"Are you going to Kuwait?" he said sheepishly, knowing full well that I was stranded, like him, in this God-forsaken airport, its roof splashed with psychedelic colours and its sad and pensive Arabs looking rather forlorn. They mulled about with that vacant stare of theirs, one that was broken only by the gold and the glitz that was reflected by the glass casings of the small booths that packed this tiny airport like so many honeycomb cells. Against my better instincts I asked him what he was reading. Murakami's Wind-up Bird Chronicles. That opened the door and I soon learnt that he was from Harvard and Aitchison, my old school.
"Let's get out of this shiny, plastic sweet shop and see the city" he contiued. I needed no prompting since I was feeling slightly nauseous. On the way out, we bumped into A, from LUMS, my university. She was reading The Alchemist, and despite our derision claimed that it was actually a good read: "everything can be changed into something else." Three Lahoris, caught in a no-man's world. There was only one thing for it: head for the best restaurant in town...
"What is there to see?" , we asked the Indian receptionist at the hotel. He pointed to a large map which, apart from a few blue squares and miniature depictions of mosques was, as far as I could tell, largely made up of empty spaces and dotted lines. It was as if the spirit of the desert had, by some magic process of osmosis, permeated into the city as well. This went some way to enhance that uneasy feeling that tugged at us: there was something quite unreal about every experience, as if we had walked on to some stage-set of a movie. Could it be that the blue squares were really watering wells and that they, with their dark interiors, hidden from the surface realities were, like the mosques, the only solid things in this candy-flossed hallucination?
"There is being good shopping here" he said as he pointed to the outer rim of the desert within a desert.
"And over here?" we inquired, looking hopefully at what appeared like a few buildings.
"Not so cheap shopping there"
We decided to head off nevertheless, determined to walk there (when we told him we wanted to walk and get a feel of the city he laughed uncontrollably, like a child. "Yes. Feet is good".
We passed a number of tattered shops ("moving phones" read the signboard..i.e mobile phones). Very soon we found ourselves walking along an endless six-lane highway under a relentless sun and a cloudless and monotonous sky. We now understood why the Indian laughed so voraciously and when I thought of that silly , teethy grinning mouth of his I couldn't but help think that there was something sinister in it all. We passed a few motels, brightly lit with large, ghastly blue and red neon lights and an occasional 'diner' ; a number of cadillacs whizzed by, and we kept our heads down to avoid the withering gaze of the arabs. With great endeavour we tried to convince ourselves that we were not back in 1950's America. I saw A rub her eyes as if in disbelief. Had we walked into another time zone when we stepped out of the airport? How sad it was to see the Arabs living the dream of another people...
Late capitalism could never be satisfied with plain and simple desire since it always suggested the idea of proportion and was invaraibly associated with the world, which was finite. What was needed was something else, some new type of infinity: unbridled imagination, wishes and fantasies of all and any kind. A virtual reality where the mind is given free play...like Dubai, Las Vegas, where the distinction between appearance and reality dissolves to the clink clink of money, where the wilderness of the desert, the frontier, has moved inwards and pleasure, like everything else, was but the most intense and yet fleeting of sensations. Or Singapore... http://www.centerforbookculture.org/context/no6/frank.html
Ero, guro, nanosensu.
Murakami Takashi: Post-war Japan was givemn life and nurtured by America..We were shown that the true meaning of life is meaninglessness, and were taught to live without thought. Our society and hierarchies were dismantled . We were forced into a system that does not produce "adults"...regardless of winning or losing the war, the bottom line is that for the past sixty years, Japan has been a testing ground for an American-style capitalist economy, protected in a grrenhouse, nurtured and bloated to the point of explosion. The results are so bizarre, they're perfect. Whatever the true intentions that underlie "Little Boy, " the nickname for Hiroshima's atomic bomb, we Japanese are truly, deeply, pampered children. We throw constant tantrums while enthralled by our own cuteness.
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