The communiqué also did not say who had set the fire, how it had lapsed beyond control, or why an arms depot sat among millions of unsuspecting civilians. In the days that followed, more stories and even more bodies were extracted from beneath the shattered glass and twisted pieces of metal, bits of flesh still stuck to them. Tales of the dead were smuggled to newspaper offices, where editors published them in bits and pieces. One official body count was one hundred. The body count based on these unofficial accounts was estimated to be anywhere between one thousand and four thousand people, felled by weapons intended for another place altogether.
The Ojhri Camp massacre showed ordinary Pakistanis just how little they knew about the deals their military rulers reached with the United States. The country that had been wrested from the British as a homeland for the subcontinent’s Muslims was now a convoy for funneling arms to the Afghan mujahideen, so they could fight the Soviet Union for the United States. The people in the middle, Pakistanis, were an afterthought it seemed to all involved. In the aftermath of that tragedy, few knew what had really happened at Ojhri Camp. In the years to come, that dénouement—of tragedy always unexplained, never mediated by the facts or by the truth—would become familiar, even routine.
AUGUST 14–17, 1988
We always woke early on Independence Day to the sound of the flag flapping proudly against the post we had attached to the upstairs balcony a solid month before the day itself. At seven o’clock sharp the sound of a twenty-one-gun salute could be heard booming from the grounds of the Mehran naval base, which stood not far from our house. We then watched the parade, telecast live from Islamabad every Independence Day morning. On our screens appeared the thousands of khaki-clad soldiers, undulating seas of brown, marching and murmuring in formation, and entrancing us with their portrait of orderliness and manly acquiescence.
The military world was a vision of Pakistani perfection that existed side by side and inexplicably against the tumult of the world inhabited by the rest of us. Sometimes, its very existence seemed like a rebuke to the disorderliness surrounding the compound. We got a glimpse of it only every now and then—on a school field trip to an air force base on Defense Day, at a birthday party of a family friend who lived inside the cantonment villas reserved for senior military officers. Military bases were magical places where children, even girls, could ride their bikes to the cantonment store alone. Little reminders of its specialness were everywhere: on the tree trunks outfitted in painted uniforms of green and white stripes and in every bush and flower standing at attention. There, you would never be confronted by boil-covered beggars pressing their palms into your face or glimpse Afghan refugee children picking through the trash heaps.
In fact, no trash heaps at all were to be found inside the military bases, the rubbish having been carted away magically to some faraway place, where neither smell nor offensive sight could assault the senses of Pakistan’s warriors. On a school field trip to the air force base, terse-faced soldiers presented each sweaty and cowed child with an ice cold soda, for which we parted with not a single paisa. Dazzled and sated we all gulped obediently, without spilling a drop on the glimmering green lawn, where the grass was exactly an inch tall. The military in our minds would always be associated with perfection and free soft drinks.
In school our adoration of the military was cultivated. We learned the names of the army heroes who had been awarded the Nishan-e-Haider, the highest medal of bravery, all of the honorees having sacrificed their lives for their homeland. They were heroes from the wars of 1948, 1965, and 1971, all fought against India, its menacing presence next door underscored by the stories of the soldiers. Our teachers quizzed us on the circumstances of the death of Captain Sarwar Shaheed, who had outflanked the Indian troops in Kashmir, or that of the boyish Rashid Minhas Shaheed, who had prevented a traitorous pilot from hijacking their plane to India in 1971. They prodded us to see if we had memorized with adequate zeal the details of dogfights with fighter planes and understood the endless trickery of the Indians who stood at our borders and threatened to take back the Pakistan they thought should never have existed in the first place. At recess, we showed off the stickers of missiles and medals we had scored at birthday parties or at the stationery store. We affixed the stickers prominently to our pencil cases and our schoolbooks. F-16s, Mirage planes, and sharp-nosed, red-topped rockets stared back at us as we lumbered through quadratic equations and conjugated complex Urdu verbs.
Born and bred on the lore of fighters, we were shocked when we heard the news of the president’s death in a plane on August 17, 1988. Our house had stood suspended in the limbo that reigned just before everyone got up for afternoon tea when the phone rang. It was my father. The president of Pakistan, General Mohammad Zia ul Haque, had been killed when his C-130 plane was downed in the skies over southern Punjab. The man who had ruled Pakistan for eleven years was dead, and with this we began to cry.
Afternoon passed with the altered pace of a day suddenly and unwillingly lifted into the uncertain realm of the extraordinary. Ghulam Ishaq Khan, the interim president, appeared on screen sitting morosely between a Pakistani flag and the grim face of Mohammad Ali Jinnah in a picture frame hanging from the wall. Khan’s face was funereal as he intoned the details of the death, speaking in a mechanical drone that would become renowned. The crash had occurred at 4:30 p.m., when General Zia was en route to Rawalpindi from Bahawalpur. Everything was going according to plan, until of course it wasn’t. An explosion in the sky destroyed the plane long before the pieces hit the ground.
The next day was proclaimed a holiday, with the funeral scheduled to take place before dusk. Like millions of other dumbstruck Pakistanis, we sat at home watching the crowds gather. It was the first funeral we had watched on television, it was the first we had seen at all, its macabre tones heightened by the tearful voices of the television anchors. The Pakistan Television Corporation showed every minute of General Zia’s last public appearance, from the flag-wrapped coffin trailed by a military convoy of sorrow-stricken soldiers to the hundreds of thousands of mourners reduced to dots by the panoramic sweep of some high-perched camera.
We learned about his humble childhood in a lush but ordinary village in Punjab, his set of sons, his tremendous rise, and most important of all, his undying love for the country we also loved. We glimpsed the freshly dug grave, the raw and pungent earth ready to receive him.
There were things that we were not told. For example, we did not learn that the wreckage from the plane had been scattered over miles of open farmland in the plains of Bahawalpur. We never knew that the coffin, handled so reverently by the gloved soldiers, contained just a few bits of the general’s remains. There was scant mention of the thirty-one other men who had also died that day. One of them was General Akhtar Abdul Rehman, the general of Ojhri Camp and the chief caretaker of the Stingers that had killed so many others a few months earlier, but no one commented aloud on the coincidence. There was also silence about the two Americans on board. What could be found of the bodies of the American ambassador to Pakistan and the American in charge of military aid to Pakistan were surrendered to the soft-spoken aides who came to take their remains back home to their stunned families.
But the men on television repeatedly announced that the general’s copy of the Holy Quran, the well-read one that he carried with him on every single journey, had been discovered in the wreckage unharmed. Crowds of hundreds of thousands were captured in the broad sweep of the camera, chanting Zia’s own slogan: “Pakistan ka mutlab kya? La Iilaha illalah.” (“What is the meaning of Pakistan? There is only one God.”) It was half in Urdu and half in Arabic, half Pakistani and half Quranic, and together it rhymed.
SEPTEMBER 1988
Despite the general’s death, the wedding season of 1988 began early, months before the weather cooled. Two years after Aunt Amina’s disgrace, we had stepped forth with the tentativeness of the recently wronged into the frigid waters of social life. We didn’t start with we
ddings but with funerals, whose less frequent occurrence and solemnity allayed the possibility of social rejection. To share a tear, everyone agreed, was nobler than partaking in the joyous frivolity of a wedding party and hence a more acceptable platform of reentry for the ostracized. Parked in a corner of the home of the recently departed, my grandmother could offer her sincere sorrow, her charitable presence a rebuke to those who should have stood up for Aunt Amina but chose not to. One-upmanship in the dispensation of spiritual and personal duties was victory.
Weddings were trickier. One couldn’t rely on a corpse to lull the gossips or to make up for the absence of the Quran table, whose radius of reverence offered shelter to the sheepish. On the contrary, weddings provided a natural space to vent old grievances, pose sharp questions in front of a captive audience, and inflict calculated public slights and snubs. But ironically, the two years between the implosion of Aunt Amina’s marriage and our reemergence had turned the churning wheels of gossip to our advantage. A girl who had run off with a poor taxi driver hit the double whammy of shame—not only did she run off, she had run off with a poor man! That scandal was then displaced by the sinister matter of the forty-year-old mother of two who became possessed bya djinn. At henna parties and Quran readings, her neighbors told tales of nocturnal routs and her bellowing musings in Balochi, a language she had never known. These bits of other unraveled lives granted Aunt Amina a much-needed reprieve. Once again we could appear at a wedding without fearing a taunt or a question that evoked the shadow of Uncle Sohail’s “other” wife.
So it was in the middle of that wedding season after the general’s death that I attended a henna party with my grandmother. I usually enjoyed outings in which it was just she and I. When we arrived, Surrayya settled in the old-lady section of the room, where she wouldn’t budge for the rest of the evening, assuming an immobility that allowed me at eleven years old to be a kid, rekindling friendships with whichever gaggle of distant second or third cousins happened to be in attendance. My grandmother did not care if I ran about with this random gang, all of us gorging on lukewarm Cokes and stealing samosas from trays forgotten by waiters sneaking a smoke outside the wedding tent. If I tired of this, I could choose to be a young lady and sit dutifully at my grandmother’s side, absorbing details of grown-up conversations.
This party seemed to have been hurriedly arranged; there were too many people and too little room. Dinner was late and the wedding party had already dispersed. More important, very few of my cousins and friends had turned up. A scared seven-year-old and an uppity twelve-year-old and I had attempted conversation and completed a roundup of the still empty buffet tables. There was no food to be found by smell or sight, so we made our way back to our grandmothers and aunts and mothers to wait out our sentence in silence.
It was at this moment that a woman, clad in bright coral and blue, plunked herself in the folding chair on the other side of my grandmother. She smelled strongly of mothballs and attar, the perfume oil worn by women who eschewed any fragrance that contained alcohol. Surrayya squirmed ever so slightly in her chair and stretched her mouth into a forced smile. She moved her balled-up handkerchief from one palm to the other and sighed. The woman was the mother of one of Aunt Amina’s sisters-in-law. Like us, she was related by marriage to Uncle Sohail’s family. Her daughter, however, had borne her husband not one or two but four healthy babies, three sons and one daughter. She and her daughter had both attended Uncle Sohail’s second wedding. They had showered his new wife with rose petals and presented her with gifts while Aunt Amina lay weeping in our back room two Decembers ago. A satin-clad carrier pigeon, this woman had in the past been the emissary of the jabs and prods Aziza Apa directed our way. Her twittering never bore glad tidings.
The woman began with a practiced list of pleasantries. First she asked about my grandfather’s health, then proceeded to inquire lightly about my father, moved on with feigned concern about my mother’s absence, and finally to her own litany of ailments, her creaky knees and her elevated blood pressure. Her relaxed chattiness did little to comfort my grandmother. Ever since the rejection of Aunt Amina by her in-laws, she had been subjected to countless verbal whacks, and most came in the midst of mundane banter. The woman paused, looked at Surrayya’s tense face and declared, “We told Aziza at first, when it was happening, that it does not look right.” She paused again, moistening her lips with her tongue and quickly scanning our faces for a reaction before continuing.
“We told her two or three times . . . We understand that Sohail wants children, but the woman he is choosing is not right. She looks even older than him, so it makes no sense . . . If you want children, you must marry a young girl, you know.” It was hard to gauge the intent of this statement, so my grandmother said nothing at all, waiting for what came next. The woman continued, “See, now it has been almost two years, and where is the baby? There is no baby. Again and again we look to see if there is a baby; month after month there is no baby.” With these magic words, the frown lifted from Surrayya’s taut face. “Sohail has made a terrible mistake,” the woman continued. “All this and no baby . . . We all know if there was to be a baby, there would be one by now.”
I looked up at my grandmother and saw that she was smiling.
NOVEMBER 16, 1988
It started with a young girl who wanted a college education. Bushra Zaidi and three of her young friends set out for college one sweltering April morning like they did any other day. The black numbers on the Casio watches so many of the college girls wore indicated it was 10:30 a.m., when the midmorning classes at Sir Syed Girls College in North Nazimabad were about to begin.
The sun was already high in the sky and the city streets choked with traffic. Like all girls colleges in Karachi, Sir Syed Girls College was a fortress of high walls and gates designed to enclose girls yearning to learn and to keep out the men yearning for them. Men lounged and loitered around the gates of the college, hawkers selling coal-hot corn or ice-cold drinks, men loafing, men waiting, men pretending they were waiting for sisters to collect and transport at the end of the day. Men were not allowed inside, but getting them away from the premises was an impossible task.
So crowded was the area around the college gate that the bus dropped the girls off across the street. It was a bare five hundred yards of heated asphalt and flying dust between the bus stop and the open gate to the college. The girls always crossed it together, in unison, a short line clad in white and blue, walking hand in hand, forming a fragile human chain against the surge of traffic. That morning the four girls clasped their hands and began to walk across the road, as they always did, their leather satchels bouncing against their sides as they made their way across. They inched forward, expertly and slowly, through a pause in the traffic, a small stop in the hum of speeding cars and rickshaws and buses. Before long, they were halfway, then two-thirds of the way, almost there.
They probably did not see the bus coming from the other side. Yellow and fast and festooned with gilt decorations that flashed in the sunlight, it was bound directly for them. The driver would later say he did not see the girls at all. In an instant, they were crumpled and flattened, their warm blood pooling in cracks and crevices of the road. One was dead and three were dying.
The name of the girl who died was Bushra Zaidi. Her family had also come to Karachi after Partition, and she was one student in a college of hundreds like her who had wrested from reluctant fathers and brothers permission for an education. Her family was of modest means, and while they had done better than those who still slogged away in the city’s slums, theirs was a frugal existence, shadowed by the knowledge that there was barely enough to go around.
The man who had killed her was a Pashtun, a member of the ethnic tribes that straddled the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. They had arrived in Karachi in droves, fleeing the war that seeped into their villages. In the city they found jobs as bus drivers, and then called their brothers and sons and cousins to join the same trade. All
of them drove private buses and few of them were literate. Together they controlled Karachi’s transport system, ferrying millions from one hapless corner of the city to the other, through the narrow lanes of the old markets to the smog-choked avenues of the new commercial areas, to the north and to the south and the east and the west.
With the abandon of wild horses galloping over the sparse steppes of Khyber they drove their buses over Karachi’s potholed highways, unaware or oblivious to traffic rules. Their recklessness was abetted by the riders themselves, each of them eager to get where they were going faster, trying always to beat the cruel clock of passing opportunities. A few moments saved could yield great benefits: being the first in a queue of hundreds, reaching some government office before it closed for the day, getting to work before the boss, getting home before dark. This was Karachi, and there was too little of everything. One or two people died in the path of the buses every day, their deaths either forgotten or forgiven or both.
Bushra Zaidi’s case should have not been any different. She had no important relatives who could cash in favors and urge arrests. Her humble family neither entertained military generals nor had accrued patronage from feudal lords; they could not even boast of a savior cousin or two in some middling government post who would speak up for the female victim. And the bus that crushed her was owned by a man whose uncle was a police officer, a fact that shifted the entire equation in favor of silence, anonymity, and no markings of bereavement at all, not even the scant minutes of mourning generally apportioned to traffic fatalities. Bystanders tried to flag a rickshaw to take the bleeding girls to a hospital, and passing strangers stopped their cars and heaved the girls’ torn bodies into the backseats of passing cars. All indications were that this event would be quickly forgotten.
The Upstairs Wife Page 14