A week in the bubble

Visits to Islamabad — Isloo — tend to be fleeting. A long bus journey or a rare flight followed by a couple of meetings, a hello-hi to friends and then back to my backwater. Job done. Having twelve days in Isloo is not only rare it is a first in over twenty years. The kindness and hospitality of long-suffering friends provides me with a comfortable perch to observe from, and the bubble of the title becomes ever more obvious as the days add up. It is often said that Isloo is “not Pakistan” well it isn’t and is getting less like the rest of the country as the years pass, a widening gap.

Leaving the motorway on the way in a sort of invisible membrane is passed and traffic suddenly becomes better behaved (mostly) and 15kms from Pakistan there is a melting pot. People and classes — and castes — are mixed and interacting like nowhere else in the country. There are bubbles within the bigger bubble to be sure and the Chinese seem to carry around a bigger bubble than most numerically, but there are Sindhis and Baloch and the peoples of Northern Areas (…and yes many of them still call it “Northern Areas”) the ubiquitous Punjabis and, though fewer in these days when the echoes of more violent times still reverberates — foreigners. Like me.

There was a time and I remember it well when you could bump into another foreigner pretty much anywhere, Balochistan always excepted. They started thinning out after 9/11 and beyond the bubble are now a rare breed indeed. In my own city, Bahawalpur, beyond myself there is a very elderly Irish nun at the Dominican convent and that’s it. I am pretty much on my own.

But up here it’s different. You can rub shoulders with them in the cafes and supermarkets, even in the cinema and sometimes strike up a conversation that often goes along the lines of “…so what is it like out there?” Perceptions of what it is like “out there” vary wildly from something akin to a lawless chaos to a sort of uniform ochre desert overlaid by grinding poverty and an absence of all but the basics of civilised life.

Most of the bubble-dwellers that are foreign are transients. They don’t live here and have a view that is coloured by an overheated media in whatever is their country of origin. They pop out of their enclaves for a spot of exotic shopping from time to time before scurrying back to whatever facsimile has been created for them of their own dear land. Ships that pass in the night they may be but they give colour and texture to life in the bubble and — for me — a chance to provide corrective balance to some decidedly odd views as to what Pakistan is actually like to live in.

Beyond these variegated migrants there are the folks who really do live here but few if any are actually “from” Islamabad. A scattering of the founding generation and their descendants are around, but there are only the thinnest of genealogical webs that bind them to this monochrome sprawl that is the architectural equivalent of an overdose of sleeping tablets.

Those that have been here the longest are the ones that are least visible. They are the cooks and cleaners and drivers that service the class above them. Not for them the Rs300 or Rs400 for a cup of indifferent coffee taken in one of the crushingly unoriginal cafes that like to think they are at the cutting edge of liberal snacking. Dear me no. These the closest that the city has to real Islamabadians operate and lives under a cloak of invisibility conferred on them by status and a robust bubble of their own that is impermeable.

Perhaps it will always be like this, the city that came from nowhere which is still a character in search of an author. Nobody sticks around long enough to do much more than scribble on the wall and that will disappear as concrete decays and is replaced by…more concrete. Me? Well I will be back to Bahawalpur on Sunday. The city I nearly come from.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 3^rd, 2018.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.