I received two invitations on my WhatsApp this week. “Now that the virus is subdued,” began one, “join us for celebration cocktails at...”
My first thought was that the world had developed a vaccine but, like a party at high-school, no one told me about it. Huzzah! Maybe the Swedes have redeemed themselves! Maybe Oxford University really is that clever! Maybe the Russians aren’t coming after all! Maybe this summer was just a fever dream of electioneering!
I scanned my news feed (“the news” implies an impartiality we do not have) with a hope I haven’t felt since bread came back to New York grocery stores. On and on I swam, through the terrified obituaries of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, past the latest Covid statistic promising a second wave, and over the latest pictures of America’s racial civil war. But nothing. No new vaccine, no new safety measures, not even a new scandal.
“What do they know that I don’t know?” I wondered.
The answer was in the second invite, this one from a Lahori country club. “Now that the government had curtailed Covid,” it lied brightly, “we are saccharine with pride to inform you that buffet service has returned. Please note: maids not allowed in the dining room.”
I suddenly had a vision of an ad: a woman in a long trailing abbaya running through a glittering hospital wing. She turns back to the camera, manicured finger over red lips.
(Sexy whisper): “Delusion...by Calvin Klein, now available in the water supply.”
I understand that getting through a pandemic and a global economic catastrophe could require some measure of coping mechanisms. Yet I am constantly surprised at how easily we embrace alternative facts (we just called them lies when I was a kid). It’s called cognitive dissonance, a term that describes the space between what we want to believe and what is actually real.
I know first hand that surviving in the Islamic Republic often requires us to put on opaque blinkers. It is a place where extrajudicial order can be maintained with by a coerced apology, everyone is on some kind of kill-list, and one has to be careful not to piss off the wrong (or Right) people. You can be killed for being a woman or an unsupervised child: you can be abducted for being too vocal, too poor, or too rich. You can be shot for being the wrong sect of Islam, burned for being Christian, and raped for being a woman; we are a country where it is easier to see two men kissing on the street than a straight couple, and anyone who thinks that implies some kind of ancient tolerance isn’t looking hard enough.
We take for granted, for example, that talking about the security establishment in anything but glowing terms is essentially illegal. We accept that “the public” wants to see women only as whiny creatures in a state of constant motion hurtling either towards or away from homicidal mothers-in-law. Liberal elites show just enough outrage for the abduction of journalists or citizens, rape cases, child abuse rings and power outages to be on Facebook but not enough for legislative change, which isn’t wholly their fault because because most of them don’t have real legislative power to begin with, but they like to hear that. The ones that do have some measure of power are often feudal lords who have the right accents but the wrong ideas, like one who recently argued with me that “Covid was a Western hoax”, presumably unlike his Princeton degree. When pressed as to why he thinks that, he’ll say its because he hasn’t seen any cases but not tell you that he didn’t leave his house for six months.
Surviving in Pakistan requires, in short, creating your own reality. And while realities are relative (thank you Einstein), mortality rates are not. To say that Pakistan has beat Covid is a delusion that allows us to pretend the virus doesn’t exist without acknowledging the people who will die because of it. It’s the same fantasy that demands the public only see the country as “Pakistan: Nuclear Badass” rather than “Pakistan: China’s rice vendor”
While I understand the need to invent ways to feel safe, I urge anyone reading this to think. Really think. How many people do you know who have passed away in the last six months of “heart attacks?” How many?
I know 13, mostly because the country club sends out weekly email blasts of obituaries along with the Sunday menu, and you begin to notice when a dozen uncles die of the same thing in two months.
But don’t worry, we beat Covid! Have a cocktail.
P.S. The Economy is fine!
Write to the kantawala@gmail.com
My first thought was that the world had developed a vaccine but, like a party at high-school, no one told me about it. Huzzah! Maybe the Swedes have redeemed themselves! Maybe Oxford University really is that clever! Maybe the Russians aren’t coming after all! Maybe this summer was just a fever dream of electioneering!
I scanned my news feed (“the news” implies an impartiality we do not have) with a hope I haven’t felt since bread came back to New York grocery stores. On and on I swam, through the terrified obituaries of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, past the latest Covid statistic promising a second wave, and over the latest pictures of America’s racial civil war. But nothing. No new vaccine, no new safety measures, not even a new scandal.
“What do they know that I don’t know?” I wondered.
The answer was in the second invite, this one from a Lahori country club. “Now that the government had curtailed Covid,” it lied brightly, “we are saccharine with pride to inform you that buffet service has returned. Please note: maids not allowed in the dining room.”
I suddenly had a vision of an ad: a woman in a long trailing abbaya running through a glittering hospital wing. She turns back to the camera, manicured finger over red lips.
(Sexy whisper): “Delusion...by Calvin Klein, now available in the water supply.”
I understand that getting through a pandemic and a global economic catastrophe could require some measure of coping mechanisms. Yet I am constantly surprised at how easily we embrace alternative facts (we just called them lies when I was a kid). It’s called cognitive dissonance, a term that describes the space between what we want to believe and what is actually real.
To say that Pakistan has beat Covid is a delusion that allows us to pretend the virus doesn’t exist without acknowledging the people who will die because of it
I know first hand that surviving in the Islamic Republic often requires us to put on opaque blinkers. It is a place where extrajudicial order can be maintained with by a coerced apology, everyone is on some kind of kill-list, and one has to be careful not to piss off the wrong (or Right) people. You can be killed for being a woman or an unsupervised child: you can be abducted for being too vocal, too poor, or too rich. You can be shot for being the wrong sect of Islam, burned for being Christian, and raped for being a woman; we are a country where it is easier to see two men kissing on the street than a straight couple, and anyone who thinks that implies some kind of ancient tolerance isn’t looking hard enough.
We take for granted, for example, that talking about the security establishment in anything but glowing terms is essentially illegal. We accept that “the public” wants to see women only as whiny creatures in a state of constant motion hurtling either towards or away from homicidal mothers-in-law. Liberal elites show just enough outrage for the abduction of journalists or citizens, rape cases, child abuse rings and power outages to be on Facebook but not enough for legislative change, which isn’t wholly their fault because because most of them don’t have real legislative power to begin with, but they like to hear that. The ones that do have some measure of power are often feudal lords who have the right accents but the wrong ideas, like one who recently argued with me that “Covid was a Western hoax”, presumably unlike his Princeton degree. When pressed as to why he thinks that, he’ll say its because he hasn’t seen any cases but not tell you that he didn’t leave his house for six months.
Surviving in Pakistan requires, in short, creating your own reality. And while realities are relative (thank you Einstein), mortality rates are not. To say that Pakistan has beat Covid is a delusion that allows us to pretend the virus doesn’t exist without acknowledging the people who will die because of it. It’s the same fantasy that demands the public only see the country as “Pakistan: Nuclear Badass” rather than “Pakistan: China’s rice vendor”
While I understand the need to invent ways to feel safe, I urge anyone reading this to think. Really think. How many people do you know who have passed away in the last six months of “heart attacks?” How many?
I know 13, mostly because the country club sends out weekly email blasts of obituaries along with the Sunday menu, and you begin to notice when a dozen uncles die of the same thing in two months.
But don’t worry, we beat Covid! Have a cocktail.
P.S. The Economy is fine!
Write to the kantawala@gmail.com