The Life and Non-Murder of my Friend

I have a friend who used to live in Karachi, but has now shifted north to Islamabad. This friend has been a source of great entertainment for me and the rest of my friends. It's not because he is a comedian or a joke maker; he is an ignoramus simpleton who has kept us laughing our asses off for showing us some of the world's funniest moments. I don't want to divulge his name for the sake of protecting his identity, and let's just, for the sake of this conversation, call him Alid.

The first time I met Alid was when I was in class 7 or 8 and the first time I spoke to him was in class 10. We were in our O'Levels and it was traditional for the juniors to arrange a farewell party for their seniors. I had recently started playing the guitar and I thought it would be nice to play a song for our graduating class at our farewell party. I asked around to find out if anyone else knew anything about playing songs and I found that another guy (let's just arbitrarily call him Kumail) also knew how to strum a few chords. 'Perfect,' I remember thinking, 'now all we need is a singer and we are set.' That's when Alid stepped up and said, 'yes, I can sing.'

Now you have to remember that I was around 16 years old at the time. I was quite naive and took most of what was said to me at face value. I did not doubt it when Kumail told me that he knew how to play the guitar, and I did not doubt Alid when he said he could sing. At the time, I had no idea that to sing meant to actually throw your voice in tune and in time. Just as I had learnt to play the guitar, I simply assumed that Alid knew how to sing. That was a grave mistake because I soon found out that Alid did not really know how to sing at all. He just said he could sing because he had also simply assumed he could. You can imagine how bad he sounded when he sang by the fact that (and honest to god I am not joking) we were boo-ed off the stage five minutes before we had even started to play the song.

Fast forward a couple of years and it’s the new era of the Internet and MIRC. Another friend of mine, lets call him Danial, and I are online from Tempe, AZ, sitting in #delusions, and we find that Alid has been killed, shot dead during a fight in Karachi. Now this was the time when cell phones were the size of cricket bats and you had to be either a drug lord, a respected businessman, or both, to be able to afford them. And Alid was no drug lord nor a respected businessman and the last time he had played cricket he had fallen asleep on the field during the match while wicket keeping because (swear to god I am not joking) he had mistakenly eaten a bunch of Valiums thinking they were Panadols. So we call his home phone (what is now called a landline), and Alid's mother picks up. We are unsure as to what to say, but are relieved when she tells us that Alid has just stepped out to buy a pack of Marlboro Mediums. Fast forward another few years and its the new era of electronic music and MSN. We are all sitting in Danial's room in Karachi and Alid is also there. That's when Danial remembers the Alid Murder Incident and we tell Alid that we had heard he got murdered a few years ago and we want to know why the rumor began and what actually happened. To this, the first thing Alid said was, 'nahi yaar, woh mera murder nahi hoowa tha.' ('No man, I was not the one who was murdered').

It was then that we realized that Alid had a tendency to say the most inappropriate things at the most inappropriate times. And it was not much later that we found that he once told his online girlfriend, 'my love for you is like the Titanic,' to which the girl replied, 'oh, but didn't the Titanic sink?' He is the same person who we once found carrying around a lit candle in the dark (the lights were out because of load 'shading') and searching for a lighter to light his cigarette, and the same person who once described an electronica song (and again I swear to god I am not joking) as being ‘deep, dark, progressive, house, trance, deep, dark, house...’

It’s quite sad that our friend Alid has moved from Karachi and is now living (and probably still entertaining people around him) in Islamabad. What does he do for a living, you might wonder? He is a Director Creative for an advertising agency and most of his work involves pressing the F5 button on his computer’s keyboard. And now you know why most of the ads we see on our television screens are like the way they are and why they mostly show people saying the most inappropriate things at the most inappropriate times.