Mina howls, Sikandar hears her – it registers as a loud, desperate wail. For a moment, he can’t see. There is a buzzing behind his left eye that he hears somewhere in his body; he can’t tell if it’s his ears that clock the sound or some deep, frightened part of his brain.
His heartbeat races and then slows as he opens his eyes, straining to see, as if he could, what has just happened to him. His legs feel cold; he doesn’t dare look down to his feet. Sikandar runs his tongue over the inside of his cheek and across his gums; he can taste the iron in his bloodied mouth. His neck hurts as he tries to move his head to face his attackers. There is a pulse that reacts, throbbing with every fraction of a millimetre that his body moves.
He sees three men, tall rangy-looking men in their late twenties wearing shalwar kameez frayed at the collars and cuffs. Woollen shawls wrapped round their bodies are held down by Kalashnikovs and assault rifles strung over their shoulders, layered upon each other like loose strands of jewellery.
The man standing by Mina’s window points his gun at her face while casting his eyes away from her. He wears a light-blue turban on his head, tied at the side with the rest of the cloth falling across his shoulder.
A second man is positioning himself at the front of the van, holding his Kalashnikov as though it were a baby, cradling it in his arms and directing his eyes, under heavy brows, at the scene before him. He looks at his two comrades as though he does not trust them entirely, as though he’s here to watch them as much as the two strangers in the Hasan Faraz Government Hospital supply van.
The man by Sikandar’s window is gaunt, his beard thin and ragged, and though his skin is sallow, pointing to malnutrition and even exhaustion, his eyes gleam in the early morning light. His high cheekbones are painted in a gentle sunburn that brings colour to his face. The skin on his nose is lightly peeling.
‘What are you doing here?’ he barks, roughly slamming the butt of his weapon into Sikandar’s shoulder. ‘Who allowed you to come into this area?’
Sikandar is quiet.
He’s heard around the hospital that the militants seek out doctors. One oncologist had been roused out of bed early in the morning by the sound of a car outside his front door. Dressed in his pyjamas and a pair of slippers he opened the door to find a grizzled man stepping out of a four-by-four truck filled with men. The man entered the oncologist’s home, seated himself in his drawing room and presented him with a stack of yellow chits. Whenever you receive one of these chits, he instructed the oncologist, you are to do whatever is necessary to help. Any man that carries one of these chits comes from my camp, you understand? Your failure to provide immediate medical care to him will be an insult that we will not tolerate. The oncologist was told his services would be free, discreet and constant. They knew where he worked, the names of his secretary and assistant at the hospital. If he did not do as he had been asked, it would be said that he was a collaborator with the state and its army. Everybody knew what happened to unlucky collaborators in Mir Ali.
‘Wia!’ Speak! The rebel at the window screams, and holding his Kalashnikov with both hands he raises it and brings it down over Sikandar’s skull. Sikandar feels the dull thud of the butt at the back of his throat. He is unused to violence. Even with two brothers, Sikandar never experienced anything rougher than a bit of play fighting.
He has never been this deep into the forest; he has no idea what chance of survival he has. He does not want to die.
‘Saib, sir,’ Sikandar begins, speaking softly, lowering his shoulders and putting his hands above the steering wheel so all three men can see that he is unarmed, ‘I’m just a driver.’
Mina doesn’t breathe.
The light rise and fall of her chest stops. She stares at her husband.
The man near Mina’s window speaks next. Mina had rolled down the window upon his instruction, but Sikandar can’t remember when. He can smell the pines – their scent travels with the rain.
‘Who is she?’ The man still does not look at her.
‘A doctor. I work at the government hospital.’ Sikandar lowers his eyes now too. His heart beats fast, faster than he knows to be medically sound. The blood in his mouth and the drumming in his chest compete for panic. He doesn’t know which to focus on, which to be more concerned about. He remembers Aman Erum’s white and red business card with its website and email addresses and numerous mobile phone numbers. Sikandar had forgotten to pass it on to his colleague, the doctor with the Islamabad Corolla. It is still in his wallet.
‘You two are alone?’
‘Eid, saib, there was no one else to accompany the lady. I was the only driver on duty.’ Sikandar leans towards the window. He can’t look at Mina. He feels her breathing slow and her temper return, rising out of her momentary confusion and fear. It bears down upon his back. He feels it.
The gaunt rebel, who wears the tired appearance of a man in charge, takes stock of Sikandar’s neatly groomed salt and pepper beard. His eyes dart over Sikandar’s clean, freshly starched shalwar kameez, the knees of which have never been darned, the pockets fine and tailored with a crisp square pattern on his heart. He looks at his two comrades. The three of them register each other’s disbelief. They saw how Mina’s face fell as the man spoke, how she followed every turn of his words, how she opened her mouth to speak several times, then didn’t utter a sound, letting her driver talk for her.
Mina holds her tightly packed bag to her chest and wishes she had kept her mobile phone on her lap. She raises herself upright after hesitating briefly, straightening her posture, and then sinking back into the seat before commanding herself to return to the earlier, slightly more authoritative stance. She speaks to the man at her window, slowly. She is careful not to let the turbulence she feels towards Sikandar infect her words.
‘Ror, brother, I am a doctor. I have been called to deliver a child in this area, a child whose life is in danger of being over before it has begun.’ She examines the man above his Kalashnikov, weathered from decades past, and places her palm on the window that separates them. ‘Please let us go,’ she pleads, careful to keep her voice from sounding desperate. But she already sounds too urgent.
The rebel with the light-blue turban ignores her. He still refuses to meet Mina’s eyes. He walks over to Sikandar’s side of the van and speaks into the commander’s ear.
14
They have to wait. There are no formal rules or codes to this sort of a day, but it is understood by all the people involved that they had better be comfortable with waiting. There are the inevitable delays – traffic, a lookout warning against exposure, a faulty mechanism that threatens to diminish the quality of the explosive attack. There are human errors that result in time spent counting flies or kicking dirt around and then there’s just timing.
Nasir has returned home to share an hour with his family that they will notice nothing special about.
They will remember later that he left early in the morning, before drinking his milky tea with the rest of the family. They will recall that it was after only a short absence that Nasir returned home and sat in the living room, trying, it will seem, to bring no one’s attention towards his presence but at the same time nestling himself among them.
The men do not often go home, not because their families would dissuade them. To have a son die for Mir Ali would secure a family’s honour for generations, worth the eternities of harassment and suspicion from the state that would automatically ensue. They don’t go home because they cannot tell their families; they cannot risk word travelling. They cannot compromise the silence of the operation with new ears and mouths.
So they play cards with friends or sit in a chaikhana and sip drinks that have no flavour in the face of what lies ahead of them. The goat’s milk loses its sour undertaste, the burned sugar of tea cooked in a saucepan tastes heavily of syrup and is vaguely medicinal, and green tea is reduced to water and only the faintest hint
of aniseed.
• • •
They have to wait. Hayat knew this morning would be interminable. Having this time with her won’t make the waiting, or what is to come once the waiting is done, easier, but it’s time with Samarra all the same. He is guiltily appreciative of that.
She wants to break out of code; she is desperate to talk in full sentences.
‘Why did you ask me if I’m ready?’ She winds and unwinds her hair into a bun, holding it in with a pencil. ‘Do you think I’m not prepared?’
Hayat watches Samarra’s hands weave through her hair as he sits on the dirt ground in front of her. They had unmade her, those beasts. They smelled the weak and swooped down only upon those whose resistance to them would be futile. But she had fought. Initially no one had understood how they found her, how they knew that she was the one to attack.
She had just joined the university and had been working with the men for only a short while, transporting papers and moving radio equipment. She hadn’t told a soul about her second, clandestine, non-house-girl life.
Almost no one.
But, even then, she hadn’t betrayed a man.
When they released her she did not speak of what they did or what hands had been laid on her.
But she fought back. She fought back to prove her innocence, hers and Ghazan Afridi’s. She fought on behalf of her missing father. Samarra remembered his promise of the coming years. She fought to believe it was still possible. She fought to establish her unbroken credibility with the men who looked nervous about asking her to continue with her work. She fought to erase from her life the man with the medals on his chest and the rose-gold wedding ring on his finger.
She fought so hard that she had started to become like them.
‘I’ve been waiting years for this. If anyone can lead this operation, it’s me. You know that. What did you mean? Did the others say they felt insecure?’
‘No, it’s not that.’ Hayat edges slightly closer to her, close enough to smell the jasmines on her wrist. ‘Samarra, this is bigger than anything else. We need time. We need time to think about what will happen afterwards; we need time to protect our people, our homes; we need time to consider what the blowback will be.’
Her smile, the curious one, returns.
• • •
Today, just before the wail of the muezzin calls the scattered men of Mir Ali to Friday prayers, there is to be a ceremony. It has been timed for today, for the Friday that falls on Eid, because it is a celebratory occasion.
The Chief Minister of the frontier state is coming all the way from his whitewashed bungalow in the capital to preside over the induction of four hundred of Mir Ali’s finest into the national army.
There had been an unofficial block against men from these parts joining the armed services for decades. They were separatists, untrustworthy, not deemed fit for active duty in any of the three branches – not the navy, not the army and certainly not the air force. The most gentlemanly of the three barely took anyone from outside the central province.
The unofficial block was politically denied. Anyone who wished to serve their country was welcome to submit an application, then all they had to do was pass the tests. But the army always suspected that anyone applying from Mir Ali or its environs was attempting not to assimilate, but to infiltrate and so they closed the door to them.
When periods of insurgency raged, there was a more official ban. They were not welcomed in any state institutions. Not the National Bank, not the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
But, recently, the state had smartened up. It was never going to win a long-drawn-out war against men who had nothing to lose. It was never going to succeed in condemning these men already relegated to the fringes. They belonged nowhere. They had nothing of their own. But if the state could draw them in, connect them to the centre they fought so furiously against, if it could co-opt them, it would neutralize their disruptions. Soft benefits were introduced first. There were visa lotteries to study and migrate abroad, but that was too obvious, too clear that the state was trying, with the help of its foreign friends, to repatriate Mir Ali’s young. Those who had initially lined up to receive emigration papers to Britain and study visas to America were shamed into tearing up their applications. The humiliation remained, however. It clung to them. Only those with ambition larger than shame, with individual desires that were stronger than the struggles of the collective, went ahead and left anyway. Most of those men never returned. They cut their ties with Mir Ali. But Aman Erum left with his head held high; no one would suspect his sympathies. He was Inayat’s son. He was Hayat’s brother. He was Samarra Afridi’s.
Next, the state opened up small ministries, the most corrupt ones where no effort was expended and no work ever accomplished – the Ministry of Health, largely – for junior civil servant positions. When the press beat their drums about the miserly amount of the budget given to the federal ministry of health and education they would now have to consider how the state was also generously accommodating these tribals, these would-be warriors. They were invited to big cities to administer government dispensaries or deal with the foreign sales of disinfectants that could not be consumed as alcohol. Petty work, doctors need not apply.
But it wasn’t enough. They would never be placated in these ways alone. They had to be brought into the belly of the beast.
The pilot project was to start with four hundred in the army. They would be sent to serve in various parts of the country. They would become a part of the machinery they assumed worked only against their people. In time they would see that it worked against everyone. They road-blocked Quetta. Stood under bridges in Karachi, stopping cars driving to the airport or heading out of the city at random. They guarded ministries in Peshawar.
They were no one’s oppressors. They were everyone’s oppressors.
The Chief Minister had been crowing about this grand new gesture, this step of greater inclusion, for weeks now. The recruits had been carefully secreted away at the army base where they had been receiving their initial training.
No mention was made of their names, how they were selected, or how they were even approached (no one in the town could recall a recruitment drive). After a five-week initiation course, Mir Ali’s four hundred would be formally inducted into the armed forces. The Khakis would make sure not to have any of their new recruits photographed at the function – there would be no faces visible in the photographs released to the press. No identifying features of the military trainers and absolutely no glances of the freshly trained men.
The Chief Minister would get all the attention.
The Chief Minister held what seemed like weekly press conferences about his upcoming trip. ‘This is a historic undertaking,’ he said when he announced his programme to visit Mir Ali.
Whether the minister was opening a tyre factory or meeting the families of jailed opponents, he wore a starched black sherwani, the collar thick and stiff round his neck. Men’s sandals made from distressed leather for the day and, for the evening, black patent shoes shined severely by his footman. His hair was dyed boot-polish black to match the hair on his arms, which crept up the back of his hands and over his knuckles.
He was a political appointee; he had never won an election in his life.
‘The only thing,’ the Chief Minister promised the media last week, ‘that will once and for all time end militancy in Mir Ali is development and reconciliation.’
Had he ever been to Mir Ali before, journalists asked the Chief Minister, shoving microphones in his face.
No, no, he hadn’t. But he had met many people who had been to Mir Ali, who assured him that the people there wanted nothing more than to be a part of Pakistan’s future. ‘They do not want violence, they want reconciliation. They are ready to reconciliate with us. We must extend to them a hand of friendship.’ With this he proffered a hirsute hand to the crowd of hacks an
d smiled widely at the assembled cameramen.
He promised, though it was not his remit to do so, that by next year there would be a thousand new recruits inducted from Mir Ali. The year after that, double.
‘If we were not serious about this reconciliation process we would not be launching this five-year plan. By the end of which, we will have many thousands of men from Mir Ali, and women possibly, serving in the national army.’ The military had no such plans, no such five-year promises, but the minister drew great applause from the suggestion that they might.
He was coming to Mir Ali to spend Eid with his ‘most important family – the people’ and to launch this great new collaboration. There was enthusiasm about his optimism. It was a bright and bold new step.
• • •
Samarra smiles. Hayat watches her, she looks calm suddenly. She stops fidgeting with her hair – now loose and combed through by her hand as she plays with her pencil, slipping it in and out of her fingers like running water. Hayat looks at her lips. He doesn’t realize he is holding his breath. Samarra speaks in a voice that breaks through her smile as she responds to Hayat.
‘You’re right, this is the biggest thing we’ll ever do. We don’t need more time. It’s today, Hayat. We’re ready.’
Hayat thinks he sees Samarra restraining a laugh.
‘We’re going to kill the Chief Minister.’
15
‘Salam, zama khog.’
Aman Erum always began the phone calls like that, calling her ‘my dear’. He liked that she woke up instantly with the sound of the phone ringing but that she took no trouble to conceal her sleepy voice.
‘It’s you.’
She always sounded surprised.
‘I’ve been in class all day – couldn’t call you late last night but didn’t want to miss you before you started your day.’
‘Sa masla na dey.’ No problem. Samarra yawned between the gaps in the words.
The Shadow of the Crescent Moon Page 13