Untitled Document

05 January 2007

Late Night With the Lady

There was a tantalizing interview on the radio with a person from Pakistan as I struggled to manage the coffee-maker. There was way too much to deal with. Red light means timer? Green light means percolate? The cascade of the surreal news and shifting faces was overwhelming.

According to the last reports before I went to bed, the Administration is going to nominate Fox Fallon, Admiral of the Pacific, to be the CENTCOM Commander. That office is responsible for Iraq and Afghanistan, and has never had an Admiral in charge. It would be a terrifying prospect if the President had not also nominated hard-as-nails Lieutenant General David Petraeus as Pro-Consul for operations in Iraq.

I wondered if that was supposed to shake up the Iranians, and send a message about where the next threat to the Revolution was going to come from, land or sea.

The Speaker of the house is now a woman, which is curious mostly because it is unusual. One tends to forget that universal suffrage did not arrive on these enlightened shores until August of 1920. The self-congratulatory hoopla of the new majority on the Hill continued into the night. The confused reports about Ambassador Negroponte's exit from the intelligence community continue to reverberate. Did he jump, or was he pushed?

I think he ran.

I got the green light to come on and the water in the coffeemaker began to bubble. On the radio, the dulcet-toned host of the Morning Update was speaking to a person named Saleem Ali, the son of a polo-playing Army Colonel and a career government official. He appears in drag as Lady (Begun) Nawazish Ali on the late-night equivalent of Jay Leno. It is liberating, or so asserted the distant-sounding voice on the radio. Real women have little place in the limelight of Pakistani life, as can be determined form the tortured career of Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of executed President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who also served, briefly, as head of state.

Bhutto was hanged by our erstwhile ally, Zia ul-Haq, with the same abrupt justice that was given to Saddam last week. Bhutto was only accused of killing one man, though.

We think of Pakistani society as repressed and stagnant, even if General Musharif appears here on Comedy Central while flacking his book. The gender roles are fixed quite rigidly in his society, or at least you would think so. Yet as a man portraying a woman, Nawazish Ali is paradoxically in a position to say whatever he thinks about anything.

Dan Damon said that clips of the show were available on YouTube, the video operating division of the Google Empire, though he made no recommendation about watching them. Once the BBC signed off and the American voices began, I had enough coffee in my veins to see the keys on the keyboard. I surfed past the news that John “Mike” McConnell was going to be named as the second Director of National Intelligence and clicked up the search topics “transvestite” and “Pakistan.” Another click and I was transported to a video world exactly as Alice fell into the rabbit hole.

On the Late night Show, Lady Nawazish Ali presents himself in a crimson and green sari, sitting on a brocade couch on a set hued in reds. There is a stand-up quartette with guitars and a drummer who does the rim-shot at suggestive remarks in fluid mixture of Urdu and English- Urdlish, I suppose would be the only way to put it.

It is musical to the ear, strangely comprehensible and impenetrable at the same time.

This echoes the role that Sasha Baron Cohen plays in his guise as the gangsta Muslim Ali G, particularly if he met Dame Edna Everage on the way to the set.

Saleem Ali denies that he has anything in common with Barry Humphries, the Australian who has been portraying Dame Edna since the 1950s. In fact, I tend to agree with him, since Dame Edna has grown into the commanding personality she is, and never was passable on her best day. The Lady is elegant and disconcerting, playing a role far old than she looks.

In fact, part of Nawazish Ali's legend is that she is the widow of a polo-playing Colonel. I will leave the dynamics of Mr. Ali's family to himself. His gimmick is to use the Ali G tactic of hosting reputable figures of stage, screen, government and literature on the show and discuss social taboos as if they were routine matters. He once hosted the fundamentalist mayor of Karachi alongside a slinky westernized fashion model.

The mayor looked confused, and said later he did not know that she was a he. I don't know what people are thinking when they agree to appear in these things.

The character grew from the impersonation Saleem used to do of Benizir Bhutto. It had a lot of novelty, though it was a one-note act. The Lady's character was suggested by an orthopedic surgeon in Lahore. There is a long tradition of transvestite entertainment in the sub-continent, and a whole caste of men who dress as women known are known as “Hajiras.” There was in the West, too, until fairly recently. All of Shakespeare's reparatory company were men, after all, and the trade of the actress was not known as a respectable one until well after women got the vote.

The Late Night Show is so popular that the Musharif government would like to take it off the air, and there is even a petition on-line to the thriving Aaj TV network to “put a cork” in the Lady, in the nicest possible way, of course.

Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the father of modern Pakistan, believed in throwing off the yoke of the colonial Raj by imposing Urdu as the national language. It had been the Persian-derived language of the Moghuls, and Hindi is the de-islamized dialect that is spoken in northern India.

The Congress Party sporadically attempts to impose Hindi as the national language from New Delhi, but the South erupts at the prospect, even as they do in Pakistan. It is another aspect of the surreal that English, the lingua franca of the deposed conquerors, remains infinitely preferable to either Hindi or Urdu to the speakers of the hundreds of other indigenous languages.

You could even argue that the language and the vast reservoir of English speakers has made possible the dynamic educational and economic miracle of India. The Lady comments on that, in her musical Urglish voice. She contrasts the repression of the media Pakistan with the rowdy and lustful Bollywood epics that play so well in the local theaters while scandalizing the straight-laced faithful.

Jinnah got a little further on the language issue than Gandhi did, and that is why half of what the Lady says is in Urdu. It could hold back wider distribution of the Late Night show, which I think could compete well against Conan O'Brien. I'm sure Saleem Ali could go mostly English, if he chose. It is just a question of whether he wants to crack the American market like Ali G and Borat did so successfully.

It wouldn't be that crazy, really. I mean, it isn't as weird an idea as having an Admiral in charge of land wars or a female president, you know?