‘Even I want to kill myself, ha ha ha,’ laughs a senior cardiac specialist, who finds any opportunity to bring up his newly purchased Toyota Corolla, a luxury bought from Islamabad with who-knows-who’s money. ‘Maybe I should drink car battery fluid, too, hain?’
Sikandar slaps his colleague on the back. ‘No such thing, boss, no such thing. Remember, malgaray – car battery fluid is, in fact, sulphuric acid, remember, boss?’ Sikandar says. ‘Our medical books called it the oil of vitriol.’
‘Nah, baba, za na poy gam.’ The cardiac specialist doesn’t follow.
‘Vitriol, boss? Vitriol,’ Sikandar explains, ‘because it’s so often employed to disfigure women’s faces.’
‘Kha, kha, yes, yes, say no more.’
‘No such thing,’ Sikandar repeats, putting his hands to his lips and silencing the doctor before he becomes insistent about his imaginary suicide.
He leaves his fellow doctors and prepares to shut down. This diversion has offered a brief respite from what is still ahead. Sikandar stops smiling as he walks down the corridor towards the car, where Mina sits waiting for him, her dupatta pulled tightly round her head. He will drop her home, drive straight to the Bukhari street mosque and then back to the empty casualty ward, to ensure spending as little of the day as possible at home.
• • •
As he opens the door, his fingers moistening from the raindrops hidden on the plastic of the handle, Sikandar hears his name being called and the sound of heels clicking against the pavement.
‘Wait!’
It is Dr Saffiyeh, a surgeon on call in casualty. She is a tall woman with short hair she sweeps back under a headband. Dr Saffiyeh squeezes her toes into modest pumps every morning, often to match the cotton shalwar kameez under her cold white doctor’s smock. Somehow she manages to transcend the hospital’s chaotic environment. Sikandar has seen her prowling the wards with several clipboards pressed against her chest and junior doctors trailing behind her.
‘There’s an emergency, past the forest,’ Saffiyeh huffs, out of breath, as she points to an empty hospital van.
‘Where’s the ambulance?’ Sikandar doesn’t understand why Saffiyeh has forced this news upon him.
‘Gone for prayers. All the drivers. Can’t find any of them. There’s a possible stillbirth – the family doesn’t know what’s happening, the midwife is some quack who turned up with crushed dung and chalk to feed to the poor mother in the hopes of producing painless contractions. Maybe the child is just in breach, maybe it’s dead. You have to go and deliver it.’
Saffiyeh doesn’t know his name, does she? She has barely acknowledged Sikandar since accosting him and inviting him to take on an emergency case while his wife sits quietly in his car. She hands him a small leather case.
‘Plus, this is an ambulance.’ She pats the old hospital supply van that has scratches along its side and a metallic Allah swinging on a chain dangling from the rear-view mirror.
‘I can’t help,’ Sikandar protests. ‘What am I supposed to do during the delivery?’ It is a weak attempt, this playing of the namahram card, but he really has no time to spare this morning. ‘You know what things are like now – how careful people are. How will they explain a male doctor?’
The brothers all have to be home to eat Eid lunch: freshly spiced biryani with soft lamb boti, yoghurt with ice-cold cucumber and mint leaves, milk and pistachio-scented rice pudding. He can still taste this morning’s buttered paratha on the walls of his mouth. It had been an awkward morning at breakfast. His brothers had barely spoken to each other, which was strange since they had seemed closer these past two months. Hayat had been sullen; his eyes looked like he had not closed them all night. Aman Erum had been more than usually evasive and Mina nowhere to be found. Mina will probably miss lunch too if she takes one of her pills and spends the day floating in and out of sleep. If he is to keep himself Eid-free for the rest of the day, Sikandar will have to make it home for lunch at the very minimum.
‘Who’s asking you for your afternoon agenda, zwe? It’s an emergency. Just drive there, correct the problem and be on your way.’ Saffiyeh is all business. She holds her hands above her head, protecting herself against the light drizzle. The rain smells like dry earth, even here in this scarred concrete parking lot.
Dr Saffiyeh calls Sikandar son, yet he is – at least – seven years older than she is, with a light beard marked with patches of white hair on his chin and cheeks. Sikandar snorts, and while still standing in the lot he reaches into the van and turns the key. The van looks old. Sikandar will have to let it warm up for a minute. It sputters and coughs as it comes to life. ‘I’m not opposed to heavy lifting,’ he says, recovering from the slight. ‘I work damn hard.’ Saffiyeh pays no attention to him. She concentrates on the progress of the van’s engine.
‘I’m Sikandar,’ he ventures, not having access to the inner workings of Saffiyeh’s mind, which has already decided that this very sort of exchange is unnecessary.
‘I know.’ Saffiyeh turns to face her reluctant chauffeur. ‘We know who you are.’ She pauses. ‘I was never able to offer my condolences in person.’ Saffiyeh pauses again and studies Sikandar. But this is as far as she can go.
Sikandar nods. ‘Mehrabani,’ he says, though she has not offered anything more than a footnote to a condolence oversight.
‘Zache zoo, baba.’ Saffiyeh’s eyes are on the road, sweeping the parking lot before the van has properly warmed up or moved across an inch of concrete. ‘Let’s go,’ she instructs, hitting the hood of the van as if to kick-start it. When it doesn’t move she faces her new ambulance driver and raises her eyebrows impatiently. ‘Zoo!’ Go!
Sikandar glances at the van, still sputtering and hacking black air out of its exhaust, and jogs quickly over to the Suzuki. Opening Mina’s door he beckons her with his hand.
‘Come.’ His fingers curl into his palm.
Mina looks at him blankly. The handbag on her lap is pressed into her stomach, the way she holds a hot-water bottle against her during cold Mir Ali winter mornings. She does not want to step out into the parking lot.
‘It’s an emergency, Mina. They need a doctor. We’ll be done soon and I need you to come with me.’
Having her there will comfort the family of the mother in labour. They will never accept a male doctor. Not even in a time of emergency, not in these remote forest parts. But Mina’s presence might make a difference. She can talk to the mother, busy herself distracting the family, so Sikandar can get the business of delivery over with. Mina was once exactly who Sikandar would have hoped for in such a situation. Now he only hopes she will cooperate.
Since the funerals have been demoted to a fortnightly and not a weekly affair – they had been an almost daily headache back when Mina was manic, overwrought with the grief that now seems only to tranquillize her – Sikandar suspects that his wife is finally letting go. He doesn’t know how she will react to a birth; he doesn’t know if it will send her into a rage or break her down. Will it have the same effect as the funerals? He doesn’t know. Sikandar knows very little about his wife these days.
Slowly, like she is being led, and for no other discernible reason, Mina assents and walks over to the new vehicle. Holding her bag against her, she lifts herself into the van and tucks her dupatta behind her ears for reassurance, making them stick out clumsily. Sikandar looks at Mina. She suddenly reminds him of the early days of their marriage when they were both so shy around each other. Sikandar resists the urge to reach over to Mina. He hears the rattling sound again as she settles into her new seat.
Sikandar opens the latch to slide himself into the roomy front seat of the van and they start their journey, driving over the speed bumps and pockmarked roads that lead the way out of the parking lot. Chunks of rubble and charred steel columns lie where the gate once was.
Sikandar is careful not to drive too slowly and not too fast e
ither, nothing that might attract the attention of the additional troops sent to man Mir Ali ahead of the minister’s arrival.
Mina folds her arms on top of the bag on her lap and fiddles with her phone. Sikandar reads the address of the house-call several times to himself before he agrees with the directions, silently mouthing street names and left turns. He isn’t nervous, his hands are steady.
The hospital van’s windows are open. There is a chill in the air. Mina continues to check her phone messages. Sikandar mentally sorts through the paltry medical equipment he is carrying and wishes he had thought to bring more of everything and less of one particular passenger.
Sikandar pulls his jacket, lined with itchy sheepskin, closer to him. They pass the hospital’s residential quarters and avoid the main roads, taking side streets whenever possible to lessen their travel time towards the sticks outside Mir Ali where a child is being strangled, born with its umbilical cord wrapped tightly round its neck.
8
They drive across the city on his motorbike, leaning into each other against the cold. It is safer for them to take small alleyways, revving the motor as they weave in and out of narrow roads. In the shadowed gullies between ramshackle homes, children loiter on the streets. They drift around their crumbling neighbourhoods, fluorescent-green snot smeared across their cheeks, their scalps shaved to keep the lice and parasites from feeding on their skin.
Some have sweaters over their filthy shalwar kameez. Big woolly ones, ages too old for the children that wear them. The sweaters hang off their shoulders and cover their tummies like ponchos.
They stand there, in pairs, quietly. Gazing at nothing. Some of them carry sticks, tools to sift through the garbage. They are natural garbage-pickers due to their small hands and compact bodies that allow them to submerge themselves beneath the mounds of rot that collect on Mir Ali’s streets.
• • •
Hayat slows down through the labyrinths when he sees the children. He doesn’t want to frighten them, to rouse them from their glassy-eyed stupor. He feels Samarra’s hair whip against his neck. He smells her, a delicate scent, as they brace themselves against the light December rain.
She wears a ring of raat ki rani on her wrist. A garland of jasmine flowers braided through a wisp of metal that she fastens on her hand. Her silver threads were once unadorned. She used to wear them plain, with the ends of the makeshift bracelet cutting into her pulse when she wrote or dressed and undressed, pulling fabric over her arms.
But that was some time ago. Now she adorns them with jasmines, like a bride.
Sitting side-saddle, Samarra holds on to Hayat. She doesn’t say a word. Not even when they pause in traffic and make way for larger cars and vehicles to pass. She keeps her silence and buries her face against the back of his neck. It isn’t done. Too conspicuous, Hayat always tells her when she touches him in public. It isn’t done, even if they assume we’re married. But Samarra ignores him, resting her cheek on his back as he drives. Let them assume, she always replies. But Hayat is discreet, as he has always been. He’s secretive about things that are done and things that are not. No public displays. Not in Mir Ali.
Samarra doesn’t drive a motorbike herself any more. Not since Ghazan Afridi left that spring, taking the Chinese motorbike that Samarra learned to drive on Mir Ali’s mountain roads with him. Now she sits behind Hayat and keeps her body still, so as not to tilt the bike left or right, already unbalanced as it is, as they drive down a straight path. She sits behind Hayat and holds him, listening to the rain.
Hayat scans the road ahead, careful not to displace Samarra as he turns his face from side to side to make sure the alleyways are clear. He sees the green and white poster again. This one is loaded with text: ‘Militants must lay down their weapons,’ it says in Pashto. ‘Choose to be a part of the tribal areas’ inevitable progress.’ They have no choice; they have to look at the proud army as their defenders and protectors. Hayat faces away from the posters.
He feels, as she moves with him, that Samarra’s eyes follow his and that she shifts her weight, lifting and dropping her shoulders to meet the motorbike’s subtle bend towards right lanes and left intersections. He wants to speak to her, to say something, something urgent, but she won’t be able to hear him above the roar of the bike and the hum of Mir Ali’s morning. Samarra does not hear well in any case. He speaks to her at a decibel he prefers not to, too loudly. But she can’t hear out of her right ear. Hayat does not ask why. He keeps his silence too; there is little point speaking to Samarra these days. She seems remote, locked up by her rage. Hayat can’t reach her any more.
He pulls the bike into a small patch of dusty ground near the recently scorched stadium and parks among the cycles and autorickshaws.
Hayat lifts himself off the motorcycle and turns his back as he waits for Samarra to straighten her shalwar kameez before walking through the parked vehicles and towards the hollow frame of the stadium.
Her fabric is a crushed yellow, embroidered lightly with faint strands of blue thread. She wears socks, navy-blue ones, with her brown shoes. She covers her toes in the winter, but not her face, not her hair. ‘They can see you,’ Hayat often tells her. ‘It’s dangerous what you do – not covering your hair. They recognize you.’ But Samarra has spent a life lying in wait. She will not hide any more.
Not in any other way is she protected or prepared for warmth. Samarra drapes a dark shawl across her shoulders; she wears it as a man does, casually, carelessly.
She follows Hayat quietly, her feet stumbling over the broken earth beneath her as she balances herself, careful not to make too much noise but not to fall either. Out of the corner of his eye, Hayat thinks he can see her lips part, as though she’s about to speak.
He imagines he sees her start and stop sentences, almost as if she were speaking to herself. Hayat has not let Samarra out of his sight, out of his eye-line, for years. Now and then he throws a glance backwards to make sure she is following as they walk.
There is a small semi-covered archway that remains upright, untouched by the machinery that felled the structure in which Mir Ali’s men would gather to watch cricket or even hockey when the summer was good and the sun gentle. The archway had been attached to an annex that housed the relatively important entourages of the relatively important athletes or the very important state ministers and governors who came to be photographed on this rotten turf.
The annex had been demolished by the bombing of an unmanned plane. All that remains now is the entrance.
Hayat kicks at the chunks of concrete as he walks towards the biggest blocks. He doesn’t want Samarra sitting on the ground, wet and muddy as it is. With the open palm of her right hand, she wipes the rainwater off a slab of what must have been a roof, a ceiling, a wall, and sits down on it, resting her long canvas bag by her feet. Hayat doesn’t sit. He stands and struggles with his thoughts. It is quiet now, there is no noise around them, but still Hayat cannot find the words. Samarra speaks first.
‘I didn’t think I was nervous in the classroom. I didn’t think it was any different to the other times we’ve met to discuss operations. There was no heating in the building – you know how cold it was in there, even more so with the window open and Nasir smoking cigarette after cigarette. But then, as I spoke, I began to sweat and I could smell my fear.’ Samarra crosses and uncrosses her ankles.
She has forgotten how to meet the eyes of the men she speaks to. She looks away from them, her chin digging into her shoulder as she talks, her eyes fixed on a distant, hazy outline of something no one else can see.
Hayat senses a lull in Samarra’s rambling monologue. He should speak now before she starts up again.
Hayat steps closer to her.
Samarra lifts her eyes from the wretchedness of their surroundings.
‘Stop,’ she says, looking at him for the first time.
9
Aman Erum met Co
lonel Tarik at his second interview, when he was called back to the US embassy. On that second visit a polite fellow in plain clothes, who looked foreign but spoke flawless Pashto, received Aman Erum at the convention centre.
He was seated in a VIP room, with leather sofas and VIP wafer biscuits and whirring fax machines, far away from the throngs who pushed and shoved to get through the convention centre and grab good places on the departing embassy buses. He was offered a cup of tea and his choice of chicken or beef patties while he waited, with his escort, for something to happen. Aman Erum removed his scarf and woollen hat as he drank his tea, sipping around the clotted skin of milk, and carefully broke the thin pastry shell of a minced meat pie.
They wouldn’t have brought him back to refuse him, to rescind the work visa, he thought. That could easily have been done by post. Aman Erum had forgotten to bring a handkerchief and his fingers were oily from the patty. He was surreptitiously wiping his hands on his Zulfikar Sons trousers when a white jeep pulled up. It had official licence plates, antennae and a small uniformed driver. The escort informed him that they were ready to be taken to the appointment.
Aman Erum was not nervous; he wanted it too badly. He wanted to be free, to move without notice, to study, to learn, to expand his life that had so far been restricted to a border town. He had been quarantined in Mir Ali too long. Everything – success, comfort, respect – felt out of reach in Mir Ali. He wanted to be a free man. He wanted a life that was bigger than his father’s, one that came with luxury and comfort and choices. He wanted something better than Mir Ali could offer. He wanted the milky tea and the still-warm patties, too, if he was being honest. He wanted to be received at separate entrances, to be chauffeured by discreet drivers, to be accompanied by foreign contacts who asked him if everything, the tea, the patties, was to his liking.
The Shadow of the Crescent Moon Page 9