Godzilla in Pakistan

Guess how the mightiest of all monsters would fare in the land of the pure

Everyone’s favourite Japanese giant hit the Pakistani big screens a few days ago. Indeed the King of Monsters finally made it to this country, but what would happen if he really did swim up the Karachi shores and made his way through the land of the pure?

While many storylines portray Mr Godzilla as simply nothing more than a force of destruction, there are several others that paint him as more of a protector — the kind that really wants to help people, while toppling their houses and potentially destroying everything in his path. His heart is in the right place, and that’s all that matters. Let’s assume that Pakistanis get the nice guy and not the wrathful monster, just like the 2014 release where at the end of the destruction day people realise that perhaps Godzilla was actually the protagonist and not the antagonist.

Scene One: Godzilla Arrives at Karachi

Now we all saw it in the movie. Mr Godzilla makes his way to the San Francisco bay and predictably that’s how he’ll end up in Pakistan. At the sparkling Balochistan beach he expected to see a little more than the vast emptiness before him. Where was his audience? Had the ISI abducted them all before he got there? Had there been another mass grave incident he didn’t know about? Pishposh he was going to head over the more populated beach, the one found in Sindh!

Any normal country that knows that a giant monster is headed their way will issue warnings to keep people away from the shores, right? Mr Godzilla would expect no less than sirens and alarm bells warning the people to run for their lives (that was why he had snubbed Balochistan). Just his mere arrival is enough to induce a tsunami after all. Now if this were to happen in Karachi, people would hear the alarm bells and go running, towards the shore, like they do every single time there’s a cyclone warning. When an earthquake produced a new, potentially deadly and unstable, island in Balochistan, we wasted no time in making our way there. So exciting! Yes, we’re a masochistic nation and we quite like adventure, big monster or not.

Scene Two: Godzilla Goes to Multan

After not being taken seriously at all in Karachi, Mr Godzilla was reasonably upset. He’s not some circus freak, he’s the King of all Monsters! He has to be feared and revered. He’s not going to sit around for the amusement of such people. So the big chunky hero did what any other kind hearted monster would do: exit Sindh and head over to Multan, Punjab. The first thing Mr Godzilla found out was that he was going to be jailed for blasphemy if he didn’t leave soon, and no lawyer would fight his case. His crime? Who prefixes “God” at the start of their name and thinks they’ll live another day? Now Godzilla isn’t just beauty, he’s got brains too. He didn’t become the King of all Monsters by coincidence. Before things got out of control he raced over to Lahore, and boy was he ready for a fight. Multan had taught him important lessons: steer clear of a murderous crowd… and try not to trip on electrical wires.

Scene Three: Godzilla Finds his Foe

Huff and puff and all that trouble later there he was ready to attack, ready to save the people of Pakistan from their biggest enemy, ready to really fight the good fight. Lahore was his kind of town, he had heard of this place a lot. So he braced himself and waited for his foe to present himself. He heard it getting closer, the buzzing sound was getting him excited. The barren horizon before him looked haunting and he waited. The buzzing sound grew stronger but his enemy was nowhere to be seen. Suddenly he saw it right before him, the smallest dengue mosquito he had ever seen. Mr Godzilla felt embarrassed, he felt confused. Had he travelled all this way to fight a machar? A machar? Where was his nemesis? Where was the glory he had come for? In his anger he swooshed his tail around; he would topple a few buildings and that would show people his great power. And he swooshed and he swooshed and then stood confused. Where was the destruction? Where were the toppled buildings?

“Oye khotiya, ay tuhada San Francisco nai ay, eddi waddi pochal na hila, waise hi barri garmi hai, mota kahin ka,” said an angry old woman. Evidently the buildings weren’t tall enough to actually succumb to the big boy’s tail attack. “Machar maran wastay aa gya hain, ja ja k Sharifan no mar te koi gal vi hovay!”

Scene Four: Godzilla’s Obesity

But wait. Had the old woman just referred to Mr Godzilla, the supreme-est of supreme monsters, as a “donkey” and then followed it up by calling him “fat”? The audacity! Mr Godzilla had had about enough of Pakistan. The people seemed least interested in avoiding things that were out to kill them; they happily flocked towards obvious dangers and then proceeded to referring to their saviour as not just a donkey, but a fat donkey. He turned and looked at the women, to give her a chance to recant her words, but she stuck her thumb up her nose and repeated: “Mota, gainday ka baap”. Pretty soon others joined in with the woman, “mota” “abay kitna khata hai” “Pakistan’s number 9 on the obesity index so we don’t need this right now”, etc, etc. All of Lahore collectively passed one judgment after the other about not what the big monster was there to do, not what he was capable of, not what he could do to them, but about how he looked, plain and simple. Anyone would’ve been forced to tears, and the Japanese giant had feelings too. He tried to jump into the canal to swim away but he didn’t fit. How could he? The crowd grew larger and their chants grew harsher “Mota! Mota! Mota!” Where was he supposed to go, what was he supposed to do?

Scene Five: Godzilla Hides in KP

At the end of his wits and with a crowd falling his every emotionally crippling step, somehow our kindhearted giant found his way into KPK. Before he could do anything the TTP tried to abduct him, after a fierce battle (which consisted of him stomping a large number of the men out of their misery), they finally tried talking to him one on one instead of trying to capture him first. “We want you to go and trample on more US cities and people, you know like in the movie, it’s better than any plan we’ve ever managed to come up with.” Mr Godzilla was once again offended, he wasn’t trying to kill the people in the US, he was merely trying to help them. Collateral damage followed him no matter where he went, and that is why he was such a feared entity. He was a nice guy and this was outrageous. He was about to turn the TTP into smoked BBQ before he realised someone was picking on his tail. “Chhipkali… dum kaat du!” he heard a group of young kids scream. “BB gun se goli mar dou bari chipkali ko. It’s not even a PTI follower”.

From the most feared monster – the King of all Monsters – he had first been reduced to a circus freak, then turned into a blasphemer, then called a fat donkey and now he was a lizard whose tail Pakistanis were so very keen on dismembering. Mr Godzilla looked around him and shed one final tear before running into China. That was the place where, if nothing else, people would at least know who and what he was and fear him. And that was the day Mr Godzilla vowed never to return to the land where he was nothing more than a fat donkey lizard.

The author secretly hopes to turn into Godzilla so that a battle with monsters may become possible. Email: [email protected].