A Season for Martyrs

by Bina Shah

  Sikandar approached the house in the early evening. Al-Murtaza, the ancestral home, which Zia turned into a sub-jail so that Benazir and her mother could be incarcerated there, was a grand structure with blue and white tiles all along the doorways, depicting in curious hieroglyphics the lives of the men and women that lived in Mohenjodaro, the City of the Dead located not too far away. Soldiers in khaki uniforms stood guard outside the gates, keeping a wary eye on all men who passed in and out of the house. Plainclothes policemen must have been mingling with the crowds, too, taking note of the names of PPP big shots who arrived in their convoys of jeeps and cars with darkened windows.

  There were no women who came to meet the Bhutto ladies; they would not have been comfortable leaving their homes to travel so far, nor would they have been permitted to come out of purdah and walk among so many strange men. But Benazir did not observe purdah. Now that the official period of detention was over and the telephones restored, meetings with visitors allowed, they were making up for all those months when they had been cut off from the rest of the world, their names excised from the newspapers, their efforts to publicize Bhutto’s plight struck down by the paranoid, shame-faced general.

  Sikandar was directed by some of the Bhutto servants to go to the garden, and as he joined the men who thronged there, he noticed bushes of beautiful roses growing along the boundary walls. Their colors enticed him; tangerine, lavender, golden. He bent down to admire them, to stroke the petals of one that looked so perfect it could have been molded out of clay. One of the servants, a young boy in a Sindhi cap, saw him, and saluted, then spoke to him in the soft buttery tones of Seraiki-accented Sindhi.

  “These were Bhutto Saeen’s favorites. He brought them from all over the world.”

  “Did he?”

  “Yes. And Bibi looked after them while he was in jail. She comes down here every morning at seven and helps the gardener water them. She tends to them as if they were her children. It is sad to watch. It makes me want to cry.”

  Sikandar touched the boy on his head and gave him a ten-rupee note. He already looked as if he had been crying for days, his eyes swollen, his nose red and chafed. No older than fourteen, he could not understand why his master had been taken and murdered. He had never been to school, could not understand the grand designs of the men who wanted to rule the country. But he would have taken comfort from the fact that his loyalty to the Bhutto family was something he could understand, and rely on. Until now.

  Suddenly, a buzz rose up from the men gathered in the garden: “She is coming. She is coming. Bibi is coming.”

  “Stand here, Saeen,” said the boy to Sikandar. “She will be sure to come near her father’s roses. She loves them so.”

  He did as he was told, keeping a distance from the other men who were pressing to catch a glimpse of the tall, chador-clad figure as she stepped from the confines of the house and into the garden. The air was still heavy and hot from the day, though the scent of raat-ki-raani heralded the approaching coolness of night, and Sikandar thought he saw her flinch when the warmth hit her; it had not been long since she’d been released from those claustrophobic rooms where sunlight and fresh air were hard to come by.

  He strained for a look at her; from this spot he could see a gaunt face, with great shadows under her eyes and cheekbones. But she held herself straight and proud, her chin lifted, glancing down her long, proud nose at the men who stumbled forward and greeted her, their hands pressed to their chest in respect. A small space was cleared in front of her so she could walk with dignity, speaking to each man and nodding her head slowly. She did not lower her head or look away, as most Sindhi women would have done; she faced each man and looked him straight in the eye, speaking in a strong, steady voice, despite her flawed Urdu.

  Ten minutes passed, fifteen, thirty … an hour later, Benazir broke through the crowds and came toward the rosebushes, just as the young boy had said she would. Sikandar waited behind one of the hedges so that she did not see him at first, and he could watch her as she stood next to the roses, straightening her chador and closing her eyes. Only when she was close to him could he see how very young she looked. Her skin was translucent, the veins underneath her pale skin blue and fine like small rivers. Her eyes were huge, the eyebrows arched above, giving her an intelligent, intense expression. And though she was a tall woman, she looked delicate, the chador heaped over her thin shoulders, her hands clutching at its edges bony and thin.

  Sikandar cleared his throat, and she glanced in his direction. She was tired, so tired, he could see it in the depths of her eyes, in the lines above her forehead. Even her clothes and shoes looked tired, worn-out and faded in the dusty heat. He stepped forward and began to speak.

  “Lady, I am Pir Sikandar Hussein Ahmed Shah, from Sukkur. I have come to tell you how pained my family and I are by your loss. Truly, the nation has been robbed of a great man.”

  She did not smile, but she pressed her hand to her heart. “Thank you. You are very kind. Did you know my father well?”

  “I did not know him, but I admired him greatly, as we all did.” As he spoke, Sikandar realized he was telling the truth. Few zamindars agreed with Bhutto’s ideas about liberating the poor, pandering to their greed. It would have upset the natural order of things. And he was ashamed to say that in earlier days, he had shared the view that if they, the nobility of Sindh, were not educated men, why should peasants and their children go to school so that they could leave the farms for the cities, believing themselves better than the zamindars and worthy of more than the life of servitude offered to them?

  Disappointment flashed across her face. She was about to make her excuses and leave, Sikandar could tell. It hurt him more than he was expecting, to let her down, when she was so hungry for anyone who might have spent a little time with her father. He could not say that he completely understood that feeling, but he, too, knew what it felt like to lose his flesh and blood.

  “But I know something about him that I must relate to you, Lady,” Sikandar quickly continued. She flicked her great, dark eyes back to him and gave him her attention once more.

  “On the day of his hearing before the Supreme Court, back in December, he was taken from jail and brought to the court in a very weak condition. He had not eaten, had not had fresh water for days. He was ill …” Benazir nodded in recognition and painful remembrance. “When he stood before the judge, ready to speak, many people did not think he would be strong enough. But then he gripped the sides of the dock and called out for help to Saeen Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, the great saint of Sehwan …”

  Her hand was at her throat, and for a moment it seemed as if they were the only two people in the garden. “And then?” she whispered.

  “The whole room began to grow bright, and your father’s face was illuminated, as if the light of God was shining on his face. And then he regained his strength, and he was able to speak, and he spoke eloquently, for four days after that.”

  Her face too was shining, even though grief was an ever-

  present color on the skin of her thin cheeks. “He did not even need notes, you know?”

  “Yes, Bibi. He was a brilliant man, even when he was standing with one foot in his grave.”

  Then her face shifted into a frown, and she looked away. “But how do you know it really happened like that?” She was so desolate, so devastated despite her outward show of strength, that Sikandar, in that moment, would have cut his own heart out of his chest to give to her.

  He said, gently, “I was there, Lady. I went to his trial. I sat in the benches and watched your father defend himself against the charges.”

  Her eyes widened. Sikandar could see her heart had begun to resume beating again, a triumphant drumbeat that could never be stilled. The color came back to her face. Someone called her name from the far side of the garden then, and as she walked away, she said, “I will not forget your kindness, Pir Sikandar Hus
sein. Come to me in Karachi. We will see what can be done for you.”

  Just for the gift of those precious moments, he was grateful that he had told her such a great lie. For of course Sikandar had not been to Bhutto’s trial. The story had only been told to him by someone who had actually been there, and it would pass into legend, as would all the tales and myths surrounding his mysterious death—that Bhutto had not been hanged, but beaten to death, that he was a living saint, a martyr, and that martyrs never died.

  In truth, on the day that they tried and hanged Bhutto, they tried and hanged all of Sindh. Therefore, Sikandar’s being present in spirit was something that could never be doubted, and his not being there in body was not important.

  December 18, 2007 (ii)

  ISLAMABAD

  After leaving them, Sikandar Hussein only ever called Ali to tell him to do something for him.

  “We need to file our taxes. Find the papers for the house, Ali.”

  “Bring my case, the one with the black handle. It’s in the storage room, on top of the other suitcases. I’m leaving for Islamabad on the evening flight.”

  “I need the electricity bills for the last year. Send them in the morning so that I can get them to the KESC office by noon.”

  Ali always listened, asked for clarification to his instructions. Sometimes he took notes. But would it have been so difficult for Sikandar to ask about any of them on one of those phone calls, even as an afterthought?

  “And how are you doing, Ali? What’s happening in school?”

  “Did you find the answer to that algebra problem? See, you’re a smart boy. I knew you could figure it out.”

  “So you want to study business? That’s a very good idea. You can help me manage the lands, after you graduate. You’ll learn things I could never even imagine.”

  Ali gave up on his father after five years of his cold distance, trying to be stoic about his father’s attitude. But it hurt Ali to see his mother age before their eyes; the burden of bringing them up alone wore her out until there were days when Ali would catch her reflection in a mirror and almost mistake her for his grandmother.

  The only one who still carried any illusions about their father was Jeandi, barely seven when he left. At twelve, she remained in love with him as only a young girl could, and flew into a rage if any one of them dared say anything negative about him. “Don’t talk like that about him! He’s our Baba! He’s given us everything!”

  Listening to her mantra, uttered in a trembling, tearful tone, seeing her small chin wobbling, Ali only felt the deepest sorrow for both her and Haris, who was only twelve when their father left.

  Ali’s father paid for everything; his children’s upkeep, education, a few trips to Dubai, and a few years ago, a new car—let it never be said that Pir Sikandar Hussein was irresponsible when it came to looking after his family. He was only on the other side of town, but it might as well have been the other side of the universe. Sometimes when Ali spoke to him on the phone he could hear the crackling of static, intergalactic line noise, other conversations cutting into the line in a million alien languages, and an eerie delay and echo, as if their voices were bouncing off satellites deep in space.

  After Pir Sikandar’s first wife died, he had become involved in politics and the PPP. It was the stuff of family jokes, how impressed their father was by Zulfikar Bhutto while he was alive, and traumatized by his death when he was hanged. He’d even gone to his trial in Rawalpindi, and to Naudero to condole with the Bhutto family back in 1979. It was in the Bhutto house, Al-Murtaza, that he’d promised his allegiance to Bhutto’s daughter Benazir. She had given him a bouquet of flowers from among the prized roses in her father’s garden; Ali found one pressed between the pages of his Quran, papery brown, a few pieces broken off and ground into a fine dust.

  The years of Zia had been difficult: Benazir was jailed again and again, and then finally she went into exile, but Ali’s father had worked with the PPP and the MRD, the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy, to prepare the ground for her return in 1986. The details were vague—Ali was hardly four or five years old, but he somehow remembered the secret phone calls, the meetings, the times when Ali’s father would come home drunk, his face a blazing blustery red, and he would pace the corridors of the house, shouting that his beloved Sindh would never succumb to the imperialist invaders.

  But there was hardly anything left of the Sindh that Pir Sikandar dreamt about. Land reforms instigated by Bhutto had cut everyone’s landholdings dramatically, and few in the interior could get an education or find employment because there weren’t enough schools or jobs. So Ali’s father had moved the entire family to Karachi; even though their income was assured from the lands (he’d been clever about the reforms, managing to put his lands into various family members’ names while pretending to agree with Bhutto that reforms were necessary for Sindh’s progress), he’d wanted his sons to go to good schools—proof, perhaps, of his love for them.

  He was so crazy about Sindh that he didn’t even consider the Balochi Sindhis, who’d been settled in the province for the last three hundred years, to be true Sindhis. “Legharis, Jatois, Chandios, pah! Even the Zardaris are not Sindhi!” he’d shout. When Benazir married Asif Zardari in 1987, he’d gotten drunk and stayed drunk for three days. He’d attended their wedding at the racecourse legless. Ali pictured him lurching toward the platform where Benazir and Zardari were sitting, laying his hand on his heart to tell Benazir that her father would have been so happy to see this moment. Then he’d turned to climb back down the three steps, but he’d fallen off the platform and broken his ankle, and had had to be in a cast for three months.

  It was always just automatically assumed that Ali would follow in his father’s footsteps: inherit his lands and his title, and continue where he left off when he was too old to look after the farm or his other interests. As the eldest son, Ali knew he would one day be the sardar of the extended family. His religious duties would not be heavy: like most Pirs of today, Ali’s father knew little about religion beyond the daily prayers and a few verses of the Quran, which they dispensed like aspirin to the few men who came to him for religious advice. Learning about agriculture was more complicated, but Ali had wanted to study business management and come back from Dubai to help his father shift into a more progressive way of doing things. He would build a school and a hospital for the poor, improve the road system, get sanitation installed in the village.

  “It will all cost more money than you’ll be able to afford,” his father had told him when Ali talked to him about his plans. Sikandar was settled in his chair, a whiskey and water by his hand, and he was watching Benazir on the nine o’clock state news as she addressed Parliament, the country’s first female prime minister, the world’s youngest Muslim woman to lead a nation. The sound was turned down low so that Jeandi wouldn’t wake up, but Ali’s father was mesmerized by the expressions on her face—animated and proud, those imperious cheekbones and arching eyebrows screaming privilege and entitlement even as her huge Persian eyes shone with intelligence and determination.

  Ali had eagerly turned away from his books and toward his father. “It won’t be that bad. We have to try, don’t we?”

  Sikandar nodded at the television. “That’s what her father wanted to do. Give the peasants and serfs power. Power to the people!” For a moment, a bitter, wry look crossed his face, but then he shook his head as if clearing it of treacherous thoughts. “Roti, kapra, aur makan. Made him popular with the masses. Not a bad idea, but done in the wrong way.”

  “You mean the land reforms?” Ali had asked. “They weren’t a good idea, were they?”

  “Not for us.”

  “So why did you go along with them? Support him so much?”

  “We had no choice. We had to do it to survive.”

  Ali was too young to know the word hypocrisy, and even if he had known it, he wouldn’t have dared a
pply it to his father. He had believed everything Sikandar told him about politics, Bhutto, Benazir, the way the world worked. He was the ruler of Ali’s world back then; through the filter of his eyes, Ali could take politics, history, economics piece by piece, absorb them, digest the knowledge in morsels until he was ready for the next bite. There was so much more he wanted to talk with his father about; He needed Sikandar to approve of the way his mind worked, to tell him that he would be a prime minister himself one day.

  But his silence had intimidated Ali, and the weary way in which Pir Sikandar raised his drink to his lips, the ice rattling inside the glass. Then the news finished, and he switched off the television with a deft flick of his wrist on the remote control, and stood up to go out for the evening.

  Looking back, Ali realized now that for all his grand ancestry, his noble traditions, for all that he had been taught how to be a zamindar and a Pir, none of his forefathers had taught Pir Sikandar how to be a father.

  The police beat them even after they locked them in the van, taking some sort of sadistic pleasure at having them all trapped in one place, unable to escape their wrath. Everyone else in the van was just like Ali, young and afraid. Ali didn’t recognize anyone, but he felt as though he knew them all. There were no girls in the van; they’d been taken away by women constables in charcoal-gray uniforms, sneers of disdain contorting their faces as they pulled at their hair and ripped their clothes. Ali had no idea what had happened to Salma or Ferzana, but he’d seen Imran writhing on the ground, being clubbed viciously as he clutched at his eyes, one hand flung out in front of him in a mute cry for mercy.