Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (38 page)

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B
ack in Damascus, our permanent home after Shah’s murder, Murtaza was lost in grief. ‘I saw Mir after the summer we lost Shah,’ Suhail remembers, having witnessed the death from afar.‘He had lost so much weight. I hadn’t seen him so skinny since we were kids in the seventies. It was a huge blow to him.’
¹
Our two-bedroom apartment had once been a home full of people. Shah and his family lived on the floor above us, Suhail, Kamar and their two sons were permanent features in both flats. And all of a sudden, there was no one. Shah was gone, Raehana and Sassi were absent, and then the Sethis moved. It was just my parents and me. Papa and I lived alone in the Mezzeh building like lost people, like vagabonds.

By the time summer was spent, taking Shah with it, and autumn grew near, Papa and Fowzia began to fight. They couldn’t live with each other any more, it had become too complicated. Murtaza had lost too much, and his wife was a reminder of what he had lost. When Papa decided that we would leave, that he would file for divorce, he sat me down and explained things to me. I was only three years old at the time, but I knew what had happened had to do with Uncle Shah. I knew it wasn’t fixable. But I also knew that my father was the centre of my little world and I remember taking the news of divorce with as little fuss as possible.

Later on, I was told, I sometimes sidled up to women with long dark hair in railway stations and bookstores, thinking they were Fowzia. I got confused at times and would follow women with long plaits. I don’t remember that; I only remember my father telling me about the divorce. I remember wearing a woolly coat in those days, and learning
new words. I learned the word divorce early; I knew what it meant and it sounded very grown-up to me.

It is hard for me to disconnect my feelings about Fowzia from the woman I encountered as a teenager and adult. I am scared, frightened even, of my biological mother. As a child I remember her moods, her unpredictable temperament, how beautiful she was and how much care she took of her hair, the dark kohl she would line her eyes with, how aware she was of her beauty. She would let me drink tea with her, sugary and diluted with milk, in the afternoons – I think that was our time together. But that’s it. That’s as far as my memories extend. Papa gave me my baths, read my bedtime stories, cut my hair, dressed me, and bought me boots that looked like his own polished shoes. I was a tomboy, as if to distance myself from Fowzia (I used to cut her lipsticks with scissors to trim their pointy, pyramid-like tips), and was a walking, talking devotee of my father.

Maybe it is my fault. Maybe my heart was too full and I never cleared it to make space for Fowzia. But even as a child, I think I tried. I remember one afternoon, it may have been morning, when Fowzia called me to her as she lay on the bed in our Damascus flat moaning loudly and tossing and turning. ‘Tell your father to buy watermelon,’ she slurred sleepily.

I left the room and and told him. Fowzia called me again, more loudly this time, yelling my name. Watermelons, she kept groaning, I need Mir to bring me watermelons. She seemed confused, in pain; she frightened me. I couldn’t do anything about the watermelons she wanted so badly. I was only three years old at the time. I felt her getting angry at me. I didn’t know how to control a situation I had no way of understanding and started to cry. Papa rushed into the room when he heard me sobbing. He came in and saw Fowzia sprawled on the bed. She’d taken something, too much of something, she was hurting. I was made to leave the room.

Fowzia didn’t possess the strength that Papa radiated, which as a child I selfishly depended on. Our lives were too heightened, too fragile, for me to have consciously accepted otherwise. Fowzia was, I confess, always somewhat of a mystery to me when I was younger.
I didn’t get her. She didn’t get me. She was erratic. I found her exotic and dainty, but not strong, not calm.

When I was older, after my father had been killed, Fowzia turned up at my high school in Karachi and demanded to be let in. Mr Dewolf, the principal, pulled me out of my biology class and explained what was happening. A woman claiming to be my mother was in the main office insisting I be brought to her. I felt sick. Mr Dewolf took me to the guidance counsellor’s office, where I called Mummy, who was on her way to Larkana. I don’t want to see her, I said on the phone. ‘See her,’ Mummy replied. Papa had wanted to throw out the photographs of Fowzia in our family albums after the divorce; it was Mummy who persuaded him not to. She convinced Papa to keep the pictures, for me. ‘See her,’ Mummy said gently on the phone. I told her that I would only see Fowzia if she postponed her trip to Larkana and came to be with me. ‘I’ll be there in half an hour,’ she said.

Mr Dewolf, whose soft-spoken wife was my French teacher, sent me to the nurse’s office to wait for Mummy. ‘We’ll do whatever you want,’ he assured me. ‘Don’t worry.’ It had been Mr Dewolf who helped Mummy and me tell Zulfi that Papa had been killed the morning after the assassination. He understood what this surprise visit meant. In the nurse’s office, patients were quietly returned to class and the beds emptied. I was brought into the infirmary’s bathroom and the doors were doubly locked, as per my panicked suggestion. Mrs Ali, the school nurse and my friend, stood in the bathroom with me, coaching me to take deep breaths as she sent for my friends to come and help me get through the next half an hour.

When I finally saw Fowzia in Mr Dewolf ’s office, I wasn’t comforted. ‘Your father kidnapped you,’ she snarled once she had given me a huge cellophane-wrapped gift basket. It was less than six months after his murder. ‘I could have taken you back, you know?’

The drama of a ten-year-old divorce was being played out in front of Mr Dewolf, whom I had asked to stay in the meeting room with us. ‘I knew people in the American military. They offered to bring you back for me, by helicopter. Your father could have done nothing to stop them,’ Fowzia continued. ‘But I didn’t, for your sake.’

Thank you? I didn’t know what to say. I was shocked, scared, and so, so angry.

Call me Mom, Fowzia kept insisting. I said I didn’t want to see her. Mummy nudged me under the table. I said I had lots of homework now that I was at high school and looked to Mr Dewolf for support. Mummy said I could do it at night. I relented, on the condition that Fowzia (‘Call me Mom!’ she bellowed, aggravated by my stubbornness) kept our relationship private and out of the media. She agreed.

That week, after I baulked and refused to see her, Fowzia gave press conferences about my ‘kidnapping’ and my brainwashing at the hands of my evil ‘stepmother’ from Bilawal House, Benazir and Zardari’s Karachi home. She called Mummy a maid whom Papa hadn’t loved but had married to take care of his child. She called Zulfi my ‘half-brother’, and said I was just like her. Fowzia wrote open letters to me in all the English language newspapers and filed a case for my custody in the Pakistani courts. The school librarian, a kind British woman, took the newspapers off their racks every morning and hid them from me so I wouldn’t see Fowzia’s latest salvo as I did my homework in the library. I employed a lawyer and told Fowzia that I didn’t want to be with her, that I would never leave my family for her, a virtual stranger. ‘You’ll forget about them in two weeks,’ she assured me and gave me on bottle of vanilla-scented nailpolish. I am, I suppose, in some recesses of my 27-year-old being, still afraid of Fowzia.

But the divorce was not the largest part of my small life; larger than everything else was the gap that Shah’s absence created.

I had seen Uncle Shah’s body. I don’t remember it. But after Papa had told his mother that her son was dead, he took her back to the apartment. There was no one to look after us, so and Sassi and I went too.

‘It stayed with you for a long time,’ Mummy tells me twenty-three years later while we move around in the kitchen late at night one evening looking for something to eat. ‘You remembered seeing
your uncle face down on the carpet and nobody imagined how much it had affected you, but one afternoon, months later, you found your father napping in the bedroom in Damascus and he was lying down like Shah had been, on his stomach, his face covered, and you shook him awake, crying and screaming at him to get up. That’s how we knew. You thought he was dead, like Shah.’ I have no memory of seeing my uncle’s body, none at all. But for years, sleeping in the same bed as my father, I would wake up at night to check on him and to make sure he was breathing.

Papa was consumed by sorrow. He lived for a while, it seemed, only for me, to feed me and bathe me and put me to sleep. But once in a while I caught him absorbed, unable to break through to the idea of life. One night, he was sitting in what would become his office in the apartment, a small room with a glass bookshelf covering the windows with white curtains behind them. Papa was sitting quietly, running his hands through his hair as he did whenever he was nervous or upset. I could tell something was wrong. I brought him a toy, a small Fisher Price computer set that had hologrammed images of fish and birds and turtles that would change every time you pushed one of the clunky computer keys. I showed Papa a few images, thinking it would cheer him up, but it didn’t. I tiptoed closer to him and put my head on his lap. Papa, what’s wrong? I asked him. He tried hard to smile at me and find a place from which to begin. Without Shah, Murtaza was all alone.

They had been closer to each other than to any of their other siblings. Shah possessed a lightness of spirit that came with his age and Murtaza was constantly taken by his younger brother’s effervescent personality. Shah’s joy was contagious. They were so different, but direct complements of each other. Where Shah was spontaneous, Murtaza was patient; when Shah was melancholy, Murtaza was hopeful. They were more than just brothers, tied by blood, they were comrades. Companions.

Shah’s death extinguished the incandescence that filtered through his family at a time when they had little else to be happy about. Papa was totally distraught. I had never seen him so overwhelmed by sadness before and would never again, not like this.

Life in exile was bearable when Murtaza had Shahnawaz to commiserate with. His company made the long nights in strange lands pass easily. Together, they returned home often, in their jokes, their language, their memories of their father and his world. They shared that same exile’s dream – the dream of returning home, one day, one day . . .

Papa’s eyes welled with tears. There was nothing to break the silence, no one to explain for him. The holographic fish were swimming across the screen as I waited. I’m sad, he said to me as I shifted uncomfortably next to him. Why? I asked, knowing the answer. I miss Uncle Shah, Papa said and I saw my father cry for the first time. He told me it was Shah’s birthday. It was November. He would have been twenty-seven that night.

Life in Damascus passed easily. I was enrolled at a new American school, Damascus Community School, that had only recently opened and occupied the basement in a large building on the main Mezzeh road. Our apartment, in the older section of Mezzeh, was near a large mosque, the Jamia al Akram, and a sports centre. We were a building of refugees. With Shah and Suhail gone from the floor above us, Omar arrived, our new neighbour whose family had fallen foul of Saddam’s Baathist Iraq. Omar became a friend; he was roughly Papa’s age and they’d sometimes play squash together and spend time talking about their countries and what had happened to turn them into exiles. There were rarely people living in the garden flat at the bottom of the building, they came and went leaving us Pakistanis and Iraqis to rule the roost.

Benazir, who travelled between her frantic political life in Pakistan and downtime with Sanam in London, spent some time with us in Syria. I called her
Wadi bua
and she called me
Fah-tee
with an elongated
ah
sound. Wadi would come to stay and move into our spare bedroom. I always cried when she left and she would hug me, her hair smelling powdery soft and her skin moist and dewy, and promise she would come back soon. I used to sit on her lap and stare at the
mole she had somewhere between the nape of her neck and her shoulders and sniffle quietly until she kissed me and lifted me off her. Wadi introduced me to Beatrix Potter and read me
Jemima Puddleduck
as I begged her to, over and over again.

Sometimes, I could sense the tension between Papa and Wadi. It was subtle, but it was there. Papa would speak to Wadi and she would just ignore him, turning cross when he continued. Or else he would talk to her in an exasperated tone and roll his eyes at me when he thought something she said queer. But I had my own relationship with my aunt; I was too domineering not to. As the family’s firstborn grandchild, a girl with a precocious attitude and a mouth that never stopped running, I reminded Wadi of herself. I reminded other people of her too. ‘You’re just like your aunt,’ was often used as both a compliment and an admonishment.

Wadi travelled to spend my birthday with me whenever she could, coming to Geneva and Damascus for important birthday celebrations when I was very young. We were both Geminis, though her birthday was later than mine. (It is a strange coincidence that the three women my father had serious relationships with, as well as his pushy eldest sister and his pushy daughter, were all Geminis. I’m not sure what that says about him. Or us.)