by Bina Shah
He knew the beatings had started when the people in front of him began to move in strange, disjointed jerks, the smooth flow of their march disrupted at the front, then ricocheting back like the carriages of a derailed train flying off the rails, one after another.
The police, who had maintained their distance all along, were now in the midst of the protestors, raising their batons and bringing them down onto the protestors’ heads, shoulders, hips, legs. The students tried to raise their sticks in self-defense, but they were no match for the professional fury unleashed upon them. Screams rang out, punctuating the thwacking sounds of metal landing on bone. Ali saw the tall QAU student sinking down under a sweating policeman’s quick, brutal blows. He whirled around to look for Salma, but she had disappeared from view. Another policeman had caught Ferzana in a tight grip, her arms pinioned behind her back, her face twisted into a grimace of pain. Ali lunged forward to try to get her out of the policeman’s grasp, but the crowds surging around him were a thick wall that he couldn’t penetrate.
“Salma! Salma!” Ali screamed. His voice was drowned in the tumult; he desperately scanned the bodies on the ground, but she was nowhere to be seen.
Somehow the crowd gathered strength again and resumed marching toward the chief justice’s house. People were limping, clutching limp wrists, holding hands to their bruised heads, but they still continued to walk. “Release the chief justice!” The cry thundered from their throats, made all the more powerful for the raggedness of their voices. Ali was jostled forward; even if he tried to fight against the tide, he would have been pushed until he too fell on the ground and was trampled by their moving feet.
The students pushed the policemen back, gaining a little space to regroup and carry on with the march. They made some headway, gaining about twenty yards or so; Ali hoped they might actually reach their destination. They planned to stand outside the chief justice’s house and continue the demonstration there for at least an hour. He had to find Salma … was that her, over there, in the glasses with a scarf thrown over her head? But the girl who looked like her from a distance turned out to be a lawyer whose black coat had been ripped off by the police.
An armored car drew up alongside the protestors and began to fire tear gas shells. Ali’s eyes began to itch, but he was too far away from them to be blinded as yet. The students drew back, screaming, trying to dodge the shells. One landed directly on a lawyer’s leg and exploded, throwing him to the ground. He lay there, blood oozing into the shreds of his trousers, staining them dark brown. The police lifted their weapons and began to fire on the crowd: rubber bullets that couldn’t kill them but knocked them off their feet and stunned them into submission. Some of the policemen bent down, picked up stones, and hurled them at the protestor’s heads.
Chaos had taken over: students ran in all directions, tear gas rising up from the ground in twisted curls like snakes coiling around their legs and waists. Ali’s eyes were beginning to blister. He reached for his cloth and bottle of mineral water, but was too disoriented to screw off the cap and pour it onto the cloth. The water bottle dropped from his hands; he wrapped the cloth around his mouth and nose, but without the water it was useless, and he too began to choke and cough and retch.
Through the haze, Ali saw a policeman beating a woman next to him, and when the man had finished with her, she was left kneeling on the ground, her hands covering her face, blood seeping from between her fingers. Two students rushed to her and helped her up, but she fainted in their arms and had to be carried to a waiting ambulance. The police charged, gas masks and black riot gear turning them into strange faceless monsters who rushed at them again and again. The terror that had seized them was a dog snapping at Ali’s ankles as he ran from left to right and back again without being able to see where he was going.
Then a strong hand gripped his upper arm, yanking him so hard he thought his shoulder had been dislocated. Ali tried to pull away but was thrown off balance and dragged halfway across the street on the backs of his heels, his arms freewheeling in the air. Strong hands shoved him in all directions; he felt himself being lifted up and launched toward the open doors of a police van. He landed inside, tripping over the legs of the students already rounded up and packed inside like slabs of meat. Policemen screamed into their faces, spraying them with spittle, jeering, calling them foul names. Then the driver started the van, and they were raced away from the street.
Inside the van, people moaned and clutched at their wounds, while others stared straight ahead of them in shocked, terrified silence. Tears streamed from all their eyes. They coughed and choked in agonized whimpers. Ali didn’t know whether he wanted to scream or cry, as he felt their humanity ebbing away with every passing second.
The Living Saints
LARKANA, SINDH, 1979
When you travel to the interior, it seems as though you have stepped back in time; the moment you alight from your car or train, you realize that nothing has changed over the last two hundred years, and nothing ever will. This is what Pir Sikandar Hussein thought as he disembarked from the train in Larkana, in June 1979, seven weeks after Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had been hanged by Zia’s military regime. Sikandar Hussein had come to Larkana to pay his respects at the prime minister’s grave, to meet with his family and offer his condolences. He could not sit still in Karachi and nurse his broken heart; he had to do something, and this seemed the right thing to do.
The entire country was in mourning, as much for their lost son as for their lost freedom; the madman General Zia had stolen from them the idea that ordinary men could have a voice in the destiny of their nation, and murdered its messenger. Democracy is a dangerous beast to those petty men, those tinpot generals, who must draw their weapons and strike it until it is dead, and only then can they sleep peacefully at night, while the rest of humanity suffers, generation after generation.
Sikandar always tried to prepare himself for the heat of the interior, but nothing could truly ready him for the way it slapped him on the face when he emerged from a cool room and out into the sunlight. The sky was white as a furnace, the air dry like the inside of a tandoor. You could leave the town, go into the desert, and look into the distance, to the horizon: the line where the sand touched sky shimmered and danced with blue water in the form of a stream or a pool. But there would be no water there; the desert seduced you with false promises, phantom oases. It was the desert’s only lie: things were much more duplicitous back in the places where men established their settlements, put down their roots, and tried to bend nature to their will.
The cities were where men learned to cheat each other, out of greed, their immense need to profit from another man’s failures. Sikandar knew that greed was the biggest flaw in a man’s soul: his nafs, his ego, is nourished by greed until it grows so big that it threatens to burst with its own decadence.
Greed and fear was what kept Sikandar’s family, a landowning family from outside Sukkur—zamindars, or feudals, as the city men disparagingly called them—in the Dark Ages. And not just his family, but many others like it. For fear of losing their grip on their land during the shaky years after Partition, they clamped down on the peasants who tilled their fields and refused to give them anything more than what it took to stay alive. For fear of progress and change, they refused to educate their sons. (Sikandar still wished his father, Pir Hassan Ahmed Shah, had let him go to school, in that cool white building in the middle of town where sixty wealthy men’s sons had learned Sindhi and English since the days of the British. He, too, longed to clutch a satchel and learn his lessons on a little handheld blackboard, to read books and be taught how to do sums. But his father scoffed at the idea: “He has lands, he will never have to be anyone’s servant, why should we send him to school?” Which is why Pir Sikandar Hussein, at the age of forty, could barely read or write. He swore every day by Almighty Allah that when he had sons, they would go to the best schools, the grandest universities. Even if he had t
o send them to England, or farther away, he would make sure they were educated men who could survive beyond this noble, limited existence.)
Instead of being sent to school, Sikandar lived a life of indolence and pleasure, as did all his brothers and cousins. They went shooting in the winter, traveled to Hyderabad and Karachi looking for the amusement of the cinemas, hotels, and the beach when the summer months lay still and heavy in the interior. In truth it was a fool’s life, but they thought themselves living saints by virtue of their bloodline—they could trace their lineage all the way back to the Prophet, peace be upon him—and their possessions.
As they grew older, the boys watched their fathers and uncles conduct the business of their agriculture, and their politics; for a zamindar’s survival depended not just on what he raised, but who he knew. The right connections could have your watercourses opened, your taxes overlooked, your rivals squeezed. Anger the wrong person and you would find your canals dry, penalties levied on your lands until you were in debt for the next thirty years. The zamindars therefore always befriended those in power, or sought to be involved in politics in some way or another. Sikandar’s family had achieved these goals with some measure of success, because by the late 1960s, his father’s name was well known all over Sindh. “Pir Hassan Ahmed Shah,” the people would say, “is a great man.” And Sikandar himself would speak of his father in tones of reverence and admiration, because sayeds and zamindars were always the staunchest believers in their own mythology.
They knew the Bhuttos of Larkana; everyone did, as they were the largest landowners in the area surrounding that town: a man could ride on a horse for three days and still be on Bhutto property. Not only this, but Sir Shahnawaz Bhutto had the ear of all the important officials of the British Raj: the governor of Sindh, the commissioner, and contacts as far away as the Bombay Presidency who ruled Sindh until the 1930s. Sikandar saw him once, when he was a small child, and Sir Shahnawaz had come to visit Pir Hassan Ahmed in Sukkur. Sikandar’s father summoned him and his brothers into his drawing room to meet the great man; but Sikandar was shy and could not speak a word when he was introduced to Sir Shahnawaz, a slim, elegant man with dark eyes and an even darker mustache, who sat upright in a leather chair and sipped at a cup of tea served in fine china, for Pir Hassan had last year bought a Wedgwood tea service set from England in order to impress his guests.
“I have a son, Zulfikar, who is a little older than you are,” Sir Shahnawaz said to Sikandar kindly—in those days elders hardly acknowledged the young. “He is away, studying in Bombay. And you, little man? What class are you in?”
Sikandar blushed scarlet. To cover up his shame, his father quickly said, “In Bombay? Well, well, well …”
“Yes, as the Prophet said, ‘Seek education, even if you must go to China.’ Well, Zulfikar is not in China, but he has ambitions of going to America, and he is a brilliant boy. Did you know that he was an activist in the Muslim League when he was at the Cathedral School?”
“I didn’t know that,” grunted Pir Hassan.
“Our children must be educated,” continued Sir Shahnawaz, thumping at the arm of his leather chair. “They are our greatest treasures! And only then, when they are men of knowledge, will they be able to look after the poor. It is our duty to care for those less privileged than ourselves.”
“Of course, of course,” Pir Hassan murmured. Sikandar was not sure whether his father gave a moment’s thought to the poor, apart from how hard they worked on his lands. But he was not confident enough to argue with Sir Shahnawaz, who was so eloquent that he had earned a position of power in the court at Junagardh, in neighboring Gujarat. Neither did Pir Hassan share Sir Shahnawaz’s sense of obligation to the poor—born of his marriage to an honest but impoverished Hindu lady, Lakhi Bai. Pir Hassan, in contrast, was married to his cousin when he was fourteen and she was sixteen, in order to keep her inheritance within the family. So bound by tradition and purdah was she that her name did not even appear on the wedding invitations. This nameless, faceless lady was Sikandar’s mother; none of them was any match for the revolutionary way in which Sir Shahnawaz chose to nurture his own family.
So Sikandar lived the life of a young Pir in Sindh, while Zulfikar Bhutto rose to power like a comet streaking through the sky, a tail of brilliance and accomplishment stretching out far behind him. Sikandar and his cousins gathered around the radio and listened in envious admiration as he spoke to the United Nations in 1957, as the youngest member of Pakistan’s delegation. They knew this was a tremendous honor, though if you asked them, they would have been hard-pressed to tell you where the United Nations was, or what it stood for. The next year, Sikandar’s younger brother Imtiaz burst into his bedroom door clutching a newspaper in his hand. “Look, look, Adda Saeen! Bhutto has been made energy minister!”
Sikandar could only look at the photograph and make out some of the words: General Ayub had taken over in a coup earlier that year, and now that he’d formed his cabinet, Bhutto was included, again as the youngest minister. Only thirty years old, and he was treading a path that men ten, twenty years older could only dream of walking. Sikandar was half Bhutto’s age, but he could no more dream of becoming a government minister than he could dream of becoming a space traveler.
“How does he do it?” Sikandar said, sitting up in bed, pulling the rilli around him.
“It’s the way he talks. He makes everyone fall in love with him the moment he opens his mouth,” replied Imtiaz.
“Maybe it’s his destiny,” said Sikandar.
“Adda Saeen, you’re always talking about destiny. You’re beginning to sound like a holy man!”
“Well, we are Pirs …” But in honesty Sikandar was confused about that as well. Yes, they were the descendants of a saint whose tomb lay not far from their home, and they were meant to be its guardians and overseers. Pir Hassan’s men made sure the walls of the shrine were strong, that they did not crack and fall on the heads of the people of the nearby villages who flocked to the shrine every day, bringing their woes and problems to the saint, begging him for his help in their everyday affairs. Pir Hassan organized feedings of the poor every Thursday night, arranging for huge pots of biryani to be cooked and given to the hungry who waited patiently for their free meal and dedicated their prayers to them and our progeny. And he accepted tribute from those families of the area who were rich and wealthy, and needed his prayers in return.
But if they were meant to be the keepers of the spiritual world, why were they so concerned with the affairs of this earth? Pir Hassan went over his accounts every morning with his munshi, who sat in front of him with the ledger books spread out on the table: the numbers written in neat rows of Sindhi, forming a picture of incomings and outgoings in the farm kitty. If the numbers were good, the munshi received a nod of approval; if they were bad, Sikandar’s father spent the whole morning shouting and raving at the simple man, who clutched his accounts nervously and tried to make the Pir see reason, that the failures were not his fault, but acts of God: the wheat crop had been cut down in the recent storms; the bananas had been stricken by worms. The man contracted to take the onions had run away before making the final payment. The sharecroppers on the far landholding had vanished overnight, leaving mangos that needed to be harvested but were now rotting on the trees.
It wasn’t just money that occupied Pir Hassan’s time: he spent most of his evenings hobnobbing with important government officials; he spent lavishly on dinners and parties where big men came to drink his whiskey and eat his food. Sometimes he would take them out for grand shikar, and they would stay out camping for days in the desert and mountains, returning with trophies of deer and ibex and wild sheep piled high in their convoy of jeeps. The villagers would watch in awe as they passed, bowing and clasping their hands in salute to the zamindars and their honored guests. They must have been the only people to walk the earth who were not just living saints, but kings as well. Sikandar’s b
rothers and cousins accepted this as the natural order of things, but Sikandar wondered if this was really what they were put on this earth to do, and be.
“You don’t understand,” Pir Hassan would always tell his son. “We have to live this way. If we didn’t have all this show, all this influence, do you think my rivals would wait one day to take over our lands, gobble up your inheritance? We don’t live in the dream world of Gandhi and Jinnah. We live in dangerous times. We have to be strong, now more than ever.”
There was one matter on which Sikandar tried to defy his father: he engaged a private tutor to teach him the rudiments of reading and writing. Over the months of his sixteenth year, he learned the alphabet from the Sindhi qaida that seven-year-olds used in school. By this time Zulfikar Bhutto was helping President Ayub to negotiate the Indus Water Treaty, which gave the waters of the Sutlej, Beas, and Ravi to India, while Pakistan received the waters of the Jhelum, Chenab, and Indus. By this time Sikandar understood that India had received more than Pakistan, because the eastern waters were far more powerful than the western ones. But Bhutto had impressed Ayub, who appointed him foreign minister two years later, and if his star had begun to shine when Sikandar was a child, by the time he became a man, it had burst into full glory, and was now a powerful sun that gave them all warmth and light in which to blossom.
In contrast to Bhutto’s life, Sikandar’s milestones were few and far between: each birthday brought with it a gift of some sort from his father—his twenty-first birthday in 1965 was significant because his father bought him his first car, a stately white Cadillac, and it was the year war broke out between Pakistan and India, barely twenty years after they’d separated. Bhutto negotiated a peace treaty with the Indian prime minister, which was so conciliatory to India that the prime minister died—“of happiness,” according to Bhutto—the day after the treaty was signed. Sikandar drove his jealous cousins up and down the streets of Sukkur in his Cadillac while people rioted in the streets against the exchange of prisoners and the shame of having to go back to Pakistan’s prewar boundaries. Sikandar and his cousins felt far removed from those disturbances; on the lands, watching the wheat grow tall and the mangoes heavy on the trees, they felt that no matter what happened in the outside world, here they would rule forever.