Broken Verses (13 page)

And what of me in all this? I was just a few months old when the Poet was imprisoned in 1972, and my mother knew the ability of a smiling infant to cut through bureaucracy. I could instantly reduce both uniformed and inky-fingered men into cooing creatures—and though they tried to snap back into positions of authority, the damage had been done as soon as they started addressing me in baby-talk. The landscape of my first few months in this world was one of courtrooms, prisons, lawyer's offices. ‘I would not allow them to tell me there was a choice to be made between motherhood and standing up for justice,' my mother used to say, and I never asked, ‘But what about the choice to be made between motherhood and romantic love?'

I looked down at the paper in my hand again.

HE WAS IMPRISONED SEVERAL TIMES DURING THE 70s BY THE BHUTTO GOVERNMENT FOR HIS POLITICAL VERSE INCLUDING ‘UJALA' (DAWN) AND ‘AIK AADH LAMHA' (A LITTLE DISTANCE).

He was one of Bhutto's strongest critics, but even so he was filled with apprehension when the anti-Bhutto movement pulled religion out from behind its veil of privacy and into the realm of politics as both secular-minded and hard-line religious politicians banded together to campaign against the government. Bhutto tried appeasing the hardliners by introducing Islamic laws, but the General in the wings took over and decided to show everyone how Islamization was really done. My memories of those days are all about fear. The Poet and my mother were in Karachi at this point but I used to feel claustrophobic in their presence, all that pessimism sitting so heavily on them, evident even to a six-year-old, that part of me was actually relieved when

IN 1977, FOLLOWING THE MILITARY COUP WHICH BROUGHT GENERAL ZIA TO POWER, HE WENT INTO EXILE IN COLOMBIA to stay with his great friend Rafael Gonzales—my mother went with him.

HE RETURNED TO PAKISTAN OVER A YEAR LATER.

He was unable to write a word in his time away, and my mother claimed that following Pakistan's news from a distance had almost given her a nervous breakdown. They saw in the New Year—1979—with a promise to their friends that they weren't going to leave again, and I moved half my toys and books back into the blue bedroom in my mother's house with every confidence that I would have no reason ever to move them out again.

IN 1979 GENERAL ZIA INTRODUCED THE HUDOOD ORDINANCE WHICH NAZIM, WHO KNEW SOME WOMEN ACTIVISTS, WAS VERY CRITICAL ABOUT.

‘How can words be used for such indignity?' the Poet said, when he heard the details of the laws being passed in the name of Islam. (And my father's father, the most gentle and pious of men, wept himself to death over it.) The Poet wanted to get back on a plane and leave the country, leave for anywhere. But my mother told him he'd have to go without her. Something in her broke free the day she sat at her dining table in dressing-gown and slippers, smoking a cigarette, and reading out loud every detail of the Hudood Ordinance. When she got to the part about ‘Zina', which said an accusation of rape could only be proved in a court of law if there were four pious, male Muslim adults willing to give eye-witness testimony, she looked up at me and said, ‘For the first time, I wish I'd given birth to a son.'

LATER THAT YEAR, ZIA HANGED BHUTTO AND THE POET WROTE ‘ZEHER' (POISON).

When he heard of Bhutto's death the Poet locked himself in his cramped, dark store-room, and when my mother finally found a spare key and opened the door she found him whimpering and shaking. Within days of the execution he produced ‘Zeher' and no one dared publish it. Undeterred, he made twelve copies of the poem, called twelve of his friends over for dinner and handed a copy of the poem to each one. ‘It was all very Last Supper,' my mother later said, recalling the dinner. It was hardly the most accomplished of his poems (‘“Eyes expelling barbed wire in place of tears?” my mother said, holding the page away from her, between thumb and forefinger. ‘That's what you get with instant poetry.') but within forty-eight hours there were thousands of copies circulating throughout the country, being set to music, and through song entering the nation's consciousness. That's when he and my mother devised the code—they knew imprisonment was inevitable, and given previous instances in which letters smuggled into the prison ground had been intercepted, they decided a secret code would be a sensible safety measure.

HE WAS IMPRISONED YET AGAIN AND PLACED IN SOLITARY CONFINEMENT.

My mother knew the climate wasn't right to agitate for his release; she had nightmares in which he was hanged and she was taken to cut down his body with nothing sharper than her own teeth to sever the rope. So she turned her attention elsewhere. That's when the third and final phase of her activism began, and it's the phase people today almost always refer to when they talk of her life in the public realm.

In the wake of the Hudood Ordinance the women's movement in Pakistan began to assert itself, though it wouldn't be until 1981 that it went into high gear with the formation of the Women's Action Forum. But as early as 1979 my mother was going from city to city, and often to smaller towns, sometimes covered up so no one would recognize her, and talking to different groups and individuals about the need to politicize women, to bring them together, to do something.

HE WAS RELEASED FROM PRISON SOME MONTHS LATER with the understanding that he had a week to leave the country if he didn't want to be re-arrested

AND WENT INTO EXILE AGAIN.

This time my mother told him she was staying in Pakistan. But once he was in Colombia she began to pine—after all those months in which she'd borne his imprisonment with remarkable fortitude. ‘You yearn for his release so you can be with him—you fear that might never happen—but then he's released and further away from you than ever,' I heard her explain to Beema one day. So it didn't surprise me too much when Rafael sent word the Poet was ill, that my mother packed a suitcase and left. She said she'd be back in a few weeks.

HE REMAINED IN EXILE FOR THREE YEARS.

And she remained there with him. She seemed to be on the move a lot during those years; often at conferences and the like, drumming up support for the women's movement in Pakistan.

THE FIRST YEAR IN COLOMBIA, THEN IN EGYPT.

My mother insisted on the move—she saw that her own belief in secular jurisprudence was not sufficient to take on a government intent on claiming its laws were God-ordained, so she went to Egypt to work with women's groups there and discover the feminist traditions within Islam which would allow her to battle the hard-liners on their own turf.

WHILE IN CAIRO HE WON THE PRESTIGIOUS RUMI AWARD, CHOSEN BY A PANEL OF POETS AND SCHOLARS FROM THE MUSLIM WORLD AND RETURNED TO PAKISTAN having received government assurances that he wouldn't be arrested on his return.

It was 1983 by then, and the Women's Action Forum, spearheaded by some of my mother's closest friends, was taking on the military government with an astonishing show of bravery. Between the Ansari Commission's recommendations that women should be barred from holding high public office, and the proposed Islamic Law of Evidence which equated the evidence of two women to that of one man, and the Safia Bibi case in which a blind eighteen-year-old girl who was raped found herself sentenced to a fine, imprisonment and public lashing on the charge of adultery, there was plenty of work to be done, and my mother rolled up her sleeves and entered the mêlée.

I decided to enter it with her. I didn't tell anyone about it beforehand, but I managed to convince one of my cousins to drive to me to a rally to protest the Law of Evidence. There were so many people there that my mother didn't see me, but I saw her as she addressed the crowd.
Grazia, grazia, grazia
. When I came home that evening, Beema saw the bruise that had been left on my arm from falling in the street while running from policemen who broke up the rally. We had the worst fight of our lives. Rabia, eight years old, phoned my mother to tell her what was happening, and Mama walked into our house in time to hear me say to Beema, for the only time in my life: you're not my real mother, anyway.

‘Say that ever again and I'll disown you,' my mother said.

She told Beema she'd have no objection to having me locked in chains next time there was a rally if I refused to swear on the Qu'r̄an that I wouldn't attend any organised protest unless Beema told me I could or until I turned eighteen, whichever happened first. So I swore, but I wasn't happy about it.

Of course, there was never a rally that she didn't attend herself. I remember going to her house one day and finding her with vicious bruises on her back and arms and stomach; and sometimes she was taken into police custody for anywhere between a few hours and three weeks, during which time Beema was almost constantly on the phone to her influential relatives. But despite how harrowing those days were there was an exultation about my mother; she had finally found an incarnation that suited her entirely. And there were significant victories too—Safia Bibi was acquitted by the Federal Sharia Court and the Islamic Law of Evidence was amended so that it was only in cases pertaining to financial matters that the testimony of two women was equal to that of one man (not enough of a victory, my mother said, but still significant), and the Ansari Commission's recommendation never became law.

And the Poet, during this time

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO KNOW IF HE REALLY WAS WORKING ON A COLLECTION AFTER HIS RETURN TO PAKISTAN, AS HIS ADMIRERS SAY, OR IF FEAR OF FURTHER IMPRISONMENT MADE HIM STOP WRITING, AS SOME WONDER.

Oh, he was still writing. Writing feverishly, though not publishing anything—he said if he was going to prison again it would be for a complete collection, not just an individual poem.

I think both he and my mother were happier with their own reflections in the mirror at this time than at any earlier point of their lives. And I, too, remember the next three years as happy times, despite—and in some way, as a result of—all the mayhem wreaked upon the nation. There was such a headiness at the centre of all the anti-government activity.

But then

IN 1986, HE WAS FOUND MURDERED IN AN EMPTY PLOT OF LAND. NO POSTHUMOUS WORK APPEARED.

And Mama became so incapacitated with grief that Beema moved her into the room next to mine, in my father's house, and she was there but not there for two years before she'd had enough, and left.

The paper in my hand started to blur. I dropped it in the waste-paper basket and sent an e-mail to the CEO saying: The bio's fine.

Then I returned to the darkness and stayed there for the rest of the day.

Who was the most civilized Crusader?

a) Richard the Lionheart
b) Frederick Barbarossa
c) Bahemond of Taranto
d) Frederick II

 

Answer: d

 

The quiz show host raised his dyed eyebrows across the desk at me. ‘They're very good questions except, as you know, for that last one.' He put down the list of questions and slashed a cross over my Crusader question without any sign of irony. ‘But, as a matter of interest, why Frederick II?'

‘He was excommunicated three times by two different Popes. That seems eminently civilized to me. But he never got his due during his lifetime, poor man. Instead of waging war on the Muslims, as any good crusader should do, he decided to enter into diplomatic negotiations and won Jerusalem in that shameful manner, while also settling a ten-year peace treaty with the Sultan of Egypt. He was ridiculed throughout Europe for this unmanly conduct.'

The quiz show host stretched his mouth into the smile with which he once recommended a brand of tea in a popular ad from my childhood. ‘Well, we can't possibly have that question, then. No Christian who wins Jerusalem from the Muslims, in any manner, can be deemed civilized by us without causing all kinds of problems.' He licked his fingertip and used it to smooth down his eyebrows. ‘You know, the opening still exists for the host of the political chat show. I know the Big Man offered it to you. You might want to give it some thought.'

By now I had been at STD long enough to recognize that the CEO's offer hadn't been a sign of any incipient potential he saw in me, but just an indicator of his desperation to find presenters for the STD shows. All that would change soon—already it seemed that everyone I met between the age of sixteen and twenty-two had the word ‘media' on their lips when asked about their future—but for the moment those of us who were ‘reasonable enough' (i.e. reasonably attractive, reasonably intelligent, reasonably articulate) had a world of on-air opportunities to pick from. ‘If it's a groundbreaking chat show, involving a'séance, which allows me to interview Frederick II, then sure. Otherwise, I'll stick to being the brains behind your beauty.'

The quiz show host smiled—he was well aware of both his intelligence and his good looks—and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Suits me fine.'

When he left my office, I checked my watch. It was approximately twenty-two hours since I had left Shehnaz Saeed's house. Twenty-two hours since she had given me the letter which had accompanied the encrypted page. In those twenty-two hours I had managed to restrain myself from reading the covering letter even once. Now there was a clear sign I was so much better than before—it wasn't that many years ago that every time I answered the phone and there was silence on the other end it was enough to make me call the telephone exchange and demand they trace the call. It was tempting now to phone Beema and tell her, you see, you see, all those attempts on your part to get me to ‘talk to someone' weren't necessary. I'm doing this on my own, I'm getting there.

Fourteen years later, and as far as I'd got was being able to avoid reading a letter for twenty-two hours.

I knew exactly what that ‘someone' to whom Beema wanted me to talk would say. She'd say, it's been fourteen years, Aasmaani. That's twice the length of time a person has to be gone before they're legally declared dead. You need to let go.