by Sorayya Khan
That was her story, plain and simple.
And, as you now know, it made me want to write mine.
Because my story and the story of my country are woven into one, I must tell you about Pakistan’s intervening years.
It took eleven long years for General Zia’s rule to finally come to an end with an unexplained airplane crash that claimed the lives of all passengers, including the US ambassador to Pakistan, who was a surprise guest on the flight. I will always remember waking up in New York at the same time as General Zia was falling from the sky in Bahawalpur, his face pressed to the cabin window of an airplane rising and dipping like the tail end of God’s yo-yo. Within weeks, the elections that had been scheduled and rescheduled for eleven years were set for the last time, and Prime Minister Bhutto’s daughter, Benazir, returned home to waiting crowds of hundreds of thousands of people before becoming Madam Prime Minister. She would be deposed not once, but twice in the years to come; three times, if her very last ascension is counted. She hadn’t quite been reelected when she was killed some years ago, three days after Christmas, and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, became president. In the back and forth and back and forth that counts for Pakistani politics, I am reminded of the metered nonsense of a Tot Batot poem I once knew. The list of generals, prime ministers, and presidents we have seen is a jumbled refrain, and the world of Pakistan molds itself to its pitch.
I traveled to Islamabad in 2008, the year after Benazir’s death. In a reality no one could have foretold, billboards with year-old election posters still loomed over the roads near the airport: Gigantic images of the murdered Madam Prime Minister Bhutto sat side by side with those of her father, who’d been hanged twenty-nine years before. It was the first time since I was a child that his likeness, immense the way it had once been in my mind, had appeared on billboards in the country.
Prime Minister Bhutto, his two sons (including Shah), and his daughter Madam Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto are all dead and buried in the same remote parcel of Garhi Khuda Bakhsh. Their mausoleum climbs in impressive domes and arches above their graves, recently threatened by floodwaters. Some years ago, they were joined by Begum Bhutto, the prime minister’s once-beautiful wife, whose mind was broken by Alzheimer’s and impossible to reach. Her plight might have been the only sane response to the madness that has ravaged her family and our land. The prime minister’s sole surviving child, a graduate of the American School of Islamabad, had her grief captured on camera at her sister’s funeral, and her face, strewn across newspapers all over the world, has been made unrecognizable by so much loss.
The world surprised us, even as the Bhuttos, one after the other, predictably met their deaths. The Soviet Union retreated from Afghanistan before my first international journalism assignment. Not long afterward, the Berlin Wall came down and eventually marked the end of the Cold War. Since then, a parade of presidents and wars has come and gone the world over. But thirteen years ago, under a brilliant blue September sky, airplanes flew into buildings, and the world spiraled into a War on Terror that will never end. The United States arrived in Afghanistan and then Iraq . . . and stayed. Today, its drones travel the skies of Pakistan, some of the unmanned aircraft piloted from a control center at Hancock airport in Syracuse, New York, the small airport with which I was once intimately familiar. On the ground, Pakistan’s cities are bursting with spies, but today they carry guns and do not drive cars with identifying license plates.
As for all of us, we’re much older, and our lives have unfolded in unsurprising ways.
My father says that while his Zenith radio brought news into our home as we were growing up, it also made a home for the news in each of his three children: I write the news, Lehla teaches it, and Amir films it. My mother lives the news as the dramas of the world unfold in the kitchen on BBC newscasts, holding her breath at nightly war bulletins, bemoaning the state of the country, continuing to hold my father forever responsible in her accusation, Your country. But my father has taken to laughing and replying, “It’s your country! Do the math! Count the years you’ve lived here!” Time and again she proves him right, whether she’s visiting Amir in Egypt, Lehla in New York, or me, wherever I am. When she tells us, “Back home, brown sugar is brown and sugar!” or “Back home, vinegar does wonders for cleaning windows,” and when she prefaces her sentences with Back home, she is referring to Pakistan rather than Holland.
My father lost his WAPDA job before General Zia lost his life, and because there was never any question of his leaving his country, he made a new job for himself in Lahore by founding a security business, capitalizing on a service whose need multiplies in the city by the day. Retired for several years, he now has lots of time on his hands to think about his country and where it landed all of us. He claims the WAPDA job was always thankless, and he pities the people in charge today who are blamed for Lahore’s paltry electricity supply, a round-the-clock schedule of one hour of electricity followed by one hour without it.
Four years ago, the country’s elections saw Madam Prime Minister’s husband, along with Pakistan’s famous cricketer, lose, and a different familiar name once again assume the post of prime minister. My father applauds the country’s first peaceful democratic transition of government, but his lament is real.
“The odds are against the country,” he says, while continuing to hope. “One day, there won’t be war: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, anywhere. One day, there will be no refugees. One day, we’ll stop fighting each other. One day, we’ll eliminate corruption. One day, we won’t be someone else’s lackeys.” Once in a while, I hear him using the catchphrase If only. “If only we weren’t ruled by such idiots.” This morning at a breakfast of halva and pooris that my mother prepared for us at my new home in London, he said, “If only we weren’t killing ourselves.”
My mother has no patience whatsoever for this. “Stop it, Javi. Saying ‘If only this, if only that’ is useless. God is not a general, and he doesn’t orchestrate from above. We must help ourselves.”
“See how you just said we?” he said, and we all laughed.
My grandfather is impossibly old and, finally, truly deaf. For years, he wrote his grandchildren, especially me, blue aerograms about the long-ago days when people fought the British, and the world, as far as he was concerned, was still being made. Now that my parents live with my grandfather in Lahore, they convey our news to him, regardless of whether he hears any of it. He is the only man older than one hundred years in the neighborhood. He has given up whispering and wearing dentures, but he reads every book my father brings him. He seldom leaves his room but attends Eid prayers every year at the mosque across the street, not because he has forgiven the amplifiers, but because at his age, so close to death, this is one of the few things God requires of us.
Sadiq is the only one of us who never returned to Islamabad. Shortly after the briefcase of rotting money was discovered, he stood on a street corner in Lahore’s Old City and gave it all away. It took Sadiq and Jamila a few more years to make peace with each other, but now he lives with her, his children (two daughters and two more sons), several grandchildren, and one great-grandchild. He enlisted the help of my father in starting a taxi service with a single car, my grandfather’s battered Toyota Corolla. The service grew into a business that today monopolizes the route from Lahore Airport to Shadman District. Now, when we visit, he ferries my children, my husband, and me to all the sites I’d been required to visit as a child. Once in a while on these drives, he tries to convince me to learn Punjabi, Lahore’s true language. I have told him that my debt to him is too large to allow him to teach me another language, and that he ought to consider allowing me to teach him English. But we both know he has no need of it, and besides, I’m rarely home.
All the while, Sadiq never spoke of the day the embassy burned, those many hours when he was missing from the Margalla house—uncut chicken on the counter, onions and garlic sautéing in a pan, cinnamon sticks and cloves roasting in the oven. And
none of us ever asked him, not the day it happened, and not once in the many years that have passed since then. We didn’t ask because we couldn’t bear to know what he had done, yet this didn’t prevent me from assuming the worst. When I was still a teenager, I lay awake at night in my grandfather’s house, imagining police kicking in the door, guns and batons flying from room to room as they came to take Sadiq away. My worst fear was that Sadiq was responsible for the deaths of two Americans and four Pakistanis. Regardless of his particular crime, I was certain that some Pakistani authority, whether policemen, soldiers, or intelligence officers, eventually would track him down.
It was the one missing piece of the story necessary to put the events of those thirty months behind me, once and for all. Whenever Sadiq ferried me around Lahore, I considered broaching the topic. I thought of asking in the presence of my children, as if they would make Sadiq’s answer easier to bear. Once when we were alone, I brought up the topic of Sadiq’s role with my mother.
“Don’t you wonder?” I asked.
“I do not,” she said too emphatically, and I left it there.
Then, after years of silence, and without any prompting, it happened.
On my last visit to Lahore a few months ago, I walked out of my grandfather’s front door with an empty basket dangling from one hand and my crying nephew clinging to the other. My sister, who was also visiting, had left her youngest child with my parents for the day so that she and her husband could bury themselves in archives for their latest research paper. I hoped to entertain my nephew by taking him to the bazaar to buy made-to-order naans from the best naan wallah in the city. I called for Sadiq without realizing he was already near the car. He was deep in conversation with a woman who I assumed was his wife, although I hadn’t seen her in years.
“Jamila! How nice to see you. How are you?”
The woman blushed, touched her forehead with contrition, and said, “I’m not Jamila.”
“Who are you then?” I asked and had a fleeting thought that Sadiq was having an affair with this unfamiliar woman in my grandfather’s carport.
Sadiq cleared his throat a few times, the nervous habit he’d never overcome.
“She’s a friend,” he said reluctantly.
I contemplated this information for a moment before brusquely inquiring, “Friend or friend?” the difference between the categories obvious to us all.
“No, no,” he stammered. “Friend.”
“I’m the ayah,” the woman said.
“You work for him?” I asked, perfectly aware that he had no need for one, because his children had long since become parents themselves.
“No. I work in the area,” she said, stumbling over her words, her eyes shifting here and there, and generally making a spectacle of herself.
After an uncomfortable pause in which the three of us eyed one another with suspicion, Sadiq finally said, “Let me explain.” His tone was fully resigned, a signpost for the explanation that was about to come.
Late that winter afternoon, thirty-some years after the embassy burned to the ground, the final piece of the story found me. While Sadiq and the ayah spoke, the milkman next door tipped the tin canister hanging from his bicycle handlebars and measured out the neighbor’s buffalo-milk order. Across the street, boys whose voices were at the cusp of breaking memorized a verse from the Holy Quran, even as a giggling band of children darted after cricket balls onto the mosque’s lawn. In the shade of my grandfather’s carport, while my nephew fell asleep on my lap and my grandfather’s window grills cast longer and longer shadows on the house, the two friends told their story.
They had known each other since the day of the embassy attack. They used identical words to describe the place each had in the other’s life. They were like brother and sister. The ayah was in the room when Jamila’s youngest sons were born. No, she was not a midwife. She was family. When the house next to theirs became vacant, Sadiq and Jamila arranged for the ayah and her family to occupy it, because this is the sort of thing you do for family.
They first met one November in Islamabad. The ayah couldn’t remember the year, but she recalled with certainty that she was eighteen. She’d been living in Islamabad for six months by then, having been sent to live with an aunt while her parents and brothers sorted out a family dispute in Lahore. The ayah’s sister worked for an American family in Lahore, and that was how she found work in an American home in Islamabad. The baby she cared for was born in August to a family that had five-year-old twin boys and a thirteen-year-old girl. A few days after the ayah started her job, her employer, Mrs. Simon, began working at the American School. The ayah and Mikail accompanied her, spending most of their time in the teachers’ lounge until she’d finished teaching and they all returned home. One day, Mrs. Simon, Mikail, and the ayah left early to go to the embassy, where Mikail was scheduled to receive his immunizations. After the doctor’s appointment, the ayah took Mikail to Mrs. Simon’s friend’s apartment, also on the embassy compound, so that Mrs. Simon could enjoy lunch with friends in the dining club.
Mikail, generally an even-tempered baby, had only just stopped crying when the commotion started. It began innocuously and in the distance, with several busloads of people arriving at the compound for meetings at the same time. She’d peered from the window when the noise grew but couldn’t determine its source. All at once, the origin was beside the point because she could make out the chants, “Amrika Murdabad,” and she understood the baby was in danger. The gunshots unnerved her. They were gunshots because, like anyone who’d grown up in a certain section of Lahore, she was familiar with the sound. She smelled the fire before she saw it. Even inside the apartment, the stink of burning tires was suffocating, but she stayed frozen in front of the window until the mob made its way toward the apartment blocks. She did the only thing she could: She took a sobbing Mikail to the bathroom, opened the bath faucet, and sat in a slowly filling bathtub with the howling baby in her arms. Too late, she noticed the open window near the ceiling, but she didn’t dare to get up and close it for fear the action might draw attention. Submerged in rising lukewarm water, her wet shalwar and kurta ballooning around them, she put her lips against the baby’s ear and sang every children’s song and lullaby she had ever known in an improvised medley that lasted hours. Not for one second did she stop praying to Jesus Christ, her Lord and Savior, that He would spare them.
Sadiq, on the other hand, did not have an explanation for how he arrived at the embassy. He just did.
He’d gone for a walk to the American woman’s house, where, of course, he’d been forbidden to go. But grief had stripped him of sanity, and he went anyway. Instead of returning home, he walked and walked, catching snippets of sermons from mosques he passed. Along the way, an inordinate number of red city buses and blue university buses rushed toward the diplomatic enclave and made him want to see what the fuss was about. The passengers shouted “Amrika Murdabad!” and without question, he assumed the chants were connected to the morning’s news that Iranians had occupied the Grand Mosque in Mecca and the revised news he’d just heard emanating from the mosques that the Americans had done so. Why, yes! He had indeed given up newscasts of all types, but when news of this nature broke, it reached absolutely everyone, without regard for level of interest.
Sadiq didn’t remember being in a hurry. When he arrived at the American Embassy, he leaned against the boundary wall for some time before hoisting himself up and draping himself over the edge for a view. The scene startled him. Fire raged in uniform bands of orange and yellow in every corner of the sprawling complex. As if he were only now noticing them, plumes of black smoke appeared suspended in the air. The Margalla Hills were not visible, and this fact, rather than the rioting mob, made him understand the embassy had been under siege for hours. Suddenly a bus arrived and stopped behind him, although it was nowhere near an entrance to the compound. The unloading passengers promptly scrambled over the wall and pulled him with them. He landed on his belly with all the a
ir knocked out of him. Nonetheless, he got up quickly to avoid the stampede and was immediately impelled by the mass of elbows and shoulders surrounding him.
He was absorbed by the horde of people moving toward the low buildings ahead. The carport was ablaze; automobiles and minivans were consumed by fire. A car burst into flame when the fuel tank ignited, but the tremendous roar of the fire drowned the accompanying noise. Buckets of fuel were transported from the gas pump to the buildings. The mob—of which he was now a part—arrived at the embassy apartments. Plants and chairs were set out neatly on patios, with tricycles, balls, and metal toy trucks nearby. As if the crowd that had carried him had had a singular plan all along, it exploded into action. Stones were hurtled through windows, water heaters were torn from the nooks beside kitchen steps, and patio umbrellas were overturned. As a result of the activity, he was momentarily released from the mob’s pressure. He wove his way between the enraged rioters and escaped to the farthest block of apartments on the edge of the compound.