by Asra Nomani
We had dropped Danny and Mariane off at the party to go park. “Jaan just means dear,” my boyfriend had insisted. “It’s nothing.”
I’d felt even more slighted. I had gone to cuff him on the side of the head to mime a hit for digging such a deep hole. Instead, I’d boxed his ears. Hard.
Both of us stinging, we’d lost each other at the party. I had peeked outside. Danny and Mariane were snuggling heads, oblivious to the thumping music and swirl of men and women around them in black on black. I’d wished that I felt so happily in love.
Until Danny met Mariane, he had never been a model of an attentive boyfriend, but this striking and beautiful woman of Dutch and Cuban ancestry had transformed him. I had surprised myself the next day, seeking relationship guidance from him.
“Can I ask you something?” I had asked in the lobby of the Pearl-Continental.
“Sure.”
“How do you become patient?”
He’d smiled his askew Danny smile. “You can’t learn to be patient, but because you love someone you can pretend to be patient.”
Oh. “There are times when you get impatient, but you don’t show it?”
“Because it’s not worth upsetting Mariane.”
I tried, but I had started to worry. My boyfriend flirted with a woman, both of them drunk at one of the many Karachi balls thrown around the city after New Year’s. He had gotten on his knees to apologize to me. Still, things had been getting strained. He had told me that it would be best if I returned to the States, because he wouldn’t be able to spend as much time with me as he had during the shortened work days of Ramadan when he could juggle work and family with our budding relationship. He had thought it best if we continued long distance for six months until we could be together.
“No, it’ll be okay,” I had said, optimistically.
On New Year’s Day, before setting off for Islamabad, Mariane had looked at an unfurnished house that I was thinking about renting in which I could write my book and nurture my romance. “You’ll even have to buy air conditioners,” Mariane had warned. “Get a furnished apartment. Make your life simple.”
That day, I had found a beautiful home on a posh lane next to the Clifton neighborhood where my boyfriend lived. Bright flowers, trees, and chowkidars, or guards, lined the street called Zamzama after the name given to holy water that supposedly sprang out of the parched desert outside the revered Muslim city of Mecca at the time of the prophet Abraham. Wide carved doors opened into an immaculately furnished three-bedroom home with everything down to a table clock with a golfer’s club as a second hand, swinging to mark each passing moment. I envisioned it as the perfect home to which I could beckon my family so they could see the life I’d built for myself on the subcontinent, comfortable, fun, and independent. I had gotten my second set of keys to a home on the subcontinent. I always kept my keys to Latif Manzil with me. I also had signed the lease with a mind to see more of Danny and Mariane.
“It’s got a great guest bedroom!” I had told Danny.
He was no pushover. “Does it get sun?”
Now, they were planning to come to Karachi on their way back to India. I needed friends. The city had turned lonely for me. My boyfriend had been right. He was spending less time with me, and somehow I wasn’t welcome at his home anymore. Although I had enough confidence to know my self-worth, I also knew that I wasn’t the ideal pick for his parents. I was older. I was divorced. I came from India. And, to top it all off, I was a woman who had her own home without a chaperone, and their son stayed out late alone with me. I was not Islam’s girl next door.
I had found myself getting depressed and isolated. I went to Pakistan to bridge misunderstanding between people with sincerity and honesty, and both my work and I were being attacked. I had found myself weeping every day, and I had started contemplating the darkest thoughts. When Danny and Mariane’s car pulled up outside my gate, I jumped out of my seat to run into the sunshine to greet them. Somehow I felt they could give me a reprieve from the depression into which I had sunk.
I led Danny and Mariane upstairs. “Look,” I told them, opening the screen door onto the veranda. Four parrots that lived across the street were gliding through the sky. Their twerps filled the air, transporting me to those magical moments where the junglis would fill the sky over Jaigahan with their chatter.
Danny set up his Toshiba laptop at my rolltop desk. “Have you seen one of the Nikes I bought to play volleyball?” he asked.
Uh, no. “Why?”
“I lost it.”
Goofy Danny. By night we listened to Phil Collins, Bruce Springsteen, and the sufi Pakistani rock band, Junoon, and I escaped for some time alone with my boyfriend.
Danny was in Karachi to do an interview with a Muslim leader. The day after he and Mariane arrived, he set off for the interview. The Sheraton didn’t have any cars available to send over. Danny was getting anxious about being late. I asked the chowkidar guarding my house, Shabeer, to find taxis for Danny and Mariane, who was setting off for a separate interview. In the bright shine of an early Wednesday evening, shortly after 5 P.M., Danny slipped into his yellow taxi, fumbling with his notebook, mobile phone, and shoulder bag, as he was prone to do. I waved to my dear friend as the taxi pulled away.
“See you later!”
He returned my good-bye with a gentle wave and smile.
Daylight turned to darkness, but Danny didn’t return home. Mariane had cooked a Cuban dinner that night to which I’d invited my boyfriend and some of his friends. She and I spent the evening calling Danny’s mobile. “It’s still turned off,” Mariane said after each try. She remained calm, but with each passing hour the tension rose.
“I’m worried,” she admitted. Danny never turned his phone off. He always wanted Mariane to be able to reach him.
We wondered aloud if he’d gone to a madrassa, a Muslim religious school, outside Karachi. I remembered that Danny had told me he might spend some time with the religious leaders’ disciples. “Maybe he’s out of range.”
After the last guest left, Mariane and I climbed the stairs to peck for clues in Danny’s e-mails and Palm Pilot on his computer. We found the name of the man he was supposed to meet: Gilani. I tapped the name into a Google search. What we found was frightening. The FBI wanted Gilani for bomb attacks in the U.S., staged from an organization called Muslims of America that converted many black Americans to Islam. He and the organization denied any wrongdoing. We found a Boston Globe article in Danny’s e-mails about Gilani. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It quoted one of the friends of the family whom I’d met in Islamabad, a man named Khalid Khawaja, as a close friend of Gilani.
The night was slipping into dawn. My boyfriend had fallen asleep as we had trolled for clues. Each passing car had given us hope that one would stop in front of our gate and Danny would emerge, kept overnight by overeager hosts. But the new day’s first light arrived without Danny.
I called this man I’d found quoted by the Boston Globe, a fundamentalist Muslim whom I’d spent hours interviewing, as other Western journalists including Danny had done, because he was an educated and articulate spokesman for the cause of not only the Taliban but also Osama bin Laden, whom he claimed was his friend. When I called him, as the cry broke out for the sunrise prayer, he preached to me about the destruction America was causing Afghanis instead of agreeing to help. I wondered about these Muslim values of goodwill that he preached. He knew Danny, but still he was balking at helping.
That day, my writer’s retreat became the command center for the hunt to find Danny. Mariane and I steered the police through all that we knew. I didn’t bother wearing a dupatta, as I did when I met elders or more conservative Muslims than my boyfriend’s crowd. I didn’t even clear away the Murree Brewery beer bottles that littered the house from the night before.
The police asked me questions about my life and work. “I’m an open book,” I told Inspector General Kamal Shah, the police chief for the province of Sindh, in which Kara
chi sits as the capital.
Yes, I was born in India. Yes, I lived in this house alone. Yes, I was writing a book, and, yes, I was on leave from the Wall Street Journal.
He tapped his walking stick. “We don’t suspect you.”
I didn’t know what to think about Danny’s disappearance. I went to the gate in the early evening. Two of my boyfriend’s friends were standing there, looking anxiously for my boyfriend. “Is he here?”
“He isn’t.” I told them I had just talked to his boss, and he said he expected him back soon. “Do you want to come inside?”
“No, we’ll be going,” they said and rushed off.
My boyfriend soon appeared in his dark business suit and a clipped walk. His face had fallen. I’d never seen him like that before. He looked afraid. He sat at the dining table with two of the Pakistani investigators. My boyfriend thanked one of them. “You got the people off my back.”
We went upstairs. My boyfriend looked intently at me. “I can’t come over much.”
“Why?”
“You’ll have a lot of things happening here. You shouldn’t have just anybody walking through here.”
“You’re not just anybody.”
He told me that he had gotten a phone call from Pakistani intelligence. We knew he and I were on their radar screen because he had gotten stopped once after visiting me at the Sheraton by a man who said he belonged to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, known as ISI, a group with a dark side of torture and harassment in the country’s history books. “I talked to my parents. They don’t want me coming over.” He told me that a mamoo, one of his maternal uncles, disappeared some years back for days, and his family didn’t want the same to happen to him. I couldn’t believe my ears. I actually thought this crisis would give him the opportunity to stand by my side, even stay with Mariane and me as male protection. Didn’t he understand what we were going through in this land foreign to us? He was adamant. “I have to leave.”
“How can you do this?” I screamed.
“I have no choice,” he responded.
“You always have a choice.” I could only think of the many times I had chosen to displease my parents for my own independent judgment. What about his love for me? He responded with a finality that pierced my heart with a dagger unimaginable.
“I’ve made my choice.”
“Your family?”
“Yes.”
I closed the door and retreated upstairs to the closet that was my meditation chamber. I wept.
The outside world sees Pakistan as a monolithic Muslim nation, but it isn’t. When I had been in Lahore the year before, a relative had told me, “We don’t have our Urdu-speaking girls marry Punjabis.”
When I wed I thought I was satisfying the desires of my culture and religion to marry one of my own. I had no idea about the identity trap into which I was walking. My family is Urdu-speaking Muslims from India, a minority called mohajirs, or immigrants. We are culturally and linguistically different from the Punjabi-speaking Muslims of the region of Punjab that dominates Pakistan politics, military, and bureaucracy. While the two often get along, there is also often a divide of distrust. I married into a Punjabi family, and now I was dating a man from a Punjabi family.
My relative told me, “It’s often said that a Punjabi man will give a Punjabi woman a chauffeur-driven car, a house, a refrigerator, and all the luxuries in the world. She will use the luxuries to appease herself while she looks the other way as he has affairs. But an Urdu-speaking girl will say, ‘Take all your luxuries but give me your loyalty.’”
The headline said, “Baffling Questions about Indian Lady in Pearl Case,” when it showed up in The News, an English-language newspaper related to Jang, the country’s largest circulation newspaper with an estimated two million readers.
From that moment on, I became “the baffling Indian lady.” I read the allegations with both horror and amusement. It said that I was denied my visa twice, that I arrived in Pakistan and then simply disappeared. The article was a direct plant from the Pakistani consulate in New York. It quoted from the letter I had written to Rizwan Khan, the New York press counselor, everything about my vision to cross cultures, my failed marriage to a Pakistani, even my phone number at Sumita’s apartment in Brooklyn—the contact number I’d left for the consulate—and the address of Latif Manzil, gotten from the back of my business card. I couldn’t understand why they were going after me. So what if I was born in India? With Pakistan’s current leader, General Musharraf, born in Delhi, did they judge me an enemy just because of my birthplace? I became enraged at their judgments, but I remained quiet, because our mission was only one: to find Danny.
I remembered the bespectacled manager of the Kwality Restaurant and Fun Foods off Montieth Road in Chennai, a man by the name of Ravindar Visht. Lucy, Esther, and I were waiting at his restaurant for our car, overdue for our trip to Pondicherry. He didn’t have to help us, but he repeatedly called the car service to check on our reservation and, then, Indian Railways for our future train trip to Lucknow.
“Thank you,” I told him.
“It is my farz,” he told me. His duty.
That’s how I felt now. It was my duty as Danny’s friend to find him. In choosing to protect Danny, Mariane, and their unborn son, I chose to aspire to values of selflessness, nairatmya in Sanskrit, the name of a Tantric Tibetan Buddhist female deity, “No-Self.” It meant I had to risk losing my own identity. Ego couldn’t define me. Fear couldn’t deter me. My own questions couldn’t hinder me. Mariane and I were beyond fear, anyway, suspended in a place past terror where there were no rules. We had to persevere. We became powerful beyond tears. I had made my choice.
My boyfriend, meanwhile, would not be swayed from his choice. He returned on the second night, again after work. I couldn’t understand why.
We went upstairs again to the room in which Mariane and I had held our vigil the night of Danny’s kidnapping. He asked me for the book contract my literary agent’s assistant faxed to his office for me days before Danny’s kidnapping.
“Could you rip the top off?” he asked.
What was he talking about? I asked, but I knew the answer. He wanted to discard any trace of his company’s name on the transmission record at the top of the page.
I rifled through my papers, angry and again humiliated. I thrust the paper at him. It didn’t even have his company’s name across the top, just the sender’s identification. I walked away without saying good-bye. After he left, I looked at the paper upstairs. He had torn the top line off.
In the kitchen one day, I confided my personal troubles to a chief Pakistani police investigator whom Mariane and I had started calling Captain and whom we trusted. “Captain, the police have cost me love.”
He listened carefully, looked me in the eye, and said matter-of-factly, “It’s in times of crisis that you discover the true nature of a person’s character.” It was true. I was learning this lesson through a crash course.
The first night after Danny’s disappearance I had curled onto a sofa in my living room so I could be near my home phone in case Danny called and, better yet, near the front door, if Danny should walk through it. Instead, a Pakistani stringer who had helped Danny make contact with the man who set up his Karachi interview had walked through the door, summoned by the police. Before law enforcement got to him, Mariane and I had drilled him for every bit of information. Danny had met his contact at a Rawalpindi hotel. We had already found the trail of e-mails that followed. The man had called himself Bashir. My Urdu from bad Bollywood movies told me that he was trouble. He had put “nobadmashi” in his e-mail address. Badmashi, literally, meant troublemaking. Who was he?
The stringer had linked the man to a dangerous militant Islamic group, Harkatul Mujahadin, fighting Indian troops in the state of Kashmir in northern India. Pakistan claimed the state as its territory ever since partition.
“You never told Danny!” Mariane had exclaimed.
The stringer ha
d admitted that he hadn’t.
The Sunday morning after Danny’s disappearance, Mariane and I readied to go to Pakistan Interior Minister Moinuddin Haider’s house with a cadre of police officials who looked like overgrown boys dressed for Sunday church. Haider oversaw law enforcement. We needed him on our side. The day’s early quiet was broken by a phone call.
“We’ve got a ransom letter with pictures,” a Journal colleague told me.
We ran to Danny’s laptop. I opened my Yahoo account. A Journal bureau chief had forwarded the letter. It came from an e-mail with “kidnapperguy” in the address. It claimed Danny was a spy for the CIA, later spinning him into a spy for Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency. The charges were ironic. Danny had been one of the first to document the widespread feeling in Pakistan that September 11 was a Jewish conspiracy to pin the attack on Muslims. As we drove around on New Year’s Danny had joked about the notion of a Jewish conspiracy: “I missed the last meeting.”
The photos showed Danny with a gun to his head.
“Is it Danny?” Captain asked. Mariane looked for his wedding ring.
“It’s Danny,” she said without a cry. There was no room for emotion to overtake us.