In the land of no loadshedding
By Adiah Afraz

Ok, don’t ask me where I am because to quote Jimmy Gilmer of The Fireballs, “I ain’t gonna tell”. The only thing I can tell you is that I ain’t here and that makes me very sad. Sad because it’s election time in Pakistan, the most exciting time ever, and I feel left out and depressed as I can’t even cast my vote. What’s more, I am missing out on all the fun. The hustle-bustle of the election campaign, the daily dose of the scandalous on TV and, most of all, the two dozen TV anchorpersons whom I have grown to love more than my mother.

At least now I finally understand why Pervez Musharraf came back to Pakistan. He was probably bored out of his wits living in a land of peace and quiet, with no loadshedding to hate and no Mubashir Luqman to love. He probably wanted some excitement in his life, and I don’t blame him for that.

Because you see when you sit quietly by a window in the land of no loadshedding, enjoying all the peace and quiet in the world and finding nothing to complain about, that is when you miss home the most – and miss it with a vengeance. Because, to put it mildly, quiet tends to be quite boring after all.

You think of Pakistan where each day is full of sound and fury signifying something or the other. One day Imran Khan gets attacked by the notorious ‘namaloom afraad’, the next Musharraf runs away from a court and finally gets arrested, and then the mother of all happenings, Mr Ayaz Amir joins the PTI and lives to tell the tale.

Meanwhile, in the land-of-no-loadshedding, the garbage gets picked up on time and everybody gets excited about road safety. Gosh I miss Pakistan. I even miss Kalma Chowk for crying out loud.

This is the time when I should have been sitting at home and serving my country by doing what I do the best: laughing at my own jokes, and stalking Imran Khan.

But since it is not to be, the first thing I do when I reach here is download a PakTV app on my phone and settle down in the middle of an early morning to refresh my memory of what’s going on back home. It has only been 36 hours since I left that crowded bench at the Lahore airport with all the tax-free mosquitoes offering to bring me my complimentary dose of dengue, yet lo and behold everything seems to have changed overnight. The Noon-League has supposedly conquered loadshedding, and Imran Khan has started wearing red.

I mean are you kidding me? Both of you! I have only been gone a few days and look what you have started behind my back.

An end to loadshedding? When did that happen and in whose dreams? This claim, as made in the paid political broadcast of the PML-N’s election campaign, is quite a study in the use of syntactical ambiguity for fooling-of-the-masses purposes. In my opinion it’s even worse than selling Bilawal Bhutto Zardari in the name of democracy. For example when the ad says “loadshedding ka khatma” meaning an end to loadshedding, and a tiger is seen on the screen with a stamp stamping it for dramatic effect, it doesn’t prove anything, does it?

The deliberate syntactical ambiguity doesn’t commit to a space in time as to when this end to loadshedding actually happens. Did it happen in the past or is it going to happen in the future? In any case it hasn’t happened at all, has it? So why have they even put it there? Who are they trying to fool exactly? Our masses are not the masses of the land of no loadshedding, remember? They know better than to get excited about garbage being picked up on time.

And as for Imran Khan wearing red, well, what can I say? It’s God’s small mercy that the PTI is blessed with a leader who has the style quotient sufficient enough to carry off even a potato sack with panache on a rainy day. Otherwise, I don’t think the world is yet ready for an Imran Khan in technicolour. So whoever is advising him to dress up in the colours of the party flag, please let’s just stick to the whites and call it peace.

They say home is where the heart is, but in my case home is where the Khan is. Because in this land of no loadshedding, Imran Khan is more popular than coffee on the go – and that’s what brings us all together on cold evenings for hot debates. In fact, all the pakora parties I have attended here so far should have been called ‘Why can’t I go to the high commission and vote for Imran Khan?’ parties. Overseas Pakistanis want to vote and they want to vote for a party they think can bring about change in their beloved homeland.

And just like me they feel left out and cheated because some bureaucratic hurdle is stopping them from being part of that change. I look at the faces of these people and their passion for the PTI and, instead of getting excited about a party I have supported for so long, I feel a strange kind of dread. Not because I have doubts about the future of the PTI, but because I actually feel confident that the future does belong to it. And this confidence makes me dread the burden of expectation its leader is carrying on his shoulders. It’s just one man and he has the expectations of millions. It’s not an easy place to be in, I am sure.

“So who are you voting for?” somebody wakes me from my jet-lagged reverie.

“I’m not old enough to vote”, I answer with a poker face.

After all, if I can’t stalk Imran Khan then I shouldn’t be laughing at my own jokes either.

The writer is a teaching fellow at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS. Email: adiahafraz@gmail.com