Dil Dil (Hyderabad) Pakistan

Posted on January 4, 2008 by hijabman

We’ve spent three or four days in Hyderabad now and (I’m not being facetious) it’s lovely here. It’s true that people are sick of Musharraf, but I’ve gotta say: things have improved dramatically in Hyderabad in the last ten years. The streets are cleaner, the middle class appears to be growing, we’re enjoying a freedom of movement that wasn’t at all possible during the nineties. I’m not sure that’s owing to anything Musharraf has done (aside from the general enforcement of law and order that was missing in the Nawaz Sharif-Benazir period), but whatever it is, it’s been working in noticeable ways.

It’s such a strange system: Upper and middle class civilians trying to get out of the really congested center move to semi-suburban style areas built around military compounds. They pay increased taxes—the implication seems to be that some or all of that is directly to the military—and as a result enjoy protection that makes living outside of the city center possible—and peaceful. I say semi-suburban because the plot system, architecture and roadway system feels more like a European town than anything I’ve seen in America. It’s certainly nothing like American suburbia. Homes are built right up against eachother, but without the packed-in symmetry of rowhouses. Every house, however modest, is custom built, local materials like marble are used for flooring (again, even in modest homes.) There’s not a strip of linoleum anywhere, not a chain link fence, not a bit of aluminum siding. It’s all marble and colored concrete or stucco, with wrought iron gates and doors and narrow lanes carved between the old village of Tando Jahania and the new “Defense” neighborhood.

Angrez, my husband, wonders if we would love it all this much if we lived here; if the romance of the dusty bazaars and the narrow lanes and the crush of donkey carts and rickshaws and cars would all be too much in the context of corruption and power outages and no reliable police service and political instability. But it’s not just romance. The truth is that one generation removed we are still deeply rooted here. Our names are spoken with ease, our clothes aren’t strange, the food smells like home. There is something here that is fundamentally home. In some ways I felt more purposeful in the U.S. after 9-11. Interfaith work and institution building has been really fulfilling. But it feels like there’s more to work for in Pakistan. Bush and his cronies—and really Clinton’s botched health initiative and sell-out to the pharmaceuticals, etc etc.—-make it hard to argue that American government is somehow more virtuous or more reliable, at least for Muslims. There is so much beauty here, and craft, and so many resources that I’m becoming a bit of a patriot—not in the sense of allegiance to the government, but love of the people and of the place.

It’s going to sound nuts, but just as an example: as someone who’s never been terribly taken with the fashion industry, I’m in awe of the textile and fashion sectors here. They’re actually inspiring. Not in an insipid Vogue kind of way, but in an old world meets new world, Silk Road of today kind of way. Cloth shops here put American fabric shops to shame. As does the elegance of the old-world service and pride in service work. The ordinary cloth seller knows cloth, same for the tile-seller, the nut seller, the shoe seller, the fruit seller. There’s, in many ways, far more dignity for the working person in their work here than in the States. Even banks in America are McDonaldized, deprofessionalized.

The food here is something else. I really wish I could bring you some carrots and some radishes—you’d appreciate the spectacular goodness of the food here, ungassed, local, reproductive, and in-season as it is. The carrots here are red and the size of zucchini, the radishes sweet before sharp, but not bitter, and the size of a baby’s fist. Milk is fresh, not homogenized, and Auntie makes dhai (yogurt) and ghee from the cream. There’s something more alive about everything.

But the other side is that Pakistan really desperately needs a ban on the use of plastic bags. Recycling is rare and there’s not even a reliable disposal system in most places. They are ubiquitous, ugly and damn near close to eternal.

–Zosha