Mr Rich and the Invisible Man

I’m invited to a farmhouse party on the outskirts of Islamabad city. I do not know who coined the term ‘farmhouse’ to replace the more appropriate ‘villa’ or ‘palace’ or ‘mansion’, but ‘farmhouse’ is in vogue, and that’s what the filthy rich in Pakistan like to call their sprawling multi-acre estates.
I don’t know the owner, but let’s call him Mr Rich. Mr Rich is not a farmer and the fact is no one knows what he really does. The envious say he’s a gun-runner, a drug dealer, a money launderer, an extortionist or maybe all of the above. Across the divide of the envious and the neutral, there is, however, a consensus: Mr Rich was not bequeathed his estate from an even richer aunt or grandfather, and he certainly didn’t earn it – in the proper sense of the word ‘earn’.
No, Mr Rich made a quick, surprising journey from rags to riches and now he owns many such farmhouses, many expensive cars and throws many such expensive parties. How that journey happened, exactly, no one really knows. The devil lurks in the details as they say. Those who knew him when he was a nobody – for the poor are always nobodies, invisible and without identities – are ominously nowhere to be seen tonight, in this glittering gala of the affluent.
We are driven up a winding driveway to an elaborate gilded portico from where valets wait in attendance to park cars or provide directions to the guest’s parking lot. Inside, liveried waiters and stewards hasten about with shiny silver trays, offering drinks, colourful canapés and roasted meat skewers, to excited and cheerful guests who chatter in an ever increasing pitch, struggling to compete with the din of techno music emanating from a powerful sound system housed somewhere in the bowels of the farmhouse. The interior is a confused amalgam of art-deco, baroque and minimalist architecture, the combination, perhaps, of an interior designer’s fevered dream and the calculated revenge of an underpaid architect. Everything is posh and branded and loud. The curtains, the rugs, the furniture and even the door handles, I’m told, are imported.
Tonight rivers of imported liquor will flow. The private discotheque, crammed with many a gyrating, perspiring body will pulsate with frenetic energy till the early hours of the morning. An expensive multiple course buffet dinner will eventually be served and for the very indulgent, high-class drugs will be on offer, for that extra kick to their intoxicated euphoria.
Outside the mansion are acres of undulating verdant landscape that stretch as far as the eye can see. There are swimming pools and tennis courts and children’s playgrounds, a greenhouse nursery, other smaller houses and rows of mammoth diesel generators, the continuous hum from which combines with the thump thump of the techno music to create a constant low-key cacophony of sound. This is an island of abundance and excess, one among many such islands that dot the length of this settlement, each one of them a match for the world’s finest country clubs. Islands of prosperity, floating in a sea of misery and abject poverty.
Driving up to the farmhouse earlier, I observed from a distance, obscured in the pale light of dusk, what appeared to be a pack of animals gambolling in the middle of the road. Closing the distance I found, instead, a family of six crouching by the roadside. It was their three boys – the eldest couldn’t have been more than four years old – barefoot and clothed in tatters, whose games would inadvertently cause them to race to and fro across the dusty centre of the road.
Their father, a bearded, sturdy, young, yet despondent man sat staring at the entrance to one among a row of identical villas, his expression a blend of pain and vehemence, but more tangibly of defeat. His wife, oblivious to my presence, struggled hopelessly with a bit of hard bread, trying to tear it into portions for her undernourished yet sprightly lads, who would, in response to the pangs in their empty stomachs, every now and then run up to their mother to inspect the progress of her labour. And beside her, the elder child, a girl of perhaps fifteen, sat hugging her knees, looking away from her family, gazing into the horizon and sobbing silently, continuously.
To my queries, our man – let’s call him the Invisible Man – would not answer at first. But with some cajoling, he confessed to having lost his job as a gardener in the house across, and to being turned out on the road brusquely, despite the entreaties of both his wife and daughter, with no wages, no food and no shelter. More cars passed, angrily swerving to avoid mine. From their interiors pale white angered faces, pressed against black tinted mirrors, gestures and expressions full of derision, as screeching tires blew plumes of dust over the Invisible Man and his equally invisible family. My inadequate gesture of charity the Invisible Man silently accepted with a resigned nod of thanks, giving me the cue to drive away into the diametrically opposed and unreal world of the rich and the privileged.
We live today in an age of extremes. The steadily growing gulf between the rich and the poor in our country has widened into a gaping insurmountable chasm. We imagine that our riches, our connections, our access to pelf and privilege, our borrowed affluence, will perpetuate this state of contradictions to our advantage alone. This smug assumption is informed partially by the recent economic phenomenon witnessed in the urban centres of Pakistan: here, an entire class of nouveau riche has emerged in the last decade, owing primarily to an unregulated property boom, but also to decrepit legal and law-enforcement institutions. This wealth and prosperity, generated through corrupt means, has no economic or institutional foundations. There are no new industries, no manufacturing units, no new service providers and therefore no real employment opportunities.
The beneficiaries of such ill-gotten gains, the semi-literate, tax evading, small traders and property dealers with political affiliations who now have big money, lack any entrepreneurial insight or ambition. As a corollary the nature of their commerce is exploitative and reliant on the informal and equally burgeoning sector of low paid, unskilled or semi-skilled, daily wagers. A mirage of affluence in the form of shopping malls and branded wholesale and retail outlets is merely the indicator of this excessive circulation of money. Yet the poor are poorer and the rich only richer, the growing refulgence in the lives of the former balanced only by the acute deprivation in those of the latter.
The question we need to ask ourselves today, a question that should concern governments and lawmakers and equally the beneficiaries of pelf and privilege, is: how long will this state of affairs endure? If history is to be made a benchmark for the future, then all contradictions must eventually resolve themselves. Will the invisible and the dispossessed of Pakistan suffer their exploitation endlessly as they have until now? Or have we achieved that critical mass? Are we poised, teetering just over the edge of the abyss, to move into an even more turbulent and violent phase in our history?
Will the oppressed perhaps rise up to decide that anarchy and use of force will be their sole recourse to justice? In the defeated yet vehement eyes of the Invisible Man, in the tears of his young daughter, in the frustrated labour of the poor mother and in the desolate smiles on the hungry faces of his children, I observed the premonition of just such a future.
The writer is a freelance columnist.
Email: kmushir@hotmail.com
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