Once A Firefighter Always A Firefighter Shirt, hoodie
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Once A Firefighter Always A Firefighter Shirt, hoodie
It started with getting a visa. The consulate in Manhattan featured an ill-chosen white shag carpet that thousands of shuffling feet had reduced to the color of New York street slush. Decoration consisted of a framed calligraphic verse from the Holy Qur’an, which I mentally translated: “Which of your Lord’s beneficences will ye deny?” As I stood there in the long, disconsolate queue, I giggled to myself, “I dunno. Which?” (Game show: “Say, which box wilt thou deny? Number one, number two, or number three?” “Oh my goodness, sir, I am denying… two!” “Hurray! Number two is Jews, offspring of pigs and dogs! You win this luxurious Lashkar-e Toiba suicide vest to go commit a terrorist atrocity at the Taj Hotel in Mumbai!” “Shukriya, sahib!”) As I enjoyed my private joke, people murmured disapprovingly. No joking in Pakistan. Which, as I was soon to discover, is very hard not to do. Though a sense of humor was to prove salutary indeed at one juncture. But do read on.
The flight on PIA to Karachi from Bombay (as it was still called then, now it’s Mumbai). Stewardesses distribute to little kids what they describe as “Islamic toys”: a round peg, a square peg, and a block with a round hole and a square hole. To think that once upon a time, Islamic sacred geometry gave us the muqarnas.
Karachi. What does it look like? Take an Indian port city and subtract color, joie de vivre, and art. Pale buildings, frowning people in loose shalwar-kameez outfits, a neon ad for Rooh Afza. The latter is a sugary syrup whose mixed Arabic and Persian name means, roughly, “lifts your spirits”. It’s an unhealthy, electric red and tastes like a mixture of gasoline fumes, rosewater, and the bouquet of odors of a busy market street in the Subcontinent on a hot noon. I got to like it. You can put it on ice cream. Yum! (Drives away pesky house guests. Me: Here’s a Rooh Afza sundae for your refined palate, Alphonse! Guest: Look at the time!) Anyway, I gave my lectures, and the friendly, hospitable, nice Parsis enjoyed them. Somewhat unsettlingly, I was introduced as a “Jew gentleman,” which sparked the interest of a non-Zoroastrian in the audience: the state prosecutor who had sent the former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to the gallows. (Bhutto’s daughter, Benazir, was to become PM and get assassinated a few decades down the line, after being deposed by a US-sponsored military coup. Pakistan’s democracy in action.) Fortunately one didn’t see any more of him. He probably got tired of listening to disquisitions on the Zend-Avesta by the “Jew gentleman”. But another Jew in Karachi, the American journalist Daniel Pearl, was not to be so lucky: soon after 9/11, which the Pakistanis both celebrated and proclaimed a Zionist conspiracy, he was beheaded on camera. His murderer has recently been released from prison and is acclaimed by the populace as a hero.
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