The mystery cat.

AT times like this, when faith in everything sane and normal and conventional is upturned by events, one is forced to disbelieve prose and escape into the reassurance of poetry.

T.S. Eliot was a British poet whose prose read like poetry and whose poetry read like prose. Whoever has read both can never forget either. His play Murder in the Cathedral (1935) is a morality play, an allegory in which the central figure is the Catholic martyr Thomas Becket.

In 1162 AD, Becket was selected by King Henry II to become the Archbishop of Canterbury. Henry and Becket had been close friends, and when King Henry appointed Becket, he hoped that his former friend would behave as a loyal servant of the Crown. However, to Henry's chagrin, Becket regards his spiritual office as archbishop as outweighing the king's temporal authority, and the two fall out. (Any similarity between a former prime minister and his benefactor COAS is purely coincidental.)

Eliot uses the device of four tempters to distract Becket. The first recalls the sybaritic pleasures he shared during his carefree 'bromance' with Henry. The second reminds him of the political power - 'the punier power' - he exercised as Lord Chancellor before becoming archbishop. The third tries to persuade Becket to 'stoop to political manoeuvring' with the nobles against the king. The fourth tempter offers Becket martyrdom. The last he regards as the most insidious temptation of all - 'the greatest treason: / To do the right deed for the wrong reason'.

Imran Khan's ingenuity in avoiding arrest reminds one of Macavity.

Anyone who has been watching the immorality play being performed outside Zaman Park in Lahore and in the judicial courts in Rawalpindi, Islamabad and Lahore must have noticed the parallel between Becket's inexorable steps to martyrdom and the PTI leader Imran Khan's dangerous courtship with it.

The Mughal emperor Aurangzeb once described the internecine struggles for the throne at Delhi as a choice between 'takht ya takhta' - the throne or the stone slab. He had a point. Modern politics in Pakistan has the same scorpion sting to it.

The efforts made by functionaries of the courts to enforce judicial writ and by various tentacles of the federal government and Punjab governments have been thwarted too often and too effectively. Was their heart at variance with their lathis?

Mr Khan's ingenuity in avoiding apprehension reminds one of T.S. Eliot's poems - the humorous 'Macavity: The Mystery Cat'.

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