COUSIN MARRIAGES

Are consanguineous marriages responsible for diseases?

In a complex tale of interrelationships, Malika’s marriage to her first cousin Latif was settled before she was born.  When the parents formalised the agreement the groom to be was too young to enunciate his first word. There is nothing unusual about this. Malika’s brother was betrothed to Latif’s sister when they were both toddlers and her mother Saniya was betrothed to her cousin Arif when she, Saniya was seven and Arif one year old.  Although Arif was so much younger it had to be him because there was no other suitable boy within the family.

When Arif died a year later Saniya was labelled as cursed. Luckily for her, the parents of a cousin on the other side were willing to have Saniya for a daughter in law and these two were married when both were eighteen. Another marriage within the safe confines of The Family, never mind that several persons in that family were diagnosed with diabetes and repeated intermarriages appeared to be reinforcing the responsible gene.

Malika’s son too was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of three.  He died at the age of five due to complications associated with the disease. The entire family mourned for a month. At the end of that period Malika’s younger sister was married to another of their cousins related to her by way of both parents. When asked (in some exasperation) why they did not marry outside the family Malika replied: ‘Because this is how we always do it.’ And that response suffices. Malika’s family is one of countless others who only ever marry their cousins if they can help it.

So the question is: Are cousin or consanguineous marriages responsible for diseases that are genetically transmitted?

Consanguineous marriage, in which two related persons such as first or second cousins marry each other, is very common among several cultures, including the cultures of Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and some middle-eastern and African countries. People belonging to these cultures together constitute perhaps a fifth of the world’s population.  In a consanguineous marriage, chances of both parents carrying the same recessive gene and therefore of their children inheriting the disease carried by that gene are greatly increased. The closer the relationship between the parents the greater the chance of both parents carrying the same recessive gene. Sickle cell disease for example, a condition that causes damage to muscles and organs occurs if an individual inherits two copies of the sickle cell allele, one from each parent. Persons with just one copy of the allele do not get this disease.

In England, research was conducted among a number of Pakistan families when it was found that a high number of children with hearing disabilities came from families where the parents were related to each other in complex ways.  “They have about twice the risk of having a child with problems which may be due to a recessive gene if they marry within the family,”  said Professor Bob Mueller of the hospital involved in this research.

Genetics however cannot be solely blamed. With diabetes for example, genes and ethnicity are risk factors, but they alone do not determine who gets the disease or its severity. Environment plays a role, as does lifestyle. Staying active, maintaining a healthy weight and eating a balanced diet can help postpone or prevent type 2 diabetes.

So why do people intermarry despite these findings? Why for example in the example cited above is intermarriage almost the only kind of marriage in Malika’s family?

It is probably a case of better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. Marriage within the family allows persons to stay within their comfort zone amongst people they know, often, for women, within close proximity to the family left behind. It means a pre-existing affection amongst in-laws, and closer relationships overall. There is also the not unimportant question of keeping property/finances within the family when marrying within it. In many families however, intermarriage is a question of lack of information and understanding of the risks involving genetic disease. Malika’s son may have survived, who knows, if his parents had taken him to a hospital … always presuming there was a hospital within reach, rather than to a pir who prescribed holy water and a talisman around the child’s neck.

Amongst immigrants from such cultures, consanguineous marriage is often viewed as a means of survival. In an alien environment surrounded by conflicting views and values, marriage within the family is seen as the best way of preserving and perpetuating an identity in imminent danger of being overwhelmed by the adoptive environment.

In the west consanguineous marriage is now considered almost synonymous with incest and marrying a blood relative is banned in some countries, but this was not always so. History and literature are replete with examples of marriages among cousins. If one must cite the example of a towering intellect, Einstein himself was married to a first cousin. None of which makes it right. One can almost see some quarters bristling at that last sentence, since several religious figures, even Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) were married within the family. But there was no genetic science in those days, and there is now, and religion advises us to think. Also, let’s not forget that the risk of disease increases with several other factors too. Older women have risky pregnancies.  Consuming alcohol during pregnancy is dangerous.

A US National Institute of Health resource says that there is significant literature on infant mortality, congenital anomalies, disabilities and many clinical conditions, often drawing attention to ethnic variations and an increased disease prevalence among Pakistani children in the UK. The situation at home has to be much worse.  Something must be done to mitigate the damage.

A tradition of consanguineous marriage points towards an insecure, insular state of mind.  Literacy, better education and public awareness campaigns can help broaden horizons. Carrier detection and genetic counselling programs have been successful in reducing the prevalence of inherited disorders in Iran. Community programmes for premarital screening are also useful. According to the Journal of Community Genetics, results from a screening program for sickle cell disease and β-thalassemia indicated that about 90% of couples in Saudi Arabia at risk of having affected children decided to marry regardless because they feared social stigmatisation and/or because wedding plans could not be cancelled at that stage. Therefore premarital screening should take place well in advance of marriage, perhaps in schools. Perhaps also the next generation, a healthier one, will learn to say, ‘This is how we always did it, but not any more.’

WHERE IS THE BEAUTY OF ISLAM?

http://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/27166/where-is-the-beauty-of-islam/

April 15, 2015



Muslim worshippers pray in the Gallipoli Mosque in a suburb of Sydney. PHOTO: REUTERS

The children’s author, Beverly Cleary, worked as a librarian for the US Army during the Second World War. In her autobiography, ‘My Own Two Feet,’ she wrote of an incident which made an impression on her during that time period:

“An army chaplain requested a book on flower arranging, a subject I had not expected to interest the army. I bought the most beautiful book I could find, and when I handed it to him, he remarked, ‘We teach little children to worship in beauty and then send them to Sunday school in church basements’.”

Aside from agreeing with the chaplain, the incident resonated with me.

In the 90s, we lived in the capital of Western Australia, Perth, which had a small Muslim population, enough to warrant a few mosques. Like all immigrants, we tried to keep the children in the cultural loop and went the extra mile to enable this. We kept in touch with the community from our part of the world, in addition to our Australian friends.

In that respect, we were unlike the better part of the Pakistani community, out of which one of them once told me proudly and a bit accusingly,

“Allah ke fazal se humaray ghar aaj tak na koi kafir aya hai na hum kisi kafir kay ghar gayay hain,”

(Thank God that till date, no unbeliever has ever come to our house and neither have we ever visited the house of an unbeliever.)

Words that are a subject for a blog in itself.

On Eid, we used to go to the mosque as a family, something that women rarely do in Pakistan, but then, immigrants are always more Catholic than the Pope. You can find the Muslim equivalent of that one yourself.

The Perth mosque was built in the early years of the 20^th century by Fateh Muhammad Deen, who migrated to Australia from Punjab. Not having been to Perth in over a decade, I am not aware of what the Perth mosque is like now, but at that time, it was housed in a small building in the town’s centre, bang across the street from a building with an interesting neon rooftop sign which read,

“Girls! Girls! Girls”

When we first visited the Perth mosque, its walls were being raised to shut out the sign, creating a little microcosm of a courtyard, and an L-shaped building consisting of a prayer room, with the Imam’s quarters in the basement.

On Eid – clothed in our best attire, shepherding a pair of unwilling children – we would arrive at the mosque where we would split up; dad to the main prayer hall, mum and the kids to the imam’s quarters in the basement. There, safely segregated from the men, the women prayed, kept an eye on the children, and tried to catch the khutba (sermon), trying to reconcile its content with their surroundings.

It was a small room at that time, full but not overflowing. A charpoy (bed) leant against the wall with the imam’s clothes draped over it as well as on a couple of chairs that stood in the corner. Not having seen the main prayer hall I cannot say how it was compared to our prayer room, but I was told the hall was ‘okay,’ which this room was definitely not.

In a culture obsessed with gender and sexual innuendo, I think it is rather inappropriate to be expected to concentrate on prayer with the imam’s shalwar’s colourful nara hanging discreetly in the background, what do you think? Surely a lock of woman’s hair is no more provocative than that flamboyant item of clothing?

It was a hot day, and in the absence of air conditioning, the slight breeze from a little window in the wall beside me was extremely welcomed. Yet, on more than one occasion, a lady from the congregation, shrouded in an abaya and hijab, walked over from across the room to shut it. Compelled into defiance by the heat, I reached out each time to re-open it. Glaring at each other as we left, I vowed to find another mosque the following Eid, and we did – the Turkish mosque.

Not as centrally located as the Perth Mosque, the Turkish mosque was more pleasant, with two large prayer rooms, the one in the front for the men and a smaller one at the back for women, divided from the men’s room by folding doors. This room would have been pleasant enough if it were not for the pungent odour from the toilets just outside its door. Naturally, since it was the women who kept the children with them, the toilets must never be far away.

The chaplain’s words come back to me as equally applicable to the Muslim world as we witnessed in Perth at the time, and almost everywhere else since. There is a dichotomy between teachings and practice in our lives. The Quran contains some breathtakingly beautiful verses and yet we concentrate so utterly on its forbidding aspect and teach only about zina (adultery) and kufr (faithlessness), and its related punishments.

Why can we not teach our children by hands-on methods illustrated by these verses, about the miracle of the honey bee and the honey it makes, the clouds and the rain, and the way the night follows day in a spherical and not flat world (Surah Az- Zumar, verse 5)?

Islam is a beautiful religion, and its scripture contains some of the most sublime passages. But although we are told repeatedly what a beautiful religion Islam is, where is this beauty reflected in our surroundings or in the words of Islamic teachers today?

BEING A PARENT IN PAKISTAN

http://pique.pk/being-a-parent-in-pakistan/

Grandpa, tell me ’bout the good old daysSometimes it feels like this world’s gone crazyGrandpa, take me back to yesterdayWhen the line between right and wrongDidn’t seem so hazy

 (Jamie O’Hara)

Coming back to Lahore after many years I needed to form connections between my memories (the good old days) and the environment I now found myself in, when the line between right and wrong does not seem to exist at all.

We all need a sense of continuity but those who leave the country struggle to find it. I had memories of school in Lahore, dashing up to my friends, entering class in a laughing, chattering line. I treasured memories of playing ‘kho’ and ‘four corners,’ netball and cricket, and sneaking out of the gate to buy forbidden snacks from roadside vendors. School was fun.  Returning after many years, one of the foremost items on my list was to go see it again.  Well, go I did but see I didn’t. The beautiful façade we were so proud of and were wont to take so much for granted was no longer visible behind the newly raised walls and we were not allowed in. It was like the peace we were also wont to take for granted, and which was no longer to be found.

That was six years ago. Today things are much worse.  Students are barricaded inside schools, behind even more towering walls, knife edged wire and sealed gates, and understandably so. After the attack on school children in Peshawar surely it takes immense courage to send your child to school in Pakistan.

Other than those walls and gates which allow no one in or out of the school except during certain hours, each person coming into the school is scanned, and there are those harsh, grimly inscrutable security cameras.  Armed snipers are stationed on the roof, emergency numbers for hospitals, ambulances and the police are posted in hallways and classrooms, and drills take place, a different drill for each kind of expected attack…run for your life, use this exit or that, or drop and play dead, like a new, grisly kho or four corners. In one school a tunnel is being dug leading out from the school to provide another exit in case of need.  The tunnel commences in what was once the swimming pool which is naturally no longer used, since school sports, what there were, have disappeared in a crack of mirthless laughter.  This is not cricket.

Yes, following the inhuman attack on school children in Peshawar and because of this necessary atmosphere of siege it takes immense courage to send your child to school in Pakistan.

A BBC report from before the attack in Peshawar says: ‘There have been almost 10,000 violent attacks on places of education in recent years, according to the biggest ever international study of how schools and universities are targeted by acts of aggression.  These attacks included the murder of staff and students and the destruction of buildings in bomb and arson attacks, in countries including Pakistan, Nigeria, Colombia, Somalia and Syria. “They are bombed, burned, shot, threatened, and abducted precisely because of their connection to education.”

These five countries, including Pakistan, have much in common.  According to the CIA fact files:

Oil rich Nigeria also suffers from poor power supply and poor infrastructure. Nigeria also suffers from pervasive corruption within its legislature, bureaucracy, trade, judiciary and security systems. Over 60% of its population lives in extreme poverty.

For Columbia as well, inequality, poverty, and drug trafficking continue to pose a significant challenge.

Somalia has no effective national government since the last one collapsed twenty years ago. The economy is largely agrarian. Its GDP ranks 166th in the world, lower even than Pakistan’s  88th.

Following international sanctions Syria’s economy contracted further, but also due to widespread infrastructure damage, reduced domestic consumption and production and sharply rising inflation. Ongoing conflict and economic decline have created a humanitarian crisis, including high rates of unemployment.

All these accounts are painfully to us in Pakistan.

Pakistan’s political and economic instability have led to inflation, its unemployment to high food prices and increased poverty.  Its myriad issues relating to government revenues, energy production, the failure to gainfully employ a rapidly urbanising population, poor education and healthcare, are not being addressed.

Place these factors in whatever order you wish, the result is the same, a poverty stricken country with an uneducated, bitter population looking to express its anger. It needs an excuse, just one more thing, anything that rubs its nose in the dirt further for it to erupt. And here it is:

The above account of schools was of course for the Grammars, Aitchisons, Convents of this country. As usual things are different in less prosperous communities. Here, like a droll little moustache on an adolescent lip a strand of barbed wire lines the top of the school wall. That’s all. Nothing else. It says as clearly as if spoken: They matter, you do not.

The bulk of the population of Pakistan has had its nose well and truly rubbed in the dirt and we are witnessing the result. Change will come only following social uplift.  For now, with the scenes from that monstrous attack on school children in Peshawar still fresh in our minds it takes immense courage to send your child to school in Pakistan.

ELIZABETH IS MISSING: a book review

http://pique.pk/elizabeth-is-missing/

A fascinating novel by Emma Healey

Every once in a while a book comes along the likes of which you’ve never read before. ‘Elizabeth is Missing,’ Emma Healey’s first novel is one.  It was short listed for a couple of awards, and in 2014 it won the Costa First Novel Award. That’s the same award won by Philip Pullman in 2001 for ‘Amber Spyglass’, the last novel of ‘His Dark Materials’ series.

Maud Horsham is an enchanting character, an elderly grandmother and mother of two who has lived through the first world-war, its rationing and air raids with her parents and her sister Sukey.  Now a widow, Maud continues to live in the English village she grew up in. Carers drop by during the day, including her harassed daughter Helen and delightful granddaughter Katy, but she is otherwise on her own.  It is an English twilight. Maud’s days are elaborately strewn with Oxfam, fish and chips, tea-cosies, vicars and buses. There is little regard for chronology, because that is how Maud, now ninety, thinks. Maud is senile. Her thoughts, never quite within her grasp, drift like smoke from the present to the past and back again in a jumble of events and characters alive and dead.

As though writing from the perspective of a forgetful ninety year old were not sufficiently daunting, Healey’s novel is a mystery story.  Imagine a (very) distracted Miss Marple looking for someone, forgetting every so often what she is looking for.  How do you search for someone when no one understands what you mean including, very often, yourself? When there is no one left who shares your memories to make sense out of your random utterances. When you must remind yourself of every small thing by means of notes, groping for them to remember what is niggling at the edge of your mind? When every person in your life morphs into someone else at the whim of your failing mind, and even your own daughter and granddaughter are often strangers?

Stories that delve into the minds of characters with specific issues help create awareness regarding those issues. In 1962 Ken Kasey wrote ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ in which McMurphy, later so brilliantly portrayed by Jack Nicolson in the movie based on the book.  McMurphy faked insanity and was committed to an asylum where he underwent electro-convulsive therapy (ECT). His experiences with that therapy were described in the book, in turn described by another character in the book, a nurse, as doing “the work of the sleeping pill, the electric chair and the torture rack.’ The book helped change the practice of psychiatry in real life.  According to a psychiatrist Dr Pittman, the book and movie helped remove ECT from mainstream psychiatric care by questioning whether psychiatry was being used for society’s purposes or for the purpose of helping people with mental illness.

Healey’s book potentially makes a similar contribution to geriatric issues (although that is not the purpose of the book) by writing about old age, its issues and the question of reality from the perspective of an elderly person with dementia.

There are bits of paper all over the house, shopping lists, recipes, telephone numbers, appointments, notes about things that have already happened. My paper memory. Its supposed to stop me forgetting things. But my daughter tells me I lose the notes. I have written that down too. And then I have this piece of paper tucked into my sleeve: ‘No word from Elizabeth.’ It has an old date. I have a horrible feeling something has happened to her.

From the perspective of a carer, Helen, Maud’s daughter and principle carer talks about her brother Tom and expresses her frustration in a fit of bitterness:

‘He flies in from Germany once a year and flies out again and you think he’s wonderful. But he’s not here day after day arranging  your appointments and talking to your carers, checking your cupboards and taking you out shopping, buying you new underwear every time you lost yours and picking you up from police stations at two o’clock in the morning.’ 

A charming book, one that will stay with you, and make a difference to your views on old age and the elderly. Published in paperback by Random House, Penguin Books, 2014.

SUPPORTING THE BURNS WARD

http://pique.pk/the-kind-hearts/

The Burn and Children Care Charity Organisation (BCCCO) deserves generous appreciation and help 

The Mayo Hospital is located on Hospital Road, at the time of its construction in 1870 a peaceful street in the midst of a beautiful town.  It is now a dirty, overcrowded road with all the attendant pollution, not a salubrious location for sick persons.  The hospital is housed in its original buildings with subsequent additions, including a burns unit within the department of plastic surgery. That burns unit at Mayo Hospital is the only burns unit in a city of over eight million people.  It is located on the third and part of the second floor of the department of  Accident and Emergency and can be accessed either by a flight of stairs, whose walls  are splattered with paan stained spittle, or by a lift whose walls are also splattered with paan stained spittle.

It was freezing cold the day I visited this ward.  The landing outside the ward was full of patient relatives (take that as a pun), seated or lying on mattresses. Children accompanying these attendants crawled on unbelievably dirty floors. Sanitation is clearly not a priority for this hospital but it is also a luxury for the burns ward which leads a precarious existence fighting eviction, shortage of funds, and trained ancillary staff.

Dr Omer Nazir, a medical registrar showed me around the burns unit which is divided into several sections. The pediatric ward is occupied by children and their mothers. Some of these children have undergone surgery to correct cleft palates, others are survivors of burns which occur all too often in the overcrowded conditions in which most people live in this country. A small boy adjusted his jacket with raw hands before allowing me to photograph him. An even smaller girl opposite stared apathetically at me out of one small eye, the other lost in a turban like bandage covering burns on her head.

The walls of the pediatric ward are brightly painted. Dr Nazir told Pique these were commissioned by a non-profit organisation, the Burn and Children Care Charity Organisation (BCCCO). ‘They also donated that,’ he said, pointing to the split air conditioner above the door and said that the bathrooms throughout the unit had been renovated and much of the equipment also donated by the same group. A special tub donated by them is used to remove exudate from the wounds which if left on the skin hardens and causes terrible deformities and infection.

‘The BCCCO donates medicines and equipment worth one to two lacs to our ward every month,’ Dr Nazir said.

The burns ward at Mayo receives no government funding, which, considering the over a thousand burn victims presenting here every year poses questions regarding government priorities.

To find out more about an organisation that makes this crucial donation every month I visited Samina Afzal who is now the President of the BCCCO.

‘This group was started twelve years ago by Samina Manzar,’ Samina told me, ‘and it now has around a hundred and fifty members, mostly housewives.  We hold a general body meeting every month to discuss requirements and collect monthly dues.’

With these dues and other donations from both members and non members the BCCCO has also provided a filter plant, food and clothing during the earthquake in 2005. But their real mission is to support the burns ward at Mayo, whose other major support comes in the shape of two meals a day for the patients and an attendant provided by the Gourmet group of bakeries from their kitchen on the hospital premises.

The burns ward was in terrible shape twelve years ago. Bit by bit the BCCCO renovated the premises, provided air conditioners, a kitchen, and set up a small and separate ICU, a mini emergency and an operation theatre.  In addition to the medicines they donate they try not to turn down any special request for additional medication or equipment.

The BCCCO offers support to patients only, in itself a remarkable and important feat.  It is unable to help the patients’ families for whom support is also sorely required, especially if the burn survivor is the sole bread winner. In the case of serious burn injuries in particular, the period of treatment and then convalescence is very long.

Ali  (names have been changed) was a forty year old donkey cart driver from Kamoki  who was burnt in an accident between his cart and a tractor.  He received burns to eighty percent of his body. Not knowing what to do with him his relatives left him in a corner to die where a friend found him a week later. The friend took him to the burns unit at Mayo hospital where Ali’s nose and his hands were painstakingly reconstructed.  Ali is now working as a donkey cart driver again. He was in the hospital for an entire year.

‘The doctors at the ward are excellent,’ Samina said. ‘Some of them have resigned from jobs in other countries to work in Pakistan.’

Pakistan needs such people, its issues are so daunting. Of the male patients treated at the burns ward most are survivors of accidental burns. But almost half the female patients have been deliberately burnt.

Maria was a first year medical student who took the bus to medical college every day and looked forward to a career as a medical practitioner. One day she received a proposal of marriage which was not accepted. Angry at the refusal the young man threw acid on Maria as she waited for the bus, burning her beyond recognition. After several months in hospital Maria is still undergoing re-constructive surgery but she has returned to medical college.

Fouzia was doused with petrol and set on fire by her husband because she would not make over her property to him. She suffered agonising burns but the worst of her suffering resulted from her own children shrinking from her, she was so badly disfigured. She was hospitalised for six months.

Burn survivors require special equipment. Among the items donated by the BCCCO is a special fluidized bed costing over fifty lac rupees, with a mattress containing sodalime beads. The soft, cool  beads cause minimum pressure and absorb the exudate from burn wounds which would otherwise prevent the wound from drying and cause infection.

Burns survivors also require specialised care. ‘We need a full time trained anaesthetist for the ventilator and also nurses trained specially to care for burns,’ Dr Nazir says.

A surgical tower is being constructed on the premises since 2006, and it is not yet complete.  Whenever it is, the department of plastic surgery is to get the top floor, and will share the premises with the burns unit.  That burns unit will include hydrotherapy, and an ICU equipped with a ventilator, and separate wards for acute and chronic burns.

Let us pray for that happy outcome, and work towards it.

The BCCCO may be contacted at: saminalatif@hotmail.com.

THE CLOSED VALLEY

http://pique.pk/the-closed-valley/

A fascinating research on the remote tribal valley of Harban by Jürgen Wasim Frembgen

I reviewed ‘Wrestlers, Pigeon Fanciers and Kite Flyers’ recently, another book written by Jurgen Wasim Frembgen.  That was co-authored by Paul Rollier Frembgenan.  ‘The Closed Valley,’ a 2014 publication is also published by the Oxford University Press but is authored by Frembgen alone.  The title refers to the remote tribal valley of Harban high in the Himalayas of northern Pakistan in the Gilgit-Baltistan region.

Closed ValIey is an ethnographical work, which is an anthropologist’s research in a cultural context alien to him.  The research is conducted by listening, looking, and questioning, and by examining casual conversations conducted in ‘the field.’  It is a pity that this region, so fraught with danger, restricted the scope of the author’s research.  Jurgen admits that the text is unsatisfactory as a result, but that it reflects his experiences in literary form.

I did not pick either book for Frembgen’s writing style which although refreshingly simple is not always grammatical. Instead I recommend both books, and definitely this one for the fascinating information it contains. How many of us after all, know anything about Harban or its people, or where Sazin is, to the east of which the Harban valley lies?

Jurgen Wasim Frembgen is an Islamist, anthropologist, writer and Senior Curator of the Islamic Collection at the Munich State Museum of Ethnology, a Professor of History of Religion and Culture of Islam and a visiting Professor in Lahore, and the U.S.

The Harbani’s reputation of being suspicious, unpredictable people, relentlessly cruel in exacting revenge attracted Frembgen to the region.  Distrusting the stereotype, and the colonial British description of Harbanis as ‘lawless’ he wished to study the society for himself.

It took almost ten years to research this book, and each visit involved much effort and not a little danger and hardship. Here’s an example: I know the matter weighs more heavily with some people than with others, but to  answer the call of nature while staying  in Harban Frembgen was faced with the absence of toilets in the home of his host, a member of the district council, no less. He waited until it was dark, then followed a small, slippery path leading to a densely wooded grove of oak trees carrying a roll of toilet paper, and an electric torch, trying to protect himself from thorny leaves as he tripped over stones, and crossed rivulets. It crossed his mind that he may encounter other people also bent on a similar mission as there was ample evidence that the slope was used extensively as a toilet by the entire population of the village. It was a dilemma he could not resolve how to behave if he did meet someone at such a time. In fact Frembgen was luckier than he realised at the time that this never happened, because men in Harban answer the call of nature only once the sun is up.  The darkness before is reserved for women to ensure their privacy. In Harban (as elsewhere in Pakistan) a man’s honour is defined by the honour of the women of his family.  For a woman to be caught in the buff would probably fall well into the category of staining the family honour, leading to a feud.

Such feuds, blood feuds conducted to avenge a perceived insult to honour are an ever present threat in this region. They are often conducted over an entire lifetime and are handed down to subsequent generations.

Religion, brought to the region by sufis suffered the inevitable interference. The Tablighi Movement forbade music, and women from assembling in the town centre where once women met to discuss community issues. The local Maulvi looked reproachfully at the author when he wished him ‘Khuda Hafiz,’ and changed the phrase to an emphatic ‘Allah Hafiz,’ ‘the distinct mark of new religious correctness.’

At Harban among many others Frembgen met Niamat Gul, a carpenter and weaver. Gul was normally paid in quantities of clarified butter. Everything in his house was a product of domestic craftsmanship, the material used almost all of it natural. A carved board used for praying, smooth with use, shone honey-yellow in the sun. The tobacco came from his own garden. Nowhere did the author see an object made of plastic.

This un-spoilt environment has its ups and downs. The fact that Niamat Gul is paid in clarified butter is deliciously quaint. Yet clarified butter does not buy education. Frembgen’s host expressed the hope that education, economic development of the valley and accessibility to the outside world would end the tradition of blood feuds plaguing his society, although presumably indoor toilets would also help.  Either way the first step is to discover the region, which is where this book can make a difference.

WHO CARES ABOUT KOALAS?

http://pique.pk/who-cares-about-koalas/

It seems a bit unfair to expect the Prime Minister or any other government minister to worry about the power crisis. After all who in Pakistan worries about the Maori in New Zealand, or about the koalas in Australia? No one. You cannot expect the man in the street to care about the welfare of a people as remote as the aboriginal people of an alien country when their own welfare is so questionable, or about the capacity of a given habitat to sustain koalas, when their own habitat in Pakistan is so threatening.  So why expect the Prime Minister (or any other minister) to care about people whose life is as remotely different to theirs as the common man’s, when their own positions (I’d say ‘jobs’ but that implies work) are so precious?

Our leaders are of the people and by the people, and although not for the people, they are definitely for themselves which considering they are of the people comes to the same thing if you look at it closely. That’s a bit ambiguous but it sounds impressive, just as the Minister for Petroleum’s explanation of the petrol shortage: Speaking at a press conference in Islamabad Mr Abbasi said, “In January, the daily demand of petrol rose from 12,000 tonnes to 15,000 tonnes.  As a result, there has been a shortage and we are managing it.” Just in case that was too easy he added helpfully that ”there was a fall in prices, people bought more petrol and hence there was a decrease in reserves.”  Good he clarified that. I was imagining it was more demand than petrol that created the crisis.

But back to the other point; it is worth considering the rarefied air our government ministers breathe in their own little bubble, free of power load shedding, electric, water, gas and now petrol. As frustrated citizens in the Punjab spent their day queuing at petrol pumps  (and battling electric and gas load shedding) our PM virtuously cancelled a trip to Switzerland (bidding au revoir but not adieu  to the cheese fondues and cream chocolates) and spent a few hours updating himself on the situation. Still updating mind you, after being in government for a year and a half with the crisis looming since well before. Rather pathetic, what? And then, after updating himself and firing a few officials to make it all look good he returns home with a tank full of petrol to a house blazing with heat and in the summer purring with air conditioning. Koalas? Maoris?

(By the way, I’d like to completely go off the track here and mention another perk enjoyed by government officials.  According to a 2013 update to the Members of the Parliament Salaries and Allowances Act of 1974* a government servant is entitled to dental treatment, artificial limbs, joints and implants, and ‘the facility of circumcision’.  I know this has nothing to do with the subject at hand but I’ve been wanting to share this information for a while.)

My suggestion is therefore that seeing our government is so much for itself rather than for the people, to cut off gas, electricity, petrol and water allowance to government residences. Which means that here’s what a typical day might be at the Sharif household with its bubble considerably pierced if my suggestion is followed:

NS: Let’s have some nihari.

KN: There isn’t any.

NS: (Missing the shortness in her tone) All right let’s have some of that biryani.

KN: You’ll have to eat it cold.

NS: (amazed) What do you mean, Kalsoom! How can biryani be eaten cold!

KN: It can be if the microwave doesn’t work.

NS: Go get another one then. I WANT BIRYANI!!

KN: (finally snapping) I’ve heard nothing but ‘I want biryani’ from you all these years! Let me tell you something I want now…I WANT ELECTRICITY! No microwave will work without electricity.

NS: (digesting the information and coming to a cunning conclusion) How about the choola? That doesn’t require electricity!

KN: (shortly) no, it requires gas.

NS: Well then send the bloody driver to get some biryani from somewhere!

KN: You big *%**” there is NO power! NO gas, NO electricity and NO petrol! And in case you want to wash your hands off the situation there is NO water either. Go put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Headlines in the national papers the following day: SHARIF SETTLES THE CRISIS. COUNTRY OUT OF THE WOODS (where it had been cutting trees to burn as fuel).

It was Robert Frost who said, ‘The best way out (of a given situation) is through’. He was right, with one proviso: While going through a crisis you must take certain people with you who unless they experience something for themselves are perfectly capable of shoving others into the mess and walking away happily. Call it in sleeping in the same bed as the Maoris and towing the koalas into your home. I’m sure it would work, only the the towing company is likely to lose its license faster than they can say ‘Incompetent!’

*  http://www.na.gov.pk/uploads/documents/1363871600_486.pdf