From Pashas To Pokemon: Story Of Love & Compromised Values Across Generations

Narrated with a distinct humour and a throbbing heart, rooted in Urdu sensibility, 'From Pashas To Pokemon' is the story of a family caught in the shift to the new millennium, a touching story of love and compromised values, of West and East, of childhood and adulthood. This journey has people at its core, hence a string of relationships echoes through the narrative.

From Pashas To Pokemon: An Excerpt

Mister Pande rolled down his window and spat out the tobacco he was chewing. A portion of the red mixture plopped on the pane. He wiped it off with his index finger as if it were routine. I tried to change the gears of the Maruti car but they had become extremely hard. I complained to Mister Pande because driving a car as dilapidated as the model they offered me at My Motor Skool was a laborious task for a beginner like me. He heard my whining and smiled back with his usual insolence. ‘Is that what they taught you in London? To give up this easily?’ He smirked at me as I mewled. I plugged away to the second gear and back again to the first as the bottleneck traffic made it extremely difficult for me to navigate through Dongri. We knew it would take us another ten minutes, at the bare minimum, to encounter an empty stretch.

We lingered in the car, until the traffic policeman came by with a whistle around his neck and personally took charge of directing the traffic. I wasn’t good at beginning conversations and patiently waited for Mister Pande to ask me something, anything. I urgently needed some metaphysical oratory disseminating through my system to deal with the situation at home. I knew Mister Pande’s unwavering commitment to dodgy abstractions wouldn’t fail to distract me. That was precisely the reason I rang him that day for an out-of-turn driving lesson. He enunciated his thoughts soon enough and I felt a peculiar consolation, the kind no one else could offer me at home.

‘So, Miss Aisha,’ Mister Pande pulled out the pen embedded in the cashmere cloth from the nape of his neck. ‘Tell me, what did they teach you in London?’ It was November but it was still Mumbai, and I didn’t understand why Mister Pande wore cashmere. It looked smart and added a cultured touch to the man, but I didn’t see the point of it when I saw the beads of sweat trickling down his neck. I decided to ignore it and looked towards him, gazing into his deep-set eyes. ‘I told you, Mister Pande I had gone there to graduate in journalism and had to return due to a visa problem that came up mid-way.’

‘You don’t get it,’ Mister Pande scoffed, ‘I meant to ask you what you learnt, not what you had gone to study. See, I came to Mumbai to become a superstar, but what I learned is how to drive a small car like this on your majestically-wide roads. You know, in my Bihar, I would only drive a truck. It wouldn’t matter if Bunnu came by with a hip jeep and bribed me to drive him down to the mall. My decision was as strong as an ox.’ The egotistical game between truck drivers and taxi drivers was a matter of much debate on Mohammad Ali Road. The lanes in our colony are narrow and do not carry the charm of Marine Drive’s wide roads filled with BMWs and Mercedes cars. Our lanes mainly see Esteems, Suzuki cars, Honda motorbikes and Hero bicycles.

The only Harley Davidson around was the one Yusuf rode with his friend Rashid Khan. Hence, truck drivers and taxi drivers have ample time and opportunity to direct attention towards themselves. The drivers often enter into arguments beginning with taunts about whose was bigger and ending on the note that size didn’t matter as much as driving talent did. I always wondered if they were remotely aware of the parallelism they created as they felt their manhood was being threatened. No sooner had they run out of ideas to insult one another, than they’d jump out of their vehicles and assault one another.

As the sun shifted to an overhead position and the heat became unbearable, the two drivers would make up and offer each other warm tea, proclaiming that their real enemies were the drivers employed by the rich maaliks because they flaunted their power by flashing around their sleekly-designed cars on Marine Drive. This was usually how the matter would reach a settlement. Like a drainpipe clogged with clay and silt, my ideas about truck drivers were stuck and didn’t see any change of judgment. Somehow, instead of breaking my mental stereotype, Mister Pande reinforced it by saying he was, strictly speaking, a truck driver only.

I heard Mister Pande’s attempt to intellectualize his observation about my London experience and belittle me. I decided to bounce back with something meaningful, which would topple over his illiterate brain and make him feel inadequate. ‘Yes! So in an attempt to answer you correctly, what I learned is how time and space exist in a continuum. In a way, if you break it you can live in the past at the same time as you live in the future. As you see, if my watch says 4:30 pm,’ I said, glancing over to my wrist watch, ‘it doesn’t necessarily mean that. Time can be whatever you desire it to be.’ I felt proud of my bright and witty comeback statement.

Unfortunately, Mister Pande’s self-confidence was like a dilating pupil that awoke with surety each time it was challenged and escorted into a dark neighbourhood. His distant simper turned into hysterical tittering as he showcased his giant set of brown teeth. ‘Aisha ji, this is exactly why women are awful drivers. You see, when the signal flashes green, you have to go, no daydreaming. If you go back and forth in time, you will have to face a score of dead bodies huddled together forming a tall mountain.’ Mister Pande pointed at the signal that had probably turned green a whole minute ago. I could hear the cars honking right behind me, waiting for me to get out of their way. I restarted the engine of the stalled car, and glared at the traffic cop who seemed overwhelmed by the number of cars and continued to blow his whistle interminably.

Mister Pande continued with his scrutinisation of women drivers. He peered at me taking a U-turn. ‘Is that all your fancy London education taught you? In that case, I’d say my education in Bihar is more valuable.’ He joked, though with a ray of discontent. I knew he was a man of words and dreams too, because he was a more refined storyteller than I could ever be. Both our eyes twinkled in that moment for completely different reasons. For Mister Pande, it was his assessment of Western education, and for me it was the confidence which spelt out that somewhere I was blessed with good karma to be sitting in the learner’s seat and not the driver’s seat. 

Once again, the road cleared out and I made headway in our little yellow vehicle. I fixed my gaze on a very familiar sight. Persian carpets adorned the street corners on my left-hand side and men were selling lubaans right ahead of the carpets on display. I could smell various odours, like projectiles discharged at the same time —— the scent of fried pakodas, lubaans, rosewater, and a queer fishy smell which must have emanated from the nearby fish market. We had reached the street corner in Dongri where Bilkish Khala lived with Zafar Khalu. It had been two years since Ammi and Bilkish Khala had ceased communication owing to their differing notions of Islam. It had begun with the phonetic interpretation of my name, but had ballooned to engulf the most gigantic ideas about life and behaviour. Apparently, they didn’t share common ground any longer. I tried several times to ask Ammi to recount the incidents that had led to this rift, but Ammi no longer shared the same enthusiasm for family gossip that she did years ago. Naturally this affected our familialties, as Arshad and Javed rarely got in touch with Yusuf and me. The only messages we exchanged now were ‘Happy Birthdays’ and ‘Eid Mubaraks.’

Excerpted from Pashas to Pokemon, written by Maaria Sayed; published by Vishwakarma Publication.