Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (64 page)

After five years he married, and then, like his father, he gave up the security of his job and became self-employed. He did so at a bad time. Karachi had grown and grown since independence; it had received immigrants
from India and from all parts of Pakistan; and now the Sindhi-Punjabi-mohajir tensions were about to turn nasty.

In January 1987, less than four years after he had married, Salman and his wife lost all their money. A friend had told them that at their stage in life they should be thinking of the future and making some investments. They had put their money in different investment companies; they had been careful, as they thought, to spread the risks; but one day all the companies just vanished. The friend had persuaded them to invest in a company run by missionary mullahs. These mullahs were not militant; they wanted only to make Muslims good, to bring strayers back into the fold, and to win fresh converts. The friend said to Salman and his wife, “You may not have faith, but this is the only company that’s truly reliable.” That was where most of Salman’s money and his wife’s money went.

This tragedy was matched by the tragedy of the streets. “Things were getting bad in Karachi and Sindh during this time. Between 1987 and 1989 this terrible thing began to happen in Karachi. A solitary pedestrian at night would be approached from behind by a motorcyclist and stabbed in the back. There must have been fifty or a hundred-odd cases. They would happen once every week or so. Just an isolated incident somewhere. I do not recall reading anywhere that any one stabber had been apprehended. I was getting more and more upset about it.

“In July 1987 this incident happened. I had to drive my wife to the airport at two in the morning. On the way back I ran out of petrol. I knew there wasn’t enough when I started, but I thought I would buy at one of the many points. This was a city that never really slept. But every single petrol station was closed for fear of armed robberies. I took my wife to the airport. My petrol was now very low. On the way back, about two kilometers from home, the car stopped. It would have been just after two in the morning. So I parked the car and started walking.

“I have never felt such a raging fear—it was surging inside me. I still very distinctly remember looking at the walls at the side of the road to see which one was easier to jump over, and escape, in case I was attacked. And then I heard this motorcyclist coming up from far behind.
Put-put-put.
I was utterly and completely terrified. And in this scramble of thoughts the only thing I remember was this desire to escape, to go over a wall. I don’t know what kept me there. And the
put-put-put
came nearer. I looked back. He was a lone rider. The attackers were always two. So I knew he wasn’t one. But still the fear was real. I stopped walking. And he came
put-put-put.
He said, ‘What are you doing on the street at this time? Don’t you know it’s
dangerous?’ I told him. He asked where I was going. When I told him he said, ‘Get on, I will drive you home.’ He was an Urdu-speaking man. I laughed and asked him, ‘You said it’s dangerous. What are you doing on the street?’ He said, ‘I’m on the way to the Indian consulate, to be first in line for the visa.’ Just after two in the morning. That is what people had to do. He must have had relations in India. He was going visiting. He wasn’t getting away from the danger.”

Salman and his wife had been playing with the idea of leaving Karachi and going back to Lahore. This experience decided him. Later that morning he telephoned his wife and said, “We really have to get away.”

“It wasn’t really fear. Fear for my own life. It was the sorrow of living in an unjust, cruel society. Everything was collapsing. It’s as though those poor people who died in Jalandhar died in vain. Why should my aunts and grandparents have to pay with their lives—for nothing? There was no bitterness. Just a sense of the unfairness in it all.”

About six months after the motorcycle incident, people who were suffering in Karachi, like Salman, organized a peace rally. There were about five hundred at the rally. They were people who had lost hope. It was wintertime, very lovely and pleasant in Karachi. The people in the rally smiled and nodded at one another. Many had tears in their eyes.

“There was an immense feeling of brotherhood, of belonging. No slogans. It was just a walk for peace in Karachi. And all along I had this lump in my throat and I thought I would break out crying. Everybody knew that we were all partners in this grief, for whatever was happening to that city. Everybody used to have this feeling for that city. It never went to sleep. And people used to say—the Punjabis and the Pathans—that it was a kind-hearted city, especially good to its poorer inhabitants.”

That year, in the first week of September, there was a massacre of some three hundred people in the city of Hyderabad, the second city of Sindh. Unidentified gunmen opened up, and in ten or fifteen minutes killed those three hundred. It was part of the mohajir war. Sometimes the mohajirs did the killing, sometimes the army. Salman met some friends that day. They said to him, “You look sick. Has someone died?” He said, “No, no. No one’s died.”

On that day Salman and his wife decided to leave Karachi. It took them three months to wind up their affairs.

It wasn’t easy for Salman to make a living. The restricted intellectual needs of the country offered him few openings as a writer, didn’t encourage him to grow. He was poorly rewarded for what he did.

He had become a kind of wanderer. He found solace now in wilderness. The country at least offered him that; there were great tracts of desert and mountain where a man might feel no one had been before.

He carried the old torment with him: the first four days of independence in 1947, from the fourteenth of August to the eighteenth, and the empty courtyard house in Jalandhar with blood on the walls.

He had not been to India, and he was beginning to think he should go there. There was a journey he wished to make. He wanted the journey to start on the eleventh of August, and he wanted it to start in the Himalayan hill station of Solan. From Solan on the eleventh of August, 1947, his aunt (who was to be murdered within a week) had written to her husband that it was getting very dangerous in Solan; he was to come at once and take her back to Jalandhar. He went and brought her down in the train. He said later (he was one of the survivors) that the hatred and tension in the railway coach was something they could feel. But they got without trouble to the house in Jalandhar on the fourteenth of August.

That was the journey Salman wanted to do again one year, within those dates, if he could get an Indian visa. “To mark the beginning of this thing.”

7
 

R
AHIMULLAH WAS A
P
ATHAN
of the Yusufzai clan, and he carried the clan name as his surname. A Pathan clan was descended from a remote ancestor; the Yusufzai, as the name suggests, were the sons of Yusuf. Some Yusufzai families had full family trees, but Rahimullah could trace his family back only three generations. His grandfather, he said, would know more.

The past went back only as far as people’s memories; people didn’t have the means of assessing or fixing the past before family memory. Time here was like a river; it was hard to mark any precise point in the flow. People didn’t always know how old they were. Rahimullah gave 1953 as the year of his birth; but on his birth certificate the year was 1954. As for Rahimullah’s young servant, small and dark and smiling, with nice strong teeth and a very full head of wavy black hair, he could be eighteen or nineteen or twenty; no one could now tell.

Rahimullah’s father was born in 1918 (as his son said) to a poor farming family. Shortly after he was born both his father and his mother died (possibly in an epidemic, though Rahimullah didn’t say); so the boy was literally an orphan. He made a living as a shepherd, looking after other people’s cattle. At the same time, up to the age of thirteen or fourteen, he got some schooling; he got as far as the eighth class. When he was of age he joined
the British Indian army as a sepoy. He was tall, over six feet, and fair, with blue eyes. In the Second World War he saw service in Egypt and Libya. In 1953 he was in the Pakistani army contingent that took part in Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. He retired from the Pakistan army as a
subedar,
a junior commissioned officer, in the military transport section.

It had been a long and good career. But then, unexpectedly, it went wrong. He was not long back in his village when he was recalled because of the Bangladesh situation. He was sent to the port of Chittagong in Bangladesh as part of the reserve. The war was lost; Bangladesh seceded; the Pakistan army in Bangladesh laid down its arms. So, at the very end of his army career, in his retirement, Rahimullah’s father became a prisoner of war. For a long time his family didn’t know whether he was alive or dead. At last one day there was a letter from him from the prisoner of war camp in Rampur in India.

When, two years or so later, he came back to his village, Rahimullah’s father took up social work. He got people to start a bus service; he campaigned for electricity to be brought to the village; he set up the first flour mill; he got people to build their own approach roads; and he had the village well cleaned. At the Friday prayers in the mosque he took his chador round to collect money for various causes. Some members of his family objected. They said, “You are asking for alms. This is below your status.” He said, “No, no. I am doing God’s work.” But it must have been held against him, because when the time came and he stood for the local elections, he lost; another member of the family won.

Rahimullah’s father would have liked his son to be an officer in the army, and he did all that he could, with his limited means, to educate him in proper schools: up to the sixth class in the English-medium cantonment school in Peshawar, then for two years in a Catholic convent school in Jhelum, then for three years in a British-built military boarding college. But at the end, big man though he had become, and a basketball player, Rahimullah didn’t pass the medical test: his eyesight wasn’t good enough.

Father and son were both very disappointed. The father said, “You can’t help it. It’s God-given.” He thought then that Rahimullah should become a doctor. And for two years and more Rahimullah studied science, at first locally, and then at a Parsee-founded science college in Karachi. In the examinations Rahimullah missed the first division by a mark or two. This meant that he couldn’t get admitted to a medical collage.

It was at this time that Rahimullah’s father became a prisoner of war. Only part of his salary was paid to the family (the rest was kept back for
him). Rahimullah had to give up thoughts of his own career and go back to the village to look after the family. It would have been a dark moment for him; it would have seemed that the world had altogether closed up. But then, when his father came back, the world slowly opened up again, and in a way that no one could have foreseen.

When he was a student in Karachi—and living with an older cousin—Rahimullah, to pay his way, had worked from six in the evening to two in the morning as a proofreader for a newspaper. This had earned him a hundred and eighty rupees a month, nine dollars, and had left him free to go to classes during the day. He had got in this time to like the idea of newspapers. And now, out in the world at last, and with the established professions closed to him, he looked for jobs on newspapers. He became a sub-editor; he did reporting. He moved between Lahore and Karachi; he changed newspapers; he worked his way up slowly.