zunn

Parveen Shakir - tanhai mei meray saath

It seems,

[Thelonious Monk + Chappalgazing] * [Acid Trip]

If Karachi sounded like an instrument, it would be a saxophone reminiscing. Quintessential dirty alleys etched with blunt smoke and urban tracings… rendering it under filters of black and white.

We are all undertones, in shades of gray.

The Material Museum of Me

My life flashed before my eyes today, and it was in the form of some one else’s ’things.’ All it was, was these ‘things’

It made me wonder… Are we the sum of what we own? And if so, what is that sum?

Will all we leave behind be simply objects, which we used, (perhaps, rarely even appreciated) yet inevitably discarded, as markers of time passing?

Our armour, our comfort, our nothing yet everything…

Religion and/or those who have found the “true meaning of life,” (Ref: self-help books?) tell us that material objects have little or no value. No seriously.

Yet today, these objects made me feel close to my own experiences and moments, as if someone had laid my life out for me to see in a singular format - like an echo or a wavy, dissipating reflection.

While I walked around this exhibition, seeing all these things meticulously laid out, I felt sombre - but I realised I was not alone, because everyone there was speaking in oddly hushed tones, almost whispering out of respect for something we all felt but could not put into words…

Like being at a funeral or around the terminally ill.

——

The above display made me laugh at the beautiful medium-cutting simplicity of it all. Our house is our container, populated with even more containers, all of which hold little place in our hearts. 

So it made me think about how we live our lives…and I started asking myself certain questions:

—-

Will you spend your life doing or collecting things which some vague collective (har har) or group of ‘others’ decided was your how you’d remember the purpose of your every day how it would be memorable…?

Or not?

These others whose experience and wisdom we live by were before our time and we all ape what we see, instead of considering whether or not we really even need a dining table for example?

So will you too be the proud owner of objects who can be anyone’s and everyone’s and therefore no one’s : synonymously anonymous.

If these are all you amount to, if this all you have: here and now…

if strangers were to peer at your possessions to catch a snapshot of you

or to longingly peer into your array of things as “we have our exits and our entrances and one time in his time plays many parts…” (Shakespeare)

how would you want to be defined?

by the medicines and nuskhay which give us the oldest definitions of sickness and health in terms of death, quality of life, belief and understanding we can’t see and yet seek to fix?

or will the light fixtures, the building material which was the bulk which sheltered you, protected you with it’s body so layered and nuanced with door handles and utensils best tell your layered story?

(Source: barbican.org.uk)

Vehshi Haseena

Have you gotten stepped off a train and inhaled Southall? 

It is ‘London’ where tali hui pyaaz is the flavour of the air. It is always, warmer and sunnier there than any other part of London (Pliss be advised: respondent’s claims are subject to the bias of feeling physically warmer, seeing pakoray and chaat on thaylay and smelling bawarchi fragrances reminiscent of a hot kitchen…) But then as long as humans are part of the equation, so is bias - so that doesn’t make it less true or factual.

Coming back to Southall…if you forget that you’re not home - that the crowded pavements of frying vats and sim card vendors and dishkum gaanay blasting from slow moving cars which carry a gaggle of boiz checking you out as they break the lights - is all happening in a limbo between des and pardes, then something as simple as the amount of money you paid for the train ride there transports you out of there and deposits you in a world where both your past and present collide, much like the nuclear fusion of the sun, to make something that you are not quite sure how to explain to someone - much like “sunlight” can’t be explained, only experienced.

Of course most mornings when I am showing up for work in Southall are not this profound, because the breathtaking (See: the Dementors variety of breathtaking) beauty of employment is that it’s sludge-green tinted glasses slop mundanity messily yet rapidly, leaving you with “meh” ectoplasm covered days. (Ref: #mehday - by @khizM)

But this morning as I sat on the bus, something happened which transcended not just my rubbish routine which is as tasteless and done as a gum you’ve prematurely gotten all the flavour out of but also overtook most people that I have ever, ever and never met in my life.

I was sitting right at the back of the bus, facing the back of the bus as well, so I could eat my lunch of two samosas in peace and pieces (aaloo and chicken) when a desi woman ambled in and sat right in front of me. She was already on the phone, which she held across her mouth as she walked in, making sure to shut all the windows as she came to sit, a practice she used as punctuation throughout the bus ride…

Just a day earlier, when I was on the bus, talking to my mother, a young, black girl started having a profane argument on the phone in a staggeringly loud volume…no she wasn’t screaming, but she must have been trained in talking on stage and throwing her voice, because daym she was LAA-OUD.

Her shouting got so intense, my journey so arduous, the weather so miserable and my mother’s voice so strained that I eventually turned around and yelled at the girl “WILL YOU KEEP YOUR FUCKING VOICE DOWN - THERE ARE OTHER PEOPLE ON THIS BUS TOO!” before returning to my rather shaken mother. To be honest, I am not great with confronting crazy dramatic types, and when I did say this, I had been rehearsing it for a while, but I was certainly not in a mood to be messed with and I felt it was especially ‘unfair’ of her to ruin everyone else’s exhausted commute home. Two ladies did root for me for telling her off with the “pshhht can you believe her?” combination of words and looks.

[Coming back to today and my bus ride to Southall…]

Hence, with each window this woman shut, I got slightly more irritated and thought about saying something to her, because it was getting stifling and much too warm and smelly, But then I thought - am I being rude to her because she was wiping her nose and rubbing it on her clothes and snorting her snot with gulpy sounds? And of course, because of the way she looked?

Oh I didn’t mention how she looked did I?

At 5ft and a few, I am not a very tall person. Being from Karachi and it’s suspect water, I have never managed to achieve the kind of health that Pakistanis refer to as “healthy”. And of course, with the hegemonic socio-political culture of my country being the Punjab, I would always find the Punjabi woman a stunning, imposing, fascinating creature. Even at their most petite and precious, the Punjabi woman has an aura that is at once inviting and intimidating…Something I applaud and wish I had - to smack them mans with.

But this wasn’t an ordinary Punjabi woman. She must’ve been in her early 30s and sure she had the blazing eyebrows, the fair complexion, the large eyes adorned with war paint and mascara, the thick hair brushed to a bush. But she dressed as a man (something we all have to freaking do in this god-forsaken country where women are “equal” but not their own entity) she also walked like a gangster with a swagga. No, this wasn’t an ordinary Punjabi woman, an ordinary Punjabi, or an ordinary woman, or heck even close to any person I had ever met. Even in the first few seconds in which she sat down next to me, that much became pretty clear. Clearly, those windows were going to remain shut.

But at this point, I was distracted from her visage, and focused elsewhere. Normally, I would have put on my earphones and listened to music and played the 795th stage of Frozen Bubbles on my phone (no exaggeration there). But I was not in the mood for music, and so luckily whilst taking the sounds around me all in - tuning through the different channels of the ambient sounds which surrounded me (much like one does with radio) and my ears pricked up, as my interested was slowly but surely piqued by what she was saying…I tuned into her show to which my undivided aural capacity was henceforth dedicated.

I know that eavesdropping is a Pakistani passion. People I know can be in restaurants and still follow conversations happening in the booth on the far side of the room. Generally, I feel eavesdropping is quite ethically repugnant, especially when people are making an effort not to be heard by speaking softly and so I actively and repeatedly tune out, and go into my tubelight flicker mode in order to avoid listening in to others. And being a Karachiite and now living in London, the more we’re “pack’d like sardines in a crusht tin box” the more we find ways to tune out and focus on the space between our ears only (earphones) or limit our world-view to our phone’s screen… so in many ways, I am not unused to tuning out loud and big people.

But she didn’t demand attention - she wrenched it from me in a way that I knew it was never mine to give…it was truly her birthright.

She was talking very loudly on the phone with someone, telling them about the troubles she had with her visa. I sent a text to a friend saying:

“loud, butch, most manly Punjabi woman I’ve ever met is on my bus. She’s so fascinating, as is her conversation…to be continued”

Apparently, when she went to get her visa to come to this country, she got in an argument which quickly escalated into a bedlam where she broke windows and chairs. Despite this, she was still upset a the audacity of her visa rejection. I began to get the feeling that I was onto something truly special here. Something so delicious and chattpatta, that I knew finally, my time livetweet her conversation had come…to forever crystallize that point in time.

Unfortunately, the autocorrect on my phone made a bit of a mess of the Urdu words. What she was actually saying was… “Unho neh mujhe visa nahi diya, mei neh kaha kyun to kehne lagay - ‘Aap ne larai ki, cheekha aur sheeshay toray, toh…” 

As I tried to type all this which was quite a feat, as my fingers suddenly felt like I was navigating greasy sausages to pluck at a harp’s strings daintily, and by the time I tweeted it, the conversation had taken a dramatic turn…

Instead of a boastful, aggressive tone, the tenor of her voice had now assumed a distinctly tharki character - a bhooki, lecherous, lustful one. The phone had now come off her ear and was being slowly rubbed across her lips as she spoke to her lover, each sentence unfolding a new delectable thrust of the phone around her smacking lips and stubbly, undulating upper lip.

Have you paused to wonder here about the gender of her lover? If you thought she was talking to another woman, then I don’t know what it says about you, but you would be right…but this took me a while to figure out…because I thought she was talking to her khaavand as her wedding finger was heftily indulged, much like the rest of her.

So yes, I was sitting on a double-decker bus opposite a woman making love to a mobile phone in a language and tone that I had heard from men in another country 1000s of miles away, where another woman was receiving all this lust.

Oh and one more thing - the woman was talking as a man. As in, “mei tum se pyar karta huun” “mei tumhe miss kerta huun” etc.  which made me squint and squirm as I thought that I must have completely gotten her gender wrong to begin with and this passionately embroiled person in front of me was a man…? But she wasn’t and so then I thought that since I already believe gender is fluid, her body parts of a woman didn’t dictate she be one, and her self-identification with the male gender didn’t mean she was less female…She just Was…and with that my mind melted.

And if to emphasise the surreal madness of this moment, where my reality was literally ripping itself into shreds, she said something that I had to tweet. I’ll give you the background of it first, and then, when you have read what she said, take a moment to digest it.

The lover in Pakistan - let’s call her S - had just received some gift that this fantastic woman - Z - had sent. As S thanked her, Z brushed her words aside, insisting that such acts were not for courting gratitude. “Mei yeh cheezain thanks ke liye nahi kerta. Balke…”

“I will eat you raw, my love - and then never take a shit!”

…

Breathe.

She laughed uproariously at her on ingenuity as I struggle to control mine within the self-imposed shackles of propriety.

Now I am a trained doctor who has seen crazy shit, things which are so far beyond fucked up that I promptly went into denial and blocked them out, so as not to deal with them…Every person trained to be a doctor has a “doctor face” and demeanour which is a face and facade one needs to maintain and keep wearing so as not to betray any emotions or reactions…But my doctor facade has never been so threatened since it’s birth as it was when she said the “potty” line…My face twitched and I felt a laughter and madness bubble inside me so wildly, that I had to physically cover my face with BOTH my hands feigning to rub my eyes to stop from reacting… But much like you curtail your laugher at the punch line of a performance long enough to hear the next bit, she had moved on to something new, which made me forget the last bit…

But before I give you the final bits of this story, I need you to sit here with me. And really, really think about this with me. I have spent all my life wondering what it means to be a woman. Not just a woman, but a Pakistani/desi woman, surrounded by our own ever changing approaches to feminity, to sexuality, to freedom, to privacy and autonomy. I’ve thought about how equality can work, and I’ve thought about how equality robs women of their own sense of self. I’ve thought about gender and its authoritative limits, and I’ve thought about how gender often feels like a prison we keep building around ourselves. I’ve thought about biology and convention, and how we keep finding these two meet in the same way, with few permutations. I’ve thought about being a woman, and I’ve thought about being myself and when these are a continuous thread and when they are tied together lumpily…

But perhaps at no time, at no moment, at no instance have all these ideas and thoughts ever been so completely shed like a chrysalis, transformed into an imago by one divine woman who took everything that was simply a form of mimesis on my part as a being into one true being, whose very pores spewed a diegesis that Plato would have sung of till the fat lady sings.

[back to the story]

Suddenly, a second mobile protested from within her girth. Z commanded S to hold on, and picked it up switching from a lover in throes of passionate telephone pyaar to a no-nonsense all-business “Commander.” Within seconds, her eyes widened as she kept uttering “shittt, shittt, shittt…” (the way all us subcontis do with emPHAsis on the “t”.) Swiftly she cut S’s call, and was now completely chanelling the entirety of her entity into the confines of this second call. As her words gained momentum, so did her volume and soon she was yelling at someone on the phone as the bus trundled on…

She said “Khan Saab, Khan Saab yeh aap kya keh rahey hain!? KHAN SAAB kitnay kharay huay hain? AAP WAHAN SEH DUUR HO JAEIN! BUS STOP PEH JAEIN KHAAAN SAAAB MERII BAAT SUNAYN BUSSSS KHAAN SAAAB!” A very frightened Khan Saab was first barked at for information, directed to a safe inconspicuous area - a bus stop and Z was now admonishing him to calm down even as she upped the crazy. Apparently, said Khan Saab was on the way to the “flat” when he saw two people outside, and a further four policemen with them. Z kept referring to them ‘vardi walay’, and their presence had her, the man and me freaked out and at the breaking limit of my poker faced facade… She kept yelling at ‘Khan saab’ to stop freaking out, “aap ki phutti hui kyun hai?” and to how to stay away from the men in uniforms and not look their way as he stood at the bus stop lest they get suspicious. 

Here is what I tweeted then.

Now at this point; self-awareness slowly started returning to my own mind and body, and it was beginning to dawn on me that not only was I witnessing a fiery lesbian desi woman, but a pakhana-pervert fiery lesbian desi woman, and now it was pretty clear that the pakhana-pervert fiery lesbian desi woman was a gangster overlord of the underhanded pakhana-pervert fiery lesbian desi woman.

Z.O.M.F.G

Z now told Khan saab that “the office” was going to be shut for a few days, until she could sort all this out, but not to worry. Suddenly, Khan saab informed her that someone named Nadia was approaching the office. She frantically urged Khan saab to make sure Nadia DID NOT enter the building by waving at her discreetly “KOI ISHAARA DAYN USSAY!” Once he was able to pull that off, Z also realized that the since the police still hadn’t rung the door bell (something she scoffed they hadn’t done ‘last time’ either!) she relaxed, and now started adopting a much gentler tone with Khan saab, one that still seemed to mock him, but was much calmer, much slower, approaching the control and swagger of one speaking to a jigri dost jiss ki aap leh rahey houn - kachayree style (Thanks for that word @gulshaniya).

It was right at this moment that I realised I had to get off at my stop for work. For the longest moment, I agonised over whether I should go back to the mundanity of my job, or stay on to keep following the adventures of the most exhilarating woman, nay person, I had ever had the chance of stumbling onto.

I suppose you can guess the choice I eventually made. A mundane fool (aka: me) chose her own adventure page in a rush of mediocrity and as expected looked at the block letters of THE END rush at her after the first few lines, leaving a vast empty page of “maybes” and “nothingness.”

So yeah, to say I regretted my choice is an understatement…I STILL regret my choice and will be haunted by what a whirlwind of utter other(under?)worldliness I could’ve been caught up in, had I blown off my safe-little, done-to-death rat race.

Who was Z? How did she manage to encompass so many stereotypes, and yet surpass them all? How did she come to live this life? How did she manage to become this person? Who did she have to knock-off to get to this position of clear authority? What was it like being a lesbian gangster in modern day London? What was it like to be a London-based lady gangster with honeys in Karachi? How did Z decide to take everything that society and conventions had thrown at her and make them into not just an armor, but a weapon to be wielded at the world, to be used for her cleave her own path across fate?

I accept that I won’t understand and maybe a part of me didn’t want to know and opted off the bus because of the fear that when the magician reveals too much it is but a disappointing parlour trick…and the magic is gone. Whereas Z is larger than life and will remain a figment of my fevered fancy. On the cold gray mornings when my clockwork life feels like a rerun where I’m not sure whether I’m awake or still asleep, her shadow looms larger than a double-decker and more flamboyant than it’s raging red, promising a life at the limits of audacity.

Z. 

Anonymous asked: you only seem to say 'jee jee poochiay', but you don't answer them, do you?

haha. Fair enough, I’m quite unreliable that way. What needs answering?