Raza Ali Hasan

Proxies—pertinent, prominent, proximate— impose war, sustain it. The Empire ever absent and seemingly elsewhere— evasive, persuasive, pervasive. Things are this complicated.

My itinerary is the eternity of exile. Deferred is the trip back into domicile. My marching orders lost at sea; my papers shrouded in an immigrant's secrecy. Lamar Avenue in Austin, Texas is wide, long and it flows. Air-conditioned apartments allow for repose. My transports and attachments to the past, my dream-life, have an urgency that is never lost. An exile's ultimate treat, tonight's dreamlike score: a dinner with the Zaidis in their Islamabad home.

has ever lit up our hearts like this. No king. See Bhutto in Karachi, 1972. His path strewn with rose petals, sprinkled with attar, leads him, not to the sea with its crashing surf and screaming gulls but into the alleys and passageways of a slum. Ferdowsi in Shahnamah tags it for the interim as “the place of worship before any others existed. . . ” No King, no King of Kings, had ever toured a slum before. It opened wide the thrice-locked chamber of mercy in our hearts. The gathering crowds expecting to catch a glimpse of Bhutto, are, instead, treated to a double vision: Alexander the Great, in a red robe, left hand resting on his sword, like in an illustration from Shahnamah , as he watches our own pilgrim, the unsuspecting Bhutto “reach for the door handle of the Ka'ba.” Bhutto’s entourage and PTV news crew push back. The crowd askew, insufflated by this vision, pushes Bhutto towards the hovel of the woman driven half-insane by poverty. Bhutto, aglow, with tears in his eyes, embraces the woman who collapses in his arms. No king, no king of kings, had ever lit up our hearts like this. No king.

The unkempt beard of the fearsome mullah overwhelms the two aging poets from the periphery, the far-flung provinces of Iran and Iraq. They stand tiptoe, toe deep in the master culture, arguing in an emptying, narrowing hallway, in the high imperial language of their poetry, over what became of the muffled, cuffed bulbul or of the straw-stuffed, stone-eyed mynah, over the proper ornithology for the symbols of woe.

Humbling of Bhutto in Mecca, Bhutto kissing Hajar-e-Aswad, half the Bhutto cabinet in Ihram, kneeling. These were the first scenes, in the rolling newsreel of half-closed doors, of the doorjamb in the way of the twentieth century’s upstarts. A nationalization, by Bhutto, of religious piety? No, but a headlong scram into obeisance of all and everybody and everything to the stately rise of Islam in the neighboring, overbearing Arabia. That year Bhutto had appointed my father Hajj secretary, and we, the seven children and the ayah, were present at Melody Cinema in full regalia to see, to our amazement, on the screen, our father in Ihram like Bhutto, and in a tent in Mina, sitting on the ground in an ablution scene, the humbling of our mysophobic mother, who before her pilgrimage would have drunk water only from a glass washed three times by a servant and who wouldn't sit on the drawing-room sofa unless it was draped by a freshly laundered sheet.

I The sky here is American like the blue of your eyes; the folds of your eyelids the Hindu Kush mountain. The rich vein of the Hindu Kush only a stony ridge cutting across the parched soil of Afghanistan on which the primal play of progress comes to pass. II Locked in, its people: nomadic, peasant or simply pleasant, green-eyed, blue-eyed, brown-eyed or simply wide-eyed. Its great teacher: Noor Mohammad Taraki, the proud translator of great works into Pashto, Dari, Turkic and Uzbek. Its cities: Herat, Kabul, Kandahar. III Assuredly, the pilgrims descend the emerald-strewn Panjsher valley. They have come to water and tend a young tree. Time is at hand, for the unhurried descent of the Western offering, whose yellow parachute will slow its fall. And this tree, which will grow underneath the cluster bomb, will hold up the pomegranate to the blue sky. IV The tick tock and whirr of metal and material in the hidden azure vault of the air has so far unleashed the American ahistoricality upon the two tall Bamiyan Buddhas. Ordained stone must give way to bared rock face. Grieve not. Rejoice, for the spirit triumphs here. V When Kabul was as beautiful as Leningrad, when our hearts hadn't grown weary, when Taraki could take a stroll down the streets of Kabul with a confident smile, when he could still be Afghanistan's Maxim Gorky, when our erstwhile bachelor could enjoy the company of dancing girls like a mogul emperor, when the way forward was the way forward. VI The uncertain exile is never to Rome— no picture postcards of the coliseum to send home— but to a mud hovel among other mud hovels by the edge of the city of Islamabad. For the uncertain exile has nothing to do with the divine or with any other kind of comedy, but with what has remained or with what reminds: with the trace of terror that persists. VII In this part of the world the children know and have desires to be a martyr, to enter paradise, to leave this life. Of the twenty-nine different names for the garden, they know all twenty-nine by heart. For this part of the world began with a garden and will end as an open ditch piled up with bodies. VIII Grant me Antigone's strength to forbear for the sun has come unstuck from a blue sky gone black, stolen for effect, and the veiled moon stands in, for the mourning women standing next to platters of rice, signifying the historically sound end of forgetfulness, returning our agency to mourn the collaborations of the merchant capitalist class with the unlistening, ahistorical God. IX If only Gandhi's spinning wheel had spun a million yards of cloth we would have covered all our war dead. And as for tents, we would have built cities upon cities of tents to keep the rain out for all our refugees. And then and only then would we have mourned our war dead, mourned our war dead.

In the lull, the afternoon sun warms the linseed field. The flowers are quiet, their bright subdued in the green while the mind wanders to the emerald mosque upon the hill, built around a flowing spring, the easy absolutions and ablutions in that mosque where the spring water has been let loose to meander over marble courtyards and inner chambers, across the geometric, green-tiled floor that cools the heels of the faithful.

To the piano of ragtime music, Paul Newman plunges his head into a basin of ice and water. A consummate conman, with Robert Redford, he's up and ready to take on the Mafia. The Sting is on. Hollywood redresses the wrongs of the world. From my proscenium seat, it is Newman's awakening into action that catches my imagination. Cool. So cool. Outside NAFDEC cinema, Kipling's Great Game rages on. Yet, I am barely away. My basin of ice cold water is going tepid. The con of it all. But to them it's jazz. It's all cool, for jazz makes them look cool. As for ragtime, just a last minute anachronistic improvisation, for good cinema's sake.