Meeting God after 10 Years

An extract from the forthcoming novel, God’s Own Progeny, by Pakistani journalist Murtaza Razvi, who was found murdered at his home last week

“No, I am no Scherezade of the Arabian Nights,” I tell Rani, when she agrees to listen to my stories. “And I am no depraved king,” she says. We sit up in bed. TV is one thing she does not want in the bedroom. So what do we do? Foreplay. Sex. What next? Sex again. Maybe. And after that? We are both kind of insomniacs; we don’t seem to get enough of each other’s company, or of waking life, even as we quarrel. So we stay awake and listen to each other’s sweet and not-so-sweet nothings. Sweet, because there’s no legal paperwork between us. A lazy defiance of convention keeps us from signing on the dotted line. Sheikhu and Rani, me and her, or Rani and Sheikhu, she and I; it can be said either way because there are no titles involved. The two of us live in our small, not-very-perfect world, in a country that’s turning more and more imperfect, as if by design. We can be executed for living together without being married, because fornication here is now equated with adultery… since 1979. Not believing in Allah, which applies more to Rani than to myself, is also blasphemy punishable by death… since 1984. But this is no Animal Farm, at least not just yet… . Odd strands of humanity remain here and there – \y Yes, I am the medium for storytelling. I grew up in a world crowded by storytellers. Everyone around me had stories to tell —their own, and other people’s. I listened hard, memorised some and was, in time, ready to spin some of my own. It’s all related. From the word go to the very end.

My journey began in Lahore, where I was born and raised, barely 14 miles from India. It’s a place where the distinction between the past and the present blurs. India is always the point of reference —the big, fat neighbour next door, with whom we fought wars, whose memories refuse to fade. In 1947, we wished India away and gone from our lives, but it refused to budge too far. Nor did we. Despite all our efforts, Lahore managed to get only 14 miles away from India. It has gone no farther since. All things Indian have remained like addictions: the food, the song and dance, the kite-flying, the birth and death rituals, the pride in one’s caste and clan, you name it.

The journey back to puritanical Muslim roots stretching into Arabia, which began at the birth of Pakistan, proved an uphill task. We lacked the Middle Eastern , black-and-white worldview; there remained a huge grey area surrounded by a rainbow—shades of opinion, even flashes of polytheism; patron saints buried in our soil remain the real, giving gods. They don’t threaten you with destruction, or hellfire in the hereafter if you don’t adhere to their teachings, for that’s a task Allah has left to the mullah. There’s no running away from this fascinating world that pits Middle Eastern puritanism against Indian pluralism; as if the two were mutually exclusive. They are not. The stories that come to me say just that.    

I am surrounded by an impressive array of pluralistic paraphernalia. Most people close to me—if not all—are mad, clinically. Friends tell me that Lahore is a mad city, and they are very proud of it for being so. Maybe that’s why, when I moved to Karachi, I found it very, very sane. I looked hard for madness and found it missing. Somewhere along the great swelling that Karachi underwent after independence, humour was lost. A city of migrants it is, to which people flock by the thousand, year after year. They come from all over, too busy digging their feet into the ground. They labour, they toil,  some give up along the way, others go looking for greener pastures abroad. The energy they exude in the process eggs on a million new entrants. Few have time for fun and frolic, fewer still for the absurdities of life—which Lahoris, for instance, indulge in wholeheartedly, flaunting it as their culture.

Karachi, unlike Lahore, leaves you alone; in my case, to spin stories. It’s a great sea of human diversity, which makes no fair or unfair demands on you. You don’t have to be part of anything. You don’t have to identify yourself or latch on to a clique. Just like the sea that borders the city, it gives you seamless space to be yourself… and tell tales. Until you’ve said it all.

So here goes:

I lost God at the age of 18, only to rediscover him ten years later. In the decade that we led our estranged lives, both God and I grew in different directions. At the time of our parting, God was more benevolent and kinder. When we met again, ten years later, and decided to reconcile, it was to be on his terms. Knowing me, he did not insist on my total submission to his will. Knowing him, and that he was now my need, I did not make much fuss about acknowledging him as the master of my destiny. I did not have the heart to argue with someone I had known for 18 long years.

The year God and I made up, following my 28th birthday, it rained in Karachi. The cloudburst was so strong that people came out into the streets to celebrate the rain after a long wait of three dry years. Later, everyone was embarrassed about celebrating the event when there was a complete civic breakdown for days after the rain. Power went off; tap water was the next to go. Then there were pools of stagnant water infested with flies and mosquitoes that refused to dry up. The potholes in the roads have stayed since then to remind us that we shouldn’t have wished for something we thought was our need. Karachiites have since had a muted response to rain. They know it may be up there, in the skies, and it can make its presence felt when it chooses, but they have stopped longing for it. They love the rain’s kindness in showering water over upon them, because it’s a rare feat in this desert-surrounded city of 15 million, but they dread the misery it unleashes. Just like my interactions with God since we last met.

So I ask: what happens to the soul after it leaves the body? Like always, as I’d known it to be the case in our previous relationship of 18 years, God has chosen not to help me in my quest—not that I expect a vision or a miracle. Given the kind of casual relationship God and I have, I would be very disturbed if a sign of God were to come to me, like it did to my pious and holy ancestors. Why were they holy and me no more? Not me, I ask again.

Questions abound, and answers elude. Why not begin by asking what happens to the soul when it is in the body? Does it age, mature, feel the pain and anguish of growing up, happiness at crossing a threshold, dealing with a turning point in life? Does it enjoy the presence of near and dear ones, mourn the loss of those who are no more, regret the knowledge of what is known, dare to know the unknown?

Frankly, I do not know. That is perhaps why I need God back in my life. He, unlike most people I know, is a good listener. He does not talk back, even when you unload your story onto him and demand an explanation. He just listens.

My first memory of excitement is from a summer many, many years ago. My uncle had come to visit us in Lahore from Dhaka. I was barely three-and-a-half years old. He took me back with him to Dhaka on a Trident plane. The journey lasted some two-and-a-half hours. Then the plane landed at the monsoon-washed airport. Driving out of the building, there was a strange, sticky feeling in to the air. I remember I kept rubbing my palms, but the stickiness wouldn’t go away. Looking back —what a sharp contrast it must have been, even for a child that young, from the baking, dry, June heat of Lahore. I had never seen so much greenery before, never felt so much warm moisture in the air.

A feeling of déjà vu gripped me years later, on another visit to Dhaka. It was as if little had changed in the magical land that was the other half of my lost country. From the sky, it seemed all of Bangladesh lay under water, with the roads below looking like long, black snakes swimming their way through the monsoon flood. When I came out of the airport, the air was just as damp as the first time I had felt it as a little boy. On the way to the city, the roads were as crowded as my mind, with all the childhood memories rushing forth. I was able to relate to the city at once in a very strange way—just like meeting God anew after having lost him for ten years.

I celebrated Dhaka’s rain-washed skyline, the damp, wide greens and the flooded landscape, the seamless rivers, over which grey clouds gathered for a rendezvous. It was as if the moving water in the river, and all around the roads, made its way up into the sky, to come back crashing down again with a thunderbolt. Little had changed in this mysteriously beautiful land. Time stood still, as it were, even though it had moved on.

Lahore, the city of my birth, lay further away from Dhaka than it used to. It was over two decades, an international and a domestic flight and a passport check away. ‘Karachi, Dhaka’, I had read on the label of Tibet Snow, a skin-whitening concoction, in an Asian store in a London suburb years after East Pakistan had ceased to be, and it had taken me back to Dhaka, the fallen city of my lost half-country.

Meeting big cities, with all their presence spread out before you for miles on end, is like meeting God. They can leave you awestruck, like Moses on Mount Sinai; or cold and shivering, like Muhammad in the cave of Hira.

Thence begins a new life—as it did for my ancestors, when they moved to Lahore from Iran in the 19th century.

“I never thought you capable of sensing continuity in history; it’s rolling into the present, giving a destiny-like sense to what’s to come,” Rani tells me in a reflective tone. “You should write it down someday. But before that you must tell me all the stories you have. Less philosophy and more tales, promise?”

I nod in complete harmonic acquiescence, a rare treat between us, even though we’re not married.

About The Author

Murtaza Razvi