The Shadow of the Crescent Moon

by Fatima Bhutto

  Sikandar can’t breathe. He chokes on his tears.

  The Talib tightens his hand on Sikandar’s head. He straightens himself and chambers a round in the Kalashnikov. ‘Kafir,’ he sneers once more. He is lifting the weapon to Sikandar’s heart when he is interrupted by a scream.

  It pierces through the light rain, through the tense breath that Sikandar allows his body to release, through the unshakeable anger of the Talib.

  The gaunt commander’s face contracts with the scream. Startled, he lets go of Sikandar, whose hair falls out of his clenched fist, and looks at his comrades.

  Mina has got out of the van. She opened her door and pushed the Talib with the wispy beard and light-blue turban, who was stationed next to her window. She pushed him hard, touching him against all convention, placing her hands flat on his body and straining her arms to push him as forcefully as her strength would allow. Mina knocked him to the ground and out of her way. The Talib could not defend himself; he could not steady himself by grabbing hold of her wrists, so he fell. She barrelled her way past the man, the teenage boy, guarding the van’s engine as if it too were an animate being, aiming his gun at the hood so he could shoot if the driver revved the van against his permission.

  Mina screamed at him when he tried to stop her, and it was this scream that the commander heard.

  ‘Zalim!’ she screams, standing under the rain. Unjust! Mina screams till her voice is hoarse.

  He moves. There is no greater slur Mina could have levelled. These men are students of justice. They can be accused of being violent, of being rash, of anything but injustice. They have built their war around the battle of the just against the unjust. People misunderstand them; they assume it’s a war against unbelievers, against disbelief. That has nothing to do with it. Their war was always about justice. They bear its mantle and they drape themselves in its banner.

  Mina strides towards the gaunt commander, holding her handbag in her hands. As she reaches him she drops it to the ground as if she only just remembered it, too late to leave it in the car. She self-consciously pulls on her dupatta and, confirming it remains round her neck, Mina shouts. She heaves air up from her lungs and screams.

  20

  Hayat kicks the earth with his foot. He doesn’t want it to come to this. The soil he disturbs is tired. Fractured clumps of dirt unable to hold together.

  He remembers a time, long ago, when he and his brothers were children. When one insurgency believed their harvest was ready to be reaped, when they felt that the moment was upon them, the feeling infected the town.

  People prepared for change, for a reversal of forces and fortune, only to be beaten back harder, more viciously, as punishment for their daring. People laid low, but they did not feel that the harvest had been destroyed. It had simply not been ready. The moon was anxious, the orbit of the constellations falling into place required more time. So they waited.

  They waited for one insurgency to pass and for another to take its place. With each battle for Mir Ali they held hope aloft and waited for the moment they would be free.

  It never came. It never promised to come.

  Hope stemmed purely from the belief that it ought to, that one day it just might.

  For Inayat and his fellow men in arms the road to freedom was perilously long but they journeyed upon it confidently. Their losses in the face of superior military might, enhanced state powers and abuses, and national ignorance of their plight, fell off their shoulders. They lived and dreamed and died for the pursuit of that promise. That hope had been enough for them.

  But not for Hayat. Not for the generation that came after and saw their parents’ dreams diminished, methodically squashed by the creation of larger and larger military cantonments where the army could teach schoolchildren how to sing the national anthem and where a larger perimeter of land flew the jungle-green and white flag of Pakistan atop their roofs and gates. The army beat this generation down by being bigger and stronger and faster. They beat them down by being exactly what this generation aspired to.

  They wanted phones, computers, access to the world. The military had all those things waiting. Eventually the battle, as they had known, would come down to this: those who wanted to be a part of a global system would not be kept outside it on account of nationalistic beliefs and codes of honour set by their parents. Struggle would be redefined; it would come to mean the length of time you waited for fibre optic cables to be buried in the ground so that dial-up Internet could be replaced by something much, much smoother. This generation wanted scholarships, they wanted to travel for business degrees and seminars, to work at petrol pumps wearing bright orange jumpsuits in Eurozone countries if it meant the chance of a different life, one not ruled by checkpoints and national identity cards and suspicion. They wanted the freedom to travel to Mecca, business class.

  It had only been a matter of time for the army. They had known that one day it would come to this. This was a lazy generation. The army had been counting on them. This generation, all spark and sound effects, quickly proved to be much easier than the army had imagined. Barring few exceptions, they didn’t want to fight. They wanted too many things that only the state could give them. Their memories would still be infiltrated by the past, by their ancestors’ grievances and sufferings, but they would recall these comfortably at dining tables and dinner parties as they wore the latest smart- phones on their belts and compared their children’s private school tuition fees.

  They sacrificed nothing of their own; the dreams had been their fathers’.

  Freedom meant nothing to this generation. It was easily bartered for convenience.

  • • •

  Hayat holds Samarra’s dry hand in his. Little patches of cold and lack of care have whitened the skin around her knuckles and joints. He rubs her hand quickly with his own.

  ‘With every escalation they hit us back harder.’

  ‘We have always been hit,’ she reminds Hayat, removing her hand from his.

  ‘They will kill Nasir’s family. If you give him the go-ahead, Samarra, they will trace him – whether he lives or dies – and they will torture his family for months before they make an example out of them.’

  She is silent.

  ‘They will leave no one. They won’t spare his siblings, his nieces – his sister’s two children. You know that. They will humiliate his father before they execute him here – on these very grounds. You know what they will do to his mother, Samarra, you above all people should know . . .’

  Samarra stands up and walks away from Hayat. The cold makes her voice sound tremulous when it is not. Although her voice is clear and decisive, the sharp whistle of the rain makes her sound unsure.

  ‘Stop it.’

  Hayat lowers his head. He remembers his conversation with his mother in the kitchen this morning. His heart, he can feel his heart sinking.

  ‘What’s happened to you? What are you so afraid of?’

  Hayat kicks the earth again and again with his foot.

  ‘You don’t see it, Samarra – you don’t see it any more, do you?’

  He burrows and digs his foot into the muddy soil. He can’t stop her. She is so far gone she can’t see anything beyond the white rage she has adjusted all her weight to carry, a rage that has grown to become a part of her. It is built into her like it was built into Ghazan Afridi, into Inayat, transforming itself virally, until Samarra has no immunity left to her anger.

  She stares at Hayat, searching his face, waiting for it to break out into something familiar. She doesn’t recognize him either. He’s always been cautious on the eve of operations, treading lightly in the days and weeks beforehand, but there had been anticipation too. Eager anticipation.

  ‘They’ve destroyed us.’

  Samarra scoffs. She makes no effort to hide her reaction. Her voice sounds rough; there is a harshness to it. He can hear it, even in her sneer
s. Hayat ignores it. He ignores the way she tilts her head and looks up at him, as if she has not considered him before.

  ‘We’re no better than they are.’

  But she won’t let him finish the thought. Samarra shakes her hands at Hayat, waving him down, trying to stop him from starting down this path.

  ‘Samarra,’ he says.

  This is not a meeting she can command.

  ‘Samarra, listen to me. They killed our heroes, so we stopped making them.’ His voice breaks. She can no longer see him; he knows she has already begun to drown him out. So he shouts. He shouts above the already too-loud decibel he speaks to her in. ‘We stopped living. We stopped our lives to take theirs.’

  Hayat looks at Samarra.

  ‘We became them.’

  Samarra sits back down again on the bare, wet earth, agitated.

  ‘Hayat, that was before. This will change everything.’

  Now she takes his hands, his also-cold hands in hers, and squeezes. Hayat looks at her hands. She must have rubbed them against her sweater, against the man’s shawl thrown casually round her shoulders. He can’t see the dry white patches any more. He looks up at her eyes, at the cold beauty mark encased in her iris, and wonders how she warmed her hands.

  ‘This is what they couldn’t do. They made our fathers old. They robbed our fathers of their youth, of their strength. They had no freedom to make their own rules. We are something stronger, Hayat. We are something that can’t be broken.’

  He shakes his head at her.

  ‘Samarra, we already are.’

  • • •

  Samarra stands up and checks her phone, a black-plastic Nokia with a backlit screen whose light never fully turns off. She doesn’t acknowledge Hayat’s words. In their place, she carries on a conversation they never started.

  ‘Let’s go.’

  Samarra presses two keys to unlock the phone and looks at the time. Nasir will be moving now. He will be preparing his position before the Chief Minister’s motorcade blocks all the routes; he will be making his way to the venue as part of the late morning traffic, ahead of it becoming a high-security zone.

  Hayat scrapes the dirt off his shoes. He can’t stop her. He wonders if he tried hard enough. There’s nothing left to do but to go ahead with the plan.

  ‘We have things to prepare. Nasir will be waiting for my call on the other side.’ Samarra moves her head as she speaks, reassuring herself as though ticking marks off a list. She checks her phone one more time. Hayat takes the keys out of his pocket.

  ‘Enough battery?’

  He knows Nasir won’t move before Samarra’s all-clear. She’s anxious now, worried her phone will fail her, concerned that all the elements will conspire against her. But she has three bars left on the mobile. Enough to make the call in an hour’s time.

  Samarra nods.

  Hayat walks towards the motorbike.

  ‘Let’s go, then. We have things to prepare.’

  She notices that he speaks to her over his shoulder. He doesn’t even look at her.

  21

  Aman Erum makes his way on foot through the thinning traffic. He sidesteps boys on bicycles and harried husbands scurrying towards the stores to pick up last-minute packages of rice and sweetmeats before businesses shut for prayers and the Eid weekend ahead.

  In Mir Ali’s narrow bazaar, there are several butchers. Four or five at least that sit cross-legged on wooden slabs and tables sharpening their knives (which are not very sharp at all), while they snap orders to their child assistants: cut down two kilos of mutton; wrap up some fat; prepare the lamb hooves and bones for paiya – cooked slowly for hours and hours in a gelatinous sauce until you can nibble off just the right amount of cartilage and chew comfortably on what was once an animal’s kneecap or knuckle.

  Lamb skulls, deep pink and covered in flies, rest on the butchers’ tables. They price the skulls for the jelly-like eyes, for the gristle of the cheek, for the marrow in the nose. Their clients don’t mind the swarm of insects that crowd round the skulls or the flies that lay their eggs in the warm crevices of the lamb’s face. The meat is easily cleaned out with warm water and lemon, a natural disinfectant.

  Two of the butchers keep battery chickens nine to a cage, stacked high on top of each other, opening the rusted cages only to grab a hairless, featherless bird by its neck and cleave it into eatable parts. As a result it isn’t the open ribbed carcasses or the dark-brown blood that slides down the butchers’ tables and onto the streets that draws attention to the meat section of the market on Eid morning, but the shrieks of the confined birds. Their skin is crusty and scabbed from repeated attempts at escaping their wiry enclosures. They squawk desperately, constantly moving in their cages and flapping their wings, as though it were possible for them to knock down the tower in which their cages are placed, and lift themselves off the ground and upwards into the cloudy sky.

  Aman Erum walks amongst the morning’s late risers, keeping track of the time. The drizzle continues. It has barely let up all morning. Now, just before noon, it is a light sprinkling of rainwater that falls timidly, sliding down the windscreens of passing cars and the arms of men wearing crisply starched shalwar kameez.

  It’s been a long time since Aman Erum was in Mir Ali on Eid. He missed the holiday when he was abroad studying. When he returned to be with Inayat as his father’s lungs filled with fluid, Aman Erum was determined to be with his family for Eid. He wouldn’t leave them for Eid again. At first he imagined he would come home for the holiday, returning to New Jersey as soon as his father’s mourning period had ended, but his family needed him. They needed someone with a steady hand to guide them; it had been such a difficult year. Coming back from America with his overseas contacts and local connections, Aman Erum was a new man. He would return to America eventually, once he had built up certain supply chains he had been working on, but until then Mir Ali would be where he spent his late Eid nights, trawling the markets, and his Eid mornings, bowed down among the bodies of those who gave blessings for a new year.

  Aman Erum passes the chicken coops and sees the almost hairless birds beating their wings against their wire cages. If everything goes well today, he will buy two of the fattest to take home.

  He will ask his mother to cook them with butter and red chilli powder, the sweetest variety of which comes from Kashmir. When he was in New Jersey, Aman Erum went to Indian restaurants, to small canteens where taxi drivers and migrants huddled under dim lighting and listened to scratchy recordings of old film tunes, sung in the days of black and white Bollywood cinema, to eat the dish.

  Aman Erum walks faster as he notices the time, quickening his step while making sure not to trip in the small puddles that have collected in the fissures and fractures of the city’s unpaved streets. The rickshaw drivers honk their horns at him: would he like a ride? Aman Erum waves a hand in the air, no, and then places it over his heart in thanks. The morning’s anxiety lifts off him. After all these years he sees an end in sight. He’ll be free of this soon. There is no other way. It has come to this after much struggle. Aman Erum’s heart hurts at the thought of what he must do, but there is simply no other way. Someone has to make the violence, the constant threat of it, stop. A steady hand is required. He has no other choice.

  One of the rickshaws slows down and the driver stretches his thinly shirted body out of the vehicle.

  ‘Agha, you are going far. Let me drive you.’

  Aman Erum looks at the decal on the rickshaw’s plastic roof: a map sawn and torn. May God steal from you what you have taken from Him. It’s a line from a poem. Aman Erum hops into the back of the rickshaw, its rain-proofed seat covers ripped from wear.

  ‘Mehrabani,’ Aman Erum thanks the driver, his hand still resting over his heart.

  • • •

  They drive past the bazaar as the shops’ shutters fall in unison. Aman Erum a
verts his eyes as they pass the Haji Abdullah Shirazi Khan slums, broken-down shacks leaning over one another, like ants crowding for space. He tries not to breathe in the fumes of the sputtering exhaust. He holds out a palm and measures the space between each raindrop. He thinks of Zalan and how the little boy used to cup his palms to catch the rain, squeezing his eyes shut as he tilted his head towards the sky. This morning will be over soon. It will all be over soon.

  The rickshaw driver stops just outside the Hussain Kamal street mosque, its garden still free of the plastic chappals that will soon be scattered everywhere, haphazardly. It’s early. The Friday congregation has not begun to arrive yet. There is time.

  Aman Erum thanks the driver, who refuses his money once and then twice, and gets out of the rickshaw. He looks around him, there’s little movement, almost no traffic. A roadblock is being set up nearby.

  • • •

  Aman Erum walks to a small hotal. Long, splintered wooden tables are spread out in the pattern of cafeteria seating and are lined with blue plastic chairs. A man stands on a raised platform, stirring a large saucepan of tea, throwing in sugar by the palmful. Further away, in front of a tandoor oven, a man in a blackened apron pulls out fluffy rotay with his uncovered hands, dropping the hot bread onto metal platters before his fingers burn.

  Aman Erum sits down at one of the tables at the front, keeping his distance from the others who have gathered here to eat a late breakfast. Men huddle together dipping chunks of hot bread into their sweetened tea, swallowing their soggy meal before the mosques sing the call of the midday azan.

  Looking across the street, turning his head both ways and seeing no one, Aman Erum orders a cup of tea. He drinks it slowly, blowing air over the milky skin on top. Light-brown film has already begun to cling to the sides of the chipped plastic mug. After scalding his tongue, he beckons the server boy over.

  ‘Sa taim dey?’

  The boy has the soft features of those who live in the border town. Hair lightened by sun and wind, and fine, breakable bones. He dries his hands on his stained shalwar and tilts his head towards the small colour TV hung under the ceiling’s yellow tube lights, unlit this early in the day. ‘It’s after eleven,’ the delicate server boy says, squinting to read the time.