At four-thirty in the morning, the day was taking shape. The travelers took a moment to clean up before the door was finally opened and Sikander, Dianne, and Lee stepped out into the early morning Peshawar air.
The birdsong was raucous. A faint aroma of bougainvillea was apparent but mixed with kerosene smells from the Gulfstream’s engines. As they proceeded away from the jet, the bougainvillea took charge. It was a scent that Sikander hadn’t experienced in a long time. Other aromas from morning street hawkers’ preparations of chickpea curry, nihari, warm naan breads, and semolina halwa, enveloped him. Their welcoming greeting brought a flood of memories of the hometown that had not long ago seemed to Sikander, in the depths of his despair to be either never, or forever, in his past. He was back now. Seven months late, but back.
The three of them had not walked far when Sikander noticed two fair-skinned men in dark suits a short distance in front of them. He supposed them to be embassy staffers, a conclusion assisted by a black Chevy Suburban with dark tinted windows immediately behind them. But to his great surprise, several meters to their left stood a solitary figure. It was Junaid—or Atif Qureishi, depending on who was to be believed.
Sikander relented to the unwelcome recollection of an interrogation months earlier. He couldn’t help seeing Junaid in a different way. He no longer knew who this man was, but as the doubts rolled around in his mind, he recalled that Junaid’s behavior had been honorable at all times and the only source of his suspicion had been his tormentor in Guantanamo. Indicating his need, Sikander peeled away from Dianne and Lee. Had Junaid simply been a Pakistani ISI officer here to welcome back a fellow officer from a long absence it would have been one thing. But these two men had last seen each other expecting to reunite in four hours—four hours that had turned into eternity.
“Sikander! Bhai! I’m sorry! So sorry for what you’ve been through, friend. It must have been an awful, terrible nightmare.” Junaid’s voice quivered.
“Junaid! Junaid, I…I…” Words overcrowded Sikander’s mind, too many to pass through the narrow opening of his consciousness. His lips could assist none to escape, but his arms were willing and he put them to good use, engulfing his friend of sixteen years with a warm hug.
When he was done, he turned to face his two traveling companions who had by now joined their colleagues by the Suburban. He approached them, wiping his face into a more presentable condition. Lee quietly shook his hand, and gave an acknowledging nod before entering the vehicle together with the two staffers. Dianne remained standing. Sikander could see the emotion of the moment had not been lost on her and much of the effort of applying makeup inside the airplane had gone to waste as she dabbed at her nose and eyes with a pocket Kleenex hastily retrieved from her handbag. He met her gaze, understanding in that moment that regardless of any warmth she might have fabricated out of duty throughout their brief encounter, she was a genuinely warm person.
“Dianne, I’m sorry.”
“Sorry Sikander? For what?” she sniffled in genuine surprise.
“I was cold and behaved badly to you when we met, while all along you’ve tried to do your job—and I must tell you that you do it very well. I shouldn’t have taken out my anger with your military colleagues on you. I was just filled with so much of it I couldn’t…well, I can’t say I’ll ever forgive what they…” Sikander shrugged. “Still, that’s no excuse to—”
“It’s okay!” Dianne’s velvet voice assured him. Quickly repairing her mildly dented composure, she continued. “There are all kinds of people everywhere. Afghans, Pakistanis, Americans…and I…well, each of us is different. Go now.” Perhaps by peering into Sikander’s soul for a few hours, she had seen the monumental mistake her government had made. Perhaps the thought of him returning to his family reminded her of the tragic loss of her own in a car accident. She couldn’t say. But the thought prompted a fresh urging from her.
“Go to your family, Sikander. And welcome back to your country! I hope one day maybe you’ll get to experience the country that I love…inshaAllah.” With that, a fragile smile, and the words, “Allah Hafiz,” she joined Lee and the others to begin their journey back to Islamabad, and to be debriefed about getting Sikander’s agreement to provide intelligence.
Sikander and Junaid walked back through the airport to Junaid’s car. They were on their way home, where a large family gathering awaited him. Sikander wasn’t ready to discuss with Junaid the matter of his identity. Instead, he expended considerable energy failing to relax as the vehicle wound its way through the streets, drawing ever closer to Hayatabad. Junaid gave him a short description of their journey home from Qunduz and the harrowing months since.
The air in Sikander’s home had been electric ever since Sameena’s message about President Musharraf’s quiet intervention had reached Sofie and Rabia. It had been a week now since they heard that all necessary steps were being taken to secure Sikander’s release, and when it was clear he’d be arriving on the upcoming Saturday, elation turned into outright euphoria.
With preparations at the house akin to those for a society wedding, beautifully colored lights were strung in swags over the exterior walls and over the large black metal gates, giving the place a festive feel. Even in daylight, the lights were stunning.
Sameena and Wasim with their daughter, Rukhsana had come; likewise, Ejaz and Hinna with Adam, Azhar, and Riffat; Saleem and Amina; Abdul Rahman and Sabiha with Sadiq and Sohail; Abdul Majeed and Fatima with young Latifa, the little traveler who had come back in the airlift from Qunduz. It was down to poor Atiya to supervise all the children, while the three matriarchs—Sofie, Noor, and Razya—oversaw the family.
Amid the welcoming mayhem in a household that had lived in quiet dread of the worst news for half a year was Rabia, who was at that time, of all times, in her bedroom, at once delighted and yet deeply pensive.
What will the experience have done to him? Rabia wondered. Would she be getting back the same man she had grown to love? The father of her children? As questions threatened, another part of her demanded to take control, insisting that such questions didn’t matter. If they could just get back together and start rebuilding their lives, everything would be fine. They would get through this. It had been a long, hellish ordeal and now that they would be together again, they would get through it. A determined woman, Rabia would be his source of strength, and he hers. They would scale the rest of the mountain of their life to reach its summit together.
Deep in such thoughts, Rabia continued with readying herself. The honking of a car horn from outside interrupted the hubbub downstairs. Pandemonium ensued, as everyone wanted to be the one to open the newly painted gates.
The family had been told to expect Junaid and Sikander for breakfast and it was now six in the morning. No one had returned to sleep after fajr out of sheer excitement. The nonresident family members had arrived the day or evening before to be sure they would be present when Sikander arrived, so blankets and bedding were all over the house as people had slept on beds, sofas, and the floors, in accordance with their relative standing in the family hierarchy.
The car drove through the gates and stopped. When Sikander stepped out, a loud cheer rang out and everyone mobbed him. There were plenty of floral garlands that tradition demanded be laid around Sikander’s neck. Sofie approached him with hers, put it on him, and enveloped him, as she wept for her son’s safe return.
As the mob inched from the patio through the doorway into the house, Noor was next. Unable to contain the blame she had chosen to own for having left him behind in Qunduz, she erupted. “Sikander, I’m sorry you had to endure…zwey! We couldn’t do anything! We were forced to leave you there. My poor—” Noor’s regrets were trampled by her joy as her eyes were drawn to Rabia’s solitary figure on the upstairs landing.
Rabia descended the steps and with everyone now gazing upon her, the hubbub evaporated as Sikander and Rabia held a mutual stare. From behind Rabia, nine-year-old Ayub came running. Puncturing the s
ilence with a joyful shriek of “Abba-jee!” he ran up to his father and wrapped his arms around him. Close behind came Qayyum.
“Ayub! Qayyum! Just look at you! Grown so much, mashAllah!” Sikander tried picking up both of them. His strength wasn’t what it should have been, and his difficulty elicited gasps from Sofie and Rabia. With determination, however, he completed the task. Rabia was likewise taken aback by Sikander’s loss of weight. He was a pale reflection of the man she had last seen leaving for Afghanistan in October.
Gently lowering his children to the floor, Sikander returned his gaze to their mother. Rabia had a shy smile on her face. With all these family members present, it would have been inappropriate for her to leap upon her husband and profess her sorrow at his absence, her immense relief at his return, and her boundless love. In such company, everything would have to be accomplished with looks given and taken between each of them. But having lived in this society for as long as they had, even elaborate communication was possible with just the eyes.
His spoke of the torment, the terrible times, the pain and suffering, the despair, and the moments of inner peace. They also spoke of the love that had survived unchanged, fueled as it was by the anticipation of eventual reunion.
Hers spoke of the anguish of not knowing his whereabouts or even whether he’d been alive or dead, and of living like a widow. They spoke of her love for him, of the relief of learning that he was alive, and of the hope upon hope for some way, any way, of getting him back.
The day was tumultuous. Sikander enjoyed the company of his relatives and friends. But from time to time, he couldn’t help recalling the torment that his fellow inmates were still feeling. As the festivities carried on, his mind seemed able to transform the happy shrieks of the children into his own screams, blurring his recent past with the present. At such times, he stroked his temple before resurfacing into the present and the festivity.
Sofie and Rabia noticed these moments. On one occasion they instinctively exchanged glances, understanding that much work lay in front of them if, now that they had recovered him physically, they were to succeed in getting him back mentally.
When nightfall came he went to bed with Rabia. There was much that he wanted to say and do, but he was too tired to remain awake after his long flight and the intense day that had followed. Besides, with such a comfortable bed, he couldn’t avoid drifting off into a much-needed sleep.
About an hour and a half before fajr, Rabia stirred awake to the sound of gasping and moaning, “Uuuuhh! No! No!”
The sound grew more forceful until it broke through from beneath Sikander’s consciousness into a full-blown scream. In the next room, Ayub and Qayyum were already awake, crying from having heard the monstrous noises. Again, Sikander screamed “No! NO! Aaaaaghhhh!”
“Wake up! Wake up Sikander!” pleaded Rabia, shaking him gently, then more vigorously.
Sikander awoke, breathing heavily, as if he’d been sprinting. “Oh…” he gasped as he became aware of his wife, his bedroom, and finally, his nightmare. Although he had left Camp X-ray and Camp Delta, they were unwilling to leave him just yet. A cruelly creative subconscious had rendered the experiences of Guantanamo, Bagram, and the ghosts from his ride to Sheberghan in hideously embellished caricature. He gripped Rabia tightly. He would do absolutely anything to avoid losing what he now had back in his possession.
“Sorry,” he offered.
She ran her fingers through the wavy mane of hair that he had permitted to grow prior to being whisked away from Guantanamo. Rabia’s soothing did nothing to prevent Sikander from recognizing what his ordeal had done to him. Hearing the children, they both arose and went to comfort them. As they stood with the boys, the family was silhouetted against a nightlight near the children’s bed.
From the master suite over the front of the house Sofie stood watching the north wing across the courtyard. She had slept only lightly that night and had stirred at the muffled sounds coming from the other side of the house. She was looking at one branch of the generation to follow her and could see the love that was present in that room. It made her feel happy for the future, yet sad that she was on this part of the family’s journey and her path to her twilight years without her husband. Her son was back, though. And right now, that was all that mattered.
Chapter 18
Carolina
SIKANDER’S NIGHTMARES CONTINUED. After almost six months, on Rabia’s insistence, he consulted a doctor who prescribed behavioral therapy and antidepressants. The medications made a difference and by the start of 2003, the episodes had decreased substantially. Sikander had done a lot of introspection during and after his now seemingly short captivity. It was as if he’d been presented a mirror to his own soul and it had helped him in ordering his life’s priorities. Now, despite inheriting his father’s enjoyment of running a business, unlike his father, he wouldn’t let it engross him to a level that would risk his neglecting family.
Rabia was expecting their third child and, uncharacteristically for a Peshawar husband, Sikander fussed over her whenever he could, often forcing her to rest while he handled simple tasks like taking the children to school or shopping.
Sikander’s transformation from his time in Guantanamo had found a parallel in the one experienced by his in-laws from Afghanistan. No longer were they village dwellers of Laghar Juy. They lived in or near some of the priciest suburbs of Peshawar. But entrenched villager habits were amusingly incongruent within their modern living circumstances. Noor and Razya had always cooked in a crouching position on their low patthras, but that was discarded now in favor of stand-up stoves and sinks in a modern kitchen. Going to the bathroom was a similar study in contrasts. Rabia had experienced the same transition, but the older women took longer to adjust.
Not long after Sikander’s return, he and Rabia had decided that apart from a brief visit to the office with Jamil to meet everyone there, he would not return to work until he felt well enough to make a contribution. Although the business had not grown significantly, Jamil had run it competently. He was a more cautious young man than Sikander, and that had been just fine in Sikander’s absence.
In less than six weeks, however, the combination of cabin fever, his wife’s and mother’s tendencies to overfeed him to help him regain his weight, and his eager anticipation of Jamil’s regular evening reports, drove him to start going to work again.
The family was often invited to visit their friends, including Hamid, now a squadron leader and soon to be a wing commander. Wherever they went, Sikander could be relied upon to recount the story of how he had been shot, captured, sold, and taken to Guantanamo, though he refused to talk about his actual experiences there. He felt it might be dangerous and it was in any case embarrassing to talk of such things as torture in polite company.
Having brushed with Americans in one manner while in captivity and, to a small degree, in a more positive way on his journey back from Cuba, Sikander’s interest in things American remained, surprising even him. The news from America, however, was not good. George W. Bush seemed committed to a campaign to “finish the job” begun by his father more than a decade earlier. The neo-conservatives in high places on his team, particularly in the Department of Defense, were in frenzied pursuit of reasons to invade Iraq, landing ultimately on “proof” of that country’s program for development and production of weapons of mass destruction. “Regime change” was pitched and packaged for public consumption inside visions of a free democratic Iraq whose narrative might have been lifted from newsreels of the liberation of France in World War II.
Following these developments on TV, Sikander was struck by the way in which labels and narratives could subtly influence interpretation and action, an example being the labeling of weapons. The approachability of a name like “daisy cutter” for a bomb conferred upon it the quality of something on “our” side. Despite its ability to obliterate everything within half a kilometer in all directions, the obliterated things would be bad, and mass destruction
wasn’t the “intent,” so a daisy cutter could never be called a weapon of mass destruction. He wondered how the American political system and media might have labeled it, had it been in the Iraqi arsenal.
In Sikander’s mind, American public opinion had been too easily sold on this “legitimacy of honorable intent.” He recalled what he thought was probably a defining moment more than a decade earlier, during the first Gulf War, when video pictures of precision laser-weapons delivered to a designated room in a targeted building were shown by American generals. Americans could feel at ease with the knowledge that even if civilians were to get killed with their tax dollars, it would be in the spirit of minimizing unintended deaths and for the greater good. He particularly resented what he felt was a Bush presidency that had chosen to ride a wave of fear within the populace, freeing the administration to make whatever belligerent moves were needed to eradicate choice enemies, especially those lacking a nuclear arsenal. Saddam Hussein, now squarely in the line of fire of Bush’s agenda, was a clear target of political opportunity.
Sikander consumed news and editorial opinion avidly. His experiences in Guantanamo permitted nothing less. As far as Sikander could determine, the Bush administration had recognized that the threat to world peace and stability needed a more graspable focus than al-Qaeda, and Saddam fit the bill. He had evicted weapons inspectors, failed to provide evidence of the absence or dismantling of the WMDs in his alleged arsenal, and according to a British government claim that fanned the flames, he already possessed the capability to launch such a weapon within forty-five minutes of forming the intent.
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