Asian Window

In Tehelka, author and columnist Kamila Shamsie on the long and tortured road to being able to vote in Pakistan, finally  

ONE OF my earliest memories dates back to Election Day, 1977, when I was four years old, and my father showed me a mark on his thumb in indelible ink and explained it was there to identify voters and prevent them from returning to vote a second time. A little over thirty years later, I’m typing this and hitting the space bar with a thumb that is — for the first time in my life — similarly marked in indelible ink.

I was too young to vote in 1988 when Pakistan had its first elections since those 1977 elections of my childhood memory (I don’t count the bogus elections that happened under General Zia’s watch.) Too young to vote, but — at 15 — perhaps exactly the right age to fall in love with the idea of voting. Today I remember it as a kind of dream, the exultation in Karachi’s air as those elections drew near. Even though there were plenty of voices, even then, saying the military would still be the real power in the land it did little to temper that exultation. I remember one party at which scores of adolescents were dancing to the election song of the PPP: Jeeay Jeeay Jeeay Bhutto Benazir! rang the chorus; a young Angrez at the party watched, shaking his head in disbelief and said, ‘I’m trying to imagine school kids in London dancing to a ‘Go Maggie’ song.’ The next song was the MQM’s campaign song and everyone danced to that with as much fervour. It wasn’t just on the dance-floors of private parties — everywhere you went in Karachi there were rallies conducted with a frenzied air of joy, and people singing on the street.

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