Next to Joyland’s ferris wheel, a small, whitewashed building once housed an arcade. Within it must have been several shooters – some involving zombies, many robbers in a bank – and there certainly were more than a few racers, perhaps even two air hockey boards. But on one end of the room, there was a Tekken machine, and in my memory – admittedly flavoured now by the wins of Arslan Ash – it was around that particular console the rush thronged.

Joyland had Tekken 2. Unlike any fighting game of its time, Tekken 2 began its character select screen with a woman. And instead of the flamboyant, European-looking female characters that would later become ubiquitous to Japanese video games, this woman was plain-looking, visibly East Asian, and conservative in appearance; Jun Kazama’s short hair was even pushed back with a hairband, quite like the ones worn by women in Lahore back in the years of the early 2000s.

Most players moved the cursor elsewhere, to a wrestler wearing a leopard mask, or someone more monstrous and intimidating; I preferred a dinosaur raptor wearing boxing gloves. But more than one might expect of a Lahore in which cat-calling and lip-smacking were such matter-of-fact occurrences just outside the gates of Joyland (so pervasive an issue that men unaccompanied by women were not allowed admission in Joyland itself), Jun Kazama was chosen quite frequently. And if a player landed all the right combos, made her spin mid-air and on the ground, he would win.

Although the players were usually young boys, a few girls did come to the Joyland arcade, escorted by affectionate uncles and adversarial brothers. My matches were with the boys, many of them nail-biting; I had older cousins with a PlayStation at home who had taught me some finesse in frantic button-mashing and joystick-swinging. And maybe because I merited some respect as a decent enough player, more than once my arcade opponents made small talk with me, bringing up the family chart of characters like Jun Kazama – how they were the mama of so-and-so, the khaala to so-and-so. Tekken 2 was already an old game by then, and good players knew the lore had expanded into sequels. Joyland was the only place that still kept a Tekken 2 machine. Lahore’s Pizza Huts and mini-golf park had Tekken 3, and outside men’s salons in Samanabad, the spiky hair of a character poster from Tekken 4 was advertised as a potential haircut. My cousins with the PlayStation, on the other hand, were playing Tekken 5 at their home. Years later, it was Arslan Ash’s skills in Tekken 6 that would put Lahore on the map of global Tekken play. Jun Kazama with the hairband did not reappear in the mainline sequels: in the time between the third and the second Tekken, she is attacked by an Aztec god and mysteriously disappears. In Joyland’s arcade, for expert players there was already a nostalgia surrounding her. I carried it too. If ever one of the players in their small talk suggested that Jun died after Tekken 2, I would be quick to correct him, saying that she had only vanished after the attack, that she might reappear. The heartless scoffed, and the sensitive said, maybe.

Jun Kazama was the first of many Japanese video game characters I associated complex emotions with – characters who evoked complicated discomforts and melancholies I had not yet found the words to articulate. I was not the only one: for many gamers in Lahore, the effects of knowing these characters and their stories was akin to the effects of other fictions, some more easily regarded as “literary”.

*

Raised in an isolated forest cottage where he was trained in Kazama-style martial arts, Jin – the first on the character select screens of almost all Tekken games after the second – was a son who loved his mother. Much of the story of the later Tekkens is dedicated to Jin Kazama entering tournament after tournament, seeking more information about Jun’s whereabouts. He is not otherwise presented as a filial character; Jin hates both his father and paternal grandfather, even clashing with a half-uncle and step-uncle. In the fifth game, the final boss is Jin’s paternal great-grandfather. And there is an additional complexity to this tracking of blood-ties in an otherwise simple fighting game: a maternal girl-cousin, also a fighter, is introduced in the fifth instalment (with whom Jin has a relatively friendlier dynamic).

There were Japanese fighting games besides Tekken in the arcade at Joyland and others dotted across Lahore, many with similar mechanics of characters fighting each other until a health bar was exhausted and an announcer boomed, “K.O.!” About certain countries and cultures not mentioned in school and absent from popular culture, I probably only developed some idea because of these games and their fighters, which often drew their ensembles and battle-stages from many nations. I remember how humiliating a defeat by Dhalsim from Street Fighter could feel, how it was like a gut-wrenching loss for Pakistan, a victory for India. But out of all these Japanese imports, none had family relationships as convoluted and enthralling as Tekken. These relationships were not niche knowledge, known only to erudite enthusiasts, nor were they limited to the ties intersecting with Jin and Jun Kazama. One of my favourite memes in Urdu, in fact, imagines a religious scholar addressing another recurring antagonism of the series: “Is making the sisters Nina and Anna Williams fight allowed in Islam?”

In Lahore, most Tekken players are children who have highly present cousins, grandparents, aunts and uncles, distant relations and family friends – some whom they like, others they hate. Our TV serials are rife with contempt for the aunt who is a father’s sister, made out to be ever-scheming and ever-interfering. On the whole, we are a people who grow up greatly preferring our maternal cousins to our paternal. And while of course the Abrahamic tradition has its own parables of wronged sons and traitorous brothers, there is perhaps nothing quite as dizzying in its scale of family discords as South Asia’s Mahabharata, in which a war between cousins and uncles and half-brothers constitutes the climactic core of the epic (Lahore is even said to be named after one of Ram’s sons, the hero of the other Sanskrit epic Ramayana). Our attention to family is perhaps singular in Asia, and what children in Lahore grow up calling “family” casts a net much wider than what this term evokes in other parts of the world.

So is it that in Tekken, in the journey of Jin and Jun Kazama, the young people of Lahore have found a kind of button-mashing that resembles their own world more than others do? Is that why in anticipation of a new release, basements and third floors of shopping plazas in Gulberg become filled with Tekken paraphernalia, with posters on store fronts and whole pillars turning into profiles of Jin Kazama? And on Hall Road, alongside banners reminding pedestrians to be vigilant of “Qadiani” conspiracies, is that why there are cardboard cut-outs of Tekken characters populating the sidewalks? There must be some explanation of that nature that can help substantiate why six Pakistanis from Lahore and its environs rank in the top 50 players list of Tekken 7 – with Arslan Ash being at the very top of course – and why, unlike other Anglophone parts of the world, it is Tekken and not Street Fighter that has captured our hearts.

*

Older cousins were a large part of my own childhood. The paternal cousins with the PlayStation with Tekken were the ones from whom I learned to grasp the Kazama family-tree. In particular, a baaji closest to me in age was the one with the most patience to teach me how to play, who told me what the dinosaur boxer had to do with the rest of the story. She had some rules: I could not play with female characters who had scanty clothing, and she was careful to demand I supplement my exposure to video games with her collection of Enid Blyton books. A maternal cousin was the aapa who lent me Harry Potter; there was a Sega Genesis emulator installed on her computer, and we played Sonic and Tails – I as the sidekick fox, and she as the blue hedgehog. I had one more cousin who was a gamer: at this one’s house, I witnessed a summoner dance and call upon the intervention of a fiery beast, Ifrit, to assist her in a battle with a monster called “Sin”. Involving the emergence of glowing glyphs and an almost cinematic, stunning sequence of staff-movements and dimensional eruptions, I made my cousin summon all the other elemental creatures she could, watching a half-naked ice queen Shiva crack open an icicle, a dragon-like Bahamut swoop down to the earth. I was spell-bound, and discovered in her playthrough a video game series that would quickly become my most beloved.

Beyond the name, I am not sure if the Shiva of Final Fantasy bears any relation to the Hindu pantheon (although at the time, I thought she was the very god that Hindus worshipped). But Bahamut and Ifrit are certainly inspired by Middle Eastern tradition. Ifrit, I immediately recognized as the name for Prophet Sulaiman’s fire-made servant in the Quran; Bahamut, I learned many years later from Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings was a pre-Islamic colossus from Arabic mythology said to be sleeping in the oceans, to awaken only when it was time to annihilate the world. And because I was so taken by the bombastic nature of these summons – and the rather conservatively dressed, short-haired summoner who performed the rituals to call them to battle – I begged my cousins to install on my Pentium 3 computer a Final Fantasy game. Through torrents, an older cousin delivered it to me. And while what he downloaded was not the same Final Fantasy I had seen my other cousin play, it had similar cinematic summoning sequences that had moved me at the aapa’s house, albeit with more dated graphics. Eventually, I myself became the kind of cousin younger children visited and demanded: show us Shiva and Ifrit, battle with monsters, make meteors fall from the heavens, turn the world into ice!

As Japanese role-playing games, the monster-battles and the summons were but a small pleasure of immersing oneself into the worlds of Final Fantasy. Each had a sprawling storyline, involving a different band of heroes embarking on a globe-spanning journey to save the world; no button-mashing or joystick-swinging was required to play them. In my computer, what was torrented was the eighth: it centered students in a cadet school-like campus who find themselves entrusted with the responsibility of containing a coup d’etat in another country. But as the narrative develops, the maturity of its themes continues to evolve and escalate. Months later, when I finally ended the game, I was devastated, wounded, suddenly aware of psychological and existential depths I had not encountered in Enid Blyton or J.K. Rowling.

These were novelistic video games, and before their dialogue came to be performed by voice actors, it took quite a lot of reading to appreciate what was happening in the story.

The less immediate action and storytelling style meant that Final Fantasy did not enjoy the popularity of Tekken in Pakistan. But every now and then, in Lahore, in Islamabad, I would come across a keychain embossed with the meteorite logo of the seventh game, or a rubber sword sold with a box featuring Squall Leonhart, hero of the eighth, or Final Fantasy merchandise in a Gulberg mall. As an adult in the Iranian Balochistan province, I encountered a couch surfing host in Zahedan who said he learned much of his English vocabulary from older Final Fantasy games. In the Abbottabad compound in which Bin Laden was found and shot dead, the CIA disclosed that one of the computers the SEALs took back had Final Fantasy VII installed. It was that very Final Fantasy I was playing in Lahore on my computer in 2007 when my grandfather in the other room began shouting that Benazir Bhutto had been assassinated.

*

Those of us who spend hours hooked to televisions or computers playing video games are rarely sporty. By grade nine, when coaches no longer goaded every student to participate in the games class, I sat on cricket field bleachers, and read.

I knew how much Japanese video games had developed my sense of self and wanted to know more about their country of origin. When, at the Readings bookstore in Lahore, I saw books by an author called Haruki Murakami, I bought one only because his name struck me as Japanese-sounding. And although I could barely explain what I read, at the bleachers, I came to read novel after novel; there was a strangeness to the storytelling that kept me enraptured by Murakami’s dreamscapes, a register he embodied that I did not think was too far from Final Fantasy.

Many boys and girls in Lahore have gone through that same arc – from Japanese video game player or anime-watcher to Murakami-reader. By the time I entered university, I was familiar with many people who had opinions about 1Q84 and Norwegian Wood. I have seen English translations of Murakami at the Book Club Cafe in the Hazara-ethnic neighbourhood of Mariabad in Quetta, all out in the western “frontier” parts of the country. At the Sunday book fairs at Frere Hall in Karachi, almost every English language novel seller has a tattered or photocopied Murakami to sell. Even in Karimabad, in the idyllic Hunza of the far north, I have stayed at a hotel that once catered exclusively to Japanese tourists, where Japanese-language versions of 1Q84 are shelved in the lobby’s bookcase. And perhaps because of Murakami’s popularity among English language readers of my generation, a smaller bookstore in Lahore, The Last Word, would entreat this readership to explore other Japanese authors, positing them as a balm to the misogynies rife in Murakami. In the campus culture of Lahore’s private universities and high schools, this same readership would bring about discussions of work by British and American-Japanese authors as well.

In Lahore, some arts council or cultural centre is always offering a course on Iqbal and Ghalib, and the Alhamra Complex holds a few free literary festivals. Close by, adjacent to a tea-house of bygone political repute, is a book fair every Sunday where one can find Pokemon-themed colouring books side by side old British colonial gazettes. Sajjad Zaheer, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Mohsin Hamid and Bapsi Sidhwa, all have their connection to Lahore, as did Urdu’s greatest writer of short stories, Saadat Hassan Manto. Lahore might have been where the Mughal princess Zaibunnissa composed much of the Persian poetry that would make her immortal as “Makhfi” in that tradition. And in spite of total state apathy, a small Punjabi literary culture continues to thrive; a bookstore selling exclusively Punjabi works of prose and poetry run by the Dhahan Prize finalist Zubair Ahmed is still around on Temple Road.

And while one might think that the genteel crowds of Lahore’s literary festivals are far from the rush of arcades and video games, we who had made journeys to Murakami as teens were a large part of the crowds that came to attend Nobel laureates and Booker Prize winners speak about their works and their visions. In fact, Alhamra is just a few streets away from the Hall Road of video game stores.

I attended a festival once in which Orhan Pamuk had been invited. He was slated to deliver a one-on-one panel scheduled between him and Mohsin Hamid on “Literature from the Margins”. At the time, there was an incredibly moving book written by Mohammed Hanif on the Baloch and the impunity with which they were “disappeared”. I, the teenager, thought Hamid and Pamuk would talk about the peripheries and margins in their own contexts, like the Pashtuns and Baloch of Lahore, the Kurds and Syrians of Istanbul. 

Hamid was unable to attend the panel. The questions by the substitute panellist, an aged gentleman of Lahore with an English accent that belied a British education, framed the Nobel Laureate, Columbia Professor Pamuk – indisputably Turkey’s foremost living literary figure – as someone from the “margins”. The panellist proceeded to style many of Lahore’s creatives in a similar fashion, as if by virtue of not being New York City or London, Lahore and Istanbul were peripheral spaces, always needing to justify their existence and cultural produce through approval from these other metropoles. He had reduced the scope of the conversation.

Those of us in the audience who had read Murakami and come of age in the world of Japanese video games did not think of the world in these dichotomies. Or if we did, the dichotomy was much more polyvalent. Our intimacy with Japan had done this to us: we did not always think of England or the United States as the centre of the earth, or of ourselves as being “brown”, unintelligible bodies desperate to be understood by a white gaze. And as teenagers who had grown up in a relatively peaceful and prosperous part of Pakistan, it seemed trite to suggest that we could perceive ourselves as “marginal” when we were anything but; to root our conception of ourselves in peoples continents away. From Murakami, we had noticed an engagement with Western culture that came from a position of parity, not of servility or deference. And while that may be an overly idealised presentation of the consumption of Western music or movies in Japan, it was an outlook that spoke to the cosmopolitan exposure gaming had ultimately given us.

*

I can hardly imagine growing up to be the sort of person who romanticised revolution and resistance without the Final Fantasy characters who had challenged religion, corporations, and militaristic empires across the different games. Even Jun Kazama from Tekken 2 was a wildlife conservation officer, and the dinosaur boxer I liked one of the many laboratory abominations she sought to save by entering the tournament. One didn’t even need to play video games to be affected by them: many of my family friends and cousins, now adults, remember Shiva and Ifrit, the names of the characters in the stories; during their treks in northern Pakistan, they’d recall how they played the sublime music of the Final Fantasy series as they traversed ravines and scree slopes to reach meadows in high-altitude valleys.

And just as business school students learn of Garcia Marquez and Alice Munro from their batchmates in the humanities, these non-gamers too expanded their world through their proximities to us non-sporty types.

In the very best of video games, emotional heights are reached that rattle us just as completely as any great work of literature. When Cloud in Final Fantasy VII holds up the limp body of the spirited and jovial Aerith – so suddenly impaled by the villain Sephiroth’s blade – tears come to our eyes as quickly as they do when we first read Priam’s appeal to Achilles. In the game, the player too has been on a journey with Aerith, and meets her first just as Cloud does: as a flower-seller on the grimy, rough streets of the city, Midgar. Just as Cloud does, we take Aerith along in our party of odd companions. Gradually, we are charmed by her, finding the reserved, guarded personality of our hero slowly melting away. And when she is killed at a juncture she has become so precious to us in our playthrough, it is a heartbreak akin to the revelations of Ishiguro’s Hailsham in Never Let Me Go, to the discovery that there is a Lady Rochester hiding in the walls of Jane Eyre. If Jun Kazama’s open-ended disappearance was the first, light laceration induced by a video game, Aerith’s death was one of the most unforgettable, and – without question – a concluded, sealed fate.

It’s no wonder that Peshawar-born Afghan-American author, Jamil Jan Kochai, would pay searing homage to another novelistic Japanese video game series like Final Fantasy in the first story of his collection, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak. Like the best of novels (and far more so than films with brief run-times), video games can have surprisingly visceral afterlives, as apparent in Kochai’s short story ‘Playing Metal Gear Solid V’. And much like filmmakers have been adopted by literary festivals, the future in which the creators of Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid deliver panels in the Lahore Literary Festival is probably not far off.

*

There is something, then, about places like Hall Road and the plazas with the video-game stores in Gulberg that is not really so dissimilar to Readings or Alhamra. Gamers, too, are part of what make Lahore so frequently styled as Pakistan’s cultural capital.

In Saim Sadiq’s Cannes-winning homage to the city Joyland, although named for the same theme park with the Tekken 2 machine, the arcade itself does not appear. It could not have: like many others in Lahore, the Joyland arcade no longer exists. On the whole, having access to video games has become much more complicated: consoles have become much more expensive than they were when I was a child, and the high systems requirements of most contemporary games demand specs that the average computer cannot handle. Still, in the sustained popularity of Tekken in Lahore – in the continued existence of video-game stores even after the collapse of the DVD industry – there is a sign many gamers are still emerging in the city. Now American video games, too, tend to be sophisticated in their storytelling, and compete against the Japanese ones in their novelistic qualities. I have even heard of a Chinese-produced game on Sun Wukong that is very popular in Lahore – I wonder if a new generation of Lahore’s teenagers will look in bookstores for Mo Yan and Lu Xun. As a temporary resident in the American Pacific Northwest, I have noticed that here libraries issue video games and their consoles too; I wonder if, one day, that could be true for libraries in Lahore.

In any case, Jun Kazama has outlasted Joyland’s arcade. In the newly released Tekken 8, I have heard that she has returned to the world of Tekken, and I would like to imagine that, somewhere in Gulberg or Hall Road or one of the newer neighbourhoods, there are storefronts and cardboard cut-outs of Jun Kazama, celebrating her return.