A Season for Martyrs: A Novel (23 page)

“Do you play chess?”

“Sir?”

“Chess, boy, chess. The prisoner wants to play. You’re the only one here that knows how.” Ahmed shivered; he knew the jail’s spies were everywhere, but he hadn’t expected them to waste their time on someone as unimportant as him …

And from the depths of the Death Cell, Ahmed heard a man’s voice.
Jailer, come and play a game of chess with me
.

Shatranj
. The Game of Kings: Ahmed had no choice but to obey. Somehow he felt as though he had turned into one of the Pir’s
murids
and had to follow him until the end. The door of the cell was unlocked and hands on his back pushed him through. He stood there, knees knocking, hands trembling, his mouth dry and dull as cotton. The whispers behind him were snakes whipping at his ankles.

The man sat half shrouded in shadows in front of a chess set that had been hurriedly produced from somewhere; the pieces were set up clumsily. Pir Pagaro was slowly aligning them, centering each piece in the middle of each square.

“Come, jailer. Sit down.”

Ahmed knew of men who would not sit in this man’s presence. They knew the secret codes, the words of obeisance, the proper ways in which to show their devotion to him. But Ahmed was like a huge, clumsy child, all awkward arms and legs, in front of a giant. His heart was beating so hard he could feel it pounding in his throat. And yet somehow he managed to seat himself opposite the man and compose himself.

“Take off your mask, jailer. Let me see your face.”

Ahmed’s fingers reached up and pulled down his cloth. He felt no fear, no hesitation. There could only be protection in this man’s presence.

“So. A young boy doing a man’s job. You are not much older than my sons. Let us play.”

Ahmed had been told by Sultan and Allah Bachayo that his gift at chess was his ability to play like a virtuoso at his instrument, transcending the immediacy of the moment to think and feel as though he were one with the board and the pieces of war. He had surpassed his masters’ abilities long ago, and had synthesized their knowledge with his own talent and intuition. He had beaten scores of men at the café, and people knew him both by name and reputation. And yet for every move he made on the chessboard, Pir Pagaro was three moves ahead of him.

The young man tried to forget his fear as he examined the board more carefully than he had ever studied any schoolbook, calculating the value of the pieces on the board, analyzing the groups of squares, working out strategies to gain control of the game. He knew better than to let the Pir win on this night. Again and again he brought his major pieces to the center of the board, only to have Pir Pagaro entice him away from the vital squares, attacking his positions effortlessly with bishop and knight while keeping his king protected in the corner by his pawns.

The Pir laid traps for Ahmed, fought out of impossible corners with only a few pieces, executed complicated strategies that left Ahmed gasping with admiration. Game after game ended with the same word, softly uttered by the man who had driven the British to despair.
Checkmate. Checkmate. Checkmate.
Ahmed lost track of the number of times he heard that word in that long night, the smoke from the Pir’s cigarettes creating a fog around them both, making them appear to Omar Bachani and the other men who spied on them as if they were figures from another world.

The British had spread rumors that the Pir was a monster—they spoke openly of his warped mentality, that he had the vacant stare of a madman. Ahmed knew that they only talked of him in this way because he had gone from being a valuable asset to a dangerous foe. Angel or demon, ally or enemy—Ahmed saw only a man in front of him, utterly absorbed in the game, joyful in victory, fearless in the face of death because he was supreme in the confidence that he could never die.

The game went on, end and beginning losing all meaning; it was one long tournament that seemed to last from sunset to sunrise. As a last resort, Ahmed decided to try the strategy of passed pawns, creating a complicated skeleton across the board, but the Pir created so many holes in the chain that in the endgame, he could bring out his king and move it to the center of the board. From there, it became the strongest piece in the whole game, threatening all Ahmed’s other pieces until Ahmed threw up his hands in defeat and the Pir, without a word, began to set the pieces again in their starting positions, a slight glint of amusement illuminating his darkened eyes.

As dawn approached, the Pir’s hand did not tremble; his eyes did not grow weary. But he became more and more withdrawn, pulling away from the earth, disengaging from its gravity. Ahmed could see it happening in front of his very eyes; his skin grew more translucent, his breaths longer and less frequent. If Ahmed reached out and placed his fingers on the man’s wrist, he was sure the Pir’s heartbeat would be the slow beating of a kettledrum, not the brisk beats of tom-tom and cymbals that were crashing in Ahmed’s own chest.

They finished the game they were playing; Ahmed losing both rooks and then his queen in rapid succession to the Pir’s elusive bishop. And then when the outcome was evident, the Pir, instead of announcing his checkmate, pushed his chair away from the board and slowly stood up. Ahmed could hear the rattling of the bars as Omar Bachani opened the locks, heard the murmurs of the British officers waiting to see the Pir escorted to the gallows. Ahmed wanted to weep, to shout, to rush forward and embrace the Pir, protect him from their bullets and their nooses. But he was paralyzed; he could only watch as the Pir slowly cleared all the chess pieces from the board, leaving it an empty battlefield without even the corpses of war left to keep the ground warm.

Then the Pir extinguished his last cigarette and turned to face the English man, a colonel of the British Army, who had come into the cell.

“Colonel Young,” the Pir said, his deep baritone heavy with cigarette smoke.

“Your Excellency,” replied the colonel. He, too, was a young man, with sandy blond hair and a sweeping mustache; Ahmed shrank back into a corner of the cell and kept his head bowed, biting hard on his lips to keep them from parting and betraying him to the two men.

“They are safe?”

“I have seen to it. They have been sent on to London. They will be taken care of as wards of the court.”

“I thank you for your assistance.”

The colonel bowed his head. “It is time.”

The Pir glanced back at Ahmed Damani. The faintest hint of a smile appeared at the corners of the Pir’s lips, lifting his mustache slightly. He looked like a man who was unafraid, and instead, amused at the vagaries of life, the unexpected destination to which fate had brought him. “A worthy opponent,” he said to Ahmed. “A boy, but a worthy opponent.” He turned and nodded at the colonel, then walked out of the cell unaided, past the rows of men who flanked the corridors to watch him go. Ahmed brought his sleeve to his eyes and wept then, brokenhearted, until his eyes grew bloodshot and his head grew too heavy to keep it lifted.

The Pir was thirty-four years old.

December 17, 2007

ISLAMABAD

Ali and his friends were gathered outside Aapbara Chowk, shivering a little in the breeze. It was early afternoon, not the coldest time of the day for Islamabad, but the enormity of what they were about to do made them all feel the fear as a chill deep in their chests. He glanced around at Salma, who kept the ends of her shawl wrapped up around her cheeks, and gave her a cheery thumbs-up. She rolled her eyes back at him.

Salma had flown up to Islamabad with the rest of the activists, on this trip that Bilal, Imran, and Ferzana had organized, arranging for the Karachi activists to join the march supporting the deposed chief justice. She’d lied to her parents that she’d been asked to participate in a special medical conference for students.
A great honor,
she’d told them;
you can’t let me miss this opportunity
. They’d relented, moved by the sincerity in her voice, she told Ali on the flight up to Islamabad.

“I feel so guilty lying to them …” She bit her lip, staring out of the plane window, as if she could see her parents’ reproachful faces reflected in the pane of Plexiglas, or in the shapes of the towering clouds beyond.

“You’re doing something really important, Salma,” said Ali.

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“Well, my moth—my parents wouldn’t like it, either. So don’t feel so bad.”

“Really?”

“No way. I didn’t even tell my father …” The word had come out unbidden; Ali blinked at his own mistake. This was the first time in years he’d spoken of his father truthfully. He looked away, overwhelmed for a moment with the futility of all the lies.

“Wow …” Salma’s eyes were wide with wonder.

“What?”

“Well, you’re so much older than me. I always thought that when I was thirty, nobody would be able to tell me what to do. Or that I wouldn’t care what they thought of me by then …”

Ali opened his mouth to protest at Salma's having added five years onto his age, but then he saw she was smiling impishly, her cheeks dimpling on both sides. Reminded of his sister Jeandi, he sent up a small prayer that she would grow up one day into a young woman as brave as this one. “At this age, if your parents don’t like what you’re doing, you’re probably doing the right thing.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

Before coming to Islamabad this time, he’d told his mother his plans; he had to stop being controlled by her disapproval, or her fear. She had looked at him wearily when he said he was flying out to Islamabad to take part in the demonstration. “I suppose you’ll be covering it for work,” she said.

“No,” Ali had said. “I’ve taken an indefinite leave of absence.”

“What does that mean? You’ve quit?”

Not yet,
Ali could have said. Or,
it’s only temporary
. “For the time being. I just want to see what my options are.” She would not understand that he had to leave City24 because of his desire to be more than just an observer to the events that were taking place around them. He didn’t want to chronicle them: he wanted to live them. Nor would she ever appreciate that he had grown weary, after twenty-five years, of being only a participant in his own life. He needed, at last, to be its arbiter.

“And you’ve got exams to study for,” his mother had added, after a long pause in which he looked away while she studied him as though it were the first time she’d ever set eyes on him.

Ali had repeated halfheartedly, “Yes. I’ve got exams to study for.” His exams had finished the day before the demonstration, but he had no idea how he’d done. He’d already failed one class; he’d have to repeat it again the following term. But even the classroom had lost its appeal, compared to what he was learning every time he went out onto the streets to protest with the People’s Resistance.

Ali had noticed, as if for the first time, the lines around his mother’s eyes and nose, the gray in her hair, the veins bulging from the backs of her thin hands. She’d been through enough, he decided. There were people who derived their strength from being angry all the time, from holding grudges, and nursing grievances. Ali was discovering for himself the possibility that real strength might actually come from generosity and tolerance; he no longer wanted to be the kind of person who thought of compassion as a weakness, forgiveness as foolishness. He wanted to forgive his mother for not being able to understand him. For not being able to talk to him, or listen to him when he was the one who needed to communicate. And even for accepting so passively the treatment she’d received from his father. By putting down the burden of his anger at her for being only what she was, he would be freeing himself.

He had reached forward and hugged her unexpectedly. “What are you doing, Ali?” she said, bewildered, trying to push him away, then surrendering to the strength of his embrace.

“I don’t know, Ama.” But he’d been surprised to realize how good it felt; that home would always be the feel of his mother’s arms around him.

Ali’s thoughts then drifted back to his last day at work. He’d left the City24 News building early in the evening—the first time he’d quit the office before 7 p.m. any time in the last year. He carried his personal belongings in a flimsy box, hoisting it high and stretching his arms underneath to hold it closed. Just as he thought the box would spill all its contents on the road, he’d spotted Jehangir rounding the corner of the building, talking on his mobile phone and gesticulating energetically in the air. Ali set the box down on the ground and waited for Jehangir to approach him.

They hadn’t spoken since the day they’d betrayed each other in front of Ameena; they’d avoided each other in the office and maintained no contact outside. Ameena had never mentioned the conversation to either of them, but she had subtly started to pay more attention to Ali, while discounting Jehangir’s contributions at work. Every time she called Ali into her office to discuss the People’s Resistance movement, Ali wanted to make an excuse and run in the other direction, but he suppressed his discomfort and went to her office, a pleasant smile nailed onto his face. Jehangir always glanced away when Ali came out. Ali often escaped to the bathroom and locked himself in a stall, kneeling in front of the toilet and trying to retch out all the anxiety and stress festering in the pit of his stomach. Finally, it all grew too much, and Ali had walked into Ameena’s office that afternoon and resigned.

She’d stared at him, her fingers steepled in front of her face. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t be so hasty. I’m not letting you go that easily. Take a leave of absence. Take as much time as you need. But I’m going to call you one of these days, and you have to come back.”

Ali had left her office, grateful that at least she hadn’t said anything about his father or his family. He hoped he would never have to see her again.

When Jehangir had spotted Ali, he stopped in his tracks and slowly switched his phone off. He came forward, stopped, took another step, then came to a halt a few feet away from Ali, the box between them marking an invisible boundary line. The cars and buses passed on the busy street; the men pouring out of the building’s large double glass doors stepped around them like water flowing around a small island in the middle of a river.