The vagabond and the slap

Despite the matric result, the FSC years were the worst three years of my life.

From 1991 to 1994 I was enrolled at Government Science College in Multan, on Bosan Road. I attended fewer than ten classes in the entire three-year period. I am not exaggerating. The math of attendance and exams is precise. I could check the records and find that the only times I went to the campus were for forms and exams.

I spent the rest of the time in local billiards and snooker clubs.

If you have not lived through this kind of period, the easiest way to describe it is that I had stopped being a person and become a habit. I would wake up, leave the house, and reappear in the snooker club within an hour. I would stay there until the evening. The other boys at the clubs were good company. None of us were going anywhere. We laughed a lot. We were funny. We were also slowly killing ourselves.

My father, Shafiq Khan Pitafi, did not pretend it was not happening. He sat with me during this period. He stayed engaged. He talked. He made plans. He suggested directions. He never gave up on me even when there was no evidence for the position.

I want to tell you what was happening from the inside, because the boys at the clubs are still out there and they have parents who are reading this and wondering whether the situation is hopeless.

What was happening from the inside was shame. The kind of shame that makes you incapable of even trying, because trying and failing is worse than not trying at all. The matric result had been real. I had been counted out and had come back. But the way I had come back was through a structure my parents had built around me, and when the structure was gone the boy was the same boy as before. The college had no Sir Mubasher. The college had a campus and a faculty and a library and a system, and that system did not see me. So I stopped seeing it. I went to the snooker club instead.

I once ran away from home in this period. I went to my uncle’s house. I told him I was tired of the scolding.

The scolding was not unjust. The scolding was my parents trying everything they could think of, and it was not working.

One day my father did the only thing he had not done. He slapped me.

It was the only slap of my life. He never slapped me again.

I want to write down what I remember of that morning. The room. The light. The feeling of having been hit by my father, who had never hit me. I cannot remember the room exactly. I do not remember the light. What I remember is the sense that something had been broken. Not in my face. In the relationship. The slap was a kind of communication. It said: I have run out of language. I am still here. I love you. The thing I am doing right now is the only thing I have left to do.

I did not change immediately.

In fact, in the days that followed, I left home again. I absconded to my uncle’s house, this time fearing more beating, even though there would not be any.

But the slap had done something. It had done something the words had not done.

Within a couple of months I started thinking about the wrongs. I began to consider what direction my life was going. I began to consider what direction my life could go. I began to consider whether the boy in the snooker club was the boy I wanted to be when my parents were old.

The slap, in retrospect, was one of the most generous things my father ever did for me. He had decided that he would do the thing he hated most in order to give me a chance at not becoming what I was becoming. He had used the smallest possible physical event in the only deliberate way it can be used. One slap, never repeated, never threatened.

I have read enough now to know that this is not a model I am recommending. I am not writing this as a manual for parenting. I am writing it as the truth of what happened, and as a tribute to a man who did the thing he did not want to do because his son was disappearing.

What I do want you to take from this chapter, if you take anything, is the structure of what made the slap effective.

It was rare. He had never done it before. Hence it carried weight.

It was followed by silence. He did not beat the lesson into me. He did not lecture afterward. He did not corner me into apology. He let it land, and then he let me work out what to do with it.

It was an act of love. The man who slapped me was the same man who had been sitting with me for three years, trying every other way, before he tried this. There was no anger in it. There was a parent who had run out of options and had done the one thing he had been holding back.

If your child is in the equivalent of where I was, what I want you to know is that nothing comes from a single act unless it is the last in a long series of patient acts that came before it. The slap worked because of the three years of patience that preceded it. The slap, by itself, would have done nothing.

I want to also tell you what happened after, because it is the cleanest part of this chapter to write.

About a month or two after the slap, my parents found a newspaper advertisement on the front page. The advertisement was for an admissions opening for a course in computers. They put it in front of me. They said, take the admission. Try.

I took the admission. I went to the class. I fell in love.

The next chapter is about that. Read on.

To my father, Shafiq Khan Pitafi: I would not be writing on this site if you had given up on me. You did not give up on me. The slap was not your finest moment. It was the moment that worked. I have spent the rest of my life trying to be the kind of father you were to me on the days you did not have to slap me, which were almost every day of your life.