Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage International) (72 page)

When we said good-bye he said, “Can you arrange for me to go to a place where I can read and write and study for five years? Because in five years, if you see me again, I may have become a cement-dealer or an exporter of ready-made garments.”

That, spoken at a bad time, showed his style. And, in fact, he had become a public relations man for an oil company, and done well. The oil-drilling business was not affected by the troubles. But life in the city had been a day-to-day anxiety and Nusrat had developed a heart condition. His gray hair had gone white and short and thin; he was still under fifty. He had loved the Karachi winter and he used to like wearing a tweed jacket for it. Now he was in a loose cotton tunic that made him look frail.

He said, “I will tell you how the ethnic infighting affected me when I was almost dying in hospital in June 1990. I was in CCU, coronary care unit. That is where you are rushed to in an emergency; that is where you live or die.

“Karachi had infighting on a bloody scale. MQM was in power in the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation. In the CCU the air conditioner wasn’t working, and this was in the middle of June. There was a shortage of medicines. The telephone exchange was blown up one night, and there was a clash between doctors and outsiders, presumably from a political party, PPP or MQM, who wanted everybody to go on strike. And I was there in that condition in the CCU. My fifth day.

“I was very close to the window lying on a cot. You want to hear about the cot? The cot had a foam mattress, and because the air conditioner wasn’t working and there was no ventilation, I asked them to remove the mattress. Of course, they were reluctant, but they finally removed it. They said the cot would be hard steel, but I said I wouldn’t mind. The next morning the doctor said to me that the head of the Institute was on a surprise visit, and he wouldn’t be happy to see the foam mattress removed from the cot and lying in the cubicle. I was very angry. I said, ‘I know the director’s AC is working, and he has no health problem. I want to see the director when he comes, and deal with him suitably.’

“We asked the attendants to open the window. We were on the first floor, and the risk was—so they said—that a bullet could come and hit us. I said, ‘The glass is not bulletproof?’ June is suffocating in the heat.

“One day there was firing outside. I got up from my bed with all the gadgetry they had put on me, and sneaked a few steps to have a quick look at what was happening downstairs. I later realized the risk I had taken, both with regard to the bullet and having got up suddenly—which I wasn’t supposed to do.

“One day I saw some attendants crying in a cubicle at about eleven
P.M.
I knew at this time that people were dying in this ward, and that some of the people I had seen had been taken away. In this case the attendant and the family, three people in all, were faced with the problem of taking the body from the hospital to Orangi, where there had been trouble for days on end and pitched battles were being fought. It was an area that was closed down at night by the local authorities. Then the ambulance wasn’t willing to risk the journey.

“Orangi was about fifteen miles away. The family was lower middle class and had to depend on public transport. Some young men in the CCU were volunteering to help. The attendants of the deceased included a young girl. I was upset and angry, not just at the state of the city and its repeated closures, but was apprehensive about what could happen to the young girl at that time of night. I was conscious of the fact that kidnapping for ransom and kidnapping for ostensibly no reason was common at that time.

“I kept telling my attendants, who were pleading with me to rest and sleep, to please do something for the safety of the young girl. I said, ‘Why don’t you take the body in the morning?’ Someone reminded me that in the heat of June bodies decay quicker. There was little that I could do.

“I don’t know what happened. I must have gone off to sleep. I can’t explain this, but despite all this, I was happy in that hospital because of the friends I had made, and because the man treating me was an old school friend.”

Ehsan was part of the mohajir movement in the mid-1980s. It was a middle-class, intellectual movement at that time—it had developed out of an older student movement—and Ehsan knew three or four of the “ideologues,” to use his word. He thought them very intelligent. They had intense discussions in private houses, and they would get worked up in an almost religious way about the injustices done to the community and their city, Karachi. It wasn’t like the charging up at the Friday prayers, Ehsan said, when I put the suggestion to him; it was more like the Shias fighting for their rights.

The movement had first to defeat the religious parties in the universities. University politics mattered in Pakistan because, with military rule, it was often the only political life that was allowed. And the defeat of the religious parties by the mohajir student movement was ironical; because it was the faith that had driven the mohajirs to Pakistan, and because it was in those religious parties that the first generation of mohajirs had felt most at home. But that was long ago; later generations had grown to understand what lay beyond the faith.

The war against the religious parties had been fought with guns; both sides had at different times, and for different reasons, been encouraged and armed by the government. In Ehsan’s college there were four or five recognized mohajir fighters; people from other colleges would give support when it was needed. Ehsan was very friendly with two of the fighters. They were both from educated families, and Ehsan thought that the most important thing about them was that they were “extremely alienated.” They took the ideological training very seriously and were ready to die for the cause.

Ehsan was studying science with one of the fighters, and every day after classes they used to go to the friend’s family house. The friend, the fighter, was about five foot eight and fat, very physical, Ehsan said, with big, thick hands which Ehsan thought were the hands of an aggressive man.

The father of the family was a high-ranking government servant, and the family house was a big government house, a thousand-square-yard house. (Mushtaq’s family, when they came to Pakistan in 1949, had lived in an eighty-square-yard house.) The father had built an enormous study for his five children; there were encyclopedias and religious books and science books. They were a middle-class family that believed in education, and they were far better off than most other people in the movement. Ehsan’s friend was not as good at studies as his brothers; but all the four boys were active in the MQM.

Ehsan was in the house one day, at about sunset, with the friend and one of the brothers, when there was a lot of firing outside with AK-47s and all kinds of guns. Ehsan was by now used to gunfire, but this was excessive. What surprised him, though, was when the mother of the family brought out an AK-47 and gave it to her fighter son, Ehsan’s friend. He went to the roof of the house—it was a single-story house—and took up position and returned the fire. The battle went on for five or ten minutes; to Ehsan it seemed much longer. Ehsan had seen his friend using guns at the college; the friend would make a joke of it and say that Ehsan was chicken. But Ehsan had no idea that the mother was so involved in the movement. She was a big strong lady in shalwar-kameez, not good-looking, but very affectionate and always ready to offer food to her sons’ friends. He hadn’t associated her with guns, and he didn’t even know there was a gun in the house.

Ehsan saw a lot of violence ahead. He saw trouble for his friend. His attitude to the movement began to change. And then one day, at a meeting in the house of one of his ideologue friends, they were all asked to take oaths on the Koran to be loyal to the movement and the leader. The leader, of a kind created by great distress and need, was now an immense public figure, conducting six-hour rallies that ended at midnight, and moving millions, as Ehsan said.

Still, Ehsan didn’t like the idea of the oath of loyalty; but he didn’t have to say no. He was able at about this time to leave Pakistan, and he was away for five years. When he came back the MQM were no longer ruling the city. The army was there, and the MQM had become an underground organization. It still obeyed its leader; he was now far away, in exile in London; but distance added to his magic. Ehsan’s friend was one of those who had gone underground. On the telephone later he told Ehsan that he had been falsely accused of killing another MQM man and was on the run. And when they met—strangely, in the family house—everybody cried, Ehsan, his friend, the friend’s mother.

The friend still had the thick hands, but he had lost weight. He said he was willing to swear on the Koran that he hadn’t committed murder. What had happened had happened when the police were hunting him. He had had during this time to move from house to house. And then somehow he had got a job on a merchant ship. They must have had some idea of his situation, because they asked him to clean the toilets and the deck; and he had to obey. With all his mohajir caste sense he hated the degradation of the job and even now he complained about it to Ehsan. He said he wanted to go to London and start a new life. He had become critical of the MQM, and he knew that if he stayed in Pakistan he would be arrested or killed. He wanted Ehsan to find a lawyer for him in London, so that he could apply for political asylum.

The mother, the firebrand with the AK-47, had changed. She said that the army and the police and the government were bent on destroying her son. She said to Ehsan, “Please do something to help him.” Her own opinions and feelings were not what they had been. She had become even a little critical of the MQM. She said they were not doing enough to help the families of boys who had been killed or were underground, like her son.

But it was to be all right for her. Her other sons had, in spite of everything, got started on reasonable professional careers. And the fighter was eventually to get to the safety of London.

What had happened in five years was that the movement, fostered in the beginning by families like hers, had changed. The movement had ceased to be a middle-class movement. It had gone down to the bottom, and there the bitterness had turned to outright rejection. The fighters and organizers came now from the poor of Orangi and Korangi, who had nothing or very little to lose. At that level—whatever had happened to the family of Ehsan’s friend—the flames were unquenchable.

The army was in Karachi for nearly two and a half years. During this time the MQM was declared a terrorist organization and its leaders absconding terrorists. Army control produced even more mohajir bitterness, and this bitterness grew when the semi-military border force, the Rangers, replaced the army. Whole localities continued to be sealed off and searched. Then the intelligence agencies engineered a split in the MQM, and anarchy was added to terror. No one could now be sure who was killing whom.

Hasan Jafri, a journalist, himself descended of mohajirs, was covering the troubles at this time. He said, “What I and other reporters saw were a lot of dead bodies. Almost every day.”

The ambulance service was the first source of information. The reporters would then check with the MQM to find out if the dead men belonged to them. If the men were theirs, the MQM would say that they had been tortured to death by the police. The police would say they had been killed in “encounters.”

“There have been eighteen hundred people killed this year. So every day there are dead bodies on the street. One and two, two and two, three and three. When I began it was disgusting. You would see a dead body carelessly thrown in a hospital morgue. About five months back there was a shootout in Korangi. It happened in the morning. I think it was five guys who were killed. They were in the Jinnah Hospital morgue. They were lying on these concrete slabs. They were naked, all of them, and the bodies had begun to smell. The area between the heart and the shoulder of one man was completely blown off. Another one had taken a burst on his hand, and the principal bone was jutting out. One of them had an expression, as if it were frozen on his face, of shock. His eyes were wide open and his mouth was also open. Because the bodies were brought quite late to the hospital, about six hours after the incident, the expressions were very frozen. It appeared that the moment when they died was written all over them.”