Its been a while since i've written. The words just came creeping back today.
When dreams are snuffed out, so are the words, so is their magic.
Its been a while (has the old "stained" tune started to play in your head yet? not in mine...thats not music to me..) since i've noticed the birds. The grey-blue plastic baggies capering around confusedly, like bubbles from a PINK-fizzy-drink (cherry 7-up) bottle.
The colours in Ammi's apron that she says is green (essentializing..categorizing... making ABSOLUTE..."It is green. No questions asked. Non answered.").
I've told her its a murky-crimsonish-slightly oliveLY jaded BLUE.
ammi: Green.
me: But look. It's such a. Depressed Confused Colour. Can't be green.
Ammi: Is.
The term is "parental angst".
What else?
The "news room". The over-flowing ash trays. The cigarette butts ALL MINE. The dried lungs soon-to-be-eroded-by cancer. Yes those are mine too, thank you.
The only chair at the "national desk" that does not squeak: Mahim's "high" chair.
It's the picture-perfect newsroom, everything the movies make newspaper offices out to be. Over-crowded. Nasty. The voices of 80 people, 18 air conditioners and 8 printers amalgamating to produce a monotonous buzzing sound. (Ever notice how a single bee never buzzes? Probably does. Maybe. But the sound is never heard. A single bee's BUZZ is unheard. Unless you're in a space shuttle and the bee is inside the glass helmet of your silver-foily space suit.)
And so they all come together. The voices. Yousaf Sahab's chuckle+Mahim's screech+Arifa's undertones+Mateen's one word vocabulary: Cheap+Najam's pointless relentless shaggy dog stories+Ammar's hillarious mimicries (of brassiers and lin-ger-ie!)+the noise that the-page-maker-whose-name-i-never-bothered-to-find-out makes when he swings his arms around in frustartion (waqat bohat kum hai aur muqaabla bohat sakht!)= THAT thunderous snakey, hum-drone.
Somewhere. An air conditioner heaves. Someone kicks a chair. And then. A paper ruffles. Crunch crunch.
Mahim "crashing" a story. Sliced and diced and flushed down the waste basket. Not good enough. Probably. Mahim is the "HEAD" of the national desk after all. In more ways than one. She knows best. After All.
And me? It is my lucky day today. 
Mariam Qureshi decides to write a story about statues that were placed outside "prominent" buildings during the British Raj. "Where they are today, no one knows," she writes. I have to "sub-edit" her rhetoric.
Alright. Fine. I'll give her some credit. Yes. She writes much better than MOST reporters at The Daily Times. Yes she tries to give me more than just facts. A little bit of feelings too. But too little to make a story. 
She wants to go around looking for these missing statues in a wave of "imperialistic civic zeal". I am forced to laugh, i can't help but laugh! How about looking for the statue of Sir Ganga Ram instead? Ever wonder where it went after being dumped in the parking lot of NCA some 40 years ago?
But No. It is Mariam's day out and she is looking for Lord John Lawrence. Who stationed a bronze replica of himself on a busy street to reinstate his authority (please read that sentence OUT LOUD in a constipated British accent). His unshakable presence. His colonialism. Taking over the heart's, minds and souls of the colonized. Taking over their roads. The pavillions where they could have held pieces of "themselves" and not emblems of extra-terrestrial intrusion.
But Mariam wants to look for him. Lord John Lawrence. What a perfectly prototypically British name! Yes i will do my own categorizing. I have faced the "crisis of representation". Now so shall he.
She is sad that the only person left to remind "us" of our "magnificent culture" is Alfred Woolner whose statue stands outside the old Punjab University Building as a last fossil of the arts of "The Time".
HAH.
Another day in an editor's life. Making a "writer" out of an often published and much admired "journalist".  Looking for a "good" cultural feature? Mariam's the woman. Goes into the nooks and crannies of Lahore and produces stories out of "crumbs of shadow".
Tomorrow Mariam will open the paper with a smile. She will pretend the words are hers. 



- posted by Mehreen Malik @ 6:01 PM