The wasteland

I walked blindly into the narrow passageway carved between the crumbling wall of an abandoned latrine and the remains of a chicken coop, its mud floor lined with the feathers of molting birds. In my heart I feared the sorrow which I knew was waiting in its appointed corner, hooded eyes slowly piercing through the composure I wear like the day’s fragrance. Ahead of me, a field of green whispered softly, incongruous amidst the grayness of squalor. I saw the men before I heard the women, and I knew I had found the home where the death of a young girl I had known was being mourned. Embracing her grieving mother, I let myself grieve for the girl’s death, for the death of young women who never know life, for the death of young children whose mothers wish they had gone before them.
In my beloved country, while Sultans build flyovers and underpasses, while their henchmen demolish the homes of those already living on the edge, while heritage and history become part of the debris and detritus of “modernisation”, 30,000 women die every year due to pregnancy related causes. Nameless, faceless, these women often never make it to hospitals or even to the Basic Health Units which dot the landscape like full-stops, places where the road to health ends. Thirty-four per cent of pregnant women suffer from malnutrition, with 48pc of lactating mothers having a caloric intake of 70pc less than the recommended level. Forty-five per cent or almost half of all Pakistani women suffer from iron deficiencies that result in stillbirths, birth defects including retardation, and infant deaths.
The cost of saving the lives of women and children are negligible compared to the budgets spent by the sultans on infrastructure which would not have been necessary had women been looked after at the outset, had women been enabled to control their own fertility, limiting their family size, resulting in population growth rates which do not outstrip the exploitation of resources or the rate of growth of the economy. The cost, Rs2m, of the ghastly, garish, rather ghoulish lights and lasers trained on the ancient edifice of the Chauburji in Lahore could have been used to save the lives of many such women, had the sultan and his minions seen the light of reason. The cost of the oval round-about planned to be erected above the Lady Willingdon Hospital, could provide healthcare and education to perhaps all the girls and women of the Punjab, with lots leftover. At Rs3.983b, this project shall take away part of one of the largest and certainly the oldest maternity and gynaecological hospital in the province. It shall also take away the opportunity for life for many of the women whose lives are at risk only because their lives are seen to be worthless, or worth less than the value of lucrative contracts and visible, populist moves on the part of visually impaired decision-makers.
It is evening now. I have spent the day wandering from place to place in this city of my birth, drifting aimlessly from lane to passageway to wide, tree-lined avenue, wondering at the obvious question, seeking answers which I know are there, beneath the lurid posters of the leering men, beneath the rhetoric of vapid phrases, empty promises. I have watched and yearned, waiting for some small fissure through which I could insert myself and seek relief for this burden of recognition, this terrible sense of foreboding which governs my reticence. I have seen the unfolding of the grand design, the clamouring for the spoils, and the arrogance of the victor who fails to see the pallor on the faces of the children crammed into a tiny quarter in a squatter settlement just outside the new “lakeside” and “alpine” colonies mushrooming all over the landscape like pinnacles of glory perched on the corpse of a long dead soul.
I have grieved for much of the time between the loss of innocence and the recognition of reality. I want to put the sorrow away, until its widowed eyes seek me out again and remind me of the tragedy which has befallen my beloved nation. I want to be able to look clearly into the eyes of the woman whose young daughter died last night. I want to be able to tell her and other mothers that the deaths of their children make us fragile and vulnerable to the unbearable anguish of loss, but that we must still breathe deeply and carry on for the sake of the others, for the sake of ourselves. Somehow, I cannot speak the words with which to reassure this mother, I cannot believe the words I want to speak, I can only hear the dull thud of truth as it falls, once again, by the wayside, crumbling like a mud wall in the monsoon.
I negotiate my way past the overflowing gutters and the heaps of garbage piled up in streets beneath the crumbling roofs of public schools with no toilet facilities for children who have no chairs to sit on, no books to read, no light to read by. Obscured by greed and an insatiable quest for power and grandeur, the vision of the sultan serves only him and others like him — all those who have paid obeisance to the God of False Things. Taking over our parks and our greenbelts, our trees and our air, our hopes and our dreams, these Merchants of Death are taking away what is ours to claim, what has been here before us, what shall remain only if we fight for it, our beloved city, Lahore.
Unreal city, I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, and each man fixed his eyes before his feet. (TS Eliot “The Wasteland”)