“I do. And it is just as remarkable, don’t you think, that a conference devoted to exploring the mental pathology that underlies terrorism should itself fall victim to someone who exhibits just such pathology in the most extravagant detail? You really should let us live, sir, so that we can study and write about you and your organization. Like the patients of Jung and Freud, you would achieve immortality in the pages of psychiatric textbooks.”
He smiled. “You mean to provoke me, but I am not easily provoked, not like our Idris. I am a patient man and I will appear in books, but not because I am insane. You know, it is the victors who write the psychiatry books just as they write the history books. If the Germans had won the war, would the Nazi leaders be considered madmen? I don’t think so.”
“Perhaps, but moral relativism ill befits a supposed leader of mujahideen. If you really believe that, I would rather take my chances with Idris.”
“And be beaten to death?”
“Perhaps, and perhaps he will remember that God is merciful and compassionate. At least he is still a Muslim. What you are, I leave to God, who knows all the secrets of our hearts. Death comes to everyone, and whether it comes today or in a week or in twenty years is of little account.”
“You have no fear of the Hell that awaits you?”
“I do fear it. I have done wickedness and I will be punished for it. But I look forward to at least one pleasure in the next life, which will be to see you roasting below me in a far hotter fire.”
“You really are a ridiculous woman, you know that? I am a mujahid and a leader of jihad, and God’s word assures me a place in Paradise. I will be interested to see if you speak so brazenly after you have condemned your friends to death, when you are the last one and the knife comes for you.”
“Not the knife, Alakazai: even you would not be so foolish as to behead a woman. But, as Rahman Baba says, ‘All the world travels to the grave, as the caravan heads homeward; death reaps all souls, as the farmer cuts the ripened grain.’ None of us can say what God has in store. You may kill me or you may not. For all you know, at this very minute a drone missile is being targeted on this house, or perhaps, since I am an important CIA agent, they are waiting until I leave.”
She observes this last remark strike home: a little flicker of doubt, some fear in his eyes. She has spent much of her life reading the expressions on faces, in therapy and, before that, on her travels, when mistaking an expression, missing a lie, could be fatal. She is quite good at it, and even in this short interview she has learned more about her captor than he knows he has revealed.
He recovers his aplomb, makes a whisking gesture with his hand. “I assure you there is no chance of that; you will surely die, and your bones will be left to the dogs and birds. That will be your end. In the meantime, go and have your conference. There is little entertainment for a man such as myself in this place, and I look forward to seeing you perform.” He speaks an order to the guard, who walks over and pokes Sonia in the ribs with the barrel of his AK.
“Out,” he orders.
“I can’t walk. Look at my feet.”
“Crawl, then,” he says, and pokes her again, harder.
She slides from the charpoy and crawls. Behind her she hears Alakazai laughing.
10
S o what happened after that?” Gloria asked.
“You really want to know this? My war stories? Why?”
“It’s interesting,” she said. “Like I told you, most guys are totally boring. Your life is like a movie.”
“You think? Okay, where was I?”
“Your grandfather and your sisters got blown up.”
“Right.”
And it happened at the worst possible time, not that there ever would have been a good time, but my mother was in Zurich. My uncle Nisar was studying in London, but it was some school break and he was off in the country with friends, out of touch for weeks. My uncle Seyd was with the army on maneuvers in occupied Kashmir, so he was also more or less out of the picture for days afterward. My aunt Rukhsana was a kid, although I have to say she paid more attention to me than anyone else. My father, who should have taken charge of the situation, he just collapsed, became practically catatonic, and had to be hospitalized, or so I heard later on. My grandmother didn’t bother looking for me. She was probably already plotting to get Farid a new wife to replenish the gene pool.
Anyway, when the bomb went off I ran and hid in the storeroom. I wanted to be near my mother’s tin trunk. Wazir found me there on the night after the disaster. When I saw him I started bawling and he told me to stop crying, and when I continued he slapped my face. He said, “Be a man! A man doesn’t cry like a woman. If a man is injured he seeks revenge.”
I stopped crying. I asked him against whom I should seek revenge and he said, “My father knows, and he is planning his revenge this minute.”
I said, “It’s my grandfather who was killed and my sisters. I should have a part in the revenge.”
So he took me to his father. Gul Muhammed agreed that I should have a part, and he told me the story of why my grandfather had been assassinated. There was a zamindar, a wealthy landowner, who was cheating his peasants-which is to say he ate food, drank water, and breathed air-but in this case the peasants had somehow found the courage to bring a lawsuit against him, the case landed in the courtroom of Laghari Sahib, and Laghari Sahib had refused the customary bribe and given justice to the peasants, at which point the zamindar, Babur Amir, threatened him aloud in his own courtroom, and Laghari Sahib had thrown him in jail-five days-for contempt of court. Babur Amir had waited and plotted the death of Laghari Sahib. There was a man who worked for Babur Amir and did his dirty work: beatings, shootings, and also bombs, because he had been with the jihad in Kashmir and understood explosives. This man was Salim Malik.
I asked Gul Muhammed how he knew this and he said, in the way you explain something to a young child, “Everyone knows this. There would have been no point to Babur Amir’s revenge if it were not known; also, having it known shows that Babur Amir has no fear of the police or the courts. Thus he can act after this with impunity, and no peasant will ever challenge him again.”
Then I asked why the police didn’t arrest these men for the murders, and he said, “Because Babur Amir is well with the government of Zia, and the government of Zia hated Laghari Sahib so they will do nothing.” He made a gesture encompassing all of us. “But we will not do nothing, oh, no!”
He thought for a while, tapping his bearded chin. “You must stay here in my quarters and keep hidden.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because I say so. Wazir will bring you food. I leave tonight, and while I am gone you must not by seen by anyone but him. Say that you understand and will obey!”
I said this, happy to have someone strong in charge of me.
He smiled and patted my head. “Good. When you are older you will know why I do this.”
The next morning, he was gone, Wazir did not know where, except that he had packed his pistol and his Enfield rifle in the sidecar of his ancient BSA motorcycle. A week and a day later I was sleeping when Wazir slipped into my room and awakened me.
“What’s happening?”
“Quick. Get dressed. Wear your Pashtun clothes and take anything you want to take, but make sure you have blankets and warm clothes. One small bag only. We leave tonight.”
I dressed in a black shalwar kameez and put a felt Pashtun hat on my head. I packed a bag: underwear, socks, sweater, a lined rain jacket, boots. And my mother’s knife.
Gul Muhammed was waiting in the courtyard with his motorcycle. He pushed it out into the street and cranked it up, a sound shockingly loud in the night air. I climbed onto the pillion and we were off, through the warren of Anarkali and then past the Mayo Hospital and out onto Railway Road. We crossed through the deserted Landar Bazaar and by a tunnel under the tracks entered a part of the city I had never been in, an area of hulking godowns and small repair shops. Gul Muhammed
threaded his motorcycle slowly through alleys where men pounded metal by the light of buzzing fluorescents and hissing gasoline lanterns; the work of Lahore never ends. At last he stopped in front of a godown. He unlocked and lifted a corrugated steel door, walked the idling motorcycle up a ramp, and closed the door behind us with a clang that echoed through the vast inner space of the warehouse. By the light of the motor-cycle’s headlamp I could see towers of crates and jute bags strapped to pallets. He steered the bike through the aisles of merchandise, the thumping motor sounding like a beating heart.
He stopped. Against the wall I could see the bound and gagged figure of a man. Gul Muhammed said, “Babur Amir is dead. I went to his haveli in Gulberg. He was well guarded. Three hundred meters from this house I found a tall tree, a cedar, that provided a view into the courtyard of the haveli. I climbed it and waited. Three days I waited, until Babur Amir came out to kick a ball around the courtyard with his sons. It was a long shot, but I didn’t miss. This animal is Salim Malik, who set the bomb.”
With that, he took his Webley out of the sidecar and handed it to me. I looked into the face of Salim Malik. It seemed to me that the resignation of death was already on it, but at the time I was not the expert I later became. I thought about what my grandfather and my sisters had looked like as they burned in the car, and what they looked like afterward, and what the smell was like. So it was not hard to cock the big pistol, set myself carefully so I wouldn’t get hit in the face by the recoil, and shoot Salim Malik in the head like a good Pashtun.
Gloria gave a small shriek. “You shot him? Oh, my God, how old were you?”
“Around nine. It was no big deal at the time. It was just like playing guns and Hindus with Wazir, which I guess is why those African militias recruit kids as soldiers. We numb up real fast and kill without thought. You want to hear the rest of this?”
She did, and I went on.
An hour later I was stuffed uncomfortably into the sidecar of the motorcycle, along with a twenty-five-kilo bag of rice, plastic sacks of dal, oil and spices and salt, the Enfield with its ammo; a jerrican of water was lashed onto the hull forward of the little windscreen: the commissary and armory of our tiny army. Wazir was on the pillion, leaning back against our luggage. He looked at me with a wild delight. We were going to war, to jihad against the Russians. Gul Muhammed had been brief in his explanation: the infidels had invaded Afghanistan three months ago and all Pashtuns were obliged to heed the call of religion and tribe. Also, it was no longer safe for any of us in Lahore. I recall asking about my mother and how she would find me in Afghanistan, and he’d said war was not the business of women, which seemed a reasonable answer at the time.
So we sped through the night city to the Grand Trunk Road, north out of Lahore toward Peshawar and the border. I was exhausted, and after a while I arranged the dal sacks like beanbag pillows, and fell asleep on them. I recall I awoke once; it must have been near dawn. We had stopped for some reason, and I looked up and into the face of a boy about my own age in a white shalwar kameez. He was attending an allnight roadside tea stall. He smiled and waved and I returned the salute. I thought he envied me my adventure.
We got to Peshawar on the third day after two hundred and fifty miles of hard pounding, half choked by dust and fumes. The city was already full of Afghan refugees from the communist takeover and the brief civil war that followed, but not as crammed as it would be in future, when the war really bit in. Gul Muhammed had an address of a cousin, Bacha Khan, who offered us the customary hospitality. He was a fat man with a long beard, the first fat Pashtun I had ever seen. At the time, as I gathered from the conversations of the men, the resistance was fragmented into half a dozen squabbling parties, each with their own armed force and ideas about the future of the country, but which were temporarily united as the Islamic Unity of Afghan Mujahideen. I obviously didn’t get the religious and political difference between the seven main mujahideen groups, but in the end it didn’t matter much. The clan elders of the Barakzai were going with the National Islamic Front of Afghanistan, so that’s where we went too.
The NIFA had a training camp outside of Peshawar in a village called Ali Shawr, so one day we packed up our stuff and went there. The original village had exploded into a vast improvised encampment on flat squishy land on either side of a trickling stream, thousands of people living a pickup kind of life in tents or shelters made of plastic tarpaulins, scrap wood, cardboard, and corrugated tin. Gul Muhammed found a shanty for us in the area occupied by members of his clan, and we slipped into the seething mass like a drop fallen into the sea. They say children are adaptable, and that was how it was for me. After a week or so, my life in the Laghari mansion was like a half-recalled dream; it was as if I had always lived here in the cold and the mud, with a dozen families, our neighbors, living out their lives in our laps, at full volume and odor.
A few days after we arrived, Gul Muhammed made his contacts with the NIFA command and went off to train as a guerrilla. We two boys, to our immense disappointment, discovered that we were to be sent to school at the village madrasa. I went along willingly enough, because they fed you a meal at the school, but Wazir rebelled, the first time I ever saw him defy his father, and he was savagely beaten for it, with an actual camel whip. Wazir was dying to go and kill Russians for God, although he had never seemed to be particularly religious up until then.
Before he left, though, Gul Muhammed formally adopted me into his clan and tribe, so I would have protection and be a real person. It was Wazir who convinced him to do it, a big deal among Pashtuns, so now I had two fathers and a brother.
Then he was gone and Wazir and I went to the school and were more or less looked after by the clan. The teacher was a half-deaf old man named Bazgar, and our education consisted entirely of memorizing the Qur’an, in classical Arabic, which none of us understood. I once asked Teacher Bazgar what it meant and he said, “It’s the word of God, that should be enough for you,” and swatted me for insolence.
Then came the endless winter-we huddled around the fires while old men told us stories of former wars and revenges-and after that the spring, wildflowers lighting up the slopes around the camp with color. When the passes and trails were clear of snow, an air of heightened feeling ran through the camp, for now convoys and caravans could be organized, to move supplies and reinforcements north to battle. Gul Muhammed came to see us one night to say farewell. He was armed, dressed for the mountains in boots, a quilted jacket, and a felt Pashtun cap, and carried an immense backpack.
“Why can’t I go with you?” Wazir complained.
“Because I say not,” his father replied. “Stay here and grow strong. This war will last a long time.” Then he gave instructions about what to do if he should be killed, threading through his vast cousinage in succession, with contingencies: if such a one should die, go to that one, if he should die, then the next. With that, he gave us each a rough embrace and was gone into the night.
There were hundreds of similarly deserted children in that camp, yet we were all cared for in the manner of the Pashtuns. Our clan took care of us, and the clans of the others did the same. We formed wild bands, fighting battles in the rocky hills around the camp, practicing ambush, assault, escape. We hung around the mujahideen training grounds, yearning; we hitched rides into Peshawar and strolled the arms bazaars, ogling the wares like boys my own age in the States did in back rooms of magazine stands; pistols were our Penthouse, rifles our Hustler, weapons of all the world’s armies over nearly a century: Mausers, Garands, Tokarevs, Enfields, Nagants, and, prized above all, the Kalashnikov AK-47, drool-making object! The bazaaris complained that prices were plunging disastrously, weapons were flooding in from all over the world; the Saudis were shipping, the Americans, the Pakistanis most of all. But the prices were still too high for boys with no money at all.
Summer, and the camp was a stove, it became unbearable to sit in a hot courtyard and chant suras, so we ditched school entirely. Refugees from the w
ar continued to pour into the camp, and the crowding became insane, all the better accommodations taken by families with young children. We slept under a sheet of plastic propped up by sticks. In July the monsoon rains came, and the whole camp became a steaming mire. We found work building duckboards for a local guy and did that for a couple of months. We were restless and bored, and one day Wazir came to me saying, “I am tired of this life. We are not of the menial tribes, you and I, and this work disgraces us. But listen: there is a convoy leaving tonight. We can sneak onto one of the trucks and by the time they find us it will be too late. We will be in the jihad.”
“But they’ll send us back.”
“They will not. I have spoken with men who have returned. They use Afghan boys just like us for carrying and for lookouts and for spies. We can do the same.”
Wazir cleverly chose a truck loaded with blankets and medical supplies, or we would have frozen to death on the trip over the mountains. The mujahideen organizations supplied their fighters via a skein of caravan trails from their Pakistani bases, always switching routes to avoid patrols. We went north from Peshawar to Chitral and then took the Dorah Pass into Afghanistan, although at the time we had no idea where we were. It was cold. I was a kid from tropical Lahore and didn’t know what cold was until that trip; winter in the camp had been nothing compared to it. We burrowed down in our nest of blankets in a tight embrace and pissed into jars. The convoy had to make several detours into side canyons and wait while patrols from the government army, the DRA, went by. It took us nearly a week to get to our destination, by which time Wazir and I would’ve fought for the Russians, almost, if they had given us something to eat or drink. We’d only brought enough food for a few days.
The Good Son Page 21