Self-help and self-respect among the unprivileged often cheer up the Pakistanis who live abroad and return to their homeland in search of the green, green grass

We were coming in to land at Lahore airport. It was midnight. Peering out of the window, my eyes sought familiar landmarks that I had grown up with. Rows and rows of awkwardly-arranged and tightly-fitted homes, made sullen by dim lights was all I saw. The silence of the night was eerie. Inside the plane, a tsunami of feelings was rising among Pakistanis coming home. Each lost in his world, the touchdown provided a moment of supreme joy.

Home at last!

The homeward journey began 24 hours earlier in New York at the brightly lit JFK airport. All one saw at the PIA counter were Pakistanis. Excited like kids out on a field trip in their Sunday best. The airplane staff attending on us could not have been better. They served us with a smile and took care of all our creature comforts, except provide relief to our tortured torsos jam-packed in the narrow seats of the economy class. Forget about leg space. But when the limbs are in limbo for hours, you invite blood clots. However PIA is not our personal physician. If you have the extra dough, buy commodious body space and fly first class. Right?
Lahore in December was Lahore in paradise once: of splendour in the grass; of glory in the flower. Images long forgotten stirred up a riot within me. Those old pipal trees on the Mall now looked alien besides flashing strobe lights and crass materialism which had spread like wildfire. The magnificent trees with their glossy leaves had shaded us from the burning sun for over half-a-century. Dirt laden, they were now dying.

Dust and people; drivers drunk on speed and dare-devilry racing in their dinky cars; screaming plazas with shoppers squirrelling their way around hoarding stuff made in China; eateries choking with families binging on burgers and French fries; blaring horns and deafening cellphone tones with bhangra tunes ringing every nanosecond had the Lahories bottomed out on uncouth consumerism or was my imagination hyperventilating?

Lovely Gulberg — where once the gentility lived in their glasshouses nurturing their snobbery and upper-crustiness while looking down on the rest as ‘low-lives’ — had aged horribly. Had Anarkali moved to Gulberg? Had it brought with it Bano bazaar, where we gallivanted for hours looking for girlie things? The line between residential and commercial sectors was decidedly deleted, fogging the urban sprawl with homes, offices, shops, schools, mosques, colleges and restaurants.
“Oh, don’t you fret over what has happened to us,” a Gulberg resident said cheerfully. “People here are laughing all the way to the bank after making a killing in the sale of their homes to commercial developers.”

Where has all this money come from? Silence was what my question fetched.

At the Jail Road park, where once dustbins in the shape of crocodiles and teddy bears sprinkled green acres laden with the cutest of rabbits and elephants engraved in cement tiles, the ravages of neglect was all I saw. The park was brown with plentiful of dust all around. The poor rabbits and elephants were defaced, some with their eyes gouged out, others decapitated. The footpaths were a hazard now. You could only walk with your eyes down to avoid a freefall. Gone were those green crocodiles and teddies that made such a pretty sight; gone were the flower bearing bushes and gorgeous looking trees that were the pride and glory of the park.

But the shabbiness of the park didn’t keep people away. It was still a rendezvous for college boys and girls stealing a few hours of romance; it was still a family place with couples picnicking with their kids; it was still a playing field for cricketers and their fans; it was still a track for joggers and walkers wanting fitness in their lives.

What had changed was the fabric of people; men, women and children from all income groups threaded together to make an interesting pattern. They mingled easily and comfortably. It heartened one to see hordes of middle class families of modest means muscling in to make a presence in a society that has always kept them on the margins.

Pakistan can only move forward if it allows its middle class to come up and compete with the privileged. For decades, we never had a middle class. We only had the rich and the educated or the poor and the illiterate, nothing in-between. For that, all of us must shoulder the blame squarely.

Yasmin is an ayah. She has a quarter in the GOR Estate, the babu mohalla of Lahore’s power elites. “My employers have gone to the Philippines,” she tells me when I meet her outside her quarter. She is with her two young daughters who go to a government school nearby. “My begum sahib was a very kind person,” she tells me when I ask how much salary she got to tend to the civil servant’s toddlers. “I didn’t get any pay, but we got this quarter free.”

Her mistress paid for Yasmin to train as a massage woman and a beautician. “I also learnt to give facials, pedicures, manicures,” she said confidently. “Now wives of officers all around here call me for waxing and threading as well.” Yasmin has been taught a skill that can provide her with a good income. Her husband is old and a heart patient. He has undergone vasectomy because he thinks four children are more than enough. “Today is our 16th wedding anniversary. I didn’t remember. My husband reminded me. I love him.”

It is sheer delight to hear Yasmin sketch her future and the future of her four children. She has big plans for them. Later that evening, I go to dinner and am almost lynched for a remark I make. “I think Asma Jehangir is the bravest woman on planet earth,” I stick my neck out. “But I don’t think it’s helpful for Pakistan when Pakistanis come to America and abuse Musharraf. He has already been nationally and internationally damned over his shabby treatment of Mukhtaran Mai.”

Almost all the media heavyweights from TV and newspapers, who shall remain nameless, lunged at me and shut me up in a minute. Unwilling to hear me out, they informed me (as if I didn’t know) that Asma Jehangir was the only person who had the guts to stand up against dictator Musharraf.

Horrified (and a little scared) I backed off immediately. One of them activated his cell phone and dialled Ms Jehangir. He wanted her to come over right away. I was put in the dock.

All I had set out to say (but was abruptly cut short) was that the human right activists could help hundreds of Mukhtaran Mais brutalized daily in Pakistan. They could set up an income generation foundation with foreign funding and make an everlasting contribution for women looking for stability, income and self esteem. Thousands were crying in the wilderness for help. I wanted to cite Yasmin’s example.

I also wanted to say that Indians who come to the US never wash their dirty linen in public. But the presence of veteran Indian journalist Kuldip Nayar, nursing a bad cold, prevented me from further embarrassing my wonderful hosts.

That night I realized how intolerant the intelligentsia had become. With its journalistic licence to sit on judgment over others, these learned people disliked views different from theirs.

On my way to Islamabad the next day, I met Ilyas. We had stopped for tea at one of the assigned stops on the motorway. He offered to clean our car. Ilyas lost his right arm as a teenager. “My arm and my hand got chopped off by a sugarcane machine when it malfunctioned,” he told me. “But I refuse to live on charity.”

Self-help and self-respect among the unprivileged was what cheered me most on my return home.