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Article Excerpt
The goal of encouraging ... historical sympathy is achieved not by
telling people what has been lost but by getting people to see what is there. (Chernoff 11) If we can find something in "nothing" then we can find something even in those that seek to destroy all "nothings."
In November 2001, the town of Ithaca premiered Jung (War): In the Land of the Mujaheddin, a film that documents how Italian doctors created a humanitarian hospital in war-torn Afghanistan. Afterwards, in the conversation that I had agreed to facilitate, I was unable to evoke much beyond the usual sense of helpless guilt and hollow moral stridency that comes from seeing others suffer. Suspecting that just below their easy sympathy lay hidden assimilationist presumptions, I pressed the audience with these questions: Is there anything we need from Afghans, Afghan cultures, Afghanistan? Can we find some lack only they can fill? If not, what impulse stops us from simply accepting the loss of this culture? Even those few who had passed through Afghanistan seemed baffled by this line of thinking. Finding no takers, it occurred to me then that I could pose these questions to myself.
Gordon College provided little competition on our home court. In the winter of 1972, it would have been a short drive from their campus in Rawalpindi to ours in Islamabad. Crossing into the compound of the International School of Islamabad (ISI), they entered a recognizable yet unfamiliar and oddly heterogeneous space--something not-America and not-Pakistan. Their bodies must have sensed and absorbed the gravity of the uneven, overlying, and jagged cultural force fields flowing, protruding, infringing, and breaking all around. On the one hand, there were the smooth soft polished brick red octagonal campus walls, with inner courtyards centered by star-shaped fountain, beds and waterless wading pools; windows from floor to ceiling, carpeted classrooms, sports fields expanding into the distance, and the large yellow, not blue, school buses waiting in the too-large parking lot. Not to mention the not-yet-men boys, with hair long and so well-groomed that the desire to touch it was tethered only by the all-powerful straps of decorum. And I imagine that after viewing the miniskirt-clad teenage girls, the unbearable displays of sexual affection, hyper-groomed boys, and the bouncing, shouting, infinitely beaming cheerleaders, they put away these snapshots and probed them only once they were out of the compound inside their blue bus. (2) Without the topographic charts and compass needed to navigate the plate tectonics of ISI, their psychic vigor must have been sapped before tip-up. But there was more; the basketball court itself was surrounded by those high on the bleachers and others sitting on the ground.
What, I wonder, did the Gordon College players make of the fact that more than a few times the bleacher crowd students, teachers, and parents burst into a medley of a badly copied but emphatic Urdu cheer:
Leader: Aag-thay, Bagh-thay, Chuchuup Chapackthay Crowd: TAH! Leader: Chapackthay Crowd: TAH! Leader: Chapackthay Crowd: TAH!
Our fans had learned it on a road trip from the fans of Lahore American School, an institution that had no choice but to be embedded in a city measuring its age in millennia. For those in our bleachers, this cheer was nothing similar to say, "Craig, Craig, he's our man, if he can't do it, Chris can...." More so, like much of the Urdu learned by my teammates and classmates, it was part of a tainted language or a "pidgin" absorbed in a thin contact zone. The Gordon College players were sure to have known the cheer and to have wondered if this double "call and response" was imitative flattery or if it was one more spin spun for their disorientation.
On the other hand, while waiting for the ball to go up, if they turned their eyes to the West they saw Margalla Hills--gateway to Peshawar, the Khyber Pass, and Kabul. Or if they followed the Hills to the North, they would find the greatest mountains on the planet with K2, Nanga Parbat, Rakaposhi, and Tirich Mir soaring into the sky. Nearby to the east jutted the high continent composed of Kashmir, Nepal, Tibet, Sikkim, and Bhutan. Like the lines on the court, they would have studied this geography.
Another sign of familiarity: sitting under the south basket were twenty, sometimes thirty, men wearing different shades of either Shalwar Kamiz or pants and shirts. Ranging from their twenties to their fifties, these were the servants of the school: chaukidars, malis, bearers, typists, clerks, janitors, drivers, P.E. assistants, and handymen. They congregated for home games. If you are thinking that they secretly cheered for Gordon College you anticipate well but miss some of the complexity. Because, you see, they rooted for me.
Not for the Pakistani team, for that risked severing them from the economy of ISI. Nor did they seem especially inclined to show support for us. But when I did something notable, they exhaled. They risked releasing murmurs, even gesticulations, thinking perhaps that in cheering for me they at least cheered for a home team player. Could there be harm in that?
Distant as I was from them, I pretended not to notice--even if a part of me shone in their pride. The triangular tension between those clothed in garments of service and me with my typical Punjabi features framed by long black locks kept in place by the blue and white threaded headbands lovingly made by the cheerleaders all under the supervision of the white faces of power--must have registered on the Gordon College players. Just as did the perfect dry heat of the winter sun on our bare skins.
And then there was my beard, an outgrowth of the internalized rage that I could not vent on my school. My parents understood the danger. The beard did not withstand the directives of my father and the far more effective pleas of my mother. The Gordon College players, though, took my beard to be a sign of meditative depth "Sufi Saab, aup ney kamal kur theia." Meaning: "Sufi sir, you've done an amazing thing." That comment came from the player who was guarding me after I connected on a no-look behind-the-back bounce pass from the key to a base line cutting Tom Morgan. It was indeed a good...
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