by Sorayya Khan
Uncle Imtiaz and my father had been friends since before Pakistan’s independence from the British. I knew their tales of participating in mass rallies and surviving the summer of Partition in 1947. “We aren’t brothers, but we might as well be,” Uncle Imtiaz had said. They had many things in common: studying abroad, marrying foreigners, and returning to serve their country. He visited us more frequently as the political situation worsened, bringing my father news that was censored at his newspaper. It was hard to believe that Uncle Imtiaz once hated the prime minister. He’d held him responsible for the 1971 war between East and West Pakistan because he’d refused to do the right thing and concede defeat to the East Pakistani political party that had won a majority in the polls. However, after the coup, you would have thought Uncle Imtiaz had always been the prime minister’s best friend.
That afternoon, my mother outdid herself by baking a flourless chocolate almond torte, a plate of linzer schnitten packed with raspberry jam, and my favorite, horseshoe vanillekipferl dusted with powdered sugar. My father returned from a meeting a few minutes before Uncle Imtiaz was expected and insisted on supplementing the desserts with store-bought samosas and chutneys. My mother was annoyed and did her best to be patient with him. A few days earlier, the Supreme Court had upheld the prime minister’s death sentence, and my father’s mood had not recovered.
Uncle Imtiaz arrived with a bottle hidden in a paper bag. When alcohol was declared illegal in Pakistan, he became my mother’s supplier. Since my mother was a foreigner, she was eligible to legally buy a monthly quota at a hotel, but she refused to do so. Even though my father did not drink, she said she would not give people a reason to gossip that the wife of the WAPDA chairman bought alcohol for him. It was understood that either Uncle Imtiaz gave my mother his wife’s monthly quota, or he bought the alcohol on the black market, where servants sold their foreign employers’ liquor.
Uncle Imtiaz was barely inside the house before he demanded a shot of bourbon. When my mother said she didn’t have any, he pulled a bottle of bourbon from the paper bag and dropped it into her hands. There was almost always bourbon in our house because my mother required it to make her own vanilla essence for baking. “Just kidding. Whiskey, please. Join me.”
“You know I don’t drink it,” she protested.
“Why not? Ah, yes. You prefer sherry. The drink of the colonizer.”
“The English?” Apparently my mother knew who Uncle Imtiaz was talking about, because she’d guessed correctly.
“Even my wife doesn’t like sherry, and she’s English!”
“Are you saying I behave like I’m English?” my mother asked.
“No, no. You’re from Nederlands,” Uncle Imtiaz said, pronouncing the only Dutch word he knew and laughing so loud he was almost bellowing.
“Tell me something, Imtiaz,” my father said. “Sherry is to the English as what is to the Americans?” His question was nothing short of a riddle.
It took Uncle Imtiaz only a moment to follow my father’s analogy. “You mean, if sherry signifies the English, what drink represents the Americans? I don’t know. Martinis? Do you have gin? Vermouth?” he asked my mother, knowing full well she had neither.
“You’re lucky I offer you anything to drink at all,” she replied, still mildly offended. My mother had double standards. She was allowed to draw comparisons between Pakistan and Europe whenever she liked because she was Dutch, but she did not appreciate others pointing out she was foreign. True to form, she replied, “I am not English.”
“True . . .” Uncle Imtiaz started, but stopped after glancing at me.
“You’ll really upset me if you say anything about my children,” my mother warned.
“Why would I do that?” he said and winked at me. “You know I would never tease your children. Only you. It’s the price you pay for having married this man.”
My father was still contemplating Uncle Imtiaz’s response. “Martinis are made from gin and vermouth?”
“But what difference is it to you? You don’t drink anyway.”
“It’s important to know the enemy,” my father said. I hated it when I had no idea what adults were saying.
“Since you wouldn’t know the difference between vermouth and sherry, how does this help you?”
“Don’t take me for a fool. That’s their mistake,” my father said, and I sat up. Suddenly there was no mistaking his reference. His eyes were squinted, his lips drawn, and his head was slowly shaking. I’d solved part of the riddle. He was talking about the Americans.
“Indeed,” Uncle Imtiaz said, suddenly angry. “Just because we’ve been colonized by the British doesn’t mean we’re about to allow the Americans another go at it.”
“The Americans underestimate us,” my mother said, and it was sad that she thought it necessary to announce she was in the same camp as my father and Uncle Imtiaz.
Uncle Imtiaz leaned in toward my father. He’d just begun working for The Muslim, a new daily, and spoke with authority on lots of things. I’d heard my father say that in order to keep his job, he could only write as the censors allowed, so he spread the real news by talking.
“I’ve heard the Americans have given the go-ahead,” Uncle Imtiaz said. It wasn’t the first time he’d suggested the Americans were supporting the prime minister’s death sentence.
“The general can’t do it,” my father insisted, as they contemplated the Supreme Court’s recent rejection of the prime minister’s appeal. “There will be royits in the street if they hang the prime minister.”
“What are you talking about?” Uncle Imtiaz said. “That fool of a general can do whatever he bloody well wishes. For men like him, medals pinned to their shoulders put stars in their eyes, and they go blind. Mark my words, he’s going to kill him.”
His fury was frightening.
He added, “Not that our prime minister is an angel, you understand.”
“Perhaps the Saudis will do something,” my father said, but he didn’t sound hopeful.
“They’ve been sitting on their asses for the last twenty months. Why would they do something now?”
“The British have sent warnings to the general,” my father said instead.
“You see, no world leader believes it can happen. Therefore, none of them are doing much of anything.”
“What’s Dr. Moody got to say?” my father asked, and my stomach somersaulted. My dentist was the only person granted access to the prime minister in his death cell.
“They’re such bastards!” Uncle Imtiaz went on, making the prime minister’s jailers, the army, and the general the subjects of his invective. “The prime minister’s gums are covered in abscesses. Puss drools from his mouth. The stink is unbearable. He hasn’t been able to eat in weeks. They don’t let him see his wife or give him fresh clothes . . .”
I couldn’t bear to listen anymore. I left to serve myself pastries, but standing in front of a table heaped with my mother’s confections, I realized I wasn’t hungry. As their conversation continued nearby, I felt the end of something drawing near, not the world or our lives but something equally real. It was coming in hops and skips, half steps even, but like the next BBC newscast, it was definitely coming.
“Aap ko kya chahiye?” Sadiq asked if he could get me anything, supposing I required more to satisfy me than what was on the table. He was barefoot; as always, he’d left his sandals at the edge of the large Bukhara carpet in the dining room.
I waited until he looked at me again, and then I said in Urdu, “What happened to Hanif’s sneakers?” I whispered so no one else could hear.
My question didn’t seem to surprise him, and he responded as if Hanif’s sneakers were on his mind as well. The sneakers were in Lahore with his wife.
“Yunis picked them up, right?”
“Yes,” he said. It was just like I’d imagined. Hanif’s sneakers had fallen to the side of the road, and Yunis had picked them up. “Eat something,” he added.
I shook my head
and looked out of the window at the lawn where Hanif had dribbled a soccer ball. His prediction had been a mystery. The prime minister would not die. He would live a life as long as the boy lived. No longer. Just as Hanif had foretold, he was gone, and the prime minister would soon follow.
I wished we’d never moved to Pakistan and, very specifically, that my father did not work for the general.
No one was hungry at dinner. I couldn’t understand why I was required to be there, and I regretted turning down Lizzy’s dinner invitation. In the last day or two, my father had almost stopped speaking during meals, and given how much he’d conversed with Uncle Imtiaz, I didn’t expect him to say anything. My mother hated his silences more than anyone, and she was determined to change the situation.
“If there’s one thing I know, it’s that leaders behave every bit as badly as your worst fear,” my mother began.
“Do you think they’ll do it?” she asked when Sadiq, his head wrapped in a soiled pagri that needed to be adjusted, brought in the food.
“When?” she asked while Sadiq refilled the water glasses, and she ignored the splash of water on the tablecloth.
“Do you know,” she said to me as I loaded butter and sugar on a chapati that I didn’t even want, “that the Nazis didn’t hang their victims?” Comparing the general to the Nazis was a stretch, and I turned to my father, but he wasn’t listening.
My mother’s rising frustration with the dinner silence filled the space until the large, airy room was claustrophobic, and I couldn’t breathe.
“Your country isn’t even civilized!”
My father didn’t so much as look at her. He tilted his head in the direction of the kitchen, where a newscaster announced through static that Iran had proclaimed itself an Islamic republic.
“The general and his men. They’ll be remembered as the animals that they are.” My mother punctuated her final pronouncement with a loud sigh, and Sadiq came to ask if she needed anything.
“Your country,” my mother had said.
Half-and-half that I was, I wondered what, if anything, might make it mine.
TWELVE
4 April 1979
The morning shouldn’t have been so quiet. I’d missed the unwelcome sounds from the servants’ quarters, including Sadiq’s urine streaming into the toilet and the clinking of a cheap teakettle on his single-burner stove. Closer to my bedroom, I’d been oblivious to the drone of my parents’ radio and the aroma of my mother’s first cup of coffee.
I drew open my curtains, and my quiet world went perfectly still, as if frozen in a camera frame. My father and Sadiq were at the far end of the driveway. My father was in his pajamas that had long since lost their color, but he refused to throw them away. As always, Sadiq was dressed in an ironed white shalwar and kurta, his head wrapped in a pagri. They wore identical sandals, with wide leather straps crisscrossing from toe to ankle. The men opened their arms at the same time and fell into an embrace. They locked together, their shoulders shaking in almost heaves, but neither emitted a sound. It took me several moments to understand what I was seeing. I’d never seen my father cry, much less imagined it, yet there he was, weeping, in the arms of our servant.
After a while, Sadiq pulled himself out of the embrace and wiped his face. He and my father slowly returned to the house, and I pulled the curtains closed, wishing to erase what I’d seen.
Some minutes later, I found Sadiq alone in the kitchen, his glazed eyes rimmed with red.
“Kya hua hai?” I asked him.
Although the radio was off, he pointed to it.
“Kya?” I asked, just as my father entered the room.
“The prime minister was hanged this morning,” my father answered. His words took a long time to get to me because they weren’t meant to go together.
“He’s dead?”
“Murdered,” he replied.
Noose and all, it had finally happened.
“Qatal kar diya,” Sadiq said, and murdered became an accidental vocabulary lesson.
“Qatal kar diya,” I repeated. I stumbled on the r, but Sadiq didn’t comment because he was helping me keep my secret of learning Urdu from my father.
My father peered at the radio, his brow wrinkled with concern. Sadiq’s bald head was wrapped, his face was missing eyebrows, the glass pitcher was full of freshly squeezed orange juice, and from another part of the house, my mother was calling for my father. The prime minister was dead and nothing had changed.
“Where is he now?” I asked my father.
“Buried.”
“Where?”
“Larkana.”
A few years earlier, Amir had gone to Larkana, the prime minister’s ancestral village, on a school trip, because Shah, the prime minister’s son, had invited his graduating class to the prime minister’s estate. Now his village had also become his burial site.
“Was Shah there?” I asked. Despite the solemn circumstances, I recalled that long ago, the prime minister’s son had jokingly promised to marry me.
My father tapped the radio’s speaker. “The children weren’t allowed to attend, and neither was Begum Bhutto.”
“The radio said so?”
I took a step or two closer to my father, who was bent over the counter tuning the radio, and leaned against him. For a moment, his fingers stopped playing with the dial. I couldn’t imagine waking up to the news that my father was dead. Would it make a difference to know he’d died in his sleep rather than having been hanged in a jail? Would it matter to me not to be present when his body was lowered into a grave? The sunflower garden on my mother’s new plastic tablecloth blurred as I tried not to cry.
“Allah ki marzi,” Sadiq whispered out of nowhere. When my father returned the phrase, It is God’s will, the call and response sounded like a secret conversation.
More than a year had passed since Hanif’s death, and for all I knew his body had decomposed. But I pictured him intact, lying next to the dead prime minister of Dr. Moody’s descriptions, who would have had a broken neck that must have flopped this way and that when the hangman removed the noose. In reality, of course, the two bodies were nowhere near each other. The prime minister’s was in Larkana, and Hanif’s was in Lahore, but death was the same everywhere.
“Where’s Hanif buried?” I asked my father, who asked Sadiq the question in Urdu.
“Miani Sahib,” Sadiq said, just as the toaster popped, and he left the kitchen with toast meant for me. I tried to imagine Hanif in what even I knew was the biggest, most overcrowded graveyard in Lahore, if not the world.
My father continued to listen to more news, this time in English on Voice of America. “In Pakistan today, authorities announced . . .”
“Hanif was right! Remember?” I recalled out loud. “He said, ‘The prime minister will live a life as long—’”
“Smart little boy,” my father interrupted me.
“But he didn’t really know the prime minister was going to die so soon, did he? Hanif thought the prime minister would live as long as he did, and since Hanif was so young, that was supposed to be for a very long time!” I had to admit that the irony of Hanif’s words was striking.
My father didn’t answer. Instead, he pulled me in a bear hug and squeezed until I couldn’t breathe anymore. It was a relief, because my mind, like my body, felt all out of air and I couldn’t think anymore.
At first I was lucky, and no one in the house noticed I was an hour late for school. My father couldn’t find his favorite vest, and after my mother discovered it twisted and tangled at the bottom of a stack of unfolded clean laundry, she unknotted it and ironed it without comment. The old washing machine made loud banging noises that brought Sadiq and my mother running from different directions. Sadiq wrung out the wet laundry and hung it to dry on the clothesline my mother could see from the kitchen. When the telephone rang, I could tell it was my grandfather calling from Lahore. My father shouted into the mouthpiece as he always did when he spoke to him, as if the volume he
lped my grandfather hear better. I didn’t need to know Punjabi to understand my father was discussing current events. I was lingering over my one last bite of toast and sip of tea when I heard the school bus at the gate. Because my parents were in listening range, I reverted to my old Urdu-English speech and sent Sadiq to tell the bus driver I wouldn’t be coming. I hadn’t asked my parents for permission to stay home, but they didn’t protest. It was only a little while later, when my father was about to leave for Lahore, that my mother realized I wasn’t in school.
“You missed the bus! Hurry up and get ready for school,” she said, rushing into my room, where I was lying in bed. “Nu!” she said—Now! in Dutch—ignoring my pleas to stay home.
I did not want to go, because how much more humiliating could it be to attend an American school on the day the CIA fathers of my classmates had sanctioned the hanging of my country’s prime minister? Who knew if they really had, but at that moment, with the momentous news of his hanging and rumors of American involvement, I was angry and it was easy to blame the most powerful nation on earth.
My father appeared at my mother’s side. “You must go,” he said.
“I don’t want to.”
“You will go because you will not give anyone the pleasure of knowing that you don’t want to go,” my father said, his calm tone failing to soften the finality of his words. Although my father didn’t spell out his reasoning, I knew he wanted me to go because it was important not to seem unwilling to show up at the American School on such a day.
“No one cares whether I’m there or not!” Really, who would notice besides Lizzy? Mr. Duval, maybe. It wasn’t as if a special roll call would be called to count the number of Pakistanis attending school.
“We care.”
“I’ll drive her,” my mother offered.
“No, let the driver take her. People will be very angry about the prime minister, and the streets won’t be safe now,” my father warned her.