City of Spies

by Sorayya Khan

  “My friend sends me tapes,” Lizzy said, as a weekly countdown of popular music hits in her hometown began.

  A woman’s voice filled the car, and the driver turned up the volume. “Touch me in the morning,” she sang, and I wondered if he understood the words.

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “Diana Ross,” Lizzy replied, assuming the name would mean something to me. “She’s really good,” she added. My musical knowledge was limited to the music program on Pakistani radio and didn’t yet include Diana Ross.

  Tapes like Lizzy’s were a regular component of school events, including parties, the lead-up to pep rallies, and school assemblies, so it wasn’t the first time I’d heard one. On those occasions, the disc jockeys’ voices seemed particularly alien to me, but during the extrasmooth drive in Lizzy’s plush car on a too-wide road, there was nothing extraordinary about the voices on the radio or the advertisements for Dr Pepper or the electronically controlled windows and melon-sized speedometer. It was only when the disc jockey announced the day of the week and read the weather report that I remembered he spoke of a life thousands of miles away, where Lehla lived and snow arrived in October and people needed reminders about snow tires.

  As we rode on Constitution Avenue, past the showy but empty new president’s building, “The Extravagance” seemed at home on the only eight-lane roadway in the city until the empty expanse abruptly ended one short mile later, and the driver turned onto the single-lane road to the diplomatic enclave. The big white car drove through the gates of the US Embassy, and I tried not to be nervous. Security was tight, and I’d heard Americans were discouraged from bringing Pakistanis to the compound. But the guard at the gate did not so much as look up from his post before he waved us through the checkpoint.

  The lights were bright in the dining room, and as I followed Lizzy to a corner table, I felt conspicuous in my tight jeans and knotted shirt, although I was dressed no differently than Lizzy. The dining room was filled with my classmates, many of whom greeted us, but I worried I was being regarded as a Pakistani rather than Lizzy’s friend. I shook my bangs, the ones I’d badgered my mother into cutting for me to match Lizzy’s, and brushed them back from my eyes with a gesture I hoped would make people think I was oblivious to them. I was not, however.

  The waiter greeted Lizzy by name and nodded at me. He took her order first, and when he’d written it on his pad, he turned to me.

  “Aap ko kya chahiye?” he said, asking for my order.

  I was startled he spoke in Urdu and that he’d done so with such certainty, dismissing who I was with, the clothes I was wearing, and the light streaks in my chestnut hair that apparently made me look less Pakistani. I considered pretending not to understand him. I raised my head from the menu and studied the man attending to me, trapped by the contradictions of my life—the brown and white, the Dutch and Pakistani, the English and Urdu, the belonging and not. My instinct was to respond in English, but as I was about to stammer out my order, I reconsidered. The hours I’d spent in my room learning Urdu vocabulary words and practicing verb conjugation came to me, along with the memory of the years I’d fortified myself so I wouldn’t have to learn from Master sahib. Pretending my hesitation was due to indecision, I fumbled for the words, and although flustered, in the end, I spoke them.

  “Ek . . . uh . . . grilled cheese, aur . . . aloo fries, and uh . . . thanda pani baraf ke baghair.” I’d not intended to ask for a glass of water without ice, but I did because it was one of the few phrases I could speak fluently in Urdu. Besides, I hated the American fascination for ice.

  The waiter took my order without comment.

  “I often forget you’re Pakistani,” Lizzy said.

  I laughed. It felt odd to speak Urdu, even the broken variety I’d attempted. I imagined people at nearby tables looking at me, but more than that, I was astonished I’d been persuaded by a waiter to own up to that part of myself.

  For the rest of the evening, we talked about the new boy in our class, the sister of another friend who’d been expelled from school by the principal for the brick of hash he found in her locker, and other gossip.

  When Anne Simon was finished with her appointment, the driver took us home and drove into the carport, where my parents’ beige Toyota Corolla was dwarfed by the Simons’ still-new American car. Immediately upon entering my house, I smelled the chicken tikka masala I loved, the chili tickling my nose, and greeted my parents, who were sitting down to dinner.

  “Come, join us,” my father said, pulling out my chair as my mother gave me a once-over.

  “I ate already. At Lizzy’s house,” I lied.

  “Those aren’t your jeans.” My mother slapped her hand against the table as she sometimes did to command attention and asked, “Don’t you have clothes of your own?”

  “I do,” I said.

  “Then wear them!” she barked.

  I turned to my father for support, but he was looking elsewhere in the special way he had for making us believe he was in a different room.

  The next morning, out of earshot of my parents, I made light of Sadiq’s creative table setting.

  “Have you forgotten? Forks on the left, knives on the right.”

  “You have forgotten!” Sadiq exclaimed. “Left is this side, and right is that side,” he said, correcting my Urdu, in which I’d confused the words for left and right. “You knew this, correct?”

  I giggled at my mistake. “But why are you setting the table like that? You’re making my mother . . .” I struggled to find the least disrespectful word for crazy and my mother in the same sentence before I gave up and said plainly, “pagal,” crazy.

  Sadiq shook his head disapprovingly, and I was sorry for what I’d said. “Begum sahib samajhdar hain,” he declared. He made me repeat the word for wise, samajhdar, three times before shaking out the orange dustcloth and turning his attention to my parents’ bookshelves.

  Alone at the correctly set table, I was left to mull over Sadiq’s declaration that my mother was wise.

  EIGHT

  November–December 1978

  One morning my father sat down to breakfast and discovered utensils, plates, and napkins in a mess that did not pass for a table setting. As if Sadiq’s dereliction finally required action, he fired the mali, our ancient gardener, and put Sadiq in charge of the garden. This was in keeping with one of his favorite assumptions, that a healthy dose of fresh air was certain to mend things, like when he’d fixed Lehla’s poor grades by demanding she join the field hockey team.

  Unfortunately, Sadiq was so ill-equipped as a gardener, he did not know where to start. When asked which task he should tackle first, my father, who knew nothing about gardens, waved in the direction of the gardening tools and told him to prune the rosebushes. In the evening, when my mother saw the rosebushes pruned in full bloom, she admonished both Sadiq and my father. In the end, she hid the gardening shears and suggested my father limit his suggestions to water and electricity.

  One Friday, Lizzy and I were sitting in the sun on the upstairs veranda, which offered a perfect view of Sadiq crouched among the ruined rosebushes, pulling weeds from the flower beds, his turban slipping from his head. Lizzy sat there aiming for a one-day winter tan, and I was simply happy for the warmth. We were supposed to be hard at work on a science project for which I’d enlisted my father’s help. We’d planned on making a conduction kit, but instead of supplying the parts, my father’s secretary assigned an office engineer to the job, and we’d been sent a hand-powered electric generator that we could never have built on our own.

  “Wow! Even my dad didn’t do our assignment for us!” Lizzy exclaimed. I didn’t expect to feel proud, but I did.

  We’d spent the afternoon relaxing rather than writing the notes that were required to pretend we’d designed and built the science project. We’d been to the kitchen a few times already, snacking from a fruit tart my mother hoped Lizzy would like. I could hear my father on the telephone, issuing instruc
tions to manage the latest WAPDA crisis that had shut down the electricity supply to half of Rawalpindi. My father arranged to visit the site as soon as he could.

  “Your father works on Fridays?” Lizzy asked, and her question surprised me because my father always worked, so I replied, “Doesn’t yours?”

  My mother had left for her monthly get-together with her few Dutch friends in Islamabad. My grandfather was visiting again, but I hadn’t seen him all afternoon, which meant he was taking a long nap in Amir’s room.

  At first the afternoon was quiet, much as it was every Friday after Jumma prayers, and then suddenly it wasn’t.

  The gate latch lifted and fell, and our weekend chowkidar, a short and fat man, carelessly swung open the gate, which caught with a loud clang on the metal hook that held it in place. Although it was unusual not to have been told we were expecting company, I didn’t pay much attention to the visitors. But when they grew louder, Lizzy and I hung over the railing and observed the driveway teeming with men. Our view was better than the chowkidar’s, and we noticed another long line of men heading into our driveway.

  As if on cue, my father stuck his head onto the veranda and told us to stay where we were.

  “Who are all those people?” I asked.

  “My employees have come to talk to me.”

  “Does this happen often?” Lizzy asked, and I shook my head in the negative.

  The next time we looked down, my father was jogging alongside the column of people in our driveway to where the growing crowd had encircled our Toyota Corolla. The men had begun chanting, but I couldn’t decipher their words. Much to my surprise, my father hopped onto the hood of the car, and then jumped onto its roof. I gasped, “What is he doing?”

  “Oooh!” Lizzy said, impressed.

  In a gesture I knew well, my father extended his arms as he did when he was overflowing with generosity. “Welcome, welcome!” he shouted, as if he’d been expecting them all afternoon. “Thank you for coming,” he started.

  The first few sentences of his improvised speech were drowned by the speeding motorcade of black Mercedes and police cars on Margalla Road. The blinking lights and blaring sirens suggested the general was in town, and evidently he was unconcerned that his decree limiting gatherings to fewer than five people was being broken in our driveway.

  “What’s he saying? What’s he saying?” Lizzy asked, jumping up and down excitedly, returning my attention to my father.

  The truth was that I could not understand what my father was saying. Like an idiot, I repeated the English words scattered in his speech. Once in a while I strung them together with some Urdu words I understood.

  “He’s saying, ‘You are important to Water Power Development Authority.’”

  “Your father is the boss of WAPDA?” Lizzy asked, and I was taken aback that she remembered the words that formed the acronym for my father’s office.

  “Yes,” I said, forced to be honest.

  “What did he just say?” Lizzy asked again.

  Rather than admit I had no idea, I made it up. “He’s saying that without his workers, the streets would be black at night, offices would be dark during the day, radios would be silent . . . Something like that.”

  While my father spoke, I considered him as I would a stranger. He was an excellent public speaker, at ease in the crowd and unperturbed by their demands. I knew he’d been on his college’s debating team, and I could see why he’d won medals. The effect he had on the crowd was palpable, and it seemed to me that the longer he spoke, the more success he had in diminishing his employees’ concerns. I thought of the prime minister, known for his oratory skills, and wondered what it would have been like to be in a crowd when he shouted his famous slogan “Roti, kapra, aur makan!”

  “What is he saying now?” Lizzy asked.

  “My Urdu isn’t fluent, you know,” I finally confessed. “I think they are asking my dad for a pay raise.” It was only a guess, but why else would angry employees descend on our house?

  Just then, my father stumbled on his words. I thought I knew the phrase he was attempting because government officials commonly used it on Khabarnama, the evening newscast. “In this nation of ours,” he said, and like a scratched record, he repeated it three or four times. He’d lost his train of thought, and I was mortified for him. But out of the corner of my eye, I saw the reason for the interruption: My grandfather was suddenly upon the scene. Everyone said my grandfather was deaf, but he constantly proved us wrong, and the fact that the noise had awakened him was yet another example.

  My grandfather started down the stairs, clasping his hands above his head in greeting. He was tall and thin, and one might have expected him to fade into the crowd, but when he stepped into our driveway, people moved aside as he wove between them and made his way to my father.

  After the moment’s reprieve granted by my grandfather’s arrival, my father found his voice with even more confidence than before.

  “What’s he saying?!” Lizzy cried a few minutes later.

  His speech was coming to an end, and I suddenly recalled what he’d once said when asked to explain why he’d moved us to Pakistan. “When your country calls on you, you fall on your knees ready to deliver whatever it needs!” Lizzy was satisfied, and since my invented translation was something he’d once said, I didn’t feel too bad about the lie.

  My father and grandfather led the men in a final chant, “WAPDA zindabad!” As impressive as the solidarity was, I doubted my father had the power to keep any of the promises he’d made. The general’s grip was unforgiving, and pay raises wouldn’t be arranged without his permission.

  “Was this a demonstration?” Lizzy asked.

  “Demonstration of what?” I said.

  “You know . . . a protest.”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “It’s my first one!”

  “Me, too!” and we bumped hips to confirm our thrill. Demonstration or not, my father’s employees had provided me with more excitement than I’d ever seen in Islamabad.

  Lizzy and I waited on the veranda until the men, one by one and then altogether, exited the gates. Our chowkidar stood watch proudly with his rifle at his side, as if to suggest that since he’d initially allowed them all in, he therefore had the sole power to send them away.

  My father named the event by the time my mother came home: Our house had been the scene of a mini-royit. My father, like most Pakistanis, routinely transposed the io in English words into oi, which resulted in an oy sound. So as far as he was concerned, a mini-royit was exactly what had happened. Unlike other instances when my father’s mispronunciations embarrassed me (violent was voylent, for example), neither my mother nor I bothered correcting him this time. Listening to my father describe the Friday incident convinced me that the event needed its own word.

  “Riot?” my mother asked in disbelief, because our house was exactly as it had been when she left.

  “Mini-royit, my darling, mini-royit!” my father said, insistent.

  As far as I was concerned, my father was exaggerating. Real riots resulted in trampled lawns, burning tires, and broken windows, among other things. Riots happened in Iran and were documented on the BBC, as they’d been recently when one million Iranians took to the streets to protest the Shah’s rule.

  “And where were the girls when this was going on?” my mother asked in alarm.

  “Upstairs,” my father said, waving at the ceiling.

  “Weren’t you afraid?” my mother asked me.

  “Oh, no,” I replied truthfully.

  “I can’t even trust you to keep my daughter and her friend safe while I have a cup of coffee with friends.”

  “But they are safe!”

  “Really, Mama, we were fine!”

  She turned back to my father. “Can you imagine the story Lizzy will tell her parents? Her best friend’s house is the scene of a mini-royit, and she and her friend had front row seats! I’ll be surprised if the Simons ever let her come her
e again.”

  “That should be the least of their worries,” my father muttered, and I had no idea what he meant.

  I was the last person to have seen Sadiq that day, and when it was time for dinner, my mother realized he’d left without permission and had not made preparations for the meal. She cooked dinner and served us a nonspicy version of chicken cutlets, a step above the grilled cheese sandwiches she might have served if my grandfather hadn’t been visiting. The only topic of conversation was the mini-royit.

  “Did you give them what they wanted?” my mother finally asked.

  “Of course not. I can’t promise them money. I don’t pay them. The government does,” my father replied.

  “Semantics, no? As far as your WAPDA employees are concerned, you are the government!”

  “I don’t have control over the money.”

  “You should pay them more,” my mother said, dismissing my father’s last remark. “I bet the electricity supply would be more reliable if you did.”

  My grandfather guffawed, and a few grains of half-chewed rice fell to the tablecloth near my glass.

  “Thanks, Yasmin,” my father said, using my mother’s Muslim name, which is what he did when she made him mad.

  “Subhan’Allah,” she said, a phrase she reserved for being called Yasmin and, as in this case, usually a preface for anger. “This is what you left your UN job for? A country where the prime minister is sentenced to hang and people don’t take to the streets? But your employees see fit to riot in our garden while our daughter and her friend watch from the veranda?”

  My father’s silence made my mother angrier. For the most part, she was a good sport about living in Pakistan, but sometimes she lost patience, and evidently the mini-royit had sapped her reserves. She launched a tirade on what was wrong with my father’s country. I squirmed in my seat, uncomfortable that she was going on in front of my grandfather.