In a land where truth is trimmed like hedges and memory is manicured in the name of security, a certain breed of gardeners holds dominion. They do not sow seeds of inquiry, nor reap the fruits of public wisdom. Instead, they prune—with surgical grace—the wild branches of dissent, the flowering questions of conscience, and the creeping vines of collective memory.
They wear no soil on their hands—only stars on their shoulders. Their tools are not spades and sickles, but file closures, gag orders, late-night knocks, and prime-time puppetry. They speak not in the language of law, but in the euphemism of “national interest.” Their creed is control; their enemy, unpredictability.
Like George Orwell’s 1984, they do not merely surveil—they revise. They do not jail dissent; they “secure” the homeland from its own voice. The screen flickers. The ticker scrolls. The anchor smiles. The garden looks pristine. Yet no one remembers which season it is.
Here, truth is not crushed—it is landscaped. Newspapers print yesterday’s authorized anxieties. Television panels perform Shakespearean drama with Sophoclean foregone conclusions. The people vote. Then they forget.
Once, this land bloomed with wild discourse. Debate rustled like wind through wheat. Poetry stood beside policy. But then the gardeners arrived. They warned that too much freedom was contagion—that the soil of dissent harbored plague. Like Albert Camus’ The Plague, disagreement became a diagnosis. To remember was to rebel.
Even the poets were pruned. Faiz Ahmed Faiz, who once heard revolution in the echo of dawn, now gathers dust on curated shelves. Saadat Hasan Manto, who dissected hypocrisy with the scalpel of madness, would today be branded “foreign-funded” or “morally unfit.”
And so the people were taught to forget. The sons of Ayub, Zia, and Musharraf—each era’s 'alien' cultivator—arrived with sharper shears. Animal Farm played out in local dialect: the pigs bore new names, but the rules changed in darkness.
“All citizens are equal—but some are more secure than others.”
“Free speech is sacred—unless it asks who fertilized the garden.”
“History is yours—unless it offends the curator.”
Franz Kafka had foretold the verdict without charges, the arrest without cause, the man condemned not for what he did, but for what he might imagine. The citizen became a suspect. The student, a subversive. The journalist, an enemy. The act of writing became the act of resistance.
And yet—gardens are stubborn things.
Beneath the concrete paths and synthetic flowerbeds, wild seeds lie dormant. A student refuses to chant. A professor dares to cite. A mother whispers a forbidden name into a microphone before it cuts to silence. The gardeners panic. They increase the patrols. They unleash the floodgates of narrative control. But some flowers bloom in silence. Some truths root in shadow.
The writer, too, adapts. He codes truth into parable, folds fire into metaphor. He reads 1984 at midnight and pens Toba Tek Singh at dawn. Like the bards of old, he disguises rebellion in reverence, cloaking resistance in rhythm. His metaphors wear camouflage.
Let them come with their shears. Let them rename the trees and repaint the sky. Let them dictate the flowering of thought. But so long as language exists, the garden cannot be fully sterilized.
There will always be one vine that climbs beyond the trellis.
One bee that refuses to serve a single queen.
One child who dares to ask:
Who gave you the shears?
And one day—when the season shifts, as it always does—those wildflowers will return. Not in rage, but in remembrance.
Because memory, like a weed, endures.
