City of Spies

by Sorayya Khan

  Before stomping back to the house, I sneaked one last look at Sadiq, just as he was pushed into his room.

  My grandfather had been sitting in the kitchen for the duration. When my mother began to tell him what had happened, he nodded his head impatiently and whispered, “Yes, yes, I heard.”

  “But you’re deaf!” I said.

  “Aliya!” My mother was upset, but so was I, and it helped to focus on the inconsistency in my grandfather’s hearing rather than the ache in my stomach. Besides, either my grandfather was deaf or he wasn’t.

  My grandfather replied, “Being deaf doesn’t mean not knowing what’s going on.”

  It would have been easy to miss his soft whisper, but I didn’t, and in return, I offered a weak smile. My grandfather always knew what was going on because he was the smartest adult around.

  A little while later, we were all still in the kitchen when my father strode back into the house, pretended we weren’t there, and lifted the telephone receiver. None of us dared ask whom he was calling. In a moment, the slow clicking of the rotary face dial coming back to rest, one-two-three-four and one, made it obvious he was dialing 41, Lahore’s city code. On the other end of the telephone line, Yunis answered the call. My father’s instructions were concise: Yunis was to come to Islamabad immediately so that he could accompany Sadiq back to Lahore.

  “You are firing him,” my mother said at the end of the short telephone conversation.

  “I should have done it long ago,” my father complained and described what the nighttime chowkidars told him had happened.

  The motorcycle intelligence officer had paid a visit the previous night and asked to speak to Sadiq. When the chowkidar told him that Sadiq had gone missing, the spy asked a barrage of questions, among them an accounting of Sadiq’s comings and goings. The chowkidar could not say where Sadiq had gone, but to appease the spy, he gave him a log in which records such as those were kept. The spy also wanted the list of foreign-license-plated vehicles that visited our house, as per WAPDA regulations, and the chowkidar gave him that too. When Sadiq discovered the chowkidars kept a log of his movements, he slapped one of them and cursed the other. In response, they called him a stinking village idiot and various other names my father said he wouldn’t translate for us. Like an animal gone wild, Sadiq lost his temper and threw everything within his reach at them, including the special servant’s chair. Regardless of what the chowkidars had done to provoke Sadiq, my parents could no longer ignore the sobering reality that there was an unstable man living on their premises.

  “Oh no, Javid!” my mother said, but I knew she didn’t disagree with my father’s decision. Like me, she’d wished for things to turn out differently.

  Her words had the unexpected effect of igniting my father in a way nothing else had. “Oh no, Javid,” he mocked my mother. “Yasmin, look what listening to you has gotten me into! My daughter kidnapped in the middle of the night, and the US Embassy burned to the ground. We’ll be lucky if General Zia himself doesn’t arrive at our gate and arrest us all!” My father addressing my mother as Yasmin made it clear that he was furious.

  “I wasn’t kidnapped!” I interjected.

  “You . . .” my father started, and my grandfather slammed his fist onto the table and sent teacups ricocheting across the surface. The distraction lasted long enough for everyone to take a breath.

  “It’s not like you to get carried away, Javid. The general didn’t give a damn yesterday when the embassy was burning, and I doubt he has changed his mind today,” my mother said.

  My grandfather accused my father of being a negligent employer and blamed him for enabling Sadiq. My grandfather had been retired from the courts for years, but he made his case with the learned deliberation of an experienced lawyer. He said that the servant ought to have been sent away at the first sign of instability. My father’s failure to do that had put me at risk. “Case closed,” he said, and my father was momentarily speechless.

  “It will all be all right,” my mother said, struggling to come to my father’s assistance, despite his harshness.

  But her comment enraged him further. “Don’t patronize me! Don’t minimize what’s happened! You scoundrels want me to lose my job.” I’d never heard my father call my mother or grandfather names, particularly not the one he typically resorted to out of frustration when referring to his lazy office employees. My father had once again transformed into a man without lips and, unaware of what he was about to do, I thought he’d never looked scarier. Then he lunged at my mother and pushed her shoulder so hard, if she hadn’t had excellent reflexes she would have been knocked from the chair to the floor.

  “Javi, Javi . . .” my mother cried, now using her affectionate nickname for him.

  “Don’t Javi, Javi me!” my father bellowed, and my deaf grandfather covered his ears.

  My mother was undeterred. She rose from her seat to wrap her arms around his neck. She sank against him, as if her sheer weight stood a chance at calming him. “You’re right to send him back to Lahore before it’s too late,” she whispered.

  “Daddy?” I said, tears streaming down my face.

  “Will you please be quiet, please?!” he shouted, but his arms were around my mother, and he held onto her as if he were holding onto life itself.

  I’d never seen my father in such a state—like everything else in my life, he was crumbling into pieces before my very eyes.

  The next day, my mother and I stood in the carport while Yunis and Sadiq settled into my father’s office car. My grandfather kissed me good-bye, leaving me with the usual spot of moisture on my forehead that I dared not wipe away.

  “I’m coming back to the village soon,” he said.

  “You do know this is the capital, right?” I teased.

  “No!” he joked.

  He embraced my mother and while he held her in his arms, he apologized for taking the car to my school.

  “I was wrong,” he said unconvincingly, winking at me as he spoke. “I shouldn’t have taken the car without your permission.”

  “I was worried about you. You’re not the best driver, you know, and Peshawar Road is terribly dangerous . . .” my mother began and went on as she sometimes did.

  My grandfather smiled widely during her monologue, his top lip stuck above his denture. He wasn’t even looking at my mother, who was still partially in his embrace, and he paid no attention to what she was saying.

  “Are you trying to say thank you?” my grandfather finally said.

  My mother broke out in laughter. “Thank you for bringing my daughter home,” she said graciously, clearly intent on putting the worry of the last few days behind her.

  Mushtaq had just closed Sadiq’s car door and had gone to the front of the car to listen to my father’s directions. I knocked on Sadiq’s window and waved my good-bye.

  My father finished instructing Mushtaq, who finally joined the others in the car.

  “Allah janta hai,” my father said as the car rolled out of the gate, and then added, “God knows what has happened,” as if my mother or I might have use for the English translation.

  My parents hadn’t spoken to each other since the previous day, so I was surprised when she acknowledged him. “God knows your country has gone to pieces,” my mother said.

  “You think?” It was my father’s standard response to her frequent generalizations, but with their horrible fight fresh in his mind, he appeared to consider her complaint more seriously.

  “I do,” she said and hurried away. She swung open the front door of the house with unexpected determination and was the first to reenter.

  For one fleeting moment, I was tricked into believing that everything could be set right. It couldn’t, of course, but it didn’t stop me from wishing that absolutely everything had been otherwise.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Saturday, 22 December, through Wednesday, 26 December 1979

  My father, like my grandfather, was a Lahori in the truest sense of the
word. Not only did we grow up with his insistence that the city was superior to any other city in the world, he was convinced that Lahore’s magic could cure any crisis. He sent my brother, Amir, to Lahore when he declared his intention to study Islam in Cairo. He sent Lehla there when she was caught breaking curfew with her boyfriend in a Karachi nightclub during a school trip. He sent all three of us there for part of our first summer in Islamabad when my mother set up the house. Whenever he joined us, he’d say, “Lahore is your history,” and drag us on the same sightseeing tour. Lawrence Gardens, the Badshahi Mosque, the Red Fort, the Old City, Government College, Lahore Museum, all were places that had to be visited; as if without such a pilgrimage, our family would fall apart.

  So it happened that my mother, my father, and I had just arrived at Lahore’s airport and were in the car on the way to Shadman. My parents informed me that Sadiq was living in my grandfather’s house because Sadiq’s wife, Jamila, continued to hold him responsible for Hanif’s death and would not allow him to return home. We all agreed that Jamila was being unfair, but I was afraid of seeing Sadiq, not only because of what had transpired in our home the night before he left, but also because of my recurring nightmare.

  In my dreams, Sadiq sat on a pirhi, a few inches from the floor, in a corner of my grandfather’s kitchen so that Yunis could spoon-feed him unidentifiable orange mush. He sat collapsed over his knees, without a pagri, and was as white as it was possible for a brown man the color of my father to be. I tried to entice him to speak. “Aap ki pagri kidhar hai?” I asked. After waiting to be corrected, I changed my grammar and said, “Tumhari pagri kidhar hai?” In frustration, I finally asked in English, “Have you lost your turban?” Then I begged Yunis to tell me if Sadiq would ever speak again. His hopeful response, “Insha’Allah,” only made me despair. The night before we left for Lahore, my nightmare extended into a sequence of scenes in which Yunis took to the task of caring for his brother with the same precision he fried our eggs, poured tea, or swept the driveway. He cared for Sadiq as if he were a child again, leading him to the toilet and washing his bottom before pulling the flush. Yunis combed and cut hair that had grown long and white on Sadiq’s head. He dressed him in starched kurtas many sizes too big and held a cloudy plastic glass to his parched lips. After the day’s long shadows became night, Yunis prepared Sadiq for bed. He drew back the bedcovers on a charpai pushed flush against his own and gently laid him down. Right before I awoke, he turned Sadiq’s face in the direction of the Ka’aba so that God and His mercy might easily find it in death.

  We were approaching my grandfather’s neighborhood when I asked my parents how Sadiq was doing.

  “Hard to know,” my father replied.

  “The man needs help,” my mother said.

  “With Hanif’s death and all, you mean, right?” I asked her.

  “That, and . . . listen, darling, we don’t know what happened the day of the embassy fire . . .”

  “We still don’t know who did it?” I interrupted my mother.

  “We know that there were a lot of angry and organized university students involved,” my father said.

  “Maybe other gundas, as well,” my mother said but didn’t explain who they might have been.

  “I don’t understand why they did it,” I said.

  “Supposedly, they believed that the US had seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca,” my father said and shrugged his shoulders.

  “I don’t believe any of it. I don’t believe anything anyone says about anything that’s going on anywhere around here anymore.”

  That said, I took a deep breath and tried to focus because I needed my father’s help. “Americans didn’t seize the mosque, right?” Two weeks after the mosque had been seized, the affair had ended, and neither Iranians nor Americans had been involved, but Saudis themselves.

  My father nodded his confirmation.

  “But then why did they do it?”

  “You see,” my father said calmly, “what the students—or whoever—did was not right. This is not the way to behave. But what happened is a cause for concern, because it shows how angry people are.”

  My father went on, getting angrier himself as he was reminded of the hanging of the prime minister, a wretched general, and various other things. I tuned out and drew my own conclusions. Very simply, the world was a small place and what happened in one place affected the other. I was suddenly reminded of Klackers, the game of two balls suspended on a string. When one ball hit the other, the click-clack sent it careening. Countries were connected to each other the same way, which made our world a very scary place.

  Finally, my mother interrupted him and steered the conversation back to where it had started.

  “What we were trying to say, my darling, is that we don’t know what happened the day of the embassy fire. Remember when Sadiq came home, he smelled of smoke? Not to mention that awful scene in the servants’ quarters?” She inhaled deeply and said, “Your father and I think he may have been at the American Embassy the day . . .”

  “So what?” I interrupted.

  “Well, we think he might have been involved somehow.”

  “That’s ridiculous. He didn’t hurt anyone. I was there when he talked to Anne Simon. He didn’t hurt her or her stupid baby and he could have!”

  My mother wasn’t dissuaded. “Sometimes, under certain circumstances, people are capable of things we can’t imagine,” she suggested.

  “You really think Sadiq was in the crowd that set fire to the American Embassy?” I pretended outrage, even though I harbored the same suspicion.

  “I don’t think he set fire to the United States Embassy,” my father said calmly.

  “I know he didn’t,” I said.

  “You can’t know that, though, can you?” my father said dejectedly.

  “He told me.”

  “He told you what?” my mother was quick to ask.

  I was saved by my grandfather’s truncated driveway and our sudden stop. “Never mind,” I said.

  “Aliya!”

  My mother had an uncanny ability to detect her children’s lies, and this was no exception. Sadiq, of course, hadn’t told me anything.

  Standing in my grandfather’s kitchen, Sadiq had shed his pagri, exactly as he had in my dreams. I pretended to ignore my parents’ warning to be careful around him, but I was aware that they were in the next room.

  “Welcome,” he said, putting down the silverware he was drying. He flung the dishtowel over his shoulder and stretched out his arms in an expansive gesture equal to his welcome, as if my grandfather’s home was his.

  “Hello.”

  “Welcome to Lahore!” he repeated, his enthusiasm a match for any television commercial.

  “Thanks.” Sadiq looked at me expectantly with a broad smile. I had difficulty reconciling the person in front of me with the one I had last seen in Islamabad. “But I didn’t want to come to Lahore.”

  “Why?”

  “I didn’t feel like a vacation.”

  “Me neither,” he said.

  “You’re already on vacation. Isn’t Lahore a vacation for you?”

  Sadiq waved away my question. “Thank God you were fine,” he announced, after a moment.

  “Why wouldn’t I have been?” I had no idea what he meant.

  “The school,” Sadiq said matter-of-factly, referring to the day when something had actually happened in Islamabad.

  “You weren’t there. How do you know what happened?” I was suspicious.

  “I wasn’t there,” he said. “But you were, though, and I’m glad you are fine.”

  “You live with my grandfather now?” I asked, changing the subject.

  “With Yunis,” Sadiq replied, as if there was a difference.

  “Is your wife all right? Your children?” I asked carefully.

  “Everyone is fine.”

  “You won’t be coming back to Islamabad?”

  “No.”

  “Well, we don’t really need a serva
nt anymore. I’m the only one home, and in a few years I’ll go off to college, too,” I said, doing a poor job of disguising my disappointment.

  “You’ll visit your grandfather, like always,” Sadiq said, not taking offense.

  “Maybe,” I said. “And you? Are you all right now?”

  “I’m fine.” He answered as if I had no cause for worry at all.

  “You know, breaking your things, the chair . . .” I didn’t finish my sentence about his unraveling.

  “Nothing wrong with getting good and mad once in a while,” he said.

  “Mad? You were a tornado.” Not knowing the Urdu equivalent for tornado, I used the English word.

  Sadiq was puzzled but didn’t ask for a translation.

  “By the way,” he said, presenting me with at least a week’s stack of newspapers from the kitchen counter. “Have you been practicing?”

  “Have you?”

  “I saved these for you,” he said, ignoring my question.

  “You’re following the general again?” I asked, as if the country’s leader was our common acquaintance.

  “No, but you should. It’s good for your Urdu.”

  “I’m sick of the news,” I said honestly.

  “Go select a story, then come back and read it to me,” he said sternly.

  I was back a few minutes later with a three-column selection that could have been written by Uncle Imtiaz. At first, I made mistakes to see if he would catch me, until he finally quipped I ought to stop insulting our intelligence. Then I gave the story my full attention, and although the news was as uninspiring as ever, and the general was issuing whatever directives struck his fancy, I was happier than I’d been in a while.

  I had promised myself I wouldn’t look in the cabinet. I made myself write the promise on a piece of paper and put it in my suitcase, hoping a written reminder would help me keep my word. In the end, my good intentions didn’t stand a chance. One afternoon while my father was in a meeting, and my grandfather was rifling through papers in his room, I declined my mother’s invitation to accompany her shopping. I wandered into the kitchen and stood in front of the cabinet below the kitchen sink, where a damp rag wove through the nickel cabinet pulls to keep it from opening. I unwound the rag and the doors fell open. The half-full garbage pail didn’t smell nearly as much as it had in the summer. I reached for the shiny brass handle behind it, pulled out the briefcase and set it upright on the counter. I righted it so that the front faced me, took a sharp breath, and snapped open the buckles.