Taking to the road BY Ayaz Amir
 

It is not given to everyone to be this lucky: to be able to cast off the cares of the world and take to the road. My own fantasy used to be to put on saffron or, safer in our parts, green, and walk down the length of the Indus to Lal Shahbaz's shrine at Sehwan. But it has remained a fantasy.

In my mind I trek the far corners of the globe. In actual fact I am a desk-bound person, overwhelmed by the thought of having to prepare for a journey.

Thirty years ago in midsummer -- and summer in Sindh can be cruel business -- I took the train to Sehwan to attend the annual urs. That journey remains etched in my memory.

I went in poverty and had nowhere to stay. But the assistant station master, taking pity on me, gave me a room. Only at night would I make use of that room. My days were spent wandering or sitting in chai-khanas, all by myself, alone in that bustling multitude.

I would just go and sit in the shrine and watch the faqirs, lost to the world, dancing the dhamal. Outside the shrine gypsy girls, drawn from all corners of the desert, would be dancing in a state of complete abandon: dusky and sinuous goddesses, with bright lips and laughing eyes. The drumbeaters were beside themselves too. Yet there was no levity about that performance. It was more an act of devotion, a form of worship.

Pakistanis on the whole are bad dancers not because there is anything wrong with our limbs but because there is some kind of problem with our souls. Deep down where it really matters, we are not completely free. Something hems us in, most probably because we seem to have inherited not the wisdom of the ages but the fear of the ages. The confusion in our minds about our direction as a nation arises from this disability: the imprisonment of the soul clouding the ability to think clearly.

Why is it so easy for foreigners to impose on us not so much their will as their thinking? Why do we start dancing so readily to any tune played in our ears? Why has physical liberation not been matched by mental liberation? My guess is because deep down we are unsure of ourselves. We are not a confident nation although, God knows, there is no reason to feel so insecure.

Those were the early Zia years when the malevolence of his brand of self-serving ideology -- from the effects of which we are not yet wholly recovered -- had begun to poison every aspect of life in Pakistan. But Sehwan was untouched by that hypocrisy. Maybe the remoteness of interior Sindh had something to do with it. Or maybe it was the power of Sindh's foremost saint to keep evil at bay. I have no idea how things are in Sehwan today.

Years later I had the good fortune to attend the urs of Shah Abdul Latif at Bhitai. I went not in poverty, as I was a guest of the Sindh government. We were lodged well and fed well, such being the ways of government in our part of the world. But it is the poverty-attendant journey to Sehwan which casts a warmer glow in my mind.

Today a similar journey would entail slightly different problems. I would probably have to take my laptop with me, such an inseparable part of my travelling gear this wonder of marvellous science has become. In fact I can only stay in maddening Chakwal, as much of the time I do, not because there are unlisted pleasures to be had there which are unattainable elsewhere (although about this too, I suppose, a tale could be told), but because it is as connected to the god of the modern universe, the internet, as any other place on earth.

What I still do for a living, my journalism, is now wholly dependent upon this form of communion, remaining connected to the net, possibly with a fast broadband connection. So wherever I go I, who came very late to the miraculous ease of computer writing, must take my laptop with me.

All the more so, because the internet is no longer just about work. It is also about pleasure, or I should say entertainment which is the more contemporary word. This is because of its exhaustible resources, the almost trackless realms of music and literature (or, needless to say, pornography, should anyone's inclination run in that direction) which are part of its matchless domain.

So if I am on the road to Sehwan or indeed any other shrine of the chosen I would have to take my magic box with me, addicted as I now am to my fix of music at night before slipping into the kingdom of dreams or, as is the case more often, into the stuff of troubled sleep and strange nightmares.

It could be anything: Noor Jehan at her best in semi-classical mode, and at her best there was no one like her; K L Saigal around whose voice, I am convinced, the Lord of the Hosts lingered while he went about shaping it; Lata at her best -- try this one as an example: sapnon mein sajan kee do baatein, ik yaad rahi ik bhool gayi; Kamla Jharia (sample her, she's worth it); some of Talat's offbeat geets; some of Surraiya's; anything in raag yaman kalyan, especially by the great Ustad Amir Khan; this from Ustad Ghulam Mustafa Khan which I keep listening to all the time, bahut bechain hai dil: and so on. The list is endless.

Who could have thought of YouTube only a few years ago? This is another miracle not so much of science as of the universe. For anchorites in the desert there was no more compelling, vision of Elysium than of an extended garden with enduring shades and never-ending streams. For the modern anchorite (if this be not a contradiction in terms) Elysium would be incomplete without YouTube and broadband internet access.

Indeed, even when the walls of Jericho come tumbling down and the mountains are one with the seas, cyberspace as we know it will perhaps remain unaffected. Imagine, the world coming to an end but not cyberspace.

We in Pakistan have no direct access to opera or ballet. Both are not part of our culture or tradition and on our radio and television they simply do not figure. This is a pity because both are great art forms and to be deprived of them is to miss out on a vital aspect of the human experience. This omission is easily filled with YouTube.

The great names of opera that enthusiasts of my generation are familiar with are, and this is just a rough and short list: Callas, Tebaldi, Pavarotti, Domingo, Tito Gobi, Kiri Te Kanawa, etc. But there are so many new faces out there today that are dazzling, as good as anything happening before.

In music I am an amateur. I think I have an ear for it but about its theory or philosophy I know next to nothing. A dissertation on it I would not be able to deliver. But a good voice and a good song I think I can recognise. And it is in this spirit that I say that if at all interested in opera (and here again I am at pains to stress that I am not addressing the highbrow specialist) you will thank me if you go to YouTube and click Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazon.

This will open a world of beauty and virtuosity that you may not have seen, the perfect antidote to the depression and anxiety of the age of terror. Netrebko is the hottest face in contemporary opera. But, more important, the hottest voice too. Villazon is handsome in a way, I am given to understand, women die for (and perhaps for this reason the kind of face most unhandsome men detest). He too is an extraordinary singer. And it doesn't really matter if the words are not understood. Opera primarily is about mood and feeling.

Taking to the road then takes on a slightly different meaning: remaining cut off from the world but remaining connected to the mysterious world of cyberspace. I suppose this would be a new form of mysticism.



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