B005OWFTDW EBOK (17 page)

Alice Bhatti bends down, picks the piss tray from the floor, holds it in front of her chest and speaks in measured tones. ‘I know your type,’ she says. ‘That little gun doesn’t scare me. Your tears don’t fool me. You think that a woman, any woman, who wears a uniform, is just waiting for you to show up and she’ll take it off. I wish you had just walked in and told me you want me to take this off. We could have had a conversation about that. At the end of which I would have told you what I am telling you now: fuck off and never show me your face again.’

Teddy Butt runs before she is finished. He runs past the legless man, now taking a nap with his face covered with an X-ray, past the ambulance drivers dissecting the evening newspapers, past the hopeful junkies waiting for the hospital accidentally to dispense its bounty.

As he emerges out of the hospital he raises his arm in the air, without thinking, without targeting anything, and shoots his Mauser.

The city stops moving for three days.

The bullet pierces the right shoulder of a truck driver who has just entered the city after a forty-eight-hour journey; his shoulder is almost leaning out of his driver’s window, his right hand drumming the door, his fingers holding a finely rolled joint, licked on the side with his tongue for extra smoothness, a ritual treat that he has prepared for the end of the journey. He is annoyed with his own shoulder, he looks at it with suspicion. His shoulder feels as if it has been stung by a bee that travelled with him all the way from his village. His left hand grips the shoulder where it hurts and finds his shirt soaked in red gooey stuff. He jams the brake to the floor. A rickshaw trying to dodge the swerving truck gets entangled in its double-mounted Goodyear tyres and is dragged along for a few yards. Five children, all between seven and nine, in their pristine blue-and-white St Xavier’s uniform become a writhing mess of fractured skulls, blood, crayons and Buffy the Vampire Slayer lunch boxes. The truck comes to a halt after gently nudging a cart and overturning a pyramid of the season’s last guavas. A size-four shoe is stuck between two Goodyears.

School notebooks are looked at, pockets are searched for clues to the victims’ identities, the mob slowly gathers around the truck, petrol is extracted from the tank and sprinkled over its cargo of three tonnes of raw peanuts. Teddy with his broken heart and the truck driver with his bleeding shoulder both realize what is coming even before the mob has made up its mind; they first mingle in the crowd and then start walking in opposite directions.

A lonely fire engine will turn up an hour later but will be pelted at and sent away. The truck and its cargo will smoulder for two days.

In a house twenty miles away a phone rings. A grandmother rushes on to the street beating her chest and wailing. Two motorcycles kick-start simultaneously. Half a dozen jerrycans full of kerosene are hauled into a rickety Suzuki pickup. A
nineteen-year-old
rummages under his pillow, cocks his TT pistol and runs on to the street screaming, promising to rape every Pathan mother in the land. A second-hand tyre shop owner tries to padlock his store but the boys are already there with their iron rods and bicycle chains. A policemobile switches on its emergency horn and rushes towards the police commissioner’s house. A helicopter hovers over the beach as if defending the Arabian Sea against the burning rubber smell that is spreading through the city. An old colonel walking his dog in the Colonels’ Colony asks his dog to hurry up and do its business. A bank teller is shot dead for smiling. Finding the streets deserted, groups of kites and crows descend from their perches and chase wild dogs that lift their faces to the sky and bark joyously. Five size-four coffins wait for three days as ambulance drivers are shot at and sent back to where they came from. Carcasses of burned buses, rickshaws, paan shops and at least one KFC joint seem to have a calming effect on the population. Newspapers start predicting ‘Normalcy limping back to the city’, as if normalcy had gone for a picnic and sprained an ankle.

D
uring the three-day shutdown eleven more are killed; two of them turn up shot and tied together in one gunny bag dumped on a rubbish heap. Three billion rupees-worth of Suzukis, Toyotas and Hinopaks are burned down. During these days Alice Bhatti is actually not that busy. When people are killed while fixing their satellite dishes on their roofs, or their motorbikes are torched while going to buy a litre of milk, they tend to forget about their ailments, they learn to live without dialysis for their kidneys, home cures are found for minor injuries, prayers replace prescription drugs. Sister Alice has time to sit down between her chores, she has time to take a proper lunch and prayer breaks. Between cleaning gun wounds and mopping the A&E floor, Sister Alice has moments of calm and she finds herself thinking about that scared little man with the Mauser, his mad story about the disappearing moon. She wonders if he is caught up in these riots, if he is still having those dreams. She wonders if she has been in one of his dreams.

Hari Kunzru

 

W
e hear a lot – perhaps too much – about ‘identity’ in relation to South Asian art. Whether it’s national or personal, this elusive quality is often seen as the primary concern of South Asian writers and visual artists, to the exclusion of all other aesthetic categories. By contrast, those who can lay claim to sufficient whiteness or
Westernness
are presumed to be the unreflective owners of secure but troublingly authoritarian identities whose dismantling is the proper task of progressive artistic practice. It’s a formulation which has, after a generation or so of post-colonial criticism, become an orthodoxy.

High Noon
, as the title suggests, stages a confrontation with this brittle identity politics and claims a kind of luminous clarity, where shadows and ambiguities disappear. Noon is when mad dogs and Englishmen are the only creatures out on the street. High NOON is also a punning physicist’s term for certain states of quantum superposition, when particles exist in both of two possible states, so perhaps there’s also a suggestion of
kairos
in the title, the ‘time of chance’, that suspended moment when decisive action may bring about great and significant change. Clearly, for Pakistan, such a time is at hand.

Whether Pakistani artists like it or not, the question of their identity now has geopolitical significance. Who are the inhabitants of this young country? What do they believe? Unmanned drones hover over the North West Frontier to mete out punishment to those who answer incorrectly, while men who have no time for representation of any kind, and who hate art for its advance into the territory of religion, are waiting in the wings. As the confusion and carnage on Pakistan’s northern border threatens to move southwards, the
long-standing
preoccupations of post-colonial cultural politics are pushed aside by more pressing concerns.

It may be that it’s only possible to wage war on those whom one doesn’t see fully, those whom one allows or forces oneself to view as less than human. This suggests that – seen now, in 2010 – the art in this collection has a particular urgency that exists as much in the desire to trace small, personal actions (getting dressed, drawing a line), as in overtly political gestures, such as the arresting opening image in which a woman hangs her blood-red washing out to dry on the wings of a decommissioned fighter plane. The machismo of the military, which has played such a decisive (and often disastrous) role in the history of Pakistan, is one factor at work in this time of chance. So is the public space of the street. What does it mean to turn private, domestic life (ironing, reading a newspaper) out on to the eerily empty roadways of Ramadan? What relationships do such actions have to the other uses of the street – as a place of protest, or commerce, or as the setting for an Independence Day parade? A wall stained with betel-spit is a modest testimony to the accretion of history, a guttural desi riposte to the vast canvases of Anselm Kiefer, with their caking of European ash and dust. Sometimes one feels the artists have internalized the categories of post-colonialism and are now doing what is expected of them as Pakistani artists, by reproducing them in the hope of critical approbation. Yet even the failure to represent oneself authentically, the impossibility of seeing oneself except as belated, constructed, supplicatory, is significant.

Right now we need more than news images, but representation of any kind feels inadequate in the face of the vast material forces driving the region towards conflict. The paradox is that the most fugitive, fleeting traces of humanity – melancholy petals painted in watercolour on a marble floor – may outlast those forces. The floor is in Kabul. The light falls across it, striating the painting with bars of shadow. What is pigment? What is light? Time is passing, quickly.
 

 

Pari Wania, 7.42 p.m., 22 August 2008, Ramadan, Karachi.