Before the deluge

IGhazi Salahuddin N the wake of the Abbas Town tragedy in Karachi, our capacity to grasp the present drift has weakened further. Headlines emanating from the Supreme Court proceedings do not offer much clarification. It is becoming more and more difficult to make sense of where we are headed. People are worried about the unfolding scenario. And as we are so fond of saying, this is a critical moment in our history.

But how would a poor scribe tell the story of these last days of an elected government that are akin to the chase sequence of a thriller? Perhaps we need a creative writer to capture the present mood in a fictional representation of historical facts. It could very well be a novel set, say, in Karachi with characters whose lives are intertwined with some major events that have shattered our peace of mind.

A journalistic appraisal of how individual lives are touched by large upheavals is bound to be superficial and quite insufficient as a measure of the underlying forces that would shape our destiny. Besides, the media remains confined to the latest developments and distracted by the sound and fury of confrontational politics.

I express these thoughts because I have encountered this week a growing sense of fear and dejection across the entire spectrum of people that I am able to interact with. Personally, I am known to be rather pessimistic among my friends. At times, I am berated for this admittedly unexciting outlook. It surely does not help when you live in Karachi and when you often have privileged access to information.

Anyhow, it is my feeling that the per capita consumption of grief has dramatically risen in Karachi. Even as a congenital pessimist, I feel that many of these reactions to the Abbas Town bomb blast and its aftermath are emotional in nature and reflect bewildering confusion about what these killings are all about. It is true that this deep despair is the cumulative effect of the shocks that our collective consciousness has suffered at a steady pace. At one level, it is the sectarian aspect of the recent terrorist attacks in Quetta and Karachi that breeds forbidding thoughts. The two attacks on the Hazara community in Quetta were of apocalyptic dimension, coming after previous hints of a kind of ethnic cleansing. That unbelievable sight of the entire community staging a sit-in with the bodies of their loved ones in below freezing temperatures would match any imagined atrocity in a Greek tragedy.

How can a newsman or a columnist, for God’s sake, deal with such epoch-making calamities? How can they frame the scene in the context of history and the fate of a nation? How can ordinary, sensitive individuals preserve their sanity in the face of such assaults on their senses?

However, it was after Quetta and other scattered acts of terrorism and the assassination of Bashir Bilour that Abbas Town happened. Significantly, it was not just the bomb blast but also criminal lapses on the part of the police and the Sindh government officials in coming to the rescue of the victims that enraged the people and made them feel utterly insecure.

Then, there was that surreal juxtaposition of the deadly blast with the glittering engagement ceremony of Sharmila Farooqi at the Mohatta Palace. A creative writer would be hard put to imagine such a metaphor to show how the VIPs are pampered by the police and the ‘awam’ are left unprotected.

Add to this the bizarre events on Wednesday when fear came stalking through Karachi in, as they say, broad daylight. Reports of firing by unknown people in some places shut down the entire city in an hour or two. It became scarier when the MQM announced its indefinite protest for the Abbas Town incident. In the evening, the MQM withdrew its call and Karachi was breathing again. Wasn’t this more like a horror story?

My point, simply, is that reporting facts and quoting statements will not draw a true picture of what is happening to us. We seem to be mere characters in a great saga of change and we need a creative genius to tell the story. I also have a title for that story: ‘Before the Deluge’. This is also my excuse to recall a serendipitous encounter with a book and a gracious benefactor to whom my debt of gratitude is overdue. It so happened that I had referred to an English translation of a Russian novel in a column last summer. “If my memory serves, its title was ‘Before the Deluge’”, I wrote. It was a reference to the lifestyle of our elite that made me think about the novel that I had almost forgotten. I recounted my fruitless search for it, including on the Google. Imagine my surprise when I received an email from someone named Ejaz Tareen. It said: “The book you are nostalgic about – ‘Before the Deluge’ – is written by Aleksandrovic Aldanov, translated from the Russian by Catherine Routsky and first printed by Charles Scribner’s Sons New York in 1947. It was later published by Jonathan Cape on January 1, 1948. No new volume is available but I can send you a copy of the 1948 edition”. He was very kind, and added: “I will send it to you for all the times that I have enjoyed your pieces”.

Ejaz lives in California, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Not trusting Pakistan’s postal system, he waited until a close relative from Karachi came to visit and I got the book which was like a lost toy for a child. It is now my prized possession. Thank you, Ejaz. I am alluding to this novel about Imperial Russia only because I think the title is very apt for an understanding of today’s Pakistan. But is there a hint here that Pakistan may be on the verge of a revolution? This, I think, is a very important question and demands expert analysis. Not being a social scientist, I often get confused in my own search for an answer. Apparently, the pre-revolutionary phase in any society is marked by exceptional intellectual vitality and organised social protest. We, in Pakistan, seem to be in a state of denial and our intellectual and moral deprivations are remarkable. Besides, where is the revolutionary party or the leader to challenge the induction of religion in politics?