Traumas & tragedies of expat Pakistanis

In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Cassius complains, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings”.

The stars have outlived their utility even for the soothsayers, but to be an underling is one of the lethal afflictions that continue to drag human beings to their nemesis. In a crumbling republic, where people are pariahs, one need not be a wizard to know that expatriates are the ones who become the proverbial underlings.

On behalf of the Pakistani diaspora, someone had to take up the Sisyphean task of revealing the complete alienation and unfortunate indifference of Pakistani institutions, especially the police, to our plights.

Being an academic, a physician, a writer, and an Op-Ed columnist for a few English Dailies, I decided to take this Herculean but unproductive task upon my shoulders, since “Those who are homeless”, Theodor Adorno says, “writing becomes their home”.

“Dwelling in the proper sense,” Adorno continues, “is now impossible. It’s part of the morality not to be at home in one’s home”. As an expatriate, a homeless living in a foreign land, is scarcely at home and one has to pay a heavy toll to adjust to the realities of a different world.

It’s like swimming against the tide, fighting the Caliban of penury, racial and cultural alienation and even against the biases interred in one’s unconscious from early childhood. It is a painful odyssey which may or may not end in pleasure but contains a story worth telling.

It is not a story of Helen whose beauty led to the Trojan War nor of the wisdom of Athena who surged into the world by splitting the scalp of Zeus, her father, and the Greek god of the universe. It is a story of the caricatures of Ulysses, whose intense desire to escape the cage and reaching home, make them exiles.

During their voyage, they have to toil against all the daunting odds a human has to face.

Have the rulers ever cared to reflect on why people like us with highly professional education are obliged to leave their country of birth with a chequered history of pleasant and unpleasant memories? The land where their mothers, fathers and loved ones are buried? Have the rulers ever attempted to see in their bosoms the wounds the expats carry as they leave their birthplaces, and those wounds refuse to heal but continue to bleed slowly in pain?

If the rulers think the ordinary people migrate by choice, I am afraid their conjecture is based on utterly misled premise.

Not everyone leaves by choice but because of the savagery of an inhuman system, sheer corruption and total alienation of the state, force them to leave what once was dear to them. Like any other human being, they have their dreams turned into nightmares.

Unlike the privileged class that uses Pakistan as its second home to enjoy perks, privileges, power and pelf, we, the skilled expatriates, are exiled in their homes.

A human exiled in his home seeks a home anywhere in the world; in the end his destiny is to become eternally homeless. We the expatriates yearn for home but have nothing to go back to but the scars of our memories and the graves of our loved ones in disarray.

The rulers may offer the argument that people of their class immigrate too. They have to live like common citizens in those countries where one has to carry one’s bag to market to buy groceries, to clean his house and toilet himself, cook food without the help of an expert fulltime cook and drive a car without a chuffer but let’s be honest, they have divinity the money to invest in those countries, some keep it in Man’s Island and the other in Panama on the other hand we migrate to earn money, our livelihood by cleaning the public toilets, driving the cabs, struggling to gather pennies to live and if possible to pay for our universities fee.

Quite a few end up sending the money back to their parents, who, believing in the mercy of God or for more productive hands to earn living, end up procreating surplus children.

I remember someone, a genius in Pakistan with a most prestigious name in physics in the world had to start his career as a cleaner in a mall.

Have you ever gone through this misery in your lifetime? Work in the West is no shame, this is what they tell us, but they don’t do it themselves. It’s a rational way to take possession of our cheap labour and the surplus value we create and make us do what the white man shuns. However, those at the apex of the power keep aligning themselves with the productive element (the dirty brown workers) and remain the parasite of old.

The modern rulers, Adorno says, simply take off the bright garb of the nobility and don civilian clothing.

Isn’t it true about the privileged classes of Pakistan? They walk on the western streets as commoners but become unapproachable to a common man, the bloody voter, in their country where they rule.

The commoner with limited resources is left to vote for a delusional change. By now the majority is fully aware that the elections of masters don’t change master slave relations but consolidate them.

If some of us, the expatriate, the stateless outcasts leave some property behind, or lease it to someone it’s sure to be ransacked, damaged and destroyed beyond owners’ recognition, if not confiscated. It becomes proverbial Gaza with only walls intact.

Has Pakistan become a Dante’s purgatory where everyone who enters must abandon his hope?

However, the crumbling of the institutions is obvious. Why else one has to run amok between a pillar and the post instead of heading to the civilian guards— the police that police the interests of a handful of plunderers, owning the entire wealth and wielding the power of the country?

Even when one of us dares to proceed through the Pakistani High Commission in the West, which to one’s amazement pretends to be cooperative, the High Commissioner’s letter to the authorities, especially to the police hierarchy, falls on the deaf ear.

This repressive department has gone so indifferent to the miseries of the people that its existence has become meaningless. Its erasure will probably improve the law-and-order situation.

The temptation of taking a judicial path does not exist for the expats, especially for the withering souls. The course needs time and energy; both are scarcely available to the expats.

The process is painfully long, cumbersome, expansive, and in the end proves mostly futile. Romans knew how justice is trivialized that’s why they kept Justitia; the goddess of justice blindfolded.

We the expatriates have no sympathy for the jugglers twisting the facts hence, in the Pakistani context, we are apolitical.

Despite being the biggest contributors to the Pakistani economy, a country that has refused us its land and air, leaving us stifled we neither seek favours, e.g., a plot, a material benefit, nor vie for an official position.

However, seeking justice is a human right, and this is the only thing we expect to receive from any incumbent government in Pakistan. Is it too much to ask for? Keeping the Pakistani and international situation in mind, the answer can be ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

Pakistan in the clutches of international capitalism (IMF) and corrupt local bourgeoisie is heading to insolvency, if it has already not crossed that milestone.

The anarchy in the country, the chaos and complete failure of institutions are merely the tips of the iceberg. Under the given dismal conditions, no one is likely to listen to our voices in this cacophony, yet we have decided to give it a shot, not in arms but in ears.

Let us conclude with a famous Shakespearean quote, “Uneasy lies the head which wears the crown”.

The head wearing a crown is supposed to provide justice to the underlings and the “guilty innocents” who for Terry Eagleton “take on the burden of other’s deeds precisely because they are blameless”.

If after wearing the crown, a head is too uneasy, it must relieve itself from such an arduous task lest the people decide to snatch it by force. History never forgives, it did not falter in case of Lous XVI in France nor it failed to obliterate the Bonapart. Zia and Musharraf are the examples close to home.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024