Straying In Pakistan, Every Week

Mallu Tokes
An endearing request by a flight attendant on Pakistan International Airlines is to please extinguish your cigarette before wearing the oxygen mask. Pakistan is a smoking nation. Men walk smoking towards the airport’s smokers’ lounge. There is no public space where smokers will feel that underlying pressure of law—though officially the fine for smoking in some public spaces is one lakh Pakistani rupees, no less. A somewhat learned point-of-view is that since smoking is the only vice officially allowed in Pakistan, people make the most of it. But that’s hard to believe. Liquor and drugs are not very difficult to access.

During the Karachi one-dayer, a 22-year-old fashionable Pakistani boy, in the middle of giving his unsolicited views on the importance of world peace, reached into his pocket to offer a free drug. It was refused but not entirely because he kept referring to the dope as "Mallu". Kerala rules.

In Tiger Country
For some reason, the insomnia of a city is highly regarded. Locals of Karachi proudly say that their city never sleeps. That much is evident when in the dead of the night, a seasoned journalist shows off prime Karachi. Kavish Crown, a large commercial structure, is said to be owned by the main accused in the Bombay serial blasts, Tiger Memon. Not many have seen Dawood Ibrahim but common knowledge in Karachi is that he is somewhere out there. Kavish Crown stands on Shahrah-e-Faisal, and is very close to the Sheraton hotel where the Indian team stayed during the first one-dayer. It was right in front of the Sheraton, on the elegantly paved Shahrah-e-Faisal, that a bomb went off last year, minutes before the New Zealanders were scheduled to board a bus.

The Hawks Roost
Nobody fully understands what the icc’s Anti Corruption Unit does, especially during this series, but it seems to be a pleasant retirement job. Reports on how it is aggressively prying on the dirty brown-skinned players are highly exaggerated. It’s true that the unit has close-circuit cameras in the dressing rooms to make sure cellphones are not taken in and shady strangers don’t walk in, but an icc official clarifies very angrily: "The cameras are placed at the door and not inside as the media has reported. The Unit does not want to see the players’ underwear."

The All-Too-Perfect Host
Only the elite could have split the subcontinent because the real people of Pakistan never go dutch.Their obsession with playing the perfect host often leads to embarrassing post-dinner settling of bills. Once, to diffuse the tension at a wayside restaurant after an Indian said, "Since Pakistan was part of India, we are not your guests," the host decided to tell a joke. A Pathan receives his guest at a Peshawar bus stop, walks him to his village. En route, spotting his enemies lurking in the bushes, the Pathan asks the guest to duck. The guest says, "But it’s your life that’s in danger". The Pathan says, "Yesterday, I wanted the worst thing to happen to them. So I killed their guest. Today they want to teach me a lesson."