At the Sight of a Phone

Chapter 6.

The Rat Bastard Thief

My cell phone got stolen yesterday. And not the "Give up your cell phone or we'll shoot you being the two shady looking guys on a bike that we are" kinda stolen either. My car window was open. I wasn't around. I came back, no cell phone.

I was at the Basement Cafe in Zamzama. No negative advertising here for The Basement, which is more than I can say for that rat hole of a place called Zamzama Boulevard. I know, I lived there once. I think my first apartment in Zamzama was the reason my memory has taken such a beating over the past few years. Your mind kinda rejects having to live in a place that crappy and eventually ends up denying it. There was a time when my family thought it was strange that I forgot an entire apartment we used to live in, but the strange thing to me was that they cared to remember it. I think I'm the only one I know to have gone through the LITERAL 'no electricity for 3 days' experience, and not the kind where a man living in a big house complains about the electricity going for 4 hours which FELT like three days.

And what's the first thing they tell you when you lose a phone? It's YOUR fault. Of course, it's my fault that people have weak souls and bend their morals at the drop of a hat, or since we dont have HATS in Pakistan, at the sight of a phone let's say. I wonder if anyone is around in the life of a thief to tell him that he's doing something wrong. I wonder if when asked why he STOLE a phone, he replies "Well, it was HIS fault, he just left a cell phone unattended, what was I supposed to do? Believe in God being the fake ass Muslim that I am and control my urges to just pick up something that doesn't belong to me and walk off with it? Come on buddy, those days are long gone. We haven't had a prophet in too long. It's not my fault I'm a spineless man without a soul. Now it's God's fault."

The strange thing is one of the first feelings I had about this was a slight bit of anger, which, being a pacifist by nature, is not really something I'm used to. But then, I started wondering if I should have left a piece of temptation out there for weak willed human beings to put a black mark on their souls with. I don't know. I think shit like that sometimes. If nothing else, atleast the incident took me off my writer's block. Isn't that something? I was asking to get sent some sort of incident which would make me want to say something about the world again. Sure enough, my phone gets stolen.

I've been on a writer's block for a few days now. Wierd because I just announced myself as a writer of sorts maybe less than a week ago. Less than a week and already I'm so fucking bored and uninspired that I get blocked. Right smack in the middle of a tv script I'm writing, the story has BARELY evolved leaving me room for God knows how much to play around with, and I'm sitting producing tiny little pieces of my best work on Orkut. I hate myself. It's a crucial part of my writing.

So now I'm driving home. From the Basement. Yes, we're back there. Nothing is seeming funny to me. Much like this blog entry is to you. For that I apologise. This may very well be my first step into becoming those sap ass characters who actually use their blogs as a means of conveying their FEELINGS and EMOTIONS instead of providing a good laugh to anyone visiting. But that stops now. So again, nothing is seeming funny to me. My brother is sitting right next to me, his friend at the back going on about how to get my SIM closed off in the morning, which of course was sounding all muffled and blurred out to me since the man had three drum kits up to his jaw in the back seat of a Mehran VX, inarguably one of the smallest cars ever to have been mass produced by any company in the history of mankind. As if the drums weren't bad enough, the DRUMMER that comes with them was ALSO in the back seat. I was driving.

It's wierd how you don't really feel like a man until this timeless Pakistani custom of being robbed of some material posession actually happens to you. I finally feel like I belong in this place now. Now, on my own terms of intensity of course, I have been in fights, I have been mad drunk on the beach, sworn at bad drivers, gotten high from the pollution in the Saddar district, been bothered by crooked cops (both blue shirts and farmies), and now, I have also been robbed. I don't think they should make your I.D card for this place unless atleast all these things have happened to you over a certain period of time. Infact, the way to get a DRIVER'S license should be testing if you're any good at hitting a parked vehicle and then disappearing without a trace. They could have that one person play the unsuspecting guy, sitting in that car in the license office lot, which has no engine, because some corrupt bastard in the office realised they never SWITCH ON the car anyway, so it's seven days before anyone even figures out that there's nothing under the hood anymore.

I love how we become Batman in your mind for the few hours after a cell has been stolen from you. For a while my friend, you are out for VENGEANCE. You want a mask, you want skills, you want the names and addresses of the suspects who got your phone, and soon in your mind, you're a one man army kicking seven guys in the head and making them cry for their moms. What's really wierd is the number of people keeps growing in your mind doesn't it? You walk into a room and face a SINGLE solitary person. All the kickass lines you wanna spit out before wailing on the fucker, you spit. Interesting play of words takes place, and then, the final word. Which usually ends up being "Then let's do this" for some reason. If you're really unimaginitive, you go with "You're gonna need that cell you stole from me....to call 15 after I'm done with you." And then you kick his ass, blindfolded, hands behind your head, legs tied to the fan and what not. Then, when you think about it, you're a little happy aren't you? You're happy that you beat the crap out of an imaginary criminal and righted a wrong in this world. But it's not enough. You close your eyes and you're smiling because you see yourself standing over the rat bastard thief. But wait, a door opens in the back. Now this is where it gets wierd, because you've GOT your phone back...but now your mind has kicked in the fact that it's not REAL bliss. After all, it IS your imagination that you got him. Through the open door, what happens? A hundred and fifty fucking guys storm into the room, charging RIGHT at you and your phone, which is something that would NEVER justify ANY mafia kingpin using THAT kind of man power, and now it's up to you to kill every single one of them, because you HAVE to protect your phone. And of course later the same night, a similiar imaginary scene takes place in the Mobilink offices, where sit do a bunch of knuckle scraping degernerates called helpline operators who can't even operate lines let alone help, never ceasing to prove to you that it's perfectly normal to call it a 24 HOUR CALL CENTRE, even if it shuts down by 1 in the morning, and putting a smile on your face when you wonder if this is where all your money is going, to give jobless night hawks a place to sit and a way to buy lunch the next day. I wonder if anyone works for a living anymore. I wonder if anyone is watching them. I could, you know. But that seems a shallow reason to want to don a cape and tights, although when I really think about it, no reason is good enough to wear tights. Not in this country. In Iran it's a death sentence to do that. In Saudi Arabia, they detain all tights at the airport, along with magazines containing pictures of women, sheep or men with long hair (all of which are regarded as sexually explicit items in that part of the world).

I guess in the end, everythings relative. I get writer's block, I lose a phone. Some guy leaves a phone unattended, some guy picks it up and walks off with it, earning another mark on his character. Somebody always wins and somebody always loses. But it's just how you care to see it, right? Maybe I'm not the one who lost. Sure I lost a phone, but what did I get in return? I got reminded of how nice it once was to not have that device ringing in your ass all the time. I still never figured out how the phone used to end up in my ass in the first place, but that's another blog entry, for another time. The thief? Did he win? Maybe, but all he won was a little cell phone isn't it? Compared to what he lost.

Perhaps the best example of a Pakistani mentality's idea of complete success in this night would go only to the the security guard at the place, who I really do believe was in on it. He walks away with a percentage of the earnings, without having to do the crime, AND the heist involved him NOT having to be a security guard, which is what he is paid to do. And so, in the age old tradition of feeling that awfully great feeling of being paid to do absolutely nothing, I guess the only guy who won last night was the guard. Maybe he deserves it, or thinks he did, like the love of my life suggested. I walked away with incredible affection from my girlfriend, and the thief got a phone. World hasn't ended today, and won't tomorrow either.

Except for the thief, who's mother is a stinking whore who should have been busy raising her kids with a sense of morality instead of leaving home at 6 in the evening every day to give blowjobs for a living.

Good Night.