A Season for Martyrs: A Novel (9 page)

He found Ram and they walked for a mile, away from the crush, holding hands. A doctor glanced at them as he ran by; they were covered in soot and grime but no blood, so he decided that they didn’t need his help, even though Ali wanted to reach out and clutch at him as if he were a plank of wood and Ali a drowning man in the middle of a swirling river. Ali and Ram walked and walked, not saying a word, just wanting to put distance between them and the terrible thing they had just seen. They didn’t talk about Haroon, they didn’t know what to do, because he had vanished and there was no way they could find him in the darkness and the confusion. In those moments they were as lost as he was; the only difference was that they would come back eventually and he never would.

“So did they, Adda?”

“Did they what?”

“Turn off the lights?”

Ali wanted to reach around and slap Haris. Instead, he frowned and reached for the remote, switching off the television, ignoring the shocked looks of his mother and sister, the open-mouthed idiocy of Haris’s face. “I don’t know what she’s talking about. They didn’t turn off any lights. She’s a bloody liar.”

And now Benazir had gone to Dubai for a few days to see her mother, who they said was dying of Alzheimer’s. It was only an hour and a half by plane; she could go and come in a day if she wanted to. Everyone was saying that she’d been frightened by the attempt on her life, that she wouldn’t return. The president and his cronies were overjoyed with what they thought was their victory over her, contradicting all their statements that they’d had nothing to do with the bombings. They’d warned her not to come, they said. Something like this was bound to happen.

“And how would they know that unless they’d planned it themselves?” Sunita said to Ali, echoing what everyone was saying in the streets, in offices everywhere, in drawing rooms all over the country.

But Ali was tired of talking about it, of thinking about it. It was like being lectured nonstop by his father. He glanced back at the beach hut, thinking that they should probably get back, that people would wonder where they were and would think the worst, naturally. “We should get back—” He stopped in mid-sentence.

“What is it, Ali?” Sunita followed his line of vision, then gasped and took hold of his arm.

A crowd of men had surrounded the beach hut: fifteen or twenty men from the nearby village, dressed in shabby clothes, doing nothing but standing and staring twenty feet away from the area where the foreigners were lying on the sun loungers. The women were jumping up, grabbing towels to cover themselves, their husbands putting down their bottles of beer and trying to stand protectively in front of them. The fishermen were not approaching or retreating, just standing there and fixing them with their piercing eyes set deep in their weather-beaten faces.

Masood came out of the beach hut, gesticulating and shouting angrily at the men, but they were unmoved by his hysteria. He ran around to the front of the house, and returned a moment later with two security guards, who waved their guns and made menacing gestures at the crowd. Only then did they begin to disperse, streaming away from the hut like the tide drawing back from the shoreline, hissing and frothing as it receded.

Sunita and Ali waited till the men had completely disappeared before attempting to make their way back, Sunita walking behind him as they approached the hut. “What happened?” Ali called out to Masood, who was still standing outside, his face contorted with anger.

“
Yaar,
I don’t know,” he answered back in Urdu, so that the foreigners wouldn’t understand him. “They were saying something about money, some kind of tax, they were saying, for using ‘their’ beach. Bastards.”

“Did you pay them?”

“Of course not! What do you think I am? This beach doesn’t belong to them. It’s my hut; it’s been my family’s hut for twenty years. We got rid of them, though. My security is the best.”

They glanced at the foreigners, who looked white and shaken. Sunita, too, was scared. Her family had no idea she was out here with Ali; they’d been told she was spending the day with a girlfriend, the mall, a movie, having ice cream. It would be very bad for her to be caught up in any kind of scene. He wanted to hug her close, reassure her that he would look after her, but they never showed any physical affection in front of other people, whether friends or foreigners.

The tension began to dissipate; Masood handed beers around to everyone, clapping the men on the backs, assuring everyone that there was nothing to worry about, that they were just some pesky locals who’d wanted some money, and he’d taken care of things. The Pakistanis remained unfazed; nothing bothered them much, coddled as they were in the arms of affluence and laziness. The foreigners, too, began to relax, taking their places on the sun loungers again. Sunita and Ali stayed outside, but decided not to wander too far away this time. They sat down on the stairs behind a little concrete partition and looked out at the waves, trying to regain that feeling of peace they’d captured out on the rocks.

The Scottish woman in the bikini was already lying back on her beach chair, her face reddened from the sun, an unsightly constellation of freckles splashed across her chest. If she pulled the top of her bikini down, Ali knew he would see the freckles dotting her breasts. Next to her was an Englishwoman whom he recognized from a television show on a rival channel. She hosted some women’s show, though Ali couldn’t remember her name. “Well, that was a little boring, wasn’t it?” the Englishwoman said laughing to nobody in particular; she was sitting up, tense, her arms crossed around her knees, glancing fearfully behind her; Ali guessed that she was afraid that the men were terrorists or religious fundamentalists out to kidnap and kill a few foreigners, even though that was hardly likely to happen here.

“Our host—what’s his name?—said that they were from a fishing village nearby,” said an Italian woman, nodding in the direction of the dirt road and the settlements beyond.

“Och, don’t worry about it. I’ve seen this before,” replied the Scottish woman breezily. “Whenever we’re out on the beach, the natives gather around to see what they can see.” She shifted her hips and ran her fingers under her buttocks to loosen the fabric from the space between them, winking at her companions and jiggling a little to make her point.

Suddenly, a red-hot fire flared up in Ali. Before he knew what he was doing, he was on his feet lumbering toward them. Sunita pulled at his arm but he shrugged her off. The women glanced up as he stood in front of them, the bottle of beer clutched tight in his hand. Later they would say he was drunk, that he wasn’t in control of himself, but at that moment Ali was the most sober he’d been in his entire life.

He said, very coldly, “Actually, they wanted to come and get a good look at your tits.”

Their gasps were like the sound a pillow made when you hit it hard with the flat of your hand, the soft foam harboring pockets of air that could only be released with a physical blow.

“And your ass. Putting it on display for them like that, I’m not surprised.”

The Scottish woman grabbed her towel once again and made to cover herself. Her husband, dozing on the chair next to her, shook himself awake. “What?”

“But you have to excuse them. They’re only
natives,
they don’t know any better, so when they see a white woman naked in front of them, what do you expect they’re going to do?”

Ali threw the beer bottle onto the stairs. It shattered cruelly, spraying glass and foaming beer everywhere. Ignoring their cries, he stalked inside, Sunita following him, tearful horror written all over her face. Ali found Masood and told him that he was leaving, not bothering to answer any of his questions. He strode out to the car, got inside, and put the key in the ignition. Sunita climbed into the passenger seat, her shoulders shaking. Masood was standing in the door of the hut, staring at Ali as if he’d gone crazy. Maybe he had. Maybe when you were in a bombing and your friend died in front of your eyes, something shook loose inside you, never to be fixed again.

Ali punched the accelerator and backed out of the driveway. He turned on to the dirt road, where some of the fishermen who’d stalked Masood’s beach hut lived in thatched cottages just across from the luxurious beach huts that cost more than they could earn in an entire lifetime. There was a small green shrine in the distance, its flags fluttering in tribute to some long-dead saint. Sunita cried softly beside him all the way home.

Ali dropped her off at her friend’s house and drove home in the ugly traffic of a late Saturday night. Everything sickened him: the unruly lines of cars and buses, the beggars scrambling for a few rupees, the policemen doing nothing to control anybody, the smog hanging around the road like a thick orange blanket. His head was pounding from the sun and the beers. He wanted to go home and go to sleep.

When Ali reached his house, everyone was huddled on the couch in front of the television as usual, watching the news. His mother shushed him before he could even ask what was going on. He sat next to Jeandi at the end of the sofa and whispered in her ear, “What is it?”

Jeandi was twelve and idolized Ali. She put her arms around his neck and whispered back, “It’s an emergency!” Her breath was fruity with some candy she’d been chewing on, orange or lemon boiled sweets from a tin. Ali hoped she couldn’t smell the alcohol on his breath. He fixed his gaze on the screen and listened.

“If you’re just joining us,” said the woman on the BBC, “Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf has declared emergency rule and suspended the country’s constitution. Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry has been replaced and the Supreme Court has been surrounded by troops, who have also entered state-run TV and radio stations. The moves come as the Supreme Court was due to rule on the legality of General Musharraf’s October election victory.”

Haris looked at Ali, clearly triumphant about knowing something before his older brother. “Benazir’s coming back to Karachi.”

“So what?” Ali stood up. “I don’t care.”

“Sit down,” said his mother. “Musharraf’s going to address the nation any minute.”

“I don’t care,” he repeated. “I don’t want to listen to what any of these bastards have to say. I’m going to bed.”

To his surprise, his mother said, “Well, if you don’t care about anything that’s happening in our country, maybe that letter that came for you today will be more interesting to you.”

She pointed to the bureau against the wall. Haris and Jeandi followed Ali with their eyes as he walked over to the bureau and saw the envelope with the official seal of the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad on it, addressed to him. The letter had already been opened, but it was useless to cry out about the violation of his privacy. There was no constitutional law that said your parents weren’t allowed to open your mail; and even if there had ever been, it was suspended now, along with the rest of the constitution.

Ali took out the letter, affecting a nonchalance he did not feel. The letter informed him that his application for a U.S. student visa had been approved for the next stage: his interview at the U.S. Embassy was scheduled for Monday, November 12, 2007.

The Gift

THE
INDUS
DELTA
, 1827

Jeandal Shah recited the name of Allah that guaranteed victory over one’s enemies:
Ya Fattah, Ya Fattah, Ya Fattah,
in time to the urgent gallop of his steed’s hooves, as he raced down the bank of the Indus River. He only had a few moments to catch Alexander Burnes before the man sailed up the river in the galley that was anchored in the Indus Delta, ready to go all the way to Lahore. And if Jeandal Shah failed to do that, then all was lost, and Sindh was surely destroyed.

It had all started when the British political assistant in Sindh had claimed he was taking a gift of horses from his king, William IV, to Ranjeet Singh, the maharaja of the Punjab. The horses, he’d said, could not survive the journey overland and had to go by water. Burnes made his appeal through the official channels of the Talpur court, and if the Mir of Talpur had been paying full attention, he would never have permitted the British man to go ahead with his plan. But the Mir was distracted by his woes: trouble with his youngest wife, Raaniya Bibi. And, somehow, Alexander Burnes—no doubt with the help of heavy bribes as well as honeyed words—was given permission to proceed up the river in March.

Unlike most of her contemporaries, Raaniya Bibi was educated, and could read and write Persian, Arabic, and Sindhi; nobody outside the Mir’s family had laid eyes on her and yet tales of her beauty had spread far and wide across the land. She was fond, it was said, of alcohol, and this made her prone to laughing and joking, rather than behaving with the strict formality her position called for. And a courtier had whispered in the Mir’s ear that she was having an affair with a member of the court: perhaps even Jeandal Shah himself, though this was surely a rumor designed only to remove Jeandal Shah from the list of the Mir’s favored courtiers …

When Jeandal Shah heard that the ship had reached the Hujamree, one of the central mouths of the Indus, he knew that the horses were only a pretext; the real reason this British man and his band of spying, lying thieves had come to Sindh was to survey the Indus River. In this manner they would discover the forts all along the Indus and the numbers of men they contained, as well as their vulnerabilities, and the terrain that surrounded them. Then they would prepare their plans to invade Sindh, which the grasping and ambitious chairman of the East India Company, Lord Ellenborough, had decided was of enormous political and economic interest to their infidel empire.

Jeandal Shah had tried to alert the Mir, but the courtiers saw to it that he could not approach the
gaddi
that day, nor in the days that followed. Even though Jeandal Shah was Matiari’s representative to the Talpur court and had been given a vast tract of land, paying the rightful amount of revenue and thus holding an important seat in the royal
darbar
.