To you, my dear mankind.

Mankind, you miserable race. You thankless, ungrateful, self-appointed crown of creation, perish! Perish for your miserable deeds. And suffer in the inferno of your evil deeds. For your greed, lust, ambition, and hatred. 

Pray, I beseech you oh evolution, to genetically-program a self-destruct code into gene pool of this sickly species. For being the wretch that stabs his own fellow in the back, for being a society that discriminates, for being a civilisation that burns the earth in black oil, for being a race that torments another, and for being a species that enslaves the innocent creatures of this planet. Perish, and do so painfully. 

You, mankind, know not what love is, and know not what everything good is; and if you do ever decide to open your self-obsessed, narcissistic mind to anything good, it will be only to sell bottles of sugared-water to your fellow beings that cannot afford a drop of real water. Burn in your philosophy, and suffocate, entangled in the web of desire that you have built for yourself. 

Desire, oh dear, that sorceress that you want to chase so you can live a life. You, mankind, of great intellect, are unwittingly busy building your own tomb. A fancy one at that. One that every other species will trample with utmost disrespect. Why, oh why, evolution, did you give this dishonourable species the gift of wisdom? If only you knew what it would do to your own children. Mankind, you prodigal child of evolution, little do you know how they loathe you. 

The animals, the birds, the plants, the very air you breathe dreams incessantly of turning poisonous and choking you to death. The water you drink wants to freeze in your gullet, the food you eat wants to burn a hole through your insides. 

Little do you know, you foolishly wise race, how you harm, disregard and trod over them all. You miserable bunch, you.

An existence more menial than your own.

There isn’t always a purpose to everything. Some things just happen as a result of other things, and those in turn have more results. There’s no purpose. It’s like the death of a brain cell, that just lived to harbour a few thoughts that caught your fancy, and once you’re done thinking those thoughts, the damn things just dies. It knows not what it lives for and whether or not the thoughts it churns up have any use for your already menial existence. Whether or not it will see the light of the day, is not in the imagination of that insignificant brain cell. Insignificant it is, but its thoughts aren’t. It goes about its day drinking up the sugars from your blood, and the occasional alcohol that you feed it on Friday evenings. It swims in the blood rush that the dilated vessels give it, throws up vivid visuals, plays sounds out to you. And then one morning it doesn’t wake up. It just dies, and is replaced by a new one; a younger, hungrier cell that has the arduous task of living up to the legacy left behind by its predecessor. It’s just a brain cell after all. What of those thoughts, and ideas it gives you. It dies anyway.

The curse of the human mind

The human mind is a race in itself, a parallel species that’s evolving faster than the human body. It seeks, hates, loves, flies, fidgets, but never does it die. The human body does. 

The human mind, it is the curse of the human body; the price it pays for being such an intricately-designed contraption. The brain, for being the crown of evolution, it suffers from all the parasites it harbours in its crevices. In the shadows of the brain, they thrive on the infinite energy available to them, until they grow into robust young, voracious adults. Ideas, they are. 

The deprive the brain of rest, of joy, of love, of all things good, of all things that bring about a release of a hormone that increases the flow of blood in the billions of arteries in the brain- the feeling of simple unassuming happiness. The human mind it is, the curse of mankind. The curse of evolution; the greatest mistake in the great cosmic blueprint. 

An unseen little flaw in its conceptualisation that puts the mind on a pedestal of power, of delusion, and on a sure path to self-destruction. It stops not at the boundaries set by land, or air, it transverses across to the stratosphere, to the moon, to the other celestial bodies, uninvited. 

In its quest to explore, to conquer to satisfy its monstrous ego of proprietorship of the little fragment of the universe visible to itself. Unwittingly, it devours its own self, gradually eroding its capabilities, and preying on the human body that hasn’t quite caught up with the human mind on the evolutionary rat-race. 

It’s a self-fulfilling flaw in the universe’s design. A slow, but sure plan to bring about its own death. It’s a curse on mankind.

Called the human mind.

Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

Being a Punjabi-speaking Catholic in Pakistan already sounds confusing on a lot of levels. Have the words in the sentence been jumbled up? No. That is the other Pakistan. The less-glorified Pakistan that's not about cricket, or Kashmir, or politics. It's the Pakistan nobody speaks about. Alice, the titular character, is the center of the working-class Karachi that hangs as the backdrop of Mohammed Hanif's black satire.

Alice is not the fully-covered woman that Islamic societies are largely characterised by. She is, as Hanif describes, 'a miracle of malnutrition' with a slender waist, skinny limbs but perfectly-shaped breasts. Alice married Teddy Butt, a police errand boy, in order to stay safe. Hanif only embellishes the story with his satirical, dark comic writing, without which, 'Our Lady of Alice Bhatti' is no different from a work of realism. Hanif doesn't shy away from talking about something he feels most strongly about- the plight of women.


Look at my legs, these are my legs that I'm walking on, this is my neck. Can you feel the ice-cold Pepsi flowing down my throat? Should I wear a nose ring? Hanif talks about sex, crime, social tension, male chauvinism, policing, moral policing, and all that that runs rampant, unchecked and unreported in the average day of the Karachi work-life. And all of this he does without the slightest romance to it, in a gloomy, but comical voice of a voyeuristic narrator. Hanif stays away from most cliches and dives right into ugly greasy social structure he exposes with the help of well-sketched characters. Alice, a nurse in a Catholic hospital; Teddy Butt, a police helper and informer; Inspector Malangi, a seemingly-sincere law enforcer; Hina Alvi, a senior nurse at the same hospital. Alongside a host of other characters that could have been stereotypes in a Hindi film, but come across as refreshingly original because of how realistically they all form the backbone of urban Pakistan's social fabric.

Hanif's plot works single-mindedly towards an end result that he seems to have in mind right from the start of the story. A tragic finish to the story that in one stroke puts a finish to the discourse on everything he's been trying to highlight. An effortless single act that ties everything up together, leaving you with a sense of deep pain, shame, and utmost regret- not just for the characters, but for the society at large.

'Our Lady of Alice Bhatti' remains in your head as an affectionate ode to the Pakistan we don't know. 

Mornings will never be the same again.

This morning, a handful of strange things happened to me. And when I say a 'handful', I mean a definite number of strange things that if I took the pain (or pleasure) of counting them, would fit exactly within the dimensions of my right palm. So, about the strange things, you'd understand the magnitude of it once I get down to describing them in high-definition quality detail.

So let me begin with the strangest of the lot, and then proceed to less and less alarming things through the course of my discourse. If you are, in the meantime doing anything that's taking a greater part of your attention, I suggest you put it down and read with complete attention. So here we go. I wake up and walk up to my bathroom, and I'm not the kind, you must know, who looks at himself in the mirror the first thing in the morning. It has happened many times before that for a good two or three seconds, I have failed to recognise myself. But lets get back to me in the bathroom, for now. So I trot along into the loo, and I pull off my clothes in an attempt to settle my bottom on the commode, to begin relieving myself. But I begin feeling a strange itch on my palms, and in the stupor that I am in, or rather was in (but since we're talking of me in the act of doing so, I'll go with 'am'). So yeah, I begin to scratch and it itches further. That's my palm I'm talking about, would you believe it? My goddamn palm has the nerve and the artery and what not, to say- "hey i'm feeling a little itchy, would mind giving me a hand, and no pun intended there". So there, I'm scratching my palm, and I'm scratching it, and I feel something odd.

Now if you think about the way our tactile response works, it's a rather complicated science. I mean how in the name of god, or Beelzebub, or whoever you wish the honour, does the right hand know where exactly the left hand is, and how much must it move in order to make the perilous journey to scratch it's laterally inverted twin? And all of this without any visual data from the eyes? So then, like I was saying, the left hand, while it was busy asking to be scratched, also sent up an abnormal tactile response through the right hand into the brain. I sat up! I mean I was already seated on the commode, not that I'd do my job there in a reclining position. And talking of doing it reclining, I wonder how horrible that must feel. A short cut to feeling like a prisoner, perhaps. But then, yes, I sat up. And i scratched again, to receive the exact same tactile response from the left hand. Left palm to be precise. It felt odd. Like some sort of growth on the palm.

Now let me spend a moment talking about my left palm. Or any left palm in general, across any being in this wonderful universe. The palm, is a barren scape. But it is characteristically barren, you might agree. Every palm has a distinct face, and a certain identity- the number of crossed veins you'll see all acorss it. The billions of little fate lines or whatever the curious little demarcations may be all about. But you'll certainly, and most definitely not see any hair! That's right, I'd like the first man, or woman, who claims to have any hair on the palm to give me a hoot, this very moment. Look at your own palm for a moment. Just stop reading this piece of unauthorized prose on trichome growth on human limbs, and look at your own palm. Take a good look at it. Do you see any hair? Yes? Give me a call. No? Continue reading.

Well, so I did quite the same to palm, and for a moment I thought it was a strand of hair from another less defined part of my form that managed to make its way to my palm and had decided to spend a good few moments there before being discovered and being washed off into the nothingness of the drain that is normally its destiny. But I gave it a tug, and I heard a little yelp. The yelp, it surprised me to discover, was from my own mouth. The little tuft of hair seemed to be growing right out of my palm. Under the beginning of the middle finger, at that odd spot where the flesh folds. There was a tuft- about five or so strands of hair in different stages of growth.

I let out another one this time. More like a shriek. I hadn't even begun my business on the commode, so I just pulled up my pyjamas, and went over to the mirror. Now let me also admit, I have absolutely no idea why I went over to the mirror like that. I mean, it's not as if you cant see your palm without looking at it in the mirror, or it's neither as if the reflection would uncover a hidden meaning behind that odd deposition of dead cells there. But then, I think of it as a pretty cinematic moment, that I walked up to the mirror for a moment of introspection. It's that shot in a film where your hero walks up to the mirror and a lone incandescent bulb dangles from the ceiling, hiding his eyes into shadow. And that beautifully photographed shot normally makes it to the posters and a lot of other publicity material. So you know you're signing up to watch an intense film about a guy who's got a mental problem and might end up winning the Kung-fu championship by the end of the debacle.

But yeah, here I am looking at the mirror, wondering what I must ask myself at this auspicious juncture. The day is yet to begin, my morning rituals yet to be attended to, and here I am, standing in front of a mirror, pondering (a rather unalarming sense of pondering there) what I must make of this. I pick up my mobile and dial the first number on the 'last-dialled' list. Again, I normally don't do such things, but the key word here is- normally. So by some stroke of misfortune, the last dialled number happened to be that of my.... (To be continued)

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"I'm looking for seeds of a rare crop, actually. I wonder if you stock them?" he said asking the attendant. "Sir here's our catalogue, you may find what you're looking for here" the attendant said, " Well I have one already, and it is, as a matter of fact, listed here" he replied, waving a colourfully printed, designer booklet. "Well then there's a number next to it- the first two digits are for the section, the next for the rack, and the third for the shelf" said the attendant exasperated.
"there's no number next to it" he replied
"Ok!" said the attendant leaping across the sack in front of him and taking the booklet from him "I'll take a look, which is it?"
The customer pointed at the small font at a corner of the booklet. "Lorem Ipsum Dolor" it read.

Swap!

She sat looking through the thick glass pane at the tramp on the platform. "Him?" she thought to herself, not that bad, she decided. She was already bored of the nylon cushions of the first class compartment. The generous serving of bacon in her breakfast wasn't easing the boredom too much.

She she looked out once again, at the platform- an old lady knitting a bright sweater, the young man in a black coat holding a bunch of roses, a plump woman screaming at her two little brats, the old man at the bookstall. Wait! "Him!" she exclaimed, causing her grandmother to nearly spill tea over herself.

She concentrated her gaze on the bookseller for a minute looking at him intently, studying every little crease on his face, his trimmed grey-white beard and the berret slung over his forehead. The unwitting old man gave a tiny jolt, waking up fully and sitting upright. He began to look around himself all of a sudden as if to take in his surroundings. He stood up after a moment smiling in childish glee "buy your lady a book, mister!" he said to the young man while throwing a glance at her.