hero jo hai bhot hee naraz ek konay mein khara rehta hai. Meray khyal say yeh sirif Pakistani filmon hee mein hee hota hai’.
Let’s hope producers heed Afzal Khan’s wish and recognize the versatility of his acting abilities. Unfortunately, for audiences that shall remain a claim because we haven’t really seen him — clearly, as he says, for no fault of his own in a major serious role on television or in the movies.
THE BBC’s Question Time is finally coming to Pakistan. The programme’s Indian edition has been quite a success, though one can’t say that it is exactly all that popular with many Pakistanis who watch it, not least because of the clear right-wing tone of many of the invited panelists and the overt anti-Pakistan stance of much of the TV audience.
The director of the show was in Karachi for a couple of days and was to address a press conference on Friday evening (a day after this column was written) to brief the local media on the specifics of the show. In fact, I had received from a friend an e-mail around four weeks ago from presumably the local organizers of the show inviting for a couple of hours to a local auditorium young educated people interested in becoming part of the Question Time audience.
Apparently, the programme — which will beging shooting from the first week of August and is to be telecast in the run-up to the October elections — will have Mehreen Khan, who has worked with Indus Vision — as the moderator. Quite presentable and with a British accent, Ms Khan unfortunately is no Prannoy Roy (the suave TV journalist who hosts Questions Time India and does an excellent job of moderating the often extreme remarks made by panelists and audience members). It remains to be seen how she manages the show.
Nonetheless, it is good that the BBC has realized that it has quite a loyal — not to mention highly affluent and influential — audience in Pakistan. Probably that’s why it has decided to come here. One hopes that the choice of panelists will not be the usual hackneyed politicians, the has-beens and the also-rans, or the usual gang of former ambassadors, retired generals and assorted ‘expert commentators’ that one gets to see ad nauscum on PTV, Indus Vision or even ARY for that matter.—OMAR R QURAISHI
(e mail: omarq@cyber.net.pk)