City of Spies

by Sorayya Khan

  Although the structure stood only a few hundred yards from the others, it appeared untouched by the hazy blanket of smoke. He was alone on the patio, and despite the deafening roar of the nearing fire, he detected the most unexpected sound.

  The ayah caught Sadiq’s gaze and held it for more than a moment before he continued.

  Sadiq listened for the sound again and had it not been immediately familiar, having spent many a night listening to Hanif cry as a baby, he would have doubted himself. But what he heard was a whimpering infant behind an open window. He pushed a chair beneath the window and peered inside. A baby and someone he assumed was an ayah were immersed in a bathtub of water, fully clothed. The ayah lifted the baby from the water to give it a moment’s relief. How many babies have purple birthmarks high on their foreheads? It was Leezy’s baby brother. The ayah jumped at the sight of Sadiq’s face in the window, and the infant wailed. “Allah rehem kare,” the ayah cried.

  The mob was getting closer. Sadiq hopped away from the window and reached for the object nearest him, a propane grill. In a fit of mock rage, he threw it into the living room window, then picked up a child’s bicycle and did the same with it. That way, he explained, he fit into the crowd and didn’t have to worry about drawing suspicion to himself. The men were almost upon him when he joined the chants, “Jeevay Pakistan” or some such thing. The raging men and roaring fire drowned the voices of the baby and the ayah, who had joined in the wailing by then. A can of lighter fluid was lit on the patio, but the flame leaped up at a few men, causing others to come to their rescue and leaving Sadiq to his own devices.

  Sadiq made his decision. He slipped inside the narrow opening between the detached water heater and wall, folded himself until he was completely hidden, and stayed there, waiting for the best time to rescue the ayah and her baby. As the hours passed, he expected the block of apartments to be engulfed by flames. At some point, for a brief moment, a low-flying helicopter interrupted the throbbing sounds of the pulsing crowd and raging fire, but it came and went without making any difference to the mob, which had moved to yet another set of apartments. Hours later and for no discernible reason, the crowd dispersed. Sadiq was shocked at how easily the mob dissolved into people who became themselves again, sauntering away from the grounds with the same ease as if they were leaving a fair.

  Sadiq stepped out from behind the water heater. He’d thought through his plan and wasted no time implementing it. He covered his mouth with his kurta and entered the apartment through the broken living room window. He found the bathroom door, and a quick kick to the door broke the chain lock. The bathtub was empty. The ayah stood in a corner with the baby wrapped in a shower curtain. She recoiled when she saw him, but when he beckoned her to follow, she obeyed. He helped her climb on the sofa and maneuver through the empty window frame. As soon as her feet touched the patio, the ayah ran as fast as she could for the farthest clump of bushes before she collapsed. Sadiq followed her, but a uniformed American caught sight of him, so he fled from the compound.

  The American was dressed for war, the ayah remembered. He wore camouflage clothes and had a belt of ammunition strapped to his chest. He tried to take Mikail from her, and when she would not let go of the baby, he half dragged, half carried her away to a makeshift post. She waited with the soldier, more terrified than ever, and did not let go of the baby until Mrs. Simon arrived and lifted the dehydrated baby from her trembling arms. The others wanted to take her somewhere and interrogate her, but Mr. Simon demanded that the ayah be allowed to accompany them home. A short while after they returned to 87th Street, the other children arrived.

  The ayah smiled. She pulled out a silver chain and a small lapis lazuli pendant from inside her kurta. Mrs. Simon had given it to her the next morning, despite the ayah’s protestations that the baby was not alive because of her, but because of someone else.

  “You speak English?” I asked. The suggestion that the ayah and the Simons had shared substantive conversations was too much for me.

  “Please? Thank you? Like that?” The ayah laughed. “No English. I would never have lasted in that household if Mrs. Simon’s husband hadn’t spoken Urdu.”

  “What?” I asked.

  She was puzzled. “You didn’t know Mr. Simon spoke Urdu?”

  The ayah’s revelation stunned me. Speechless, I looked on while Sadiq and the ayah, unperturbed by the detail, launched into a separate Punjabi conversation. Left alone, I recalled details, the significance of which I’d once missed. Mr. Simon had always exhibited surprising facility with Lehla’s name. He’d been the only one in his family to pronounce Mikail’s name correctly, at least in my presence. I wasn’t certain, but the longer I thought about it, the more convinced I was that he’d been equally adept with Pakistan and Afghanistan, and possibly also Khyber Pass, on that long-ago day he’d sat on the sofa with Lizzy and me and shared photographs of a recent trip.

  I finally spoke, but stumbled over words that weren’t audible above the ayah and Sadiq’s lively chatter. “He spoke . . . he spoke Urdu?”

  I thought back to when I’d arrived at Syracuse University and had discovered that Pakistan and Urdu were not even in the vaguest recesses of anyone’s mind. This many years later, I had yet to meet an American who spoke fluent Urdu. Mr. Simon’s mastery long ago was an anomaly, and that made it all the more astounding that his family had kept it a secret from me. If I had ever had any doubts, I did not have them anymore. Mr. Simon, malaria expert and father of my best friend, had been a spy in a city of spies.

  “What’s your name?” I asked the ayah, interrupting them.

  “Parveen,” she said. “You don’t remember?”

  Suddenly the weight of my sleeping nephew overwhelmed me. The ayah’s name was familiar. I recalled learning it a lifetime ago, when Lizzy and I were caught playing with Mikail instead of going to our next class. Her name, more than the specificity with which she remembered the ages of Anne Simon’s children or her description of petrol bombs, confirmed the veracity of their story. I struggled to change my sleeping nephew’s position on my lap, and when he wouldn’t budge, Sadiq lifted him from my arms and took him to the house.

  Parveen studied me. “Now you know why he’s my brother,” she said casually, as if I’d asked or we’d been friends for years.

  The possibility that Sadiq could be a brother to anyone besides Yunis was difficult to absorb. Sadiq was a solitary man and, despite the large family that grew around him over the years, I could not see him otherwise. So I focused on what accounted for their bond. “You think he saved you?”

  “I know he did.”

  I gazed at her, taking in her simple nose ring, the matching crow’s-feet along her eyes, and the slack of silver chain settled in the dip near her breastbone. She’d only been five years older than me when she was employed as Mikail’s ayah. “That’s quite a story,” I finally said.

  “Ye afsanah nahin hai, ye hamari zindagi ki kahani hai.” This is not a tale. This is the story of our lives, she said, a little surprised.

  After Sadiq drove Parveen to her place of work, we went to the naan shop and I quizzed him at last.

  “Why didn’t you ever tell us what really happened?”

  Sadiq responded with his own question: “Why didn’t you ever ask?”

  “I didn’t want to pry.”

  He shook his head, and for a moment, I thought that might be his only response. “Forgive me, but that’s not true,” he finally said.

  “Well, why do you think I never asked?”

  “I have nothing but the highest regard for you and your family,” Sadiq said. Then he hesitated. “But all of you—you, your parents, your grandfather—thought I’d done something terrible.”

  I didn’t bother to contradict his assumption. “Then why didn’t you correct us?”

  Sadiq took his time, pausing between sentences. “I did something I shouldn’t have done. I wasn’t supposed to be on 87th Street. I shouldn’t have gone to the embassy. But you
were just a child, and even you thought I’d done something much worse!”

  “I didn’t think that,” I lied, and he knew it. “You could have just told us the truth.”

  He didn’t take my denial seriously, and his response was swift. “I did not tell your family what had happened because it would have been humiliating to defend myself.”

  “Humiliating?” I never liked the word. In Urdu, as in English, it had the strange effect of transferring its meaning onto me, and I felt slightly humiliated. But why was Sadiq suggesting that our need for an explanation was demeaning if such an explanation would have absolved him?

  Sadiq was in no hurry to elucidate. I wondered if he thought it odd to have such a frank conversation with me, when he’d once been our servant, a fact I often overlooked. As I waited, a thought slowly began to take shape in my mind. In the context of our suspicions, and given the uneven and generally unspoken power relationship between us, compelling him to explain himself was uncomfortable, and indeed, possibly humiliating.

  “If you’d just told us, it would have saved us so much trouble,” I insisted.

  Sadiq momentarily appeared not to understand. “What trouble? Your wondering all these years?” He stifled a chuckle. “That’s hardly trouble, you have to agree.”

  “Anyway,” I finally said, “you’re wrong. My grandfather never thought you set fire to the embassy.”

  Awkwardness settled between us, but I was more uneasy than he was.

  “Is that what you thought? I struck a match and boom, people were killed, and the embassy burned to the ground?”

  “My grandfather never thought that.”

  “You’re right. He never thought that. Otherwise he wouldn’t have let me into his home.” Sadiq was careful to draw a distinction between my grandfather and the rest of us.

  “How did you come to see the ayah . . . ? I mean, Parveen, again?”

  “She’s from Lahore. The neighbor’s chowkidar on Margalla Road was also from Lahore, and her aunt knew him. Parveen came to the Margalla house to thank me after I left, and he struck up a conversation with her. One thing led to another, and when she returned to Lahore, she called on me.” Sadiq still seemed amused at the serendipity.

  I mulled over some details of her experience the day the embassy burned. “She must have been terrified that day,” I said.

  “She’s the bravest person I know, and an excellent role model for my daughters and granddaughters.”

  As if I were still a child, or his wife needed defending, I almost said, “Jamila is brave, too.”

  At the naan shop, Sadiq placed our order and returned to the car with a hot, steaming naan for me to snack on while we waited, a ritual from my childhood. He passed it to me through my car window, then leaned against the car as we watched a man slap rounds of bread dough into the outdoor tandoori oven. I let the naan grow cold in my hands without taking a bite.

  “So what did you say to the American woman the night you went to 87th Street?” I couldn’t have asked if we’d been facing each other. The question was only possible because I was still seated in the car and Sadiq was still outside, leaning against it, his back to me.

  “Mrs. Simon?” It felt strange to hear Sadiq refer to Anne Simon by name. “I showed her a photograph of Hanif,” he continued.

  As if it were yesterday, I remembered the paper seesawing to the ground the night I’d spied on Sadiq and Anne Simon. It was a photograph. In all the time since then, I’d never considered such a possibility. Had Anne Simon seen Hanif’s face after she’d run over him? Could she have recognized Hanif in the photograph?

  “Did she know she was speaking to the father of the boy she’d run over?” I probed.

  Sadiq deliberated over my question. “I think so. Who else would have been shoving a photograph of his child in her face that night?”

  “She didn’t speak Urdu, though, did she?”

  Sadiq shook his head.

  “Well, what did you say to her?” I was insistent.

  Sadiq rubbed his cheek and crossed his arms while he pondered and did not take his eyes from the naan being prepared. “I don’t know. Nothing that made sense.”

  “What did she say to you?”

  “You know I don’t speak English, right?” He laughed, and I waited. “She said she was sorry.” He said sorry in English.

  “For what?”

  “Wasn’t clear.”

  “For running over Hanif?”

  “I showed her the photograph and it fell from my hands. She picked it up and bumped into me,” he said and gently slapped his palm against the car door to demonstrate. “Most likely she was apologizing for that.” He had turned to face me, and we studied each other through my open car window.

  “Why did you go there that night?” I asked.

  He turned more circumspect. “Maybe I hoped she would acknowledge what she’d done.”

  Sadiq’s claim was suspicious. The prospect of a meaningful interaction between the two of them wasn’t plausible in the absence of a common language. “You weren’t planning on hurting her, were you?” I asked, somewhat indignantly.

  “Is that why you followed me?”

  “No,” I lied.

  “Your following me got me fired,” he said.

  “It did not. Your scene the next morning did.”

  “But you shouldn’t have followed me.”

  I could conjure every detail of that night. The blooming bush of upside-down flowers, the angle of Sadiq’s arm as he reached for Anne Simon, the tenor of the marine’s voice. I remembered. “You tried to grab her.”

  His face hardened. “You think so little of me.”

  “Well, if I were you, I would have wanted to hurt her,” I said quickly.

  Sadiq took his time responding. “You see, I didn’t want their settlement money. That night, I didn’t want to hurt her. I think I was after something else.”

  “Did you get it?”

  I watched Sadiq carefully consider my question, his brows knit together, his eyes unblinking with the effort of deep concentration. “I don’t know,” he finally replied.

  The naan wallah brought us our dozen naans wrapped in a morning newspaper. I put the package beside me, and before Sadiq had reversed out of our parking spot and onto the road, the heat began bleeding the newspaper text and accompanying photographs into an indecipherable mess.

  We drove through Lahore’s busy traffic as the sun set and the smog turned the sky an orange we rarely saw in Islamabad. There was one question left to ask. Now I was free to inquire about the intimate detail that would put my childhood worry to rest. “Did Hanif die the moment he was struck?”

  Sadiq took a sharp breath. “Yes, Alhamdulillah. My son did not suffer, and the last few moments of his life were happy.”

  I remembered the prime minister, and the images of his stinking death cell and rotting abscesses rose in my mind with the same clarity as they had when I was a child. “Not like the prime minister,” I mumbled.

  The car lurched forward, and I knew I had startled Sadiq with the memory of Hanif’s curious connection to the prime minister. At the next stoplight, Sadiq took both his hands from the steering wheel and lifted his open palms to the sky in a resigned gesture that mimicked his thought. This is life.

  As if he’d spoken, I added to it. “This is the life where nothing ever happened, until it did.”

  “Bilkul,” Sadiq said. Absolutely.

  My grandfather’s old Toyota Corolla sputtered as Sadiq shifted the grinding gears and drove us home.

  POSTSCRIPT

  The American Embassy compound, long since rebuilt, is in the new Red Zone of Islamabad, which is host to the entire diplomatic enclave, the Presidency, foreign office, and rebuilt Marriott hotel. The Red Zone, the highest security cordon in the city, borders Margalla Road and Embassy Road, Lizzy’s old neighborhood. The city is almost unrecognizable, with new avenues and districts running seemingly forever along the foothills and filling the once-empty land befor
e Rawalpindi begins. Buildings previously tall and imposing, much like the three-story blocks of the Blue Area market, are dwarfed with dense construction. On my last visit to Islamabad, despite my parents’ written instructions on how to navigate the new underpasses and overpasses, I quickly lost my way and couldn’t locate the street where Anne Simon had struck Hanif.

  Outside the fortified gates and walls of foreigners’ homes, Pakistani guards armed with automatic rifles lie in wait behind sandbag bunkers. Concrete barricades zigzag across the streets of foreign residences, so cars and people must thread the narrow gaps, each as slowly as the other. On my last day in Islamabad, I sought out the Margalla Hills, the only familiar, unyielding edge of the city. I walked steep and winding trails into the beautiful hills, passing armed bodyguards and their foreign charges, anxious to complete the descent before dusk. Finally arriving at Viewpoint, where Sadiq told me he and Hanif had once shared a bottle of 7UP, I surveyed the sprawling city below—streets, avenues, and districts stitched together in a blinking mess of lights. After a while, I gave up trying to find our old house, the landscape of my long-ago time in Islamabad almost but not quite forgotten.

  Sometimes, all it takes is the hint of a certain shade of purple, the echo of a note bending downward, a flicker of a yellow lightbulb, or the smudge of newsprint on my fingertips to make my father’s rosebushes, the melody of the azaan, the rooms of my childhood, and the newspapers of my life come rushing back to me. Other times, I will it all back. I close my eyes in the middle of a hectic day and conjure the crevices of the hills, the clarity of the summer sky, the crescendo of singing parakeets, and the clank of our gate catching the stopper. The layers of memories are endless, spaces and times for the taking, if only I try hard enough.

  My home is a barrage of headlines. You see, my country is at war. My cities are burning. My capital is a police checkpoint where journalists disappear. My sector borders the Red Zone. My road is a sandbag bunker. My hills, my beautiful Margalla Hills, are an airplane-crash site. My Kohsar Market is the site where the Punjab governor was gunned down. Later today, tomorrow, or not until next week (if we’re lucky), the list of headlines will have grown.