A pocket full of pain

IN recent days you may have had the opportunity to partake of the bounty of misfortunes, big and small, that Pakistan has to offer.

Your home may have been burglarised by a band of robbers, your mobile snatched at gunpoint outside your office, your aunt or uncle sentenced to suffering by the overwhelmed staff of a local hospital. The array of tragedies is formidable and its variety staggering at a level perhaps beyond the comprehension of anyone not quite as schooled in the strategies of survival as the urban Pakistani.

With your pocket full of pain, and your judgment compromised by its agony, you may seek solace in conversation with the office mate, the neighbour or the almost-friend. But unless you are a storytelling maestro, or your audience a hapless employee sentenced to silently digesting your woes, you are unlikely to achieve the catharsis promised by the sharing of pain. Far more likely is the interruption of your saga with one far superior.

If you lost a few pieces of jewellery, it turns out that others have lost that plus cash and even perhaps sustained bodily injury. If you lost a fridge or freezer during a 24-hour spell of loadshedding, others have lost an aged grandparent amid the vagaries of powerless hell. If someone stole the stereo from your car, others have lost the car itself and that too of a newer, more expensive model.

This perverse competition will goad you to embellish and push the summits of your pain. Like everything else in Pakistan, misery is a competitive sport and winning requires single-minded focus.

Like the dust that settles over Karachi or the muggy oppression of Lahore`s monsoon vigil, tragedy cannot be sold in Pakistan — its ubiquity marks its worthlessness. It is no wonder then that Pakistanis big and small, elite and almost-elite, are on the hunt for other venues where their misery can be marketed. As per Pakistani custom, the elite — armed with fiefdom-funded degrees from Ivy League universities and a cabal of sympathetic foreign friends — are best suited to capitalise on the rise of the persecuted Pakistani`s stock.

Next in line stand Internet-enabled journalists, whose forays into the seamy dregs of mafia underworlds and jihadi outfits have left them subject to harassment by a host of foes. Their stories can now be told to the world beyond Pakistan`s borders, where laws still apply, where security doesn`t require an AK-47 and where tragedy is still tragedy.

But pinning the Pakistani disdain for each other`s suffering on simply war-weariness is to deny the decay that underlies it. In everyday exchanges sympathy is denied not just because we don`t care but also because of a wilful desire to deny the moral elevation that it seems to demand. If you weep over another`s loss you affirm that they are good and that the robber, doctor or government official that has wronged them is bad; in doing so you accept their superiority over that of their adversary.

The point of the exchange, then, is to demarcate these lines — a public recognition of powerlessness that has come to signify goodness.

After all, once you are a casualty of fate or fortune, random evil or intentional sin, you are absolved from the burden of responsibility — the terrible idea that your current misery may, even in some small incidental way, be your own fault. Far better to remain embroiled in the impossible calculations of whose misfortunes weigh more, which death is more tragic and who has borne the greatest weight of inordinate suffering.

The housewife is powerless before her in-laws and their unending demands, the clerk powerless before his boss, the boss powerless before his father — long, involved chains of victimisation that absolve everyone from any blame for anything at all. Even when told abroad, the tales of Pakistani suffering follow the same trajectory, devolving quickly into quests to legitimise claims to victimhood and deny complicity in any of the ills so avidly described. The rich will unabashedly weep over Pakistan`s poverty without acknowledging the staff that caters to their whims at home; writers and journalists may lament institutional excesses without ever referring to `gifts` accepted to malign this or that politician.

Certainly, their stories of suffering, torture and terror are real, but the refusal to temper them with ambiguity or humility denies them depth, leaving a romanticised story that makes its subject heroic and perfect but not really human. Their western audiences, long schooled in the art of weeping over the miseries of this or that failed state, shed the requisite tears, are happy to have discovered an appropriately empathetic way to satisfy their curiosity about dangerous Pakistan.

These peddlers of Pakistani persecution must not be grudged their success. Indeed, the export of our plentiful sagas of suffering represents another iteration of Pakistani resourcefulness that can successfully market the misfortunes that are currently our capital production.

But if you`re looking to go beyond finding a market for your misery, or manage to be hopeful enough to consider a resurrection of compassion in Pakistan, then discuss not just your suffering but also your imperfections. Consider in polite conversation not simply the time you were fired unjustly but also how your well-connected uncle made a call that got you into business school; speak not only of the time your car was stolen but when you wrongly accused your servant of stealing a lost watch; weep not simply over your own overlooked promotion but the one you denied for the sake of a good friend.

Recognising these everyday failings reveals us as both victims and perpetrators, and defies the myth that a good Pakistani is either perfect or powerless. He is, instead, simply imperfectly human.

The writer is an attorney teaching political philosophy and constitutional law.

rafia.zakaria@gmail.com 

Source: Dawn News