The Pakistani Patient

I was then a young boy of 19, on the run from the war in the North, who had found an unexpected patron in an old wiry Khan Saheb who had apparently known my grandfather during the turmoil of the Afghan Wars. One morning, the Khan Saheb barged into my room when I was still enfulged by sleep and told me that there was an old woman I would have to attend to from that morning. He took me to Peshawar's Military Hospital even as the 8 o'clock army siren was piercing through the morning sky.

She was wrapped up in the purest white linen and was staring at the distant lake through the brown window. When we stepped closer to her, she raised her frail right hand slowly and tried to reach for me. The Khan Saheb whispered to me to move nearer to her. She gently touched my right cheek with her fragile fingers and slowly let them run down to my chin.

'Ah, Qasim ... Qasim ... Qasim', she softly sighed to herself, and looked out through the window again.

I was there with her during the last three months of her life. When she found out that I could write Urdu, she asked me if I would write down her autobiography as she dictated it to me. For ten weeks, she spoke, in a tirelessly ferocious stream, of various things, events, and people, as I desperately struggled with my pen to keep up with the pace of her narrative.

The day before she died, however, she told me to keep my papers away. She asked me to come closer to her and began to whisper in my ears.

'There is something that I want to say, but when I speak this to you, you must pretend that you are not in this room, that you are not hearing what I am going to say, that it is as if I am talking to those blank walls in front of me. I speak because I want some human being to know this truth before I am dead.'

I silently nodded my head.

'You can burn all those pages that you have written. Some historian might someday find them interesting, but they tell nothing about me, about who I really was. My entire life was nothing but a long never-ending attempt to escape from the dark prison of the family. What did I not do to earn and safeguard my freedom? First, I got attached to this band of wandering Sufis in Iran. And then, yes, I even joined the Communists in the United Provinces. Hah, can you believe that? Me, this old bag of bones, struggling with the reds? And finally, I joined the Muslim League in Lahore and listened to the Quaid-e-Azam's speeches. People would sometimes come up to me and say, 'How noble of you! How generous of you!'. Bah! If only they knew why I was always running away from one place to another!'

After the Partition, I went to the University of Islamabad where I became a student of the Islamic philosophy of Ibn Rushd, Ibn Sinna, and Al-Ghazzali. It was then that I first became aware of how elusive the 'I' is, how the 'I' is but a fragmented entity that is constantly being built out of our own stories and the stories of those around us.

Even today, however, I do not know whether I am the first-person who speaks in the posts on this blog or whether I am just the collection of the disconnected third-person voices through which I try to hide myself.

Perhaps I shall never know in my life-time.

Perhaps it is only after I am dead that the Transparent Ironist will reveal who I was when I was alive.