WHY MY CHAMPA TREE REMINDED ME OF THE SECT-FREE MOSQUE

Express Tribune 22 July 2013

My champa tree was a ridiculous little bare stump - and then suddenly, a leaf, then another and then another sprung from it. PHOTO: FILE

More than six months ago, I bought a small champa tree, supposedly because my husband wanted one, but really, I lovechampa myself. It’s ‘frangipani’ in English, but it is the name ‘champa’ that means for me this short tree with a most definite idea of self.

Its branches twist this way and that most tree-ishly, its leaves a rich deep green, veined and elongated. And then the flowers, so many varieties, but all champa: the pale pink ones edged with a blush of slightly darker pink with the signature yellow in the centre…  Champaflowers all have this yellow right there. There are the very pale pinkchampas with the merest tinge of pink at the edge, the whites with a jaunty blue edging, and my favourite, the yellow throated ivories with no other colour anywhere else. Ours is the ivory and yellow, but our neighbour has the pink, and it is the most striking feature of their lawn.

So, we planted the tree and it was just beginning to look happy, when… Well, we have a dog. He lives outside and spends his life barking at the maids who walk past our house, the children skipping to school, the trash truck guys twice a day, every day, and heaven help any intruder who tries to scale the wall into the garden. Anyway that animal took exception to our fledgling champa and one night while we slept, he decided to sit on it. The tree was only about eight inches tall then, and you’d think it must have been uncomfortable to sit on it, but who knows who gets a kick out of what.

We awoke to a champa bearing all the appearance of a tree that had been sat on, flat on the ground, its leaves all pushed down.

The gardener pulled off the torn branches, and straightened the small trunk and we let it stay there in the hope that it may survive. It remained a ridiculous little bare stump in the middle of the lawn for some months and then suddenly, a leaf, then another and then another sprung from it. It is now a small tree, still only about a foot and a half, and I can’t wait for it to flower and spread its fragrance straight into our room.

The other day, when I heard about that sect free mosque up in the Margalla foothills, I was suddenly reminded of our little champa. It is through such efforts that Islam gets a new lease of life. May that mosque be allowed to flourish and function, and may all destructive creatures stay away from it. Amen.

AISHA IN TOBA TEK SINGH

I mentioned in a newspaper blog that I sometimes make use of nursery rhymes to teach my students (all of them from underprivileged homes) English; and that some subjects were so taboo in our culture that they had to be avoided.

Many people commented that I ought to stick to subjects the girls are familiar with. They have a point, and I often do.  But the same people also regretted the taboos. They forget that the unfamiliar is always threatening and that if one remains mired in the familiar, one loses the ability to tolerate anything else. Witness Pakistan.

Education should teach the mind to stretch and extend knowledge to where experience cannot reach, like those extendable poles with which you reach remote corners of your ceiling to sweep away the cobwebs. You do not need to visit China to know that a sampan is a traditional Chinese boat, or to visit the moon and see traces of the lunar landing to know that man has been there (our old cook, for those who remember Gulzar used to say years ago that that was all American propaganda.)  So why restrict your children or your students to the familiar?

But above all I use rhymes and other things that may or may not be rooted in the sub-continent because these girls are so grounded in the mundane, so stuck in the wretched and the threatening that they have no opportunity, not a single one, of being in touch with the absurd, neither in reality, nor in Urdu literature.

Yes Alice is rooted in an English Wonderland, not in the sub-continent, but the sub-continent is no less wondrous. Why, instead of those tragic women forever hanging over stoves and being driven to tears because they cannot be married, or because they are and possess mothers-in-law can we not have Aisha, a heroine on PTV who jumps down a mouse hole and eats first a gulab jamun and then drinks a flask of lassi and finds herself in Toba Tek Singh where she meets an inebriated mouse (he had kanji or daru, not beer)...why not? 

ON RITUAL PRAYER

One day, my father advised me not to shut my eyes when I performed the ritual prayer. I was a bit startled because most people tend to do exactly that, probably to help them concentrate. But he said that the ritual prayer (not the one where you screw your eyes up, clasp your hands and say ‘Please, please pleeease God! Help me lose weight and I’ll love You forever! Amen!) should be performed in full awareness of what is around you, of Whom you pray to, and why; that it should, in addition to being an act of worship, symbolise a certain attitude according to which religion is to be studied and understood and not just practised with your eyes shut, nor its verses parroted back as litany alone.

JOB SATISFACTION

                                                       

Every day the trash truck comes around to collect rubbish from bins on the wall outside each house. Our bin is on the wall just outside the side gate. It is the best time of the day for the dog, the signal for him to hurl himself at the gate and do his job. Sometimes, in the covered side porch with walls on two sides it sounds as though he has managed to raise all his ancestors who are arraigned at his back, each one of them joining in, generations of suspicion of the man-at-the-gate expressed in a blood chilling volley of barks like kalashnikovs. I suspect it is also the high water mark of the day for those guys in the truck. 

They have perhaps two minutes to hurl abuse at each other, the trash guys to vent all their frustrations against their employers, against the people who put things they shouldn't in the bags, and above all against their job in that smelly, filthy truck, before the trash bags are hoisted into the truck and it leaves. But I think the dog has the best deal of all. Twice a day every day, he struts his stuff and scares the living daylights out of those men, and you know what? They have never dared to come in, not even once. 

Can there be any greater job satisfaction than that?

SPEAKING OF DOGS

An Aussie Postie

..but speaking of dogs, I remember when I had started reminding myself of one. Those were the days before email, or rather when it was not as widespread as it is now; before it cost as little as it does these days to pick up the phone and talk. Away from Pakistan, waiting for someone to write I used to lurk near the post box, or keep an ear open for any sound of the Postie’s motorbike. Yes that was Australia; anytime you see a world such as ‘Postie’ you can safely assume it is. In Australia they puttered up to your gate twice a day, but although they got away quite safely each time, oh I felt like snapping at their ankles if they brought nothing for me.

JAFFERJEES - Lahore

The location is good, but the store isn’t easy to spot because the sign above it isn’t large. It says in a narrow script in an almost off-hand sort of way: ‘Jafferjees’. 

There’s never a scrum at the parking lot. The steps are clean and pleasant surprise, there is a ramp for wheelchair access. The door is opened for you, and you’re instantly surrounded by the scent of leather. A sales person appears to hone in on your presence and without hovering gives you his undivided attention while you’re there. He wears clean gloves when he handles the leather products.

It’s a well designed store using muted colours, nothing fancy or too large; just your average glass counters and display cases, a misfit in a city that measures it’s preferences in bling. It doesn’t push itself, you either take it, or you don’t, and you know what? You take it. 

You can elect to have your purchase personalised. It’s done efficiently and neatly in the script of your choice, carefully placed inside a soft cloth bag, and slipped into a brown paper bag. Oh and your receipt is given to you in a tiny brown envelope. 

Whether or not you keep this receipt, a Jafferjees product is accepted back for repairs years after sale without question, as a parent happily accepts a child. But the best part is yet to come: when you open your purchase at home, there, tucked away in a corner of whatever you have bought is a small card of care instructions, and visibly written on the bit that shows is a short proud statement: Made in Pakistan. 

It never fails to hit me whenever I leave this store that this is how Pakistan could have been: quiet, peaceful, and professional, clean and well presented, considerate, reliable, taking pride in itself and its workmanship. 

This was not an advertisement for Jafferjees. It was a yearning for what could and should have been, but isn’t.

Swat Jirga: For the women, by the women – but will it work?

By Rabia Ahmed                   
Express Tribune

The Khwaindo Tolana organised protests on Tahira’s parents’ behalf and pushed the authorities into registering her case, forcing the murderer to flee, a distinct improvement on the male modus operandi. PHOTO: AFP

The best environment for terrorism is ‘poverty, injustice, racism, and deprivation of human rights,’ factors identified byMalala at the UN on June 12. Pakistan, where terrorism is a major force, has them all. Malala, a living example should know, and obviously her defiance emboldened other women, since all four factors are rampant in Malala’s district, Swat, where the men are known for male chauvinism, like a dragon is also known as a worm.

Tahira, married at 12, suffered marital abuse. There’s nothing unusual about either the child marriage or the abuse, they happen all the time. One day her husband threw acid on her, which also happens pretty often. Most victims manage to survive (although many die). Tahira died a horrific death after days of agony.

Why was Tahira married at that age? Why was she not in school? Why did no one help her? And why, after she died, did the regular authorities refuse her parents’ plea for justice, or even register the case? Such are the manifestations of a government that does diddlysquat.

Government courts take years to settle cases, so Tahira’s parents took the case to their local jirga composed of men, who said that Tahira’s parents should marry their son to Tahira’s murderer’s sister. Mercifully, a women’s jirga had recently come into being, mobilised by an NGO in Swat. It calls itself the ‘Khwaindo Tolana’, meaning the “Sister’s Group”.

Naturally the male jirga does not recognise its female counterpart, which wholeheartedly returns the compliment:

“We’re fed up with male-only jirgas that decide only in the favour of men and sacrifice women for their own mistakes,” said Tabbassum Adnan, who heads the female jirga.

Just how many legal systems can co-exist before things become chaotic, or in our case, even more chaotic?

We already possess a judicial system that is supposed to deal with such matters. Unfortunately, it focuses on issues that focus the spotlight on the individual and supreme components of that judiciary to the great elation of the masses.

There’s the Taliban method. Up north, for want of the real thing, they call it justice. The Taliban’s years of power in Swat saw a liberal deployment of whips, daggers and gallows, often applied to the wrong person, too often female. Rough, swift and ready ‘justice’ and then life went on. No knocking on official doors or making endless rounds of courts.

And finally, jirgas, the third system, the cultural one.

This is what happens when demand exceeds basic facilities, or as in Pakistan, when basic facilities are simply not there.

In some countries midwives tackle routine cases of childbirth, freeing more hospital beds for others. However, these midwives are trained, and they refer complications to the proper quarters. Members of a jirga could be similarly trained to take over slack from the courts for your average case of cattle theft etc. An untrained jirga is like a grandmother prescribing clove oil which may help your aching tooth but that is all; beyond this, would you rather a trained dentist extracted the tooth, or would you still prefer your grandma’s sarotha?

So the questions are: what are the qualifications of these people in jirgas? Who are they, and what is their remit?

I write in the hope that I am wrong. I hope the women of this jirga whose courage I truly honour will achieve great things. However, in this conservative society known for its militant interpretation of religion, women are not normally too educated, if at all; witness Malala, her campaign and her fate.

The women of this jirga belong to the same community as the men. It is not a huge place, so they are likely to be connected to the men in some way. Therefore, however sympathetic they may be, how different can the women’s understanding of justice be, keeping in mind the men’s verdict in Tahira’s case? Besides, justice is not about sympathy, it is about being just.

Also, besides, these women may often themselves be victim, judge and jury, yet justice must be impartial. How can a woman be so, if her own child was shot/bludgeoned/burnt to death, or is alive yet abused and her mother must give a verdict in a similar case? Or adjudicate regarding another woman who killed the murderer of her child?

Perhaps the women’s jirga operates differently to the men’s. It is certainly a platform for the women of the area, and fills an immense void.

The Khwaindo Tolana organised protests on Tahira’s parents’ behalf and pushed the authorities into registering her case, forcing the murderer to flee, a distinct improvement on the male modus operandi.

However, AFP observes that given the conviction rate in Pakistan, it is unlikely that this jirga’s decisions will be carried out. So this group has the power to punish.

Should it? Remember granny, her sarotha and your aching tooth.

Most importantly, what’s the alternative?