As the car hurried past the newly erected triple towers of The Centaurus towards the Blue Area....
STORY
As the car hurried past the newly erected triple towers of The Centaurus towards the Blue Area, the twenty years old Sohai almost screamed, “Chacha, slow down, I need to take a picture!” Her chacha, an old man with his wife beside him in the front seat, complied without comment. She was his niece, and had come from Sukkur to seek admission in one of Islamabad’s universities. “God, there are so many of them here!” she had commented. “Chachu take me to Red Zone as well? They won’t let us there without you. I so want to click the Parliament and the Supreme Court!” The old man nodded. No, almost nodded! There was such an odd air about this couple that Sohai had lately been doubting the sanity of all her relatives who termed them as the ideal couple. They were, at times, reminiscent of a Shakespearean tragedy, without either of them knowing what the tragedy was. She had, at first, tried breaking the ice between them but soon realised the futility of this act, and had re-adjusted to mentally judging them. Except for their noses, she thought, they didn’t even look Sindhi. They belonged to another world. Sohai proudly adjusted her ajrak at this nationalistic thought, and looked at her aunt: was she too wise or too foolish to have cut everything off so relentlessly? Sohai considered herself a product of the new age, and as debatable as it was, she was sure that these decades had brought about a radical progression in the mindset of even her small city. Her marriage proposals were already lined up, but she was sure she would marry only for love: her soulmate. She charged the old couple sitting before her to have married only for security: financial, social and personal one. Right about then, her old uncle twitched the fingers of his left hand forwards. Her aunt took the cue almost immediately and passed him the bottle of water. “Security!” Sohai thought and turned her gaze towards the metro buses scurrying towards the Constitution Avenue.
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Of all the tragedies they had been through in life, old age was arguably the most brutal. When they were young, they had dismissed old age, like death, as one of those distant realities that befall only others; they had considered themselves somehow immune to the catastrophe it wreaks. But now that they were old, they were having a rocky time with adjustments. With every new muscular pain was born a new blame, though neither of them often expressed it. He blamed her for not knowing enough Sindhi cuisine. She blamed her for misplacing the shampoo in the bathroom. He blamed her for her lack of fluent English. She blamed him for not saving the city from his department’s recent ill-work. He blamed her for not giving him any children. She blamed him for her distance from her parents when they had died.
They both blamed each other, equivocally, for not being the people they once were.
They would not talk to each other for days on some petty issue and lacked the warped sense of humour or the energy to passionately make things up with. But then, sooner or later, in a moment of lucidity, they both would realise that their accusations were totally unfounded.
Idiopathic. Without any cause. The worst of them all?
And it was also during those moments that they’d find a common enemy - Islamabad!
“It’s this city!” she finally said once. “It’s its lack of character, its want of culture, its need of identity, its quest of power that has seeped into our beings. We have been sucked in by the idea of this forsaken city!”
Those were the days when they’d free themselves of any charge whatsoever, and bask in the shade of the discovery of their disillusioned enemy - putting all that was wrong between them very authoritatively down to the city.
And the city of Islamabad would smile with all its conceited glory on having infused a new, albeit temporary, breath of life into a dying marriage.
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Rayan Ahmad dreaded marriage to the boot. He looked around impatiently for the fourth time, seated at the edge of Monal’s terrace with the city sprawling itself into a multitude of colours beneath him. He would get married, of course, but only after his career as a writer had taken a start. After self-publishing his first novel, which had been a fiasco on so many levels, he had vowed to rake in some reputed publisher for the second one. His agent, an individual in the UK who was just as desperately trying to get in the world of literature as Rayan, was consistently pinging him for the first draft - but he had gotten nowhere to getting the job done. “Write a Pakistani love-story in the wake of 9/11...” he was told. “Those things always work!” Rayan fixated his eyes on the dazzling capital that lay below, many around him taking their selfies with the magnificent view. Red, blue, orange, yellow; colours following each other in a jovial banter on the orderly network of clean, wide roads that snaked throughout the city. It was as he turned to inquire about his order from the waiter that he saw the old couple - a sight that held him immediately. It was peculiarly absorbing: the woman, who he guessed would have been quite a sight in her day, adjusting her shawl more out of obsession than need, and the man shifting uneasily in his seat. They could have been eloped, awkward lovers, if not for their age. Rayan had resolved to write about life more authentically than most people lived it, and that old couple became a queer inspiration. They’d have been privy to this city’s secrets, they’d have played audience to regimes rising and falling. He eyed them consistently, not caring about the social repercussions. It was then that he saw the old man take out a brown envelope from his pocket and place it between them. The blank expression on their faces didn’t allow much room for guessing as to what it was, except that they both had been anticipating it - probably for quite some time now. Was it an old school love letter? He smiled at the thought. Or perhaps an anniversary gift, a high-rise studio apartment as was so typical of the city’s elite? And then it hit him - divorce papers? He inhaled at length, closing his eyes just in time to let the dastardly thought sink in. He perhaps took a bit too long, for when he opened his eyes they were gone - just like that; in their place a vacuum of unanswered questions, unresolved anger and misplaced emotions almost palpable. So suddenly had they vanished into the capital’s thin air that Rayan couldn’t help wondering if they were only a figment of his ‘writerly’ imagination. Deep down below, the city of Islamabad went about its business as usual. It was a beautiful city, after all. There were too many lights to get lost into.
