by PATWARI
Forgetting is imposed as a strategy to hide the haunting memories that cannot be revealed without destroying our romance with nationalism.
Yasmin Saikia
During the many blackouts and power outages in the Pakistan of my childhood, my family used to sit in the veranda of our home cursing the electricity department and cooling ourselves down with hand-fans. But on cool autumn nights, blackouts were rather enjoyable, and we would ask Ammi to sing. ‘Aa ja sanam, madhur chandni mein hum,’ a Raj kapoor and Nargis number, apt for a moonlit night in the veranda, was her favorite. That was also the song that she and her favorite nephew (her eldest brother’s first son) used to sing at Eid dinners as a duet. The whole family adored him. He was brilliant and a high achiever. Every kid in the family, to this day, is compared to him: Those that do well in their studies are likened to him and those that don’t are chided to try to be like him. I never got to meet my cousin.
One day in 1978, my Mamu was told that his son, my mother’s favorite nephew, a 28-year-old major with the Pakistan Army, had committed suicide. Mamu never believed that his son committed suicide. His son had told him that he had taken on his superior for some financial malfeasance. My Mamu believed it was for this reason that he was murdered. The story that I grew up with was that the alleged suicide note had a blood stain on it and that Mamu had taken the matter to court, where the judge had said that it was not a suicide. The forensic investigation on his remains was never completed. Some military high-up threatened my Mamu with an offer to arrange for him to meet his dead son. Mamu stopped pursuing the matter, but his grief lingered and the story lived on in my family.
Despite the scar left on my family by the Pakistan Army, I, like so many kids, was fascinated by soldiery, even as I heard my father swear at the TV every night, as he watched General Zia on the TV screen. My brothers and I used to stage elaborate battles between two armies of toy soldiers separated by a Ludo board or an old desk calendar, and lob stones at the other side. Sometimes the artillery included lit matchsticks that had to land on, or sufficiently near, the enemy soldier for it to be counted as a fatal hit. That game of ours, in its indoor manifestations by the windowsill, ended when the curtain caught fire, but the war fantasy continued in other games. My brother and I would line up two chairs, one in front of the other, and throw a heavy blanket over them. This tent would sometimes be a helicopter, and at other times a tank, firing and dropping bombs at the imaginary enemy.
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(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)