The Good Son

by Michael Gruber

  The next morning, just after sunrise (a tomato-red smear barely visible through the scrim of brown filth in the air) they all go, sleepy and cranky, to the buses. Although there are only ten people to transport, Amin has decided to engage two minibuses, to allow for stretching out a little and to leave room for the considerable load of supplies necessary for a week’s stay in an isolated area. On Sonia’s bus are Amin, the two Cosgroves, Father Shea, and Dr. Schildkraut. Hamid’s son Azar is the driver, and Hamid sits in the shotgun seat with a stockless AK stuck in the footwell. Leaning against an old Land Rover are the cousins, who will lead the way, and Hamid’s other son, mustached and hung with webbing gear and toting the same kind of weapon. Ashton, Nara, and Craig are on the second bus with Hamid’s other two sons as driver and guard, but Rukhsana is not; she calls at the last minute. She has an emergency meeting: someone is suing her about a story she wrote and she has to attend to it with her employer. She will follow in her own car; of course she knows the way perfectly well.

  So they set off under a yellowish-pink sky, traffic blessedly light at this time of day, and soon they are on the famous Grand Trunk Road, which stretches from Kabul to Calcutta, heading north out of Lahore. As they pass through the outskirts of the city, Schildkraut says, “So this is the Grand Trunk Road! I had somehow imagined that it was, so to speak, grander.”

  Sonia says, “Yes, it would be a county road in the U.S. or Europe, but then it’s over four hundred years old and hasn’t been widened since. Except for the motor vehicles, Kipling would feel right at home. On the other hand, you’ll think it pretty grand when we get up into the mountains, where the standard is a one-lane dirt track.”

  They drive on amid frantic honking traffic. Before Rawalpindi, they turn onto a secondary road, barely a lane through high brush, that Hamid promises will be a shortcut. Dust soon coats every surface. The heat builds up and there is hardly any breeze coming through the windows because of the closeness of the roadside vegetation. The passengers fall into the somnolent, jouncing discomfort of the road traveler in South Asia. This too would be familiar to Kipling.

  Now the road is perceptibly rising, leaving the dusty plains behind. Immense mountains loom violet in the distance and evergreen trees appear on the low ridges. They pass through Azad Pattan and Rawala Kot, Bagh and Dungian. The air clears, it becomes positively cool. In the backseat, Schildkraut sags, gently snoring. The Cosgroves converse softly or read. Father Shea is snapping photos with an expensive-looking digital camera, exclaiming at the increasingly sublime landscape. Past Chikar they enter the Jhelum Valley. Shea’s exclamations increase and Schildkraut awakens to join in expressions of wonder at the steep slopes, covered in cedar, fir, and pine, and at the crystalline air, the waterfalls, and the rushing river far below.

  Past Naili they enter the restricted zone and stop at a blockhouse, where Amin gets out to converse with an officer and show him papers. When he returns, he says, “We should be at Leepa House by three at the latest. It is just twenty kilometers up this road.”

  “This road” turns out to be a track cut into the side of a mountain. Riding on it is like flying a small plane, so vast is the view; at one point they have to back up almost a kilometer to allow for passage of a convoy of troop carriers and armored vehicles.

  They enter the Leepa Valley. The road makes a sharp hairpin bend to the right. The Land Rover in the lead disappears around it.

  Now comes a flash of orange light. The shock of an explosion shakes the bus, followed by a cloud of acrid smoke. Hamid cries out an oath and stamps on the brakes. They come around the bend and there is the Land Rover on its side, burning. Hamid yells in despair and jumps from his seat. He runs wailing toward the ruined vehicle and is immediately cut down by a burst of automatic fire. Azar unlimbers his AK and leaps out of the bus. He gets off a string of shots and then he is hit too and falls next to his father.

  More firing. Sonia tells her fellow passengers to get onto the floor and they do. Everything seems to be moving in slow motion. A random bullet shatters one of the side windows. The firing stops. They can hear the wind sighing in the cedars and the sound of running footsteps.

  The side door of their minibus is flung open and a man stands there. His face is masked and he points a Kalashnikov at them, shouting in Pashto: Out, out!

  They stumble from the bus and stand in the smoke of the burning car. Sonia sees that the other bus is being similarly treated. The windshield there has been blown out and Hamid’s two promising sons are still in their seats, slumped and dead.

  More masked men come down from the hillside. The passengers are surrounded, their hands are bound in front of them, and they are pushed into a close group by the rifle butts of their attackers. Other men loot the baggage in the second minibus.

  Then the passengers, the former conference on mental disease and violence in the subcontinent, are roped into a coffle and marched off the road up a footpath. No one on either side has said a word after the initial rough commands. The conferees have left, for a time at least, the domain of speech.

  3

  T he army is generous with dope, I’ll give them that; I walked out of there with enough OxyContin to stagger a platoon. I know a number of my fellow wounded sell it on the street, but not me. I take it as prescribed, no more, no less, whether I need it or not. I am not supposed to drive or operate heavy machinery when dosed, but I take this as a suggestion and not a rule, so I drove my rental home to my parents’ brownstone in the pricy Washington neighborhood called Kalorama. The house was empty, my father being at work and my mother in Lahore. I live with my parents on the few occasions when I find myself off duty. It’s cheap and saves a lot of hassle and it’s traditional.

  I changed into sweats and opened a beer, which I also wasn’t supposed to do on the dope, and plopped down in front of the TV. I do this a lot now. Really, the worst thing about being wounded is the agony of time passing with nothing to do-no, the second worst thing. The worst thing is being weak, slow, off balance, the body no longer the spear and shield it once was. It gets me to the core, makes me nasty at times. I’m not a good patient.

  Also, it’s hard to get involved in American television now. There’s no war here; all that horseshit about everything being changed by 9/11 lasted around two months and then back to sports and game shows. I don’t know, maybe that’s all right; maybe obsessing about money and sex and celebrities and celebrity sex and the teams is a sign that the terror has failed to bite, which is great, but if it’s no big deal why the hell are we breaking the army into pieces over it? Once again, not in my job description. But still, it’s another thing that makes me snap and get pissed at my fellow Americans.

  I switched over to Ary, the Urdu channel out of Pakistan that my father likes, and I watched a news program, mainly about corruption scandals and unrest in the tribal areas and whether there were going to be elections and would they be honest or not. They interviewed a general who lied about the recent killing of a terror leader outside of Quetta; the guy’s car vaporized and the general said it was a Pakistani army op, although children in diapers knew it was a Hellfire missile from a CIA Predator drone. Not even that good of a liar; his eyeballs flickered and you could see the sweat on his face.

  After that came sports, cricket and football, and a longer piece about a desi golfer on the pro tour, and after that a talking-head thing and I was about to switch over to Geo, looking for a cultural program, maybe hear some ghazals, when I saw my mom on the screen with an interviewer.

  He introduced her as Sonia Laghari, which is her usual nom de umma, a writer and psychologist, a Pakistani-American, daughter-in-law to the late, much-mourned jurist B. B. Laghari, and one of the organizers of a conference on solutions to the current mess in the country. No mention of her famous books. There was text on the screen; my reading Urdu isn’t up to much anymore but I thought it said that this was a tape of an interview made the previous day in Lahore.

  They were speaking Urdu. The interviewer’s
name was Jamil Babar Khan, and he started off by complimenting her on her Urdu, and that was as nice as he got because, although Mom was in full Pakistani rig, he started right off on America and its many sins against the Muslims.

  My mother smiled at him and agreed. America was not good for the umma. Mr. bin Laden was perfectly correct in his goals, although his methods were deplorable, and in her considered opinion he was destined to fry in the hottest flames of Hell for causing the deaths of women and children and of many, many Muslims. Therefore, she said, America should completely withdraw from the Muslim world. It should close its embassies and prohibit its citizens from working in Muslim nations or trading with Muslim nations. It should expel from its shores all foreigners from Muslim nations. This would eliminate the source of any conflict with Muslims and save a great deal of money, since aside from Muslim terrorists, America had no natural enemies. It should be of no concern to America how Muslim nations governed themselves.

  “But what about the oil, Mrs. Laghari?” the man asked.

  My mother made a dismissive gesture. Oh, the oil. That’s not a problem, she said. America and the West could become independent of Middle Eastern oil in a decade if they put their minds to it, using existing technology. The price of oil would collapse and the principal exports of the Muslim world would go back to being dates and rugs. The Saudi princes would become simple camel drivers again, no one in the West would care what happened in Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan, and all would return to the wonderful days of the early caliphate. Men would be simple and just, women would be chaste, sharia law would prevail throughout the umma and Osama bin Laden and his followers would no longer rage. When that happened, Westerners could return as tourists to the quaint crumbling cities of the new caliphate. They could buy rugs and dates.

  Jamil Khan said, “Forgive me, madam, but that is a ridiculous position and patronizing as well. It assumes that the majority of Muslims worldwide are supportive of the mullahs and people like bin Laden. They’re not. They want the same freedoms and the same opportunities for self-improvement as people in the developed nations.”

  “Yes, I believe that too,” my mother said, grinning, “with all my heart. I’m afraid I was being a bit facetious. Forgive me. But the truth is that America has poisoned the well through her clumsiness and stupidity. As it stands now, every Muslim father who wants his daughter to get an education, from Morocco to Bengal, can be portrayed as un-Islamic and a tool of the Americans. If you want democracy and free speech and secular law, that’s un-Islamic because America wants all those things too. It demoralizes the whole umma. But if America became less aggressive, the mullahs would fall on their faces, because they really cannot provide people with what they want. The Iranians would throw them all out next week if they couldn’t keep pointing to the Great Satan. Thousands of Pakistanis tolerate the Taliban, thugs who practice a religion utterly inimical to the Pakistani tradition and spirit, and why? Because American troops are occupying Afghanistan and Iraq, and killing and torturing Muslims, and bombing civilians in Pakistan itself.”

  “But I thought it was the American withdrawal after the Russian war that enabled the Taliban to take over Afghanistan.”

  “Yes, and so what? No American would have given two pins about how Afghanistan was ruled if bin Laden had not been based there and attacked America, and he would not have attacked America if we hadn’t been up to our armpits in the politics of Muslim nations. It is not our responsibility to decide how others should live, and whenever we try we fall into the most arrant hypocrisy. And lies. The Americans say, ‘Oh, we’re fighting to preserve our way of life; the mujahideen hate our way of life, just like the communists.’ But as bin Laden says, al-Qaeda has no interest in changing the Western way of life; he doesn’t attack Sweden. All he wanted from the 9/11 attack was the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Arabia, and he got that almost immediately. He won; the war is over. Why are we still fighting? Look, I am a Pakistani and an American. I love both my countries, but one of my countries, America, is incapable of rational action in the other country. When little boys fight with sticks, the mother must separate them and keep them in separate rooms for a while, and that is what I am suggesting.”

  “The Israelis would not be happy with what you suggest, and as we all know the Americans do what the Israelis want.”

  “Yes, except when they sell arms to the Saudis,” she said. “I’m tired of hearing about Israel. Israel has the only modern economy in the Middle East, the most powerful army, and over two hundred nuclear weapons. Israel can take care of itself. What keeps that ulcer raw is not only the land hunger of the Israelis, about which we can do nothing, but also the stupidity of the Palestinians, and I would say here that America is fortunate in the Palestinians, because otherwise America would be the stupidest nation in Middle Eastern affairs.”

  “You think that wanting freedom and an end to a brutal occupation is stupid?”

  “Of course not, but look at how they resist! They could have had their own state and an end to the occupation twenty years ago by using the same methods that were successful against the British, right here where we’re sitting. India defeated the greatest empire in history using Gan -dhian noncooperation and nonviolent resistance. You think that Israel’s nasty little empire cannot be defeated in the same way? But they don’t do that, they love their posturing and their face masks and the rifles waving, and the people are controlled by bandit gangs who are constantly selling one another out to the Mossad. It would be ridiculous if it weren’t tragic.”

  The interviewer seemed not to want to pursue this line so he asked her about the conference and they talked about that for a while, and it was here I learned that they intended to meet not in Lahore, where there was at least some security, but in Leepa House in Pakistani Kashmir, which was a long fly ball from the Northwest Frontier Province, otherwise known as Jihad Central.

  The rest of the interview was about who she was supporting in the coming elections, but I hardly listened, and as soon as it was over I switched it off and dialed my mother’s number on my cell phone. It was past midnight in Lahore but I didn’t care.

  I got a not-available recording and left a message. I was pretty calm, considering that she had just pissed off on international television every bunch of armed maniacs on the planet except the Basques. What was she thinking? Did she want to get blown up?

  As soon as I had that thought it hit me that maybe she did, maybe that was part of what made her Sonia, what my father called her trapped-fox part. I had that too, if I was honest with myself; I got it from her and from how I was brought up, maybe an adrenaline deficiency, the whole dicing-with-death thing. Or maybe not. I know guys who do sport jumping, motorcycle racing, whatever, but it’s not like that. There has to be an opponent; death has to show himself in human form; you have to beat the angel on its own terms.

  These old thoughts were boiling into froth, and under them the thrill of real fear. I kept calling through the evening, the last one at eleven-thirty, and still nothing, even though it was now morning in Lahore. My mother never turns her cell phone off during the hours she’s awake. I left a message demanding an instant call-back. Then I called my Auntie Rukhsana, who keeps hers on even when she’s asleep. Also no answer. I left a similar message. Then I took another pill and had another beer, after which I conked out in my room upstairs. I’d been out a little over three hours, by my watch, before the ache and thirst and the need to go to the can got me up, which was a pretty typical night for me, and when I was up and around I heard the sound of the TV in the living room. I recalled switching it off, which meant that my father was up.

  He was sitting on the couch watching Pakistani cable, and he didn’t take his eyes off the set when I came in, which was funny to begin with because my father is a formal guy, always stands up and gives a hug and a kiss when we happen to meet. I sat next to him on the couch and asked him what he was watching. The screen showed a couple of talking heads, the usual morning anchorperson and a
guy with the familiar sleek and sneaky look of a Pakistani pol. He didn’t answer me and I looked at him and saw that tears were streaming down his cheeks and I knew what it was and cursed.

  “Something happened to Mother,” I said.

  He pointed mutely at the screen: a shot of a mountain road with a burnt-out Land Rover on it and two empty minibuses with their doors hanging open like a dead bird’s wings and Pakistani military swarming around them, looking pretty helpless. There were big patches of what had to be blood on the ground and the glitter of spent brass scattered around.

  The announcer was saying that a party of foreigners had been abducted on a road in Pakistani-administered Kashmir; they had no names yet and no knowledge of what had happened to them. Then back to the anchor and the interior ministry official, who dispensed empty assurances and more ignorance.

  I said, “They don’t know it’s her group.”

  He replied, “But we do. My sister just called and woke me up with the news. It is Sonia’s group without question. Rukhsana recognized the minibuses. She would have been there herself had she not been delayed. She was entirely devastated.” He stared for a moment at the repeating images on the screen. “Apparently they killed the drivers and the guards.”

  He threw his arms around me and sobbed and I comforted him as best I could, which to be frank wasn’t all that much. A breakdown like the one he pulled after Baba and my sisters were killed wasn’t what I needed now.

  But in a few minutes he recovered himself, went away to the bathroom, and came back, composed again and grave.

  I asked, “Babu, did you know she was going to Lahore? She called me and asked me tell you.”

  “Of course I knew. Your mother is a wonderful woman, but she derives an infantile pleasure out of sneaking. She kept the whole thing quite dark, as she imagined, but naturally Rukhsana has kept me apprised throughout. As has Nisar. I told him I did not approve of allowing them to use the house at Leepa, but he ignored me. As he usually does, of course. He very much wanted a meeting with William Craig, and I understand this was part of the arrangement.”