| At first I thought my glasses might be playing tricks on me. I could not see clearly any more. But I had not had to change the power of my lenses for years so I suspected that I may have a serious problem. I consulted an optician and learned from him that I was suffering from a kind of wasting disease which would begin with double vision and would gradually deteriorate until I would not be able to recognize anything as it really was. |
| Having been warned, I prepared myself as best as I could. I trained myself to see both sides to any argument; I sought to distinguish differing points of view; I could recognize the disparate sects in Islam without losing sight of their place in the larger fraternity of the Muslim Ummah; I looked at the map and although seeing two wings of a country identified both as parts of the same Pakistan. I could even without squinting discern the two faces of an insincere friend. |
| More recently though, as the disease has spread, I have found myself becoming increasingly confused and disoriented. Like a explorer without a compass I too have lost my bearings. I could not decide which moon I should welcome as the herald of Eid – the Provincial one or the Federal one sighted a day later? After waiting half a century for the reappearance of the vision of Pakistan first seen at Lahore in 1940, I stood on the same spot and was told that it would appear on 20th March and obligingly again on 23rd March. I felt disturbed, uneasy. Would I always be seeing two moons on each Eid? Would there in future be two commemorations of Pakistan Day each year? |
| Was I the only one affected by this double vision, I wondered. Apparently not. Rather like AIDS, it was something that more people had contracted than were prepared to admit, and like AIDS it lowered one’s levels of immunity and power of resistance until one sank inexorably into twilight of impaired faculties and faulty judgment. Soon I could expect to lose my hearing, my power of reasoning, my commonsense and finally my instinct for survival. I would become a lemming, driven by some uncontrollable urge until I destroyed myself. |
| During the period of my decline, I would be subjected to a number of tests, I was told, some of them as painful as electrical shocks mental patients are often required to endure. |
| One such test, I was warned, will be to read the original manifesto of the Pakistan People’s Party and to reconcile its now arcane tenets with the policies of the present PPP Government. Another test is to memorize the provisions of the Constitution and to spot the deliberate mistakes which have allowed elected representatives of all shapes, size and political deformity to squeeze through its loopholes. Another ingenious one is to be shown a pack of inveterate Opposition leaders which is then shuffled and dealt with the dexterity of a card-sharp. I will be given ten seconds to recall the various names – Round Table Conference, PNA, MRD, COP or whatever – applicable to each varying spread of Opposition personalities. |
| Randomly, I shall be handed mug shots of policemen camouflaged as dacoits and dacoits uniformed as policemen, and be asked to tell them apart. I could be given accusers and accused to weigh in the scales of justice and have nothing more than the feather of a bribe to tip the balance. I may be asked why only the poor pay their dues, the salaried class their taxes, while the rich pay only lip service. |
| I shall certainly be asked to unravel a mystery now almost as old as I am. Why am I preparing to go to war over the right of self-determination by a motley community of Muslim and Hindu Indian passport-holders who ignored a call to arms in 1947, fought against us in 1965 and again in 1971, when the right of self-determination was so decisively exercised by East Pakistan. I might even be asked why I believe that in the name of Islam, the people of Jammu and Kashmir, many of whom like our own voting generations, were born after 1947, would necessarily vote for union with another vassal state, or for that matter with a more foreign and stranger Pakistan. |
| I doubt whether I will pass any of these tests. It will probably be more humane to allow me to slip uncomplainingly into an ordained decline, until I can no longer tell the difference between night and day, fact and fiction, straitened right and crooked wrong, hope for tomorrow from despair about today. Double speak will become as natural to me as double vision. |
| I cannot take leave though, I have been told, without one last terminal act of courage, as demanding as the final leap by the lemming over the precipice. I have to keep my eyes open long enough to see a final blurred image of frenzied citizens tearing piranha-like at the flesh of my country, gouging mouthfuls even of each other. I have to let my ears listen to the deafening din of lies drown the death rattle that escapes from the throats of strangulated truths, for that I am told is the last sound I will ever need to hear. |
| Published in THE FRIDAY TIMES, Lahore, 24-30 May 1990.] |
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