Desis made the King of Pop one of their own a long time ago, writes Huma Yusuf.

One of my best friends and I first started talking because of Michael Jackson. It was 1991, and satellite dishes were creeping into Pakistan. Weeks after my family splurged on a dish, the iconic music video of ‘Black or White’ hit the airwaves – one viewing of that, and we knew the cash doled out for the dish had been worth it. Our worlds – and minds – had been blown open, and nothing was ever going to be the same.

My father stationed himself in front of the television for nights on end, glued to Channel V, eagerly anticipating another screening of the world-turning, people-morphing, dance-inspiring video. For months, I was summoned out of bed, out of the shower, away from the dinner table, and even off the toilet to watch the last 30 seconds of a video that used special effects to defy bodies, space and race. It got to a point where I started wondering that my family was a bit weird, a tad too obsessed with the cinematic draw of Jackson and his video. And then my classmate, let’s call her Z, admitted to staying up nights in the hope of catching another screening of the video.

For weeks, Z and I analysed each and every frame of that video, the lyrics of the song, the poignant casting of Macaulay Culkin in the rap sequence (hey, it was 1991!), and more. We’re still firm friends. But even better, I realised that my understanding of the World Out There, friendship, family, music, dance, desire and film has forever been shaped by Michael Jackson.

Of course, Jackson had permeated my world years before the satellite dish came to rest on my roof. His music was everywhere in the 1980s, and after finding a pirated copy of the complete version of the ‘Thriller’ video on VHS, my elder brother ensured that my nightmares were populated with yellow eyes, animated corpses and jerky arm movements for many months. No doubt, the King of Pop as artist and celebrity was a familiar figure. But it took me a little longer to figure out that Michael Jackson as cultural phenomenon has always been a part of my everyday life.

What trip to Murree was complete without a walk down Mall Road, my protective cousins and parents cautioning me all the way to watch out for ‘yahoos’? These young men, lingering in clusters at the doorsteps of good karhai spots, defined my understanding of male sexuality. And they, in turn, were defined by Michael Jackson. Brightly coloured jackets with sleeves pushed up to the elbows, white socks with black shoes, awkward mullets, and a slouch that ensured that the hip and pelvis jutted out from the body in all manner of suggestive ways – these were the trademarks of the ‘yahoos’ who stalked my adolescence.

Even now, you can stroll through Zainab Market on a December evening and find an array of leather jackets with straps and sheens to make Wacko Jacko seem saner than most. Pakistani fashion – and a young Pakistani man’s sense of how he should be – are forever indebted to MJ.

Of course, Pakistanis are forgiven for internalising Michael Jackson because they were always getting a double dose of him. The original MJ cast his spell, mesmerising us through music videos and magical beats. But we really made him our own after Bollywood appropriated the best that Jackson had to offer and made it as desi as chai, samosa and arranged marriage.

In a tribute to Jackson, Richard Williams writes:

He loved the world of glitter and divas, of Judy Garland and Diana Ross. He was the pop star of the era of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, or ET and Star Wars, futuristic in style yet terminally sentimental in content.

Glitter, glam, special effects and sentiment – no surprise, then, that Bollywood and MJ were meant to be. And where Bollywood went, desi youngsters were bound to follow.

In my opinion, Jackson confirmed his status as the biggest super star ever when Amitabh Bachchan donned a silver glove, tried to moonwalk and warned the ladies, ‘dance dikhaon ga aisa, Michael Jackson ke jaisa’.  In 1989, Sridevi took MJ’s ‘Bad’ and made it badder with ‘Main Hoon Bad Girl’.  Meanwhile, ‘Thriller’ was never going to be the same after Tamil cinema turned to red leather and put a goli through the heart of what made Jacko the greatest of them all.

Through the 1980s, Bappi Lahiri and other composers used Jackson’s funk and pop style and Billie Jean beats to shake up South Asia. And by the early 1990s, India even had its very own Michael Jackson in the form of Prabhu Deva, and his face-paced dance movements had all of Pakistan (now well equipped with satellite dishes) hip swinging like the Jackson 5. Not one to be left out of the cultural zeitgeist, even Shah Rukh Khan put in a flash cameo as the King of Pop, reminding all of us that you can’t claim to be a star without channelling MJ himself.

And so it is that I take comfort in the fact that Michael Jackson may be gone, but he’ll never leave us. All I need to do to get a taste of Michael is go to a mehndi or walk down Murree’s Mall Road in June. We can miss the superstar that was, but we can just as easily find the Michael within.