by Sorayya Khan
Before long, she was caught up in denouncing Pakistan’s unpredictability. “A democratically elected government one day, a military regime the next; the prime minister in the national assembly one day, on death row the next; a dapper prime minister in suit and tie one day, a Nazi-like uniformed general in charge the next.” She took a breath, and my grandfather nodded as if in agreement, even though he could not have heard all she said. “A quiet house one Friday afternoon, a mini-royit in it the next! This place is as far away as you can get from Vienna—where buses and trains run on time, sugar and flour are not rationed, and grocery stores carry the same goods from one day to the next.” She glared at my father and continued, “Not to mention, in Vienna the city’s water and electricity supply is a simple fact of life!”
No one knew what to say until my father figured it out.
“Pakistan has Vienna beat in one way,” he said.
“And what would that be?” my mother asked.
“Chowkidars! We have more chowkidars here than we know what to do with!”
My mother thought his comment so absurd, she paused before stammering, “And that’s a good thing?”
My father informed us that he’d fired our weekend chowkidar, and starting the following night we would have two nighttime chowkidars who would spend their shifts walking rounds.
“Is that really necessary?”
“Probably not. But government regulations require two chowkidars once security is breached in an official’s home.”
My mother had a point. Pakistan was unpredictable; anything could happen here. There were strict regulations for a minor security breach in an official’s driveway, but a general could do what he wanted with a prime minister. Rather than stay at the table, I asked my grandfather if I could be excused. Surprisingly, he heard me, said yes, and left with me.
At breakfast, Sadiq reported that in his absence the previous evening, the motorcycle spy had paid a visit. The new chowkidar didn’t know what to tell him, so he suggested a return visit the following day. Since they had time to prepare, was there anything specific my father wanted the man to know?
“God help us,” my father quipped. “Everyone in the neighborhood knows there was a mini-royit at our house yesterday, yet the spy comes to us for information.”
Sadiq’s appearance that morning was unsettling. His forehead had grown wider, and his eyes were bulging. No one commented, but he had shaved his eyebrows.
“What did you tell Sadiq?” my mother asked.
“The truth, of course. What else is there?”
“Spies aren’t supposed to let people know they’re being spied upon, right?” I asked.
My father threw his head back with laughter. “Good point, sweetheart.”
“This is Pakistan, after all,” my mother said and shrugged.
Unlike the previous evening, she was calm and matter-of-fact, and she was right.
NINE
February 1979
I was home alone but it didn’t feel like it. The footsteps of two nighttime chowkidars making rounds from dusk to dawn made sure of that. I had learned to fall asleep to their booted feet hitting the pavement at precise intervals, click-click, like a ticking clock. A rifle slung across his shoulder, each of the guards circled the house in opposite directions, and the words they exchanged when they met up every eight minutes were absorbed into my dreams about school. Bismillah. Allahu Akbar, said Mr. Duval in French class in my sleep.
My father was serious about making sure the chowkidars did their jobs. He could control the light in the chowkidars’ hut using a button, and the men had to respond by clicking a switch that ignited a light in the bedroom. It was my father’s way of making sure the chowkidars weren’t sleeping, at least when there was electricity. Once my father instituted this ritual, my mother swapped sides of the bed with him. She insisted that since my father had chosen to play games, the bulb should flicker in his face, and she was right. All this upheaval was because of the mini-royit. Lehla was lucky to be away in America, because it wouldn’t have been easy to sneak out of the house at night with two chowkidars on patrol.
Every so often, my parents were invited to the American Embassy, and this night they were attending a reception there. They received invitations to the embassy because of my father’s job, yet I couldn’t help thinking it also had to do with the fact that he had a foreign wife, and the three of us children were students at the American School. Inviting my father was like inviting the least Pakistani Pakistani. My father and mother, it seemed, gave themselves permission to go to the forbidden place.
Sadiq had finished his work for the night and was in his room, probably listening to a cricket match. I was playing with the television, switching it back and forth between the country’s two channels, adjusting and readjusting the volume and sharpness of the picture, as if that act provided me with more options. In any case, television was hardly worth watching. The general had recently decreed that the news on one of the country’s two channels be delivered in Arabic. He didn’t understand that saying your prayers in Arabic five times a day did not mean you could understand an Arabic newscast. The other station was showing an intermediate hour-long Holy Quran lesson featuring a stern religious scholar behind a bare desk. Finally, it was time for an episode of CHiPs, an American television show about the adventures of policemen on motorcycles, but it had been so heavily censored, I couldn’t follow it.
The general had ruined everything. In order to pass censors, television shows like CHiPs were sliced into spastic panoramas with incomprehensible plots. Women newscasters adopted new hairstyles to accommodate the dupattas covering their heads and began each broadcast with “Bismillah-ir-rahman-ir-raheem.” Even my grandfather, who spent countless hours sitting on his prayer rug, was outraged. “In the name of God, the merciful and compassionate!” he sputtered sarcastically in English, confident that God had nothing to do with the news that was being read.
Across from where I sat with the television was my mother’s antique walnut desk, the only object in the house from her childhood that had made the journey from Europe to Islamabad when we moved from Vienna. Hidden underneath letters from Amir, electricity bills, and invitations, I found what I was looking for. After memorizing its exact location, I carried it to the sofa where I had a view of the gate and the driveway. I undid the red tie string and pulled out a typewritten statement from the legal affairs officer at the American Embassy.
The facts spoke for themselves. On Wednesday, 22 February 1978, ten minutes after ten at night, on the corner of Embassy and Majlis Roads, Sadiq’s son, Hanif, approximately nine years old, was struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver. The white luxury sedan was registered in the name of a USAID official. Rather than face what could have been a hostile, possibly violent reaction from the two adults with the boy, the driver returned home and, following procedure, immediately reported the accident to the chief security officer of the American Embassy.
The last page of the document outlined the terms of the settlement and included four signatures. Sadiq’s name appeared in Urdu with my father’s next to it. I scanned the next name quickly, unprepared for it to be significant. But when I realized how familiar it was, I read it again more slowly. The blue signature looked like practice words in a cursive-handwriting workbook, tall and even letters leaning to the right. The last signature belonged to Mr. Simon, the designated witness.
Anne Simon. It took me a moment to connect the name with Lizzy’s mother. Perhaps there was another Anne Simon in Islamabad married to a different Mr. Simon. Then I began recalling details. Lizzy’s mysterious illness which kept her out of school for two weeks, and when she’d returned, her lack of appetite, the shadows under her eyes, deep and dark like bruises . . . and the same expression on her mother’s face.
Further along, the settlement indicated Sadiq would receive 50,000 rupees as compensation for his son’s life. Did Anne Simon know what that amount of money could buy? Did I? Did Sadiq? A car, maybe,
but Sadiq couldn’t drive. A tiny farm somewhere, but Sadiq wasn’t a farmer and he couldn’t suddenly become one, because, after all, he had to look after us. I settled on the idea that the money might buy him a new house with cement walls to keep out rats and a roof thick enough to ward off the monsoons in the rundown quarters of Lahore. Perhaps the sum would buy him running cold and hot water. A lorry rumbled on the road and shook the windows of the living room, reminding me that my parents might soon be home. I carefully returned the papers to the envelope and buried it between Amir’s latest letters and my mother’s silver-embossed stationery.
For the next hour, I wandered around the empty house, up and down the steps, in and out of Amir’s bedroom, through the kitchen, around the living room, into the front hall, in a series of circles that would have made anyone dizzy. I wanted to eject what was in my head, like a sixty-minute cassette from Amir’s tape recorder, but I couldn’t stop the refrain. Instead, the sheer repetition of Anne Simon was the driver lodged further and further into my consciousness. I finally stopped in my parents’ bedroom long enough for their formal smells, Old Spice and Chanel No 5, to distract me.
I sat on my father’s side of the bed, and although I’d never done it before, I pressed the new light switch, waiting a few moments for the flickering lightbulb to respond.
Suddenly Sadiq appeared, asking me if everything was all right.
“Why?”
“Are you testing the chowkidars?”
I took too long to answer, trying to reconcile the information in the settlement with the man standing in front of me.
“It’s too early for them to be asleep,” Sadiq teased, but his missing eyebrows took away the joy from his half smile. When I didn’t respond, he asked, “Can I get you something? You want some water?”
“What’s the word for when two people agree on something?”
“They settle on something?”
“Yes. Something like that.”
“Samjhauta karna.” He repeated it twice, and as was his habit, did not stop drilling me until I had said it perfectly and used it in a sentence.
“The agreement between them was wrong,” I stated.
“Not a good sentence. But it’s good enough for tonight. If you need another word, don’t bother the chowkidars, ask me.”
“OK,” I said.
“Good night?” Sadiq asked.
“Good night,” I confirmed.
A few hours later, while I sat in the armchair in their bedroom, my parents discussed one of the guests at the reception, a middle-aged Pakistani executive of an oil company. He was famous for carrying a narrow flask of whiskey in his breast pocket wherever he went. At the American Embassy, where alcohol was abundantly available, he’d been seen drinking from his flask in plain sight of the host.
“What a disgrace,” my father said.
My mother then mentioned a man who’d pretended to speak in an official capacity and claimed that the exposure of her midriff was un-Islamic. She’d been so annoyed by his comments, she pushed her sari farther down below her waist and walked away.
“Please tell me you didn’t do that,” my father said.
“But I did!” my mother replied. She didn’t look up because she was busy expertly unwrapping her sari into perfect folds of pink silk as if she’d worn saris all her life.
My father asked me if I knew an Iranian boy, Humayun, in our high school.
“Humayun? I think so,” I said, finally recalling a skinny teenager who reminded me of Amir. “I think that’s his name. I don’t really know him, though. He’s much older than me. Why?”
“We heard that yesterday he and his family left for the US in the middle of the night.”
“Why would they do that?” I asked.
“His father must have been appointed to the Iranian embassy by the Shah, and they fled because of Khomeini,” my father suggested.
“His father was SAVAK,” my mother said, quickly getting to the point.
“The spy agency?” I asked, displaying knowledge I’d recently gained from the radio, secretly thrilled that Islamabad, the quiet, sleepy city where nothing ever happened, suddenly housed Iranian spies fleeing in the middle of the night. The thought of spies in Islamabad set my mind wandering. I knew they weren’t Get Smart–type spies (one of the many television shows canceled by the general), but more likely, boring people who studied what they saw and reported back—to whom exactly, I didn’t know. There had to be multiple bosses, because the one thing I knew for certain was that all the spies running around Islamabad were not on the same side.
“What’s the license plate number for Iranians?” I asked, as if the two digits had some relevance to what was being discussed.
I was pointlessly trying to make conversation, but neither of my parents answered me. My father walked to the bathroom to brush his teeth while my mother was carefully hanging her sari in her closet, alongside the rest of her colorful collection. Their silence made me worry that they’d detected a change in me and magically concluded that I’d read the settlement papers. But as I was glad to see, my parents were not mind readers, and I was almost disappointed when they behaved normally with me. It meant I would have to keep the shocking information to myself, and I wasn’t very good with secrets.
The last thing I wanted to do was to retreat to my room, preoccupied with my fresh discovery, so when my father came out of the bathroom, I tried to start another conversation.
“Humayun’s family went to America because the Americans are friendly with the Iranians?” I asked.
“Were friendly,” my father corrected me. He explained that the Shah of Iran and the United States had been close friends for many years, ever since the United States had engineered a coup d’état against Prime Minister Mossadegh, an elected ruler of Iran, and replaced him with the Shah. Now that Ayatollah Khomeini had returned to Iran, the United States was rightfully worried.
“Why did the Americans get rid of Mossadegh?” I asked, and it rang both true and peculiar to refer to a country and a prime minister like chess pieces.
My father embarked on a long explanation that didn’t make sense to me, having to do with colonialism and American and British oil interests. He mentioned a different country, Guatemala, where Americans had also directed a coup and ousted another leader for different reasons. As he went on, my mind wandered back to the settlement papers I’d just discovered, and a parallel began to form in my mind. With the hit-and-run accident on an Islamabad street, Anne Simon had behaved in her personal life the way American governments behaved in the world, doing whatever they wanted, without, for the most part, suffering any consequences.
“Let her go to sleep, Javid,” my mother interrupted. “It’s late.”
As I was leaving the bedroom, I tested my resolve at keeping my secret and asked whether there had been any Americans at the reception.
“Of course, sweetheart,” my mother replied. “It was at the American Embassy!”
“Who?” I demanded.
Between them, my parents recited a list of my schoolmates’ parents, and I was glad the Simons were not mentioned.
Getting ready for bed, I felt guilty about having accepted rides and having had the Simons’ driver bring me back from Lizzy’s house in the white Buick. Sadiq was a servant, not a friend, yet I felt I’d betrayed him. I vowed never again to accept rides from the Simons or wear Lizzy’s jeans. I puzzled over how I would react to Lizzy when I saw her next. Your mother killed our servant’s son, I imagined myself saying, and I doubted I had the courage ever to utter such an accusation.
When the noises of Sadiq’s routine stopped—his prayers had been said, the toilet flushed, the door bolted—and the new chowkidars were on their third or fourth circuit outside my window, I sat on the floor of my bedroom with my Urdu readers spread around me. In one, a picture of a young girl stared up at me, and I was reminded of Lizzy’s face in the weeks following the accident. Her face had been as lifeless as the girl’s in the book. Was it
possible? Did Lizzy know what her mother had done? Had she lied about getting the flu, about the lining of her stomach being flushed down the toilet? I wasn’t angry with her, though. Who knows how I would have behaved if my mother had been driving that car?
Before I climbed into bed, my head a jumble of Sadiq, Hanif, Anne Simon, and Lizzy, I was overcome with a strange feeling. The world was closing in on me, settling into the small cracks of my life, inhabiting them and widening them. Until then, my life had been neatly divided. In the mornings and evenings, there were my parents, and before they moved away, Amir and Lehla, and in the hours tucked safely in between, there was my other universe, the school. But knowing who’d killed Hanif made the spaces in my life fall into one another like collapsing sand tunnels. It would be impossible to separate them, reshape them, and restore them to the way they had been. I was alarmed. I closed my eyes to the image of Hanif’s faded photograph on the ledge above the kitchen sink. The bony fingers that held the cricket bat, the shy smile for the camera were as real as if Hanif were in the room with me. I tried my very best not to think of Anne Simon’s white Buick crashing into him.
TEN
Early March 1979
On Sunday, the first day of the school week, I was quiet when I saw Lizzy. “What’s wrong?” she asked, but of course, I couldn’t tell her.
“I don’t know. Maybe I’m getting the flu.”
“I hope not. It’s awful.”
“Really?”
“Remember when I had it last year?”
“Is that what was wrong with you?”
“Leeeeeya!” Lizzy said, and when she said her nickname for me all drawn out like that, I almost felt like someone else.
I locked eyes with her and slowly asked, “Did your mother have the flu at the same time you did?” Lizzy looked puzzled, and I almost blurted out Or did she just kill Hanif with the Buick and run away from the scene?