You might want to sit down for this. Mrs. Marzi, my raven-haired, hawk-eyed, 80-year-old frenemy from next door, died this week. It was all rather sudden. I had seen her walking down our lane just last week and had found her in fine combative form: head up, shoulders pushed back, judgment oozing from every pore. I could tell she was making mental accounts of how much everything cost. (“New gas canister? How new? Old new or Expensive new? You overpaid. No sense in young people nowadays. Where’s your mother?”)
I was away for the next few days; and upon my return I found a traffic jam outside my house, only to be told that Mrs. Marzi, that tough old bird, was having her funeral.
I shall miss her. That’s a fib, actually. It’s what people say about other people who die without warning. The truth is I’m perpetually shocked when someone goes from Existence to Not Being. It only ever takes a moment, and now she will never pester me about dogs or snakes or architectural discounts.
I’m surprised how sad that makes me feel. Obviously my twitch of empathy is nothing compared to that of her 90-something husband, who looked, when we met yesterday, slightly surprised to learn that he had outlived her. I remember when my own grandparents saw Mr. and Mrs. Marzi move in to this neighborhood a decade and a bit ago. Mrs. Marzi was a force then, her hair darker and her will stronger. Her husband was an exercise in conjugal contrast: short and bent over, with skin like Japanese paper, he would shuffle along an inch at a time with his walker during his early morning constitutional. Everyone made bets as to how long the extremely frail-looking Mr. Marzi would reside in our hood. 12 years on, he’s outlived both my grandparents and his wife, proving that slow and steady wins the race.
I don’t like thinking about death. (I also know that what I think doesn’t make a difference to Death.) Being alive is, after all, not being dead, so it’s hard to celebrate one’s existence without occasionally pondering the alternative. We all live in perpetual fear/awareness of a dark phenomenon that can strip us of everything we hold dear. Even now I’m shaking at the thought of it. I think about it in small instances, like when I feel guilty about losing my temper with my parents and begin thinking awful thoughts like “when they pass away, you’ll remember all these nasty little interludes and then cut yourself on the arm.” I sometimes try and guess how long my loved ones will live, and as I approach my thirtieth year, I have taken to leafing through my high school yearbook to see if anyone has died (as it happens, three of my schoolmates have been kidnapped and five shot, so the odds aren’t really great.)
News of Mrs. Marzi’s death reached me around the same time that I heard about the death of Indian author and politician Shashi Tharoor’s wife. The story was made for the tabloids. Sunanda Tharoor, it was being said, had recently discovered her husband’s affair with a Pakistani woman journalist and subsequently took to social media to vent her anger. (Like the raciest real-life soap operas, this one too floated and flailed on the Ocean of Opinion that is twitter.)Two days later, Mrs. Tharoor was found dead in a high-end hotel room. Now her death is being called an “overdose” (there was no suicide note, at least not when I wrote this column).
That, ladies and gents, is what one calls “way sketchy.” The Pakistani journalist is under siege (I would not want to be her this week); and Shashi Tharoor has, in a very short time, gone from being “urbane” and “impossibly good-looking” to A Typical Desi Philanderer. As an Indian op-ed wickedly put it, they’ve “Tehelka’d” Tharoor.
[quote]You'd be forgiven for thinking of India as a colorful amalgam of Parampara and Santa Barbara[/quote]
Continuing its awkward imitation of the United States of America, the Indian media is hotly scrutinizing the personal lives of the rich and famous, and even of the un-rich and un-famous. It’s not exaggeration to say that sexual harassment and infidelity nowadays get top billing in the Indian media. I mean, whatever happened to famines and insurgencies and slums and child hunger, to say nothing of the nuclear arms race and what Arundhati Roy has called India’s “somersault” of dutiful alignment with America? If you based your analysis of India solely on its front pages and fast-paced news shows, you’d be forgiven for thinking it a colorful amalgam of Parampara and Santa Barbara.
Of course, it’s only a matter of time before a sex scandal in India inspires a sex scandal in Pakistan. And so it was that, in the same week, I came to learn of Meera’s Sex Tape.
I am not going to use the world “allegedly” here to qualify my critique because, well, I can’t. The actress, thus far famous for her novel pronunciations of English words, has fulfilled the fantasies of adolescents across our country. You don’t see anything in that video that you wouldn’t see on a French TV channel. But the fact of it is quite surprising, as is the lack of a general uproar. I am hoping our (comparatively) muted reaction to the tape reveals that we have moved on since the Veena Malik debacle of 2011. (It also proves to me that the Mad Muslim Mind has finally been tamed by hours of Internet porn.)
I am hoping, given how I have no gas or electricity or hot water in my house this week, that this is a sign of progress, i.e. we are now on the path to realizing that we have bigger issues – such as Death and Taxes – to address in Pakistan.
Write to thekantawala@gmail.com and follow @fkantawala on twitter
I was away for the next few days; and upon my return I found a traffic jam outside my house, only to be told that Mrs. Marzi, that tough old bird, was having her funeral.
I shall miss her. That’s a fib, actually. It’s what people say about other people who die without warning. The truth is I’m perpetually shocked when someone goes from Existence to Not Being. It only ever takes a moment, and now she will never pester me about dogs or snakes or architectural discounts.
I’m surprised how sad that makes me feel. Obviously my twitch of empathy is nothing compared to that of her 90-something husband, who looked, when we met yesterday, slightly surprised to learn that he had outlived her. I remember when my own grandparents saw Mr. and Mrs. Marzi move in to this neighborhood a decade and a bit ago. Mrs. Marzi was a force then, her hair darker and her will stronger. Her husband was an exercise in conjugal contrast: short and bent over, with skin like Japanese paper, he would shuffle along an inch at a time with his walker during his early morning constitutional. Everyone made bets as to how long the extremely frail-looking Mr. Marzi would reside in our hood. 12 years on, he’s outlived both my grandparents and his wife, proving that slow and steady wins the race.
I don’t like thinking about death. (I also know that what I think doesn’t make a difference to Death.) Being alive is, after all, not being dead, so it’s hard to celebrate one’s existence without occasionally pondering the alternative. We all live in perpetual fear/awareness of a dark phenomenon that can strip us of everything we hold dear. Even now I’m shaking at the thought of it. I think about it in small instances, like when I feel guilty about losing my temper with my parents and begin thinking awful thoughts like “when they pass away, you’ll remember all these nasty little interludes and then cut yourself on the arm.” I sometimes try and guess how long my loved ones will live, and as I approach my thirtieth year, I have taken to leafing through my high school yearbook to see if anyone has died (as it happens, three of my schoolmates have been kidnapped and five shot, so the odds aren’t really great.)
News of Mrs. Marzi’s death reached me around the same time that I heard about the death of Indian author and politician Shashi Tharoor’s wife. The story was made for the tabloids. Sunanda Tharoor, it was being said, had recently discovered her husband’s affair with a Pakistani woman journalist and subsequently took to social media to vent her anger. (Like the raciest real-life soap operas, this one too floated and flailed on the Ocean of Opinion that is twitter.)Two days later, Mrs. Tharoor was found dead in a high-end hotel room. Now her death is being called an “overdose” (there was no suicide note, at least not when I wrote this column).
That, ladies and gents, is what one calls “way sketchy.” The Pakistani journalist is under siege (I would not want to be her this week); and Shashi Tharoor has, in a very short time, gone from being “urbane” and “impossibly good-looking” to A Typical Desi Philanderer. As an Indian op-ed wickedly put it, they’ve “Tehelka’d” Tharoor.
[quote]You'd be forgiven for thinking of India as a colorful amalgam of Parampara and Santa Barbara[/quote]
Continuing its awkward imitation of the United States of America, the Indian media is hotly scrutinizing the personal lives of the rich and famous, and even of the un-rich and un-famous. It’s not exaggeration to say that sexual harassment and infidelity nowadays get top billing in the Indian media. I mean, whatever happened to famines and insurgencies and slums and child hunger, to say nothing of the nuclear arms race and what Arundhati Roy has called India’s “somersault” of dutiful alignment with America? If you based your analysis of India solely on its front pages and fast-paced news shows, you’d be forgiven for thinking it a colorful amalgam of Parampara and Santa Barbara.
Of course, it’s only a matter of time before a sex scandal in India inspires a sex scandal in Pakistan. And so it was that, in the same week, I came to learn of Meera’s Sex Tape.
I am not going to use the world “allegedly” here to qualify my critique because, well, I can’t. The actress, thus far famous for her novel pronunciations of English words, has fulfilled the fantasies of adolescents across our country. You don’t see anything in that video that you wouldn’t see on a French TV channel. But the fact of it is quite surprising, as is the lack of a general uproar. I am hoping our (comparatively) muted reaction to the tape reveals that we have moved on since the Veena Malik debacle of 2011. (It also proves to me that the Mad Muslim Mind has finally been tamed by hours of Internet porn.)
I am hoping, given how I have no gas or electricity or hot water in my house this week, that this is a sign of progress, i.e. we are now on the path to realizing that we have bigger issues – such as Death and Taxes – to address in Pakistan.
Write to thekantawala@gmail.com and follow @fkantawala on twitter