BOTH FAMILIAR AND STRANGE
A nuanced collection of essays on the history, culture and politics of Pakistan
Afew pages into the timeline at the beginning of Nadeem F Paracha’s Points of Entry; Encounters at the Origin Sites of Pakistan, you put down the book to check out Koko Korena on Youtube. You also make a mental note: ‘Watch Jago, Hua Savera, Pakistan’s first art film scripted by Faiz Ahmad Faiz.’ This impulse to understand what the author is writing about through an online immersion in the cultural artefact he’s discussing reasserts itself every few pages, which means it takes longer to read this 160-page book than it usually would. Since the artefacts Paracha holds up are simultaneously familiar and strange, it often feels like you’ve slipped through the breach in The City and The City, China Mieville’s weird fiction novel, where characters are taught to ‘unsee’ things in a space that might be geographically adjacent, even shared, but exists in entirely disparate cultural dimensions.
This is what makes Points of Entry a rewarding read for an Indian accustomed to seeing Pakistan only as the place from where friends’ grandparents fled clutching babes in arms and as a problematic neighbour forever flashing the evil eye. Paracha’s writing is smooth, and quite unlike what the reader imagines Lion’s Whisky, which the author and his friends swig during a stopover in 1980s Larkana, tastes like. On the surface, his pieces seem to be talking of one thing, say, a trip to Mohenjo-daro, or the band Vital Signs, but are actually about something much larger. A chance meeting with Tibetans in search of the mythical Dhanakosha lake, believed to be the birthplace of Buddhist sage Padmasambhava leads him to a spot near Lower Dir “bone-dry and covered with shrubs” which perhaps once held the lake.
He writes of the conquest of Sindh by Arab commander Mohammad bin Qasim in the 8 century CE and how that event has been repurposed to invent the idea that South Asian Pakistan has Arab roots. In the superb essay on the Siddhi population of Karachi’s Lyari, you are astounded to learn that these Afro-Pakistanis have maintained familial links with Africa. The excellent piece on Karachi’s Goan Christian community reminds you of Mumbai’s late legendary Jazzy Joe Pereira, who spoke of arriving from Pakistan “after independence, like a refugee”. Like Jazzy Joe, who arranged music for many Hindi film composers, Goan Christian musicians in Karachi were an integral part of the Urdu film industry, which was sadly mauled in the 1980s by the twin onslaughts of Zia ul Haq’s Islamisation drive and video piracy. The piece on Jhuley Lal-Udero Lal, the saint beloved of both Hindu and Muslim Sindhis is interesting too but it is Paracha’s rumination on Sufi music while travelling down the Indus that is truly moving. Here he is on Yakub, the owner of the ferry, who sang Sufi songs, including Bulleh Shah’s Bullah Ki
Jaana Mein Kaun, as they drifted downriver:
Yaqub had sailed up river Indus towards the KP province so that he could visit a Sufi shrine in one of the towns there. As he was about to enter the place, a huge explosion flattened the place. Dozens of devotees were killed. The explosion was caused by a suicide bomber belonging to an extremist outfit. So, Yaqub, the sailor of the ancient river Indus, the singer of folk songs of spiritual love and peace, befittingly took his last breath at the shrine of one of his beloved Sufi saints – killed there by men full of spite, hatred and a sickness of both the mind and the soul.
Layered and powerful, Paracha’s writing takes you beyond the fundamentalist mobs and the bazaar bomb blasts, to present a nuanced picture of a complex nation caught, as the book flap suggests, between the modernist impulse and the theocratic one.
Now that Indians aren’t quite so smug about freedoms, about the nation’s supposed liberal core, this is also a book that will make you think about the idea of India, about the many ways in which the fractious South Asian siblings are similar, and the many ways in which they are not.