By Patricia Lee Sharpe
The film Kashf: The Lifting of the Veil is a captivating homage to a Pakistan of tolerance, grace, aspiration and good humor, a Sufi-influenced Pakistan that is tragically under threat today from violent, grimly-puritanical, Saudi-financed salafism. So real and well-publicized is the political black veil of looming Talibanization that most outsiders see Pakistan only in those terms.
This sad, pervasive blindness has been inhibiting distribution efforts in the U.S., according to Ayesha Khan, who wrote, directed on location in Lahore and acted in Kashf. “Film festival organizers are looking for honor killings and shuttlecock burkhas,” she says, with a sigh. “They want bombs and terrorists and ski masks. But there’s another Pakistan, the real Pakistan, of ordinary people with ordinary lives. I wanted to show that.”*
She did, beautifully, and fortunately I was able to see Kashf, which was featured in the clearly more venturesome Santa Fe film festival, then given a longer run by the Cinema Café. I’ve lived in Pakistan, even in Lahore, the setting for Kashf, and I instantly recognized everything I saw in the film. The wet streets in a monsoon rain. The Mall jammed with traffic. The old mosques of red sandstone and white marble. The mazars and shrines, like the featured Datta Durbar, nightly resplendent with the equivalent of Christmas lights. People’s casual intermixing of English and Urdu. (The dialogue is perfectly subtitled, where needed.) The upper middle class milieu, where mothers and aunties hover anxiously over sons and nephews, especially those who don’t slide seamlessly into “proper” upper middle class life, in which context becoming a Sufi pir would be as shockingly declassé as becoming a Lollywood star, the relevant aspirations of the young co-protagonists in Kashf. There’s love here, love, exasperation and endless hope, all depicted with a fond, delicate hint of ridicule that serves as a rebuke to the slapsticky stereotypes that populate Urdu soap operas on TV or Lollywood productions.
So, let me pause here to say that Kashf, for all its deep seriousness, has some very funny moments. The call center scenes are masterpieces of absurdity. A car sequence that has a hallucinated Armaghan weaving through traffic is hilarious—and scarier by far than most crash-bang-and-explode set pieces.
Ali’s manic dance sequence is a hoot of skipping, scarf-play and coy tree-hugging along the banks of the Ravi River, not least because he’s aping a choreography that’s meant only for women in Lollywood film productions, according to Ayesha.
Movie-lovers should not imitate the cinema gate-keepers. If Kashf comes your way, see it and be enchanted. It’s human. It’s funny. But it’s much much more. It reminds us of the redemptive Sufi appreciation that the paths to happiness and fulfillment (and God), though obscured or veiled, are many and findable, with effort and determination. What’s more, the physical and the spiritual are not natural antagonists. Every path has many stepping stones.
The garish veils that Ali twirls, wrings and twiddles with as he struggles to master the hero’s role in a remake of a classic Pakistani farce are not merely frivolous bits of silk. He’ll succeed only when he gets rid of his self-defeating hangups and gives himself freely to the process of realization. He won’t need drugs or meditation tapes to relax and banish panic attacks. His natural ebullience will shine out. He will be (and is) irresistible, even though Ali Tariq, who plays the character Ali, is not a cookie-cutter hunk. Once he’s on the right path, moreover, he’ll not only attain his dream, he’ll have fun and be happy, too, the very antithesis of character-building, puritan-style, though denial and humorlessness—and no music or dance, for sure!
Armaghan’s search-and-struggle is a a more difficult assignment for an actor because it's an internal process, because this thread is never played for laughs and because Armaghan's face is often much obscured by a seeker’s hippie-like beard, which of course does not prevent us from knowing that Bilal Zaman is achingly handsome. At times I found myself thinking (Sorry!) that this is what a handsome young Christ must have looked like. At other times, I just wanted Armaghan to get a good trim, the sort of thing a mother would think.
Armaghan is puzzled. He has hallucinations or visions that he must decipher or lose his sanity. He must find and follow the enigmatic beautiful woman who is the Messenger and he must open the green (Muslim green?) door behind which, he intuits, something or someone important awaits him. He must discover his fate, his kismet, his karma/dharma. I’m not kidding here. We are, after all, right next door to India. Advaitic mysticism was congenial to the Sufis who, in turn, made Islam palatable to Hindu converts. Sufi pirs are still revered today by Hindus, which of course does not boost their stock with Islamists.
Time for the back story: Armaghan's mother is childless, which is not good for a Pakistani bride, so she visits a shrine to pray for fertility. She will have a child, promises the pir, if she and her husband share a roti or chapati he gives her. There's a catch, though. The resulting child must follow his path. It's an offer she can't refuse. Alas, as in more traditionally-set fairy tales, a complication ensues, once the roti is home and lying on a plate in the kitchen. Hubby doesn't eat his half. The bride's sister (or sister-in-law) does. The cousins born as a consequence are related not only by blood, but by that promise. Whether they like it or not, they must follow the path. Meanwhile, Armaghan's parents have given him a name that means "gift." (No, I'm not going to belabor all the ways that the gift-idea relates to Kashf.)
Although his mother, once widowed, has sought to protect Armaghan from the consequences of her rash promise by sending him to the U.S. to grow up and be educated, the seed of enlightenment is activated as soon as he returns for a visit to Lahore. Driving in from the airport, he sees Datta Durbar all lit up, jumps out of the car to investigate and is so overwhelmed by the experience that he faints. "You're just exhausted by the long flight," his mother says. She and his auntie set about persuading him to seek a good job and get married, while his old friends want him to party. They'll introduce him to a good time girl. Sex and Scotch! Armaghan politely ignores them all. (This film is about youthful rebellion, but not the violent kind.) Even the family's servant boy decides that Armaghan is slightly pagal, which is to say crazy.
I can see why certain kinds of Islamists might not like this film. Not only does it legitimize what salafists would call saint worship, which they consider to be a corrupting form of idolotry, it legitimizes apparent frivolity---joy, music, dance. In Kashf the spiritual and the material are twined around one another like the complementary strands of DNA. The two cousins, apparently so different, support and encourage one another.
How refreshing! Neither's goal is denied, belittled or destroyed. Both young men are fulfilled. During the last scene, respectfully, reverently, in sweet recognition, Armaghan takes his finally-found pir's hand in his, while Ali is already happily at work in a silly dance sequence that reminded me of Krishna and his adoring gopis. (Many Punjabi folk tales have Muslim and Hindu versions.) I also found myself thinking of the Hindu concept of lila, of play, which suggests that ordinary life is like a Hollywood/Bollywood/Lollywood production, which is fine, so long as the fictionality of it is kept in mind. I doubt that Hindu ideas were intentionally embedded in Kashf, but anyone with a foot in both Indian and Pakistani cultures would see the overlap immediately. Poor Pakistan! No wonder it's a fraying rope in an ideological tug-of-war.
Evidently some who've seen Kashf would like a sequel. I too would like to know what happens next to Ali and Armaghan. We care, which means that Ayesha Khan's concept works. But should there be a sequel, I'd like to see a girl also on the path realization. There is still a window of opportunity for young women in Pakistan; perhaps a film as deeply felt as Kashf could help to keep it open.
Film makers have to pick and choose. It's not possible to depict everything there is to say about any era in the 90 to 120 minutes permitted to most feature films. So I embraced this film as I watched it. It was wonderful, for that short while, to be back in Lahore, where I too once lived. It was exceedingly pleasant to imagine that nothing had changed since I taught American literature at Punjab University, and my kids went to school with Pakistani PB & J sandwiches in their lunch boxes. But no one was throwing bombs on the streets of Lahore then. No one was destroying dozens of girls' schools in Swat, where my family vacationed, either.
Here is a recent quote from Asma Jehangir, Pakistan's outstanding civil and human rights lawyer. Based in Lahore, she has made a career of defending women fleeing for their lives from abusive husbands and unsupportive families. Now, in the very heart of cultured Lahore, not in some remote tribal area, she is receiving terrifying anonymous fax messages from Islamists warning her to stop helping potential victims of honor killings.
Kashf is a wonderful film, and it beautifully depicts an appealing milieu. But, I'm very sorry to say, there is a certain dissociation at work. The cars are the cars we drive today. The cell phones and call centers are au courant. But the texture of life is a little too untroubled. The culture of the Pakistan Ayesha Khan clearly loves (as do I) is seriously in danger. Even Sufism is under threat. Turning away from this ugly reality will not preserve anything. Depicting hate's inroads may.
This might not be Ayesha's cup of chai, but I'd love to see a film built around the lawyers' movement. With a heroine, not a hero. A female lawyer with a mystical bent, maybe. Or how about a plot built around Najam and Jugnu Sethi (also getting death threats), who nevertheless keep publishing the Lahore Friday Times, which I'd be reading regularly, if dueling computers and internet protocols hadn't got my password(s) hopelessly screwed up. (Help! if anyone out there can.)
Meanwhile, the soundtrack for Kashf is terrific! If you're into bhagra, which is derived from Punjabi folk music (and Lahore is the capital of Pakistani Punjab), you'll love the background music. It's more complex and subtle than dance pop can be, though, and it's often infused with the driving heartbeat rhythms of the instruments strummed and thumped by Sufi devotees. Unfortunately, the soundtrack CD doesn't include the deeply affecting, more sufistic vocals and instrumentals which, to my mind, convey the essense of Kashf.
*Note: this quote is a condensed version of a long conversation.