by Bina Shah
Ferzana leaned forward and stabbed at the computer with her finger. The screen dissolved into a new image: protestors on the ground, bruised and bloodied; police above them, beating them with long wooden rods. People in the audience gasped out loud. Ferzana let the image linger for a few silent minutes, then she clicked the keyboard again and the picture was replaced by one last slide:
Our Aims:
Support the civil rights organizations
Demand the suspension of financial and military aid to Pakistan
Restore the Constitution
Release political prisoners
Restore the judiciary
End media curbs
Musharraf should step down as head of the army
Free and fair elections
They left this up on the screen so that even after the meeting was over and people were breaking up into small groups to drink coffee and discuss what they’d heard, everyone would remember what they were fighting for. The journalists in the audience clicked off their digital recorders, while students copied the list of aims into notebooks with bright cartoon figures dancing on the covers. Ali wandered around, ordered a cup of coffee from the bar, then sat down with a group that included Ferzana, a few journalists, and the girl with the square-rimmed glasses.
“Free and fair elections is all very well,” said one of the journalists. “But who are our choices? The same damned crooks that stole everything from us the last time around?”
Ferzana nodded. “I know what you mean. But things have changed since eight years ago. Pakistan’s changed. There’s bound to be new faces. We have to participate in the election process; we can’t just let the army go on throwing their weight around because there’s no alternative. That’s their line, isn’t it? All along they’ve said that democracy doesn’t work. We have to show them that it can and it will.”
“Who are you going to vote for?” asked the girl with the glasses. Ali leaned in closely to hear the answer.
“Benazir, definitely.”
“What? Why her?” Ali blurted out loud. As all eyes turned to him, he swallowed nervously. They were watching him, politely waiting for his input. For a moment Ali was speechless. He couldn’t tell these people that he mistrusted Benazir because his father had loved her so much. But he recalled that this was precisely the reason he did resent her: she was the child his father had wished for, instead of the son he had actually gotten. The pride that his father should have invested in him, in Haris, in Jeandi, had been diverted to an icon to which none of them could ever measure up. And if Ali’s father had tried to escape the dissatisfaction he’d felt with his own family by obsessing on Benazir, then Ali had done exactly the same thing—except where Ali’s father had heaped all his admiration and hopes on Benazir’s shoulders, Ali had laid all the frustration and rejection he felt from his father at Benazir’s feet.
“I just think she’s a Western tool,” Ali said lamely, while his mind clambered around all these fleeting thoughts.
“It’s not about being a Western tool,” said Ferzana. “She speaks their language. She’s a woman. She’s Westernized, secular, intelligent, articulate. They feel they can trust her. That’s important—as much as the West has interfered in our affairs since God knows when, we still need to work with them.”
“Besides,” added Salma, the girl with the glasses, “isn’t Benazir a great symbol for how we want our country to be? We don’t want to be ruled by the Taliban, or the mullahs. She’s the exact opposite of them. That’s why the fundos don’t like her. She makes them nervous.”
“But she’s a feudal,” said the journalist.
Ali cringed. How many times had someone said the only way to solve Pakistan’s problems was to eliminate the feudals, enact land reforms, destroy their power base? “We need a revolution!” they said. “Kill the feudals. Redistribute their land. Get them out of parliament and government. End this tyranny once and for all!” Then, when they found out that Ali himself was a Sindhi, they’d halfheartedly apologize, thinking that he, too, was one of them. “We don’t mean you. We know you’re not like that.”
“I’m not a feudal,” was always Ali’s answer. If he said it often enough, he told himself, it would stop feeling like he was trying to claim his brown eyes as blue, or his blood type as O when it was really A. But unlike the lie he always told about his father, this one had yet to feel true.
He held his breath and waited to see how Ferzana and Salma would respond now.
Ferzana said, “Maybe that’s where she came from, but that’s not where she’s going. She’s educated. She has a different outlook on things. She values justice, democracy. Religious freedom. Women’s rights. That’s what Pakistan needs. That’s what Pakistan wants.”
“She did nothing for women when she was last in government!” said the second journalist, a woman.
“She couldn’t. Her hands were tied,” said Ferzana. “The army was still calling the shots. And she was only thirty-five years old when she became prime minister. Think about that. Could you have run an entire nation at that age?”
“And the money that she stole?” said Ali, at last.
“She should give it all back if she cares so much for this country,” said the woman journalist, nodding in agreement with Ali.
“I saw a great cartoon in the newspaper,” said Salma, putting her hand over her mouth to stop the giggle that was already trying to escape. “There was this poster on the wall, right? And it had a picture of Asif Zardari and it said, Asif not to return to Pakistan. And there was one of his polo ponies standing in front of the poster, weeping.”
Laughter broke out all around. Ferzana guffawed so hard that tears squeezed out of her eyes. The two journalists slapped palms; it was their newspaper in which the cartoon had been printed. Ali smiled at Salma, and she winked back at him
“Look, I’m not saying that Benazir is perfect. She made a lot of mistakes. There was a lot of wrongdoing in her government. But she’s paid her dues. She’s been in exile for eight years. Her husband went to jail for ten. I think she’s changed,” said Ferzana.
“Maybe,” added Salma, “she deserves a second chance.”
Ali sat at the table after everyone had left, pondering what Ferzana and Salma had said. Plenty of people said that Benazir’s first term had been all about revenge: for the death of her father at the hands of the military. That was why she had allowed her husband to ride roughshod over the country’s coffers with such impunity. Could she possibly be back for a different reason this time? To make amends? To seek redemption? Ali nursed his cup of coffee late into the night and thought about redemption and second chances until the waiters began to clean the tables and put away the chairs. Only when they turned off the lights did he leave, driving home so deep in thought that he almost missed the turn to his house.
So Ali found himself pulled into the world of smart protesting. It was as if someone had given him a shot of adrenaline. Each morning, on waking he immediately grabbed his cell phone, but he wasn’t checking only for Sunita’s messages anymore: there might be a text waiting for him to say that there’d be a flash protest in three hours outside Agha’s Supermarket, or the Press Club, or the Sindh Secretariat. He’d reach there and meet the other protestors with grim smiles and tight nods, and someone would hand him a placard. They’d stand there, not saying anything, just holding up their signs while photographers took pictures and the video cameras from press agencies rolled. After fifteen minutes they’d put down their placards and silently melt away.
An email asked for volunteers to go on the Save Pakistan Graffiti campaign, so Ali volunteered for that, too: they met at four in the morning and went around the city, stamping the image of an army boot with an X marked through it under the tutelage of the young artist Asim Butt, who taught them how to use stencils and spray paint under the cover of darkness. In the morning people woke up to see their
handiwork and, the next day, photographs of the crossed-out army boot appeared in all the newspapers. The graffiti was painted over by the end of the week but the protestors had made their point.
Ali went to candlelight vigils at night, joined protests during the day outside the City24 News building condemning the block on the Pakistani private media. These were noisier affairs, with protestors shouting slogans and defying the police to stop them. “Down with PEMRA, down with censorship!” they screamed, shaking their fists in the policemen’s faces. Ali was astonished at the many people that showed up for these events: as well as the usual journalists, NGO activists, and students, he saw housewives who brought their children, accountants, artists, and musicians. All kinds of people, it seemed, realized how precarious the future was and were tired of the endless cycle of victimhood that being a Pakistani had meant for the last sixty years.
Bilal, Imran, and Ferzana were at each event; Salma was a medical student at the Aga Khan University, so her time was limited, but she came to as many protests as she could. Ali worried about her the way he’d worry about his sister; the three leaders could take care of themselves, but Salma was just a kid, and her parents would take her out of medical school if they found out what she’d been up to while she was supposed to be studying chemistry and anatomy.
Ali told no one in his family about his growing involvement with the People’s Resistance. There had been a gradual thawing of relations since Ali had returned from Islamabad; things had almost gone back to normal between him and his brother, while his mother, still hurt by Ali’s secretiveness, talked to him about harmless household matters; the everyday discourse gave a semblance of normality to their home life. He didn’t want to do anything to upset that recovering balance, so he merely said that he was away on work when he had to slip out at midnight or in the early hours of the morning. They didn’t question him, either; Ali could see that they were frightened by the way he could draw shutters down and keep them out of his private world.
Talking to Sunita was out of the question. She hadn’t bothered returning any of his texts or emails. She’d even changed some of her class periods, so now he only caught glimpses of her as she hurried out of the university gates, and at a distance he couldn’t even be sure it was her. She had faded away from him, like a desert mirage that weakens as you approach and finally disappears under the sun when you run toward it.
The only place Ali felt free to discuss his new activities was at work, which relieved some of the boredom and the tension created by that boredom. Nobody at City24 knew what was going to happen: the channel was still off the air, both here and overseas, since the government had pressured the Gulf nation from where they’d been broadcasting to stop their transmissions “for the sake of law and order.” They were continuing to record programs, make documentaries, but they were banned indefinitely from reporting the news day by day, hour by hour.
Now, instead of disappearing inside her office for six hours at a time, Ameena lingered by the news desks. Ali expected to be snapped at, or told about some assignment he’d have to run and cover, so when she sat down at his desk and looked at him expectantly, he didn’t realize at first that he was actually supposed to have a conversation with her.
“So, Ali,” Ameena said, fixing him with her narrowed gray eyes. “I hear you’ve been going to some of these citizens’ protests. I hear they’re quite revolutionary.”
Ali was alarmed. How did she know? But then, this was a television station. And other news stations, those that had bowed to government pressure and promised to stop airing controversial footage, were back on the air. Ameena had contacts in all those places; she had spies in a hundred different parts of Karachi. Kazim Mazhar had his own contacts in the government and in Islamabad. It was the only way to run any kind of business in Pakistan: things got done according to what you knew and who you had to pay to find it out.
Jehangir was at the next desk and though he continued to sort through the papers in his file cabinet, Ali knew he was listening carefully to the conversation between them. Ali had tried to talk to Jehangir about the protests, to persuade him to join them at the next protest at the Press Club that Friday. But Jehangir just rolled his eyes. “Yaar, that’s not my scene. I’m going to Underground that night anyway.”
“Underground?”
“Oh, yaar, don’t tell me you’ve become so boring you don’t remember how to have any fun. Underground. Café. In Zamzama?”
“I know where it is, Jehangir.”
“Of course you know where it is because I took you there. So why don’t you forget all this resistance bullshit and come with me? Arty’s coming, Lila, Xeneb, some of the other girls. Don’t you want to find a new girlfriend now that you and Sunita are—”
“No, I don’t. And I don’t like that place. Too many media types there.”
Jehangir laughed. “What does that make us? Come on, yaar. Good scene. Plenty of booze and other fun ways to pass your time. Know what I mean?”
“I’m not into that shit, J.” Ali didn’t want to get into the discussion on why he didn’t try hard drugs, why trying hash a few times had been enough for him, why Jehangir seemed to get such a kick out of pills and lines of coke. He couldn’t even remember when Jehangir had started indulging; it seemed like he’d been involved with it for a long time now. But Ali knew his own life was complicated enough without drugs. They were a distraction for people who didn’t have the sort of problems that he had.
Jehangir had tried to convince him, then shrugged his shoulders. Ali was thinking about what Jehangir said, about Sunita and he being … were they? They’d had no contact for two weeks, but it felt like two years. He put the thought away under the section in his mind marked To be answered later.
He turned to Ameena and said, “Yeah, actually it is really exciting. The protests are amazing. So many people there from so many different backgrounds, working together for one cause. And it’s not just protests. They’re doing really cool things, too. There’s going to be a car rally next week, can you believe that? A car rally for democracy!”
“Really?” Ameena took out a cigarette and lit it, sat back in her seat, and regarded Ali with an interested stare. Ali couldn’t recall ever seeing that expression on her face before. “A car rally, hmm?”
“Yes. And they’re organizing street theater as well. That’s going to start up in a few weeks. You know, to get the message out to the average person.”
“That’s very interesting. Maybe you could do a piece on it. You know, when we go back on the air.”
“Is that going to be anytime soon?”
“I’m not sure. We’re working on it … let’s see. Kazim’s going to Islamabad on Monday. I’ll go with him. We’ll keep you all advised.”
Jehangir had stopped pretending to work and was now blatantly staring at the two of them. They’d spent hours telling each other that Ameena was a total bloody monster, yaar, who couldn’t care less if either of them lived or died. And now here she was paying attention to Ali, and if he wasn’t mistaken, leaning forward a little bit and allowing the collar of her shirt to drop open where she’d unhooked a button at her neck. Jehangir was pulling his chair closer, wanting desperately to be involved in the discussion. Ali didn’t know why that made him feel so gratified, or why it felt so good to be one up on a person he’d always counted as his friend.
“I didn’t think you were all that interested in politics, Ali,” said Ameena. “But maybe I’ve been mistaken.”
Jehangir cleared his throat at that moment. Ameena half turned and saw him. “Oh, Jehangir. Do you think Ali’s got a future in politics?”
“No, he just goes to all those protests to meet girls,” said Jehangir, flashing her a charming grin.
Without thinking, Ali shot back, “You’re just jealous, fag.”
The moment the words left his mouth, he knew he’d made a terrible mistake. Ameena’s face s
tayed impassive, but there’d been a lens click of comprehension in her eyes—she didn’t miss a thing!—as she was processing the stricken look on Jehangir’s face, starting to regard him in an entirely new way, at his hair, his slender fingers, the way he wore his shirt tucked into his pants. Evaluating. Putting two and two together. Ali knew he’d murdered his friend more effectively than if he’d picked up a pistol and shot him in the face.
After a silent, nauseating pause that seemed to last forever, Jehangir raised his chin. “Actually, Ali has a great future in politics.” His voice was different now, still jokey, but with an undercurrent of poisoned steel. He turned to smile at Ali. “Isn’t that right, Ali? Thinking about running for the elections?”
Ali said in a low voice, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Jehangir could be dangerous when slighted, bearing a grudge that lasted weeks or months against even a minor infraction. Ali had seen it happen with other people; girls who’d spurned Jehangir’s advances, Jehangir’s parents when they refused one of his whims, servants who displeased him with their inefficiency. Ali wished desperately he could take the last five minutes back but there was no turning back time for him now.
“Is your family in politics, Ali? You never said,” Ameena said. She looked as though she could put the conversation on a plate and eat it for breakfast, it was so delicious to her.
“No,” replied Ali. “We’ve got nothing to do with any of that.” He tried to keep his voice steady, keep up the pretense, even though he knew it was already shattering all around him.
“Oh yes,” said Jehangir. “His family’s very much into politics. In fact, his father’s running for a seat in the National Assembly from—where is it, Ali? Sukkur? Shikarpur? One of those feudal bastions anyway.” He waved his hand in a vague direction that seemed to imply everything north of Karachi. His accent tightened and became more clipped, recalling the private school that he’d gone to that required recommendations from heads of foreign banks, ambassadors, even heads of state.