Everyday heros

1
My car’s battery had been playing up for several days. It finally went down in a glory of auto-start windshield wipers and I had to park the car in the Jail Rd service lane, near Eden Centre. The next day, I went over to the electrician who I’d been promised would be my messiah. But my description of the symptoms didn’t convince him that the fault was electrical. He asked me to somehow get the car to his garage, located on “LOS beach” as he fondly calls the strip of workshops and houses that line the open sewer running from LOS stop to Multan Rd. Walking back in the shadow of Saruman’s interminable flyovers on Ferozepur Rd, I realised that I’d have to have the car towed or pushed. Near Tollington market, a ricksha-vallah skeptically took on my commission. Young man, nimble mind, a little prone to judge I felt – but I was too occupied with rescuing my car. It took us maybe 15 minutes of pushing – initially on foot to position the car in front of the ricksha and then with the ricksha-vallah in his ricksha, his foot applied to the car’s rear bumper, me, steering the car – to get to LOS stop. At this point, he asked me to arrange a tow-rope as the leg he was pushing the car with had started to ache badly. I found myself in front of the strange “USA tools” shop right at the LOS traffic signal, surely the only open tools shop within walking distance on that cold, hazy Sunday afternoon. The first tow-cable they gave me turned out to be faulty. The replacement was solid. Another 5m to set up the ricksha to tow the car, which involved pushing the car across Ferozepur Rd on foot and into the entrance of the road next to the LOS sewer. Then another 10m to tow the car to the garage. The ricksha-valla helped me get the car into the right position in front of the garage doors so that it could be pushed inside easily, checked if I was satisfied and turned to leave. I thought he’d just forgotten. But he’d made up his mind. No question of payment. He was content, smiling. Me, he left re-inspired, rejuvenated even.

2
jurrat-e-kufr: the brainy-as-hell, total geek from a “maarra” background who has no inhibitions telling off any colleague – whether peer or company director – who talks down to him, gives him attitude or back-bites about him. Thin as a reed, liable, it seems, to be blown away by the next strong gust of wind, but true to himself.

3
Jigra: This from a friend. He’d gone to donate blood at Ganga Ram, contacted by a stranger who’d found his number on one of the websites that maintain the contact info of blood donors in Lahore. The patient’s attendants, two young men, met him at the emergency entrance, took him down to the blood bank and treated him to juice AND tea at the cafeteria while they waited for his turn to be bled. They hailed from some place near Khanqah Dogran. The younger brother works in a factory near Qainchi that only offers intermittent work, depending on whether they have a shipment to make and whether there’s gas available. At the time, he was unemployed. The younger brother’s friend is a tailor master, specialising in formal suits, lives in Makkah Colony. He gives my friend the low-down on ready-made vs. tailored suits (the latter are not all that much better) and offers to help him get the best quality for the right price at whichever shop in Lahore. Naturally, phone numbers are exchanged and promises to meet at a less stressed-out time are made. The patient’s husband, the elder brother, comes in, thanks my friend profusely and then asks how these blood donation websites work and whether one needed some ID to be listed there. My friend asks him to give his number, name, address and blood group so that he may add him to the sites. His brother and their friend also requested the same service. They had all given blood previously, and sitting there with my friend whom they would never have found if one of their friends had not known about such websites, they realised that they needed to up their game. Spontaneously, without needing to be prompted in the least. This friend describes them as tall, broad-shouldered but thin to the point of seeming under-nourished. Yet spunky, full of beans.

resistance, a quieter shade of

We worked closely during the lawyers’ movement, he radicalised me, as well as a whole group of “mummy-daddy” kids, set precedents we could not shirk away from. He even went to jail, got beaten up by the police. We learned together to deal with tear gas in protests, with terrified parents, with setbacks during mobilisation efforts. He taught us courage on so many different levels and he practised his belief in his fallibility – which, again, forced us to confront ours.
Then, he went quiet, seemed to retreat from the public sphere.
A few days ago, he finally let me in on a small initiative he’s taken and sustained for the last several years: preventing wastage of water. If he sees leaky taps in a bazaar, he has them replaced. If in a mosque, he talks to the in-charge to have it fixed, offering to pay for it. At his workplace as well as within the extended family, he has quietly worked to remind people of the criticality of saving water, and when someone becomes interested, it gives him the opportunity to talk about other non-renewable resources and the naked plunder that our “created needs” have led to.
He knows that Lahore’s main aquafer is of the non-replenishing kind, so he knows we’re sitting on a time-bomb. He doesn’t have the resources to launch a massive media campaign on the issue, he’s too wary of potential pitfalls to set up a bureaucracy (a trust or an NGO) to work on this issue, but he’s found ways to make a solid contribution.
This is my way of making his effort known. His identity is not so important, but this cause and his bottom-up pedagogy are critical.
My hope is that readers will reflect and be inspired to engage with the “small issues” that our frustration with ineffectiveness at grander scales leads us to ignore.

Day of the Ascendancy or Eve of Sorrow (یوم تکبیر یا شام غم ؟)

(please excuse the rather clunky translation of the Urdu title of this post)

So, May 28, 1998, chauvinistic Pakistanis here and all over the world erupted in wild celebrations because Pakistan successfully exploded a nuclear bomb in the Chaghai hills. That day is celebrated since as Yom-e-Takbir. I won’t bore you with details and commentary that you can easily find elsewhere on the Internet.

Twelve years later, by some strange coincidence, on that same fateful date, 96 fellow Lahorias, most of them Ahmedis, were killed by extremist Islamic supremacists who seem to want to rid the country of whatever meagre diversity it still sports. It was a massacre that lasted several hours. Two sites were targeted, both mosques, one in Grrhi Shahu, the other in Model Town, just after the main congregational Friday prayers.

The day before the first anniversary of the attack, Salman Javed, a friend from the FASTRising days, posted on a Facebook group to remind us of the upcoming day of mourning and shame. The next day, I woke up to see an SMS from an old schoolfriend, essentially a “forward”, that congratulated everyone involved in the nuclear weapons programme (politicians from Bhutto to Nawaz Sharif, named various generals and prominent weapons scientists, but interestingly enough, did not mention Salam’s role), and advised us all to own this great achievement and to rejoice in such a grand success. I tipped over. I mentioned what happened the year before and I asked him if he had ever spared a thought for the children born in the district hospital at Naukundi with all manner of deformities. Not surprisingly, he wrote back to say that he condemned the preceding year’s massacre as all loss of life was regrettable. He also said that he had never heard of the effects of nuclear radiation on the local population, not even in media foreign or websites. I didn’t bother to point out that most Baloch separatist websites were blocked within Pakistan since he would not give them credence anyway. I did mention to him that I had heard of these deformities from in-service Baloch doctors at the Bolan Medical College (actually, their teaching hospital). He responded with the standard caveat: let’s not believe things that one has only heard of. I responded that, yes, I hoped one day to visit and confirm these stories myself.

Later in the day, a comrade from the National Students Federation sent an excellent SMS that tore apart the propaganda of the nuclear establishment. Still later, at the IPSS office, Diep was talking with a visitor about their inability to mount much of a protest campaign even after such a horrendous massacre. It was she who provided the figure of 96. I had forgotten. I forget.

So, finally, I snapped out of my paralysis and proposed that we do a small candle-light vigil in front of the mosque. Luckily, many of the young people at the lecture I was attending agreed to join and in the end, we were ten or eleven, instead of the two or three I was expecting. I was really heartened to see a courageous, young Ahmedi, a friend of the NSF comrade, join us.  After all, it was such short notice, people have plans, commitments. Ten or eleven in a sprawling city of almost ten million.

At the mosque, despite our entreaties, we were refused space point-blank. The six or seven policemen on duty were sympathetic and appreciative but regretted that they were bound by the orders of the mosque authorities. The authorities, it seems, were too afraid to do anything that would bring about a repeat (or worse) of the previous year’s atrocity. We reluctantly moved away, and then decided to head to the Press Club. Our Ahmedi friend informed us that he volunteered for security duty once a week inside the mosque and that the community actually had very little faith in the ability of the police to protect them against a second attack. He also told us that they were under a barrage of constant death threats, many of whom mentioned intended targets by name, communicated via fax, sms or slips of paper. I suddenly realised that, deny it as much I would, I was on some strange kind of battle-front, where the state’s monopoly on violence disappeared and a certain class citizens had to take care of itself.

We stood in front of the Press Club for about 40 minutes in a long arc that helped slow down traffic enough for even motorists and motor-cyclists to read our placards:

• We demand that the killers of the tragedy at Grhi Shahu and Model Town be presented in a court of justice
• Yom-e-takbir or shaam-e-ghm? 96 Lahorias were massacred on 28 May, 2010
• Stop intimidating and threatening Ahmedis
• Stop shedding blood in the name of religion

The killers were never arrested. I think one of them was wounded during the gun battle, and shifted to Jinnah Hospital. The next day, they attacked the ward where he was convalescing and managed to extricate him.