Iqbal’s Story

FEBRUARY 2003 - The thing about Mohammad Iqbal was the clear and straight look in his eyes. There was an integrity in that look that made it possible to believe what he would often say. Slight of build he had the smooth darkish complexion that comes from working in the outdoors and he would turn up at the house on Sunday mornings to give my perennially aching right foot, a longish massage. He was punctual and once the session was underway, would be my conduit into the other world of Lahore, the one where theme dinners, Thai cuisine and the features of the new Lexus were not the great subjects of interest.

Iqbal wasn’t from Lahore, but a small village called Moazzamabad situated somewhere beyond Sargodha, from where another Rs 15 by wagon got you to his little house, where his father, mother and sister lived and tended to their buffalo and worked in the fields. Your typical rustic lifestyle. A tractor driver by training, he had ventured to Lahore, in search of better prospects and to break away from the predictability of life in the village and a future that wasn’t shining too brightly. An everyday story, which explains the congestion on the streets of the cities and the absence of rural labour when required for planting or harvesting. Iqbal hadn’t exactly taken Lahore by storm. After knocking about at many doors of opportunity he wasn’t getting anywhere so in some desperation and to avoid returning home to the fields, he hung on converting his strong hands to massaging the clients he could get of an evening. As far as I knew, he had no real address and therefore had no proper place to sleep in – I had not asked that openly since I was not prepared to help out and get involved – the story with most of us. We used to have a pleasant time, me asking various questions about his daily income and his life back home. Almost always the answers were straight and delivered without too much emotional tags attached. He was obviously poor and struggling but never asked for anything extra except to borrow from a discarded pack of Captain Black cigarettes that were lying in the room. He would take one on the way out.

Then Iqbal disappeared. For the next 13 Sundays I never saw him and neither did I make any enquiry. He had borrowed a small sum of money the last time he had been here – the only time in fact, saying that someone was visiting him from the village and he needed to look after him. I came to the city-slicker conclusion later believing that he had simply moved on and was not going to show up just to return the debt or work it off. Then one Sunday, as was his custom, he arrived at 10 am sharp looking ragged and weary. He had washed his clothes at a tubewell near a small park in Lahore’s famous Chaburjee and had gone to sleep there waiting for his clothes to dry when a police posse picked him up at about 11 am and dumped him in their van. They were on a daylight mission of finding derelicts, delinquents and criminal elements and were short on their required quota so were quickly rounding up whoever they could. In the next few minutes, Iqbal was neatly deprived of the Rs. 300 he had and instead found himself to be a drug dealer and holder of an unlicensed revolver. He was thrown into Camp Jail along with hundreds of others, some cripples and unable to travel even a few yards on their own. Each one was charged with the easiest of things – ‘manshiat’ as the cops call it. Iqbal of course said he had never done drugs or sold even a sliver of the stuff, but we all know that is largely irrelevant. Since there are some good guys always, though increasingly in short numbers, the cops returned Rs 100 and told him that the balance had been used up to get together the paperwork required for his detention. Iqbal said that he did not protest he was innocent because it would have only earned a beating. He was in Camp Jail for the next three months, living like the other inmates, working in the fields outside or whitewashing the premises. For one reason or another, there was no progress on the case against him and he fell into the routine of half a loaf of bread and tea in the morning, then a 'chapatti' and 'dal' twice and some meat on the eighth day when the Superintendent made his weekly round. He was taken to the courts a few times but either the magistrate was not present or there were far too many cases and not enough time. His Rs 100 got used up to pay for the occasional cigarette or biscuits, the trade routed through the cops. Because no one knew Iqbal was in jail, no one ever came to see him.

Then one day, he was produced and the charges were read out against him. Iqbal pleaded guilty and begged for forgiveness by going down on his knees with his hands clasped before his lordship, who sentenced him to 5 months, but on more pleading by Iqbal, reduced it to 3 months. Since Iqbal had already served the period, he was shoved out and told to get lost. This little story must be as common as it gets. In fact, given the state of affairs here, Iqbal was very lucky. He lost only three months of his life, was not beaten or sodomised and finally managed to get out. We all know what are the conditions like because we keep reading about horrendous things that happen to people, but we should also be aware that what we supposedly know is next to nothing, that the jails of this country are choking with thousands of Iqbals and thousands of his sisters who rot and crawl about waiting for justice of some kind to release them from this one misery – there is a bigger misery outside but then that is there fate as most people will tell you with a shake of their head. There was nothing I could do for Iqbal. I cooked him a big breakfast and gave him enough money to take him back to his village and some left over to see him through for a few days. The only advice I gave him was to get out Lahore which had done nothing for him. He had remarked that if you didn’t have a roof over your head, you were a nobody and I asked him about the roof in village Moazzamabad and he said that was very much there. Therefore that is where I directed him. Like most of my kind, I didn’t do anything for this young man and remained troubled for many days. I had seen the flimsy slip of paper and the fictious charges on it as well as the release paper, another equally flimsy scrap of meaningless mumbo jumbo. Driving past Ch. Shujaat Hussain’s luxury villas that day near F.C. College, I couldn’t count all the Land Cruisers, the Pajeros, the green-plated Corollas, Civics and the hordes of cops and cop cars and jeeps and smart sergeants on their imported motor bikes. The new rulers are settling in and getting about staging the quick recovery of their election investments while getting into the mainstream of rapid escalation of fortunes which are already beyond belief and beyond the wildest dreams of Pakistan’s Mohammad Iqbals.

Pakistan is a sorry state where the few who hold power have ensured a system where their fortunes are multiplied many times over. Some do it in the name of patriotism, some in the name of God, some for Kashmir, some for Islam and some for any cause that keeps them in power and glory. And that’s the way it will be because nothing less than a catastrophe will change this country and the way we treat our common people.