Pakistan dairy

The sound of birds chirping outside the window is constant. Lush grass and small plants cover the muddy brown landscape around me. The wind is still but every now and then it picks up and a small breeze enters the room through the iron mesh of the window. Many dark green trees dot the horizon. Some pigeons are jumping and running on the awnings outside Serene and peaceful glorious scene of beauty. A few children come around the corner shouting and running playfully – sometimes laughing and sometimes wrestling with each other. Most of them are poorly dressed shoes covered with mud. Faces brown as a berry. Some cows and sheep can be seen ambling around in the background grazing on the lush green grass, which has grown quite tall due to the recent heavy rains. It is so strange to see the two worlds of the rich and the poor collide in Pakistan almost everywhere. Technically these poor children and goats and sheep are my neighbours. There is only a narrow five-foot dirt road separating their village from the posh houses of the housing society. But I will never talk to these neighbours or know anything about their life or problems because a big iron fence and guards all along the fence divide this world of rich and poor. These poor children will never be able to drink cold water from my fridge or lounge in the coolness of my AC or ever be offered the several lavish dishes the cook prepares every day .I can only look at them from a distance as if looking at a painting or a picture as if they are part of the beautiful natural background and nothing more.

We have been battling with wave after wave of COVID for months even years now. Most festivities felt subdued. Even Eid was different. No Chand Raat no mehndi no chooriyan. No more one wheeling No rushing to the mosque in nice new Eid clothes. I remembered the movie the children watched in their childhood  ‘’The Grinch’’ in which an evil angry man takes away all the happiness from  people over the festive season  and leaves only misery and sadness behind. It felt a bit like that. We must have angered some grinch somewhere. And the merriment, the happiness and joy all were gone. I used to wonder how much worse it must be for my neighbors on the other side of the fence. Sometimes I was behind a steel fence protected by uniformed guards, sometimes I was behind the high walls of houses that looked like palaces, sometimes I was in a fancy garden protected by trees and neatly trimmed hedges. The physical manifestations of the mental separation between the rich and the poor?  The poor sitting on the other side of that wall with one plate of curry and one dry roti’ and me on the other side with a table full of food enough for several hungry mouths.  The wind outside is getting warmer and smells like the grass, trees, and the occasional whiff of cow dung. I It is so much easier to talk about equality and human rights in the west, up  here you could get into serious trouble for challenging the class divide. You can talk about helping the poor from your posh comfortable sitting room and I learned the hard way that crossing the steel fence and  trying to make friends with the  with the poor on the other side doesn’t always bring about much change – it just gets you into a lot of trouble for rebelling against the class system. Democracy and freedom is a beautiful fruit laden tree that grows and prospers very well in the first world but try breaking a branch of that tree or getting some seeds off its fruit and plant it in the sandy harsh soil of the third world and the branch withers and dies within a few months.  . Outside an ice cream van is playing a cheerful beach tune again and again to attract children. Some transsexuals dressed in gaudy colorful clothes surround the ice cream van and demand free ice cream. The ice cream guy complains and shouts loudly that he too has children to feed, but the transsexuals persist and in the end the ice cream guys gives in muttering and complaining under his breath.