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The area around Multan’s New Delhi Gate is an old one; inhabited long before Pakistan was a country and love for it a prerogative.
The houses in the area are small and the opportunities are smaller still. In the little hovels, families eke out their livings and hope for a windfall. When their own dreams do not provide routes to the better jobs, to easier lives and the prettier wives, they look to holy men, and their mix of faith and magic.
Such was the case of the very ordinary and very wanting Qureshi family. Their home was tiny, a dark and old two rooms in a sad building in a decaying neighborhood. The smells of the past lingered in them, the shreds of abandoned hopes and stalled desires. The old couple, 68-year-old Alam Qureshi and his wife had three children. Two were daughters, their gender stitched to the price tag of the dowries to be paid. The youngest of them was a son, Zeeshan Alam Qureshi on whose coming earnings the future of the family dangled.
It would have been an ordinary life, strung with the unremarkable disappointments of the usual kind. The opportunities that never came, the jealousies of neighbors, the car someone bought, the job another got.
So it would have been, if the Qureshi family had not chosen to consult who they believed was a higher authority; an aalim or religious scholar; a man who claimed to possess knowledge of other dimensions and of inexplicable truths, inaccessible to their own lowly selves.
This was not in itself an act of marked difference, the childless mothers and jobless husbands of the neighborhood near Delhi Gate were all used to such consultations, cheap routes to hopefulness when optimism was running low, frustrations boiling over and strictures and constrictions remaining as strong and unyielding as ever.
It is said that the mother went first. But while the details are murky, the consequences are not. One year ago this April, the Holy Man, goaded by whichever meager offerings the family of Qureshis living near Delhi Gate could offer him, arrived at their doorstep. His visit and the message he brought with him would change the family’s life forever.
In this, the late aftermath, it is difficult to imagine how he broke the news, or told the secret, far easier to picture the little family with nothing much, huddled together in the moments after he left.
“Our lives have changed forever,” they may have whispered to each other in the dimness of their two rooms, the old woman and the man, the two daughters and the son. A treasure was buried under the house, the holy man had told them, and their small habitation had under it something special and extraordinary. A Sikh family had lived in the same rooms, the Holy man said, and they had buried their riches in its depths before fleeing the pogroms of Partition.
If there were doubts, if there were digressions, if one of them was skeptical, if another of them was doubting, that is not known now. What we know is what they did. About a year ago last week, they, or rather him, the one son, Zeeshan Alam Qureshi began digging. In the small house thus, began the even smaller tunnel, the barely two feet wide hole that would lead them to the treasure.
Maybe they were eager when they first broke the ground and saw the earth below. Perhaps they could already see in the dark turned shovelfuls of dirt, the bags of gold, the luster of left behind necklaces and bangles peeping through the earth to which they were entrusted 60 long years before. The girls may have giggled, everyone would have hoped.
They seemed to have had enough hope to go on for a year. One long year, despite the protests of neighbors who asked questions, heard in the no secrets nearness of poverty, the sounds of the shovel pounding the earth, saw in the dusty earth stained clothes of Zeeshan Qureshi a dangerous deal. It didn’t stop Zeeshan, goaded perhaps by his own optimism, or his mother’s urgings or his sisters’ hopes, he kept digging.
On April 13th 2014, the day the rest of the world would learn about the family near Multan’s Delhi Gate, the tunnel was deep, nearly 50 feet deep. It made sense, who would bury a treasure in a small tunnel, one easily accessed. The harder the quest to obtain a treasure, the more magnificent the trove would be.
It was on 6 pm of that day, when dusk dangled over the houses of Delhi Gate that Zeeshan’s mother called rescue workers. They had, over the year devised a system to keep in touch when the young boy slithered into the tiny tunnel, deeper and deeper into the ground. He had his cell phone and she could send him texts. She would know immediately when the treasure was found, he could signal for help if he needed it. Neither would happen.
When Mrs. Qureshi called 1122 for help she had not heard from her son for many hours. The earth that had promised a treasure had taken her son. An adjoining wall that had been next to the tunnel had also collapsed with three other people caught beneath it. The cost of one family’s greed exacting costs from unrelated others.
The rescue workers who came and shone their flashlights into the dark tunnel could not believe what they saw, an underground vein stuck so deep into the earth, so very narrow, so very dangerous. They refused to go into the tunnel; it was not safe they said. So delicate was the tunnel, so small the house, so winding the lanes that led to it that no other rescue equipment could be brought to extricate Zeeshan from the depths within which he lay.
He would not be found alive. The tunnel and the earth had caved and trapped him within it. It would take another day to extricate his corpse.
Greed and dreams entrap all of us. In the ordinary mixture of our lives, we crave the unexpected windfall, the undeserved break, and the turn that will come of its own accord and embrace us with its good fortune.
So strong is our thirst for it, so deep its attraction that it can suspend logic, the certainty of treasures we already possess, justify the farce of betting all on nothing. The beauty of the unknown life, the wished for world, fills our days in ways the real world never can. Such perhaps was the case of the Qureshi family, beckoned by the thoughts of something they did not deserve, the idea of being lucky, of being better, of being chosen by fate for something they did not earn.
Such also is the fate of Pakistan, poised on possibility, on awaiting chance, the lure of a perfect world for which everyone seems to be digging in the darkness.
In the collective disbelief of the family, lies the collective denial of a nation, believing still that the paths of ignorance, of denial, will yield for them a treasure that no one else has found. If the stupidity of the family, their greed and gullibility seems unbelievable, the devolution of Pakistan, its deliberate and intentional sinking into a world of bans and barbarity seems to others a similar descent into a tunnel, where treasure is a lie and where death is a certainty.
Probably, no one could convince the Qureshis to stop digging and in this way, the country and the family are united, one and the same, and unsusceptible to reason.