A fond adieu to Zahrah Nasir

Zahrah Nasir's may be an extreme case, possibly unique even, but this is a place increasingly unsafe for foreigners.

There was a time when you would see foreign faces and hear a Babel of languages right across Pakistan. Many of them were tourists because, difficult as it is to believe today, Pakistan was a popular tourist destination and in some places had the tourist infrastructure to support and service visitors.

Those that were not tourists often worked for NGOs; there was a scattering of missionary priests, some nuns working in the education sector and any number of consultants working for multinationals. And they are, for the most part, gone. There are still a few nuns from abroad — two live in my home city of Bahawalpur but they don’t go out and about much. I have not heard from the missionary family from Wales for years. They worked with the desperately poor Hindus in south Punjab and my assumption is that they have now gone as well. There are a few expatriates living long term in Islamabad and I occasionally bump into them, but they keep a low profile. Any consultants that there might be still kicking about do so very discreetly.

Now, the expat community has suffered another loss — Zahrah Nasir, an old friend, has left. She had been here for 27 years, was married and widowed here, and earned her living like me as a writer in the English-language press. She lived in a gloriously eccentric house perched on the side of the mountain below the Pearl Continental hotel in Bhurban. She was usually cut off by snow for at least two months of the year and after the death of her husband, devoted herself to her garden — which formed the basis of many of her columns over the years.

Things went pear-shaped for Zahrah after she ran afoul of some people you do not want to run afoul of in Afghanistan; there were credible death threats and it became clear that she was being hunted here in Pakistan. She lived incognito for months, only surfacing to deal with the practicalities of selling her house and arrived back in UK last week, safe and sound, from where she holds court on her Facebook page. No doubt she will chronicle the episode in detail herself and it is not my purpose to do so here.

Why bother to write about a Brit journo who writes gardening columns? Because her exit is symbolic of what Pakistan has become. Hers may be an extreme case, possibly unique even, but this is a place increasingly unsafe for foreigners.

Even though I have lived here for over 20 years and consider this my home, it is a house with hidden dark corners, a house with doors through which I never go, a house riddled with traps and pitfalls. It is a house that is getting smaller as well. There are no more trips to see friends and colleagues in Peshawar as the risk of getting kidnapped or killed — or both — has become unacceptably high.

Karachi is the same, where I once strolled around Saddar and went to the slightly seedy cinemas in the evening — the streets are no longer safe. Balochistan — fergeddit.

Northern Areas (I still have trouble getting my head around ‘Gilgit-Baltistan’) will feel my boots again later this summer, but even there, blood stains the campsites of foreign expeditions and most of the hotels that flourished in the 1980s and early ’90s are now echoingly empty, scratching a living.

Gradually this land is emptying itself of ‘the other’ — that which is different in some way, that which represents another perspective, a viewpoint that is at variance with the majority. Voices that are raised against injustice soften, drop to a whisper and then are silent — only to be heard again but from a place beyond these borders.

The greying of Pakistan is a slow process, the growth of a monoculture carefully nurtured by powerfully malign hands taking years to envelope all.

Thus, it is that I bid a fond adieu to Zahrah Nasir — eccentric to a fault, kind and generous, uber-gardener, savant and peacenik. She also writes rather well, too. Pakistan will miss you, a bright dot in a louring landscape. Right — next job... get the security cameras serviced.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 22^nd, 2014.

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