‘But they shot them anyway,’ she concluded with a shrug.
‘Will the UN give us an extra bag of sugar if our answers are sufficiently precise?’ asked Umm Hassan’s son.
‘It’s not exactly for the United Nations, but we are hoping to document evidence of war crimes…’ I had started and that was enough. Oh, the seduction of that term! After that, I couldn’t stop them. The names of the children overwhelmed me. I was writing in a pad by now, exasperated by the form’s lack of ambition, who was whose brother, which girl it was in the red skirt trying to help her three-year-old sister in the blue. There was no stopping it and I scribbled and scratched until way past the hour I had set as the absolutely latest time to leave, while the ghost children, orderly now, stepped up and presented themselves as though I was their teacher, or (God forbid!) their only mother.
He came. He was coming! He had come to get me out of there. The sound of a car travelling far too fast over a bumpy surface, the screeching of tyres audible over drones, helicopters and tanks – that was the sound of him coming for me to get me out of there.
He came! He came! He came!
‘Who left you here?’ he shouted, chucking stuff (a child’s drawing, a first aid kit, a camera lens) off the passenger seat.
‘Hatem. His wife was in labour.’
‘He should never have left you here. Never.’ He was holding the steering wheel in a melodramatically fierce way. I could see the slubs in a blue vein that ran on either side of his middle knuckle. It was him. In the shirt he had worn that evening in Ramallah when he had twiddled the gardenia stalk in his fingers round and round until I pulled it from him and stuck it in his hair for he was too shy to place it in mine. ‘But you’re okay?’ he asked, ‘You look okay.’ Quiet. It was quiet, that last line.
‘I’m fine,’ I insisted, ‘I just messed up my exit strategy, that’s all.’
‘You certainly did that.’ He was looking upwards through a dirt smeared windscreen as he said this because it was clear that one of the helicopters was taking the same path as us. He accelerated, launching us against the rubble-strewn roads, grating at them with the bare-piped stomach of his Fiat.
‘That way,’ I said, although, in truth, I didn’t really know. In darkness, the town had transformed itself again. It was more whole now, more resolute. The human diggers had gone: the men, women and children who had clawed at rubble with spades and hands. Either side of us were tombs of brick, wire and mattresses. The remaining houses were expressionless in the dark. Shuttered up and shut up, sprayed and scrawled with army graffiti that they didn’t agree with.
He was trying to drive fast but the roads weren’t allowing him to. We kept hitting things and being thrown by them.
‘I heard you were in the area. I–’ Even then, I was not considering what it was that was about to happen to us.
‘We may be safer on foot,’ he said, but he did not brake or give me a chance to get out. Tank engines could be heard, even above the strains and skids of the car, the hell of the helicopter. I still had to know, more than anything, I had to know, ‘What happened to her?’
‘To who?’ He shouted, loud, angry like a father. The helicopter was hovering right over us, thwacking away as though the sky were made of tyre rubber.
‘The bride your mother found to replace your unsuitable girlfriend,’ I was screaming. His face turned up to the hovering weapon. A slam of brakes.
‘Get out!’ he screamed, ‘Get out!’
‘Okay, okay–’ I leant forward to get my bag (my bag!?) pulling at the door with the other hand.
He grabbed my arm, made me face him, look at him. His eyes hard, steady, but talking, talking, like I see them now.
‘She was a mistake, okay? The whole thing. She was a big mistake. Now get out. Get out–’
It was at that point that the shelling began.
Asma Elbadawi
Belongings
Belongings
Before I am stripped of my belongings
no tangible hold on the memories I harvested,
there is much to do.
I will one day have to answer to a man that is not my father
and he may not be as understanding.
This man wasn’t there on the first day of nursery,
me standing at lanky school gates in my pink summer dungarees.
This man wasn’t there the day I confessed maths is my weakness
and though I admire the accurate craft of an architect
my hands were not created to build soaring skyscrapers and houses:
I am changing my degree.
This man wasn’t there to summon me for breakfast, lunch and dinner
(everyone knows I cannot cook
I spent my childhood playing cricket, rounders, netball, pool).
He wasn’t there to know that the only sibling I have is a brother
so I know more about toy hot wheel cars and BB guns
than I do of Barbie and Ken.
This man wasn’t there all the times I fell and grazed my knee
all the times I couldn’t stop crying
all the times I couldn’t stop laughing
all the times that I embraced my stretching zone
time and time again I question
is it time to give it all up
before it’s officially time to pick up and uproot?
This man may never understand
that my whole life I worked towards the women I am today.
The clothes I give away
have remnants of my life sewed in them
the watches I wore
tick between chapters of my adolescence
the bags I carried
held me from one country to another.
The name I give away is the name that was used to register me
every day at school
on my passport and birth certificate.
How is it that we erase the history of a women
as if nothing mattered before her wedding day?
Summer
Winter came
and like every one before it I longed for summer.
I have been here for decades,
you would think my flesh would have tightened
to accommodate the short days,
thickened to fight the pinching cold,
the pearl white crumbling snow.
But after that last leaf falls every autumn,
I long for summer again.
The 6 weeks between school years,
between two entities
two me’s infused with relatives and screaming kids.
Relatives I didn’t know existed
until I was in between 11 and 12
and I gazed up at him.
My small body reaches half way between the top of his head
and the sandy ground beneath his shib shib.
I confidently call out in to the thick night ‘Baba’.
I feel the burning of my cheeks as I realise he is not my father
Mother interrupts my embarrassment with her familiar laugh
Da amic Maki ya Asma, akho abook
This is your uncle Maki, Asma, your daddy’s brother.
I have never heard the term brother used in this way.
Brother was Mohammed.
The idea that family was bigger than what I could see
hits the almost 12-year-old me with a tidal wave of
awkward heat.
I guess winter only ever comes to remind me of the warmth of summer,
parts that are missing but always adorned.
Summer lives in the cracks of my skin,
the smile of my grandfather,
the cries of a new-born cousin
and the laughter of the Nile.
Samira Shackle
My Other Half
You ask me about that country whose details now escape me.
I don’t remember its geography, nothing of its history.
And should I visit it in memory,
/> It would be as I would a past lover,
After years, for a night, no longer restless with passion,
With no fear of regret.
I have reached that age when one visits the heart merely as a courtesy.
Faiz Ahmed Faiz
We were the only women on the plane, my mum and I. The London-Dubai leg of the journey had contained a more mixed demographic, but the final stretch, Dubai-Karachi, pretty much entirely consisted of migrant labourers, taking a break from their work in the Gulf to go home for the holidays.
‘This plane is full of peasants,’ Mum whispered to me, loudly. She was a self-avowed feminist and socialist, but this proud egalitarianism went completely out of the window when it concerned her Pakistani compatriots. I assumed it was a hangover from the intensely class-bound society in which she grew up.
She hadn’t really wanted to go; the trip was my doing. My mother was born in Karachi in 1950, three years after this new nation was born out of Partition from India in 1947. She moved to London with her parents and three siblings in the 1970s, when she was in her twenties. Her last trip back had been in the early 1990s, when my brother and I were small. She’s a proud Pakistani who rarely wears western clothes and doles out Urdu proverbs at every opportunity. Yet, she said, she simply hadn’t felt the need to return. Her immediate family is scattered over the globe; parents and brother in the UK, sisters in India and Bangladesh. London became the centre of gravity for our geographically dispersed family, the central point where everyone converged to enjoy and endure each other’s company throughout the summer months, a cacophony of loud voices and strong personalities that grew together despite the vast distances between us in our daily lives.
The trip to Karachi, then, was because of me. It was 2011 – twenty years since our last visit to Pakistan – and, I’d decided, time for me to understand more about this society, at once so familiar and so mirage-like. Growing up in a multicultural area of London, I’d never given a huge amount of thought to my mixed heritage. I was English and I was Pakistani; a Londoner with an exciting first name and ambiguous colouring. I didn’t speak Urdu and wasn’t religious, but could recite Islamic prayers if necessary and utter the most basic Urdu phrases: hello, goodbye, how are you. I could cook Pakistani food and knew how to greet my elders respectfully. The culture – folklore, family history, geography – was soaked into the background of my life. My mother is a mythology fanatic, and my father, although English, is an academic who specialises in the languages and religions of South Asia. This country was so often misrepresented to the world, reduced to a collection of crude stereotypes: corner shops, jalfrezi, terrorism. As an adult, working as a journalist, my interest in my mother’s homeland grew. I had never visited this country – at least, not while I was old enough to remember – but I felt that I instinctively understood it, a generationally transmitted knowledge from my grandparents, my mother, my aunts and uncles. It was mine.
A few months before we boarded that plane, I’d curated a special issue of the New Statesman (where I worked as a staff writer) on Pakistan. I had drawn on my network of family friends for what I’d planned to be a rich and different take on the country. It didn’t look only at Kashmir and militancy, but also at the country’s rich literary history and flourishing arts scene. The issue was a success and I’d had lots of congratulations on the contents, but, due to factors outside my control, it had been published with a picture of a giant cartoon bomb on the cover. To avoid any chance of misunderstanding, the bomb was painted with a Pakistan flag. It hardly did anything to dispel stereotypes, which had been my overwhelming aim in putting the package together. I was mortified. Blinded by maternal love, my grandmother still determinedly distributed the magazine to her extensive network of Pakistani expatriate friends, who politely congratulated me on the contents without mentioning the cover. I wondered whether they were just used to it.
Editors were quite happy to take my ethnic origins as evidence of my authority to write on Pakistan, but I began to feel I should go there and see for myself if I actually understood as much as I thought I did. After all, what does it really mean to be ‘from’ somewhere, if you’ve spent your entire life thousands of miles away?
Persuading Mum wasn’t the easiest task. ‘I don’t like the heat,’ she said. ‘I don’t like long flights. Actually, I don’t really like Pakistan.’ But, eventually, the calls were made to her cousin Sumayra in Karachi – my aunt, in the south Asian way of describing family relations. One of the many anomalies of my family was that my mother and her siblings had never held Pakistani passports; their grandfather – my great-grandfather – had been a Knight Commander of the British Empire, so the family had been given British passports at birth. Accordingly they never really considered themselves immigrants when they moved to the UK, despite the fact they had grown up in Pakistan. I’d never had any Pakistani identification either, so Mum and I both applied for visas, and the flights were booked. There we were, on a plane, heading towards a homecoming of sorts.
A heavy-set man pushed past me to get his luggage out of the overhead carriage. Grumpy and tired after eight hours of travel, I shot him a filthy look and sighed ostentatiously. Mum grabbed my arm, with panic in her eyes. ‘You mustn’t fight with these villagey types,’ she said, horrified, after he’d sat down. ‘You don’t know how they’ll react to an assertive woman.’
I decided it wasn’t the time to discuss her inconsistent class politics. And anyway, the flight from Dubai to Karachi, a coastal mega-city in Pakistan’s south-west, was mercifully short, which meant limited opportunity for Mum to offend anyone. I settled back into my seat and closed my eyes.
As the plane landed an hour later, clapping and cheers broke out. The man in the seat in front of us leant forward, his hands clasped. ‘Alhamdulillah apni sar-zameen peh pohonche,’ he said, his voice full of emotion.
Mum translated for me. ‘He said “Praise God, we have arrived on our earth, under our sky”. It means we’ve come home, to the land that we belong to.’ I looked at her. She had tears in her eyes.
Karachi, city of lights, home to more than 20 million people, doesn’t exactly have a good reputation. Mum and her siblings had always spoken about it as a cosmopolitan, coastal paradise, a swinging city that had been the proud capital of Pakistan upon Partition in 1947, the jewel in the crown of this new country full of promise. Even before my family left in the 1970s, government had migrated to the new capital, Islamabad, a planned city located closer to the middle of this enormous country. Since then, the security situation in the country at large had deteriorated, along with governance. And Karachi had become known primarily for crime, terrorism, and political violence.
Before leaving, I made the mistake of looking at the Foreign Office’s travel guidance, which at the time could pretty much be summarised as ‘don’t go’. (This was 2011 and there had been an upsurge in political violence, with murder rates skyrocketing). The threats were constantly referenced by friends and relatives – practically everyone seemed to have a story about being held at gunpoint or kidnapped – but whiling away afternoons in palatial houses, eating an array of delicious fried snacks, it didn’t feel particularly immediate.
There was a constant, dizzying stream of relatives I’d never met before, some I’d never even heard of. Cousins, aunts, uncles, great-aunts, great-uncles, friends of my grandparents, friends of my mother’s, friends of my aunts’. ‘Look! It’s Samira, Shahrukh’s daughter, Ahmed Husain’s granddaughter. Aren’t you tall? Aren’t you fair? Didn’t you go to Oxford?’ But after these initial exclamations, what surprised me most was the fact that I wasn’t much of a novelty at all, despite my fair skin and English accent. As soon as I’d been placed within the family web, understood as part of the network of Karachi society, I was immediately accepted, unquestioningly enveloped into this huge tapestry of people I had never known.
It was March and the weather was starting to heat up, although there was a delicious sea breeze that managed to c
ut through the sharp, dry heat, even on the warmest days. I sat in the garden next to the pool, surrounded by sumptuous greenery, delicate yellow and white frangipani flowers, and vibrant bursts of red and orange hanging from the trees above. I wanted to wear my bikini so I could get a tan, so my aunt Sumayra told the servants (there was a small army of them) not to come outside. This was ostensibly to stop them from leering, but I suspected it was also to prevent their minds from being corrupted by the sight of a practically naked woman blithely wandering around, in a place where it’s highly unusual to show your knees in public.
Sweat dripped off my forehead onto the page of my book; the air was baking hot, but I didn’t want to admit defeat. I was sitting outside in defiance of a series of woeful, direly serious warnings from relatives about the risk to my health. An older relative looked distressed when I mentioned my plans to bronze my skin. ‘You’ve been blessed with a fair complexion, and this is what you do?’ Someone else warned me that I could expect severe stomach upsets if I overheated, and another that Karachi sun didn’t turn you golden, but grey. I chose to ignore them.
Eventually, though, I gave up, oppressed by the heat, and went inside, hoping that noone would gloat about my failed mission. When I’d cooled down, we went for a driving tour of the city, my aunt, my mother, and I. My aunt pointed out places of their childhood – the house where they had lived as children, the place where this cousin or that cousin still lived. Mum repeated that she couldn’t believe the change. As we passed the building where she’d gone to school, she told me that, when she grew up, there was nothing but marshland between this structure and the sea, where now a thousand buildings had sprung up.
A few days later, we went for dinner with an old family friend at Bar-B-Que Tonite, a five-floor restaurant with a roof terrace offering a spectacular view of the city by night. It was a balmy evening, the heat of the day lifting to a near-perfect temperature after the sun went down, the breeze a reminder of the nearby sea.
We looked out over Karachi, the lights shining under the haze of pollution. ‘I can’t get my bearings at all,’ said Mum.
The Things I Would Tell You Page 16