A Time of Madness: A Memoir of Partition

by Salman Rashid

‘So you don’t drink anymore?’ ‘Not really. Even now I don’t mind a sip or two.’ The phrase he used ‘pee-poo laida ey’ is richly redolent with typical Punjabi sangfroid and nonchalance.

We did however learn one lesson right. Jinnah said, ‘Every successive government [in Pakistan] will be worse than its predecessor’. Leaders and commoners of the Quaid-e-Azam’s Pakistan made this utterance of his their guiding principle and we have seen a steady and unstoppable decline in governance, bureaucracy and military leadership. The intellectual decay is widespread, for we find progressively feeble-minded and immature persons rising to the top. They say we are ruled by the cream of the nation. To me it seems more like scum riding the flow of a sewer.

‘Why did this have to happen?’ I asked on that March afternoon as we stood sheltering from the sun in the gated corner of Krishna Street. Mohinder Pratap looked me squarely in the eye for a moment. ‘It was a time of great madness,’ he said simply.

It seems it now only remains for our regional languages as well as Urdu to be overhauled. I suppose it is only a matter of time that all sounds unpronounceable in Arabic will be expunged from our lexicons so that the Arab colonization of Pakistan is complete. So much for our independence and a Pakistani identity.

I say we never really became independent. From British control we speedily slid under American influence and within years became slaves to international monetary agencies that pumped in loans so that even as her leaders misappropriated the funds to enrich themselves beyond measure, Pakistan hurtled down the dark tube of debt-ridden perdition.