Lily's Adventures in the Big City VI
It's About That Book You Really Must Write,
That And A Taxi Driver.
Off to the pharmacy to pick up meds, tired, waiting for a bus that never came, I hailed a taxi to go home. The driver, in his mid-40's with excellent English, turned and looked at me with the usual amazement when I spoke in Urdu to tell him where I wanted to go. Intrigued, he asked the usual questions, where did I learn, was I married to a Pakistani (that one always gets a strong rebuke, the nerve thinking that I have to be attached to a man to want to learn something...he took it well), and, finally, why did I learn that language, the one only a handful of Americans speak well.
So I told him stories, about the Pakistani politicians I knew and loved, about how the former ambassador to the US thought me to be a challenge to her status as THE one and only intelligent, knowledgable and attractive woman in Lahore and snubbed me regularly, for years, how I winkled the papers of the Unionist Party out of thirty years in hiding and had the only copies in the world until the owner of the papers gave the microfilms to the University of Chicago library.
Taking this all in, the taxi still at the curb by the pharmacy, laughing, shifting back and forth from English to Urdu mirroring my shifts, as sometimes the Urdu words I needed were lost in the edges of the Altzheimer's forest, he finally asked me about my research. I told him about the British imperial need for social and political control among nomadic tribes in an area that is now so long under canal irrigation that people don't know about the nomads or that many contemporary political families with a landed base were once tribal leaders of nomadic tribes, about how the British coopted the leaders of these tribes, giving them at almost no cost as much as 10,000 acres to farm, with the condition that all the land be irrigated by canals dug from banks of one of Punjab's five rivers.
Then I told him the names of the tribes - Tiwana, Noon, Daultana, the Syeds of Jehanian Shah, of Qatalpur, of Shah Jiwana, the Khakwanis, and so it went, - and each of these tribal names can now be found attached to younger people, in their thirties or forties, still landed, still holding power in rural areas, still running for elections just like their grandfathers or great grandfather's did in 1921, when the first elections were held in Punjab province. (You can even find the current generation, and often, their fathers, using google and the tribal name alone.)
I followed that up by telling him about the four to five generation deep geneologies I had done of these landed political elite families - finding that the preferred marriage was to the father's brother's daughter, although any first cousin would do in a pinch, and some would marry double first cousins (this is true for all of Pakistan and for many Muslim countries - and no, it doesn't cause the birth of lots of freaks, though the birthrate for such a closely related couple is lower than the norm as is fertility).
I was able to trace through time the use of politically strategic marriages to non-first cousins beginning at the turn of the century, when all the marriages outside the lineage were into families who lived very close by, giving a daugher to the local religious leader, for instance, insuring that his disciples would follow the leadership of the tribal leader because the religious leader would tell his disciples to do so. By the early 50's, the physical distance between the two families had expanded far enough to reach from Punjab into elite families in East Pakistan, now Banagladesh, where certain Punjabi families sought to ensure their power across this divide as well as by out of lineage marriages to religious leaders or to a smaller tribe which they needed as allies in their home electoral districts. .
By the time I linked the work I had done on the development of a rural political elite from the nomadic tribes, now long settled, and how the elite consolidated and perpetuated itself through strategic out-marriages from the birth lineage, my taxi driver was almost ecstatic. "I never knew all this, never," he said, " and I lived there until I was in my late twenties. I've got friends all over this area who want to know what you have put together, no one has done that, no one has written about it. Ever!" (he's right about that...)
A thoughtful man, well educated, with a master's in engineering, he then told me that I should write and publish my book so that it was available in the US, not with Oxford Karachi as I'd planned. I asked him why, not thinking about money, scholars don't usually do that. "The diaspora," he replied. "There are Pakistanis and people of Pakistani descent in the UK, Australia, Canada, some european countries and the US. I could make a few phone calls this evening and have a hundred people ready to hear you lecture and buy your book for $30.00 (here he stopped to show me the book he'd bought the day before for $28.00 at the local Urdu/English bookstore) tomorrow afternoon, and pay to attend the lecture. We are greedy to know what you know. No one in Pakistan could do that research and publish it. You've done it, it's amazing and I myself want to read every word you've written and you have a huge audience for it, just waiting."
We had been an hour and a half talking. He started the taxi and drove me the eight blocks home, refusing to take money, telling me I could pay him after the first book sold. I have his cell phone number and have promised to let him read the drafts as I go, for I am not writing for a severe scholarly audience, I no longer respect those who work in my litle special field. I'm writing for people like this driver and if he can understand what I've written I've done my job and paid back all the Pakistanis who spent hours and hours and hours and sometimes days helping me find what I needed to find, helping me make connections, feeding me and my young son, sending me off with their drivers' on explorations or to meetings, kindness upon kindness.
I've had a lot of trouble around finishing this work. It was what I loved most of all. It was what was taken away from me forever by the breakdown; I'll never be able to go back, not as a scholar with research to do. I've been out of the field too long, there is no funding. It's been hard even to take out and look at the materials I still have to work from to finish.
And so a stranger, driving a taxi, taking me home, tells me what I most need to hear in the world about this. I am humbled, in tears as I write this story, and have promised myself that I will heed what he said, because he is right and speaks the truth that pulls me out of myself and the pain that surrounds this sore subject, and shows me what I must do.
Doors. Doors open, if one can remain open to the knowledge that there are doors in places where we do not see them.
pearlbamboo
copyright e.p. hodges 2005
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