Sunday, 12 June, 2011
By Khawaja Manzar Amin
The established pattern of ruthlessness against ordinary citizens by the state organs of authority must cease forthwith, if the country is to confront its real external and internal enemies with unity
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country. It touched e v e r y o n e and everything, even the self-centered bourgeois and the chattering classes. As Camus wrote in The Fall, ‘Have you noticed that death alone awakens our feelings’? Above all, the highest civilian quarters felt compelled to ‘take notice’ of it and some of the parliamentarians too showed their human side for a change! The sight of the unarmed young man begging for his life, the cold and casual demeanour of the killers in uniform as they shot at him, the agonizing screams of the ill-fated victim, and his dying pleas to his heartless assassins to be taken to hospital, which fell on deaf years, should (or ought to) continue to haunt the peace of our collective consciousness and conscience till justice is done. Like the protagonist of Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim, ‘there was no going back… It was as if I had jumped into a well or a whirl pool – into an everlasting deep hole’ and the narrator of the tale is
The cheapest thing at this time in the whole planet is the life of the ordinary Pakistani citizen (with a few Chechen women thrown in for good measure), and our most ubiquitous state, the state of denial
Lawless law enforcers The time has come to replace our doctrine of ‘national security’ with a doctrine of ‘national conscience’
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m a n approached the Rangers personnel deputed outside Benazir Shaheed Park with a complaint against a young bandit inside the park. The Rangers officials went inside the park and spotted the youngster who fired at them. The return fire from the Rangers killed the bandit.” –Sindh Rangers spokesman “Friend take me to the hospital” –Unarmed Sarfaraz Shah’s plea to half a dozen Rangers who shot him from point blank range “Raymond who?,” the guy in the
Rangers uniform must have talked to himself, “We have always been better at killing innocents and never had to pay diyat.” They then shot the boy pleading for his life and then left him to stutter and die. This was in full confidence that they will not be reprimanded. Headquarters would follow suit. And follow suit it did. The Sindh Rangers media cell, fully complicit, declared that the boy had shot at the Rangers and they shot back. The incident was declared an encounter. Interior Minister Rahman Malik (how I hate his ability to enter my articles) reinteracted. Purportedly without taking out the time to watch the one-minute clip being aired on television showing the incident he declared the boy a thief. And so somehow from the bottom to the top, the Ranger who shot the boy knew he was going to get a clean chit. And so did the six other officers that stood next to him as the boy asked, “Friend please take me to the hospital,” to those who had shot
Silence is not an option today neither is it a virtue, as our ‘patriotic’ Corps Commanders would like us to believe
him. Such is the desperation of the boy, such was also a reflection of his personality, or, maybe, it was the fear of the Rangers, that it was not a triad of abuses he hurled, but the words, ‘dost, please take me to the hospital.’ But the men surrounding him did not move. I tend to be an individual easily able to channel my anger into interplay of sophisticated words. On Thursday the only words I hurled from morning to the next morning was abuses.
A doctrine of ‘national conscience’ I suppose this is a turning point. Everyone knew that the incident was not a one-off. The last month had seen five Chechens killed w h i l e
crossing an FC checkpost in Kharotabad. There too the blame was being shifted and it is likely that another defunct inquiry shall come to no result. The problem, rather, is structural. Killing its own people is a norm for the military and no one has ever questioned it. The Rangers and the Pakistan army and their affiliates have gotten away with both murder and rape on our watch and been spared under the logic of the ‘national unity’ doctrine. Let us propose a new doctrine today: a doctrine of ‘national conscience.’ Let us decide that no one shall get away with wanton murder. And that we shall open up every ghost of the past and give due recognition to each and
Illustrated & Designed by Javeria Mirza
By Hashim bin Rashid
2 Anthology: Well-packed potpourri 4 Windmill of change
picture, the hardboiled old timers used to say, is worth a thousand words. By that premise a ‘caught on camera’ video may be worth more than a million, indeed, it may be the difference between truth and falsehood, innocence and guilt, humans and beasts, between a shootout and a cold-blooded murder. On Thursday last, horrified audiences of all the television channels witnessed what must certainly be the most shocking and chilling experience of their entire lives, images of the cold -blooded murder and final death throes of a young Pakistani citizen at the hands of none other than the Sindh Rangers, the supposed law and order guys, the protectors. The killers compounded the original sin by watching their quarry slowly bleed to death, an act of unbelievable inhumanity. This was indeed a disquieting mirror of our paramilitary forces at their worst. Suffering itself was on display and barbaric cruelty too, in living colour, on prime time across the
moved to remark, ‘A lost youngster, one in a million, but then he was one of us’ and it was ‘as if he (Jim) were an individual in the forefront of his kind, as if the obscure truth involved was momentous itself to affect mankind’s conception of itself’’. The senseless killing in Karachi was indeed one such watershed moment, but unfortunately it won’t be the last unless a bold example of fair play is set in this case. Remember, the open-and-shut case of the late Salman Taseer is still lying in the doldrums. Since the late 1970s, our society has seen a surfeit of tragedies and bizarre behaviour in every
the review
The Horror,
Anthology
the review
Well-packed potpourri Refreshingly different from the usual anthologies, the book holds the promise of a new generation of Pakistani writers By Rakhshanda Jalil
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situational comedy on BBC 2 featuring the life and times of a showbiz dwarf, titled rather cleverly Life’s Too Short, caught the imagination of an unsuspecting public in 2010, spawning a range of events pegged on the near-universal appeal of this catchy phrase. However, nearly a year before the BBC sitcom, a group of young people in Pakistan decided to launch a nation-wide hunt for new literary talent; they chose to bill their contest – open only to Pakistani writers writing in English – as Life’s Too Short: For a Long Story. A distinguished panel of judges whittled down the 800 submissions to a shortlist which was eventually published as the Life’s Too Short Literary Review: New Writing from Pakistan. The Editor’s Note explains the impulse behind the contest thus: “This publication came about as an exercise in curiosity. While Pakistani fiction in English comes into its own, and Pakistan takes shape in the global imagination due to a clutch of trailblazing authors, precious little is being done within the country to encourage and promote, or for that matter, discover new talent.” With a first prize of Rs.100,000 it managed to do just that. Refreshingly different from the usual anthologies, the writers included here make a pleasant change from the usual suspects. What is also different is the multiplicity of voices and concerns emerging from this slim collection.
Naughty and playful, bold and daring, provocative and combative, smart and sassy, reflective and insightful – there is much here to read and savour. Moreover, this new brood of writers – presumably mostly young – hold the promise of a new generation of Pakistani writers who will, hopefully, mature into abler chroniclers of the lives and times of their compatriots, abler that is than many of the present lot who have begun to produce writing that is almost of a kind. While it is always instructive and useful to gain insights into a troubled country, surely any country (no matter how troubled) has more to offer than glimpses into violence and extremism.
What is also different is the multiplicity of voices and concerns emerging from this slim collection The Life’s Too Short Review shows us the “other” Pakistan in finely-etched cameos of the everydayness of life. Sadaf Halai, winner of the first prize for “Lucky People”, paints a meditative and minutely-detailed portrait of middle-class ennui and envy for those who occupy the higher echelons. Living in a genteel but firmly middle-class enclave of Gulshan-e-Iqbal, Asma finds herself voyeuristically drawn into the life of her cigarette-smoking, westernised, rich, young tenant who opens a new world of spinach quiche and modern art. Confronted not merely by the class difference but the possibilities that life can hold, Asma faces her hitherto buried (or unacknowledged) frustrations and aspirations. Rayika Choudri’s “Settling Affairs”, which was judged second runner-
up, is also a poignant study of middle-class manners. A faithful servant watches the neat sorting, p a c k i n g , dividing of his Begum Sahiba’s household after her death. Told from the point of view of the servant, Zaheer, the story unfolds the dismantling of memories and memorabilia as the son and daughter of the deceased “settle” her affairs and sack her servant away with “three months’ pay and the promise of good recommendations”. There are other stories, too, such as a light-hearted look at a haircolouring job gone wrong (“Mir Sahib’s Hairdo”), or the nostalgia and dread of the diasporic Pakistani (“Ruth and Richard”), or the mumbojumbo dispensing holy men at shrines who prey on young boys (“The SixFingered Man”), or the indescribable sadness of a young couple who bury their still-born first baby in a foreign land. A story that stood out for its steadfast refusal to wallow in pity and false sentimentality is “The Wedding”. It recounts the coming of age of a young girl who knows life will hold out none of the treats, trinkets and toys
that girls her age cherish. Apart from the new fiction that comprise the entries for the contest, the book also includes, somewhat inexplicably, a photo essay, an extract from a graphic novel and a translation from a popular “pulp” serial in Urdu. While the editors may have done well to have stuck to the short-listed stories, the last extract – entitled “Challawa” — is a brave new look at lesbian love by one Sabiha Bano whose identity and gender remains a mystery. With the contest for this year having been announced, one looks forward to the second volume of the Review. (Rakhshanda Jalil has edited Neither Night Nor Day, a collection of short stories by Pakistani women writers, HarperCollins, 2007).
Classic
The mystic poet
Khusrau’s elegant poems are a commentary on the infinitely diverse and multi-hued sub-continent culture
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Sunday, 12 June, 2011
By Abdullah Khan
H
azrat Amir Khusrau of Delhi was one of the greatest poets of medieval India. He wrote in both Persian, the courtly language of his time, and what was then called Hindavi, the language of the masses. The same Hindavi later developed into two beautiful languages called Hindi and Urdu. A disciple of famous Sufi saint Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, Khusrau’s contributions towards the development of Qauwalli, South Asian Sufi music, and the sub-continent’s Islamic mystic culture, Sufism, were very important. He is also credited with the invention of Sitar and many other musical instruments. Khayal and Tarana, two popular forms of Hindustani classical music, are believed to have been discovered by him. Amir Khusrau is also remembered as a founder of the Ganga-Jamani Tehzeeb or the Indian culture “which is a synthesis of Muslim and Hindu elements.”
Poetry in Hindavi
By writing in Persian, Khusrau reached out to the upper crust of society. For the masses, he wrote his poetry in Hindavi. Across north India and in Pakistan, even now, we come across Khusrau’s poetry on a daily basis (remember his geets, qauwallis and riddles) but sometimes we are not aware that it was written by him. At times, he had beautifully mixed these two languages. The best example is Zehale-miskeen makun taghaful, duraye naina banaye batiyan; ki taab-e-hijran nadaram ay jaan, na leho kaahe lagaye chhatiyan. (Don’t be heedless of my
sorry state/He rolls his eyes, he makes excuses/For I cannot bear the separation, Why won’t he take me in his arms?) Here the translators have tried hard to provide us the exact meaning of the poem but how can he translate the lilting effect of the Persian words or the melody of the Hindavi or Brijbhasha phrases. Nobody can. In other words, translating a poet like Khusrau – specially his Hindavi poems which are rooted in the Indian folk culture – will always be a difficult task.. The same constraints must have been faced by Paul Losensky and Sunil Sharma, the translators of this wonderful volume titled In the Bazaar of Love: The Selected Poetry of Amir Khusrau. Paul Losensky, who teaches Persian literature at Indiana University, has translated the Persian ghazals. Sunil Sharma, a professor of Persian and Indian Literatures at Boston University, has taken care of rather more difficult and almost untranslatable Hindavi poems. The translators have done a commendable job by taking Khusrau to those readers who do not understand Persian and Hindavi. At some places, however, the duo has gone for literal translation rather than trying something poetic. Further, if the original texts of the poet have been included, particularly in the case of Hindavi poems, side by side of the translations, it would have given more pleasure to the readers familiar with Hindavi or Persian. Anyway, Khusrau’s poetry, even after the passage of seven centuries, remains relevant to our lives. His concept of composite culture and his firm belief in the equality of all cultures and religions are still to be fully imbibed by us. So, we all should read this
book, first as a book of elegant poetry and then as a commentary on the infinitely diverse and multi-hued sub-continental culture.
Title: In the Bazaar of Love: The Selected Poetry of Amir Khusrau, Translated by: Paul Losensky and Sunil Sharma Penguin Books India, Available at: Readings, Lahore. Rs.945
Pen sketches and memoirs
Two highly readable books from from the erstwhile or present teaching faculty of GCU, Lahore
By Syed Afsar Sajid
S
abir Lodhi and Zaheer Ahmad Siddiqi, both from the erstwhile or present teaching faculty of GCU Lahore, have come out with two highly readable books on different subjects. The former has composed pen sketches of 15 scholars and litterateurs in his book Bhulaya Na Jaeyga whereas the latter has narrated his biography in the second book Nisf Sadi Ka Qissa vis-à-vis his association with many a government college in the country including the Government College (now GCU), Lahore, spanning an eventful period of some 50 years.
Bhulaya Na Jaeyga The book contains pen-pictures of Dr. Syed Abdullah, Syed Wiqar Azim, Qayyum Nazar, Dr. Nazir Ahmad, Dr. Muhammad Ajmal, Rahman Muznib, Dr. Muhammad Hamiduddin, Mirza Muhammad Munawar, Ghulam-us-Saqlain Naqvi, Meerza Riaz, Jafar Baloch, Dr. Wazir Agha, Dr. Anwar Sadeed, Dr. Abdul Majid Awan and Farkhanda Lodhi (a well known fiction writer and the late spouse of the author). Sabir Lodhi has been a teacher of Urdu for over thirty-five years. His last assignment was that of a professor of the subject at government college, Lahore. Over a passage of years, penportrayal (khaka-nigari) has graduated from a literary pastime to a polished creative genre in Urdu. Writers who have promoted it include, among others, Ismat Chughtai, Manto, Shahid Ahmad Dehlvi, Shaukat Thanvi, Maulana Charagh Hasan Hasrat, Rashid Ahmad Siddiqi, Muhammad Tufail, Mumtaz Mufti, Syed Zamir
The Horror, the From Page 1 sphere of life, so much so that most of us have become seemingly genetically immune to the sea of tragedy, injustice, poverty and malevolence surrounding us. The cheapest thing at this time in the whole planet is the life of the ordinary Pakistani citizen (with a few Chechen women thrown in for good measure), and our most ubiquitous state, the state of denial. The people of goodwill (the real silent majority) all over the country must pick up the gauntlet for the protection of their basic right to life. They should flock to the house of the victim to provide succour to the family in its hour of grief and send wreaths and flowers as a gesture of solidarity and remembrance. A hillock, if not a mountain of flowers! They must agitate the issue at all forums so that this tragic incident is not swept under the carpet, as in the earlier Sialkot lynchings, and the Kharotabad massacre in Balochistan. The key word here is accountability (also includes resignations), and once the perpetrators of this heinous crime receive their just deserts, after due process, it would surely be a warning for itching, trigger-happy fingers in future, whether in uniform or in mufti. The established pattern of ruthlessness against ordinary citizens by the
Jafri, Ahmad Bashir, Farigh Bokhari, A. Hameed, Dr. Ibadat Brelvi, Sadiq-ul-Khairi, Mirza Adeeb, Ram Lal, Hameed Akhtar, Dr. Salim Akhtar, Ata-ul-Haq Qasmi, Dr. Nayyar Masood, Dr. Muhammad Yunus Butt, Dr. Tahir Taunsvi, Muhammad Ashfaq Virk, Dr. Anwar Ahmad, Anwar Jamal and this writer. The author has appended a long epilogue to the book stretching over two parts that deal with his reminiscences of Multan and Sahiwal where he passed the best part of his life – his
The pictures that Sabir paints of his subjects look like a mosaic of palpable human frames – robustly moving, acting and gesticulating. He treats his protagonists as humans, not angels childhood and youth. Sabir Lodhi seems to enjoy a photographic memory as suggested by his description of the men and matters he interacted with in these urban towns. Incidentally many of them are known to this writer also. Who can forget men like Ibn-e-Hanif, Malik Bashir-urRahman, Asghar Ali Shah, Iqbal Muhammad Bhatti, Mian Asghar Ali, Prof. Raja Abdul Qadir, Prof. Kh. Salahudin, Prof. G.M.D. Mirza (Alig), Agha Amjad Ali, Dr. A.D. Nasim, Haji Bashir Ahmad, Qayyum Saba, and Kh. Askari Hassan! The author’s attitude toward his subjects is humanistic, at best. Many of them belong to his place of work, the government college. His observations on their personal traits and propensities show his acquaintance, nay intimacy, with them. Thus the pictures that he paints of them look like a mosaic of palpable human frames – robustly moving, acting and gesticulating. He treats his protagonists as humans, not angels. Farkhanda Lodhi’s sketch is remarkable for its empathy, spontaneity
Title: Nisf Sadi Ka Qissa Author: Prof. Dr. Zaheer Ahmad Siddiqi Publisher: Takhleeqat, Mozang Road, Lahore Pages: 416; Price: Rs380/and pathos. The rest of the characters too are unforgettable in a veritable harmony with the title of the book.
Nisf Sadi Ka Qissa The book contains a biographical account of the author’s association with different colleges in the country including the government college, Lahore, as a teacher of Persian. After his superannuation he continues to be allied with the latter college (now a university) in the capacity of a distinguished professor. Prof. Dr. Zaheer Ahmad Siddiqi’s maiden entry into the provincial education service was at Government College, Muzaffargarh, in the
Title: Bhulaya Na Jaeyga Author: Sabir Lodhi Publisher: Maktaba-e-Roshan Khayal, Lahore Pages: 223; Price: Rs250/year 1959 from where he went to government colleges in Jaranwala, Mastung and Gujranwala successively before he finally landed at Government College, Lahore in 1969. He has narrated his experiences, minor and major, as an educationist with side reflections on a host of issues ranging from educational policies and administration to his own contribution to these institutions. He has also recorded his journey to Iran in a separate chapter of the book with a wellworded commentary on the history, geo-politics, culture and progress of that country. The book is author-centric but written in a perspicacious style and bears a statistical slant with an indulgent narrative tone.
Horror... Lawless law enforcers
renegades in the state organs of authority must cease forthwith, if the country is to confront its real external and internal enemies with unity. Otherwise, terror will only evolve towards more terror… It is sometimes said that the age of human innocence (after the initial Adam and Eve episode) ended in the second decade of the twentieth century in the ravages of the First World War. This was the first ‘total war’ in history, in which advances in technology combined with the massive military-industrial complexes of modern nation-states to engineer a blood bath, resulting in the deaths of an entire generation of young men in the trenches – the ‘lost generation’. And, it seems, mankind has never looked back, slipping lower still down the greasy slope of man’s inhumanity to man, none more so than in our twisted, tortured and tormented country. At the risk of sounding unpatriotic, one sometimes wishes we had a Gandhi, the genuine article or the ‘frontier’ variety, to travel across the length and breadth of the land with a message of goodwill and non-violent protest, and simultaneously bring about real change in warped mindsets and institutions as the ‘naked faqir’ successfully did against the mighty British Empire.
From Page 1
every victim of our military oppression and the public’s silence. If we are to learn from this young boy’s gruesome murder at the hands of a manin-uniform we must do more. We must ask for accountability for all internal killings in Pakistan’s history: 1953 Lahore, 1971 Bengal, 1974-77 Balochistan, 1982-83 Sindh, 1987-90 Sindh, 1992-95 Karachi, 2002 Okara, 2008 Swat, 20022011 Balochistan. As of today, there has been no public inquiry into the lawlessness of our so-called defenders of physical and video logical frontiers. That the video was captured was perhaps an unlucky moment.
No questioning allowed
Let me narrate a recent incident in brief. At Wah Cantt the army makes residents stand in single file before allowing them in after checking them. Someone I know went to the officer checking the line and asked them to, ‘make a second line to speed up entry.’ The officer abused him. The friend turned and scoffed. Subsequently, the army officer had him surrounded by intelligence officials and taken to the Military Intelligence office in Wah. Here he was harassed, his ID’s taken and made to write a declaration of patriotism and an apology. The friend, an America returnee, vowed never to return to Pakistan again. Add to this, the incident of the lady lecturer that was kept in a police station overnight because she had scolded an ISI Major during a traffic altercation in Rawalpindi. All this reflects that our army patriots take civilians almost for fun, and also that the army and its affiliates have been let to get beyond themselves. Take Karachi for example. The Rangers and army was sent into Karachi in the 90’s. Since then the city has been its playground. It has been unquestioned in what it has
done. And it is likely that no record of the multiple murders it has committed in the city has been maintained. In Pakistan the army goes into a local population, harasses it, kills civilians and no public inquiry emerges. This is the reason why, on Thursday, a Sindh Rangers spokesman had the audacity to believe he could get away with a, “this was an encounter. The man fired on us,” declaration. It has done so numerous other times. And they shall admit it in private.
All the king’s men
What is more shameful is that the top brass of the army have taken to politics again. On Thursday the Army’s corps commanders assembled and discussed their critics. They issued a statement saying their image was being tarnished and they would not stand for it. When I read this I smirked. With such barbarism within their ranks, did they expect it would never be revealed? Oh…and let’s be sure that there was no statement about the Karachi brutality. The meeting went on as if the incident did not exist. And in the ISPR statement that followed the army subtly declared itself vested with the authority to determine national interest, again. Who gave the COAS the right to make a public statement on what is and what is not national interest! Maybe this is a moment when it is in the national interest to critique the military. Our nationalism has become a hollow shell. It has been left without a conscience. And it is time to reclaim our conscience and hold the military to account for each cold blooded murder it has committed. Only then will they know that what happened in Karachi and Kharotabad, and what happens every day in Balochistan, is
not acceptable to the public. Gandhi once said as he stood before the Allahabad High Court, “Sedition is the duty of every citizen.” And he said it because sedition is not sedition. It is being true to the conscience of a nation. A citizen acts as a check on government and the State. And so members of the National Assembly are within their rights to call the Rangers’ a ‘terrorist force in uniform.’ Within the space of a month the professionalism of all military wings: The Army, The Air Force, the Navy, the Frontier Corps and the Rangers has been left exposed. If our military men had any dignity the heads of each of these institutions would have resigned. Going backwards, the Rangers DG should have tendered his resignation for the Karachi killing, the FC chief for the Kharotabad killings, the Navy chief for the PNS Mehran attack, the air force chief for the Abbotabad operation and the ISI chief for the discovery of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. The much-touted intelligence agencies have also shown themselves to be, what we always knew them to be: better at roughing up those who speak the truth. It is a disgrace what has been done in Shahzad Saleem’s murder investigation. The removal of his phone records only serves to confirm our first fears. The real danger to anyone who wishes to utter an iota of truth comes from within the Pakistani state – from those who have hijacked the state for so long. And again after this incident, no matter how outraged we may be, we know none of the kingpins will fall. The Karachi killing is not the first extra-judicial killing by the Rangers. Do not expect it to be the last. Silence is not an option today neither is it a virtue, as our ‘patriotic’ Corps Commanders would like us to believe.
Sunday, 12 June, 2011
Pictures by the Author
Ranahu, caught amid high rippled dunes, was idyllic. The well was its centre of activity and in the two days I spent in the village, I never found it idle
Windmill of change Who knows, as Tharparker in the south has become a tourist destination, Achhro Thar too might – and all because a simple wind turbine and pump were installed in the village
I
By Salman Rashid
n February 2006, freewheeling around Sanghar district in Sindh I ended up in the village of Ranahu. Now Sanghar is nearly equally divided between barrage-irrigated farmland and sand desert. What makes the desert remarkable in this region is the texture of sand. While southward in, say, Mithi or Umarkot districts (of the erstwhile vast Tharparker district), the sand is dark gray and hard packed, it is light in colour and texture. Here the sand dunes are rippled. Because of the pale colour of the sand, this part of the Thar Desert is called Achhro (White) Thar. The flowering trees were here too mobbed by purple sunbirds and babblers whistled from the thorny thickets, but I did not see any peacocks that usually run across your path in Tharparker to the south. Ranahu, caught amid high rippled dunes, was idyllic. The well was its centre of activity and in the two days I spent in the village, I never found it idle: there were always two or three men working it either to fill large canvas bags fitted on camels for domestic use or topping up the watering trough for the livestock. The water was drawn in a sort of bucket made from old tractor inner tubes which brought up around fifty litres at a time. Since the well was about a hundred metres deep (that’s three hundred feet!), it was difficult to pull up the bucket manually. Consequently, a camel was used to raise it from the unseen depth. One man drove the camel with the rope attached to it, while the other minded the bucket as it came up and emptied it into the various containers lined up by the brink. Out of curiosity I spoke with the men at the well and learned that having to spend the livelong day at this tedious chore, they were good for nothing else. They could not go to the
city for work nor could they mind the livestock grazing out on the range. There being no agriculture, livestock was the only source of income here. Though they had plenty of milk, butter, ghee and lassi, they annually sold a part of their herds to purchase other food items to make life go. Livestock was therefore their very lifeline. Recently I returned again, this time with a friend from Sindh Agriculture and Forestry Workers Coordinating Organisation (SAFWCO). Between my first visit and now, SAFWCO and Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund (PPAF) had joined hands to gift a wind turbine to the people of Ranahu. The simple device was connected to a pump on a deep bore and a pipe emptying the delivery into a large masonry water tank. Overflow from the tank went by a lined channel to a nearby watering trough where camels and goats were drinking. As against the old well, there was no one minding the wind turbine. It worked by itself. Children came with plastic buckets to fill at the water taps on the tank and animals slaked their thirst at the trough. Hathi, Singh whose guests we were to be overnight, came around to tell me one startling thing which had not occurred to me at the time of my first visit five years ago. Every family had two men engaged in the water chore. In winters with lower water requirement the work was easier, but summers were a blur of engagement at the well. From daybreak until after sundown, two men from each family were at the well, either drawing water or waiting their turn for it. That, said Hathi, left only boys to mind the grazing livestock. Now, the desert is home to the wily fox. Indeed, as we were driving in we had come across two at different times that quickly trotted off behind some bushes. Boys being boys and a little irresponsible, they failed to mind the livestock as mind they should. Since they were not always paying attention, foxes took a sizeable toll of suckling kids. Hathi Singh said it was not unusual for a livestock owner to lose every year up to as many as a dozen kids to the prowling foxes. This was a major setback when livestock was their only source of income. But there was nothing for it. They were caught between a rock and a hard place: the men could not leave the well to go either with their animals or to the city to seek work. Hathi Singh told me that the wind turbine was installed in 2007 and
in the past four years, the number of animals sold has jumped up on average by forty percent for each livestock owner. I thought that was an exaggeration, but then others like Khan Mohammad Rajar from a neighbouring village (also with a wind turbine) confirmed. Hathi had other statistics too. He said the maintenance of the old well cost about three thousand rupees annually. In comparison, the leather washer of the piston in the bore needed changing once every three months. In the beginning they got a man from Hathungo (the nearest town) who charged six hundred rupees to come out to fix it. But the men of Ranahu watched him work. Just by looking they now have three trained pump mechanics and they do the job themselves. Not only they have acquired a new skill, but the repair now costs only one hundred rupees. There is now the dream of getting another wind turbine, perhaps somewhat larger for a greater delivery of water, to turn the troughs between the dunes arable. I observed that may be a long way off and Hathi said there was no harm in dreaming. If I return in another few years’ time, I may find Ranahu completely transformed. Who knows, as Tharparker in the south has become a tourist destination, Achhro Thar too might if some enterprising goat farmer sets up a two-room
doss house with his savings from livestock sales. And all because a simple wind turbine and pump were installed in the village. – S a l m a n Rashid, rated as the best in the country, is a travel writer and photographer who has travelled all around Pakistan and written about his journeys.
The flowering trees were here too mobbed by purple sunbirds and babblers whistled from the thorny thickets, but I did not see any peacocks that usually run across your path in Tharparker