And the World Changed

by Muneeza Shamsie

  SEPTEMBER 20, 2001

  Thursday, a week after. A dear friend whom I call hermanocito sent me an email. He had barely escaped being beaten up. He was threatened because he has a beard and wears a turban. Just before I received the email I had been talking with my neighbor whose wondrous eight-year-old daughter asked, “But why do those people hate me, Mummy? I’m American.” And then I turned on the TV and saw what is now Afghanistan for me. Food was being distributed. Names were being called. The names were of adult males. But most of the adult males were dead or gone and so the children were coming up to collect the food allocations. No women. There were a few little girls. A name was called out. Silence. No one came up. And then one of the men smiled sadly, went to the group waiting for food, and called out a tiny girl. She had wild curly hair and the beautiful eyes of childhood. It seemed as if she were too young to recognize her father’s name, who most probably was already dead or fighting toward death. She came forward and picked up the bag they handed to her and began dragging it. Someone showed her how to sling it over her shoulder. And she did. The bag was as big as she was. Maybe bigger. And then they put a cardboard box in front of her. She stood there looking at it and tried pushing it with her feet. The man who had brought her forward smiled sadly again and gestured that he would bring it to her house later. It was that small gesture of compassion, and the tiny girl-child going back into the crowd with her bag over her shoulder, that shattered me. I sat screaming, bleeding from the womb that my body hasn’t possessed for over thirty years.

  It may be good to write about the horrors we bring upon ourselves. Writing, after all, is a political act. I understand that peace and justice are what we have to keep working toward in our own way to keep from shriveling up in body, mind, and spirit. Compassion. I am haunted by the image of the little girl carrying the bag of food over her shoulder. War—and yet the hope of peace.

  AUGUST 2004

  Innana is the name we hear. She is—we are told—the Queen of Heaven and Earth. Her older sister, widowed Ereshkigal, Queen of the “Underworld” recognizes the descent of Innana for what it is. Our bombs have torn the skin off the Earth and Ereshkigal emerges to wander across the land searching for shattered, unburied lovers and murdered children.

  The image of the little girl in Afghanistan and the presence of Ereshkigal merge into the woman in the documentary. There is nothing contained, nothing stylized about her grief. It is the scream of the mother who has seen brutal death. She is grandmother, mother, sister, sister-in-law, aunt, daughter, binti, hija, beti, neighbor, sakhi, amiga, companion who has walked with us since we were born. She curses all of us, the Americans, who have brought death and destruction to her family, her friends, her neighborhood, her city, her country of Iraq. Sitting in the air-conditioned comfort of a theater in an enormous multiplex cinema complex located not that far from San Francisco, once hailed as the City of Flowers, peace and love, we are stunned into silence. The munching of popcorn and chocolates, the bubble of sodas, the soft shuffling of bodies are silenced. I see the woman in front of me trembling violently. We know that we are once again implicated in the creation of sorrow and furious grief. A very old woman enters the theater. She is late and can’t see well enough in the dark to find a seat. She begins to wail softly, “I can’t find a place. I am lost.” She stops near me and I reach over to help her to the seat next to me. She says, “Oh my, I missed the beginning of the film. Why is that woman screaming? Is that Arabic? Is she mad?” Someone behind her tells her to be quiet.

  Mad? In all the senses of the word. As I see bombs falling from the sky and listen to the young men and women ready to unleash their terrifying technology onto those they dare not think of as being human, I am reminded of the history of this particular war. The steady march of greed and the brilliant manipulation of words and ideas that have at last culminated in this war. A war that is once again shrouded in lofty words and promises. I remember the words of Euripides: “Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.” I know that the woman’s curse is on me as it is on all of us who have not yet found a way to stop the insanity called war. War in all its forms.

  A few months later, a student stops me before we enter the classroom. She apologizes for having missed one of the classes and explains that she had to go home to her family to take care of her mother. I nod and say, of course, these things happen and one does have to take care of family. I begin to move away. She stops me. She says, “It is because my father died at this time last year.” I look at her and realize that her father couldn’t have been much older or much younger than me. Before I can express my condolences, she says, “He committed suicide.” And again before I can say anything, she says, “He was a Vietnam vet. He had been attempting suicide even before he left Vietnam. Years before I was born.”

  As I hear about the women in Mexico sending their sons to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq so that they can get the citizenship promised them in exchange for their bodies, and as we continue to call down Peace upon our Prophets—the sung and the unsung ones—the children, the women, the men—I think of the old man who stopped me near my home in Karachi when I was moving toward my ninth year. The air was alive with the sound of the evening azaan. The man was a stranger and I never saw him again. He was weeping and he said, “Beti, may Allah have compassion on all of us. On all of us. Friends and enemies—there is no difference.”

  DECEMBER 22, 2007

  OAXACA, OAXACA

  I have been trying to read Francisco Goldman’s The Long Night of the White Chickens. It is difficult reading. The Guatemala of the book is Pakistan to me. Pakistan of military rule supported by U.S. tax dollars. As I walk through Oaxaca, I am haunted by the sardonic words of one of the characters in the book: Guatemala does not exist. I know. I have been there.

  I am tempted to write on the page of the novel (in pencil of course):

  Guatemala does exist. Pakistan exists. They exist to remind us of what is happening not only in Guatemala and in Pakistan but also in Mexico, in Palestine, in Israel, Iraq, Iran, Burma, France, Germany, the United States, Africa. In our world. Lawyers, students, teachers, human rights activists, men, women, children beaten, killed, disappeared. Nothing new—anywhere in the world. Nothing new except the horrifying intensity and acceleration of violence and just as horrifying an intensity and acceleration of apathy by those who think they are untouched by, not complicit in this violence.

  I do not write in the book because it belongs to the Oaxaca Lending Library.

  DECEMBER 27, 2007

  CALLE ALIANZA, COL. JALATLACO, OAXACA

  Chuck/Carlos who has been watching the news wakes me up. “Breaking news. Bad news,” he says. “Benazir Bhutto has been assassinated.”

  I feel as if my whole living self were filled with horror, despair, anguish. He says, “Why are you shocked? Didn’t you think that something like this would happen to her?” No, I did not expect this murder. I try to meditate. To calm myself, to calm the world that Benazir and I have inhabited. The people and the tierra, the desh, the vataan that in this time of our history is named Pakistan. All I can do is shout, “Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. We have all become inmates, all of us—of an insane asylum.” I am still muttering and crying as I run two blocks to Casa Arnel to phone my cousin in California. Benazir has been murdered in Rawalpindi but her city—my city—Karachi is blowing up. My cousin in California hasn’t heard the news yet. She promises to call her sister in Karachi immediately. The images of the murders, mayhem, and chaos in Karachi that I had just witnessed on television are with me as I call my friend and mentor, Ijaz Syed, in California. I can’t finish the message of outrage and grief that I leave on his voice mail. English, Gujarati, or Urdu can’t express what I feel and think.

  Benazir had returned to Pakistan in the fall of 2007. In the first attempt to assassinate her, she survived but 170 people died. After this I received emails discussing, beating, detailing Benazir’s history, her personality, her political and personal goal
s.

  I had stopped respecting Benazir Bhutto early in her first term as Prime Minister of Pakistan. I had actually been wary of her since a brief encounter I had with her in the 60s. She was about twelve years old. I was about twenty-five years old. A friend of my parents who was a supporter and admirer of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had invited me to go with him to the Bhutto residence in Karachi where he had to deliver some papers. He told me that he would like to introduce Benazir Bhutto to me. “She will be our Prime Minister one day,” he said. He did not add, “Inshallah.” The future Prime Minister of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto, came into the room where we had been left standing, looked me straight in the eye and said not a word in response to my greetings or to the greetings of my companion. She had the coldest eyes I had seen in my twenty-odd years. Her eyes, her refusal to greet or thank us, made it clear that she was not interested in “unimportant” people such as us.

  Many years later in Oaxaca, on December 28, 2007, the wonderful lady many of us know as Mama Glafira tried to console me after Benazir’s murder. According to Mama Glafira, what made Benazir beautiful were her beautiful eyes. I realized that since her father’s assassination, Benazir’s eyes—in all the pictures of her I had seen in magazines and on TV—had lost the haughty, cold look. But even if she had retained those cold eyes and her disdain for “unimportant” people, even if she did prove to be a very disappointing and frustrating politician, the threats of violence against her and her cruel, calculated, violent death can never be justified or condoned.

  It is January 2, 2008, and as I walk down Macedonia Alcala toward the zócalo, I remember that today is my parents’ seventieth wedding anniversary. But I am still in mourning for what has happened in Pakistan, what is happening in Pakistan, the senseless and horrifying violence that is consuming our world. I bend down to thank the old, blind man who has been singing on this road nearly every evening for twenty-odd years. About ten years ago, my friend Ofelia and I had accompanied him—off-key of course but with great gusto—as he sang “Naila.” Others had joined us. We had sung the song twice to the great amusement of the singer. On this January day of cold, dry air that reminds me of winters in Karachi, he senses the tears in my voice and says, “No llores, amiga” and begins to sing the song of the dying mother to her daughter. The mother who tells her daughter that lamentations and tears will not help. If the daughter cries, the mother is sure to die and remain dead. But on the other hand, if the daughter sings in the face of death, the mother will never die, she will always be alive. It is a song that has always haunted me.

  I know—with sorrow—that I will be searching until the day of my death for a melody, a few lyrics that would exorcize the violent deaths, the injustices, the cruelty from our world.

  MIRAGE

  Talat Abbasi

  A short story writer, Talat Abbasi (1942– ) was born in Lucknow, and grew up in Karachi. She was educated in Pakistan at St. Joseph’s College, Karachi, graduated from Kinnaird College, Lahore, and later the London School of Economics, UK. She moved to New York in 1978 where she lives still. She worked for the UN Population Fund until her retirement in 2004, working on gender and population issues across Asia.

  Abbasi has published a collection of her short stories, Bitter Gourd and Other Stories (Oxford University Press, 2001), in which “Mirage” originally appeared. Her short fiction is set mostly in Pakistan and revolves around class and gender; it has been published often in U.S. college texts.

  “Mirage” was first broadcast as the prize winner of a BBC World Service short story competition in 2000. In this story, Abbasi provides a moving account of a mother’s heroic struggle to look after her severely handicapped child, and her complex emotions on leaving him in an institution. Abbasi says:

  The title “Mirage” was taken from [an] enduring image in my head . . . this shining pool of water on the road driving from somewhere to somewhere in Pakistan in blazing heat—spectacular until of course it turned out to be just that—a mirage. A promise ending in disappointment simply because you were temporarily fooled by the deception. A commonplace occurrence most people will have experienced, the tricks life plays on you. Nothing more, nothing less.

  • • •

  “November twentieth,” says Sister Agnes.

  November 20, I write.

  “Nineteen eighty,” says Sister Agnes.

  1980, I write.

  There’s something very practiced about the way she says it. Perhaps they all falter at this point, the last thing after all on the last form they’ll sign. Scores of parents over the years have come through the front door of Hope House to hand their children over to Sister Agnes because they’re mentally retarded, schizophrenic, autistic, epileptic, or have cerebral palsy. Hardly the complete list of reasons, just a sample. Young parents on the whole, many still in their thirties, because Hope House is only for ten-year-olds and under. Many coming alone, on their own, as I have with Omar.

  Mind you, I’m not faltering, not me. Not one bit. If I’m behaving like a puppet it’s because I’m drained, exhausted. I was exhausted at least mentally even before we left home today. I’m always tense, in quite a state when I have to take him out in public and, of course, today I was worse than usual. He sensed it and acted up. I must’ve flung a bag of candies into his mouth by the time the diaper was done. A dozen pieces of candy at a time every time he bared his teeth to shred it. Understandable, of course, his reaction to a diaper at his age. It isn’t always needed, but I have to, just in case. It’s candy corn, the sticky kind he can’t just swallow, is forced to chew, gives me time.

  “Candy corn’s bad for his teeth.”

  The pediatrician says that every time I take him to get the prescription refilled for his tranquilizer. But not very seriously. He doesn’t expect me to give up on the candy corn. Then I zipped him into his jeans, fastened his belt which he doesn’t have the skill to undo. That’s why it’s jeans, not pull-on pants. And then to keep his hands as well as his mouth really busy for what he hates most of all—his harness—I gave him half a bag of potato chips, his greatest weakness, the salted kind with lots of MSG. It hasn’t occurred to the doctor to tell me that MSG is also bad for him.

  Then all of a sudden I threw myself on top of him, pinning down both his arms with my elbows, taking him by surprise. Rammed the spoon between his teeth and held it there to keep his mouth open until he’d swallowed every drop of his tranquilizer, until it had all gone down. I realized that I had gritted my teeth so hard, I’d bitten my own tongue! I cried a bit so there was no time left to cut his nails. The taxi driver was buzzing me from downstairs. He was parked across the street two blocks away from the apartment building. That’s another reason I’m exhausted. Just the thought of traffic lights and having to cross the street with him before they turn green!

  He hates his harness. And that, too, is understandable. A full-grown energetic ten-year-old in a toddler’s harness. Imagine being allowed to walk but in leg irons! Still, I have to use that harness when I take him out just in case he decides to stage a sit-in in the middle of traffic. He did that only once before I thought of a harness and believe me, it wasn’t easy, dragging him by the collar of his shirt, inch by inch, like a dead weight across the road. And on top of it—

  “Pair of loonies!” yelled the driver who had to brake suddenly.

  “Who let you out?”

  He meant both of us. And who could blame him? Who could blame them all for staring? Unexpected, let’s face it, even for New York.

  Still he was wrong about me. Not a loony, not me. But always at my wits’ end, it’s true, no matter what. Cooped up with a hyperactive frustrated boy in the bare two-room apartment. I lined the floor with mattresses, quilts and foam after receiving warnings from the landlord about the neighbors complaining of “a herd, at least, of thumping, marauding elephants up there.” They too were wrong, of course. No threatening elephants. Just a small exquisite bird trapped in the room, flying in panic from wall to wall, hurling itself against
them, hurting only itself, incapable of harming others. Watched in silence by the mother.

  I thanked God it was at least a corner apartment, no neighbors on the bedroom side. Imagine having to line the walls too with mattresses, I thought, as I watched in empathy. Then as the weeks grew into months, even a year and more, and the frightened bird still found no peace—neither smashed itself against the walls nor found a way to fly out—I watched in rage and self-pity.

  And becoming melodramatic at the end, likened myself bitterly to a Pharaoh’s slave buried alive with him. Nothing happened this time though, thank goodness. The taxi’s brought us without incident to Hope House, Omar’s home.

  But “Omar’s home” sounds wrong. How can he have a home apart from me?

  Am I faltering now?

  Maybe I am.

  Only ten and strikingly pretty. His black hair, which I am stroking to soothe him, keep him quiet on my lap, is amazingly still baby soft though the curls are showing signs of straightening out. His fine features are in perfect proportion, chiseled on a small delicate face. Strangers have always been drawn to him, impulsively reaching out to pet him, complimenting me. In fact only last month I took him to the pediatrician. He had had his tranquilizer and so he was sitting quietly by my side. I didn’t notice this woman, being in quite a state myself as I usually am when I have to bring him out in public—there I go, repeating myself—especially to small enclosed places like the doctor’s office. Yes, there can be trouble even with a tranquilizer! But suddenly she’s there before me, chapped red lips parted in a smile, hands reaching out to fondle his curls.

  “What a beauti . . .”

  That’s usually how far they get! Then they all stop, awkward, embarrassed, because close up they all see something. It’s the eyes, of course, under those fantastic long eyelashes they were all set to coo over. They’re not blind eyes, seeing nothing. They’re seeing as well as you and I, but what they’re seeing is nothing you and I can understand. That much they tell you as they confront you in one long, unblinking stare before they go back to darting constantly, nervously, from left to right and back again, never at rest.