Today was almost overwhelmed by sentimentality. I watched the first episode of Aakhri Station, which was getting some buzz as a good new Urdu drama series, sort of like a feminist Black Mirror. The conceit is that it is set in a women’s carriage on a train from Lahore to Karachi and each episode is (presumably) the backstory of one of the improbably middle to upper class women travelling alone by train. It’s directed by Sarmad Khoosat, who directed Manto, a sentimental and over-acted biopic of the great writer, and sponsored by the Kashf Foundation, one of the more reputable and active women’s organisations. Anyway, it was sentimental pap and I’m not sure that the message was all empowering. In brief, a young woman in Lahore’s inner city wakes to find her husband is taking away her last valuable, the earrings her parents gave her, to sell. He sells them and goes to a gambling den. Meanwhile she gets humiliated by various shopkeepers to whom she owes money and there is no food in the house for her plump daughter. The husband loses everything and whilst drunk and smoking (the liquor glass is blurred out as though it were a dangling testicle) his buddies persuade him to prostitute his wife. He does, and for the first time the next day there is ample money for food. He takes to this as a business and tells his wife that the real money will come when he sells their daughter for sex, but in the meantime he’ll get a bottle of liquor and the husband and wife can celebrate after she’s serviced tonight’s client. She flees, with daughter.
So yes, sentimental pap and I didn’t think it particularly empowering. It was also charged with the sort of middle class morality where your child starving to death is a risk as your husband gambles away the food off your table but stepping out to look for work as a cleaner or something is not. When I think of Azra, our cleaning woman when I was a teenager, who brought up her children singlehandedly, cleaning houses while her husband was lost in a drunken stupor, I wanted to laugh at the sighs and teary glances in the drama.
The second bit of sentimentality was, if anything, even worse. I came across Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand thinking it was a light funny book along the lines of
Quite unconsciously, to clear the palate I have turned to Elie Wiesel’s Night.
Dinner ewas a remarkable success today. I finally used my paneer press to make some excellent paneer, and cooked a light bhaji with leeks and tomatoes. I also made a really superb chana daal, my favourite kind of daal. I’ve never made it very well, but found this excellent source of desi recipes by someone who likes his daal streetstyle. I made the fry version.