Ten minutes from the Housing Societies, Tariq Road had been the ritzy shopping hub of the eighties, when the first malls, aspirationally named “Shalimar Center” and “Glamour One,” opened to attract shoppers away from the crowded alleys of Saddar and Bohri Bazaar. Like Gulshan-e-Iqbal, Tariq Road’s glory had waned under the assault of time. The air conditioning in the modern “shopping centers” worked for just a few months. When it sputtered and finally gave way, the hundreds of shops became dank, airless cells reeking of sweat and packing materials. Pedestal fans, loud and whirring, arrived, and skipping over their wires as one navigated a winding course became a modern version of skipping the sewers and puddles in the open-air markets of old. Despite these realities of commerce in Karachi, Tariq Road remained the dream palace for hopeful brides and hopeless housewives, maybe not the prettiest or the richest, but those most determined to replicate the patterns popularized in the Sunday newspapers. Neon-lit shops lining each side of the street peddled everything from cotton brassieres to bejeweled bridal dresses in every hue and shade.
The second house the ISI raided stood behind such a row of shops. The neighbors had long been chased away by rising property values, not to mention the supply trucks unloading all night and the robbers who targeted the shops. The boarded-up houses that remained awaited the speculators who would purchase them to cash in when prices rose. This, the Americans believed, was home to Al-Qaeda.
Inside they found a gaggle of people, men and women and children, pretend pieces of a family that did not seem to fit together. When the investigators from the ISI, with the FBI watching as always, had sequestered them in one room, they went through the whole house, room by room and drawer by drawer. In one room, they found twelve SEGA game consoles whose unscrewed backs revealed they had been rewired to detonate. In another, twenty well-sealed plastic packages were discovered to contain carefully wrapped passports, which were later determined to be intended for the members of Osama Bin Laden’s family. The children in the house, two boys, were the sons of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the man who coordinated the 9/11 attacks.
The final raid of the summer took place one day after the raid on Tariq Road. Building 63C on Fifteenth Commercial Street was much like those surrounding it in the sparsely inhabited block, close enough to the ocean to absorb a whiff of salt and rotting fish, and nondescript enough that it was seldom singled out for inquiries. The men from the ISI and the FBI kept vigil over it through the night, watching the dim lights in the apartment going on and off. With the creeping dawn and the call to prayer, four men emerged from the apartment and walked toward the mosque a few hundred yards away. When they returned they were met by the Pakistani paramilitary, dubbed the Rangers, who would take the lead in storming the apartment. On the stairwell of the darkened building, they grabbed two of the men. As they did so, the others who had already run up into the stairwell began to shower them with grenades and machine-gun fire. The siege of Building 63C had begun.
The military cordon around the building thickened as vans of Pakistan’s news stations arrived to scoop the story before a hot, relentless day dawned. At around 10:00 a.m., a barefoot woman clad head to toe in a black burka emerged from the building, holding by the hand a small girl dressed in red. No one knew who she was or what she had been doing in the building. At noon, when speculation about the building’s inhabitants had reached a fever pitch, a group of heavily armed Rangers were finally able to fire several tear-gas shells into the apartment window. Chants of “Allaho-Akbar,” “God is great,” rose from within the building.
Within ten minutes several Rangers stormed the apartment. The hunted men were holed up in the kitchen and showered the Rangers with cutlery when they entered. “Bastards!” the men yelled at the Rangers in English. “You will go to hell!” One of the men held a knife to his neck, threatening to kill himself if he was captured. The man was Ramzi Bin Al Shibh, the man who had coordinated the activities of all the 9/11 hijackers. The date was September 11, 2002, and by the time Al-Shibh was led to one of the ISI’s secret sites in darkening Karachi, the sun was just rising on the East Coast of the United States on the first anniversary of the attacks.
JANUARY 2003
Aunt Amina decided to supervise the cleaning of the first floor herself. She was convinced that it could be restored to its former glory, unsullied by renters and betrayals. It would take more than just will, of course, and so large quantities of cleaning materials—ten packs of a bleach of high potency, twelve packs of orange phenyl, a whole row of the green and white bottles of disinfecting Dettol—had been lined up in the courtyard ready for action. With them came brushes, three plastic buckets, and four reed brooms, as well as one with thicker bristles for wet floors. Ten boxes covered with brown paper, with a large red cross printed on their square-bellied fronts, also stood at attention; they held the poison to be laid down for rodents and any other creatures that the droppings of the renters had attracted.
These boxes were opened first, under the scrutiny of Aunt Amina. The woman Ghafoora and the old man Hameed, a couple who had been hired by Uncle Sohail to assist Aunt Amina in her project, carefully cut the seals on the top. They had been hired cheaply, paid by the day, because they were old and thus in the twilight of their ability. With Aunt Amina huddling behind them that first day of the job, they spread the rat poison in all sixteen corners of the four rooms on the first floor. When that was done they laid the poison along the walls of the courtyard and in the cracks of the broken tiles that had become stained by mud and rain and wear. In the very old bathroom, with its chipped green tiles and the squat green toilet, they laid some extra poison.
This was all they had time to do the first day, because the deliveries had not arrived until late and Hameed and Ghafoora had insisted, as the one condition of their employment, that they were to be let go before the Maghrib prayer every day. They had to take three buses and walk a mile before they reached their house near the airport, and at Hameed’s age he was less able to push and jostle the wiry bodies of younger men or clamber lithely to the top of the bus for a seat on the roof. Being an old woman, Ghafoora fared a bit better, but what good was it if she got on a bus without her husband? So it had been decided that whoever hired them had to allow them to leave just before dusk, when it was still cool, so that they would fare better on the journey home.
The rat poison laid, Aunt Amina drew the bolt on the door with a clang and turned the key in the padlock. Upstairs and alone that week, Aunt Amina huddled by the window of her third floor apartment. She watched the hunched Hameed and the chadorbundled Ghafoora hobble under the blue, pink, and green lights of Destiny Gardens. And then she once again tuned her ears to the sounds and silences below. She listened as she ate her dinner, a kebab in two slices of white bread, annoyed that the sounds of her own chewing made it harder to hear the scurrying below. She imagined the rats dropping dead one by one as they ingested what was laid out for them.
When morning came, she watched the clock for the arrival of Ghafoora and Hameed, for their huddled figures in the stairwell and their hesitant knocks on the door. Once the three of them were together again, they went below, ready to begin the work of reclamation. Not much death had happened there. The sun streamed through the courtyard, revealing only the lineup of cleaning supplies, the quiet boxes of whitewash and untouched bottles of bleach. The piles of rat carcasses she had imagined, whose corpses felt like a crucial first step in the cleansing she had planned, were not to be found in any of the places where the poison had been scattered in lethal amounts. Its fumes had killed some smaller things, spiders and roaches and piles and piles of fire ants.
The rats must have fled, they thought, like the renters, fazed perhaps by the fumes of the poison and the prospect of change. Aunt Amina with her staff of two proceeded with the plan for the day, sweeping out and mopping up every surface, carrying out the junk left in corners where the backs of cupboards or the undersides of beds had offered the impression of eternal hiding places. The old co
uple made trip after trip, carrying it all outside and dumping it onto a large pile in front of the house, until the pile stood taller than either Hameed or Ghafoora.
The four-burner stove on which she had cooked her first meal for Sohail had to be dismantled. She watched the old man as he took the wrench and pulled the pipes from where they met the gas connection. The stove was wedged away from the wall and pushed toward the door. Its absence left a clear, dark imprint on the wall, a square of whiteness unblemished by the grime of the intervening decades, an accidental remnant of the newness of her marriage when everything was a clean slate. It brought some comfort to Aunt Amina. At the end of the second cleaning day, the white square was all she needed to remind her of what she was attempting to restore.
It took another day to clear the house, to remove the two aging fans from the cobwebbed ceiling and to replace the leaking faucets in the kitchen. On the fourth day the bottles and boxes of chemicals were brought out to bleach away the past. Ghafoora and Hameed scraped and mopped and wiped with their faces covered, his with an old rag, hers with a scarf wrapped tightly across her face. Aunt Amina watched as the walls, stripped now of pictures and posters and nails, were splashed white with the wash that Hameed mixed in the courtyard.
One week into the cleansing of the first floor all traces of the renters had all been eradicated, their forgotten treasures heaped on the mound of trash out front and carried away by a Suzuki van to the unknown place where all such things in Karachi went. After measuring out the final days’ payments in a neat pile for Ghafoora and Hameed, Aunt Amina drew the padlock over the door of the first floor and bid them good-bye.
AUGUST 2003
Benazir Bhutto was not present in the courtroom on the day that the Swiss court in Geneva convicted her and her husband Asif Ali Zardari of money laundering. “There is no doubt in my mind,” wrote Daniel Devaud, the magistrate assigned to the case, “that her behavior is criminally reprehensible in Pakistan.” She was not in Pakistan either, as she had been banished into exile nearly four years earlier when her second government was dismissed like the first, on charges of corruption. With her three children and her aging mother, she had in the wake of that cataclysm gone to Dubai, shuttling between the desert emirate and their other home in London.
Everyone knew where her husband was. Asif Zardari, the turbaned man Benazir had wed years ago, sat in jail in Karachi. His was not an ordinary prison, not the dank sweat-and-blood-soaked dark rooms reserved for lesser criminals. He was a VIP, and prisoners of this ilk got two of their own rooms, with air conditioning and two attendants. Food was brought every day for Mr. Zardari from 70 Clifton, the headquarters of the Bhutto clan from whence his father-in-law had ruled. He was allowed as many guests as he wished and he entertained them with aplomb. Many stayed for hours, listening to stories and exchanging guffaws in the prison salon.
A diamond necklace had supposedly given the couple away to the Swiss after it was found lying in a vault in Geneva, placed there perhaps on some quick jaunt the two were accustomed to in their days as rulers. The story of the necklace, rumored to have cost 120,000 pounds and studded with many glittering, sparkling diamonds, was a murky one, beginning at a jeweler in London’s Knightsbridge where it had been paid for. She would insist later that it was he who had bought it, with the gains that would later be traced to a company in the British Virgin Islands, where he stashed kickbacks for government contracts given to private companies operating in Pakistan. She would later be quoted as saying she had refused it when he had presented it to her. No one, of course, knew exactly what the story of the necklace, or for that matter Benazir and Asif, really was.
On the day they issued the judgment, the Swiss were not much concerned about whether the necklace was a present from a beloved husband or a long-imprisoned one or both. They had connected the dots between the foreign companies Cotecna and SGS, which had been given a contract for the inspection of goods arriving inside Pakistan, and the 6 percent of their earnings that were transmitted to bank accounts registered to two front companies in the British Virgin Islands. A Swiss lawyer, long known to the Bhutto family, had set them up with Citibank accounts. The first was under the name of Asif Ali Zardari himself and the second in the name of Nasir Khan, Benazir’s brother-in-law. It had all come together when the money for the diamond necklace bought in Knightsbridge, by Bhutto or for Bhutto, was, according to a New York Times report, paid for in part from one of those accounts.
In this way Benazir Bhutto and Asif Ali Zardari bore the news of their coupled crime separately, she in Dubai raising a family in exile and tending to an aging mother and he in prison amid the swirl of lackeys and well-wishers who came to rack up the favors they hoped he would be able to pay back tenfold when he managed to climb back up the slippery rungs of power. They had separate lives in that apolitical interval. She tried to keep her reputation: she made jaunts to New York for lectures and attended dinner parties at the homes of those who had feted her when she was in power, reminding everyone now that even though in exile, she still existed.
It would be a whole year until the husband and wife were together again, as Asif Zardari was mysteriously freed and then arrested again and then freed again in November 2004. After the November release, he was finally allowed to fly to Dubai and into the arms of his wife. This was an older wife and behind her were the children, growing too fast. After their years apart, there was perhaps little time to consider the consequences of sins past, of diamond necklaces and secret companies. There was instead a future to consider together, and for Benazir and Asif that also meant a return to power.
MARCH 20, 2004
It was early spring, when the heat could still be handled by fans and breezes. These few and precious pleasant weeks would soon be gone, to be replaced by the infernal months of April, May, and June when the heat would rage. Uncle Sohail’s second wife had stopped working a few years earlier; the news of her early retirement only coming to Aunt Amina after she witnessed one, two, and then three weeks in which she did not descend into the car with her husband and drive away with him.
With the departure of the renters and the cessation of their constant comings and goings, their cries and curses, only the sounds of the two women were left to punctuate the days. These came regularly enough to be soon memorized by Aunt Amina: the door shutting when Uncle Sohail left for work in the morning, the door opening downstairs to let in the maid, the clang of teapots, the blender starting and stopping on whichever floor Uncle Sohail was expected for dinner that evening.
In those days of almost silence, the women upstairs and downstairs were two lone dwellers separated by a single floor. Their sounds coursed more closely in the new emptiness that surrounded them, the choice of the television show upstairs informing the one downstairs, the smells of frying garlic and onions whetting the appetite of the solitary reader upstairs. If the women had once listened for each other deliberately in the early days of a divided husband, of newly constrained lives carved into weeks of lingering and longing, now their sounds were subtler, less perceptible, and the persistent passions that had once suffused the house had become softer, eroded by time.
Aunt Amina hated by habit, but even this hate she had nurtured for so long had become familiar, cozy in its constant presence. She still told the latest story, now two years old, about that spurned overture of friendship when the other wife had arrived at her door, bedecked in the burka of the modest believer, wishing to make a trip to the prayer sessions at Destiny Gardens. What a spectacle they would have been for the neighbors, she still mused, the two warring wives of Sohail, finally reconciled and trotting together like good, obedient women who acknowledged the right of their husband to marry again and again and again. That gripe she would carry to her grave, she still said, although she had fewer occasions to recall it.
She would never forget that she had never assented to his second marriage. She had opposed it and she did oppose it and she would oppose it and she would not let him forget it. So
she made him remember in countless ways, in the lines of her forehead if he accidentally mentioned her by name while he was upstairs, in the flat silence of her turned back when he arrived later than he was supposed to on the morning when her week began, in her terse nos when he tried to make an excuse and shuffle a day from one wife’s share to another’s. Those were the nonnegotiables, the battles whose early carnage had established the course they would take when they recurred, with the same formations of troops, the same lining of defenses for the three people bound together in one marriage.
When she was by herself, though, the sounds downstairs infused her day with the solace an isolated prisoner takes from the shufflings and heavings of another. During the long stretches when the electricity came and went and came again, they suffered together as the loud drone of the power generators rattled glassware and china in the identical glass cabinets Sohail had given his wives. They wondered why the owner of the newly built house next door had had each and every window tinted into an impenetrable blackness. They heard the cries of the madman, who in the past year had taken to walking up and down the street, hurling abuses not at people but at the piles of trash.
It was on one of these ordinary mornings of separated togetherness that Aunt Amina noticed some omission in the regular sounds that rose up from the floor below. It was her week and a Tuesday. She and Sohail had woken at seven in the morning when the electricity shut down, the ceiling fan stopped, and warm air settled down on them.
Sohail had slunk to the bathroom and she had put the pot on for tea, splashing her face with water at the kitchen sink, hot and groggy from a night of only intermittent electricity. The tea would be good, she thought, as she went through the motions: measuring out tea leaves that she kept in the empty tin of powdered milk; the waiting; the spreading veins of brown when the tea hit the boiling water. She waited for the first boil, then the second, and added the milk and waited for a third boil, the rituals cemented into the movements of her limbs. She strained the tea and filled the thermos; the power came back on and the neighbor’s generator stopped its droning as she remembered that she still needed to iron a shirt for Sohail to wear that day.
The Upstairs Wife Page 22