My schedule was so tightly packed that I was not sure I would be able to make it to Nighat Rizvi’s reading of the Necessary Targets. In view of her recent trip to Mumbai, India where she read the play with Jane Fonda, Eve Ensler and Ayeshah Alam, I did not want to miss it. But with my son’s exam a day later, we had our own targets to meet. My husband came to the rescue, taking on the onerous task of teaching our son Urdu while I took a friend along to investigate Necessary Targets at the Islamabad Club auditorium.
Necessary Targets is based on the stories of the women, Eve Ensler (the author) met in Bosnia. Enraged at the injustices dealt to them and moved to tears by their tenacious struggle to cling on to life, she says that” when we think of war, we think of it as something that happens to men in fields or jungles. We think of the moment of violence – the blast, the explosion. But war is also a consequence - the effects of which are not known or felt for months, years, and generations. And because consequences are usually not televised, consequences remain invisible. As long as there are snippers outside Sarajevo, Sarajevo exists. But after the bombing, after the snippers, that’s when the real war begins.”
The story is of two American women, a Park Avenue Psychiatrist and a Human Rights worker who visit a Bosnian refugee camp, believing that they would be able to heal the women by helping them confront their memories of war.” So what else do you think we have been doing,” says one of them. Life has come to a stand still. Amidst the stench and the dismal want, they are waiting to live again, waiting for something to happen, torn between hope and fear, sustained only by memories of the past. The wills of their men, those who have survived, have been subverted completely because of their sense of impotency in confronting war. As the reading moved on, each relived the horror of her experiences, evoking the question, Is war necessary - does is really solve anything?
Nighat played the role of a beautiful girl, Saeda , who is dazzled by the visiting psychiatrist. She sees her as the harbinger of hope – as one uncorrupted by the war. She carries around a precious burden, in complete denial of the memory of her rape after her young husband had been murdered and she had dropped her new born baby in the panic. However, encouraged by the warmth of those around her, she relieves the horror with such conviction that not a soul listening could have not wept for her. Nighat had tears in her eyes as Parveen Malik (Jelena) defends her husband’s volatile temper in such times or when Bilquis Tahira (Azra) weeps for her cow, Blossom, a reminder of her beautiful rural home. Zainab Omar (Nuna) the young teenager provided pauses of relief in the 90 minutes of intensity but she is not without her share of pain. Her father in being on the other side is their enemy. War has done strange things to all of them. The complexities are too deep for a psychologist to unravel. Emma Hooper ( J.S) begins to question her life in the States. The constant struggle for more and more, she realizes seems to have de-humanized her. Ambreen Mirza ( Zlata) , who had once been as privileged as she was, helps her confront reality and she finds that she has found meaning in her life. However, her assistant, Shahnaz Aftab, (Melissa) having recorded all the gory details for her ambition is ready to move on to the next chapter.
As I sat there, I wondered why Nighat did this. Then I remembered her telling me that they had asked her the same question in India and she had told them that during the course of her work, she had came across so many women who had been scared by violence that she could no longer ignore it. She had decided to lend voice to their silence. The audience and the actors were visibly moved. There had been no formal rehearsals. The emotion had to come out raw and unfeigned: they owed this to the real people whose real stories they were reading. I admit some parts were hard for me to take, some details seemed unnecessary, but in totality, it had a powerful effect.
But this story is not of Bosnia alone. This is happening in Iraq right now. It has happened in Palestine, Afghanistan and Kashmir and still continues to happen. Necessary Targets raged for the human in the collateral damage. It reminded me of the story of the kashmiri woman (recorded by my aunt, Rubina Qazilbash herself), who had fled across the border when they threatened to burn her children if she did not divulge her husband’s whereabouts. She escaped with two. The third was left to the mercy of the soldiers.
It is true that when the sensationalism of war has passed, we all lose interest and move on to the latest headlines. We all are anxious to blame the victims for what has happened so as to assure ourselves that it can never happen to us.
A couple of months ago, I came across a Canadian born Arab woman – commonly categorized as Taliban, from Afghanistan. Except that she did not measure up to the impressions, I had conjured of her. She had come to Islamabad in search of her son and husband who had been victims of raid’s in Wazirabad, but nobody was willing to help. “Is there no one who can stand with me and say that I have a right to defend myself,” She asked ” I have done nothing wrong.” My husband was livid when he got to know that I had given her audience. Well-wishers warned me that I must never do it again for the punishment for any support given to them was jail without bail. I was cautioned but the thought that still niggles me is that it could have happened to me.
Eve Ensler had felt for the cause of the Bosnian Muslim woman, seeking to portray her as one of us. The images from Iraq were leaked out by humane elements on the other side of the barracks, people all over the west are protesting against the inhumane treatment of the prisoners in Cuba but Muslim voices are inaudible.
I met Nighat later that night at the house of mutual friends. She was still visibly distressed. It was here that I also met a Doctor from Karachi. I was horrified to hear that he had been the victim of a kidnapping and lucky to be alive only because the kidnappers had realized their mistake in time. And this was outside war. He told us that young professionals like him, many of whom he knew personally, with young kids and wives had been murdered. Why? Nobody knows.
“It is strange ,”said the doctor, “that there is such indifference that even though everyone knows that the next target could easily be them , there is little collective effort to put up any resistance. Business and life goes on, crime an accepted reality.”
It had turned out to be a long day. I felt utterly drained. I had taken in too many impression, too many thoughts muddled my mind. I needed time to think, to sort it out, for it to make sense. Certainly what happened next made up my mind that I would not stay silent any more. Seemingly insignificant, it was the last straw.
As we were driven home later that night, we saw a car toppled over. The accident had taken place only a few minutes before. When we arrived at the scene there was a young boy lying on the road, howling bitterly, his sobs heart wrenching, while onlookers were figuring out what exactly needed to be done. He seemed to have fractured his leg. I thought he had been a pedestrian who had walked before the car but as it turned out he had been pulled out from the car. Then, I noticed a young family cuddled together on the pavement, the father hugging his wife and children who were suffering from shock. They had been the other passengers in the car. Nobody soothed the boy who was the worst hit of all. His dress made me guess that he was probably the hired help. We watched for a while and then my husband detoured and sped towards home. There was nothing we could do, he said, reasoning with my emotion. Perhaps that was true but the events of that evening triggered a reaction. How often do we say this? Is it really true or just a reassurance?
The truth was that the child needed the warmth of words to reassure him. He needed a human touch. It was what he needed most at that time. We all understood but remained aloof and clinical. Why, I wanted to know? In the Doctor words, it’s a million dollar question.
