Haris, an old college buddy of mine back in the mid-1980s, came from a highly conservative middle-class family in Pakistan’s chaotic, colossal metropolis, Karachi.
Yet, he was an impassioned member of the left-wing student outfit that we were both once an integral part of. However, I was never really quite sure about the nature of his ideological disposition.
For example, though Haris would usually agree with our student outfit’s views on matters such as democracy and supported the organisation’s opposition to the reactionary dictatorship that was in power in Pakistan at the time; yet, he would refuse to participate in the many demonstrations that we held on the campus against those who were aiding Afghan, Arab and Pakistani militants fighting against the Soviet-backed communist regime in Kabul.
Though, today, I can effortlessly call the entry of Soviet troops in Afghanistan as an all-out invasion, back then, in a world still in the grip of the Cold War, I would passionately try to prove that the invasion was part of some glorious socialist revolution unfolding in Kabul.
All of us who were on the left sides of Cold War politics described the other side as being nothing more than a bunch of counter-revolutionaries. But none of us were able to fully gauge the true nature of the fall-out of the Afghan Civil War, especially in Pakistan.
Benazir Bhutto, during her first term as PM (1988-90), was the one who first began to exhibit concerns about how the winding down of the Afghan Civil War would witness the wholesale return of fighters who had been radicalised while fighting the Soviets. But personally, I became a lot more conscious about this predicament by what I was once told by a cousin of Haris.
In December 1990, I began my career as a journalist and hadn’t been in contact with Haris after both of us graduated from college in late 1987. Bumping into his cousin at the Karachi Press Club in early 1991, I only casually inquired about Haris.
He told me that right after graduation, Haris had travelled to Afghanistan. I instinctively asked whether he had gone there to side with the Soviet-backed regime — just as dozens of young men from leftist student groups in Pakistan had done across the 1980s.
I was baffled when I was told that Haris had actually jumped on the other bandwagon: The one that hundreds of young Pakistanis had jumped on to ride into Afghanistan to join the anti-Soviet mujahideen. I was told that Haris had fought alongside the mujahideen for almost a year and only returned to Pakistan in late 1989 when he got injured.
I finally met Haris in 1994. At the time he was rearing to go and fight in Indian-held Kashmir. I asked him what had made him turn right from left, and he told me that he had joined the leftist student outfit at college only to bother his conservative father with whom he was not on very good terms.
So, after college, instead of trying to bother him, Haris decided to impress his father. Not by joining a government institution or a private firm (as his father had wanted him to); or by growing a beard (which he eventually did in Afghanistan); but by actively declaring his enmity against those his father detested the most: The surkhas (communists). By travelling to Afghanistan, he wanted to put this into action.
So, was the father impressed? Far from it. He was mortified. All he wanted was a ‘pious’ son with a stable professional career.
Well, by going to Afghanistan, Haris had ended up bothering his father again. And he wasn’t able to go to Kashmir because his parents just refused to let him go. I had jokingly suggested to him that he'd become a leftist again because maybe this time his dad would be more appreciative.
But Haris did not react jovially to the joke. With a stony expression, he responded by saying: “But there is no Soviet Union anymore. We defeated it.” And when I inquired that whether by ‘we’ did he also mean the United States, he remained stone-faced.
Haris never went to India-held Kashmir. Instead (as I found out in 1999), he travelled to Madrid and then ended up settling in Seattle in the United States.
Two of his paternal uncles had settled in Seattle in the early 1990s, and by the early 2000s, Haris was living with one of them and working (as a partner) at three grocery stores that they owned in the city. He called me in May 2004 and told me he was visiting his family in Karachi. We met in my office for lunch. He had gotten married and had two young kids. He had come to my office with the aforementioned cousin.
As I was jokingly teasing him about his flip-flopping ways, his cousin suddenly jumped in and sarcastically mentioned something about how Haris had now been busy trying to make Pakistanis living in the US, 'better Muslims'.
Haris had by then joined an apolitical Muslim evangelical group. So I asked him what he was doing living in a western country. His reply: “They (the Westerners) are very tolerant and understanding people. They let you live according to your culture.”
His cousin again jumped in: “Great. Why don’t you now invite a group of American Jews and Christians to Pakistan? Let’s show them how tolerant we are as well.”
Haris was not amused.
Haris’ cousin was totally apolitical in college. I never knew him as much I did Haris, but he told me that he was very close to Haris’ father whom he had blamed when Haris had run off to Afghanistan.
Haris returned to Seattle. I didn’t hear from him again. Ten years later in 2014, when on Facebook I shared a picture of mine taken in Dubai, I got an SMS from a number that I did not recognise. It was Haris’ cousin. He said that if I was still in Dubai, I should go meet Haris who now lived and worked in Kuwait and was visiting Dubai the same time I was.
I asked the cousin what Haris was doing in Kuwait.
“He runs a business there. He moved from the US two years ago,” the cousin texted.
I asked him why. And this is what he texted back (with a smiley): “He thinks they (the Westerners) are very intolerant and biased people.”
“But didn’t he say they were very tolerant?” I asked.
“Yes” the cousin texted back. “But Haris isn’t.”