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Authors: John Freeman
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When they left they made sure both panels of the door were open behind them, each cage swinging on its long chain.
The next song he’d make up for her would be about a lamp in a room where two lovers met – so engrossed did the flame become in watching them that it continued to burn when the oil finished.
POEM | YASMEEN HAMEED
PK 754
The city glitters
and in some dim light you, too, are sleeping.
From these heights
the moon’s surface is closer.
But, no –
no one knows
whether the air is swift or cold here,
whether this is a floating smoke of clouds
or the dust of companionship.
Is this the quivering wave of the final call
or the unsteady vessel of flight
or the lurching earth below?
Who was it went to sleep holding sand in his fists
became distant even to imagination and dream
disappeared in the tangled hair of straying night?
Are the stars moving with me?
What regret is it that has not yet been soothed?
Heights, separations
even intimations of death have not eased it.
Fellow traveller of depths
of altitudes
tell me –
on earth
in the air
the path that never took shape
what came of it?
Tell me
what kind of sleep is it
that can cross the wall of night
and transform into morning?
What kind of dream?
Tell me, what is this cry of pain in the air?
What is this restlessness?
The journey is coming to an end
and the noise is deafening.
Translated by Waqas Khwaja
GRANTA
PORTRAIT OF JINNAH
Jane Perlez
W hen a Pakistani friend won a promotion to a powerful job in Peshawar I went to congratulate him on his new sinecure. He is a cultivated man with a beautiful home from the British colonial era and tentacles all across Pakistan’s tormented tribal region, where he once served as a political agent – the all-purpose government official who is supposed to act as lord and regent over the fractious tribes and the inexorably rising tide of the Taliban.
As always, my friend wore a starched and pressed white shalwar kameez. While we talked he carefully untied the green ribbons on stacks of well-worn cardboard folders, signed the government papers stacked inside with a fountain pen, and then tossed the retied folders on to the floor. Every half-hour, a clerk appeared and carried away the piles of completed paperwork.
Government offices are important symbols in Pakistan – size, furniture, scope of retinue. This one was handsome, a large room set off a broad veranda in the ersatz Moghul-era quadrangle of pink stucco. A white mantelpiece signalled the dignity of the office holder. Above it hung a portrait, more a sketch in dingy brown, of Pakistan’s founding father, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. The face was gaunt and elderly – an aquiline nose, sunken cheeks, unforgiving mouth. A peaked cap high off his forehead and a plain coat buttoned to the neck with a high collar gave the aura of a religious man. The picture reminded me of the first image I had ever seen of Jinnah: a mysterious, dark oil painting covered with glass hung high on a wall of the formal reception room at the Pakistani High Commission in London.
A few months later I returned to see my friend. Same signing of documents, same clerk, different portrait above the mantel. The new visage showed a serious young man with a full head of dark hair, an Edwardian white shirt, black jacket and tie, alert dark eyes. What happened? I asked.
‘I would like to see Jinnah brimming with life,’ my friend said. He did not want to be reminded of the clerical image that is now considered politically correct in many places throughout Pakistan. An Anglophile acquaintance of my friend’s in Peshawar had found the more youthful, secular image of the founding father as a law student in England and had personally come to hang the replacement.
The question of Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s portrait is no small matter in Pakistan. For a foreigner, the choice of portrait is one of the most telling signs of
The next song he’d make up for her would be about a lamp in a room where two lovers met – so engrossed did the flame become in watching them that it continued to burn when the oil finished.
POEM | YASMEEN HAMEED
PK 754
The city glitters
and in some dim light you, too, are sleeping.
From these heights
the moon’s surface is closer.
But, no –
no one knows
whether the air is swift or cold here,
whether this is a floating smoke of clouds
or the dust of companionship.
Is this the quivering wave of the final call
or the unsteady vessel of flight
or the lurching earth below?
Who was it went to sleep holding sand in his fists
became distant even to imagination and dream
disappeared in the tangled hair of straying night?
Are the stars moving with me?
What regret is it that has not yet been soothed?
Heights, separations
even intimations of death have not eased it.
Fellow traveller of depths
of altitudes
tell me –
on earth
in the air
the path that never took shape
what came of it?
Tell me
what kind of sleep is it
that can cross the wall of night
and transform into morning?
What kind of dream?
Tell me, what is this cry of pain in the air?
What is this restlessness?
The journey is coming to an end
and the noise is deafening.
Translated by Waqas Khwaja
GRANTA
PORTRAIT OF JINNAH
Jane Perlez
W hen a Pakistani friend won a promotion to a powerful job in Peshawar I went to congratulate him on his new sinecure. He is a cultivated man with a beautiful home from the British colonial era and tentacles all across Pakistan’s tormented tribal region, where he once served as a political agent – the all-purpose government official who is supposed to act as lord and regent over the fractious tribes and the inexorably rising tide of the Taliban.
As always, my friend wore a starched and pressed white shalwar kameez. While we talked he carefully untied the green ribbons on stacks of well-worn cardboard folders, signed the government papers stacked inside with a fountain pen, and then tossed the retied folders on to the floor. Every half-hour, a clerk appeared and carried away the piles of completed paperwork.
Government offices are important symbols in Pakistan – size, furniture, scope of retinue. This one was handsome, a large room set off a broad veranda in the ersatz Moghul-era quadrangle of pink stucco. A white mantelpiece signalled the dignity of the office holder. Above it hung a portrait, more a sketch in dingy brown, of Pakistan’s founding father, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. The face was gaunt and elderly – an aquiline nose, sunken cheeks, unforgiving mouth. A peaked cap high off his forehead and a plain coat buttoned to the neck with a high collar gave the aura of a religious man. The picture reminded me of the first image I had ever seen of Jinnah: a mysterious, dark oil painting covered with glass hung high on a wall of the formal reception room at the Pakistani High Commission in London.
A few months later I returned to see my friend. Same signing of documents, same clerk, different portrait above the mantel. The new visage showed a serious young man with a full head of dark hair, an Edwardian white shirt, black jacket and tie, alert dark eyes. What happened? I asked.
‘I would like to see Jinnah brimming with life,’ my friend said. He did not want to be reminded of the clerical image that is now considered politically correct in many places throughout Pakistan. An Anglophile acquaintance of my friend’s in Peshawar had found the more youthful, secular image of the founding father as a law student in England and had personally come to hang the replacement.
The question of Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s portrait is no small matter in Pakistan. For a foreigner, the choice of portrait is one of the most telling signs of
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