The Language of Secrets

by Ausma Zehanat Khan

  Ashkouri interrupted her.

  “What brings you to the mosque, sister?”

  Paula answered for her, unexpectedly helpful. “She’s like Gracie, Hassan. She’s trying to find herself.”

  Ashkouri pinned Rachel with his boundless, dark eyes.

  “The Masjid un-Nur is a difficult place to locate, even for those who know what they are searching for. How did you stumble upon it?”

  Rachel felt that stillness seize the room again. And again she failed to identify its source. She kept her eyes from Jamshed Ali and Dinaase Abdi with an effort. Standing behind them were Zakaria Aboud and Sami Dardas, also on the list. This was her moment to convince Ashkouri of her status as a hapless outsider—or to blow the operation sky-high.

  She took another bite of the baklava.

  “One of the sisters at Middlefield mentioned this place, said it was much quieter for someone who was new. She said you conduct proper study sessions here. I don’t live far, so I thought I’d give it a try.” She pushed her hair under her scarf, the movement clumsy. “If it’s not—is it open to the public? Did I just barge my way in?”

  When no one answered her, she set her plate down on the counter and brushed her hands against her trousers. “Shoot, I’m sorry.” She swept crumbs from her scarf. “When you’re new, you don’t get anything right. I’d better go.”

  She shouldered her way past Grace and Paula, feeling the tension in the hall dissipate a little. From the corner of her eye, she saw Ashkouri’s quick glance at Jamshed.

  Ashkouri placed a graceful hand on Rachel’s arm, halting her progress.

  “Sister Rachel,” he said. “In God’s house, everyone is welcome. There are no gatekeepers to keep you from whatever it is you seek to learn here.” Paula’s hand was still fastened onto his arm. “Isn’t that so, Paula?”

  Paula struggled to disguise her displeasure at his unwanted invitation.

  “As you wish, Hassan. Whatever you wish.”

  Rachel caught Ashkouri’s discreet nod at Jamshed.

  “If you’d like, you may join our halaqa tonight. You won’t find it as didactic as in other mosques, perhaps.” Ashkouri said this with a mildly tempered smile. “We speak of poetry as much as of anything else, but what is poetry if not another path to God? Don’t you think so, Rachel Ellison?”

  Rachel’s answering smile was hesitant.

  “If you’re sure I won’t be in the way.”

  Ashkouri shook his head, disarranging his dark curls.

  “Just as you seek to learn about us, there is much we’d like to learn about you. About any new member who crosses our threshold.”

  Rachel’s smile faltered on her lips. She glanced quickly at the four men who had been at the training camp with Mohsin.

  Unlike the group of worshippers basking in the glow of Hassan Ashkouri’s mystique, she knew he meant the words as a threat.

  10

  Khattak turned his key in the lock and let himself in. The family home was in Forest Hill, not far from the boys’ college where he had spent his youth with Nathan Clare. The girls’ school his sisters had attended was also within walking distance, hallmarks of a privileged childhood. His mother spent the winters in Peshawar. His sisters lived in the family home, a space he shared when his mother was away, a fact that Ruksh sometimes quarreled with. Misbah, on the other hand, would look at him with compassion, and whisper to Ruksh that Esa was lonely.

  It was late afternoon, and the house was cold.

  He could hear his sisters’ voices in one of the upstairs bedrooms. He took the stairs two at a time, not pausing to reflect upon how to approach Rukshanda, the older of his two sisters, the one guaranteed to disagree with any suggestion he offered.

  Ciprian Coale’s words still rankled, as did the easy superiority behind them suggesting that Coale knew Khattak’s family better than Esa did. Coale had wanted to get under his skin—Esa would be a fool to let him. But the questions remained: Had Esa been so immersed in the Drayton scandal that he hadn’t noticed his sister was wearing an engagement ring? Would Ruksh have taken such a step without consulting him?

  He knew it couldn’t be coincidence. If Ashkouri had found a way to ensnare Esa’s sister, knowing who Esa was, it would be part of his design, somehow connected to the Nakba plot.

  He knocked on the door of their mother’s room. His sisters didn’t notice him at first. Ruksh and Misbah were bent over the king-size bed, removing colorful fabrics from their plastic sheeting. On one side of the bed, books and magazines were stacked in a haphazard pile. A dozen of these were wedding magazines: Modern Bride, The Knot, Kismet, Asiana. And one peeking out of the stack that Khattak had never heard of: Lavish Dulhan.

  He took a breath. Ruksh’s ring finger was bare. He wasn’t the world’s most absentminded detective after all. But if Coale had been exaggerating, it wasn’t by much. The clothes on the bed were wedding silks—in red, Persian green, and royal blue.

  In that moment, he felt the keenness of his sister’s peril.

  What was Ashkouri’s real interest in Ruksh? How was he planning to use her?

  Misbah glanced up and saw him, her smile bright and welcoming.

  But Ruksh was startled, a guilty thing surprised.

  Khattak was never home at this time of day. And both of his sisters should have been out, Ruksh at her residency in epidemiology, Misbah at university, studying for her final exams. Instead, they were ensconced in their mother’s room, cheerfully picking out wedding clothes.

  Whose wedding? When was it to take place? And most of all, who was Ruksh thinking of marrying?

  Khattak’s habitual warmth with his sisters was beyond him at this moment.

  “Would you leave us please, Misbah?”

  An apprehensive glance passed between the sisters.

  And in that moment Khattak saw that they were not as dissimilar as he had always supposed. Ruksh was younger than him by a decade, Misbah by an additional five years. Ruksh resembled Khattak in physical appearance, if not in temperament—dark-haired, green-eyed, pale-skinned, her striking features made more dramatic by her volatile personality. Misbah was quiet like Khattak, reserved in judgment and pronouncement, less obviously Pathan in coloring, small, dark, and slight, with an ever-present warmth that brought Khattak’s mother to mind. When Misbah was around, he missed his mother less.

  Now, in the glance that passed between his sisters, Khattak found a surprising familiarity between them. In the normal course of things, Ruksh had little time for Misbah. Her true sisterly attachment was to Nathan’s younger sister, Audrey Clare. Audrey and Ruksh were the same age, they had attended the Bishop Strachan girls’ school together, and they still passed most free weekends in each other’s company.

  Misbah was the afterthought, the late addition to the family, amiable and innocent, indulged and then forgotten by both her older siblings. Left to her own devices, Misbah had chosen to pursue a career in international development studies. Ruksh was the only one of the three siblings to follow the well-traveled family footsteps into medicine. She was bright and impatient, possessed of an overweening ambition.

  “Don’t dismiss Misbah like a child. She can think for herself.”

  As was so often the case, Esa saw that his interaction with Ruksh was destined to be fractious. He nodded at Misbah, knowing which of her siblings Misbah would choose to obey.

  She shut the door to their mother’s room, unaccustomed to making demands of them.

  Khattak moved to the bed, capturing the slippery red silk between his fingers.

  “What is this, Ruksh?”

  “Why ask if you know the answer?” She was already angry, and Khattak had been in the room less than five minutes.

  “Because I’d like to know it from you.”

  “I’m not one of your suspects, Esa. You don’t get to trick me into a confession.”

  Khattak pushed the fabrics aside, making a space for himself on the bed.

  Weighing his words, he asked her,
“Do you have anything you need to confess?”

  A slight smile touched the corner of his mouth. With her arms crossed in front of her, and her hair pulled back in a ponytail, his sister reminded him of the much younger Ruksh who would follow him and Nate around, getting into scrapes that required his intercession without damaging her pride. A wave of tenderness washed over him.

  “These look like wedding fabrics,” he said, wishing he could let Ruksh tell him in her own time. “Have you met someone? Are you thinking of getting married?”

  “Have you been spying on me?” she asked at once.

  And how could he answer that?

  I haven’t been, but you’re caught up in an antiterrorism investigation. Do you know anything about that?

  Coale had warned him that Ruksh was under surveillance. Whether that meant electronic surveillance of the Khattak home, or of Ruksh’s phone calls and daily routine, he couldn’t be certain. And Coale would take a specific perverse pleasure in denying him access to that information on national security grounds.

  He wasn’t spying on his sister. He had never thought to spy on her. It was Ashkouri he needed to watch, Ashkouri whose motives could only be sinister

  But Ruksh would have no idea of this. Her reluctance to confide in Esa was based on her first failed engagement.

  “I’m not spying on you, Ruksh. But if you’re thinking of getting married, that’s obviously of interest to me.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “You’re not acting like my brother, you’re using your detective voice. And I don’t need Inspector Esa Khattak in this room.”

  She pushed a bolt of lavender silk away from her. It slid from the bed to the floor. When Khattak moved to recapture it, she blocked his attempt to help. He reached for his sister’s hand and held it, turning it palm up.

  “What is it, Ruksh? Why are you so angry? Shouldn’t this be a time of happiness for you?”

  She jerked her hand away.

  “As if you don’t know. As if you don’t remember what you did.”

  Khattak stood up. He rubbed a hand across his brow in a gesture that Ruksh imitated without realizing she was doing so.

  “Would you have preferred to remain in ignorance? Wouldn’t you have blamed me more if I had let you marry a man in love with someone else?”

  Ruksh had been twenty-two the first time she had decided, on impulse, to marry a man she had met at school.

  He’d shared the same background, faith, and culture. He’d also been dating an Irish-American student in an ongoing cross-border affair.

  At twenty-two, Ruksh hadn’t wanted to know.

  Khattak had hoped that time would mature his sister, lessening the pain of that early betrayal. He hadn’t expected that she would still blame him so many years later.

  She rushed in to defend herself.

  “It’s not what he did, or the fact that I was young and stupid. It’s what you did, investigating him. I never asked you to do that.”

  To this day, Ruksh didn’t believe that Esa had simply stumbled upon her fiancé with his other girlfriend. Esa had accepted the anger and the blame, knowing that Ruksh needed an outlet that wouldn’t hurt quite as much.

  Her brother was a safe target because Esa would always love her.

  Though sometimes, he found it hard.

  “Samina would have hated your chauvinist attitude.”

  Khattak blanched at the mention of his wife.

  “Staying at the house when Mum leaves the country, checking up on us. Samina never let you treat her that way—the all-knowing Inspector Khattak. She led you around by the nose.”

  “You don’t know anything about Samina,” Esa said quietly. “What she thought of me, how she saw me. She would have expected me to be involved in your life. That’s what family does. If you’re planning to be married, I would like to know. I would like to meet him.”

  Ruksh had the grace to look ashamed. She sank down on the bed, sending the magazines to the floor in a slithery heap. A book of poetry appeared at the top of the pile.

  Rooms Are Never Finished.

  A collection of poems by the great son of Kashmir, the poet Agha Shahid Ali.

  Khattak studied his sister.

  “He wants to meet you, too,” she said at last. “We haven’t decided anything. We’re still—just talking.” She shuffled one of the silks with her foot. “I’m probably getting ahead of myself.”

  “How did you meet?”

  “At a halaqa.” Her eyes lit with excitement. “Esa, his poetry is beautiful, transformative. You won’t believe it.”

  She rummaged through the pile of books until she found a loose sheet of paper. She passed it to Khattak, who read it through. The last few lines of the poem made him pause.

  Reclaim me in promise

  Of victory sweet.

  O homeland,

  O heartache,

  When shall we meet?

  Did Ruksh see what he saw? The poem followed a well-established tradition of Arabic poetry, conflating the personal with the political.

  In this case, the markedly political.

  Did the poet mean Jerusalem, the eternal homeland, the longest exile of contemporary history?

  Where shall we fly when all else is lost?

  Or did he mean Iraq?

  A land that promised us wheat and stars.

  And if it were the latter, he could no longer deny to himself that his sister was speaking of Hassan Ashkouri.

  He gathered his thoughts, returned the poem to her.

  “The halaqa was on poetry?”

  Ruksh frowned at him. “Not exactly. I mean, it was a proper halaqa—on theology, and historicity. It wasn’t lacking in any way, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  It wasn’t. He was intrigued by his sister’s use of the word “historicity.” In Khattak’s experience, most amateur scholars of the Qur’an chose to treat it as an ahistorical text, or as a fixed articulation of principle, disconnected to seventh-century social conditions. Any attempt to make use of context to modify meaning or to extract an ethical reading of scripture from the prevailing conditions of the day was generally met with condemnation. Innovation in matters of religion was considered unlawful and destined to lead to misguidance, regardless of the poison that spilled forth in the name of purity, disguised as fidelity to the past.

  Khattak had never heard of a halaqa where anything other than primary or secondary religious texts were studied—poetry was far afield. In most mosques, any mention of literature or poetry in this context would have been roundly condemned, reading beauty out of the Qur’an—an extraordinary irony for a civilization whose crossroads met at poetry, and where the Book itself was the greatest poetical expression of the language.

  As much as Khattak despised the idée fixe of men like Ashkouri, he was also intrigued. How had Ashkouri found recruits to his cause, if he was ready to stray from the most adamantine orthodoxy? What path would he have chosen as a scholar of Islam?

  “Is he Pathan?” Esa asked his sister.

  She was angry at once.

  “Does it matter? Are you really hung up on tribal affiliations just because you married a girl from Swat Valley?”

  A girl from Swat Valley.

  Samina. Gone these seven years, the loss still fresh in moments like this. Her photograph faced him on his mother’s dresser. He turned his head away, trying not to think of what the last decade had brought to the people of Swat, and to himself. The Taliban ascendancy, the Pakistan army’s counteroffensive, and the innocent whose bodies were littered between them. Samina’s parents had refused to allow their daughter to return to visit Swat, though they had taken heart from Malala Yousafzai’s courageous stand against the Taliban.

  Malala’s defiance had consisted of her insistence on going to school.

  “Not at all. I’m just curious.”

  “He’s Iraqi, Esa. And someone who’s more at peace with himself, I’ve yet to meet.”

  If that were truly the case,
which Khattak knew it couldn’t be, he would have hoped that some of that tranquillity would have rubbed off on Rukshanda. Her words were aimed at shattering his composure. At engaging him in long-forgotten battles.

  She was a strong, self-reliant woman. Yet she still felt the need to prove herself to her brother, the brother who had struck out on his own path at every opportunity. And had suffered the consequences of doing so.

  Khattak quickly refocused.

  “What is your poet’s name?”

  Ruksh looked defiant. “Hassan Ashkouri. You don’t know him.”

  Would to God that he didn’t. If Ruksh hadn’t forgiven him over a short-lived infatuation, what would she do when he was done with Ashkouri?

  He didn’t know what to say to his sister. Everything he did from this point onward, she could only view as betrayal.

  He couldn’t tell her about the operation. And even if he disobeyed orders and told her what he knew, Ruksh was too stubborn to believe him. And much too sure of her own judgment to be swayed in the slightest by his.

  He looked at the wedding clothes that had slipped from the bed to the floor, a liquid ripple of jewel tones.

  “It looks as though you know what you want. How long have you known each other?”

  “Quite as long as you knew Samina.”

  Less than six months. Long enough for Khattak to know that he had been granted God’s most generous gift. And he had been younger than Ruksh was now.

  He remembered a line of Nizar Qabbani’s ravishing poetry.

  God gave me the rose, and them the thorn.

  He felt powerless. Trapped in a web woven by Ciprian Coale. The only bit of light in it, the words Ruksh had tossed out at the beginning of the conversation.

  He wants to meet you, too.

  “I’d like to meet him whenever you think best.” He paused. “Does he know about me? What I do?” Khattak’s profession had kept many of his sisters’ suitors at bay, but he knew that Ashkouri would have chosen Ruksh because of it.