It’s a shrine, darbar or mazar in local parlance. Crowd is all over the place, both men and women together and yet separate. They seem nearly lost; some mumbling to themselves, some muttering under their breath.

Men usually pray to the dead saint to grant them boon; expansion in business, big and small, jobs, preferably those of government, cure for a family member whose medical treatment the family can’t afford or spectacle of their rivals (Shareek) biting the dust. And women? They want sons or their mothers-in-law dead, husbands’ violence tempered with compassion and increase in family income by hook or by crook.

They feel convinced rather believe that the saint has the miraculous power because his hagiography transmitted orally from generation to generation tells that for example their beloved saint as a child sat astride a wall and ordered it run. Low and behold, the wall started moving as if it was a horse. If the saint could turn a wall into trotting horse, why can’t he grant them what they want, goes the spiritual logic.

It would in fact be far easier for him to grant his devotee his/her wish as they ask for much simpler things involving much less use of miraculous power at his disposal. Interestingly, the paradox is lost on all. Devotees firmly believe that their patron saint in his life had absolutely nothing to do with worldliness of society, material possessions or social status. He was much above mundane existence. He lived purely in the rarified world of spirituality. But what do they want from him? Little more than mundane and material things! The very things he is believed to have never been enamoured of. In other words, they want things crudely material out of a spiritual factory.

“A rustic plants acacia tree and expects Bajaur’s raisins from it/ And spins wool and seeks to don the silk robe”, says Baba Farid, the sage and the pioneer of Punjabi literary tradition.

There is a crowd in a circle. In the middle is a man, usually from the north of the country with herbs spread out on a sheet and a few small bottles filled with some odd looking stuff. A large gaudy map with mountains and monkeys on it serves as a backdrop which looks out of place. Seems it is some sort of item from a vaudeville or some weird road show. The man in charge knows how to build the thing to a crescendo despite the fact he hardly has command over any single language; he uses mix of Urdu, Punjabi and Pashto. He, however, gets his message across in his pidgin Urdu. Anyway what is needed is communication, not eloquence. His curious wares facilitate him in communication with all male crowd drawn from petty bourgeoisie, lumpen proletariat and working class. The showman talks of role of sex in man’s life and how it can make his life heaven or hell. Gradually his expression becomes laced with risqué banter and laughter. His bawdy jokes coupled with smart salesmanship keep the audience spellbound. He reaches climax when he starts waxing eloquent on what surely, in his opinion, can cure impotence and erectile dysfunction. The cure is storax, salajit in his parlance, collected from the tops of high mountains with effort, a godsend gift for males weighed downed by hardly shareable sense of embarrassment and worthlessness. The crowd, at least some of them, in dire need of cure fail to realise that they are being fobbed off. They have perhaps never heard of sexologists or don’t have faith in them. Better to buy storax from a vendor with no questions asked than being subjected to answer questions of private nature by a sexologist which modestly demands should be left unanswered.

Living with sexual disorder is to be preferred to finding a medical cure by getting the patient open up in terms thought to be morally unacceptable.

Large sections of middle and upper middle classes have lately become vociferous in articulating their political ideals in their drawing rooms and to an extent out on the street. United States of America, India and Pakistan are good examples to study. Such classes in these countries despite their visible differences are defined by certain common features such as religious nationalism, supremacist streak, intolerance and above all intellectual illiteracy.

As to the Pakistani middle and upper middle classes, they have recently mounted the political stage after being dormant for decades. Their vision, which is still blinkered, has been shaped by a massive dose of state propaganda and sanitised and controlled education. Subsequently, they feel imbued with ideological imperatives which are abstract and self-serving. Their rallying point is their much touted contempt for corruption by politicians. And their rally cry is; demolish the old guard at all cost. In their naivety it never occurs to them that corruption especially of financial nature is inbuilt in the power structures we live under. Take any specimen and you will detect corruption buried in its innards.

Dictatorship, democracy, theocracy, fascism and monarchy all are oiled by corruption. A regime supported by holier-than-thou middle classes will be as corrupt as any other if not more. It’s a structural problem that can’t be wished away by display of piety. Since they can’t create their New Jerusalem, they look for a saviour. If they can’t find one, they will invent one. Irony is that large segments of these classes that pretend to wage crusade against corruption are in fact beneficiaries of corruption if not product of it. Nearly all government employees coming from middle classes brazenly indulge in financial corruption and their families happily live off it. The state pays them for not doing things and hapless citizens pay them - under the table - for doing things which they are otherwise duty bound to do. Middle class businessmen, traders and shopkeepers don’t pay taxes. They live in costly houses riding new vehicles without paying a penny as income tax and yet make noises. The airy-fairy mantra of corruption-free polity offers no magical solution.

A pragmatic approach would be to keep check on corruption and cap it at certain tolerable level as necessary evil in the prevalent system. The search for ideal solution would be a saccharine song full of oohs and aahs vacuously predicting the coming of a political messiah.

Political messiah’s regime, in the words of Waris Shah, would be a: “paper boat rowed by a monkey”. 

— soofi01@hotmail.com