By MOHSIN HAMID
FEB. 18, 2015
A soldier standing guard at the school where gunmen from the Pakistani Taliban opened fire, killing 150 people, including 134 schoolchildren. Credit B. K. Bangash/Associated Press
In Lahore, Pakistan, the city where I was born and where I once again live after two decades abroad, my experience of picking up my children from school has recently changed. As of this term, I can no longer enter my daughter’s kindergarten. I must show an ID card with her photograph at the fortified gate, a rectangular aperture in a high wall, and she is then brought out to me, emerging like a blue-clad fairy from some strange castle.
My son is younger, not yet 3, and he goes to a play group in an old converted house. But its boundary walls, too, have just been raised. Guards frisk me when I approach, and as I walk down the driveway, with toddlers awaiting their mothers and fathers staring up at me from below, I am also watched from on high by someone new: a sniper in uniform. I know I am meant to feel reassured. But I don’t.
The most proximate cause for these changes was the massacre by the Pakistani Taliban of 150 people, including 134 children, at a school in Peshawar in December. Its targeting of the young, and its shocking bloodthirstiness, created a widespread sense of horror. The provincial government of Punjab, of which Lahore is the capital, shut schools and universities early for the winter holidays and forbade them to reopen until enhanced security protocols were put in place. The price of razor wire is rumored to have quadrupled; a friend who works in education tells me that hand-held metal detectors have sold out.
I don’t recall encountering armed guards very often when I was a child. They were a rarity in this city. They became more common as law and order deteriorated in the 1990s — a result of rampant inequality, corrupt governance, misguided state support of extremist groups and the chaos in neighboring Afghanistan — and commoner still as terrorist attacks multiplied in the 2000s. After the truck bombing of the Islamabad Marriott in 2008 that killed 53 people, expensive hotels here became fortresses. I first noticed private schools beginning to secure themselves around that year. Now all schools must do so, and the sight of the new precautions — the tops of swing sets and jungle gyms disappearing behind curtains of brick — still has the power to shock. Perhaps only briefly, though: With time, you become used to even previously unimaginable things.
Around the world, we are witnessing the construction of eerie thickets of concrete and barbed wire, the planting of traps meant to snag those we fear. I lived in the United States for six years of my childhood, seven years for college and graduate school and four working in business. America is the country where I first learned to write, first fell in love, first rented an apartment, first had a job, first published a novel. For 17 years, I entered and exited the country with ease and traveled within it without impediment. But I left the United States in the inaugural summer of our new millennium. When I return now, I am sent to wait for an hour or longer at the secondary inspection facility deep in the windowless belly of every large American airport. My boarding passes emerge from automated American kiosks with a row of the letter “S” running across them. The letters, certainly, are not scarlet or enclosed within Stars of David or (yet) set off by a meaningful Islamic crescent, but they are all the more alarming for their bureaucratic opacity. I was once pulled off a domestic flight in the United States because, as the apologetic security supervisor explained, a trainee on duty had neglected to give me the enhanced security screening to which I was entitled.
I remember, a few years ago, carrying a copy of Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast” around Paris, sitting at a cafe that painstakingly tried to preserve the appearance of his era, hearing my wife comment upon a troop of fetchingly attired paramilitary police and then noticing what these troopers were themselves observing — a jaunty group of boys who seemed to be of North African descent, teenagers formerly boisterous, who had now fallen silent, knowing, perhaps, that there might be harsh penalties for expressing themselves freely. (Hemingway, too, had been young and brash here, his ancestry also foreign. His feast, it seemed, had moved.)
Ours is an anxious, frightened era, barricaded, observed. Sentries and informers are everywhere. I watch on television militarized police forces in Ferguson, Mo.; in Oakland, Calif.; in the West Bank. I have visited favelas in Rio de Janeiro that are called pacified, a term evoking war, and seen the insignia of the government’s paramilitary reoccupying forces prominently on display. I have spoken to South Africans about their home-defense protocols, the concentric and overlapping layers of countermeasures that they employ against intruders. I have zoomed through traffic lights in Karachi, told that here, at night, at this crossing, you must never stop, never. In the distance: a bulletproof S.U.V. with a pickup truck as its escort, bodyguards with Kalashnikovs bouncing along, as they do across this region, in the open air, under the stars.
The people most often held at bay by our new boundaries, in almost every society, are the poor, the darker-skinned. And yet wealthy citizens and wealthy countries grow ever more fearful. Each wall scares into being another. Behind our walls, those of us who have access to broadband Internet roam relatively freely. Still, even online there are barriers. I cannot directly access YouTube from Pakistan, but proxies and onion-routing browsers let me in circuitously. China has its Great Firewall, smaller countries have their smaller variants and all have state-backed obscurantist hackers.
For the most part, though, it seems that cyberspace gravitates to surveillance over denial. The virtual globe is more porous, and it is also more closely watched. Spy agencies suck up every bit of our data, logging on their giant servers where in the digital world we have been, what we have done there, with whom. And when spy agencies are not watching, companies are. With each upgrade of the operating system of my computer or my cellphone, my devices default to sending more and more information about me to their makers. Unless I take evasive action, even my searches for files on my local drives are passed on, presumably to be logged and referenced and captured, without warning.
We do not live in a global culture that is shaped by freedom’s triumph over tyranny. Rather, we live in a global culture where the two have merged. If we are to speak freely, every word must be monitored. If we are to roam freely, every entrance must be locked.
And yet, within our walls, like fertile soil forming in the crevices of a rock, we find flux and fluidity. The United States will one day soon have a nonwhite majority. Some European cities, like Rotterdam, are nearing a similar shift. We are drawn, despite ourselves, to otherness. In the centuries of colonialism, northerners once spread to the global south. In the decades since colonialism, southerners have spread to the global north. And northerners are mixing, too, with other northerners who are strangers to them, southerners with southern strangers. There is planetwide, gyrating churn. Dubai, a city on the Arabian Peninsula, is peopled mostly by Indians and Pakistanis.
It seems odd to speak of the magic of mogrelized society and then to praise Lahore as a place where one might discover oneself to be gay....
Stan 17 hours ago
How sad that this American-college-educated Pakistani, while posing as a reasonable and peaceloving person, needs to resort to an...
SS 17 hours ago
Mohsin Hamid is a great writer. He describes the effects that immerse him in lovely prose, but fails to address the self-afflicted cause...
Lahore is a place that embodies the magnetism of difference: It is the site of remarkable mixing despite sniper-guarded schools and high demand for razor wire. Many people leave Lahore, but even more, they come. Since the year of my birth, 1971, the city has more than tripled in population. Today it has nine million inhabitants. Some of these are the children and grandchildren of Lahoris. Most are not. My wife and I are both Lahore-born, but even the most cursory look into the past is enough to reveal our migrant roots. My mother’s family comes from the south of the province, near the deserts of Rajasthan. My father’s comes from the valleys of Kashmir and a part of Punjab that is now in India. My wife’s maternal grandmother came from Italy, from the hills of Piedmont, to be precise. My wife’s father’s family are Kakezai, people who journeyed centuries ago from Afghanistan and settled in Punjab.
Like all great cities, Lahore is a lake into which rivers of humanity flow. Barricades erected out of fear have done little to block this: The migration is gathering pace. The Lahore of my childhood ended in croplands not far from my house. Now it stretches unbroken for many miles in every direction. I live in a 60-year-old single-story home built by my grandparents, typical of the bungalows of our once-sleepy neighborhood. But new office towers soar all around it. Houses once inhabited by my playmates, or by pretty girls I glimpsed each day from my bicycle as I pedaled by, are disappearing with wrenching shudders into construction pits, to be replaced, seemingly overnight, by shopping malls.
I see increasing numbers of Pashtun faces in the markets, people displaced from the conflict-ridden northwest of the country and from Afghanistan. I hear village accents in the clinics, people drawn to modern medical care and amenities. I watch newly arrived families, with all their possessions bundled on their heads, crossing dangerously busy intersections in violation of traffic lights, pulled here by the promise of work. I speak to Christians who have come from midsize towns in the hope that they will find less bigotry and intolerance in the big city. Now on each street there is something or someone new: a diner run by a woman from Korea, an Imax movie theater with the beams of its promotional spotlights wheeling in the sky, a tiny kiosk that refurbishes scrap cellphones and sells them for less than the cost of a refill card.
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