City of Spies

by Sorayya Khan

From the kitchen, I could see the neighborhood mosque behind my grandfather in the doorway. My father had used it, and anything else he could think of, to persuade my grandfather to leave Five Queen’s Road for a new home in Shadman. “You’ll hardly have to walk across the street for Jumma prayers,” I remembered my father saying. For years, my grandfather had fought my father “tooth and nail,” as my father was fond of saying, to stay in Five Queen’s Road, the utterly dilapidated remnant of a home in which my father had grown up. My grandfather only acquiesced when a violent monsoon season flooded the house and made it uninhabitable once and for all.

  Later that night, as my grandfather and I watched Indian newscasts on the black-and-white television, I asked him, “Where do you go for Jumma prayers?” He put his face close to mine to hear me better, and I tried not to notice that his dentures were too white for a man his age.

  “No need to go anywhere,” he whispered.

  “Because the azaan is so loud?” I asked.

  “Your parents give me hearing aids, but you will be deaf in a month if you stay here.” He left the room for a moment, and after returning, dropped a set of earplugs in my hand, instructing me to use them when I slept, or else, he warned, “You won’t get any sleep in Lahore!”

  The television showed grainy images of India’s Prime Minister Morarji Desai, American President Jimmy Carter, and the new president of Iraq. While the formal Urdu of television newscasts was difficult for me to follow, I caught almost every word that night. The former president of Iraq had resigned and a new leader, Saddam Hussein, had just been appointed to take his place.

  I jumped up and stood in front of my grandfather, obscuring his view.

  “Can you keep a secret? I speak Urdu now,” I announced proudly and translated what I’d just said into Urdu to prove the point.

  “You always did,” he pointed out kindly, although he was lying.

  I didn’t argue with my grandfather but made him promise not to mention to my father what I’d confessed. I still wasn’t ready to tell him.

  I spent the night tossing in bed with my window closed, the ancient air conditioner dripping water on the floor instead of blowing cold air. Along with everyone else in Lahore, I awoke to the clamor of competing azaans, a mess of unsynchronized calls ricocheting across the city. I pushed my earplugs deeper into my ears, and while they didn’t muffle the muezzins, they kept out the sounds of the rising city at dawn—bicycle bells, shrill calls of vendors, car horns—and eventually allowed me to sleep again.

  My first few days were spent the way my Lahore visits always began. I went to Ferozsons bookstore on Mall Road, where my grandfather let me select whatever books I wanted. Next, my grandfather took me on our standard tour of Lahore’s sights in his battered Toyota Corolla. He drove through red lights as if they were green and proclaimed that cataract surgery had given him perfect vision. We visited the Shalimar Gardens, where the dozens of fountains in shallow pools of water actually worked that summer. We managed a longer visit than usual to the Lahore Fort, where I learned that the wide walkways were designed for elephants and that the tulips painted on the tiles came from Central Asia, not my mother’s Holland, as I’d assumed. Then we went to the Old City, where we rode in a tonga and ate chicken tikka and naan prepared right in front of us. From the rows of tiny stalls that sold thin glass bangles of every color and design, I picked out dozens of bangles, including green ones with gold glitter, maroon ones braided with silver, and plain purple ones. The shop owner slipped two dozen of the most beautiful glass bangles I’d ever seen over my wrist without breaking a single one. My grandfather instructed him to put together an identical set for Lehla, and because I asked, he bought another set for Lizzy.

  As we drove, my grandfather, normally reserved with words, offered running commentary on the inferiority of Islamabad, “the village,” as compared to Lahore. Its restrictions, such as no rickshaws or tongas on the streets, forever separated it from the rest of the country. Filled with foreigners and laid out in a grid with broad avenues and numbered sectors that served no purpose, the place was insufferable. Constitution Avenue was a national disgrace: six wasted lanes that rarely saw more than a few cars and, worse, was named after a document that was suspended, amended, and abrogated so many times it had come to mean nothing, especially under the new general. My grandfather went on to mock the Presidency, a futuristic palace with secret underground chambers meant for god-knows-what. He repeated a rumor that city planners had imported Japanese trees to line the streets. “As if what grows in Japan has any chance of thriving at the foot of the Himalayan mountains!” he said.

  I didn’t care much about Islamabad one way or another, but I finally asked, “What did the city ever do to you?”

  “Village,” he corrected me. “It gave me the general!” He was right. The country’s leaders ruled from Islamabad, but the army’s headquarters, from where the general ruled, were in Rawalpindi. Not to mention that the general had been born in what was now India, but it was best not to argue such fine points with my grandfather.

  One afternoon, just as Yunis was about to serve a lunch of aloo saag (which was the only way I agreed to eat spinach), my grandfather answered the front door to find Sadiq standing on the stoop. After looking him up and down and poking an index finger into his scrawny chest as if to confirm his presence, my grandfather whispered, “None of you can stay away from Lahore!”

  Sadiq’s arrival was completely unexpected. My father had charged him with looking after the household in Islamabad while my mother and I were away. Instead, my father reported that the following day, on a Sunday evening not one week into my visit, he returned from a long workday to find Sadiq missing. I was standing next to the telephone when he rang, but Sadiq got to it first.

  “What are you doing there?” my father demanded, the shock in his voice booming through the static-filled line.

  “Nothing,” Sadiq replied blandly.

  “Nothing? I thought something happened to you.” When Sadiq neither apologized nor offered an explanation, my father became furious. “If it weren’t for my wife, I’d let you go. First you forget how to set the table and make my tea. Then you go off to . . .”

  Sadiq moved the receiver away from his ear and covered the earpiece with his hand to protect me from my father’s tirade.

  “Give it to me!” I ordered him. Sadiq held the receiver beyond my reach, my father’s words safely muffled by his hand until Yunis came to see what was happening and took it from him.

  “My brother is not well,” Yunis pleaded with my father.

  “I’m losing my mind!” I could hear my father shout.

  “Sir,” Yunis said, with a seriousness appropriate to the statement he was about to make. “He has lost his mind.”

  Sadiq had taught me the Urdu words for lost his mind, but it still took me a moment before I comprehended what had been said. Had Sadiq been showing signs of a man who’d lost his mind? If so, had he lost it in the exact place and at the precise moment Anne Simon had run over Hanif? Or had he been losing it bit by bit since then? Was grief wearing him out, grinding him away, leaving a dustlike trail behind his shrinking body? The last possibility comforted me, if only for a crazy second in which I imagined chasing him with a butterfly net, catching scattered pieces of his mind and safely returning them to him.

  “Put him on the telephone!” my father shouted to Yunis, who grimaced but did not obey. Suddenly my grandfather appeared, wrested the telephone from Yunis, and dropped it back in the cradle.

  Within hours, my father arrived in Lahore to deal with Sadiq in person. He entered my grandfather’s house, closely followed by a WAPDA driver who was struggling to carry his two briefcases and keep up with him at the same time.

  “How are you?” my father asked no one in particular, then went right to the kitchen where Sadiq had relegated himself for the day. I intercepted the WAPDA driver and instructed him to leave my father’s baggage by the front door.

  “You left withou
t telling me,” I heard my father say. “Why?” He was met with silence, except for Yunis, who had barely begun to defend his brother when my father ordered him to be quiet. “You left without telling me,” my father repeated with even more gravity, as if there were no crime more serious than leaving without informing someone.

  Later in the evening, my father sank into the sofa and, because my grandfather was not in the room, put his feet up on the coffee table. “What can you do with these people?” he asked me, although it wasn’t really a question at all. Sadiq brought us our tea and stirred three spoonfuls of sugar into my special oversized teacup.

  “You take that much sugar?” my father said.

  “We’re visiting Dada,” I answered, as if in my grandfather’s house, my father should know better than to offer comments about my sugar intake. Luckily, he was so preoccupied with Sadiq, he dropped the subject.

  “How’s your wife?” he asked Sadiq. “Your daughters? Do they need anything?”

  “No,” Sadiq said in a monotone.

  “Where are they?” my father asked.

  “Home.”

  “Why aren’t you there?”

  Sadiq froze, but I knew he wanted nothing more than to sprint to the kitchen away from my father’s interrogation.

  “Well, now that you’re in Lahore, you should be with your family.” My father made it sound like a reasonable suggestion, seeming to forget that Sadiq and Jamila weren’t on speaking terms.

  Sadiq slowly shook his head, but my mother’s absence made my father less careful and more stubborn, so he pressed on without tempering his words. “Why not? They are your family.”

  “I don’t have a family anymore,” Sadiq mumbled. He left the room and soon we heard him heading for the mosque across the street, where the muezzin was fiddling with the microphone before calling the azaan.

  With Sadiq gone, my father directed his lecture at Yunis. He told Yunis tragedies struck all sorts of people in all walks of life, but, God willing, they found the courage to survive and continue to be responsible to their families. “You’re his brother. Explain this to him,” my father insisted.

  “Pardon?” Yunis said, unable to hear my father through the roar of the beginning phrases of the azaan.

  “Goddamnit!” my father said, breaking into a single English curse, only to immediately revert to Urdu. “What’s that bloody noise?”

  My father didn’t curse often, but when he did, his anger had the rhythm of Urdu curse words, not the ones I heard on the bus, but curse words all the same—haramzada, ulloo ka patha—but I’d never heard him say goddamnit before.

  “It’s the azaan,” I said. My father appeared surprised that I’d followed his Urdu or, more likely, that I should think he really required an answer.

  “What is this?” my father said, waving in the air as if the wailing muezzin’s “Ashahadu an la illaha illallah” was something he could touch. Just then, my grandfather appeared in the hallway on his way to his study.

  “It’s the mosque,” my grandfather whispered curtly. “Remember, you bribed me with it to get me to live here?”

  His second sentence was lost on my father, who’d already headed for the bathroom to wash before offering his prayers. He never missed them in his father’s house.

  “I’ll deal with this situation later,” my father said mainly to himself, which was fine because no one believed he had any idea of what to do.

  As always, the azaan ended with “La illaha illallah.” There is no God but God. The last line was my favorite. Even with all the muezzins across Lahore shouting it through microphones at slightly staggered times, the melody of that last line hovered in the air, gentler than the lines that had preceded it. The entire azaan once had sounded like that final line, before the amplification of the general, his loudspeakers, and microphones. My mother told us that when she visited Pakistan for the first time, she fell in love with the azaan. The melody of music and prayer five times a day! Things were different now. I’d seen her cover her ears when the din began. Was that blasphemy? My father didn’t always say his prayers five times a day, and did sometimes say goddamnit or worse. Was that blasphemy? It didn’t really matter because he was responsible for my mother’s conversion to Islam, and as a result had a seat reserved for him in heaven.

  Heaven . . . where, hopefully, Hanif was.

  I hadn’t realized how much I’d worried about Sadiq staying behind in Islamabad until the sight of him in Lahore flooded me with relief. He’d been forbidden to go to Embassy Road, but who knew what he was up to when my mother and I weren’t in Islamabad? The first time I was alone with him in my grandfather’s kitchen, I asked why he’d decided to come to Lahore.

  Instead of answering me, he said, “For months, you people give me train tickets to Lahore. Now I’m here and it’s a problem. Whose fault is that?”

  “Daddy’s.” I shrugged. “How long did the train take?”

  “Four hundred twenty minutes,” Sadiq said, testing my knowledge of numbers.

  “Seven hours!” I said triumphantly, having long since learned to count in the hundreds.

  “Please don’t be so angry with Sadiq,” I pleaded with my father later over a dinner interrupted by work-related telephone calls. “After all, he lost his son,” I added, copying an expression adults used to talk about death.

  “The child is dead, not misplaced,” my father countered.

  “Do you have to be this angry with him?”

  “You let me worry about him. You worry about yourself. Yunis!” my father called, and in a second, Yunis was standing in front of him, ready to receive instructions. Yunis would continue to visit Jamila every day. If there was anything she or the children needed, he was to report it to my father.

  “I could always tell Sadiq,” Yunis suggested.

  “That would only be helpful if the two of them were talking again. Are they?”

  Yunis shook his head and smiled, but his smile was very sad.

  One morning, two days before I was to return to Islamabad and one day after my father had left, I woke up in what seemed to be an empty house. I couldn’t have been alone, but it was unusually quiet. After a breakfast of Yunis’s special halva and pooris that was left on the dining room table for me, I carried my dishes to the kitchen. The kitchen was an oven, regardless of the time of day or whether cooking had begun. I put my head in the freezer looking for ice cubes, but found only freezer snow that scraped and numbed my fingertips. My grandfather had told me there were plastic ice trays somewhere in the kitchen, and that morning I decided to finally look for them.

  I began in the far corner of the kitchen, methodically searching each cabinet. I went through shelves of glasses, plates, pots, and pans, without finding the ice trays. I rummaged through the cabinet where Yunis stored the various flours he used for chapatis, parathas, and pooris, and found squeezed between the flour bags, brand-new hearing aids—still in their original boxes—that my father had bought my grandfather. In another cabinet, I discovered plastic food containers my mother bought for the house and I’d never once seen used. A double cabinet was stuffed with files of yellowing papers, and a drawer was filled with rusted nails, broken pliers, candle stubs, and blunt, dirty scissors. Underneath the kitchen sink, a place I’d almost overlooked, I found a bucket of foul-smelling garbage, a collection of cleaning products, and some rags. I caught sight of a brass handle tucked behind them that I would have left alone if it hadn’t been so out of place. Reaching as far back into the cabinet as I could, I lifted out a heavy black briefcase. In the process, I hit my hand on the cabinet divider, knocked over a bottle of furniture oil, and broke the last of my glass bangles, all at the same time.

  Kneeling on the floor, I clicked open the latches of the old briefcase that resembled one my father once had. A strange smell wafted up, an unpleasant mix of rotting cauliflower, damp leather, and new banknotes. It took me a moment to grasp the contents, neatly arranged like the banker’s tray in a serious Monopoly game. Coverin
g every inch of the faded paisley lining were bundled stacks of rupees arranged in orderly rows. I’d never seen that much money before, and all of it was in hundred-rupee bills. When Yunis walked into the kitchen, I was clasping neat, solid bundles in each hand with my arms outstretched like the arms of the vegetable wallah’s weighing scale. I dropped one handful on the floor, continuing to stare at the packet until Yunis retrieved it. He put it back in the briefcase, then gestured for me to replace the bundles I was still holding. I stood up to get out of the way so Yunis could return the briefcase to where I’d found it.

  “Is it yours?” I asked him when he was finished.

  “No,” he replied.

  “My grandfather’s?”

  “No.”

  He began scrubbing my breakfast dishes in the ancient kitchen sink that should never have been transplanted from Five Queen’s Road.

  “It’s a lot of money,” I said to his back.

  Just then Sadiq swung open the kitchen door. He went to a counter littered with used and unused orange halves and began to squeeze juice by hand.

  “No need for juice, thank you,” I said, hoping to get Sadiq’s attention. He continued to squeeze until most of the juice ran over the top of the plastic lemon juicer. Had Hanif liked oranges? Had Sadiq ever made juice for his son? “I would not like juice, please,” I said as formally as I could.

  “Khatam.” Yunis walked over to Sadiq and removed the oranges from the counter. The way he said finish made me aware that he wanted Sadiq not only to finish what he was doing, but also to leave the room.

  “Sadiq?” I began gently as Yunis led Sadiq to the back door. “Do you know about the briefcase of money underneath my grandfather’s sink?”

  Sadiq stopped in his tracks and replied, “Yes.”

  “The money is yours?”

  “It’s my brother’s.”

  I was sure the bundles of hundred-rupee notes added up to at least 50,000. It had to be Sadiq’s settlement money, and he’d given it to Yunis.

  “Why? Is it Yunis’s?” I demanded, but neither of them said another word.