2 Minute Worlds

In the ’65 war, weapons for the front were being funneled through Sialkot Junction. The city was holding its breath, steady but tense. On September 11, right at sehri, the Indian planes came. Someone had tipped them off. They dropped their bombs on the railway station.

But the station master was a sly man. He’d quietly sent the train loaded with weapons seven kilometers away to Sialkot Cantt. The bombs missed. Instead, they fell on the bus stand across from the station, tearing it to pieces. A lot of people died there. Among them was my uncle by relation, who had been doing his duty at the chungi right next to the bus stand. That day, Sialkot shook with fear.

My father gathered us up and took us to Wah Cantt, where my uncle lived. One thing led to another, and he ended up taking a job at a factory there. That’s where I saw the ’71 war unfold.

Back then, in school, we had two or three teachers who called each other comrade. I was in fifth or sixth grade and thought comrade meant kafir. My school stood at Laeeq Ali Chowk, where a giant open ground stretched out like an unfinished thought. Every year, the ground turned into a carnival—circuses, a zoo with sick-looking animals, and the Well of Death, where motorbikes whirled like angry flies.

Sometimes, during class, while we pretended to study, the eunuchs would begin their dances inside the Well of Death. Music blared from giant speakers:

Bari Bari Imam Bari

Sarkar Bari

Merī khotī qismat karo harī…

And my teacher, Maulvi Comrade Zaman (may God rest his soul), would sing along, except his version was dirtier, rougher, stretched into long obscene verses we couldn’t repeat without blushing.

Our teachers were full of strange stories. They told us this country was a donkey, and abroad the world had galloped ahead. “In their fields,” they said, “monkeys drive the plows.” We believed them and marveled. Then they claimed the streets of Paris were made of glass. Again, we believed, picturing cars and carriages gliding over transparent roads.

But the story that stuck hardest was about the glasses. Our elders whispered of a pair invented by the Whites—glasses so powerful you could see straight inside a woman. Every organ, every secret, clear as daylight.

For years, I thought about those glasses. Searched for them. Dreamed of them. The Well of Death collapsed, the circuses stopped coming, the wars ended, my father’s factory job became routine life. But still, in some corner of my mind, I was restless—waiting for the day someone would hand me those miraculous glasses.