Indian and Pakistani men cannot see beyond their male pride in the love story of a Pakistani cricketer and Indian tennis champ, writes Aijaz Zaka Syed* Ah, to be young and in love! And when you are young and in love, you seldom see beyond your nose -- or that of your sweetheart's. If Pakistani cricketer Shoaib Malik was foolish to exchange vows over the telephone with an Indian girl in distant Hyderabad eight years ago without ever having met her, he is down right stupid to fly to India to meet tennis champ Sania Mirza, his new love, in the face of a brewing storm of global proportions. But then what love is -- madness. And as someone said, when love is not madness, it is not love. The affair between Pakistan's former cricket captain and the hot Muslim tennis champion of India reads like a Bollywood love story. It has all the elements that make for a juicy, heady potboiler, and the Bollywood dream merchants are drooling over it: love, the seat-edge suspense, conspiracy of circumstances and resistance from zalim samaj (society), the villainous other woman, and two telegenic and famous faces at the heart of all the emotional circus. This India-Pakistan love saga is far more arresting than anything the most gifted of Bollywood storytellers could come up with. No wonder the media in India and Pakistan, especially its over-the-top television news networks, is hungrily lapping it up, producing the same chewed and overchewed, long regurgitated crap 24/7. My youngest holds her pretty head in her tiny hands when she sees me tune in to Zee News to watch for a zillionth time the latest on the Shoaib-Sania affair. Which is not much different from what you saw five minutes back -- or five hours ago. This affair seems to have cast a spell on the entire South Asia and beyond. The faces of Indo-Pak sports celebrities and lovers are permanently plastered on television screens. The two of them are torn apart by the bespectacled image of the beady, bleary-eyed Ayesha Siddiqui, the girl who claims to have married Shoaib in 2002. Shoaib, who is in trouble now, what with the Hyderabad police filing a criminal case against him and seizing his passport after hours of interrogation, says Sania and her family know "the truth" about his first marriage. But whatever the truth and the suspicious circumstances in which this marriage was performed, a marriage is a marriage. Besides, whether Shoaib divorces Ayesha and marries Sania or not, this whole episode has made a mockery of Islamic Sharia and the institution of marriage that plays such a critical role in Muslim and South Asian society. I can't bear to watch Islamic scholars, dazed by the blinding lights and all the paraphernalia of a television studio, hopelessly try to explain Shoaib's actions in the light of Sharia even as their hosts bend over backwards to suggest all Muslim males are like Shoaib and this happens all the time to poor women in Muslim society. But what has it got to do with Sharia or Islam? No religious teachings can explain or justify the recklessness or pure idiocy that love seems to bring out in the Shoaibs of this world. After the damning revelations made by Ayesha's parents in a globally telecast press conference, Shoaib flew down to Hyderabad like a gallant, cavalier hero in true filmy fashion to woo back his disturbed heroine and reassure her obviously concerned parents. But in doing so, he may have provided a heaven-sent opportunity to the scorned Siddiquis, the media and the mob, of course. Hopelessly bedazzled by love, Shoaib seems to have walked into a minefield from which I am not sure how he is going to walk out alive or at least without egg on his face. True to the sub-continent's time-honoured traditions, this crossborder love story has turned into an ever-widening mudslinging match between India and Pakistan. Soon after Sania's family revealed her plans to tie the knot with Shoaib, there was all-round jubilation in Pakistan with many Pakistanis patting Shoaib's back -- and their own --- for his "Indian conquest". After years of Bollywood movies that always show Pakistani girls falling for Indian men, the revenge couldn't have been sweeter for Pakistanis. Predictably, this was greeted by loud condemnations on the other side of the border, with many of my fellow Indians seeing in Sania's love for Shoaib the ultimate betrayal of mother India. The irrepressible Bal Thackeray, again hopping mad over the fact that Sania's heart beats for a Pakistani, as usual implies all Indian Muslims are traitors and Pakistani agents. And it is not just the Hindu groups that are upset. There has been total bedlam online here in the Gulf. A fellow Hyderabadi based in Saudi Arabia sparked the free-for-all by thrashing the tennis sensation in earthy Deccani Urdu for picking a Pakistani. Suggesting he cannot now face his Pakistani colleagues and neighbours, he moaned: Main munh pe kapda daalke ghoom rhhaun aajkal because of her (I have to cover my face because of her). This started a virtual cacophony with some, including yours truly, defending the lovers' right to find their love wherever they please and others interpreting it as a "surrender" to Pakistan. Some were upset that this could spark another vicious campaign against Indian Muslims by militant Hindu groups. Remarkably, all of those who see in this harmless love affair a catastrophic sellout to Pakistan are Muslims and come from the city of pearls and Charminar like Sania does. The city that some in India see as being allegedly soft on Pakistan with the police regularly rounding up young Muslims as ISI agents. But clearly this has little to do with patriotic fervour and more to do with male chauvinistic pride being hurt by the fact that one of their girls has fallen for someone from across the border. The same pride that forced pre-Islamic pagan Arabs and some communities in Rajasthan, India to kill their daughters right after birth. If this is how Indian Muslims think, imagine the heartburn this whole thing must have caused our sensitive friends in the Hindutva brigade. Let's face it. In our hearts, we are all Male Chauvinistic Pigs no matter how much progress we have made in terms of education and economic growth. Also at play are double standards and rank hypocrisy that seem to come naturally to us. We take immense pride in some of our distant relatives making it to the West, flaunting their Western passports. We get hysterical even at the suggestion of Sania settling down in Pakistan or embracing her prospective husband's nationality. And what's wrong if it's the other way round and Shoaib settles down in India? We were after all one people and one country, for God's sake! Until only six decades ago. We do not just share culture, language, religion, literature, music and sports. We share this great land. Whether we like it or not, we are joined at the hip -- inseparable from each other. Let's learn to live with each other. And, yes, let's give Shoaib and Sania a break. It's their life after all. This India-Pakistan love story should bring the two nations and people together, not tear them further apart. * The writer is opinion editor of Khaleej Times.
