by Saba Imtiaz
‘Really?’ Jamie had come across as this hard core correspondent who was completely committed to his work. I should have listened to Saad, damn it.
‘So who did he steal this one from?’ Andrea asks.
‘Err, me,’ I say. She sits up. ‘How?’
‘I told him that I was interviewing the detainee, but he never let on that he was interested in the story. Then I went to Larkana and came back to discover he’d dug out a contact for the guy and had interviewed him.’
‘I see,’ she says, looking thoughtful. ‘That is terrible. It was clearly a great scoop. Didn’t your editor do anything?’
An image of Kamran perusing the Chairman Mao menu with steely-eyed intensity pops into my head. ‘No. And I pitched it to someone else in the UK but the commission didn’t work out because CNN ran it first.’
‘That is quite sad. Tell me again, what kind of stories do you usually focus on? I remember in Larkana you were talking about gangs and their political wings.’
‘Yep,’ I say. ‘I do pretty much everything, you know what it’s like in a newspaper, but I’m really interested in reporting more deeply on gang violence, as well as religious movements.’
We end up discussing our own experiences with covering religious parties in Pakistan. She’s a bit surprised to hear that I’ve spent a lot of time hanging out at rallies. ‘And they’re fine with you? I mean, you’re a young girl.’
I don’t know how to explain to her how long it took for me to gain anyone’s trust, the days I spent at protests covering stories and writing copy that never made it into the paper, the mad guy on the bike chasing me to Garhi Khuda Bux or the Sipah-e-Sahaba spokesperson who wouldn’t look me in the eye but called me at midnight to ‘chat’. I’ve never really considered any of these things to be the worst part of my job.
‘I suppose. They’re still a bit suspicious, but that’s to be expected because they clearly know that I don’t adhere to any of their ideologies.’
‘You know, I may have some work for you,’ Andrea says, and reaches for her iPhone. ‘I just got this e-mail from a former colleague of mine, who now works at Al Jazeera in New York. They’re looking for someone to contribute to their website from Pakistan and they wanted me to recommend someone.’
‘Oh, thanks. You really don’t have to.’
Andrea waves her phone in the air. ‘Of course I do. It’s such a pity about James stealing your story and honestly, I have long found the man to be a parasite. I’m really glad you told me about this.’
I give Andrea my e-mail address and phone number, and she dashes off an e-mail introducing me to the editor. ‘A piece of advice,’ she says, as she calls for the check. ‘Use this opportunity wisely. It could potentially lead to something bigger. And never tell James about a story ever again!’
She walks off. The last twenty-four hours of my life have been the most bizarre experience. How did I go from joy to crushing sadness to optimism in just a day?
I spend the evening exchanging e-mails with the Al Jazeera editor, who appears to be really excited about me contributing. We decide on four stories and when she tells me how much she’ll be paying me for each, I nearly keel over. Why have I never considered freelancing before?
6 p.m.: Call from Zara’s brother Imad. I answer it, wondering why he’s calling me. Maybe he wants to throw a surprise party for her or something.
It’s not Imad. It’s just someone crying hysterically. I’m going to cancel the call when I hear, ‘Ayeshaaaa.’
‘Zara? Is that you? What’s wrong?’
‘What’s wrong? Well, I bloody well got mugged, that’s what’s wrong.’
‘Shit. Okay. I’ll be right over.’
I get to her house to find Imad pacing the foyer. ‘She’s in the lounge,’ he says, ‘She’s really shaken up.’
Zara has stopped crying, but I can see where her tears have cut tracks through her make-up. Her cropped hair is all mussed up.
‘I’m so sorry Zara, what happened?’
‘Oh Ayesha, you know how we always tell people that muggings are just part of life in Karachi and they should either move on or move out?’ Zara is twisting a tissue and shredding it into bits.
‘Err, yeah,’ I say, trying to figure out whether she’s in shock or just upset.
‘Yeah, I’m never saying that again. It’s so horrible when it happens to you.’
‘So what happened? Where were you? They didn’t hit you or anything, right?’ Memories of friends telling me that they’d been smacked across the face with a gun are flashing through my head.
‘No, no, they were just really frantic. I’d gone to the market to buy some fresh juice and was at the signal to turn towards the house when two teenage boys—you know, really young, they were barely 18—came out of nowhere and started tapping on the window with their guns. So I rolled the window down, and they just started SCREAMING. “Give us your phone, give us your phone”. So I obviously handed it over…and then they wanted money, so I took out my wallet—hai, Ayesha, I’d only just bought it from Charles & Keith—but they kept screaming “more, more”.’
‘So then?’
‘Well, then I gave them my handbag but they still kept screaming! That fucking signal wouldn’t turn green, it’s like I was frozen in time with these two boys just asking me for things.’
‘Oh you poor thing,’ I say, handing her a glass of water. ‘What did you do?’
‘Well, I had picked up booze from Anil this morning but I never got around to taking it out of the car so it was in the glove compartment. I took the bottle of whiskey out and gave it to them.’
I’m trying not to laugh. Zara got mugged, this is horrible, but who has ever handed over alcohol during a mugging?
‘But they kept saying “give us everything”, and the only thing I could see in front of me was the falsa juice I’d just bought from the market, so I just shoved the bag at them and then the signal turned green and they ran away, clutching my bright pink bag, the whiskey I spent three thousand rupees on, and falsa juice.’
I can’t hold the laughter in anymore. I giggle and Zara looks at me like I’m crazy. ‘So, you basically gave them a new wallet with money, booze, and mixers?’
Zara starts laughing too. ‘Yeah, it is kind of funny isn’t it?’
‘Those boys must be having such a party tonight,’ I say, and that sets Zara off. She’s laughing hysterically and then eventually flops back on the sofa. ‘God, I really needed to laugh. I just couldn’t believe what was happening to me. And then Imad wants me to go to the cops—what am I going to tell them, that I basically handed over booze?’
Saturday, April 18, 2012
Headline of the day: ‘Taliban gift car to militant who shot at a drone’
Woken up by a call from a woman who describes herself as Kamran’s PA. Kamran has an assistant now? What happened to him using the first staffer he could find in the office to order his lunch, track down his missing notebooks, and write his e-mails? ‘This is Meher,’ the woman informs me. ‘Kamran sahib would like to see you in the office today for your appraisal.’
We have appraisals?!?
There’s a crowd of people gathered outside Kamran’s office. One reporter is clutching printouts of all his stories from the past year. ‘What is this?’ I ask. ‘Who knows,’ one of the sub-editors pipes up. ‘This has been going on for two days. The receptionist said she overheard the HR manager’s driver telling Kamran’s guard that they would lay off 10 percent of the staff. How am I going to pay for my trip to Thailand if Kamran fires me?’
When my turn comes, Kamran first asks me to explain what happened with the story. I am so tired of repeating the gory details, but I go ahead anyway. ‘Right,’ he says. ‘Well, that was no reason to take time off work but whatever.
‘So, the last year… what do you think you’ve achieved in the last six months?’
I am so unprepared for this. I can’t think of a single story I’ve done. ‘I’ve helped contribute significantly
to our coverage of events,’ I say. ‘And I’ve spent a lot of time researching timelines etc., you know, the kind of stuff you wanted to enhance our coverage.’ What is wrong with me? Surely I can think of something better to say.
‘Exclusives?’ Kamran says, writing something down. I rack my brains. ‘I did do the story on sexual harassment involving the government official, and I also had a few exclusive interviews from the winter round of rallies. We were the only English paper to interview Hafiz Saeed. We had exceptionally good coverage of last month’s rape case.’
‘Acha,’ Kamran says. ‘Look Ayesha, I personally admire you a great deal…’
Oh no. This sounds ominous.
‘…but I can’t really make a case for you getting a raise this year. And I think you need to evaluate your own contribution to the paper. You seem more interested in doing stories on religion but you know we’re an English language paper, and most of our readers think anyone with a beard is a militant. It doesn’t sell. You insist on doing stories that will get us into trouble with the establishment. Do you know how many times I’ve had calls from the ISI after your work has been published?’
‘I’m not quite sure what you mean by doing antiestablishment stories. Really. Explain this to me.’
‘There’s no need to be so defensive,’ Kamran says. ‘I just said evaluate your own work. And I can get a sub-editor to make timelines too.’
‘But this is what you assigned me to do,’ I say. ‘You were the one who made me do this. I’d be ready to go cover something and you’d tell me to stay back and research the back story. And I did bring you an exclusive that you shot down and is now making headlines worldwide.’
‘If you’re so unhappy, why don’t you leave? Make my life easier.’
I can’t believe this. I gave five years of my life to Kamran. I once sorted through the debris of a cinema that had been bombed to find documents that might have survived the flames. I had cockroaches running over my hands when I finally found a sheaf of documents listing all the celebrities who had supported the cinema. Six lean months and he’s letting me go? I have ten thousand rupees in the bank. What am I going to do?
‘Sure,’ I say. ‘I’ll have my resignation to you in an hour. It really was quite a pleasure working with you.’
‘No, no, Ayesha, that’s not what I meant,’ Kamran says. ‘I don’t want you to leave.’
‘Why? I’m sure someone else will order your cappuccino. Best of luck teaching them how to spell the word.’
I storm out. The group of people outside his office seems frozen. ‘What happened?’
‘I’m leaving,’ I say. ‘Best of luck.’ I head to my computer, and thank god that I had the foresight to back up my work on to my e-mail the last time I had to come in to work on a Sunday, when I knew the IT department wouldn’t be there and tracking my every move. I send Kamran a terse e-mail, copy HR and in a fit of spite, write that I will not be serving notice in lieu of vacation time. There’s nothing of any value on my desk. I run up the stairs and wave to the receptionist as I open the doors. ‘Leaving so soon?’ he asks.
‘Not soon enough,’ I retort.
It’s raining outside—how bizarre for this time of the year—and I stop for a second to think about what I’ve just done. At the back of my mind, I know that my behaviour is entirely irresponsible and completely out of character for me. You’re in shock, Ayesha, you’ve had a bad week and you’ve just thrown away your one chance at a stable income. I’m about to turn back when I remember the cockroaches and the condescension in Kamran’s voice, and the number of holidays and Eids and Saturday nights I spent at work. Fuck Kamran and fuck this job. I have a potential Al Jazeera story, a bunch of great ideas, and hundreds of contacts, including a guy who claims to know an entire gang of contract killers. I’ll be fine.
CHAPTER 11
Headline of the day: ‘City wears anti-dengue look’
3 p.m.: The rain accompanying my defiant stomp out of the office gives the whole event the effect of an emo video. Within a minute and a half the street, with its rubbish clogged drains, has started to fill up with rainwater, which is now lapping at the pavement. Attempt to flag down a rickshaw as it speeds past me without the driver so much as looking in my direction. One rickshaw stops. ‘Can you take me to…’ I start. ‘No, can’t go there,’ the driver says before I even get to the end of the sentence. Manage to flag down a cab, which stalls just as it nears the curb. The driver gets out, kicks the cab and starts pushing it to the side. ‘MOVE, MOTHERFUCKER!’ shrieks a tanker driver leaning out of his window. ‘DON’T YOU KNOW HOW TO MOVE A FUCKING CAR?’
As always, everyone’s left their offices before the first drop of rain even hit the ground, turning the streets into a nightmarish, apocalyptic scene with buses, rickshaws, and cars caught up in a snarl, the sound of motorcycles backfiring booming like a hundred little bomb blasts.
In spite of this, the rain always brings on the romantic ‘oh such beautiful weather, want to dance in the rain’ Facebook statuses. I’m going to hit the next person who says they love the rain. I expect it’s pleasurable if you’re rich and can enjoy it from the comfort of your four-wheel behemoth while singing along to November Rain on the radio, played by all the stations even if it is raining in bloody April.
3.30 p.m.: Finally spot a rickshaw that’s empty. Hurl self inside and beg the driver to take me home.
‘That will be three hundred rupees,’ he says, adding, ‘it’s raining,’ in case I hadn’t noticed, or in case I missed it as I sat back against the rickshaw’s wet plastic seats.
5.30 p.m.: After two hours in traffic and a near crash with a motorcyclist and a bewildered cow, we finally get to my neighbourhood. The rickshaw driver takes one look at the flooded lane and refuses to go any further. I get off and stand on the muddy pavement. A kindly old man is setting up a mini obstacle course that involves gingerly stepping on tyres, concrete blocks, and what appears to be an old billboard instead of wading through the ankle-deep water that is surely infested with snakes. Kindly Old Man for office, I say.
An hour later, I’m dry and sitting in the dark staring out of the window. The utility company shuts down the power the minute it starts raining, hoping to avoid fatalities caused by electrocution, so now one just has to worry about things like falling down the stairs in the dark and breaking one’s neck instead.
It occurs to me that I have absolutely nothing to do—no stories to file, no timelines to research, no violent religious extremists to interview. The excitement of having finally told Kamran to shove it is slowly being replaced by severe trepidation. Make that out and out terror. My stomach somersaults every time I think of my ‘savings’, i.e. the contents of my current account.
Oh my god, I’m going to be the 28-year-old who needs to ask her father for money to pay her phone bill. I have become the culmination of the disappointed look he gave me when I didn’t pursue a corporate job. Speaking of which, how does one go about getting another job anyway? The thought of having to work for fourteen hours a day and grovel before some new Kamran-like editor is horrifying. The thought of sitting at home eating daal roti and not being able to afford coffee at Espresso is equally dreadful.
A photo of me on the dresser, taken when I was eighteen and still had some hope in life, is staring at me. Eighteen-year-old me, who hadn’t started smoking yet and still thought she had years to lose weight is telling me, ‘You’re a failure. You’ve done nothing in the past—jeez—ten years.’ Am I now going to turn into a crazy person who talks to a portrait? Perhaps I have taken after my distant aunt who, according to family lore, ‘fell in love with the sun’ when she was sixty and spent the rest of her days lying on a charpoy in the courtyard talking to a fiery blob in the sky.
Must not panic. I’m a great reporter. I can make this work. I was born to do this. This isn’t a setback, this is an opportunity.
The rain’s stopped and there’s suddenly total silence. The cat, who was trying to chase raindrops on the wro
ng side of the window, is taking a nap. Why is it so quiet? Is my phone not on? Check phone and realize why. My work e-mail account has been suspended and so my phone hasn’t beeped incessantly with the six dozen e-mails that would have arrived in my inbox by this point.
The electricity suddenly comes back on. But for the first time in years, I don’t have to leap at the laptop to check what I missed. I may never have to check the news ever again. My life lies ahead of me, suddenly feeling like a really, really tediously long time.
Ooh, phone. It’s Zara. ‘Hey, did you call? Was stuck in bloody traffic for an hour and my phone ran out of battery.’
‘Yep. So listen, I resigned.’
‘You what? Jeez, I think there’s some water in my phone. Fucking rain.’
‘No, I RESIGNED.’
‘What. The. Hell.’
The next hour is spent rehashing the entire saga with Zara on the phone. She curses, I sigh. We plot revenge against Kamran. ‘I mean, Ayesha, what are you going to do now?’
‘No idea,’ I say, aimlessly switching television channels. An earnest young cleric is demonstrating how to make a pumpkin milkshake on a religious programming channel. There’s a repeat of Humsafar. Instead of turning into sun-obsessed aunt, will I spend my days watching TV and lying on the sofa while everyone else goes out and makes money? There’s an ad for a gated community in Dubai and I suddenly sit up. I need to tell Saad. After Zara promises to drop in with an aid package made up of Anil’s finest wares I start dialling Saad, but I feel exhausted.
I don’t have the energy to sit through another phone conversation about what I’m going to do with my life. I write him a short e-mail instead, promising that I’ll send more details when I feel up to it.
My father comes home and is surprised at seeing me home before 7 p.m. ‘Did you get off early?’ he asks, between wringing out water from his jacket and trying not to trip over the cat who is winding herself around his legs.