Noon by Aatish Taseer

Author:Aatish Taseer [Taseer, Aatish]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447203971
Publisher: Picador

4

Port bin Qasim: An Idyll

(2011)

Suroor Barabankvi

A syntactically unfaithful translation: There is upon the horizon the anticipation of a stone-like sun/ As a mirror shattering, the night will scatter/ All those who worship darkness, those who have been reared on twilight/ they must go as goes the night.

The Tabassums! Sahil Tabassum, you know, once said to me, years after I had met him, ‘I like a book to have a beginning, a middle and an end.’ I thought to myself, answering cliché with cliché, if everyone has a book in them, mine cannot be that kind of book. The gaps in my life were too many, the threads too few. And though I knew this, knew there was little to string life together, the tendency was still to appear as whole before the world, to let the imagination fill in the spaces that experience had left blank.

A mistake, I now feel.

In writing this last episode, I tried often to see what I had not seen, to be places I had not been, to pretend that my view of Port bin Qasim had not only – and ever – been an eclipsed one. In this, I was like a man, who peeping through a keyhole, is denied his vantage point, when leaning too forcefully against the door that has restricted (and excited) his vision, he causes it to swing wide open. A mistake, you see: for what we cannot know is as much a part of us as what we do know. And people, like places, must learn to live with their absences, with those parts of the record that have been sanitized.

This story came to me during – and I think you will see why – a final visit to my father’s country. I was tempted many times to abandon it, for the material is strange and distressing, and the tale without moral, unless you consider looking and recording with a sympathetic eye as moral enough. But, in the end, the writing need was too strong; and, for all my misgivings, it made its way onto the page.

One morning in May, when the sun was already high over the tarmac, I stepped off the plane in Port bin Qasim for the first time. Even deep inland, where the airport stood, surrounded by pale hard land, there was the briny breath of the sea. Overhead, casting the ominous shapes of birds of prey, were the frayed crowns of palm trees. There was in this play of short shadows and flickering wind-blown sunlight a noontime menace. And about the young man, who appeared from a line of unfamiliar faces, with a piece of board that bore the name ‘Rehan Tabassum’ there was the scent of guns, dollars and drugs.

He knew me immediately. His tall, slim figure pushed its way out of the crowd; he was smiling knowingly at me.

‘My God, saab,’ he said, extending a sunburned hand. ‘You are Mr Sahil exact. Even more than your brothers, you look like him. And Mr Narses gave me this .

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