The forty-four days of Rubaiya’s captivity were marked by terrifying searches and seizures. Each night Indian soldiers went door to door, bursting through, sending women scurrying into corners, their children wailing. Men would listen for the soldiers at their doorsteps and scurry out their back doors into the darkness of frosty fields, emerging hours later from their rocky hideouts. Those who didn’t know of the hiding places or those still innocent enough to believe their innocence mattered were simply taken away by the soldiers, leaving a trail of weeping women behind them.
Halfway through Rubaiya’s captivity, night raids that took the women began. After all, it was a woman, the daughter of a man who represented the unity of the Indian state who had been taken in the first place. Everyone knew that what happened to Rubaiya as she spent her days in captivity, what could happen to her, must happen to all the other women of Kashmir. If the kidnapped Rubaiya’s purity could no longer be presumed, neither would theirs. The officials in Delhi debated whether or not they should accede to the kidnappers’ demands and release the imprisoned Kashmiris. Would this humiliation create a precedent?
While the men talked in the capital, the women of Kashmir were left to endure the abuse of the soldiers. The women were taken into dark corners of their own homes while their men were handcuffed and gagged. The order had come from Delhi; a new chief minister appointed to the embattled provinces of Jammu and Kashmir had decided to teach the Kashmiris a lesson for harboring separatists.
On the night of January 19, 1990, the weight of their wrath fell on two neighborhoods. Chota Bazaar and Guru Bazaar were small settlements of modest homes, where women stayed inside and did not see strangers. For as long as they could remember, their lives had been defined by war. The first had come in the throes of Partition, when the boundaries of India drawn up by the British included Kashmir and the boundaries of Pakistan did not. It was Kashmir that kept the militaries of Pakistan and India on high alert ever since, stretched all along their borders from the mountains of the north all the way down to the deserts of Rajasthan.
There had been wars ever since for this piece of land, once beautiful and now bloodied. Through the years, the war that had been fought in the streets made its way into the women’s homes. That night in January stood out as particularly brutal. The women who had not yet been raped and taken away wept and wailed for those who had, and the men who remained burned with anger at their own powerlessness. Amid the tears and the fury, a helpless uncertainty reigned in the little houses. The women stayed inside, but the men, whetted by their anger, streamed out into the soldier-filled streets.
Old men wrinkled and wrapped in shawls, boys who studied hard and never protested, boys who believed in peace and in a future as Kashmiri Indians—all of them poured into the streets. Angry and unafraid, they marched through the winding lanes and alleys, past shuttered shops holding meager provisions, past burned-down houses, past rows and rows of windows from where the women looked on.
The crowd gathered at the Gawa Kadal Bridge, swelling with the anger of those who were defying state orders, some for the first time. Those new to the uprising had no curfew passes and no weapons. They did not know Rubaiya Sayeed, they did not know the men who had taken her, and they did not know the boys whose freedom was being demanded. They only knew of the violations of their own homes and their own women.
The Indian soldiers saw the crowd on the bridge grow, defiantly taunting their curfew. Their bullets began to pierce the bodies that had just been chanting for freedom, protesting against the nightly invasions of their hearths and hearts.
Some fled behind walls and under the smallest spaces of store shutters wedged open by unseen hands, behind any shrub or shelter that would put something between them and the bullets. Those bullets were everywhere that day, a metal monsoon of carnage. The little market, the street, the bridge was covered with bodies. Afterward, when it was too dark and too quiet, only the bodies and their smell remained, three hundred lying in the streets, desolate and empty. Later it would be reckoned that ten men had been killed for every man that had been freed to obtain the release of Rubaiya Sayeed.
MARCH 1990
The street in front of our house was never completely quiet. If you woke from some confused dream, you would hear a sound reserved for that still portion of the night. First, the trill of a whistle, followed by a man’s low and melodic moan. It was the night watchman, a man hired by the neighborhood collective. His task, paid by fee from every household, was to ride his bicycle in the hours between the darkest night and earliest light of dawn. One after the other the sounds would follow. They were meant to reassure the city dwellers who took silence to be a sign of something sinister, reminding everyone that while the neighborhood slept, someone was vigilant and all was well.
When the intruders did come, they came in the middle of the day. There were four men, two armed with Kalashnikovs and two with pistols. They barged into the house across the street just after the family who lived there had finished their lunch. It was a Friday. The family owned an electronics shop in Karachi’s teeming downtown, and the men were all at home, drowsy after a big, spicy meal. No one remembers what pretext the robbers used to enter the house, whether the servant who answered the doorbell saw their weapons and unlatched the gate in a panic, or if someone had naïvely left the gate open, or if, as the more paranoid neighbors would insist, a servant had been paid to let them in.
It did not matter. Once the men were inside they went room to room and marched the family down the halls and into the dining room. Two of the men stayed with them while the other two swept the house, taking every wallet, purse, watch, and jewel, every piece of electronic equipment. When they were finished, they packed their loot into the family’s two cars and sped away.
It was dark when the family broke out of their paralysis, and when they saw the house, they wished they hadn’t found the strength to move at all. Everywhere they looked broken latches and scattered papers covered the surfaces, every piece of clothing turned over and torn in the robbers’ search for anything valuable. They could touch nothing, the father of the family said, for the police had to be called and the First Information Report registered. The telephone at the police station rang and rang, so the men of the family went there themselves.
It was nearly one in the morning, and the whistle and the moan of the night watchman had just begun when the station house officer could be bribed and cajoled into visiting the scene of the crime. He was tall and thin with a sharp jaw and a black sliver of a moustache. He went through the house, nodding ruefully, and made a list of all the things that had been taken. He said little until he was finished, when he offered the solemn observation, “You had a lot of nice things.” The family knew at once the robbers would never be caught.
My bedroom window, the one that had belonged to Aunt Amina, looked directly into their narrow front garden in front of their dining room. They had a lot of time to stare at our house, to wonder why no neighbor could feel their terror. When they related the incident to my mother a few days later, one of them told her that they were sure they had seen the curtain in my bedroom move, and that they had seen someone at the window. All of them had hoped that whoever it was would call for help and come to their aid, but no one had come. When my mother returned home, she told me to always keep the curtains in the bedroom window drawn, and never to look out that window again.
MAY 1990
Hyderabad, Pakistan, had served as the capital of Sindh for centuries, back when the now bustling Karachi was little more than a nameless fishing village. In 1843, when the British annexed Sindh to create another trade route to India, they focused their expansive energy on Hyderabad. It was in this humid city, a few hundred miles inland, where Amir Talpur fought the invading British forces. Rich and river-flanked, Hyderabad had been much beloved by the Talpurs. Descended from Mir Tala Khan, they had arrived in the region with the conquering Nader Shah. Their leader, Mir Fateh Ali Khan, had been declared Nawab of Sindh and
hence the ruler of the mud fort that sat in the city’s center. They would come to rule the region for at least a hundred years.
But a one-hundred-year pause was a sliver in the history of the land that surrounds Hyderabad. An hour or so outside the city one can find evidence of a story that began long before most regions of the earth were known to have been inhabited. In these dry and sandy expanses, it requires an imagination to picture the verdant towns that existed when the Indus meandered through following a route different from the one it takes today. Archaeological digs reveal that the Amri civilization, dating from 4000 to 6000 BC, once flourished here. A little farther away is the town of Kot Diji, whose ancient inhabitants created plaques inscribed with a picture language thousands of years old that have yet to be deciphered. The towns were destroyed by fire, flood, and conquest, leaving behind only fragments of the civilization’s accomplishments, foretelling perhaps the destiny of the towns that would rise in their place.
Hyderabad now lies on the banks of the River Indus. The birthplace of the Sindhi language, it was the city coveted by the many conquerors of Sindh. It beckoned not only warriors; poets and writers came from all over the Indian subcontinent to be near the city’s Sufi shrines, which lit up just like they did in Bombay and Bahawalpur. The descendants of the Sufi dervish Jalaluddin Surkh Posh Bukhari settled near the town, bringing with them their own followers. They searched for the divine on the heat-hardened plains, where they built humble mud houses with triangular towers on the roofs to try and lure the winds to the rooms within.
The mud fort Pacco Qillo, or “Strong Fort,” stood deep inside the city, built by the Sindhi ruler Mian Ghulam Shah Kalhoro, who ruled the area in the late eighteenth century when British ships had only just begun hauling India’s resources to England. Thick and formidable with a commanding central tower, it was one of the strongest military garrisons in the region, housing hundreds of soldiers and casting a shadow on all the enemies glancing greedily at the riverbank city. Traders from all over southern Punjab and throughout Sindh province set up shops around the fort, its many inhabitants providing a market for their carpets, sugar, spices, and silk. Many languages were spoken and many deals made: it was not the God of the Muslims or the Hindus that ruled here but the deity of the exchange.
When the British came, they bought guns with them, so thick walls and strong forts were no longer needed. Pacco Qillo, and the whole city of Hyderabad, languished after the British annexation of Sindh. To ship what they had plucked from the land, the British needed a port. This inland river town did not fit into their plans, so Hyderabad was forgotten, and the attention of the British shifted to Karachi.
Hyderabad’s neglect lingered after Partition, another grand mapping feat by the departing British. Millions of Hindus moved away from Sindh just as millions of Muslims were arriving in Karachi with their dreams of life in a truly Muslim land. Some of the arrivals did what so many searching for gold often do: they staked out a spot far enough from the others where opportunities were yet to be found. They chose to travel farther inland, to Hyderabad, and the unoccupied nooks and alleys around the abandoned fort became their destination and soon their home.
For decades after their arrival in 1947, the Muhajirs, the migrants who had come to Pakistan from India, lived in and around the Pacco Qillo, its bricks and bones now echoing with the sounds of Urdu rather than the Sindhi poetry of centuries past. As they did in Karachi, the Muhajirs took over the businesses abandoned by the departing Hindus and established new ones of their own. The city of Hyderabad became the place where the old Sindhi civilization met the diverse dreams of a new country, where those who had lived on the land for centuries brushed up against newcomers who wanted to be a part of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
And for a while at least it seemed the two could coexist. The Muhajirs built mosques and businesses, piling the new on the old and bringing liveliness to the city. Sweetshops sold delicacies from faraway places in India, and minarets blared the call to prayer five times a day, drawing men into mosques that filled and emptied with the rhythms of the day. Cultural and religious differences kept the Sindhis apart from the newer arrivals. The Sindhis were still deeply set in the feudal ways of patronage and of favors based on relationships that stretched over generations. The Muhajirs in turn frowned secretly or not so secretly on the Hindu rituals of the Sindhis, their customs of touching feet and breaking coconuts reminiscent of temple rituals they had learned to keep out of their own Muslim devotions. They knew, after all, how to be Muslim in a non-Muslim land.
On the afternoon of May 27, 1991, less than a year after Benazir Bhutto, a Sindhi, had taken office, unexpected visitors took the residents of Pacco Qillo by surprise. Amid the usual sounds of the afternoon came the roar of police vans. In minutes the armed officers spread through the winding streets and alleys of the old fort. Because it was the middle of the day, many of the men were at work; the frightened women and children left behind promptly retreated inside their houses where they remained scared and confused. The police cordoned the area and began bellowing through megaphones, “Come out of your homes” and “Surrender your weapons.”
The women wept and wailed at the siege suddenly confronting them. They had no weapons, and they did not know what the police wanted from them. From their windows they could see the policemen clad in khaki and black and the guns pointed at them. Hours passed and families used to having only what they needed for the next meal began to run out of food. The temperature inside their homes was over a hundred degrees. Men expected to return home at the end of the day never came, having been held back by the police. With the children’s hunger and their own captivity and the commands that came from the megaphones, the women gradually grew frantic.
At dusk, when they could no longer take the avalanche of sounds and the absence of their men, they took their children and began to leave their homes. They had nothing to protect them, so they carried their copies of the Holy Quran on their heads. Old women and young women clutching crying children, all holding books over their heads and streaming out in a sad, thin line into the streets. The books would protect them, they had told themselves and their children; the Qurans would show the policemen that they were innocent women forced from the sanctuary of their homes, where they were honorable, and out into the unprotected streets, where good women never ventured without their men.
The police had waited all day under the fly-filled riverbank sun. Now, as they saw the procession coming toward them, they cocked their guns and began to fire, showering bullets into the procession. Screams of women and cries of children echoed through the walls of the old fort, but the carnage continued. When the police were done, bodies of women and children lay in the streets and alleys, their blood pooling into rubbish heaps and trickling under fruit carts.
According to some counts, more than eighty people died that day, most of them women and children. The residents of the illfated Pacco Qillo said there had been many more, bodies carried off by the police to unmarked mass graves when they realized they had killed those who never could have fought them. Years later, the Sindh policemen who had been carrying out the orders would also tell their versions, each one insisting that they had been told that a group of terrorists with a cache of illegal weapons had been hiding inside Pacco Qillo. They had believed that snipers were hiding behind the women and children, so they had fired and fired and fired again. The Sindhis and Muhajirs had long had differences of custom and language, but until the incident at Pacco Qillo, few would have imagined the fault line between the two becoming so bloody.
JULY 1990
They gathered because of a betrayal. The men and boys met at the Kokan community center located near Uncle Sohail’s three-story house to discuss a neighborhood matter of great urgency. The community center still retained the smell of the chicken biryani that had been served at the wedding ceremony hosted there that very morning. At the wedding banquet they had feasted, and although they had washed their faces and combed th
eir hair, and some had put on a fresh kurta or sprayed a wisp of cologne, they all had the disheveled look of wedding guests encountered after the revelry.
For as long as they could remember, the lane on which the community center stood was mostly inhabited by people they knew, who had congregated in the area more than a decade ago when the Housing Society sold them the land plots. Across the street from the houses of the Kokan Housing Society was a large and empty tract of land. Here, the more daring Kokani boys, the grandsons of the migrants from India and sometimes their friends, improvised games of cricket on nights when there was little else to do. It was a convenient depository for them, less than a stone’s throw from the houses at the edge of the lane. When arranging games or a rendezvous, the boys referred to it simply as “the ground.” They felt it belonged, if not by design then by default and entitlement, to them.
The Kokani owner of the ground had moved away from the neighborhood a long time ago, his investments bearing greater fruit than the middling and sometimes failing deals of those left behind on the lane. Piece by piece he had bought up choice sections of Karachi. The land in front of the lane he had simply let be, even after he and his family moved to an ornate and commodious bungalow near the ocean to be surrounded by the rich. At first he would return to the lane a few times a week, exchanging slaps on the back and guffaws and sharing childhood memories, a cigarette or two, and snips of gossip. Then he had started showing up at the Kokan mosque only for Friday prayer: the society was, after all, far away from his seaside bungalow, and managing his many properties took time. His sons grew and the eldest married, and somewhere around this time he stopped coming around altogether, presumably focusing on his new life in a new neighborhood.
The Upstairs Wife Page 18