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short faction Zia
Mohyeddin column
By Mirza Athar Baig And then suddenly the man with an enormous thirst was transformed into a child. A child with a thirst enormously more acute than that of the man: a child's thirst. A child lost in the wilderness of parched lands and glowing hot granite rocks, with sandy gravel under his feet and a blazing sun overhead and all that swept by torrid gusts of wind. It was extraordinary for a child of his age, to be in an inferno like that, but then he was an extraordinary child himself, and knew it. At the tender age of twelve, he had already acquired the steely obduracy and the self-annihilating will-to-fire of the man with an enormous thirst. So the child crossing 'the desert of death by thirst and starvation,' Dasht-e-Merg as they called it, knew he was the only one of his age among them who could accept the challenge. Yes they had posed it as a challenge to him, as they did earlier, challenging his spirit to dare, to brave the unimaginably dangerous circumstances. And always he had come off
victorious, be that a jump off from the edge of a high cliff, or a dive And the man with an enormous thirst was startled out of his wits at the arrival of the child, so unforeseen, so sudden, like a phantom from nowhere. But then the sun was the same sun, and the asphalt road underneath his weary feet was the same blistering hot sandy gravel, and the brick-ish blocks of buildings around the road were no different from the granite rocks and all was aloft in the same hellish gusts of wind as they had in the valley of death the child had to cross to save his honour, so puerile and perishable. And then of course the 'thirst,' searing and shearing down his throat and ripping his innards asunder, was the same thirst. The child was not surprised as they brought the dare with the same words: "You are a brave boy. No one else but you can do it. Every boy of the village will accept you as his leader. What an honor." And their eyes would sparkle, as if purified, ever so momentarily of the murky shame of the child's secret: the child's reward. The man with an enormous thirst cursed the frantic squirming of his shrivelled tongue in the infernal void of his mouth, only to be quenched with the cool heavenly draughts of water. The child approached the cacti plants laden with the crimson fruit shaped like inverted bells, full of sweet and sour pulp imbued with water, and he knew that he wouldn't die of thirst, but would return to the village with the piece of white marble found only on the edge of the deadly wasteland, as a proof, that he had achieved the unachievable. And then the man with an enormous thirst smiled, and his parched lips cracked and bled, but he too knew that he wouldn't die of thirst; his would be the holiest, the noblest of deaths, unachievable for any ordinary mortal. But he has to reach his destination in time, right in time, or it would be all in vain. To banish his thirst, he talked to himself: "Go away, you messenger of Satan. Go away. I won't die the death of thirst; mine would be the greatest of deaths, it would be martyrdom." But the sun was the same scorching ball of fire and the air was the same blazing blast of fire, and the child was the same child, devouring the crimson heavenly pulp of the cacti fruit. Perhaps I should have a sip of water somewhere, he mused. "Don't drink or eat anything on your way, or it may make you sick, and you may fail," he recalled their last command. But the child knew that he would not fail, he had defeated the thirst, and with the piece of white stone in his hand as a proof of his success, was on his way back to the village, and then came his mother crying and wailing, running deep into to wilderness after him. She clasped him, hugged him, kissed him and wept, "Fool! don't you know, they want you to be dead." That night, and for many a nights to come she told him her secret and cried and cried and she died. The child set out to the desert, again, to live among lizards and befriend scorpions and snakes; but then they came, in holy garbs, "Come; with us child, God can forgive all the sinners, come with us, to safety and forgiveness, and to the greatest, and the holiest challenge of your life." The suicide bomber rushed in panic towards his target, stumbled and fell. Frantic, he rose again, dashed towards his target and pushed the button. Click and nothing. Again click and nothing. No more. The man with an enormous thirst returned to the hideout, and looked towards the looks of disdain around him, and then he listened to the voice: "You are a brave man. Don't worry. You won't miss next time." The child went towards the pitcher of water and drank deep and long. "I want to share a secret with you," he said at last. "What secret?" the voice was contemptuous. "My father was not a thief, and my mother was a chaste woman," he said and his hand slithered down to the push button and this time it worked.
By Saeed Ur
Rehman It is raining on the tarmac
below. You can see it on the screen showing live imagery from the camera Worried haggling with a taxi driver about the fare to the bus terminal on Peshawar Road, Rawalpindi. 820 rupees. Shuttling in a rickety taxi that does not stop at red signals during the nights while the driver blames the government for all the lawlessness and corruption. He also praises Zia ul Haq for transparency and honesty. All the previous martial laws were okay. This one is really bad. The prices have gone up. Especially petrol which controls the prices of everything else. Too bad. Too bad. Yes, only Allah is running this country. Yes, of course. What is written on this CD hanging from the rear-view mirror? The prayer for Allah's protection while travelling. Yes, we all need protection from our own selves. The bus terminal. Magazine stalls. Public telephone points with operators dozing at the counters. Efficiency and early morning drowsiness. One ticket to Lahore please. 520 rupees for our luxury bus service. What does that involve? A meal and a lot of legroom. Does it have a toilet? No. What kind of a luxury is this? Isn't this bus service a multinational presence? No, it has localised itself by simultaneously upgrading the standard of Pakistani transport industry and downgrading the international buses. Take your ticket please. Get your luggage scanned for bombs with metallic parts. Oh who is this woman? Our ground hostess. She echoes the departure and arrival and serves food while college boys enjoy their risque laughter. The road is smooth. It is the motorway: Pakistan's symbol of clean modernity that bypasses all other symbols on the way to Lahore. Above the driver, ads and entertainment silently interrupt each other on the TV in a programme called Consumer Plus. If you put the headphones on, you can hear the latest song of Jawad Ahmad. A child cries in the rear. Mother tries to calm the baby named Osama. Nothing in this common Arabic name. Put the headphones on. Plug the jack in. Turn the volume up. Lose yourself in groovy Punjabi pop that glorifies the girls of Lahore. After the first part of Consumer Plus, the bus stops at a roadside restaurant. Shuffle out of the bus. See the world that you have been away from. An incomplete past run into an imperfect present while nostalgia and desire remain intensely elusive. Come back. Sit in the bus. Brood all the way to Lahore. The bus terminal in Lahore. The thick sheet of noise and smoke under the dust-covered sky. Breathe while trying to arrive all the time. Take another taxi. Get swindled. Do not worry. Try to justify the legerdemain of the driver by thinking that he is a dehumanised person who can only survive by lying. Think that the system is dehumanising. Somewhere deep down you know that you are using dead metaphors, shortcuts to the death of your own thought. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Listen to the prayer calls. Listen to the sound of honking horns of commuter vans. See. You are made of dust that is why you have to inhale smoke. There is no logic in the journey from nothingness to dust to compost for hemp plants in the Miani Sahib graveyard. Only the implacable logic of things. Contradictions sustain human societies and their graveyards like the persistent hands of the beggars at traffic signals. Enter home. Lie to your parents. About what you have been doing in the seductive and uncouth Europe, which was called the Sub-continent before colonialism made it a continent. You had only been studying (Sub-)Continental Philosophy. You never made love, never drank and became a vegetarian because halal meat was difficult to find. Take a shower. Find an empty room. Bolt the door. Sleep. Sleep through all the prayer calls, pretending not to hear them. Come out in the middle of the night when everybody is sleeping. Go to the roof of the house. Not a single star in the sky. Human beings have eaten the stars while running on the roads. Night thoughts. The sounds of tyres cutting the heart of tarmac in the distance. Sit for a while on a chair broken by the inclemency of life. Your words sentence yourself. Go downstairs. Sleep again through the prayer calls till late in the morning. Breakfast table. One relative tells you that it may be possible to get a good job through some of his connections. You are divided among many people and you are being spoken in many voices. You are many people at once because you are no one in particular. A hand pours mineral water for you from a bottle of 'safe' water. A voice informs you that it is the only water that is safe to drink in Pakistan. You drink safety poured from a plastic bottle. Water and plastic are both indestructible. When you are destroyed, plastic will survive you. You think about starting a poem about Lahore, modelled after T. S. Eliot's 'The Wasteland': 'April is the month of abandoned plastic bags flying in the streets.' No. Not a good idea. Eat your share of chapati and think about your entrails while relatives dish out small talk in ladlefuls. Try to look engrossed, interested. Impure life. Go into the empty room again. Lie on the sofa. Zia
Mohyeddin column At school we learn that the 'tragedy' is a narrative -- mostly in verse -- written in an elevated style and dealing with the downfall of an exalted person. We grow up and discover that there have been countless doctrines and definitions of tragedy. So many of the elements which critics, at various times, have regarded as constituents of tragedy are not present in some indisputably great tragedies, or are very tangentially or incidentally present. We may think that the Aristotelian definition of tragedy is outmoded but I cannot think of any tragedy of note, which is not based on some of the principles that Aristotle outlined. Greek tragedy is one of the greatest legacies that the Western world has inherited in the sphere of literature. The acting, the stagecraft and a certain dramatic technique that we see today in the live theatre are derived, in no minor way, from the example set by the Greek dramatists. Despite the small number of complete plays extant and those only by the great dramatists whose names are well known (Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides) there is sufficient evidence to show why Greek tragedy should so influence drama through the centuries and why for the greater part it has become almost immortal. It has to be remembered, too, that this great art form was developed over only one hundred years, approximately, from the time the great battles of Marathon and Salamis were fought against the Persians at the beginning of the 5th century B.C until about 400 B.C, after the ghastly conflict known as the Peloponnesian war between Athens and Sparta. Nevertheless, that period covered the great age of Athens, of the building of the Parthenon with all its wonderful sculpture. The expression of the tragic form of drama that spanned the 5th Century B.C can excite and interest us even today. Since the early history of the Greek world is largely veiled in the dark mists of time, we cannot do better than read this quotation from Thucydides' introduction to his sad history of the Peloponnesian war: "It is evident that the country now called Greece had in ancient times no settled population; on the contrary migrations were frequent and several tribes readily abandoned their homes under the pressure of superior number. Piracy became prevalent and all the coast populations whether seafaring or not, were constantly plundered." Although there were perhaps countless sieges and piratical raids, the story of Troy and how it was besieged for ten years by Agamemnon in an endeavour to win back Helen, the wife of his brother (Menaleus) who had been seized by Paris, is most familiar to us because it emerged later in a literary form we call epic. The Homeric stories were handed down to us through the generation of poetic bards. In time to come, the epic form would influence the development of lyric and didactic poetry to a great extent. The first great and well-known name who appears upon the stage of ancient Greek tragedy is Aeschylus (525-456 B.C). He developed primarily as a poet, but the effect of what he saw and witnessed at these battles is very prominent in his plays. Being so close, as he was to the events of the Persian wars, his work shows an intense spirit of patriotism and the power of the gods over men and the force of destiny. The world of the ancient Greeks was full of violence and cruelty -- cruelty of the gods mostly. Everyone accepted the prescribed order of things until those who created Greek tragedy instilled a new dimension into human thinking. The word for dancing ground in the Homeric Greek is Choros. This then is the beginning of the Chorus (in drama) who both sing and dance. A form of dramatic representation was already in existence and, to a certain extent, this might derive from religious ceremonies indigenous to all parts of the Greek mainland when the sowing of the seed and the gathering of the harvest were celebrated. Some sort of a god of fertility or vegetation was honoured by a song and dance performed by a Chorus with possibly a leader. In the time of migration as the pirates and settlers come to the mainland, they brought their stories with them and these stories were represented by the Chorus on the dancing floor already in existence. It might not have been a dancing ground. It could have been a grove of trees, a spring of water or round an altar to a tree spirit, so that the religious element was always in evidence. From the primitive choral ode, sung by a rustic Chorus, drama under Aeschylus developed into the leader answering Chorus, on a raised platform, or stage, with the introduction of dramatic devices such as messengers' speeches reporting what had happened elsewhere. Orestes kills his mother in revenge for his father's murder and knows he has to suffer: Prometheus defies Zeus and brings fire to mankind and prepares, unflinchingly, to stand punishment; Orestes is acquitted of his great crime, but he is willing enough to suffer if the verdict goes against him. All these and many other questions of how to define the right way of life are emphasised in these plays. There is much to remember about the Greek tragic writer Sophocles who lived from 497 to 406 B.C. He is said to have written nearly a hundred plays of which only seven are extant. Sophocles, it is said, was the first dramatist to use painted scenery. He improved upon general stage management. His plots have more variety and his characters are very much more perfectly portrayed. While Aeschylus laid all at the feet of the gods (and no man could go unpunished for his sins), Sophocles tends to ignore the overwhelming force of destiny and the present power of evil. To him, man is an ordinary mortal and master of his own fate. Sophocles is perhaps best known for the three plays he wrote dealing with the cycle of legend that surrounded the royal house of Thebes, not Troy. These plays ('Antigone', 'Oedipus', and 'Oedipus at Colonus') were not staged as a trilogy or written in the order of a story. Because of this, there are various discrepancies in the portrayal of character. The thing that strikes us most is the awful tragic horror watching a character on the stage who, unwittingly, marries his mother after having killed his father, to have these terrible things revealed to him by a set of circumstances. Oedipus was a good man in his own way, not especially connected with wickedness but, nevertheless, all unbeknown, he was the victim of the vilest evil that can befall anyone. In the play all this is revealed when the shepherd, an old man now, confirms the whole ghastly truth. It is an excellent example of dramatic irony. (to be continued)
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deep into the putrid water of some abandoned well, or crossing the path of
some rabid dog, or catching and killing a snake with bare hands, or urinating
in places known as the undisputed haunted abodes of the diabolical creatures:
the child knew how to defend his childish honour, to stand his ground among
his playmates, the spoilt brats of the high ups of the village. He knew that
he could infuse deathly terror in their hearts and for once, only for once,
crush them to nothingness. The child's reward. But then all that would fade
out gradually and they would come again, once again, with disdain and mockery
in their eyes at the child's secret, and with a new ordeal.
attached to the belly of the plane. The crew announces turbulence and
seatbelts. Your hands act on the instructions. Through the windows on your
left, you look at the night sky glowing with lightening. The plane shudders
and sinks. A heavy muffled thud and the sound of tyres trying to stop. 4:30
a.m. landing at Islamabad. Scampering after the cabin luggage. Long queues of
amphibian creatures. Your turn at the stairs. A bus takes everybody to the
main building. Waiting for the bigger suitcases. Shuffling feet and trundling
trolleys. X-ray machines displaying everybody's pudenda in colour codes. Sky
blue shirts and dark blue trousers with badges on their shoulders rub sleep
off their eyes and monitoring screens. Outside.