Illustration by Abro

A few months ago, I reconnected with a friend of mine who I hadn’t met for over 30 years. He somehow got my cell phone number and invited me to his son’s wedding.

Even though I could not go to the wedding, another call by him got us talking about the past.

I had first met him in the small town of Moro in the Naushero Feroze district of Sindh in 1986. I was studying at a college in Karachi at the time and had accompanied a posse of young anti-Zia activists travelling onward to Nawabshah to organise a rally for Benazir Bhutto, who had returned from exile, to challenge Gen Zia’s dictatorship. Benazir had managed to hold a large rally in Lahore and then in Karachi’s Lyari area, before she was arrested and put under house arrest. I was in Moro when she was taken in. We were staying in the backyard of an old shrine of a Sufi saint, where we often met by a group of men who belonged to a small Maoist party, the Awami Tehreek (AT).

AT had played a prominent role in the PPP-led movement against Gen Zia in 1983. The movement had thrown much of Sindh in turmoil. Even though the movement was brutally crushed, AT was preparing to participate in yet another movement called by the multiparty alliance, the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD).

How a bunch of leaves left me contemplating about tyranny and insanity

After the rally which we were supposed to help organise was cancelled, we spent much of our time lazing around the courtyard of the shrine, discussing politics.

This is where I met Haroon, a young Sindhi nationalist, who was a couple of years older than me. He had arrived with the AT activists. While exchanging pleasantries with me, he almost immediately noticed that I was perhaps the only non-Sindhi in the group. He said, “You speak Urdu like a Mohajir, but you dance like a Punjabi …”

Taken aback, I asked him what he meant by “I danced like a Punjabi?”

It turned out he had seen me the evening before, participating in the anarchic Sufi folk dance, the dhamaal, at the shrine.

I chuckled and told him I was just having some fun and couldn’t understand how my dance was “Punjabi”. But I did tell him that he was correct about my Urdu accent: “My father is a Punjabi, and my mother is a Mohajir. But I am a true Karachiite …”

Haroon just nodded his head, as if he already knew this. Not that someone had already told him about me, but it seemed he just knew. Instinctively.

He had been in jail in Dadu (a town near Moro) ever since 1984, and had been released (on bail) just a few days before our meeting. He was severely tortured there, and proudly showed us the cuts and wounds he had received on his back, shins and parts of his head during his time in a tiny cell.

As we got talking over tea and cigarettes, I kept asking him what he had meant by “I danced like a Punjabi.” He finally smiled wider than he usually did, and said: “Punjabis do the dhamaal in a particular manner. They are more uninhibited, whereas we Sindhis remain more restrained. But though you were doing the dhamaal in a most free and uninhabited way, you are actually a very reserved person, am I right?”

I had just shrugged my shoulders. He smiled widely again: “But, my Punjabi-Mohajir brother, whenever you go to Multan or Lahore or any city of the Punjab, do notice how their (the Punjabis’) style of dancing is changing. They are now dancing the way Gen Zia wants them to dance.”

I protested, “I was in Lahore when BB (Benazir) arrived from exile. Thousands of Lahoris turned up. Many of them danced exactly the way you saw me dance …”

Haroon was unmoved: “But no other people have experienced the intensity of Zia’s Martial Law the way the Sindhis have.”

Before I could add my bit again, he said the most weird thing. “There is actually a way we can make others feel this intensity …”

From his pocket he took out a small pack. In it were dried leaves: “Do you know what this is?” He asked.

“Of course,” I had replied. “Bhang. I have had it on a couple of occasions,” I added. Bhang is a preparation made from a hallucinogenic plant and is traditionally used in South Asia.

“This is how we make others feel the intensity of Zia’s rule in Sindh,” he explained.

By now I had begun to laugh: “Through bhang?”

“No ordinary bhang,” Haroon had retorted.

Well, that evening our group was treated to Haroon’s bhang. We gladly took it, vigorously mixed with icy water. It took about 50 minutes to kick in, and when it did, my God! All I can say now is that within the next few hours, most of us were convinced we had gone mad.

We would laugh, cry and sulk for no apparent reason, try to hide from the most terrifying hallucinations, and make teary-eyed pleads to Haroon to get us committed to a hospital.

The next morning, after the hallucinatory nightmare was finally over, I told Haroon: “I now understand …”

He just let out a loud laugh and said something in Sindhi, which I was later told had meant: “Tyranny breeds insanity.”

Before the ordeal, when Haroon had told me that this was how they (the Sindhis) made others realise the intensity of Gen Zia’s regime (in Sindh), he wasn’t really making it all up.

The bhang that he had had with him was made from an extraordinary strain of a hallucinogenic plant which had appeared in Sindh in 1981. It was aptly called ‘Martial La’ (Martial Law). It grew in the wild around the forests that surround the towns of Dadu and Moro, or maybe someone had planted it there. It was first introduced into the ‘market’ in 1983 during the peak of the violent MRD movement against Gen Zia.

No one knows who gave it its name (‘Martial La’); but Haroon later told me, it remarkably vanished soon after Gen Zia’s demise in 1988.

Haroon moved to the Middle East in 1991 and I lost contact with him, until late 2015, when I received his call. He worked as a nurse in a hospital in Qatar, and then after completing his MBBS, from a university in Cyprus, he became a physician and settled in Greece. There he married an Iranian lady, had four kids, and was in Pakistan to get one of them married.

I couldn’t go to the wedding (because I was travelling at the time); but I did remind him how he had made me almost lose my mind with ‘Martial La’.

He laughed, “Look at it this way, Paracha. Something good also came from it.”

I asked him what?

“When the next time you do the dhamaal, notice yourself,” he said.

“I haven’t done the dhamaal in ages,”I replied.

“Yes,” he said, “but if you do, you will do it like a Sindhi!” He laughed again.

I laughed too. “Thus spoke a citizen of Greece. What do Greeks know about the dhamaal? Come back to Pakistan, saain.” I taunted him.

Haroon went quiet for a bit. Then in a serious tone, said: “Remember, saain. Tyranny breeds insanity.” This time, he said it in Punjabi.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, May 8th, 2016