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The Upstairs Wife

Page 25

by Rafia Zakaria


  SEPTEMBER 2007

  One year after that meaningless darkness, Karachi was festooned with flags again, the black, red, and green of the Pakistan People’s Party. After nine long years in exile, Benazir Bhutto had managed to outwit all the men who would have kept her from returning to the country and managed to wrangle permission to return. The long odds that would have deterred so many had somehow evaporated in the short span of four months. There was the matter of the military general who had taken over the country after the last coup, when the government of her rival, Nawaz Sharif, had been dismissed. Then there were the corruption cases, enormous piles of them, the ones for which her husband Asif Ali Zardari had languished in prison for many years. The weight of accusations had been heavy, almost immoveable, and she had borne it for eight years.

  Then it was gone. Some said a secret deal had been reached between General Musharraf, whose power was waning, and the banished Benazir. Now, the same unelected general had granted her an indemnity from prosecution. The National Reconciliation Ordinance, signed by General Pervez Musharraf in September 2007, made it painless for Benazir Bhutto to return to Pakistan. With his signature her exile ended and the daughter of the country, pure once again, was ready to return to rule.

  The event was historic and the drama of her homecoming had to be perfected. The first act was the announcement by a top official of the Pakistan People Party’s: “I want to give the good news to millions of Pakistanis,” the mustached man declared triumphantly amid the cheers of party workers who already knew what he would say. “And I want to give you the date,” he awkwardly continued into the din. “The date is 18 October and the place is Karachi . . . She will return to her home city of Karachi.”

  His words were lost in the storm of cheers; the crowd had known the date as well and was eager to start cheering, as they knew they were supposed to. In the days leading up to her return, there were even more cheers. There were the cheers of a forgetful people now fitfully waving flags into the sky, ready to welcome once again the woman who had brought democracy to Pakistan. The cheering banished easily the memories of the two times she had been dismissed for corruption, the millions she had been accused of stealing, and the hundred-thousand British-pound diamond necklace she had bought with the money of Pakistani taxpayers.

  SEPTEMBER 30, 2007—MAKEEN, SOUTH WAZIRISTAN

  Baitullah Mehsud was a small man in a world where size mattered. Like many small men who have much to prove, he had learned to overcome with charisma what he lacked in stature. Any remaining deficits had been made up by luck, and the blessed fortuity of being in the right place at the right time. Few who have seen them would consider the craggy gray-brown hills and valleys of Makeen in South Waziristan the right place for anything. Since the start of the war in Afghanistan it had become a particularly hardscrabble place; the apricots and apples that grew in the farmers’ orchards around the scant settlements often rotted in the trees, their ripe promise interrupted by the security cordons that allowed nothing in and nothing out of Pakistan’s tribal areas.

  What may have been an unlucky time for fruit was a good time for ripening leaders. The gushing influx of men and money from Al-Qaeda nourished those locals who held the most promise as fighters for Islam. It was as if the owners of the largest chain of food stores in the world had descended on the tiniest corner store and announced suddenly that it would be their headquarters. Where militancy was concerned, Waziristan was becoming a boomtown, and Baitullah Mehsud, a child of Waziristan and a man of Waziristan, had a lot to peddle to the foreign financiers who looked to make his place their place as well.

  He rose in their ranks, plowing through with aplomb and without his lowly peasant origins haunting him as they would elsewhere in Pakistan. Like all other boys bred in this stark landscape, his only schooling was the local madrassa, where he learned to memorize the Quran, rocking back and forth and avoiding as best he could the instructor’s cane, which came down hard across the knuckles of any boy who missed a verse, a prayer, or a preaching. In the hours between helping at home and memorizing the Quran, he, like all the other boys of the region, learned to scramble up and down and about the hundreds of caves that dotted the hills that surrounded their home. One could evade elders and even cross borders without ever emerging from their depths.

  Baitullah Mehsud’s home base was Makeen, a rough-hewn town now sitting in the middle of the two militant volcanoes of North and South Waziristan. By the time he had become a fighter, Makeen was an ideal headquarters for recruiting and training followers and for planning operations. It was these Pakistani troops who would pave Baitullah’s ascent. On August 30, 2007, thousands of men he had culled from the nameless hills and unheard of towns of Pakistan’s northwest fought the Pakistani Army, which was armed by America and charged with flushing out militants from the northwest frontiers of their country. After a battle both bloody and loud, with gunfire and death and uncertainty echoing through the dry, gray horizon, Baitullah Mehsud’s men vanquished their opponents. Not only were they victorious but their army of foreigners and tribal boys also took not one or two but two hundred forty Pakistani soldiers hostage.

  The victory would change everything for Baitullah Mehsud; he became a household name in a country whose multitudes of militants rendered most of them nameless. The vanquished men were counted, recorded, and kept as hostages for two months. For the entire time it was Baitullah Mehsud, short, unassuming, and polite, who negotiated with the Pakistani military over what he wanted, what they wanted, and what sort of agreement might be reached to insure the release of the soldiers. During the entire time, his men guarded the two-hundred-odd prisoners in the massive training facility they and their foreign financiers had built for the purpose of jihad.

  At the end of September 2007 a deal was reached. Its stipulations mandated that the two hundred forty captive soldiers would be exchanged for twenty-five Taliban militants being held by the Pakistani authorities. The exchange happened one afternoon at the end of September, and Baitullah Mehsud himself was said to have welcomed back the freed captives. Each one of the released men, as the Pakistani government would later acknowledge, was a trained suicide bomber. They would not stay in Waziristan for long, for Baitullah Mehsud had given them missions all over Pakistan.

  OCTOBER 2007

  Asif would stay in New York City and Benazir would go to Karachi. The city where she was expected to arrive watched with trepidation as it was invaded by vast numbers of people desiring to make history. Because history is erected on the bent backs of the forgetful, large numbers were required. Since few in Karachi were forgetful enough, they had to be imported in large numbers from other parts of Pakistan. They brought with them a tremendous din: men waving flags, men shouting slogans, men whooping with delight, men making signs of victory; a sea of men elated at making up a little piece of a historic event.

  Fed by the mass arrivals, the story of historic return grew fat. Eight years, eight such long years, the groggy newspaper readers thought as they unfolded the pages and saw pictures they remembered, read promises just like the ones made twenty-one years ago when Benazir had returned the first time, chin up and chest outstretched against the glare of another military dictator. In their heads, the symphony of return played, interrupted now and again with the odd chord that suggested something unknown, something ominous. Had the world, Karachi, and she changed in the meantime? Could they go back to what once was and pick up the story of democracy, of a woman-led country, where it had been interrupted? Was a more portly Benazir, padded by the weight of babies borne and worries overcome, win over a city swollen beyond its capacity with countless migrants?

  They sat quietly with their questions as the Bhutto cavalcade in Dubai readied to board the plane that would bring Benazir and one hundred fifty of her closest supporters back home to Pakistan. Elbowing their way to proximity, these one hundred fifty were the chunky men and few women who most ardently hoped for positions in the future Bhutto government. A Bhutto governme
nt, everyone agreed, was nearly a certainty, for when had a Bhutto return not been followed by a Bhutto reclaiming of the torch? In all the forgetfulness of the moment, this fact had not been forgotten. As the convoy grew ready, they fretted about their distance from the woman that was its magnetic center, nervously eyed the men sitting closer, trying to read their lips as they whispered into the ear of Benazir Bhutto. In turn, the men who sat closer or closest worried that their hard-won positions would be usurped by others who wanted them just as desperately.

  “Jeeay Bhutto!” or “Long live Bhutto!” was the cry that went up in the plane as it entered Pakistani airspace. No flight attendant could restrain the pandemonium within, the tremendous tumult of a returning heroine. Benazir Bhutto and her entourage landed at Karachi’s Jinnah International Airport without any untoward event marring their arrival. The sky was clear and blue and hot; it was a typically dusty October afternoon. Benazir cried as she left the plane, and the avalanche of waiting flashes caught every dropped tear and showed them to all the country. And so in the sea of people, the shower of burgundy rose petals, the sweat and the pushing and jostling of reporters and party workers, of people who had been promised this or that, the first episode of the historic return was concluded.

  It took two hours for the procession to exit the plane and arrive at the VIP lounge at the airport, and another two to exit the airport. The sun had begun its descent over the horizon. Time did not seem to matter to the woman at the center or to the hundreds of her closest supporters working hard to keep their positions close to her. It did not seem to matter either to the hundreds of thousands of Pakistan People’s Party workers who waited all along the long road from the airport to Mohammad Ali Jinnah Road, where Benazir Bhutto would make her historic address to a rally of her party workers. The distance between the rally site and Jinnah International Airport in Karachi was approximately twenty kilometers, and two hundred officers of the Karachi Police had been assigned the task of guarding the entourage as it made its way from one end of the city to the other. With the size of the crowd, they had estimated it would take an hour for the motorcade to arrive.

  The procession moved slowly, more slowly than even the slowest estimates. Four hours after it began at the airport it had traversed only about five kilometers. It was dark now and the lights of Karachi, always dim, flickered on and off on different parts of the route, shedding only intermittent light on the people leaving, joining in, cheering, and chanting. Bhutto herself stood with her white veiled head poking out from the sunroof of a truck. No longer delicate but stolid and middle-aged, she waved to her supporters hour after hour after hour, replenished from her long rest of eight years. She did not tire or complain or weary of the slow pace. She was not in a hurry, for she was already there, in Pakistan, and this was her moment.

  It was luck that saved her. When the blast hit, abrupt and resounding, she had just ducked down into the safe shell of the truck. It was her first break after eight hours of being on her feet, and it happened to come at exactly the right time. But if the explosion was sudden, it was not a surprise. The hundreds of thousands of terror-weary Pakistanis watching on their televisions at home, the ones who had seen year after year after year of mounting terrorist attacks in the eight years that Bhutto had been gone, would only cluck their tongues. They could have told her so. The details were similar to other bombings she had missed in her absence. Two suicide bombers, one wearing a vest holding five kilos of explosives, wading through the crowd and sidling up to a motorcade of thousands until they were at its center. One hundred forty were killed in the bomb blast that ripped through Benazir Bhutto’s return procession and several hundred others injured.

  Benazir Bhutto managed to survive. In the aftermath, she was scuttled away at great speed, taken from a scene of carnage where cries still rose from mangled bodies and torn off limbs and blood soaked the flags of the Pakistan People’s Party. She did not see the piles of bodies or pieces of arms and legs and torsos that were recovered from the cars and buses in which they perished. She did not see the blazing pools of gasoline that had bled out of wrecked vehicles. They were the only lights on the darkened street where the blast had occurred; the streetlights were not working, so the fires illuminated the grisly task of taking away the bodies and saving the wounded.

  Pallid but still alive, Benazir Bhutto retreated into the home she had built by the sea soon after her son Bilawal had been born, after she had won her first election and become the first Muslim woman to lead a Muslim country. When the teams of police investigators sent by the inspector general of the Sindh Police arrived, she refused to let them inside. She was certain, she told her supporters and advisors, that the next attack against her would be carried out by men wearing police uniforms, and she would not let any of them, not a single one, inside her home. Not knowing what to do, the policemen, who had been sent by their bosses in the Sindh Police to ask questions and to start an investigation, shrugged, turned around, and went home. Night descended on Bilawal House and sea breezes blew onto its lawns. Benazir Bhutto was home again for the first time in eight years. As she slept, the churning rumor mills began to throw out bit by bit the names of possible culprits. The Pakistanis who had stayed awake into the night after yet another bloody day listened to them before they went to bed.

  NOVEMBER 1, 2007

  The meal sat on the square dining table in the middle of the only room of the house that was lit, on the top floor. It was Friday and Amina had cooked the meal she cooked every Friday, the same one that was cooked at her mother’s house. It was fish curry, cooked with roasted tomatoes and pungent garlic and a freshly squeezed lemon, just as she had been taught in the kitchen of the apartment where her family had lived when they first arrived from India.

  She had cooked it so many times that she could do it in her sleep. Now she looked at Sohail and realized that he could just as well eat it in his sleep. There was a sluggish automation to his motions, curry over rice, fish over curry, chewing and swallowing, a stray belch coming forth every now and then. He kept his eyes on his plate, the same plates they used every Friday. Fridays and fish curry were special, and their special status was signified by the nicer china that she always brought out for the occasion.

  Friday of late was also the day of disappointments, when it had only alternately been so in the Fridays past. This Friday, like all the other Fridays since the other wife had passed, he had gone downstairs into the cavernous silence of the middle floor, where Amina believed he had erected a shrine to his second wife. This posthumous monument, she had grown convinced, was far more formidable even than the real, mortal woman in whose memory it was created. Under its spell, the husband who returned was wrapped in an impenetrable membrane, stubborn and impervious to the curries and conversations of the living.

  This Friday she had a plan. It was the plan she had been developing in the loneliness of many Fridays, as she strained to hear his movements downstairs, his steps and his sighs echoing in the silence. It was clear to her now that death alone could not make her marriage whole again. She now realized that a greater act of change was required, a return to what had been before, before an interloper arrived. Only she remembered those days well, the aimless mornings, the pure silences untainted by the thoughts of another, the security of knowing that each was possessed singly and equally and perfectly by the other.

  They would move downstairs to the first floor, she concluded. The old first floor that had been scoured and painted and for which they had still not managed to find suitable renters. That blank slate would be the venue to return to, the new old beginning, to reclaim the marriage as it had once been. In the weeks since she first had this idea, it had percolated and become robust with detail. This new venue had emerged as a stage, with the same props from the first scenes of their marriage.

  She had chosen this Friday to tell him about it. It would be done ever so delicately, between the fish curry and the rice pudding, the aperture between one part of a carefully prepared m
eal and the next. As he ate now, unthinkingly pushing morsel after morsel, she rehearsed the words of the request and the terms of the proposition. She had already preempted his objections that renovations were needed to the bathroom and kitchen. They would not be an obstacle, she would insist, she could handle it all, plus the rooms were airier and brighter, even if just a bit smaller. If that didn’t convince him, she would set out her trump card, the aching knees and backs of their approaching old age. “The bottom floor would be so much more convenient,” she would say, requiring no rupees to be shelled out to neighbor boys to carry up this or that, no heaving sighs when none were to be found and kilos of onions and potatoes had to be lugged by him up three flights of stairs.

  She began as she put down the delicate dish of bone china in which she had set the rice pudding she served on Fridays. “I was thinking,” she said as he lifted his head, “that we should move downstairs. Not downstairs just below I mean,” she continued, registering immediately the silence, the confusion on his face, “but downstairs to the bottom floor, like before.” He heard her, but he said nothing, his spoon clinking against the bottom of the dish of pudding as he ladled three spoonfuls into his bowl. The pudding was dotted with raisins; he loved them, and she had put in twice as many as usual.

 

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