A Season for Martyrs

by Bina Shah

  One of the younger men sat quietly sobbing in a corner but the rest were too stunned to even cry. The van sped through the streets of Islamabad, sirens wailing, until it stopped with a jerk that threw them on their hands and knees onto the floor. The doors were wrenched open and men started shouting at them to come out as rough hands reached inside to yank them out, blinking like bats in daylight too strong for their teargassed eyes. They were shoved into the police station at Aabpara where it had all begun.

  No matter how macho everyone pretended to be in Pakistan, even the biggest muscle-bound buffoon was frightened of being taken to a police thana. It was the stuff of nightmares for couples caught on illicit dates, or women who were raped and stupid enough to report it at a police station. All that happened was that men got thrashed and women got raped again. Through his work at the station, Ali had heard of street children being taken to the police stations and being made to have sex with policemen so that they were allowed to sell flowers on street corners. There was a news item back in January, a report from some human rights organization that made its way to their fax machine, that they’d tortured a man accused of stealing in Larkana, beating him severely, cutting off his penis and leaving him in a cell in a pool of blood. Ali watched Ameena’s face as she read the fax: it drained of all color, leaving her skin looking like cottage cheese, and she hurriedly threw down the piece of paper and ran to the bathroom.

  Jehangir picked up the fax, read it, and whistled, then tossed it to Ali. “I guess we’re not going to be running this on the evening bulletin …”

  Their knees were knocking as they were herded into the police station and made to stand in front of the desk, bruised and bleeding, while policemen swarmed all around them, shouting and screaming and hurling abuse. They stripped everyone of their cell phones and wallets, and Ali knew he would never see either again. He stared at the dingy cracked walls and the concrete floor, where a puddle of blood trickled past his legs—but when he blinked his eyes, it was only water from a leaking faucet at a filthy sink in a corner of the room. There was a smell like burst sewers emanating from somewhere outside the room, curling into Ali’s nostrils and making him want to vomit.

  Two hours passed like this, as they sweated and tried to clean their eyes and begged for a glass of water or to be allowed to use the toilet, requests that were all ignored. Finally a Station House officer showed up and instructed a constable to take down their details while he stood close by, his hand caressing the pistol holstered on his hip, and scrutinized each person with deep-set, shadowed eyes. Each person was registered, fingerprinted, photographed. Abuses were hurled at them and their family members, and if anyone protested, he was caught by the collar and slapped hard on the face.

  Then one by one they were taken down the hall to the jail cells. Ali wondered if they would be beaten more in the cells, or just left to sit or stand or lie on the floor until someone figured out what to do with them.

  One young man started to gasp and panic when it was his turn to be led away. “Oh my God, oh my God,” he moaned. “My father’s going to kill me! My father’s going to kill me!” It was an odd thing for a grown man to say, but Ali felt an answering spasm in his own chest. Before he’d broken ties with his father, Pir Sikandar’s approval or disapproval was the most important thing in the world to him: he waited for it like a mariner consulting the weather before deciding to take a trip out onto the sea. Since they’d stopped speaking, Ali had learned how to trust his own judgment, checking his own compass instead of someone else’s all the time. But that young man’s fear resonated with something inside him. He reminded Ali of himself when he was seventeen, before he knew the shape of his father’s perfidy.

  Suddenly, the officer at the desk was shouting at Ali. “You! You, come here.”

  Before the man standing guard could push him, Ali stumbled forward, eyes still smarting. His fingers burned where the baton caught him against the edge of the van door. The SHO cast a glance over Ali’s sorry appearance, his dirtied clothes and swollen, defiant scowl. The register on the desk was filled with the names and details of at least thirty different people. The officer’s pen hovered over the page, ready to add Ali’s name to the list.

  “Name?”

  “Sayed Mohammed Ali Sikandar.” He scratched it down painstakingly, each stroke of the pen another jab in Ali’s throbbing eyeballs.

  “Address?”

  Ali mumbled it out. The officer remained impassive when Ali said he was from Karachi.

  “Father’s name?”

  “Pir Sikandar Hussein Shah.” It came out automatically, as it always did when Ali was asked for his father’s name in a hundred different bureaucratic situations: filling out school forms or applying for a passport, opening a bank account or buying a SIM card for a mobile phone. And even more so in social situations: people always asked Ali who his father was as a way of identifying him on the tree of society. Among Sindhis, Ali was the apple growing off one of the topmost branches, deriving an elevated status from his father’s high position.

  The police officer’s pen kept scratching on the paper. But the SHO cocked his head, peered at Ali from underneath bushy eyebrows. Close up, his eyes were not the usual brown of most Pakistanis, but rather a hazel that didn’t match the somber tone of his oak-brown face.

  “Wait,” the SHO said to the officer, whose pen froze a millimeter above the page. The SHO beckoned Ali to follow him. Ali strumbled behind him, his legs trembling with weakness. They went to an office, a tiny room just off the main hall fitted out with a wooden desk and two chairs. A ceiling fan whirred uselessly overhead. The SHO clasped his hands behind his back and stared out the window onto a small grassy patch of ground outside. He didn’t invite Ali to sit down.

  “Your father is Pir Sikandar Hussein? Of Sukkur?”

  “Yes.” Ali’s heart pounded harder than before; his mouth was dry. He wanted to ask for a glass of water but he was too afraid of being shouted at, or worse.

  “You are sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  Abruptly, he reached for his pocket, and for one crazy moment Ali was certain the man was going to take out his gun and shoot him, point-blank, right here in this room. But instead, he passed Ali his cell phone with a grunt. “Call your father.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Call your father. If you can get him to come up here, I’ll release you without charge, on his recognizance.”

  I don’t want to do this. Ali longed to tell the SHO that he couldn’t call his father, that he hadn’t spoken to him on his own initiative in two years. He wanted to break down in tears, tell the SHO how his father left them all, found a woman who wasn’t Ali’s mother and slept with her and now Ali had a half-sister whom he’d never seen but who apparently looked just like his sister Jeandi. There was something about this man’s eyes that told Ali he might just understand.

  But the man stared at Ali, his hazel eyes with their slightly raised eyebrows expressing the tiniest bit of impatience, and Ali knew that if he didn’t make the call, he’d be stuck in this jail cell and probably beaten up by any police officer who’d had a fight because his wife wouldn’t make love to him, or who didn’t have enough money to get his daughter married and needed to take it out on a rich, spoiled brat like him.

  The phone rang a few times, and then that familiar, raspy voice, mellowed by years of whiskey and cigarettes, came down the line and into Ali’s ear, going straight to his heart. “Hello?”

  “Baba?”

  A pause. “Ali?”

  “Baba, it’s me.”

  “What is it, Ali?” If he was surprised, he didn’t let it show in his voice.

  “Baba, I’m in trouble.”

  Another pause.

  “Where are you? Have you had an accident?” Ali could hear the breaks where he stopped to light a cigarette, breathe it in, expel the smoke in short strong puf
fs. Ali’s mother used to beg him to stop smoking, saying that it was terrible for his health, but he never listened to her about anything. Ali glanced at the SHO, who’d turned his face away again, as if to give Ali some privacy, a symbolic gesture Ali was too shaken to appreciate right now. “I’ve been arrested.”

  “What?”

  “I’m in the Aapbara Police Station. The SHO let me call you.” Ali spoke in Sindhi but he knew the SHO could understand every word he was saying.

  “You’re in Islamabad?”

  “Yes, Baba.” Ali’s voice caught on his name. “I was … I was in a march.”

  “A march?” It was to his father’s credit that he didn’t sound shocked, but Pir Sikandar had not always been a man who could stay in control of his reactions.

  “For the judges.”

  A long pause this time, a deep exhale and inhale. “I saw that on the news. It looked bad. Are you all right?”

  “I’m all right. A little bumped about, but …”

  “Let me talk to him.”

  Ali handed the phone over to the SHO. Ali was on autopilot now, relieved to have two grown-ups to whom he could turn the situation over. They spoke to each other, but Ali wasn’t listening to the SHO’s responses. He closed his eyes, wishing he could sink down into the chair, even though its seat was torn and one leg was shorter than all the others.

  At last the conversation ended, and the SHO handed his phone back to Ali. Ali pressed his ear to it, enjoying the warmth against his bruised skin. “Ali? Just stay there. I’m coming on the seven o’clock flight. Don’t worry.”

  Ali nodded even though his father couldn’t see him doing it. Then he switched off the phone and handed it back to the SHO. The man pocketed it, then pulled out the chair and told him to sit.

  “You can stay in here until he comes for you.”

  “Thank you.”

  Ali was so tired he could have fallen asleep for a thousand years. He lowered himself down gingerly; no position felt good with aching ribs and fingers, and an assortment of bumps and bruises that ran all the way up and down his spine. He had never been in this much pain in his life.

  His head was starting to fill with fog, and although he was wondering why the SHO was giving him special treatment, instead of leaving Ali to rot in the cells with the others, he knew that it was because of Pir Sikandar Hussein Shah of Sukkur. That was the way it always went in Pakistan: you could get into any kind of trouble—you could even kill a man—and as long as your father knew the right people, you’d never have to pay the price. Maybe Pir Sikandar promised the SHO a nice little sum of fifty thousand rupees to make sure that his son didn’t have to endure the ignominy of jail, shaming him and bringing him down from the treetops, onto the ground where the ordinary people had to live and survive.

  The SHO glanced toward the door to make sure it was shut, and then he sat down at the desk, opposite Ali. He leaned forward and started talking in a soft voice, and Ali realized he wasn’t hearing Urdu or even Punjabi, but Seraiki, that sweet language spoken by people from the lands on the border of Sindh and Punjab. If an artist drew a map of Pakistan not in solid inks but in watercolor, you’d see a soft melting line between the provinces, blurred and seeping onto the page, and that was the way Seraiki people lived, between the spaces where Punjab and Sindh knock into each other.

  “My village is in southern Punjab,” the SHO was telling Ali, who understood him perfectly, as all Sindhi speakers could. “We’ve been devotees of Khwaja Khizr for six generations. We’ve been many times to his shrine, where your village is. The Sufi poetry written in his honor is sung in our village. Some in my family are followers of Pir Sikandar Hussein. I cannot have his son in my jail, even for a single day. It would be a matter of great shame for me.”

  He got up, left Ali alone with his thoughts. Ali closed his eyes. Would it be too hypocritical to offer a prayer of thanks to the saint, who saved Ali’s neck, even though he never asked for the favor? Ali had been maybe five times in his life to the shrine. He said it anyway, hoping that the saint wouldn’t think him a hypocrite. And then he drifted away.

  The last flight from Islamabad to Karachi left at one in the morning, and it was a rush to get out of the jail and into the airport in time to make the plane. Somehow they managed it, though. The SHO offered them dinner but Pir Sikandar refused, saying that he didn’t want to put the man through any more trouble. Father and son ate, instead, at a little roadside restaurant on the way to the airport that served fresh barbecued food. Ali was ravenous, but when he tried to eat the chicken tikka his jaw throbbed and he was forced to mouth down the food half chewed. It saved him from having to say anything to the man sitting across from him at the table, who, despite all the DNA they shared, was a stranger to him.

  It was not until they were both sitting in the plane, strapped into their seats, that Ali was able to relax. Everything was swirling through his mind like a parade of scenes from a movie montage, but he was just too drained to do anything more than watch them and then let them go. He wanted to worry for Imran, Ferzana, Bilal, and most of all Salma, but the relief that he was not in jail was much greater in comparison. These were days in which thousands of people had disappeared, or been arrested by the government for engaging in “terrorist” activities. The army had practically been waging war against the people of the Frontier and Balochistan, thanks to George Bush’s influence on Musharraf. Ali knew he had come close to becoming one of its victims. He was not ready to die for his country yet, but if he’d been one of those nameless victims, shot or bombed or jailed or simply disappeared, nobody would call him a shaheed, or put him in a martyr’s grave.

  He leaned his head back in the seat, although any way in which he tried to twist his body caused more pain. The lights in the cabin were dimmed and the plane began to taxi down the runway. His father was sitting with his eyes closed, his hands resting on his knees. He was whispering a small prayer under his breath; Ali suddenly remembered that Pir Sikandar had always been afraid of flying.

  With a bump and a thrust, they were airborne, and Ali looked out at the lights of Islamabad dropping away beneath them, the darkened line of the Margalla Hills standing guard over the city. The plane tilted sharply and pointed one wing toward earth, pivoting to make the turn southward to Karachi. Sikandar gripped his knees a little bit tighter, and Ali could see his knuckles start to grow white. He patted his father’s hand awkwardly. “It’s all right, Baba. We’re in the air, look, we’re practically home already.”

  Sikandar squinted one eye open, then quickly shut it again. He murmured, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Go to sleep.”

  Ali resisted smiling. His father was too proud to admit that he was terrified of going down in a great big fireball of death. Ali had no such fears; planes relaxed him, put him to sleep. His eyelids were being tugged downward, so he leaned back in his seat, trying to find a comfortable place for his arms to rest, and thought about Sunita.

  Suddenly, Ali was shaken awake by a pocket of turbulence. The whole cabin began to rattle, dishes in the galley clattering in their trays, the luggage in the overhead bins banging around against the doors of the compartments. The flight was not full, and some people still slept through the racket, but Sikandar sat bolt upright, his eyes open wide, glimmering with fear. He looked around from side to side, trying to see what was going on. The seat belt sign flicked on, and Ali glanced down to make sure his father was wearing his, then gazed back up at his face and tried to breathe slowly for him. Sikandar’s teeth were clenched, his jaw tense.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay, Baba,” Ali said softly.

  The shaking got worse and Sikandar grimaced. “Where’s the air hostess? Why isn’t anyone telling us what’s going on?”

  “It’s just turbulence. An air pocket. Don’t worry. It’s like bumps on a road, when you’re in a car.” Ali’s first instinct was to soothe him, to reach out and gr
ip his arm, give him some sort of comfort. It confused him; he’d hated him for so long that he felt he should be enjoying watching him frightened and uncomfortable. He hadn’t even talked to Ali about the march, or what he was doing there. Yes, he’d dropped everything to come up and get Ali out of jail, but wasn’t that more out of a need to save face than it was to save his son? Appearances had always been more important to Pir Sikandar Hussein than anything else.

  But maybe it was up to Ali to talk.

  The prospect of having this conversation with his father made him recoil in fear. It was scarier than facing the police in the march, seeing their faces with their teeth bared and their batons lifted in the air, ready to bring them down on the protestors’ heads. The last time Ali was this scared was in the moments after the explosion at the rally for Benazir, when he raised his head and realized he was still alive, but others around him were dead. It was his only chance, though. They were no longer in Karachi, where normal rules applied. On the ground, Sikandar was strong and Ali weak. In this metal tube going at six hundred miles an hour, twenty thousand feet in the air, Ali could dare to take the first step, freed from gravity and of the pain of the last five years.

  He took a breath, swallowed hard. “It was terrible, today, at the march. They teargassed us. They were beating up girls. I never saw anything like that before.” He spoke slowly, his voice low, trying hard to control his nerves.

  “What were you doing up there?” Sikandar muttered through clenched teeth.

  “I joined the People’s Resistance Movement. We made a plan to go together and show our support for the judges.”

  Sikandar let out a snort. “Those corrupt bastards? They’re not coming back. Don’t waste your time.”

  He was not telling Ali directly that he didn’t want him involved, but Ali could sense it. He replied, “I don’t think it’s a waste of time. I want to be a part of it; I want to make a difference. We’re all tired of the way this country’s leaders have been plundering the nation. We want a change.”