‘Wait,’ he said, pinching the air with his fingers. ‘The coming years will bring Pakistan to its knees.’ Ghazan Afridi told Samarra to be patient. They were building something big. He drove the motorbike up to Jalalabad one summer, journeying alongside the Kunar, leaving Samarra alone at camp.
Aman Erum didn’t have to wait for Samarra to come to him then. There was no interminable hanging around and killing time, sitting, as he had become used to doing, in front of the honeycomb screen door in Mir Ali, listening for the sound of her footsteps on the pebbles outside his house, with books piled on his lap, the weight of them deadening his legs.
‘What if we lived here?’ Aman Erum asked one midnight outside their fathers’ tents. ‘What if we just stayed?’ For as long as he could remember he had felt constrained in Mir Ali. He wanted to get out, to be free, to make money, to move without checkpoints and military police poking their red berets into your car and asking for your papers. The other boys of Aman Erum’s age didn’t seem to feel confined by the country’s wild borders; they didn’t feel restricted the way he did.
Samarra laughed. Even in the dark, Aman Erum could see the spotty pink of her gums. ‘This isn’t our home.’
‘But we could make it our home. I could be a guide, set up a business. Take travellers through the passes.’
Aman Erum knew about the mountains, he knew how to navigate the forests. Inayat had taught him how to magnetize a needle, rubbing it on wool cut from the sleeve of a sweater for three minutes until his fingers went numb. Inayat would watch as Aman Erum laid the needle on a leaf, making a compass to guide them through the unknown wilderness. His father had taught him maps of the land, drawn from memory and measured in footsteps, not miles. Belonging. Inayat thought his son would find belonging in this cartography of the heart. But Inayat was thinking of a different boy, a much younger son.
Aman Erum was fifteen. He had been dreaming up escape plans since taking his first trip out of Mir Ali many summers before. Chitral was all he knew of Pakistan so far. But he had seen a magazine photo spread on Bahawalpur, its sandstone palaces lit up with fairy lights, its magnificent forts and blue and white shrines. He had read about the port in Karachi, about the ships that sailed there from Greece and Turkey full of cargo, and the highways that connected the green plains of the Punjab. He would go anywhere. He didn’t care where, but he didn’t want to spend his life in Mir Ali.
‘You can’t do that.’
Samarra was sixteen.
Aman Erum stared at her green eyes, unlined except by her thick lashes. A dark-brown speck of colour escaped her iris. Even this, Aman Erum thought, looking at Samarra under Chitral’s pale moonlight, was beautiful. Her spindly arms had filled out and her voice had grown up too. Samarra pronounced her words slowly, almost languidly. Aman Erum turned away from her and looked out over the valley.
‘Of course I can. I’ve been coming here since I was a boy. I know the terrain and the trails. I’ve been hiking with Baba since – I don’t know. Ten years? There are so many travellers out here on their own. How do you think they’re getting around now? No one’s taking them to the best spots, where there’re carp and rainbow trout and the open –’
Samarra, whose hair was no longer in plaits but now loose round her shoulders, interrupted him.
‘No, you can’t choose your home. You can’t just make a new one.’
Aman Erum was quiet. She didn’t understand about the future.
Samarra, who no longer wore jeans, stood up and cleaned the grass from her shalwar, wet in patches from the dew. ‘We have a home.’
Her words were swallowed by the night. Aman Erum wasn’t listening.
• • •
The summer Samarra turned seventeen, she didn’t come to camp. No one had seen Ghazan Afridi since the spring. He had packed his motorcycle with enough food for a week’s drive. He waved goodbye to his wife as she stood at the doorstep and kissed his daughter’s hand. Think of me, Ghazan Afridi said. He touched her hand to his eyes. Ghazan Afridi didn’t say where he was going; he rarely did those days. Think of me. That was all he said. It was all Samarra ever did.
The fathers considered delaying the trip, breaking the tradition to keep vigil for Ghazan Afridi, but in the end they went. Who knew when he would return? Who knew if he would? And in what shape?
‘It might be months. It could be years, even,’ Aman Erum said to Samarra Afridi by way of commiseration as he packed for the trip.
Rolling the tarpaulin neatly onto the back of Inayat’s light-blue pick-up truck, Aman Erum said the word years. Samarra had heard people gossip; she had heard them say that Ghazan Afridi had another family across the border. She had heard people say he had other children. That he had been running training camps. Taking money from other countries, from other states. She had heard all those things, and she’d been happy to hear them. Nothing was worse than what she imagined.
‘Maybe years, Samarra – most probably just a few months, but even if it’s years, he’ll return.’
He loaded the truck and nodded his head. ‘Maybe years.’
But Ghazan Afridi never did come back.
Aman Erum climbed into the back of the truck, and sat holding a jerrycan of petrol between his knees. He envied Ghazan Afridi. He had got out. It almost didn’t matter to Aman Erum how. He was so sick of Mir Ali. ‘Samarra, you know more than any of us that he’ll return.’ He spoke to her as he adjusted the can, pointing the nozzle away from him and making sure he had enough space to stretch out his legs, but when he looked up he saw Samarra had already left. He couldn’t see her but he heard her footsteps fading on the pebbles outside his house.
Aman Erum wrote Samarra poetry until their adulthood brought their communication by letter, and therefore unchaperoned, to the notice of the grown-ups who guarded their children’s hearts.
Samarra never wrote a single line of poetry back to her beloved. She allowed Aman Erum’s serenades and consented to receive every stanza and story as a necessary diversion, but she was too heartbroken to reply in verse. Samarra would not go to university like Aman Erum. She would stop at matric, a tenth-grade education which the world had decided was more than enough for a seventeen-year-old beauty who would never, they hoped, have cause for further studies. Her life would be blessed, they imagined, and she would not have the time to study once married and living in her husband’s home. Perhaps Ghazan Afridi would have returned to see his daughter settled by then. Wouldn’t she like that? Wouldn’t that be nice?
Samarra wouldn’t complain. She would study on her own, at home, reading second-hand physics books bought at the small bookstall at the bazaar that sold comic books and dog-eared copies of Rahman Baba’s poetry, and doing exercises in used exam workbooks until eventually the elders had no choice but to relent and allow her to attend the local university, provided she stopped after a Bachelor’s degree.
Aman Erum had applied, quietly, to the army. It was a secret attempt to flee. He was young, he had no record, his mother’s family was clean. He thought they might take him out of Mir Ali and into one of their cadet colleges. Two things happened. First, he was turned down. The army didn’t want men from these parts; they didn’t even have a recruitment office in Mir Ali then. The officer Aman Erum had spoken to, the lone man in khaki green on duty at the base, had laughed in his face.
So, first, Aman Erum had been turned down, and second, Inayat had found out. Aman Erum never knew how his father discovered his attempt to enlist in the armed forces – he hadn’t said a word to his mother or brothers – but Inayat knew. Discussing his second option, his only viable option, at the kitchen table one evening Aman Erum spoke of studying commerce at the local university.
‘It would be a step, obviously. I’m not going to study commerce just so I can stay in Mir Ali and haggle over the price of carpets. It would give me the foundation to apply for further studies abroad. Yes, fine, it will be
expensive but if I work hard here perhaps I can get a scholarship.’
Aman Erum devoted more time to thinking about himself as he grew older and became bolder about expressing his desires. Sikandar, the middle brother, had been listening and holding a broken-off bite of rotay in mid-air.
‘How much do you think?’
Aman Erum considered the question. ‘I’d have to pay – it would be lakhs – even with a scholarship, but probably only the cost of housing and living.’
At that, Inayat, who ate very little, only some yoghurt with his rotay, pushed his plate away. ‘You will have to pay for your choices, Aman Erum, much more than you realize.’
The words hung between them.
Aman Erum’s heart started to beat fast, too fast. He looked at his own plate, filled with food he hadn’t touched because he’d been so busy talking. He picked up a piece of lamb, a small charred boti, and put it in his mouth.
Inayat placed his hands on the table and lifted himself out of his chair. He left the kitchen without another word.
The only way out for Aman Erum, then, was business. He had to earn his way out. Aman Erum was the eldest son, the one who would set the way for his brothers to follow, a way out of the carpet business the family had struggled in for decades – and which was now endangered because of the halting of trade routes and the army’s insistence on being given a share in the transportation of rugs across the Northern Frontiers.
‘Askari Carpets!’ laughed Aman Erum’s father, his hair a bright white from the roots of his scalp to the down of his beard and neatly trimmed moustache. ‘Imagine that,’ he said, and laughed less confidently, more softly.
‘They will have put their fingers everywhere, even on the ground on which we stand and the fibres through which we weave our stories.’
• • •
Inayat had fought in the first battle for Mir Ali in the 1950s, and had survived. He had fought amongst the bravest, against the nervous young soldiers of Pakistan’s new army. He had raised his young sons on the stories of Mir Ali’s struggles.
‘After a fortnight of camping in the hills and peaks on our bellies, ducking bullets and trading fire with monstrous machines, we would dust off our shawls that doubled as elbow rests and mufflers and pillows and welcome in the next regiment that came from the city to take our place. After donating our leftover tea leaves and warmest winter protection, we walked an hour and a half to the doorsteps of our mothers’ homes.’
‘Did you go back?’ Aman Erum must have been fifteen. He was only a boy.
For many years after that conversation, Inayat shook with the memory of this question, a query Aman Erum did not even remember making.
‘Did we go back? Did we go back?’
Inayat shook his head and ran his hands through his hair.
Aman Erum did not remember asking if the rebels returned to the battlefield. But later in life, as he began to withdraw from Mir Ali, he remembered other questions from his teenage years.
‘The next two decades we spent in hiding, in torture camps, in unknown and unmarked cells across the country.’ As his body aged, as his shoulders drooped and the white hair of his eyebrows grew, and as Inayat’s lungs strained against his ribcage, he committed the remainder of his life to passing on the memories of a youth lived in battle, fighting for Mir Ali.
‘The state did not wait, this time, for a rebel band to cross a frontier and plant a flag or issue a proclamation of independence and self-rule. This time they came to us first. They waited for the lull in fighting to settle in fully. For us fighters to take off our magazine clips, our rugged boots and camouflage, and return to the daily lives and uniforms that took us to work as professors and shopkeepers and economics students and plumbers. And then they sent the soldiers in.’
Thousands of them, in convoys of armoured vehicles, weighed down with garlands of assault weapons and hand grenades, flooded into Mir Ali. They came in conquering battalions and in plain clothes. Aman Erum knew the story by heart.
Doors were broken down in the dead of night, men were kidnapped from their streets, women were widowed and children were orphaned to teach the town its most important lesson: there was no match for the ruthlessness of the state. Another generation of male warriors would not grow in Mir Ali.
Inayat brought himself to tears as he spoke.
‘Some of the elders were able to escape across the border to Afghanistan; some of their sons joined them and were eventually hunted down – killed and left to bleed on faraway soil and buried in no-man’s-land. For a time, till the late seventies, the state believed – truly believed! – that they had beaten the rebellion out of the people of Mir Ali.’
‘Haven’t they?’
Aman Erum remembered this question now.
‘Haven’t they already?’
And he would never forget the silence that followed.
• • •
Inayat did not tell Aman Erum his stories from then on. Inayat was a sentinel of Mir Ali’s history; he checked for those with whom his nostalgia might be shared and for those to whom it should be denied.
‘Don’t isolate the boy,’ Zainab begged her husband as she watched him take their youngest into his memory, nightly feeding Hayat the stories while Aman Erum was left to his schoolbooks. ‘You’re excluding him.’
‘He’s too angry,’ Inayat would say quietly. ‘He counts my defeats.’
‘Aman Erum is just a boy,’ Zainab argued. ‘He won’t understand why you speak to Hayat about these stories and not to him.’
‘He understands.’
Inayat would shake his head and say quietly, ‘He understands very well, Zainab.’
• • •
Mir Ali’s history continued like this.
Most Pakistanis thought of Mir Ali with the same hostility they reserved for India or Bangladesh; insiders – traitors – who fought their way out of the body and somehow made it on their own without the glory of the crescent moon and star shining overhead.
But the shadow of that moon never faded over Mir Ali. It hung over its sky night after night, condemning the town to life under its cold shadow.
Mir Ali had stalled. Aman Erum refused to be stymied alongside it.
Aman Erum wanted to leave. He wanted a stamped passport out of his strangled home. But he said, convincingly, that it was only the opportunity to work freely that he wanted – a living that could not be threatened away.
He could make a business anywhere, he told his mother, who knew nothing about free markets but often dreamed of the world. He could take a flight to Australia and set up an international travel agency marketing itself towards immigrants, those whose home countries did not feature on routes advertised at Qantas office desks or listed on their computers.
He could go to Canada – there were immigrants there too, living in empty, undecorated homes – and import local handicrafts that would be a reminder of the landscapes left thousands of miles away as they built their new Canadian lives.
England. He had heard of neighbours’ sons who left for England and worked in corner stores and restaurants until they built neighbourhoods out of their enterprise. It would be easy, Aman Erum told his family, his young brothers, once he learned the international language of business.
His brothers, younger by months and then by years, followed his plans avidly. Sikandar even silently marked Aman Erum’s university textbooks as his own for when he also earned a place to study commerce. Together, he and Hayat waited for invitations to be offered, for chances to become partners in Aman Erum’s yet-to-be-named, yet-to-be-established international businesses.
But Aman Erum’s invitations never came without a price.
• • •
‘The Pir Roshan road jumat?’ the taxi driver says, turning his head so the passenger, who has not stirred in his seat or moved his eyes away from the window, can hear
him. ‘It’s not what it used to be. The sermons are short and uninspired. Why don’t you go to the Sulaiman mosque instead? I can drive you there. The imam is very spirited, fiery, much better.’
‘One of my brothers is going there. I’m going to Hussain Kamal jumat,’ Aman Erum says, as he follows Mir Ali’s roads intently. He doesn’t look at the taxi driver, a jaundiced-looking fellow with a brown woollen sweater over his wrinkled kameez.
‘So why not go with him? What are you doing going to that far-off mosque when you could be with family at Sulaiman jumat?’
‘Too dangerous.’
He turns his head away from the window, just a degree, to meet the frown of the taxi driver’s eyebrows, a look almost permanently stitched to the man’s forehead.
‘In case something happens.’
Aman Erum clears his throat. The sentence is stuck in his windpipe and needs to be ejected properly. Does he sound paranoid?
No one goes to the vegetable market with their mother; she goes alone and carries the thin plastic bags of over-ripened aubergines and salty karela on her own, her arthritic knuckles turning white with the weight of the vegetables.
No one works at the mechanic stall their father built with his sons’ hands, after the death of the family’s old carpet business, a death that came after Aman Erum’s refusal to take it over – as he is often reminded. They take shifts when things pile up for their father’s old manager, who still runs the shop. But no longer do Aman Erum or his brothers stand together over burned engines, smoking cigarettes through fingers stained with toxic grease and sweat.
No one prays together, travels in pairs, or eats out in groups. It is how they live now, alone.
The taxi driver’s forehead falls; his eyes understand.
‘I don’t go for Friday munz any more. It’s better not to. Allah will exempt us. He has already exempted us. He has exempted and misplaced and forgotten everything that came to Him from Mir Ali, from the frontiers of this country within a country.’
Aman Erum doesn’t want to get into it.
The Shadow of the Crescent Moon Page 2