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| I decided this week to end the census. I was confronted by several suspicious men
who wanted know why I was sending the cricket players out to ask questions. I got
to cook for the first time in 8 months. Finally I had to endure some implied criticism
for not shaving my underarms. Going through all the quesitonnaires that have been returned I became aware that there are problems of duplication of housholds. Some of this duplication is the result of my interviewers having overlapping boundaries, some is the result of carelessness on their part. In one case I suspect a more sinister motive. One interviewer interviewed a woman, her husband and her daughter who lives with them. It's hard for me to believe this was simply an oversight on his part. I am still pondering how best to deal with this. In one way this can be advantageous. It means I have a check on a few of the interviews. Do different interviewers get different responses? Yes. Do different people report different things? Yes. However with all the flaws I think the interviews will still give me an idea of average family size in the village. I have over 200 interviews and estimate that the village has about 300 houses. Once I have calculated all the interviews and arrive at an average figure for house residents I will physically count every single house in the village. I recognise that this is not perfect. Some houses have a single entrance for multiple households. I may miss where one house begins and one ends. Other problems may come from the fact that the interviews are not as random as they should be. I divided up the village geographically to give each interviewer an exclusive area. Some interviewers managed to get a great many interviews and others much fewer. The problem with this is that castes tend to live in clusters. So the area with the least interviews is also the area with the castes I have the least information about. If it had been another area this might have been less problematic but these castes live predominately in that one area. If their average family size is significantly different from the rest then I have a problem. Also, up till now the sex distribution has been as close to 50/50 as one could hope for. What if the last hundred houses have 50 or 60 houses with no women? Or no men? I don't think this is the case since that many female headed households I hope I would have heard about. And I have not heard about that many men who live without some woman to cook for them and take care of them. In terms of the examples of Malik help I have received enough very good responses to stimulate a further round of questioning for more details about these cases. I have learned that there seem to have been more murders in the village than I was lead to believe-- at least if we go by the number of times Maliks were asked to help free someone from jail in a murder case. Almost all of these answers are very brief so I need far more information than they provide before I can be satisfied. The answers about why I'm here are equally interesting. For the moment all of this is slowly but surely being entered into the computer hopefully to be ready for some analysis well before I leave. While taking an early evening stroll through the village one evening I was confronted by several young men who wanted to know the purpose of the questionnaires. Where was the information going? Who was it for? What was I going to do with it? I told them the information is promarily for me to know how many people are in the village, how many men and women, how many of each caste and examples of what Maliks do for them (if anything). Pakistanis, like Americans, love conspiracy theories. I am not terribly fond of conspiracy theories myself since they are never the simplest solution and I like simple solutions. One man, who's been a fellow cricket fan and watched many a game with me, was very suspicious and refused to answer questions from any of my team. He told me he would answer the questions for me but only for me. I think this has as much to do with not wanting to submit to being questioned by a 15 year old as anything else. I understand but since the census is now closed it has become a moot point. I think I satisfied everyone I spoke to that there is no sinister motive behind it all and there is no conspiracy. When one man asked if my country was planning to invade Pakistan everyone around him laughed, as did I, and we all collectively assured him that no one in the west has the slightest intention of invading. He then started teasing me about other things and I realised that he had been joking. Sometimes humour from other cultures is hard to get right away. I don't know why but one day this week I suddenly had a craving for a pizza. There are no pizzas in Taxila as far as I know and Pindi is the nearest place I can get into a pizza restaurant so I could only sit and dream. I was whining to my friend Malik Bilal Mehdi that if they only had an oven in this village I could make my own pizza. He got very excited that I can make pizzas and promised he would arrange the oven if I would teach him how to make pizza. Three days later we went into Pindi together to get the ingredients for pizza (and while we were there had a pizza for lunch as well). The following day I cooked for the first time since coming to Pakistan. It felt really good to actually chop onions myself and fry mince and do all the things I frequently do at home. Malik Bilal took careful notes. The oven, it turned out was a tandoor. We had debated several other options (including the smallest toaster oven I've ever seen which was rejected). The only problem with the tandoor (the indigenous oven of South Asia-- used for that delicious bread) is that it is incredibly hot. The opneing on a tandoor is at the top. The cook has to stand or sit over the oven (which is always open) and plunge his or her hands inside to place things or remove things. The bread, by the way, is cooked by sticking the bread dough to the walls of the oven and when it's cooked prying them off with a metal rod. I started to put the pizza in the oven and felt my eyebrows start to singe so balked rather quickly. My softie Malik friends never considered putting their hands inside the tandoor. Fortunately for us Mrs. Saffia came to the rescue. She was incredibly helpful and more than willing to place our pizza on the top of an upside down pot on the floor of the tandoor. We cooked three pizzas this way and I must admit that apart from the problem of getting food in and out the tandoor is a marvelous oven-- every bit as good as any wood burning oven I've ever seen. The pizzas were something of a disappointment as I was lazy and decided to use roti dough for the pizza dough. Roti is not meant to rise and so our pizza dough was just a bit too heavy. Next time we have decided to take the extra trouble and make the pizza dough ourselves. So now I have to figure out what yeast is called in Urdu. A choli is an undershirt with pockets that many villagers wear. It makes up for the lack of pockets in shalwar kameez (which usually have only one or two and sometimes a third if you ask the tailor to put it in). I was wearing only my choli one day which is sleeveless. Some men noticed I hadn't shaved my underarms (which I never do). I knew that Muslims are supposed to shave their groin and underarms regularly but I don't think they realised that most western men do not do this. Many Pakistanis are sloppy about this (so I have heard confidentially from several sources) but generally if they're going to go around in a sleeveless shirt then they make sure their underarms are reasonably well shaved. So it was shocking for them to see me brazenly going about with this filthy hair for all the world to see. I'm trying to make this sound pleasant or amusing but it wasn't at the time. It brought home to me very clearly that 'dirt' is absolutely a social construct. What they find disgusting and filthy is not for me. And of course some things I am uneasy about and find dirty are not perceived as such by them. For a few days this seemed to come up fairly often and then one of my good friends got very angry at two men and more or less ordered them to drop the subject-- that I am not a Muslim and not Pakistani so therefore my ways are differnt. That seems to have settled the matter. I admit that there's a part of me that wants to explain to everyone that I am very clean and that they only perceive this as dirty but it's not really dirty. But of course for them-- it is really dirty. I guess I'll just have to accept that the only way I can win this one is to start shaving. I've decided to lose this battle and just be a dirty thing. |
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