February 08, 2008
Dropping Names or Money
As much as things change in Pakistan some things never do. Like bribes and influence oiling the daily workings of life. And then we grow beards that flail in the wind and embody ourselves in the hijab-niqab-jilbab trio, a kind of chest thumping as it were of our faith and righteousness.
A cousin’s peon usually collects my deceased father’s pension for my mother. This year we unwittingly decided to collect it as one just might do a business transaction here in a US bank. At the National Bank branch in Kehkashan Clifton we were directed to a lady who was attending to three customers at one time. Now I do marvel at the talent of the Afghani cloth merchant in Aashiana who is anxious to not lose a single customer and so deftly deals with three at a time. But at a bank?
People in Pakistan also have no issue whatsoever in interrupting your conversation and without a single “excuse me” butt right in and get their stuff done. And you are left standing there, open mouthed and last on the list.
It is sad commentary that the followers of a religion which specifically teaches manners and etiquette are so incredibly rude and inconsiderate.
“What do you mean you are coming after three years to get his pension?” she demanded as though my mother might well have killed her neighbor. Weakly my mother tried to tell her of her heart disease, for which she had, of course, no patience and shooed us off to the bank manager.
In his sort-of-private office the soft-spoken bank manager said that we would have to go to the Treasury Office. The lady would give us directions. We shuttled out to the lady, and her monstrously untidy desk, and she flipped open her cell phone and called Nasir Sahib in the Treasury Office, supposedly for directions. As soon as he answered, her face warmed and the familiarity flowed. Initially there were personal abbreviated exchanges and then a sudden rise in volume and an explanation of our case and that she was sending us for his signed statement that it was OK to give the pension and pray where was his office. “It is behind the City Court in the Lighthouse area,” she told us. I asked for a street address, at least a street name, and she told me to tell my driver the two magic words of City Court and Lighthouse and he would get us there.
Our driver was an intelligent man but needed to stop twice to be able to get us there. I have seen ramshackle offices but this one will remain etched in my mind for, by rights, it should be condemned property. In the hallway was a hill of broken chairs, from floor to ceiling that had been there so long that they had coalesced into one another.
I asked for Nasir Sahib and found a middle aged, very dark-skinned man in a starched white shalwar kameez, and very obtrusive rings on the fingers of both hands, paan seeping through the crevices of his lips while he hung around in the verandah. He escorted us into an office, which did not have chairs for visitors and when they were produced, the plastic sagged and the wood frame dug into my thighs threatening to give me a blood clot in my legs. The only light was the sun peeking into the thickly dust-layered rim of windows at the top of the room.
Nasir Sahib went around and sat across the ready-to-break desk. “Your case will have to go to the Accountant General Sind’s office and then it will come back to us, and that will take three weeks”. Noting our shock, he said, “Did not Sajida tell you?” When we professed ignorance he excused himself and disappeared for 20 minutes. Unable to wait any longer, I left the office and found him in his favorite spot, loitering on the verandah, chatting on the mobile.
“It can’t be done, it is not in my power” he told me, only willing to give the address of the local Accountant General’s office. Looking at us he had figured that the bucks would be many, and he was only giving us enough opportunity to realize and pay up.
His hangout, the verandah was lined with a multitude of widows, their desolate faces half-covered in chadars, who made that trip daily and greased whichever palm to what extent they could to get what was only their right. Amazingly he remained unmoved that I was a journalist, that I promised I would write about this, that I was related to some government officers as well. The despondent women suddenly were all ears. “Nasir Sahib, I will get my stuff done, but how do you live with yourself, taking advantage of all these poor, voiceless women?” I may as well have been talking to the hill of chairs. Nasir Sahib had heard this before, not just from people but from his conscience. But rationalization and “economic necessity” can silence any qualms.
The new national pastime is to treat people like ping-pong balls. On a quick different note, a cousin took me around in Islamabad and tried for us to visit Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, whose house is decorated with rolls upon rolls of barbed wire. She tried to persuade the soldiers that I had come all the way from the US so I should be given access and they said that I should be taken to the other gate. You know what would have happened at that other gate. They would have sent us to this gate.
I can’t find an English equivalent of the world taalna, but it certainly has become a Pakistani perfection. Refusing to be a ping-pong ball in the be-ringed hands of Nasir Sahib I returned to the National Bank branch in Kehkashan and told Ms. Sajida our adventure. Disbelievingly she dialed her mobile but Nasir Sahib did not answer. Even more disbelievingly she stared at the phone as if to berate Nasir Sahib for not telling her any of the stuff he had told us, and then she again ping-pong-balled us to the manager’s office.
And then I snapped inside.
In a pressured unstoppable litany I let him know that I wrote for a couple of papers and as God was my witness I would write about all this and how, most obviously, Nasir Sahib wanted money and when he did not get a penny, he decided to make it even more difficult, and that I knew some very well placed government officers. And then I dropped the bomb: that my cousin was married to the president and CEO of National Bank. Very quickly all the impossibilities seemed removed. He told Sajida that we had been “stressed” by the trip to the Lighthouse area unnecessarily and that the bank should agree to the pension payout. He even apologized for the fact that it would take about a week before the money showed up in the account!
My mother has her husband’s pension. While I was unwilling to slip a few notes to Nasir Sahib to get it, I still dropped a few names to the bank manager. Using influence may not be religiously illegal, but it is representative of the collapse of our system. Bribes are rooted in economic hardships, and influence is the virtual dagger that would dig deep if the bank manager had not done what he should have in the first place.
Those scared eyes with chadors held by their teeth haunt me. The burden that I got my mother her pension and no one’s there to get them theirs breaks my heart. And scavengers like Nasir Sahib roam free, parasitizing desperately poor widows all the while.
(Mahjabeen Islam is a physician and freelance columnist residing in Toledo Ohio. Her email address is mahjabeenislam@hotmail.com)
