Avatar in Lahore
By Mohsin Hamid
On the day I went to see Avatar I finally got a haircut. I don’t have much hair, but still I usually have myself cropped every three weeks. This time six had gone by, and I was looking scraggly.
It was January 2010 and a month earlier I’d moved back to Lahore after several years in London, and before that several more in New York. The week I arrived a pair of bombs went off in Moon Market, killing 42 people and injuring 135.
For a few days people avoided markets and banks and restaurants and other crowded places if they could. Then things more or less went back to normal. There were 8 million people in Lahore before the bombing. There were 8 million people in Lahore after the bombing.
I held off on going for a haircut. Maybe I was too busy settling in.
My barber wasn’t in Moon Market. He was in Main Market. Main Market differs by two letters from Moon Market. Main Market is four kilometers away from Moon Market. Main Market is also larger and more densely packed than Moon Market.
The front of my barber’s shop is a big glass window with some fading posters on it. On the narrow street outside are rows of parked motorcycles and cars. Bombs in Pakistan are sometimes left in motorcycles and cars. A bomb outside my barber’s shop would turn that big glass window into shrapnel.
Eventually my wife pointed out that my hair really needed attention. So I went for my haircut. I hadn’t seen my barber in years.
“Hot or cold?” he asked me.
“What do you mean?” I said. What the hell was a hot haircut? Or a cold one for that matter?
“Hot or cold?” he repeated, a little surprised.
I realized he was offering me tea or a soft drink. “Neither,” I said, shaking my head. “Sorry, I’ve been away a while.”
He cut my hair. Then he gave me a scalp massage. Then he gave me a shoulder massage. He was good. I thought of staying longer. I looked at the big glass pane of the window and the cars and motorcycles parked outside. I paid him and left.
I’d had a number of missions since moving to Lahore. I’d had to get us a new fridge and sort out the strange smell coming from one of our bathroom drains and shepherd the cardboard boxes of our belongings through customs at the dry port. But my top priority had been getting broadband. I’d succeeded remarkably easily.
Now when I went online at home, thanks to a 1999 rupee (roughly 23 dollar) monthly contract, I flowed at 2Mbps through a Pakistan Telecommunications Limited ADSL telephone line, down to Karachi, offshore to the SEA-ME-WE-3, SEA-ME-WE-4, and I-ME-WE, a trio of optical fiber submarine telecommunication cables that handle the bulk of data moving between South Asia and the Middle East and Europe, and thence to any server or router I needed to access on the planet.
Out in the cyber universe, my internet persona could continue to live pretty much the same life it lived when my physical existence was in London or New York. It could visit the same websites, follow the same news, correspond with the same friends and agents and publishers. This pleased me.
I’d been able to watch a streaming High Definition trailer for Avatar before going to see it that night.
When we arrived at the cinema, barricades meant that no-one could park outside. We had to leave our car in a vacant plot down the road. A police jeep was stationed near the entrance. Security guards manned a metal detector. Inside, each bathroom had a guard as well. Other than that, it was like going to a modern Hollywood-dependent cinema anywhere. There was sweet and salty popcorn, there were hot dogs and nachos, there were M&M’s and Coke.
The cinema was not configured for 3-D. But the screen was large and the surround sound system was powerful, so the 2-D experience was still impressive.
The audience cheered as a race of exotically-named, technologically disadvantaged, religiously-inclined, dark-skinned (well, blue) people fought a marauding, resource-hungry, heavily-armed force of seemingly American marines whose leader roared of the need to “fight terror with terror.”
A friend leaned over to me when it was done. “Is James Cameron secretly Pakistani?” he asked.
We stepped outside. Some people smoked cigarettes. Others smoked joints. Then we drove home. I passed an army checkpoint on my way. At an intersection a digital billboard was running a news ticker with the number of deaths from the latest drone attack.
The main character in Avatar was a marine who goes online to inhabit a hybrid body that looks like the dark-skinned enemy. I wanted to get home to go online and explore his fictional universe further. I also wanted to get home because the streets were oddly deserted. A winter fog had descended, making it difficult to see ahead.
(From: Tar Magazine)
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