Our leaders and elites may have left the poor behind, but the poor themselves have moved on

Thankfully, no more ‘aunty’ business when being addressed by strangers. Nor ‘baaji’, for that matter. Now one is addressed as ‘madam’. The addressor’s tone is solemn; his behaviour impersonal. Far from being gratuitous, it is professional. Believe it or not, this is the first thing to strike me when I return from America after an absence of seven years.

The second surprise is the cell phone revolution while I was gone. The cleaning man (you don’t call them sweeper in the US) carries his cell in his shirt pocket. Suddenly in the midst of performing his mundane duties of scrubbing and sweeping, the phone comes on with a loud bang of bhangra music. Samuel looks at me sheepishly, switches off his cell and goes back to whatever boring chore he’s been assigned to do for that day. Sammy is not a shirker, nor a great talker. Don’t ask his salary for you will think me a slave driver. The person who sent him told me what to pay him. (Personally I think the money is peanuts.) “Don’t spoil him by offering him more. He’ll be useless to you,” I am forewarned.
The sewer man who goes around our street with a long metal wire to clean the clogged gutters of our homes has a cell too. Boota is his name and he’s a man in a hurry. The sewer doctor waves his magic wire and presto the foul smell vanishes. No wonder, Boota is so much in demand; his cell never stops clanging.

The part-time cook who travels from Wah charges Rs500 for two hours of cooking. “Call me on my mobile whenever you need me,” he instructs me. When I ask him to make daal roti and aloo gosht (something I have lusted after in America), Liaquat looks at me aghast. “I am a chef not a cook,” he reminds me. “So do you want Chinese or English dishes cooked today?” he asks somewhat impatiently. I am overwhelmed by his talent and leave him to his devices in the kitchen. Two hours later he produces dishes, for the likes of which I would have to pay a small fortune in America.

Ejaz, the carpenter, is a graduate. He is young and frisky. He keeps a French beard, wears jeans and sports a sufi-like hairstyle with thick locks pulled back. His eyes are deep and contemplative. He takes pride in his craft and works fast with his hands. Tell him what you want done and he does it. Once I got him to shift the shower curtain rod three times, until I got the height and the position right. While drilling holes umpteen times, he looked exasperated but didn’t complain. As he squatted on the floor after turning down the chair I had offered him to sit on to scribble his bill, he handed me the bill written in English in the most beautiful handwriting I had seen. No spelling errors either. It was so reasonable that I had to throw in a hefty tip. The young man had put in many man hours in my work. “Thank you madam,” Ejaz said with a smile. For once I noticed the sadness from his face lift.
The electrician is another gem I picked up from the street. Sajjad works for a government department and after duty hours sits at his brother’s shop in the vicinity. He’s honest and hardworking. More importantly he knows his job and comes whenever called.

The first thing I do upon acquiring a cell is to feed in the numbers of my cleaner, cook (oops the chef), sewer man, carpenter and electrician. I hold these people in high regard and value their worth. In America, I did all these jobs myself, except clean the sewer, the need for which never arose.

Either I have changed — mellowed down with age — or the work ethics of our people have changed for the better in the seven years I am gone. No longer do I feel frustrated with the inferior workmanship that I found prevalent in Islamabad when I came out here from Karachi in 1993. Everyone wanted to make a quick buck; including domestic help (you don’t call them servants in the US). Islamabad was still a small town then. It was hard to find skilled workers. And those who did know their job had become spoilt rotten by the foreign missions who snapped up their services, leaving the hoi polloi, salaried people like us, to deal with yahoos who didn’t know how to connect two wires without blowing up a fuse or stop a minor faucet leak without causing a flood.

Today, I live in one of the new sectors of Islamabad. The plots are small and the houses joined together. People with modest incomes live here. In the middle of our sector is a bustling market which has just about everything — tailors, barbers, beauticians, cable operators, electricians, plumbers, carpenters, poultry sellers, nan bai, vegetable vendors, bakers, pharmacists, stationers, realtors, drycleaners ...
Providence provides livelihood for all in the area I live. In an empty plot across from me, I often see young women with big scavenger bags, picking up whatever can be retrieved for recycling. Also, the garbage man, who comes knocking with his wheelbarrow daily, is a one man recycling plant who separates the reusable stuff from household garbage right on the spot.

From across the park, I often see a line of women, some carrying babies balancing big bundles of firewood on their heads that they have handpicked in the nearby jungle. Some young girls wander around the park in search of saag, or wild spinach to cook their haandi with. In springtime, nature provides this poor man’s dish with abandon.

Men on their cycles carry brightly-coloured kitchenware woven in cane and beautified with fetching threadwork, the pride of our cottage industry. They call out to housewives to buy these things of utility, handmade and affordable.

The millions of poor and the unlettered are simple souls, whose only worry is how to earn money and run their households. Democracy and Bush mean nothing to them. Nor do they care whether General Musharraf wears his uniform or not. Neither are they interested in Benazir Bhutto’s and Nawaz Sharif’s promises of enriching their lives if allowed to return. They don’t look to the state for roti, kapra, makaan; they have given up all hopes for seeking justice, equity and fair play from their rulers.

The simple truth is that these rustics have taken their lives in their own hands and moved on. There is dignity of labour, self-respect and a desire for survival that I find everywhere I go. It was missing before, but it is there today. This socio-economic metamorphosis among the unprivileged classes is the only silver lining that I notice. It reflexively pulls me in and floods me with feelings I never had during all my years in America. I felt an outsider there; an alien, but this is home and the people here are mine. There’s a pride in this ownership and we are all stakeholders.

Our leaders and elites may have left the poor behind, but the poor themselves, with the help of God and none other, moved on. They have not begged, nor borrowed, nor stolen, nor cheated (as our elites have done). They have relied on their own sweat, toil and tears to carve a niche for themselves and a future for their children, untouched by the fruits of freedom (that Bush never tires of touting); untouched by the billions of dollars of foreign aid that never reached them; untouched by the progress that the rulers claim they have achieved for the downtrodden and underclass; untouched by the so-called development and prosperity that donor agencies pay millions to consultants in cataloguing and then reward our leaders with foreign junkets to wax eloquent at the UN in New York.

No, not our leaders but these poor people are our real heroes. Former prime ministers living abroad, the one still with us and the president are “surplus to requirements”.