A Season for Martyrs

by Bina Shah

  “The welfare and security of Sindh and her people is dependent upon our taking care of those sublime souls and the places where they reside: Shah Hyder in Sann, Sayed Khairuddin at Sukkur, Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in Sehwan Sharif, Shah Abdul Latif at Bhit Shah … the list goes on. We must protect them until we die.”

  “Jeay Sindh!”

  “I have decided to serve Sindh by choosing the paths of political and social welfare of my people. Therefore I have called upon men far greater than I to speak at this conference, and for its success and the success of the Khilafat Movement, I appeal to Almighty Allah for his help and blessings and guidance.”

  “Ameen!” shouted the Maulanas from the stage.

  “And so I say to you, we must put our faith in the Khilafat Movement. For it is only when the Muslim world is free, and the British have quit India, that Sindh will reap the benefits for a thousand years or more. I know too well that some of our compatriots hate independence and love enslavement. But it is a trap that we must avoid at all costs. We must never accept oppression in our beloved Sindh, no matter who the oppressors are or where they come from.”

  People murmured to each other, naming those Pirs who everyone knew supported the British and had refused to take part in the Khilafat Movement, remaining loyal to the government instead. Ghulam Murtaza Shah paused for a moment as he wiped the sweat from his forehead. “I would like to quote the lines of our beloved Shah Abdul Latif, whose shrine I visit every month with willing devotion:

  Oh God! May ever You on Sindh

  bestow abundance rare;

  Beloved! All the world let share

  Thy grace, and fruitful be.

  “I thank you, my brothers, I thank you, Saeens, I thank you for coming here today and giving me your support. May Allah Saeen bestow upon us not just abundance, but victory!”

  “Jeay Sindh!”

  The boy quickly climbed off the table and sank back into his seat, his chest heaving with effort and emotion.

  Turab Ali Shah couldn’t wait until there was a break, at which he heaved himself out of his chair and shot off toward the stage as fast as his legs could carry him. Jan Mohammed clutched at his sleeve, but Turab Ali Shah charged the table like an overexcited bull and went up to Ghulam Murtaza Shah, his hands outstretched.

  “Well done, by God, well done!”

  Ghulam Murtaza rose from the table, glowing at the praise. He bent downward to touch Pir Turab Ali Shah’s feet, then they salaamed each other with the namaste and embraced. Turab Ali Shah clapped the boy on the back so hard that he coughed and his glasses almost flew off his head.

  “Do you really think it was good?” Ghulam Murtaza said shyly, and it was only at that moment that Turab Ali Shah realized how young the boy really was.

  “Saeen,” said Turab Ali Shah. And that one word was enough.

  Ghulam Murtaza flushed again. “Do you know,” he said, in a hoarse voice, so low that Pir Turab Ali Shah had to strain forward to hear him, “I have been an orphan since I was sixteen months old. I always thought I was unlucky to never have known my father. But I see today that it is not true.”

  “How do you mean, Saeen?”

  “Just look …” The boy gazed in wonder at the rows of men that had come here from all corners of Sindh, Pirs, waderas, zamindars, men of learning, men of the lands, men of menial work, and men of intellect. “Sindh may be my mother, but it seems today that I have many fathers. And if they are half as proud of me as you are, then my Baba, may God rest his soul, does not have to worry.”

  Then Turab Ali Shah turned away so that Ghulam Murtaza would not see the tears glistening in his eyes.

  November 23, 2007

  KARACHI

  Ali put down the phone and stared at it as if it were a loathsome creature: a cockroach or a rat, instead of a combination of plastic and computer chips. He had been calling Sunita every day for the past week, but her phone was always switched off. The number you have dialed is not responding at the moment: please try again later. That meant she’d changed her number—it was easy enough to do in Karachi, with cheap SIMs available at every corner shop and market in the city. Her inaccessibility made him panicky; he found himself without appetite, lacking in confidence. He couldn’t even bring himself to entertain his many sexual fantasies; at night, instead of lying on his back and thinking about her in bed with him, he just slipped into unconsciousness.

  He had a recurring dream during these nights: he was standing at a shrine somewhere in the interior of Sindh—he couldn’t tell which one—while worshippers and pilgrims passed by, ringing the bell at the doorway before stepping across the threshold and going to the saint’s tomb to offer prayers and make their promises to him: Grant my prayer, O blessed Saeen, o offspring of the Prophet, peace be upon him, intercede with God on my behalf and I will feed sixty poor people every Friday for the rest of my life.

  … Get my daughters married …

  … Cure my father’s illness …

  … Please let me have a child …

  But instead of joining them in their adoration, he stood paralyzed on the fringes of worship. He tried to raise his hands in prayer, and found he could not remember the words. And then Sunita suddenly marched past him, dressed in a sari with a bindi on her forehead, carrying a tray of little pots with spices and a small blazing diya. She went up to the saint’s bier, which was covered with a green cloth and heaped with roses, set her tray on the floor, then put her hands together in namaste and bowed her head, praying softly. He would wake from these dreams and quickly check his phone to see if she’d texted him, but no message ever waited for him.

  Ali still saw her in class, but she refused to look at him or respond to his attempts to speak with her. She surrounded herself with girlfriends and pretended she couldn’t hear him when he called out to her. She was blanking him as effectively as if she’d disappeared. Every time he saw her, his heart jumped to his mouth with the hope that today might be the day she ended the ostracism. But when she turned away from him, dashing his hopes, he grew more and more dejected, leaving him with the realization that he simply didn’t know how to fix the gap that had opened up between them.

  Still, he emailed her every morning. At first he wrote her the story of what happened at the embassy, how he’d left just as his name was being called, how he’d thought the moment would have terrified him but all he could feel was an exhilaration and the strange confidence that he was doing exactly the right thing. Then he worried that she would find him still selfishly centered only on his own life, so he wrote to tell her something that would make her soften her heart toward him: nothing pleading or apologetic, just the little details of his day in the hopes that some phrase or memory would resonate with her, and draw her back to him.

  He told her about how the channel had been shut down and while they were still going to work, the station was like a graveyard, with little to do except look at each other’s strained faces and play solitaire endlessly on the computer. He told her how he’d arranged a small fund for Haroon at the office, one of the accomplishments he was most proud of at City24. He wrote about how the electioneering was making him sick with the sight of all the banners going up with politicians’ faces sneering down at him from every lamppost and wall. He didn’t bother to mention that Haris and his mother were barely talking to him after the US visa debacle. He’d explained to them again and again that he hadn’t gone through with the interview, that he’d changed his mind about going to America—but it seemed that his desire to go in the first place was betrayal enough to them.

  Ali accepted their wrath meekly after a time, finding himself too exhausted to explain his motivations or actions any further. In his more contemplative moments, he wondered if they weren’t substituting him for his father, punishing him for Sikandar’s abandonment all those years before. It seemed as if years of pent-up wrath were being released now, as if Ali had torn th
e skin off wounds that had seemed to heal but were in fact still raw under the surface.

  The only person who gave him any affection these days was Jeandi, too young to understand why her eldest brother had done such a bad thing by wanting to go and study in America.

  “Adda, when you go to America, will you take me with you?” Jeandi asked Ali one day when they were having breakfast together. He was chewing on a piece of toast and watching a cricket match on television while she played with a bowl of chocolate-

  flavored cereal that was turning the milk brown as she stirred the soggy flakes over and over with her spoon.

  Ali almost began to tell her that he wasn’t going, but the look on Jeandi’s face, hesitantly hopeful, touched something soft inside his heart and he decided to indulge her in the fantasy. “Of course I’ll take you with me.”

  Jeandi did a double take, as if she hadn’t been expecting him to agree. “Will you take me to the mall there? I’ve heard they’re really big and they have everything in them!” She spoke quickly, worried that the offer might be rescinded if she didn’t secure it fast enough.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “And will you teach me how to drive?”

  “I can do that here, Jeandi.”

  “No, Adda, Amma says it’s too dangerous for girls to drive. She says they can get kidnapped or worse. What’s worse than being kidnapped, Adda? I don’t want to have that happen to me. I’ll wait until we get to America and then I’ll learn there.”

  Ali’s eyes watered suddenly. “That sounds great. And I’ll buy you a car, too.”

  “Really, Adda?” She pulled the spoon out of the chocolatey mess and sucked on it happily.

  “Yes, anything you like.”

  “Thanks, Adda!” She jumped up from her seat and came around to give him a hug. He patted her arms as she wound them around his neck and rubbed her cheek against his. She’d been so young when their father had gone; people always said that it was difficult for boys to grow up without their fathers, but Ali suspected that Jeandi was suffering the loss of her father in her own way. It was up to him to take his father’s place, to show this child that there was still a man whom she could turn to under any circumstances, who would love her even when she believed that she was unlovable. It was the only gift he wished his father had given him when he’d been that young.

  After breakfast he sat down at the computer to write Sunita his daily email. I’m going to a meeting of the People’s Resistance Movement tonight at nine. It’s at the Second Floor. I met them when I was at the lawyers’ protest last week; they’re just ordinary citizens, not politicians or anything, and they’re organizing ways that we can get involved. I just thought I should check it out. Maybe it’s something we could do a story on. If—I mean when—we come back on the air! He paused, then added, Maybe you could come, too. It sounds really interesting.

  Ali stopped, reread what he’d written, and deleted the last two sentences before pressing SEND. He couldn’t say anything that would pressure her to meet him. If she wanted to come, she knew where he’d be at nine o’clock that evening. He’d keep telling her every day where he was going to be; it would keep the bond alive between them until she was ready to forgive him for having sinned.

  The Second Floor was a coffeehouse that had opened only six months earlier, but Karachi’s intelligentsia flocked to its poetry readings, musical concerts, lectures, and workshops. People who had returned from America, Canada, or Great Britain, looking for a place to help them forget that they were in Karachi, came to browse the tiny bookshop and try out the mouthwatering iMacs and MacBook laptops on display. Artists exhibited their graphic designs and oil paintings and watercolors on the brick walls, while a colorful mural on the opposite side of the room created lively debate among the customers about its surrealism: shirtless men painted in tones of sepia clasped each other as they walked among bright green fields, other similarly shirtless men performing manual labor in the shadow of an oversized tractor and a red-fronted truck.

  As Ali walked into the coffeehouse, two women were standing in front, arguing.

  “I think it’s vibrant,” said one. “Who’s the artist?”

  “Someone called Asim Butt. I don’t understand it!” replied the other.

  A fluttering movement from above caught Ali’s eye and he looked up: from a beam in the ceiling dangled a copy of the Pakistan constitution with a single word scrawled in black marker across its front: SUSPENDED.

  He found a seat in the back row, making sure he had a good view of the projection screen set up in a corner of the room. The chairs quickly filled up with people, eager, nervous students, khaddar-clad NGO types, journalists from various newspapers and magazines, teachers, and professors. Ali recognized a few of them; most were his age, while some were in their forties and fifties. He nodded to familiar faces, counted the black armbands on their arms, and reached and took a sticker from a pile on a nearby table. Printed on the sticker were the words Restore Democracy Now! and a black palm print with a red thumbprint.

  At a quarter after nine, two young men and a woman got up to the front of the room and introduced themselves as the organizers of the movement: Imran, Bilal, and Ferzana, activists who held day jobs in a law office, a school, and a newspaper group. Ferzana pressed a button on the laptop and the overhead projector began to beam images and words onto the screen. Bilal, the lawyer, explained them, waving his hands in elegant circles to emphasize his points.

  “As you know, the Supreme Court dismissed all the petitions challenging Musharraf’s eligibility to contest the elections on November nineteenth. And on the twenty-first, the president handed down the order that amended the Constitution—”

  “The suspended Constitution,” called a man, pointing at the ceiling, as the audience snickered.

  Bilal grinned. “Yes, the suspended Constitution. And what the PCO said was basically that all actions taken during this emergency are legal.”

  The audience muttered their disapproval, shaking their heads and rolling their eyes.

  “Pakistan was suspended from the Commonwealth yesterday. The Western countries are putting pressure on Musharraf to hold fair elections. But the United States is reluctant to get rid of a ruler who is so willing to do their bidding when it comes to the War on Terror. That’s why this People’s Resistance Movement is so crucial. We need to show that we won’t accept the undemocratic actions of this government, no matter what the West says.”

  “Quite right. Quite right.”

  “The judges have already been deposed, and now they’re under house arrest: Munir Malik is seriously ill and in need of dialysis, but they won’t let him go for treatment to the hospital. Same thing with our prominent human rights people—Asma Jehangir, Hina Jilani, Iqbal Haider, I. A. Rahman all under house arrest. And it’s not just well-known figures, but thousands of people who have been illegally detained or who are missing, in the Frontier, in Balochistan, in Sindh and Punjab. All their lives are in danger.”

  Imran spoke up at this point. “The suspension of the Constitution has given Musharraf unchecked powers to do what he likes, without regard to human rights violations. Here, have a look at your rights that have been taken away.”

  A new slide appeared on the screen:

  Suspended Rights:

  Article 9 (Security of Person)

  Article 10 (Safeguards to Arrest and Detention)

  Article 15 (Freedom of Movement)

  Article 16 (Freedom of Assembly)

  Article 17 (Freedom of Association)

  Article 19 (Freedom of Speech)

  Article 25 (Equality of Citizens)

  Ali murmured along with everyone else, wondering which fact was more depressing: that these rights had been snatched from them or that he hadn’t even known he possessed them in the first place.

  “And now, today,” continued Bilal, “the Supreme Co
urt—”

  “The false Supreme Court!”

  “The illegal Supreme Court!”

  “The bastards!” A roar of laughter followed this last cry.

  “The Supreme Court has handed out a clean chit to Musharraf. They’ve validated the emergency, the PCO. And criticized the deposed judges for standing in the way of law and order.”

  Amid the rumbling, a girl said, “So how can we help?”

  “Yes, what can we do?” Ali said. He and the girl looked at each other. She wore boxy spectacles, the kind that pretty girls used to look extremely intellectual. Her long, golden-brown hair was done up in a messy chignon. He smiled at her and she nodded in reply. This was the kind of girl who wouldn’t give him a second glance on the street. If democracy could get him this kind of action, then he was all for it! Then Ali remembered Sunita and quickly turned his attention back to the front of the room.

  Ferzana took the microphone from Imran. “Believe me, we all know the feeling of helplessness. It’s been like this for the last thirty years, the citizens at the mercy of the army. But we’re determined to show the world that the people of Pakistan do not want dictatorship. We’re going to make sure our voices are heard.”

  “How?”

  “Protests. Marches. Vigils. Blogs. Keeping in contact with the outside world no matter how many media restrictions are in place and how many times they bring down the Internet. We’ll make sure that the international media, human rights watchdogs, Amnesty International all know about what’s going on in Pakistan. We’ll pass around a clipboard; please leave your cell phone number and email address, because that’s the way we’ll contact you to let you know when something’s going to happen where you can participate. Our idea is to be smart protestors, because we know that the army and the establishment are out to get us. You can imagine why we won’t want to announce our events in the newspaper.” As laughter burst out once more, Ali took the clipboard from his neighbor and hesitated only a moment before writing down his telephone number. Then he quickly wrote down Sunita’s cell phone number and email address just beneath his.