A Season for Martyrs

by Bina Shah

  A crowd of men had surrounded the beach hut: fifteen or twenty men from the nearby village, dressed in shabby clothes, doing nothing but standing and staring twenty feet away from the area where the foreigners were lying on the sun loungers. The women were jumping up, grabbing towels to cover themselves, their husbands putting down their bottles of beer and trying to stand protectively in front of them. The fishermen were not approaching or retreating, just standing there and fixing them with their piercing eyes set deep in their weather-beaten faces.

  Masood came out of the beach hut, gesticulating and shouting angrily at the men, but they were unmoved by his hysteria. He ran around to the front of the house, and returned a moment later with two security guards, who waved their guns and made menacing gestures at the crowd. Only then did they begin to disperse, streaming away from the hut like the tide drawing back from the shoreline, hissing and frothing as it receded.

  Sunita and Ali waited till the men had completely disappeared before attempting to make their way back, Sunita walking behind him as they approached the hut. “What happened?” Ali called out to Masood, who was still standing outside, his face contorted with anger.

  “Yaar, I don’t know,” he answered back in Urdu, so that the foreigners wouldn’t understand him. “They were saying something about money, some kind of tax, they were saying, for using ‘their’ beach. Bastards.”

  “Did you pay them?”

  “Of course not! What do you think I am? This beach doesn’t belong to them. It’s my hut; it’s been my family’s hut for twenty years. We got rid of them, though. My security is the best.”

  They glanced at the foreigners, who looked white and shaken. Sunita, too, was scared. Her family had no idea she was out here with Ali; they’d been told she was spending the day with a girlfriend, the mall, a movie, having ice cream. It would be very bad for her to be caught up in any kind of scene. He wanted to hug her close, reassure her that he would look after her, but they never showed any physical affection in front of other people, whether friends or foreigners.

  The tension began to dissipate; Masood handed beers around to everyone, clapping the men on the backs, assuring everyone that there was nothing to worry about, that they were just some pesky locals who’d wanted some money, and he’d taken care of things. The Pakistanis remained unfazed; nothing bothered them much, coddled as they were in the arms of affluence and laziness. The foreigners, too, began to relax, taking their places on the sun loungers again. Sunita and Ali stayed outside, but decided not to wander too far away this time. They sat down on the stairs behind a little concrete partition and looked out at the waves, trying to regain that feeling of peace they’d captured out on the rocks.

  The Scottish woman in the bikini was already lying back on her beach chair, her face reddened from the sun, an unsightly constellation of freckles splashed across her chest. If she pulled the top of her bikini down, Ali knew he would see the freckles dotting her breasts. Next to her was an Englishwoman whom he recognized from a television show on a rival channel. She hosted some women’s show, though Ali couldn’t remember her name. “Well, that was a little boring, wasn’t it?” the Englishwoman said laughing to nobody in particular; she was sitting up, tense, her arms crossed around her knees, glancing fearfully behind her; Ali guessed that she was afraid that the men were terrorists or religious fundamentalists out to kidnap and kill a few foreigners, even though that was hardly likely to happen here.

  “Our host—what’s his name?—said that they were from a fishing village nearby,” said an Italian woman, nodding in the direction of the dirt road and the settlements beyond.

  “Och, don’t worry about it. I’ve seen this before,” replied the Scottish woman breezily. “Whenever we’re out on the beach, the natives gather around to see what they can see.” She shifted her hips and ran her fingers under her buttocks to loosen the fabric from the space between them, winking at her companions and jiggling a little to make her point.

  Suddenly, a red-hot fire flared up in Ali. Before he knew what he was doing, he was on his feet lumbering toward them. Sunita pulled at his arm but he shrugged her off. The women glanced up as he stood in front of them, the bottle of beer clutched tight in his hand. Later they would say he was drunk, that he wasn’t in control of himself, but at that moment Ali was the most sober he’d been in his entire life.

  He said, very coldly, “Actually, they wanted to come and get a good look at your tits.”

  Their gasps were like the sound a pillow made when you hit it hard with the flat of your hand, the soft foam harboring pockets of air that could only be released with a physical blow.

  “And your ass. Putting it on display for them like that, I’m not surprised.”

  The Scottish woman grabbed her towel once again and made to cover herself. Her husband, dozing on the chair next to her, shook himself awake. “What?”

  “But you have to excuse them. They’re only natives, they don’t know any better, so when they see a white woman naked in front of them, what do you expect they’re going to do?”

  Ali threw the beer bottle onto the stairs. It shattered cruelly, spraying glass and foaming beer everywhere. Ignoring their cries, he stalked inside, Sunita following him, tearful horror written all over her face. Ali found Masood and told him that he was leaving, not bothering to answer any of his questions. He strode out to the car, got inside, and put the key in the ignition. Sunita climbed into the passenger seat, her shoulders shaking. Masood was standing in the door of the hut, staring at Ali as if he’d gone crazy. Maybe he had. Maybe when you were in a bombing and your friend died in front of your eyes, something shook loose inside you, never to be fixed again.

  Ali punched the accelerator and backed out of the driveway. He turned on to the dirt road, where some of the fishermen who’d stalked Masood’s beach hut lived in thatched cottages just across from the luxurious beach huts that cost more than they could earn in an entire lifetime. There was a small green shrine in the distance, its flags fluttering in tribute to some long-dead saint. Sunita cried softly beside him all the way home.

  Ali dropped her off at her friend’s house and drove home in the ugly traffic of a late Saturday night. Everything sickened him: the unruly lines of cars and buses, the beggars scrambling for a few rupees, the policemen doing nothing to control anybody, the smog hanging around the road like a thick orange blanket. His head was pounding from the sun and the beers. He wanted to go home and go to sleep.

  When Ali reached his house, everyone was huddled on the couch in front of the television as usual, watching the news. His mother shushed him before he could even ask what was going on. He sat next to Jeandi at the end of the sofa and whispered in her ear, “What is it?”

  Jeandi was twelve and idolized Ali. She put her arms around his neck and whispered back, “It’s an emergency!” Her breath was fruity with some candy she’d been chewing on, orange or lemon boiled sweets from a tin. Ali hoped she couldn’t smell the alcohol on his breath. He fixed his gaze on the screen and listened.

  “If you’re just joining us,” said the woman on the BBC, “Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf has declared emergency rule and suspended the country’s constitution. Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry has been replaced and the Supreme Court has been surrounded by troops, who have also entered state-run TV and radio stations. The moves come as the Supreme Court was due to rule on the legality of General Musharraf’s October election victory.”

  Haris looked at Ali, clearly triumphant about knowing something before his older brother. “Benazir’s coming back to Karachi.”

  “So what?” Ali stood up. “I don’t care.”

  “Sit down,” said his mother. “Musharraf’s going to address the nation any minute.”

  “I don’t care,” he repeated. “I don’t want to listen to what any of these bastards have to say. I’m going to bed.”

  To his surprise, his mother s
aid, “Well, if you don’t care about anything that’s happening in our country, maybe that letter that came for you today will be more interesting to you.”

  She pointed to the bureau against the wall. Haris and Jeandi followed Ali with their eyes as he walked over to the bureau and saw the envelope with the official seal of the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad on it, addressed to him. The letter had already been opened, but it was useless to cry out about the violation of his privacy. There was no constitutional law that said your parents weren’t allowed to open your mail; and even if there had ever been, it was suspended now, along with the rest of the constitution.

  Ali took out the letter, affecting a nonchalance he did not feel. The letter informed him that his application for a U.S. student visa had been approved for the next stage: his interview at the U.S. Embassy was scheduled for Monday, November 12, 2007.

  The Gift

  THE INDUS DELTA, 1827

  Jeandal Shah recited the name of Allah that guaranteed victory over one’s enemies: Ya Fattah, Ya Fattah, Ya Fattah, in time to the urgent gallop of his steed’s hooves, as he raced down the bank of the Indus River. He only had a few moments to catch Alexander Burnes before the man sailed up the river in the galley that was anchored in the Indus Delta, ready to go all the way to Lahore. And if Jeandal Shah failed to do that, then all was lost, and Sindh was surely destroyed.

  It had all started when the British political assistant in Sindh had claimed he was taking a gift of horses from his king, William IV, to Ranjeet Singh, the maharaja of the Punjab. The horses, he’d said, could not survive the journey overland and had to go by water. Burnes made his appeal through the official channels of the Talpur court, and if the Mir of Talpur had been paying full attention, he would never have permitted the British man to go ahead with his plan. But the Mir was distracted by his woes: trouble with his youngest wife, Raaniya Bibi. And, somehow, Alexander Burnes—no doubt with the help of heavy bribes as well as honeyed words—was given permission to proceed up the river in March.

  Unlike most of her contemporaries, Raaniya Bibi was educated, and could read and write Persian, Arabic, and Sindhi; nobody outside the Mir’s family had laid eyes on her and yet tales of her beauty had spread far and wide across the land. She was fond, it was said, of alcohol, and this made her prone to laughing and joking, rather than behaving with the strict formality her position called for. And a courtier had whispered in the Mir’s ear that she was having an affair with a member of the court: perhaps even Jeandal Shah himself, though this was surely a rumor designed only to remove Jeandal Shah from the list of the Mir’s favored courtiers …

  When Jeandal Shah heard that the ship had reached the Hujamree, one of the central mouths of the Indus, he knew that the horses were only a pretext; the real reason this British man and his band of spying, lying thieves had come to Sindh was to survey the Indus River. In this manner they would discover the forts all along the Indus and the numbers of men they contained, as well as their vulnerabilities, and the terrain that surrounded them. Then they would prepare their plans to invade Sindh, which the grasping and ambitious chairman of the East India Company, Lord Ellenborough, had decided was of enormous political and economic interest to their infidel empire.

  Jeandal Shah had tried to alert the Mir, but the courtiers saw to it that he could not approach the gaddi that day, nor in the days that followed. Even though Jeandal Shah was Matiari’s representative to the Talpur court and had been given a vast tract of land, paying the rightful amount of revenue and thus holding an important seat in the royal darbar.

  “It’s best you stay away from the presence of the Honored King,” said the bejeweled flunkey who barred Jeandal Shah’s way into the darbar. “He is not in good temper, having been caught up in domestic strife, and he would not want to see anyone who might remind him of his displeasure with his queen. I suggest you go home today and try again tomorrow.”

  Jeandal Shah cursed at the man, but the flunky refused to grant him an audience with the Mir, and Jeandal Shah grew panicky, knowing that the British ship would soon move up the river and it would be too late to stop them. Jeandal Shah knew that he who controlled the waterways—its veins and arteries, pumping precious lifeblood through the land—controlled Sindh, and whoever controlled Sindh was halfway toward ruling the western areas of India; the Indus reached up like a jugular vein right into the heart of the Punjab, and once the British were allowed to contaminate those precious waters with their missionaries and merchants, troops and weapons were sure to follow.

  Jeandal Shah could not bear to think of the foreigners traipsing all over Sindh, the English army boots treading the land that held the bones of innumerable scores of Sufi saints and holy men. They had no fear of Allah, nor any respect for the Prophet, peace be upon him. They would disturb with impunity the shrines where the saints rested, and destroy the source of the spiritual energy that shimmered over Sindh like a magnetic shield, protecting its people from harm.

  When he was finally granted his audience with the Mir a few days later, he tried to present this line of argument to the king, who listened attentively to Jeandal Shah’s words, but his abstracted look revealed that his thoughts were not with Sindh, but in the haveli where his queens lived. He was not worried about where Burnes wanted to go; instead, he feared who might be with Raaniya Bibi when his back was turned.

  “Huzoor,” said Jeandal Shah. “Sindh grows weak. The Pirs who are entrusted with the spiritual affairs of this land are falling prey to greed and corruption.”

  The Mir rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “How so, Jeandal Shah?”

  “The descendants of the saints have broken their vows of asceticism! They are far too interested in the vulgar affairs of daily living. They are accepting presents from the British political officers! The British know that all they have to do is have the Pirs in their pockets and we are their slaves!”

  “Hmmm …” pondered the Mir.

  “Huzoor, your generosity to the Pirs is unrivaled. Land, money to keep up the shrines, a seat in the darbar for their representatives—everyone knows you have been more than magnanimous with them, and astute in your knowledge of what will keep them loyal to you. But they are now weak and spoiled. Look at them, their white robes, their jeweled turbans! They are acting like kings in their own right!”

  “Are they?” said the Mir, showing some interest for the first time in the conversation.

  “The people of Sindh are simple folk, Huzoor. They just increase their tribute to the Pirs and promise them allegiance to the end of their days. But they worship false idols, who can be bought by the highest bidder! The British suspect this, and think that is the perfect time to gain a foothold into Sindh. They want to spy on our forts, to ferret out our weaknesses, and so destroy us!”

  “You really think so?”

  “Why else is this Burnes here, Huzoor?” Jeandal Shah bowed his head and waited for the king to see reason.

  “Well, then. Why don’t you go and receive him, and accompany him up for the first leg of his journey? That way you can make sure he’s not up to any trickery.”

  “Huzoor, that’s not good enough! He must be stopped—”

  “Oh, Jeandal Shah, I’m sure you will think of something. I have more important matters to attend to, anyway. Now go, and do not fail me.” And with that, the Mir clapped his hands. A courtier immediately rose to his feet and called out, “The darbar is finished for today!”

  Jeandal Shah found himself being escorted out by the same flunky who had stopped him from seeing the Mir all the days before. He angrily shrugged off the man’s hand on his elbow, and went to his rooms in the palace to try to figure out what to do. He paced up and down all evening, muttering to himself about the foolishness of men who were so deeply bewitched by a woman’s charms that they could no longer think straight. Even kings could fall victim to female witchery; but the safety of Sindh was at stake, and men of honor could not
sit idle and allow besotted kings to let its soil slip through their fingers like the grains of sand on a beach.

  By the morning prayers before the first light of dawn, he decided that he would use his own initiative, so he raced to Thatta, near the Hujamree, to summon the help of his cousin, Sayed Sikandar Shah, a minor official at the Mir’s court. It was a journey of some ninety miles; it took him nearly two days to reach Thatta, and by then Jeandal Shah was almost certain the British ship had already sailed up the river.

  “Wake up, cousin, wake up!” shouted Jeandal Shah, pounding on the door of Sikandar Shah’s chamber in his haveli in Thatta. It was all but impossible to rouse his cousin from one of his magnificent afternoon naps: Sikandar Shah was a hugely fat man, far too fond of mangos and lassi and huge fried breakfasts. His corpulence was the stuff of legend: no horse could carry him, so he had to move around in a specially built cart pulled by two mules, and his trousers were made from sixty thaan of finest cotton, instead of the usual forty.

  “What? What is it?” said Sikandar Shah, appearing bleary-eyed at the door. “Is it dinnertime already?”

  “Come with me. Immediately. It’s an emergency!”

  “But where?”

  “There’s no time! Hurry!”

  Jeandal Shah had already had Sikandar Shah’s peculiar means of transport readied, and he pushed, prodded, and bullied his cousin into getting dressed and taking his place onto the cart, glancing worriedly all the while at the sun as it moved across the sky. Finally the procession set off, the bad-tempered mules pulling the cart, Sikandar Shah groaning that his stomach hurt without at least a cup of tea and a paratha to fill it, while Jeandal Shah galloped ahead on his horse, his sword glinting under the afternoon sun as they hastened toward the mouth of the river.

  By some miracle of God, the ship was still waiting at Hujamree, Burnes having been unable to find a pilot to take them across the bar. Furthermore, they’d taken the wrong route, ending up in the shallow mouth of the river rather than the deep water, stuck in mud as they’d attempted to plow up the channel.