A Season for Martyrs: A Novel (14 page)

If this fails, there is always the incentive of a grand reward; late last year I authorized a great sum of 500 Rupees for information leading to the arrest & conviction of the leading Hurs. Perhaps this will sweeten the pot more than those wretched
lunghis
&
afrinnamas
written in gold & silver lettering which I secretly believe only the most foolish Sindhi would feel are of any merit whatsoever.

But no amount of monetary reward, I fear, will be able to counter the tremendous strengths of the Hurs. Firstly, to be a Hur, & moreso one involved in these sorts of nefarious activities, is considered a great honor: ballads are composed by wandering minstrels which sing of their being made martyrs, who go straight to Heaven without even facing the trials of judgment Day! The villagers vie for the honor of feeding & housing these criminals & even offer their daughters in marriage to the worst of the rascals.

When our troops enter their areas in strength, the Hurs flee into the Makhi Dand, a swamp in the wilds north of Sanghar, where the Hurs are to be found in greatest numbers. It can be imagined how well this covers anyone who wishes to disappear from the view of the authorities! Its shallow lakes, thick jungle cover, & trees (tamarisk & acacia) ensure that anyone who seeks refuge here will never be found, no matter how many times we order the grass to be cut or burnt down.

But there is hope for our situation, for we are making plans to ensure cooperation from the Pir; who will be told to ensure that his
Murids
quit their illegal activities. We have tried our usual methods on him, but he only gives us excuses; that he has already disowned those Hurs who continue to embarrass him & affect his honor in our eyes. But now we are tired of his excuses, & plan a more drastic way to ensure his cooperation in aiding us to bring law & order back to Sindh. …

He will be forbidden entrance to Thar Parkar or the affected parts of Hyderabad District. In this way he shall be cut off from his areas of greatest support, his tribute, or
nazrana
. & we shall leave the threat of the loss of his Darbar chair hanging over his head, like the Sword of Damocles, & warn him of what is to follow if he does not perform to our satisfaction.

I have already refused one of his gifts: a basket of fruit, which displeased him greatly. This has been as an earthquake throughout Sindh, & lowered his respect & damaged his
Izzat
greatly.

If he does not heed our warnings, then the next step shall be to disallow him an audience when the Commissioner visits upper Sindh at the end of this year. I shall make it known that the Queen of England is greatly displeased with him, & he shall be forced to convey this
in person
to his followers
. For the Pir to have to approach his followers in an open audience in Hyderabad rather than await their pilgrimage to him in Kingri (another practice which we can forbid if we so wish) would be considered a greater shame than if Mohammed had refused to pay homage to Mecca and instead demanded that Mecca approach him instead!

Who knew that we could use the Sindhi love of honor as a tool against them, in order to coerce them into actions that are beneficial to our government? But any government that wishes to succeed in Sindh must always remember this point: that honor is equivalent, in their eyes, to power, & that even if that honor is symbolic, they will do anything to sustain it.
Anything
.

I am confident about my success in this endeavour, for this Hur Rebellion, as we have named it amongst our quarters, will ultimately fail. It is in the Pir of Pagaro’s interest to effect a peaceful equilibrium with us, although he might be pushed from below by the needs & demands of his followers. This is because even though the Pir fancies that he holds his followers’ lives in his hands as their godhead, we have, with God’s grace, absorbed his
Gaddi
—his throne—into our own system of political control. Our power comes from the fact that we recognize no God but our own, the true Christian God, and we value nobody’s honor but that which belongs to our own Beloved Queen Victoria, who is, after all, the true Empress of this land.

November 17, 2007

KARACHI

At first Ali didn’t tell anyone about what he’d done. Not his family, not Jehangir, nobody at work, and certainly not Sunita, who hadn’t known anything in the first place. He didn’t want their questions, didn’t want to supply them with explanations. They’d interrogate him:
Why did you do it? Why didn’t you go through with it? What got into you?
And the inevitable conclusion that they would draw from his actions:
Well, if you let it go that easily, then it couldn’t have been that important to you all along.

But from the moment Ali had escaped from the embassy, he’d grown queasy with the fear that he’d made a terrible mistake. He’d waited for the bus to collect him on its way back from its rounds, and sweltered under the inadequate shade of a clump of trees planted over a rough shelter of benches and picnic tables. The people waiting with him were divided into two groups: those who were returning in triumph, and others who had been rejected and looked like they were going to commit suicide. Ali didn’t know which group he belonged to, so he sat alone at a picnic bench and pretended to go through his papers, trying to hide his passport from view. Filled with nervousness and regret, he put his hand to his mouth and began to chew on one of his nails. By the time he reached Karachi, they were all bitten down to the quick
.

His father would be the first one to jeer at him. “You’ve always been immature,” he’d say, barely glancing up from his newspaper. “Always. You could never decide anything important for yourself: what you wanted to study, where you wanted to go.”

“That’s not fair,” Ali always tried to argue back, feeling the ground shifting like quicksand beneath his feet.

“Maybe, but it’s true. That’s why I have to make the decisions for you. Because I know better.”

Ali had a lot of conversations like these with his father, jumbled-up pieces of tapes that played in his head, based on real talks, imagined conversations, wishful arguments, discussions commenced but never completed. It was part of the legacy of having a parent who was no longer there. In all of them Ali argued his point with eloquence and intelligence, always persuaded his father to see his point of view. In reality he’d never been able to get his point across, never succeeded in feeling heard or understood. No matter how much he imagined talking to his father as an equal, though, he knew he could not rewrite history. His father had the upper hand on him, even in his own mind.

What always defeated him was that when it was time to make a choice, Ali’s father made decisions only with his head, choosing what made the most sense and fitted in most practically with circumstances and chance. But there were many different types of decisions: those that you made with your head—what to study, where to go to university—were only a small part of the choices that presented themselves on any given day. What about those that were made by the heart, the body, the soul?

The decision to love, for example. It was something you decided with your heart, as Ali had with Sunita. He knew the pitfalls of getting involved with her, the chasm between their religions. But his heart had not allowed him to walk away from her. The decision not to sleep with her, even though his body was begging to take the lead like a rambunctious puppy that could only think of gamboling and chewing on everything in sight, was also made with his heart; because he loved her, he didn’t want to sully her with his own base desires. And then there was the part of him, belonging to neither head nor heart, but some unnamed entity, more stubborn and less definable, that didn’t want to be the unloving man that Sikandar Hussein had been to them all. He didn’t want to be the lost man that went from marriage to marriage, unsatisfied with each subsequent reincarnation of the first, best love.

The choice to hate, even though it didn’t feel like a choice, but something that just happened naturally, was also made by the heart. Ali loathed his father with a reflexive kind of hate, born out of the fear that his father did not care for him. Sikandar always told others how much he loved his family, his sons, even his daughter, though Jeandi as a girl was a second-class citizen in her father’s eyes. But Ali couldn’t sense it, nor could Haris. If Sikandar had been like other friends’ parents, who quarreled with their children one minute and then in a tempestuous change of heart showered them with affection the next, Ali might have felt his sincerity. But Sikandar’s departure from their house was the clear evidence pointing to the strength of his detachment.

And the decision to forgive—now that was a decision made by the soul. To forgive his father for his limitations, his weaknesses and vulnerabilities, his inability to show love was a step that Ali was not yet ready for. He could see it waiting for him as part of his future. Someday when he was married and had children of his own, when he lived through the stresses and pressures that a man had to go through in order to feed his family and still remained sane, he would understand, and then perhaps he would know compassion for his father’s flaws. But for now, Ali wanted to run away from having to see his father as fully human.

To declare his father dead was a decision Ali made with heart, mind, and soul.

When Ali arrived home, they were all out of the house: Jeandi at her tuition center, Haris probably ferrying his mother to the supermarket or the doctor’s. Relieved, Ali went to his room and shut the door. He didn’t come out again until the next morning to go to work; he woke long before anyone else was stirring and didn’t bother to eat breakfast before he went.

At the station, things had still not calmed down. Policemen stood menacingly outside the building, and Ali had to push through them to get to the door. They asked for his identification and press card, examined it with sneers, then thrust it back at him and waved him through. Ali noted that the policeman who’d looked at his papers held them upside down while he pretended to read them.

Ameena called him into her office later that morning. She was sitting at her desk and smoking, the ashtray next to her computer filled with cigarette butts from the previous night. The monitors on the wall flashed recent clips they’d filmed of the street protests that had repeatedly occurred since November 3. Ameena’s hair, usually left open to fall around her face, was tied up in a tight ponytail, and she looked tired and grim as she glanced up at Ali from behind her computer screen.

“I want you to go film a lawyer’s protest.”

“When?”

“Saturday. Outside the High Court.”

He hadn’t gone on a film assignment since the bombing in October. He’d been given a week off to recover from the shock, then was restricted to desk work when he’d returned. Overseeing graphics, helping with editing, doing research, making phone calls—all soothing busywork to keep his mind off the void that had opened up in front of him on that night, and to stop him from thinking of Haroon. But Ali saw Haroon everywhere he turned: in the production booth he could see the man lurking in a darkened corner; when he sat down to lunch, Haroon was just leaving the cafeteria, his camera bag slung on his back. Ali once caught Haroon’s face reflected in the bathroom mirror, two halves split by a large crack that had been there for years and that nobody had ever thought to repair.

“Are you up to it?” Ameena was asking him. Ali suddenly felt a rush of appreciation. She wasn’t the hardhearted monster he’d always thought she was. He opened his mouth to tell her about how he was feeling, how Haroon’s ghost was following him everywhere he went, feeding off his guilt and his shame, but she went on before he had a chance to speak. “Because nobody else thinks you are. And I have to say I tend to agree with them. But Kazim said to give you another chance.”

She was acting as if it was his fault that the bombs had gone off! Ali gritted his teeth. “I can do it.”

“All right.” She reached for another cigarette and lit it without even having to shift her glance from the screen. “Don’t get into trouble this time.”

“Thank you.”

Ali seethed through the entire day, stopping numerous times in his work to fire off emails to Jehangir about the webcam plan to humiliate Ameena, wishing he could tell the police that there were dangerous criminals being harbored inside the City24 building, longing to call up the American consulate and say Kazim Mazhar knew where Osama bin Laden was hiding. Jehangir was cautious in his replies; he’d kept his distance from Ali since that day at French Beach, informing him that Masood didn’t want to see him again. “You embarrassed him in front of his guests,
yaar
,” said Jehangir. “You can’t put a man’s
izzat
in the dirt and then expect him to still want to be your friend.”

“The hell with
izzat
,” was Ali’s response.

Jehangir shook his head. “You’ve changed, Ali. You used to understand the way things work around here. Now it’s like you don’t even care.”

“I don’t.”

“But you have to.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You do.”

“Shut up, man.” Ali found himself too exhausted to call Jehangir anything more abusive, in their time-honored tradition. Too much had changed since the last time they’d traded their friendly insults.

Jehangir didn’t retort with a curse, either. He just stared at Ali with wounded eyes and walked away. Ali swore at him as he disappeared into the conference room, but Jehangir was right: he
had
changed. He no longer wanted to play this game, take part in the etiquette of hypocrisy, where people met and exchanged all the right courtesies, then backstabbed each other with glee. He didn’t want to meet an acquaintance at a wedding and greet him with “
Yaar,
how are you? It’s been ages! We must meet up!” and then after a year, meet again at another wedding and do it all over again. He wanted to burn all the insincerity and showing off and meaninglessness out of his life until only what was true and meaningful was left. He didn’t mind if he lost his so-called friends. As long as he had Sunita’s support, he could start over again and befriend people whose lives he would be happy to live.