Tunnel Vision Read online

  Even now, standing by her husband at my bedside, she seemed calm. Unruffled. Ever practical, she smoothed the sheet where it had bunched across my chest and sighed in exasperation as she touched the bruise forming around the canola in my hand.

  ‘We want to be a world power, but we can’t even learn the simplest things,’ she remarked softly, ‘look how roughly they’ve pushed this in.’

  The nurse in the room gave no signs of having heard her comment and waddled out soon after.

  ‘And there’s bloody cotton wool on the floor. Don’t they have any notion of hygiene?’

  ‘Sssh Amna.’ Mamu and his nervousness. ‘Speak softly.’ He shot an apprehensive glance towards the nurses outside.

  ‘Jaan, this filth is dangerous for someone in her condition. Don’t you remember what happened to Akhtar Bhai? His bypass was fine but then he contracted that bacterial infection in PO and it nearly killed him.’

  What was it with middle age and the onset of medico babble? Overnight, people went from being as unconcerned about cleanliness as the next Karachiite to becoming obsessed with disease and decay. Perfectly obnoxious adults who once spat in stairwells now rolled out the heart disease section of medical manuals with aplomb. It was odd to hear post-op from my mumani’s little bow-shaped mouth. Abbreviations from her convent educated lips seemed almost profane. At the same time, astral me was happy someone was concerned enough to be making even the mildest fuss.

  The machines connected to the burn victim next to me had been making anxious noises for a while now, but there were no attendants by that bedside and the nurse ignored them.

  A nostril tube was the only indication of where the nose had once been. A milky eye permanently fixed on the ceiling where the eyelid had burnt off. I decided it was a her. They generally were.

  After that initial glance, I did not have the courage to look at her. Although the beggar freak-show at traffic lights in the metropolis had done its best to fry my compassion for human suffering, the maimed window-rappers tended to be male. And when they were female, their injuries were blatantly fake, only the most superficial nod to gender equality in the beggar workforce. Frequently accused as we were of being a patriarchal, retrogressive society all hung up on honour, we didn’t like to parade female victims of violence (accidental or deliberate). We tried to restrict their anguish to hospitals instead or if they had any notion of patriotism (went the extremist mantra), then they just died and saved us the embarrassment. Any number of infidel civilizations eager to point fingers at us would rush at the chance to exploit one of those (mythical, of course) kerosene or acid-burn victims that popped up every now and then.Was this woman one of them, I wondered.

  Her gruesome injuries made my mummy-wrapped head look trivial in comparison. And I wanted to dwell on my own misery, so I turned away. If I forgot, for a second, my connection with my body might snap. I might drift away, up, down, sideways. I wanted to be here, stay here; at least till I had seen all those I loved.

  How many of us daydream about what would happen if a horrible accident befell us? How would people react? What if you died? Would your family, friends and lovers be sad? One of my favourite daydreams was now my only reality. If God had just upped and decided to start granting my wishes why didn’t he do the one about the hips?

  Mamu had filled Amna Mumani in on what the doctors had told my mother. She stroked my arm lightly as she thought.

  ‘We have to get a second opinion,’ she said brusquely.

  ‘Shouldn’t we wait for forty-eight hours like the doctor said?’

  ‘We should find out whether we should wait or whether there is something else that needs to be done.’

  ‘But the doctor …’

  ‘Look around you Najam!’ The voice was still gentle, but the tone suggested ever so delicately that a straightening of the spine was the only proper way to respond. ‘Look at where we are? Don’t you read the papers? Haven’t you seen a million accusations of malpractice and neglect on the city pages? And this is not a standard appendectomy; it’s a head injury. If I know my niece, she considers that the most important part of her, and you need to do your duty and see that it’s well taken care of.’

  I was beginning to enjoy this. Really, I was. Mamu was very endearing when nervous. When he had lived with us, Adil and I used to yell ‘Fire,’ or ‘Dacoits,’ every once in a while just to watch his reaction. He was like a sparrow trapped in the old children’s trick of basket, seed, stick and string; even now in stillness that same frenetic hopping nervousness seemed to ripple under his skin.

  ‘Right. Er … yes.’

  ‘Yes what?’

  ‘Yes we should get a second opinion.’

  ‘Good. Now go out and arrange for one. Perhaps we should move her to another hospital like the Agha Khan.’

  ‘Is it a good idea to move her?’

  ‘Why don’t we ask that doctor you’re going to go and get?’ Mumani smiled sweetly.

  At the door Mamu turned. ‘How do I find the right doctor? We don’t know any.’

  ‘Isn’t that boy she’s been seeing well connected? Talk to him. His father probably has connections with a lot of medical people.’

  She had no idea how right she was. After years of assiduously courting the patronage of the movers and shakers of the Pakistani medical realm, Saad’s father had connections with a lot of ‘medical people’ indeed. In this part of the world, criminal complicity was the start of many a beautiful friendship.

  Pharmaceutical malpractice, while widespread, didn’t get a lot of press in the home country. Newspaper owners not supported by government advertising in exchange for ‘editorial restraint’ relied on corporations. In essence, take a harsher line with officialdom but turn a blind eye to the policies of the big private corporations. Of course it was same all over the world, but at least in developed countries there were watchdogs baying for their blood. Pakistan’s consumer protection initiatives were generally stillborn.

  The point was, Saad’s not-quite doting daddy’s connections with certain luminaries of the medical community weren’t entirely based on the principles enshrined in that oath they took. Tickets to regional conferences, sponsored junkets in Bhurban, an avalanche of calendars, diaries and wall clocks, it was more about presents than products. His generosity always made it easier to ‘win friends and influence people’. But whether he was willing to exploit those relationships for me was a different matter altogether. In his version of the film about our lives, I was definitely the villain.

  AA BAEL MUJHE MAAR

  FOLK SAYING

  ~

  When Saad first began showing an interest in me that was beyond the professional, his father was probably the fourth person to know about it. Right after Saad, me and the super sleuth stool pigeon that told him. Why else would he have engineered a one-on-one meeting? It was ostensibly to review my team’s performance, but I had worked for Dada Labs for two years at that point, and this was the first time he had shown any blatant interest in one of his ‘chotas’, as he called anyone not on the board. Like any Seth with the label, he knew everything that happened at the SITE headquarters but made sure he never appeared to snoop.

  Like a one-day batsman facing a bouncer right into bat, I was forced onto the back foot which is what he intended, of course. The rest was about acquiring knowledge, and subtle intimidation. He wanted to gauge Saad’s seriousness, and my chances, all at once. Show me that he knew what was happening, humiliate me into understanding that a climber like me wasn’t good enough for the only son of a man like him. And that’s when I decided to respond to Saad’s overtures. While I had decided early in the professional game to be smart and forego office romances, now I really wanted to annoy his father. I was a social climber, was I? When my ascent was done, he’d be scrambling to lick the mud off my shoes. Sensible wall climbing shoes, of course, not stilettos. I was a working woman, after all, not a trickster angling for a prize.

  Saad’s pleasure at my finally saying yes t
o his repeated requests for a cup of tea at a nearby dhaba was flattering.While I’d known he was attracted to me before he did (it’s all in the body language), I had considered it more nuisance than new beginning.Yes, he was good-looking (five feet eleven, twinkling eyes, luminous skin), rich, articulate (bonus in the land of the emotionally constipated), but he was my boss. I didn’t want an action replay of my last job.

  After getting my BSc in chemistry from Karachi University, I steamrolled through a series of professions while doing an MBA at the IBA’s evening programme and going into sales. I had never planned to do an MBA, in fact it had figured nowhere in my list of ‘top ten things to do in the evenings’ (much like the accident), but it seemed impossible to find a worthwhile job without one, and also it got me away from the simmering stew of tension that was our house in those days.

  I wasn’t content to be a lab rat, having nurtured delusions of worth all my life. Everyone was happy when I landed a job at Airway Travels after getting my MBA. Ammi was especially happy I’d gotten that silly degree, she thought it would help drive up my market value as far as marriage prospects were concerned. She was probably right, but at that point marriage wasn’t on my list of top ten things to do in the evening either.

  At Airways, I started out being responsible for all corporate sales. I’d always been good at telling people what to do, where to go and how they should get there. It seemed like a logical progression.

  Direction savvy, that’s what I was. Not bossy, there’s a difference.

  There are two kinds of women dominant in Pakistani organizations. Parasites and pit bulls. Sure there are others; mousy non-entities flitting from desk to bus and back again, hoping no one will notice and their husbands/fathers won’t beat them too badly for an imagined indiscretion, confident urban graduates that thrive in controlled environments where the men have all undergone sensitivity training and khaddar is king (or queen?), like equal opportunity NGOs, women who work in groups and move in packs (teachers at all girls’colleges for example), occasional trailblazers that pop up in individualistic fields like film or art … but there are more parasites and pit bulls than all the rest together.

  I felt this now after years of working, or possibly because the head injury had finally forced the lesson to sink in, but this version of reality had long been discussed anytime the women in my MBA class had a minute or two to chat or gossip. The buzz was that if you wanted to succeed in the local corporate world and you were a woman, you couldn’t just ‘be’.Your gender had to become your best friend or your worst enemy. Either you batted your lashes and tittered helplessly at all the right people (don’t waste your wattage, make every smile count), or you annihilated all aspects of your femininity and assimilated into the male mainstream by epitomizing its worst aspects, that is, its crudity, machismo and ruthlessness. The only way to break that glass ceiling, and at that time this was experienced vicariously through tales of so-and-so’s sister’s adventures in retail, was to make everyone want to sleep with you or no one want to have to fight you. Bitch in heat or Alpha Male. So it was.

  And so it shall be, I wanted to weep on that hospital bed, till some cosmic power hitches us to its tractor and hauls us out of the dark ages. If I had just accepted it when I was still studying, Mr Khairuddin wouldn’t have been such a shock to my system.

  DEKH MAGAR PYAR SAY

  BACK OF RICKSHAW

  ~

  To say that I was naïve when I joined that travel agency is like saying that the sky is blue, or the Arabian Sea is polluted, or even that Karachi has a solid waste management crisis. Perhaps because I’d never stuck to any workplace long enough to learn anything other than superficial lessons, I was still labouring under the illusion that despite my being a second class citizen of Pakistan by virtue of my gender, in the workplace at least I was equal to, if not better than, my male colleagues. Mr Khairuddin changed all that. In hindsight, he probably did me a favour, but if I’m ever in a position where I can hurt him, I shall rip his head off and feed his eyeballs to the crows. I’d feed them to the vultures, but apparently they’re practically extinct because of some drug South Asian veterinarians continue to use on animals despite it being banned elsewhere in the world.Yet another footnote in the murky history of pharmaceutical malpractice in the Third World, but I guess that’s a whole different story.

  It was a busy day in Airway headquarters when Mr Khairuddin strolled into my cubicle. Outside, the sun was shining, rickshaws were putt putt puttering and every once in a while a pigeon would guttergoo contentedly after depositing a fresh load of guano on the windowsill.

  ‘So Ayesha Bibi, how do you like the work so far?’

  ‘It’s interesting, Sir.’

  ‘Not too difficult?’

  ‘Not at all difficult, just time-consuming.’

  ‘Yes, but then someone like you would have a lot of time.’

  ‘Someone like me?’

  ‘Well, you’re not married, are you?’

  ‘No. But I do have a family to go home to.’

  ‘If you had a husband, that would be a totally different thing though.’

  I wasn’t sure where this was going, so I just nodded and looked at my computer screen again.

  ‘See, a husband likes his wife to be available all the time. When he comes home, she should be fresh.’

  The line evoked a vivid image of bananas and melons glowing in the sun. I was offended by the sexual undertones of his comment but wanted to avoid a confrontation with my boss so early on. Noncommittal, I figured, was the way to go.

  ‘I wouldn’t know, Mr Khairuddin. Like you said, I’m not married.’

  ‘Hahahaha. Yes, yes.’

  He got off my desk and said, ‘Married women aren’t always the only ones with men in their lives.’

  The next day the office peon brought me tea every couple of hours without being asked, to the annoyance of everyone on the floor. I made him stop, but not before he loudly requested that I tell Mr K that I’d insisted he did.

  It didn’t help that I knew my options for retaliation were limited. Good old General Zia-ul-Haq. This was really all his fault.

  I’d had my share of the leering and pinching during my daily bus commute when I was at the IBA, but this was the first time someone in authority was walking the line with me, and also the first time the game was being played on such a delicate level. I hoped I’d established my lack of interest.Then again, who said the woman had to be interested?

  Mr Khairuddin let me stew in my disquiet for a week before swooping down to perch at the edge of my desk like a particularly grotesque species of migratory bird.

  ‘And how is everything with you, Bibi?’

  ‘Going well, thanks.’

  ‘Found your way around the organization?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Any technical problems you need some advice on?’

  ‘I’ll ask if I have any. So far none, thanks.’

  ‘The boys aren’t bothering you, are they?’

  This was rich, ‘the boys’ of which he spoke being the most emasculated collection of XY chromosomes I’d ever had the misfortune of being around. Mr Khairuddin wanted to ensure he was Alpha Male. I probably had more testosterone in the hair follicles on my pinky finger than every other male, barring Mr Khairuddin, who roosted on my floor.

  I had actually become quite friendly with two in particular: Ahsan and Shan, and we had started taking our lunch break together at the coffee house around the corner.Was that what this was all about?

  ‘The boys are all very well behaved, and I don’t think that problems like that occur in a workplace as professional as this one.’

  I hoped the pointed flattery would earn me a reprieve. Till the next time anyway. Show signs of weakness and they lapsed into protector mode, taking you for one of the parasites. Be aggressive in your denial and you were labelled a pit bull, with male colleagues often acting together to ensure that you were leashed.

  ‘Well, of course we’re ve
ry professional. We are one of the best in the field.’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘You let me know if you have any problems.

  Ahsan and Shan had already started teasing me about Mr K’s desk perching. Shan had shared a story gleaned from an older colleague, that a pretty assistant sales manager was standard for Airways Travels.

  ‘So don’t start thinking you’re our equal,’ said Shan, ‘you only got the job because you don’t have as much facial hair as we do.’

  When I got to work the next day I found a plush new swivel chair where my creaky one used to be. I hadn’t requisitioned it, even if I had had the authority to, which I didn’t.

  ‘Ah Ayesha,’ Mr K waved as he walked by, ‘hope you find that one satisfactory.’

  Everyone else on the floor was studiously avoiding looking at me. With one masterly stroke, Mr K had begun to separate me from the herd I had been trying so assiduously to blend into.

  I thought long and hard about what to do with my new chair. Mr Khairuddin waved me through the open door of his office before his secretary could get a word in.

  ‘Would you like me to close the door?’ He slammed it shut before I could answer. The thud reverberated through the floor. His closing the door suggested an intimacy between us that did not exist

  ‘Sit, sit. Be comfortable.’ He parked himself in his chair; arms elevated behind his head, and looked me up and down.

  ‘No thank you. I have that report to submit. I’ll only take a moment of your time. Thank you for upgrading my chair, but I was comfortable with the old one.’

  He waved his hand towards the door. ‘You are not like them. They’re beneath you. See the chair as recognition of what makes you special, why don’t you? You should be happy you’re so appreciated.’

  I bit my tongue to stop myself from telling him he was just a dirty old man and I wouldn’t let him even lick my (sensible) shoes. Whatever happened, I could no longer afford to not have a job. Adil was in his final year; Mamu’s contribution was not enough to cover his tuition and our household expenses. Ammi didn’t work and she could not claim a pension for a missing husband. My months being unemployed had been increasingly difficult for everyone. Mr Khairuddin didn’t know it yet, or maybe he recognized it from my sensible shoes, but at that point in my life I was vulnerable to all manner of infection, financial or otherwise.