by MIRZA ATHAR BAIG
An excerpt from ‘Hassan’s State of Affairs’, translated from the Urdu by Haider Shahbaz.
The terrible event happened to Hassan Raza Zaheer after a lifetime of displaced sightseeing.
Taking full blame for this cumbersome formula (“displaced sightseeing”), if we try to find out when, why, and where Hassan got the habit of displaced sightseeing, then we will have to walk for a little while alongside Hassan down the path of his life…in fact, more importantly, we will have to see with Hassan, because the whole problem is that of seeing, and what needs to be seen is what kind of seeing this will be.
Hassan Raza Zaheer got the job of an accountant at a chemical factory after finishing his studies in finance at the age of twenty-four. The factory was located fifteen kilometres outside of the city. It was an accommodating and appropriate job: the pay was decent, there was the prospect of annual promotion (given compliant and industrious work), meals were free and, most importantly for Hassan, there was the benefit of a company car that picked up the employees every morning from different parts of the city and dropped them back at their houses in the evening.
Hassan always sat next to the window towards the middle of the car, which, in reality, wasn’t a car, but a large van that could seat up to twenty employees. Within a few seconds of sitting down, his neck would turn to the right and, with the van beginning to move, the displaced sightseeing would begin too. The familiar houses of the neighbourhood, shops, then other neighbourhoods, bakeries, auto-workshops, barbershops, schools, colleges, hotels, corner shops, alleys, markets, office buildings, petrol pumps, bridges, rivers, railway lines, grubby dirty neighbourhoods, farms, rural mud houses, public places for gathering, wrestling rings, streams, innumerable kinds of trees, factories… and other than these static targets: moving bodies, pedestrians, animals, cars, bicycles, motorcycles, rickshaws, buses, tractors, trucks… The factory’s parking lot, “Time to get off, sir.”
On the way back, the same series would repeat for the left-hand side of the predetermined route. There was nothing outwardly unusual about Hassan’s act of watching. Any person looks at the world in front of him and to the world on his right and left in much the same way when moved from one place to another. We can say that the feeling of being unconnected to the sight is a prerequisite to displaced sightseeing and is an essential component of our training in “world-watching”.
Then again, it is not at all a matter of training or learning, since we already know from the moment we begin to use our senses that if, in the process of seeing, we get stuck on something that troubles us and forces us to halt, the sensible thing to do is to forget the troublesome scene and keep moving from one sight to the next.
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