A Season for Martyrs: A Novel (32 page)

The speaker raised his hands, until the noise died down. “All you have to do is let me into your home and your heart. I promise I will never let you down. I am a simple man, not the great magician that everyone says I am, but if you do not forget me, I will never forget you …”

The street theater was proving to be a great success: a few members of the People’s Resistance were performing a skit they’d written called
Jadugar,
about a magician who persuaded a poor family to let him stay in their house, eating all their food in return for a few extravagant promises. This was the third performance they’d put on that afternoon on the long Seaview road, which ran all the way down Clifton Beach. After receiving a text message about the show, Ali made his way to the beach at five in the evening, and was standing in the audience now, enjoying the crisp winter air, the caressing breeze of the Arabian Sea, the water flat and blue like a mirror laid on the sand, reflecting only milky wisps of clouds scattered here and there in the sky.

Ali turned away from the impromptu stage to observe the people who’d gathered around: young men in
shalwar kameezes,
cheap shirts and trousers and baseball caps; five or six women; and a dozen giggling children standing in the front row with their hands in their mouths. The actor playing the magician wore a black
shalwar kameez
and a cape, with an impressive head of long hair and a matching beard; when he came close, the children drew back, eyes wide, fearful that he might actually cast a spell on them. The men, who knew better, went along with the spirit of the performance, calling out to the poor family, warning them that the magician was up to no good, while the few women in the audience said nothing with their mouths but everything with their eyes, lively and amused in their otherwise serious faces.

It didn’t hurt so much to turn his head anymore; Ali’s bruises were healing nicely, although his fingers still hurt when he tried to pick up even the lightest object in his hands, refusing to bend and paining him during the night, especially when it was cold. On landing in Karachi, Ali’s father had taken him straight to the emergency room at the Aga Khan Hospital, where a sleepy intern examined Ali and ordered a few X-rays to find out the extent of the damage.

Ali and his father sat in silence, side by side on a row of hard plastic chairs in the waiting room. The bumping of the plane’s wheels on the runway had ended their brief interlude; now again they fell into a companionable silence. Ali’s father stretched out his legs and leaned his head back against the wall, closing his eyes: it was three o’clock in the morning. But Ali’s mind began to stir, like a restless dog, and was soon flooded with thoughts of Salma, here in the clinic that she’d described so often to him, where she underwent the torture of her lectures and rotations. He rang her phone several times, then Ferzana, Bilal, and Imran: no reply. Frantically, he began to send out text messages with his good hand.

“Who are you messaging?” Ali’s father asked.

“A few friends who were with me at the march.”

“Ah.”

Just then the intern reappeared with Ali’s X-rays: he summoned them into the examining room to tell them that there was no permanent damage, but two fingers were broken and had to be padded in a splint, and Ali needed bandaging around a cracked rib and a stitch just under his eye, which would leave a small scar. “It will make you more attractive to the ladies,” the intern said, as he poked around with a needle and surgical thread, while Ali’s father watched with a frown as Ali tried not to wince at the doctor’s ministrations.

The car ride from the hospital to Ali’s house took less than ten minutes. The driver navigated the darkened streets, while they sat in the back, each encased in his own world of private thoughts and silent regret. Ali knew by now that his father held many sorrows about the events of the past. And he was just like his father: suspended in the amber of his mistakes, nursing the wounds he had sustained in the trauma of separation. All this time, Ali and his father had been longing for each other, hurt and grieving in isolation. That they had reconnected now, and managed to show each other the depth of their pain, was a possibility too momentous for Ali to contemplate.

Suddenly, Ali’s mobile phone beeped. He glanced at the screen: it was a message from Ferzana.

Released just now. Coming home tomorrow. Salma with me. Imran & Bilal still in jail.

Ali quickly sent back a reply:
Thank God. R u ok?

After a minute, the phone beeped another affirmation.
We r ok.

He let out a long, shuddering sigh, and then the tears broke through the fog in his mind that had been holding them back all day. He wanted to press his fingers in the corners of his eyes to stop them, but the stitches were in the way, so he let them pour out over the wound on his eye, stinging him as the salt seeped into the stitches, and he raised his arm and wiped his sleeve on his face.

Ali’s father was alarmed. “
Khariyat?
”

“It’s … it’s okay. They’re all right. I was really worried … there’s this girl, a friend, really young, and … she got arrested, and I was scared about what might have happened to her.” He could hardly get the words out. The sobs caught in his throat and he had to swallow hard to push them back down. And then, to his surprise, he felt his father pat his arm gently.

“
Bas, put
… Enough, son. Don’t cry. Come on, everything is all right.”

Ali resisted the urge to lean into his father’s embrace. But he managed, somehow, to stop crying, and when his father offered him a clean starched handkerchief from somewhere in his pocket, Ali took it gratefully and wiped his face, dabbing carefully around the cut beneath his eye, before giving it back to his father. “Here … thanks.”

“Keep it.”

They were outside Ali’s house now, and the driver was holding the car door open for him. Ali put one foot on the ground; half in and half out of the car, he tried to turn back to look at his father, but the movement sent a wrenching pain around his waist and up his back. With difficulty he planted his other foot outside and heaved himself up to a standing position. Like a man in a suit of armor, he turned so that his whole body faced his father, still seated in the car. “I’m going now.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“You don’t have to.” The response was automatic, proof that his defenses were still active, still second nature. He already needed to ward off the rejection that he was sure would come tomorrow. He had spent too many years of his life waiting by the phone, looking down the driveway, standing trembling in the doorway of his father’s room, his childish schoolwork in his hands. He was almost superstitious about it by now:
think no thoughts of your father, push his image from your mind, because he’ll know you want him, and then he won’t come.

A shrug of the shoulders, a hand through the hair that had once been generous but was now receding and grayed. “Well, you know where I am. If you need anything.”

Ali nodded.
I don’t need anything,
he wanted to say to his father.
I haven’t needed anything for years
. And then he closed his eyes and saw Haroon’s face, his friend, his brother, who had died without being able to say goodbye to his father. The pain in Haroon’s father’s eyes when he’d come to the office, searching for the remains—the remnants—of the boy in whom he’d invested his hopes, his dreams.

“Thank you, Baba Saeen.” Until the other day, he hadn’t uttered the endearment in years, but now he was using it as he always had when he was young. Was there love behind the name anymore? Or just respect, an acknowledgment of what his father had done for Ali tonight? He didn’t know. He would never know. But he would remember what there had been, once upon a time. Ali would know forever, because of what his father had done for him tonight, that once, a long time ago, he had been loved.

And just maybe there was still some of that love left for him. He didn’t want to dwell on the thought, but if the chance was there, then he’d have something to hold on to when he had to face the next day, and the next, and all the difficult ones after that.

As the driver closed the car door, Ali thought he heard Sikandar say one last thing before the engine started and the car pulled away into the night.

“Give my
salaams
to your mother.”

The magician had by now moved into the poor family’s home, but was eating up all their food, taking up their valuable space. He wore a green cap and a comfortable brown housecoat and lolled on a chair, reading a newspaper upside down, while the family members squatted on the ground in front of him.

The head of the family said, “We’ve done everything you asked. You said we’d have more food, better housing, better jobs if we let you stay. Now it’s your turn!”

The magician put down his newspaper and looked down his nose at the man and his wife and daughter. “You still need to do more. You must keep some fierce dogs to protect yourself, and make the walls of your house higher. Only then can I bring richness into your house, because then it will be properly protected!”

“We can’t afford that. You’ve been here for months, my mother has died, and my young son is still unemployed! It’s time for you to deliver on your promises!”

The actors playing the family looked into the audience, holding their hands up helplessly. “What should we do, friends?”

The crowd began to call out: “Kick him out! Get rid of him! Send him away!” Nobody was naïve enough to believe that the play was only about a magician and a poor family, even the children. Some of the men in the crowd were muttering to each other about the president and other unpopular politicians who had also outstayed their welcome. Ali grinned at the curses heaped upon their heads. After eight years of dictatorship, they had gained nothing, despite the extravagant promises, the dreams of a prosperous future that the power-mongers had guaranteed would someday turn into reality. Their leaders were like an artist standing in front of a blank canvas and telling them the beautiful painting he would create, if only they supplied him with the right kind of paint; they knew full well that they had been duped, and that the masterpiece would never be completed.

“Throw him out!”

“We’ve had enough of these looters, these plunderers!”

“They can go to hell!”

Ali, too, called out, enjoying the feeling of being able to vocalize his displeasure. Frustration and anger were written large on everyone’s faces; why else did people misbehave the way they did on the streets of Karachi, driving like maniacs, littering the streets, defacing property? Because nobody cared. The country and its people were a whore to be used violently and greedily until the users were spent and exhausted and could grab and take no more. And they would be forced to give and give and give, for generations, not able to lift their heads or think of anything beyond daily survival. It was the quickest and surest way to destroy a nation, poison its people, shatter a land into pieces that could never be put together again.

Ali’s mobile phone beeped in his hand. He looked down; he didn’t recognize the number. He put his free hand over his ear and pressed the phone to the other ear.

“Hello?”

“Where are you?” It was a female voice, a soft voice that made his heart hammer frantically inside his chest like a moth beating against a lit window.

“Sunita?”

“It’s me, Ali. Where are you?”

“Uh … I’m at Seaview … where are you?” His hands grew clammy, even though the day was cool and dry. “Are you at college?”

“Put your hand up and wave so I can see you. I’m in the crowd, I just can’t see where you are.”

Ali turned around, but his vision failed him, and the faces surrounding him melted and blurred into one indecipherable mass. He blinked his eyes over and over again, trying to find the one face that he’d been looking for, all these days and weeks. He put his hand up in the air and searched desperately for that dark hair, those doe eyes, the tea-colored skin that he missed as much as the gentle laugh, the teasing smile, and the generous warmth of the girl he loved.

Sunita.

She was standing there, having somehow materialized behind him. She wore a dress in a wine-red color, one that he hadn’t seen before. It gave her skin an added luster, brought out new highlights in her hair. Weeks had gone by since he’d seen her last; perhaps she had a whole new wardrobe by now, a new boyfriend, a new life. She looked healthy and well, but there was surprise on her face. She reached out for him and touched the scar under his eye. “Does it hurt?”

“No.” He knew she’d want to know how it happened. “It’s a long story …”

“Did they do that to you on the march?”

It was his turn to be shocked. “How did you know?”

She smiled crookedly, then moved her hand from his face to cover her mouth. “Don’t you know? You’re a TV star. It was on the news. I didn’t see it, but Jehangir called me and said that you’d been arrested.” He held up his hand for her, and her eyes widened at the bandage around the two fingers of his left hand. “Are you all right?”

“Let’s go sit down over there.” He led her to a bench, away from the crowd. She followed him, and they sat side by side. Ali wanted to stare at her, to fill his eyes with her beauty. But he was suddenly embarrassed, and instead gazed out to the sea, where a trawler was crossing the horizon, just west of Manora Island. He’d been to that island once on a navy boat, a long-forgotten picnic from his childhood, where he and his brother and their friends for that day had played around the lighthouse and watched the boats ferrying people to and from their jobs on the mainland. Karachi from that distance looked like a different place, the white buildings stretching on the gentle curve all the way from the West Wharf to Seaview, where they were now. Maybe some children right at this moment were on that island, looking at the city that had morphed and grown into something gigantic, something beyond anyone’s control.

“My father took us to Manora once, on a picnic,” Ali said. He’d never been able to tell her the truth about his father; she thought he had died five years ago. She’d believed the lies he’d told her, just like everyone else. He took a deep breath. “My father … he came to get me out of jail after the march. I got arrested. Beaten up. I don’t know what they would have done to me if he hadn’t come. Two of my friends are still in detention up there.”