by Sorayya Khan
I changed out of my sweaty clothes and went to find Sadiq. When I found him in the kitchen, he was standing over the ironing board and pouring vinegar into a juice glass. The smell made me nauseous.
“You aren’t going to drink that, are you?” I asked, alarmed.
He looked up and said, “I’m cleaning the iron.”
The iron plate was dotted with a paste of salt, but odd as that was, it didn’t hold my attention. Sadiq had a bright red burn near his thumb.
“Did you show your burn to my mother?” I asked, and Sadiq ignored me.
“Did you do the chores I asked you to do?”
He took a step away from the ironing board and said, “How many months before winter arrives?” It took me a second to understand that he was drawing attention to the summer and winter clothes I’d mentioned in my instructions.
Just then, my mother entered the kitchen.
“Sadiq!” my mother cried. “What in God’s name have you done to your hand?”
“Koi baat nahin,” Sadiq mumbled.
I was surprised by my mother’s anger. “It’s your fault he burned himself,” she said. “You had no reason to ask him to iron your clothes. Does he look like the dhobi?” she added, referring to the man who came to our house every Sunday and ironed our clothes on an ironing board set up for him in the servant quarters.
“I’m sorry,” I said, including both my mother and Sadiq in a quick glance, and I really, truly was.
Just when I thought I couldn’t bear one more day of the summer holidays, the beginning of the school year arrived and I started eighth grade. Our bus was unusually loud during the morning ride as friends were reunited and summer gossip was exchanged. Ten minutes from the school, as Lizzy was telling me about new students she’d already met at the embassy, and we were keeping an eye out for the first glimpse of the school compound, I thought the bus driver had taken a wrong turn. The previously unpaved stretch of road, which began at a cluster of mud huts and marked one boundary of the boys’ spitting games, had been transformed into a modern two-lane artery. As we approached the school, the column of yellow school buses ahead shared the road with white minivans, black-and-yellow taxis, and a red city bus, which had never happened before. The new railway station was visible a few hundred feet from the nearest school gate.
“They weren’t supposed to build the station so close to the school!” Lizzy complained.
“Why?” Everyone knew the answer, but I was curious to hear my best friend say it.
“Because of the kids’ safety or something,” Lizzy replied.
Our bus joined the others on the school grounds. One of the school’s few chowkidars stood at attention with an empty rifle slung on his back, waving at the students; one or two waved back. I was always hesitant about being too friendly with the Pakistani staff for fear of drawing attention to the Pakistani part of me, but I hoped he would interpret my slight nod as a greeting, and he did.
As much as I had looked forward to school all summer, I’d conveniently forgotten the discomfort of the first day. As I stood in the aisle waiting to get off the bus, I steeled myself against the familiar discomfort of being half-and-half. I could see the railway station a few hundred yards ahead, and even though I wasn’t American, the proximity of the railway station to my school was unsettling. I’d liked it better when the American School of Islamabad was located off a dirt road in the middle of nowhere, and it was easy to forget I was even partly Pakistani. I disagreed with my mother, who’d opposed the school’s decision to extend the walls as a result of security concerns. I didn’t mind the extra height that put more distance between me and the people roaming on the other side. Who knew if the scary man who’d accused me of being Amrikan was in the neighborhood?
Mr. Hill, the new principal, who’d been Mr. Simon’s friend in Iran many years ago, made an announcement during school assembly that the chowkidars would keep the gates to the school closed during the day. As always, students were forbidden to leave the campus, and if they disobeyed, they would be suspended. My first impression of Mr. Hill, in addition to the fact that he was the tallest man I’d ever seen, was that he was what my mother would have called a “no-nonsense character,” and he promised to be much stricter than previous principals. At the end of his first day, he was in the parking lot directing new students to their buses, encouraging others to do their homework, and warning one or two of the older ones that chewing tobacco on the buses would no longer be tolerated. I wondered how Mr. Hill might react if he learned of the spitting games. But it did not occur to me then, or ever, to be the one to inform him.
Within a few weeks, Mr. Hill had a problem on his hands. The science teacher was diagnosed with a serious case of hepatitis and was medically evacuated from Pakistan. It took the principal a few weeks, but he was able to convince Anne Simon to be a long-term substitute for the rest of the semester. I’d been at Lizzy’s house for Mr. Hill’s first call to Anne Simon, who had protested that she didn’t have teaching qualifications, that she’d just had a baby and had given up her nursing job to spend more time with her children. But Mr. Hill didn’t give up easily. He offered to rearrange the science schedule so she would be in school only part of the day, and he suggested she bring Mikail and his ayah, the nanny, to school with her. Lizzy didn’t want her mother to accept the job, because she was a typical thirteen-year-old, and none of us wanted our mother sharing our school day. She sulked for the first day or two Anne Simon taught, but soon she was asking her mother if we could take Mikail from Parveen, the ayah, and hold him while we ate lunch.
I liked Anne Simon, and although she didn’t teach any of my classes, her presence at the school was a comfort to me for a special reason. If Sadiq chose to violate house arrest and find his way to the corner of 87th Street again, he would not find Anne Simon at home. At least not on school days when she was forty-five minutes away, teaching Biology and Chemistry.
If only there was school on Fridays.
Sadiq could not have tried harder with his work. No one, not even my father, would have said otherwise. When we woke up in the morning, he was already in the house, at work with his dustcloth. He sorted laundry, vacuumed carpets, and did dishes without being asked. He even remembered to pick cilantro from the herbs growing in the servants’ quarters and to squeeze juice from the tiny limes that grew on bushes along the driveway to freeze for later use. At some point, he went back to making me halva and pooris on Fridays. In fact, he was more occupied with household duties than he’d been in months. And while he didn’t stop making mistakes the rest of us corrected, he tackled his chores with a new single-mindedness, as if he recognized that the sum of his chores was keeping him intact.
Even so, he strained with the effort of each task, whether climbing a ladder to clean a ceiling fan or bringing in laundry from the clothesline. It sometimes seemed as if the effort had him struggling against an invisible force that was as real as the water Lizzy and I struggled against when racewalking in the shallow end of the swimming pool. It made us want to help him, and soon, my mother and I had assumed much of what Sadiq had once routinely accomplished on his own. It was easy to forget what Sadiq had been like before Hanif died. I asked my mother whether she noticed that Sadiq seemed to be doing everything in slow motion, and she simply asked me to leave the fellow alone.
I couldn’t know for sure, but my guess was that the arrival of Anne Simon’s baby accounted for some of his behavior. When I finally asked my mother, “Do you think he knows Anne Simon had her baby?” she didn’t even have to think before answering.
“Is anything a secret in Islamabad?”
I hated it when people answered my questions with questions of their own. Besides, her question was stupid because we all knew Islamabad was full of secrets.
Sadiq was a different person in the garden. We’d thought my father unwise to fire the mali and pass on his responsibilities to Sadiq, but it turned out he was right. Not only did the fresh air do Sadiq good, he happily ass
umed the responsibility. Pushing a lawn mower or wheelbarrow, or watering the rosebushes, he seemed free of the weight bearing down on him inside the house. One day he retrieved a variety of tools from the servants’ quarters and dug up a front corner of the garden. By the time I came back from school, he’d already built a rock garden and created a small pond and was trying to convince my father to buy a water pump.
“For what?” my father asked suspiciously.
“A fountain.”
“What do we need a fountain for?”
Sadiq thought for a moment. “For beauty?”
My father shook his head and went off to consult with my mother. “OK,” he said when he returned. “I’ll have an engineer from the office stop by tomorrow with a design that won’t waste water or electricity.”
“A WAPDA engineer is going to design the fountain?” Sadiq asked, amazed.
“I am the chairman of WAPDA, and I can’t have people saying that my household wastes water and electricity. Therefore, yes, an engineer will come by tomorrow.”
“Daddy, let him build it the way he wants,” I interrupted. “It’ll be fine.”
My father’s response was lightning quick. “The man can’t even set a table correctly, and you want me to trust him with constructing a fountain?”
“Standing water breeds mosquitoes,” I muttered under my breath, perfectly aware that this fact had nothing to do with the issue at hand.
Sadiq didn’t understand much English, but my father hadn’t said anything beyond Sadiq’s comprehension, and I was embarrassed that he’d probably understood our exchange.
It took only a few days for the fountain to become operational. Sadiq’s crude pond had been replaced with a kidney-shaped black plastic tub set deep in the ground. A small fountainhead sprayed a stream of water a few feet high. Lizzy would have loved it. The first time we stood in front of it together, Sadiq smiled proudly and claimed to be responsible for creating the Margalla Road Shalimar Gardens. He planned to lobby my father for a spotlight so we could see the fountain at night, but I told him not to get his hopes up.
For the rest of October, the days fell into a safe rhythm, and it was possible to believe that the worst was behind us. One afternoon, without consulting anyone, my father sent Mushtaq, the driver, to Rawalpindi on a special mission. My mother and I didn’t think much of it until he returned with two plastic bags bulging with water and goldfish. Early that evening, Sadiq and I released the baby goldfish into our pond and, like magic, the swimming orange fish turned golden in my favorite light.
NINETEEN
Early to Mid-November 1979
I hadn’t exactly followed in Sadiq’s footsteps and given up the news, but really, what could be as important as the hanging of the prime minister? I spent my breakfasts ignoring the newscasts blaring from my father’s black-and-silver Zenith radio in our kitchen, until one morning I heard a surprising combination of words, American hostages, surface through the hum. A second later, as if my visiting grandfather also heard the BBC newscaster’s precise articulation of Teheran, he looked up from the hard-boiled egg on his fingertips and motioned for me to relay the headline. My parents joined us while he was attempting to read my lips for the second time: “American hostages have been taken in Teheran.” My father fiddled with the dial and lost the radio announcer in his never-ending and fruitless search for a static-free bandwidth. My mother stood beside him for a moment contemplating the news before exclaiming, “Amazing!” Only Sadiq walked around the kitchen oblivious.
I didn’t know much about Teheran, but I’d seen television images earlier that year of a tearful Shah fleeing a few days before the ayatollah’s triumphant return. When I was small, Teheran was also the place airplanes refueled on trips from Vienna to Karachi. The proof was buried in a family album in a black-and-white photograph of us on the airport tarmac, impressive mountains looming in the background.
Sitting next to Lizzy on the bus that afternoon, listening to the urgent voices surrounding us, I tried not to appear too interested in the sixty-six hostages that had been taken at the American Embassy in Teheran. Talk alternated between the few students who’d lived in Iran and those who hadn’t and involved a slew of English and Urdu profanities to describe the captors. Fucking animals. Goddamn gandus. Behenn chuuts.
Except for this, the ride was like any other, with the boys in the back turning to their games as soon as the bus rounded the first curve on the newly paved road. Suddenly, from the opposite direction, two buses and a truck rushed by in quick succession, very nearly grazing our bus.
“My dad says we need to be careful,” Lizzy commented.
I agreed. The morning’s newscast had warned Americans to use caution in their host countries.
We were interrupted by jeers from the back of the bus. One of the boys’ spitballs had hit a man, and he’d fallen off his bicycle and collided with another cyclist. Our bus slowed down while the driver studied the rearview mirror and watched the two tangled men get to their feet. For a few minutes, an argument ensued about how many points the hit was worth until a new student, the son of the new American deputy chief of mission, shouted, “Shut the hell up!” and put a stop to the ruckus.
“Juveniles,” Lizzy said, and I dared to nod in agreement.
After a minute, talk quickly returned to the hostages.
“Bomb the goddamn country,” someone said.
“And their oil fields,” someone else said.
“Fuck, yes!” two or three replied in chorus.
Lizzy whispered in my ear, “They’re embarrassing.” For the rest of the journey, she kept a watchful eye on her twin brothers a few seats in front of us and didn’t say much besides reminding me that her father had lived in Teheran.
I imagined the embassy in Teheran as a duplicate of the Islamabad embassy, a red-brick building planted in a corner of the city, where a giant plain joined Margalla-like hills. By the time the bus ride ended, faraway Teheran and sleepy Islamabad sat side by side in my head, but the evening television footage immediately informed me I’d been wrong. The American Embassy in Teheran was nothing like Islamabad’s; it was whitewashed buildings on a busy, tree-lined downtown street.
The next day, classes were interrupted for an emergency school assembly, an event that had only happened once, years earlier, when students had broken into the principal’s office during the school day and issued a false alarm using the secret emergency radio connection between our school and the American Embassy. As a result, armed American marines had stormed the school, the students responsible for the false alarm were nearly expelled, and an assembly was called to explain everything to us. But no one could guess the reason for the assembly today. When the auditorium was filled and the students quieted down, Mr. Mancini, the assistant principal, read a prepared statement. At first I thought I’d misheard, but the audience rippled, and the music teacher sitting in the row behind me gasped. The principal of the school, Mr. Hill, a man who’d barely served out three months of his contract and was responsible for Anne Simon’s job, was among the hostages in the American Embassy in Teheran. Almost as an aside, Mr. Mancini offered an explanation for Mr. Hill’s presence in Teheran. He had taken one week of leave to retrieve some personal effects from his former school in Teheran, including a fountain pen that was a family heirloom. He’d also hoped to confirm that his former students’ school records were properly moved from one building to another.
“Dad’s going to be so worried for him,” Lizzy said, but she was the one who sounded very worried.
“I bet they’ll let the hostages go really soon, and Mr. Hill will be back in no time,” I said.
“I don’t know,” Lizzy said doubtfully.
I was sad for Mr. Hill and for his wife and children, but all through the day my primary focus was on the fountain pen. What kind of a pen could it have been for Mr. Hill to board an airplane and fly to another country to retrieve it? And to do so while school was in session? The story sounded like a fairy tale to m
e, but it wouldn’t have been so inconceivable if the pen had secret qualities, like something Maxwell Smart might have used in a Get Smart television episode. That was it! Mr. Hill was a spy, and the fountain pen was his Maxwell Smart or James Bond secret tool. Mr. Hill, the CIA spy, was my idea before I heard it implied by Uncle Imtiaz a few days later. He visited our home with a copy of The Muslim fresh off the presses underneath his arm and joked with me about Mr. Hill. “I’m sorry for the man,” he said. “Must have been a very special fountain pen, eh? Irreplaceable! But between us, what kind of an undercover operation is he running at your school? Not to mention, what message is he sending to his students? Their leader jumps on an airplane to recover nothing more than a fountain pen?”
Mr. Hill hadn’t made much of an impression on me either way. I’d seen him in friendly chats with students and playing basketball a few times with the older boys, but I couldn’t recall exchanging a word with him or noticing much about him except for his height and the fact that he could dunk the basketball with one hand into the regulation-height basket. Had it not been for the hostage crisis, I would not have realized how clearly I remembered his face. Whenever I listened to news of the crisis, in my imagination, I saw sixty-odd Mr. Hills blindfolded and bound in different corners of a red-brick building, surrounded by an army of angry students.
A new sign appeared every day next to the principal’s photo in his office window to let us know how many days he’d been held hostage. Our classroom display cases were filled with newspaper clippings about the hostage situation, but the teachers avoided speaking directly about Mr. Hill. Almost two weeks after the emergency assembly, around the time thirteen hostages were released—none of them Mr. Hill—the social studies teacher unrolled his world map and taped it to the blackboard. He traced the outline of Iran’s borders with the rubber tip of his pointer. He located the tiny star that marked Teheran and enumerated the distance it lay from neighboring countries. “Twelve hundred miles from Pakistan,” he said, and went on to inform the class that Pakistan shared a long border and the name of a province, Baluchistan, with Iran. He asked if the class knew how wide the Atlantic Ocean was, and when no one answered, he chastised the students, most of whom traveled the route at least once a year. He wrote the number with chalk on the blackboard, made a few silent calculations, and ran his pointer in a direct line from New York to Teheran to Islamabad. “Eight thousand miles,” he said before dropping his pointer and dismissing the class early.