A Season for Martyrs

by Bina Shah

  There were days when your bones ached, your eyes were rheumy, and an old man sometimes wanted nothing more than to lie down and have a long, dreamless nap, despite the glory and the excitement of Pir-hood. Never mind being mentioned in the Rig Vedas, the Quran, the romances of Alexander, and the Sumerian mysteries—and in this way, Khawaja Khizr thought that his other four compatriots, Zakaria Noor Gohri, Bahauddin Zakaria, Syed Jalal Bukhari, and Lal Shahbaz, had it easy. Were they entrusted with access to the Fountain of Life and the Water of Youth? Had they guided countless eminent persons—Moses, Ilyas, even St. George—over the last eight thousand years to drink of those waters? Had they brought dead fish and dead kings to life as if they were tricks to be performed at a dinner party?

  Of course not. Bahauddin Zakaria had only had to travel to Baghdad to be awarded the Khilafat—the head—of the Suhrawardia order; and that, too, after serving only seventeen days as the previous Sufi master’s disciple!

  Syed Jalal Bukhari had got involved in the mess up in Multan, with that foolish daughter of King Harichand who’d stolen their horses. Khawaja Khizr had counseled patience, but Jalal, always possessed of a hot temper, had rushed off and persuaded Lal Shahbaz to agree to his plan to destroy the city of Aabu, and all for what? The old king had still died of leprosy. That good-for-nothing tomboy princess had never returned the eighty-one horses and all the goods they were carrying. And worst of all, when the five Pirs’ own wives arrived in Aabu in search of their husbands, Jalal was so furious that he’d cursed them all, so that they’d ended up buried under the earth.

  Their screams, coming from beneath the dusty ground, still haunted Khawaja Khizr. Sometimes he woke up from nightmares in which he could hear them calling out, “Help us, oh please, Pir Saeen, please save us!” Salty tears running down his face and into his mouth, the blood pounding in his veins, his heart racing. Oh, Allah, why had he gone along with Jalal’s madness? Why hadn’t he revoked the curse and helped them out of the maw?

  After that debacle, Zakaria Noor had approached Khawaja Khizr privately, on the island of Astola, in the Indian Ocean. “Let’s go away,” he told Khawaja Khizr, saddened by grief at the loss of his wife, who had been very young and pretty and much beloved by Zakaria Noor.

  “Where to?” sighed Khawaja Khizr. He was resting in one of the caves in the cliffs off the south face of the island, his feet tucked underneath him. His green and brown robes surrounded him like lush foliage, but in reality there was no foliage on this strange, desolate isle, where he liked to come and offer his prayers sometimes when he needed a place to meditate and escape the vagaries of life. He’d sheltered there when Alexander’s army had come marching through the mainland, and had decided through istikhara, the holy process of dream divination, that he should meet Alexander in the Land of Darkness and guide him to the Fountain of Life.

  But that young man, also known as Sikandar and as hotheaded as young Jalal Bukhari, had refused to follow him at the fork of the path by the mountain pass, and so he had got lost, while Khawaja Khizr had followed the Pole Star and drunk from the fountain to become immortal. And Sikandar had gone on to try to conquer India but died in the attempt, a golden-haired child of thirty-two, while Khawaja was fated to live forever, patrolling the rivers of the Indus on his palla fish as his hair grew gray and then silver, and his whole being shone white in the luminous moonlight.

  “I don’t know,” replied Zakaria Noor. “West, to Persia? Or east, to see the Yamuna and the Ganges?”

  “I’d have to change my name to Varuna,” replied Khawaja Khizr, shaking his head.

  “Is that so bad? The Hindus love you as much as the Muslims. They pray to you as much, they light diyas in your honor, and feed the poor in your name. Don’t you fancy a change?”

  Khawaja Khizr gave it serious thought. It would be tempting to leave the Land of the Sindhu behind, with its crazy, lazy people, the fishermen who drowned in droves every year because they refused to learn to swim, the rulers and kings who thought nothing of going on sorties to plunder and pillage, as if proceeding to the river for a winter picnic. The truth was that, though Khawaja Khizr’s message was one of peace, his devotees still struggled with their primal urges to possess and destroy. And it was tiring him out.

  But in the end, he shook his shaggy white head and refused his friend. “I cannot leave them.”

  “Saeen, they don’t value you!”

  Khawaja Khizr smiled at Zakaria Noor, who was only a thousand years old, and still had the passions and ideas of a young boy. He put his hand on Zakaria’s forehead, sweeping the hair away in a paternal gesture. “They may not value me, but they still need me.”

  “But that’s not fair!”

  The old man chuckled. “Fair? Not fair? It is not up to us to decide that.”

  So Zakaria Noor left Astola, alone. Khawaja Khizr stayed on at the island for a month, praying and meditating in the cave, coming out after the dawn prayer to watch the fishermen set off on their daily odyssey into the sea. He wandered among them, invisible, whispering quls into the ears of some, blowing Ayat-ul-Kursi onto the bodies of others. He waited on the cliff above the shore, praying for their safety, until their ships were seen again at noon on the horizon line. When they hauled their nets heavy with shining, slippery fish onto the sand, he offered nafils of gratitude to Allah Saeen, not just for the day’s catch, but for the kindness of the sky, the generosity of the water.

  And so it went on, for centuries. Eventually Khawaja Khizr returned to the Indus, stepped again onto the back of his faithful steed, the palla fish so beloved to the people of Sindh, who negotiated its thousand bones just for a taste of its sweet river flesh. He traversed the waterways of the Indus, blessed his devotees, oversaw the endless cycles of rain and drought, high and low tide. Summer, fall, winter, and spring, the farmers turned to him and begged for rain to water their crops, and when it came, they thronged his shrine at Bakar, that lovely island in the middle of the Indus. They set lighted lamps into scores of tiny boats floating on the waters, which always delighted Khawaja Khizr, and brought a rare smile to his weathered features.

  The years passed. Khawaja Khizr was tired every day, the muscles in his legs hurt from balancing himself on the back of the tricky little fish, and the blind dolphins who accompanied him on his travels were growing fewer in number, poached as they were by greedy men. There was even talk that some monsters liked to use the dolphins as they would a woman, finding some perverse similarity in the genitals of both. Such talk broke Khawaja

  Khizr’s heart, but still he continued with his work, asking Allah for strength and protection from the evil in men’s souls.

  In the later years of the twentieth century, another burden was placed on Khawaja Khizr’s shoulders: to protect the land of the Indus from the war that had broken out between the Hindus and the Muslims. Khawaja Khizr could not understand how this had happened: the land had been one for millennia, and then suddenly he had woken for his prayers in the middle of the night, by an angel whispering in his ear that where there was once one country, now there were two. And worse than that: they went to war against each other, planting bombs in the ground, dropping them on each other’s territory from airplanes overhead. Worst of all: the seas were no longer safe for the fishermen of both sides. Warships patrolled the waters, capturing innocent men who’d only sailed out to feed their families, throwing them into jails and branding them as spies.

  Khawaja Khizr prayed nonstop for everyone, Hindu and Muslim, on either side of the arbitrary border that the British had drawn, and which was painted in the blood of millions in the mayhem that followed. He threw himself on the ground until his knees bled and dark marks appeared on his forehead and the palms of his hands from his prostrations. He stayed up for forty days and nights, reciting the Quran, performing the secret rituals known only to the Sufis, begging Allah Saeen to save these foolish people from themselves.

  The effects of his pray
ers were subtle. On a night when Indian planes came out to drop bombs on Hyderabad, clouds suddenly gathered in the sky, blocking out the moonlight and forcing the planes to return to their base, their thirst for blood unfulfilled. Land mines scattered along the Rann of Kutch would not explode when stepped on. Prisoners somehow found their ties loosened, gates unlocked, guards asleep or otherwise occupied, and were able to escape and make their way safely to the border.

  The war ended after three weeks. The people of the Indus had endured huge losses, but things could have been much worse. The worst of the fighting, in Kashmir, which was out of Khawaja Khizr’s jurisdiction, had been contained; the land of Pakistan remained unconquered, although the generals were bloodied and ashamed. They would never admit it, and even stole a day out of the calendar to commemorate their “great victory.”

  And then war broke out again, hardly six years later. Khawaja Khizr returned to his prayer mat and redoubled his efforts, but this time in vain. Two countries became three: slaughtered students and pregnant women from Bangla came to Khawaja Khizr in his sleep and cried: “For what crime have we been killed? For what crime?”

  Again and again. War, treason, corruption, and murder. After forty years of being raped by one government after the other, the people of the Indus lost faith. And Khawaja Khizr grew wearier than he could ever remember being, his every bone crying out for the relief of the grave. He wanted nothing more than to be reunited with his Beloved; he spent hours and days in solitude, in the cave at Astola, trying to achieve annihilation that never came.

  Then, one day, Khawaja Khizr got off his prayer mat, lay down on the ground, and fell asleep. A long, deep, dreamless void, as if he were in the aramgah, the final resting place of the Sufi saints. He was not dead, but he could take no more. The weight of his years, the weakness of his body, caused him to curl into a fetal position and brought his heartbeat and breathing to an almost unobservable rate. He was somewhere between the worlds, traveling in the cosmos, his soul flown to heaven but still kept captive by his living body.

  His absence began to tell almost immediately. The Indus gradually lost its volume, shrinking from a powerful flow to a thin trickle. Drought came more often than before and lasted longer, drying up plains that had been fertile and productive. Silt began to claim the best farmland; poorer farmers committed suicide when their lands were ruined by rising salt tables. The people began to wonder whether Khawaja Khizr had abandoned them, but they could not believe it, not yet.

  It was only when the Red Tide came to the harbor that they knew something was terribly wrong. A young boy woke up early one morning on Bhit Island, just beyond Karachi, and ran down to the shore for his morning swim. He drew a shuddering gasp when he came upon thousands of fish lying belly up in the tides, dragged up and down the shoreline in fetid water the color of ancient rust. The boy ran screaming back to the huts and brought the men of the village with him to see. They knelt down and began to pray on the shore for Khawaja Khizr to end the Mara Pani—the Deadly Water—as the bodies of the fish, in all shapes and sizes, ebbed between the branches of the mangroves and sent a powerful scent of death into the air.

  Government officials claimed it was due to a type of poisonous algae whose pigment discolored the waters. The nongovernmental organizations stated it was due to the industrial pollution that came to the sea from the Lyari River. Unscrupulous traders gathered up the dead fish in their nets and tried to sell them at Empress Market to city dwellers who were too stupid to know better than to eat any fish found sick or dead.

  But only the fishermen knew that it was because the people of the Indus had fallen out of favor with Khawaja Khizr, their protector and guardian. And disaster could only follow.

  October 18, 2007 (ii)

  Karachi was dressed up like a bride ready to receive her long-awaited groom. It was 10 p.m., and though night had fallen hours ago, the colored electric lights strung up on all the buildings were blinking frantically on and off, turning Shahrae Faisal into a brilliant outdoor disco: blaring pop music pulsed through the heat, and the smell of food and thousands of bodies rose into the air. Posters of Benazir Bhutto adorned every free wall, hanging from every bridge and lamppost; banners and flags turned the sky into a forest of red, green, and black. Men were dancing jubilantly, and someone had got hold of a can of silly string and was letting it off into the crowd, covering everyone in the foamy white strands.

  Ali was trying to push his way through the crowd, looking for someone who wanted to talk to him and the camera. He was completely exhausted: his legs were shaking and he felt as though he’d been beaten by someone wielding a lathi. They’d been on the move now for fifteen hours, but “move” wasn’t meant to be taken literally—the convoy had hardly traveled a few miles from the airport since it arrived in the afternoon at quarter to two. The team had already been waiting there—the cameraman, the sound technician, and Ali—for two hours, having jostled and pushed their way to the front of the crowds at Terminal 1.

  Welcome, welcome, Benazir, welcome. The singsong chorus had been blaring all day long from a loudspeaker right next to Ali’s ear. He told the cameraman to take a shot panning the crowd: thousands of young men, some women here and there, a sea of ajraks draped on shoulders and across chests and fashioned into turbans to show the hospitality of Sindh welcoming its prodigal daughter home.

  When her vehicle emerged from the terminal—a huge, mechanized box placed on top of a truck, flanked by bulletproof cars and armed escorts—the crowd sent up a roar of “JIYE BHUTTO!” It could have filled up three football stadiums with its velocity, a greeting worthy of a rock star or the pope. Benazir, a tall, proud-backed figure standing on the box, waved to the crowds; she looked like the Pakistan flag: green shalwar kameez, white headscarf, imam zaman tied around her arm, and prayer beads clutched in her hand. Even from their distant vantage point Ali could see the brilliant smile on her face.

  The cameraman was busy filming the scene, but behind the camera, Ali saw tears running down his cheeks.

  “Haroon, are you okay?” Ali asked him. Haroon’s hands were shaking; Ameena would scream about that later, no doubt. She wanted every shot to be perfect; she wouldn’t want a wobbly frame. The news was not about honest emotion, but about smooth edges and the right sound bite.

  Haroon took one hand off his camera to wipe his eyes. “Oh, Adda, I can’t explain it, I can’t explain it. She’s home, and everything’s going to be all right now.”

  He was such a young guy, Haroon: couldn’t have been more than twenty-two; a Sindhi like Ali, from Hyderabad. Barely old enough to remember the riots, the killings in 1990: when the MQM threatened to slaughter every Sindhi family who didn’t pack up and leave their homes that very night. Haroon had to run to Qasimabad and take shelter in one of the shanties that were going up everywhere, haphazardly, surging with desolate, desperate men and women. His mother was sick in those days; she barely survived. Haroon was only seven or eight, but he had never forgotten.

  Welcome, welcome, Benazir, welcome. The convoy set off and Ali and his team followed it—there was no space to drive a car; they had to make do with hopping on motorcycles all the way from the office and weaving their way slowly through the crowds that were heading to the same destination. They were all swept along in a powerful oceanic surge that reclaimed the land, inch by inch, for Benazir.

  The open joy on people’s faces, their smiles, shouts, whoops of laughter, were hard to resist. Ali tried to stay aloof from it all, neutral and observant, while directing Haroon to capture the best shots on the camera: a small boy with his face painted red, green, and black, dancing to an old Allan Fakir song; a group of Makranis from Lyari, breakdancing; old dignified men with white beards, the mirror work on their Sindhi caps catching the bright lights and flashing them around like shooting stars. Even after fifteen hours—more, these people had been coming to the city over the last few days, camping out on the streets at night—their enthusi
asm was unabated.

  Ali, though, was exhausted. Crushed. He’d been picking up little snacks from food stalls and roadside hotels all day but hadn’t had a full meal; he’d even had to relieve himself against a wall in a tiny alley a few hours ago. He wanted nothing more than to go home and go to bed. Benazir or no Benazir. They had enough footage, he’d simply had enough. But they had to stick it out till she reached the Quaid’s Mazaar, that peculiar landmark where Jinnah lay entombed, and which looked like the Taj Mahal stripped of its minarets. She was going to make a speech; at this rate they’d reach the Mazaar at four in the morning.

  They had six or so interviews already—little clips of the man on the street, what did he think, all that bullshit—but they still had to do a few more. Ameena wanted to have a wide choice when she made her cuts in the editing booth. Ali spotted two men standing in the doorway of a cheap hotel, the Hotel Babar. One was a waiter, the other a doorman. A security guard stood beside them, toting a menacing shotgun; all three looked bemused at the circus passing before them.

  This was a good opportunity, Ali decided. He beckoned Haroon and the sound technician, Ram, forward, and waved the microphone at the waiter. “Could you talk to us for a few minutes?”

  The waiter saw that the three of them were from a TV station, straightened up, touched his cheap bow tie. “Certainly.” The doorman looked affronted that he hadn’t been asked, but Ali assured him they’d talk to him next. “And me?” said the security guard, clearly wanting to be part of the action. He was a Pathan from the north with a ferocious beard and sharp gray eyes. Take him out of his crisp blue uniform and replace his shotgun with a Kalashnikov, and he could easily have passed for a Taliban. “Of course,” Ali replied.