The Shadow of the Crescent Moon

by Fatima Bhutto

  When he saw that his appointment time was approaching, Aman Erum tucked his plastic folder into his suit jacket, careful not to bruise his papers. He wrapped his arms round his chest, mindful of his shiny new suit, and began to run. Aman Erum ran until the edges of his folder poked his stomach and his fleshy sides and sent a pinched pain to his lungs.

  Panting and out of breath, his face flushed and his pulse throbbing, Aman Erum boarded the convention centre bus at six in the morning with all the other tired, harassed-looking applicants and they slowly wound their way around the slums of the Diplomatic Enclave towards the American embassy.

  Aman Erum hadn’t imagined the Enclave would look like this. He imagined palatial houses, grand embassies with uniformed guards and flags flapping majestically, but this was nothing. There were small brick houses, open sewers, barefoot children with matted hair chasing cars, men sitting on rickety wooden crates selling onions.

  ‘Is this the Diplomatic Enclave?’ Aman Erum leaned forward and, in his best unaccented Urdu, asked the ticket collector who had loaded them all into the bus and now hung onto the open window.

  ‘No, no, no,’ the man replied, his accent hiding something too – a northern lilt, Aman Erum thought. ‘This is the back way. We don’t drive in front of the embassies because it disturbs the firangis. They’re out jogging and walking their dogs this early in the morning.’

  The man laughed. Walking their dogs, he repeated.

  When they reached the enormous white structure that looked like an obtrusively designed warehouse, the ticket collector herded everyone out of the bus and made them stand in two separate lines across the road from the embassy.

  There were the immigrants who had come in familial blocks, infants and great-grandmothers shivering in the morning frost. Their smiles were weak and contorted, moulded into the same shape as the smile of the person directly in front of them: upside-down, teeth-baring, pinched. The families either smiled all together or not at all. The second line was of single men mostly, who were trying their luck as students, businessmen, but also well-dressed pregnant women with neatly blow-dried hair, who shifted their weight from one foot to the other as they stood in line trying not to look impatient. They were to be the mothers of future American citizens, after all, and held in their manicured hands references from Texan hospitals that promised they had the means to deliver on American soil.

  The two lines stood across the road and watched the local guards in front of the embassy for a flick of the wrist, a nod of the head, anything that signalled permission to cross the street and ascend one level higher.

  But the ascent was slow. Hours passed between one line snaking into the next and between the sound of the local guards shouting numbers that signalled entry into the next sphere. Snipers were stationed on the roof, positioned behind their Barrett sniper rifles. Aman Erum could not tell if they were Pakistani. The solid, serious-looking men patrolling the perimeter of the embassy, walking equally large German shepherds on tight leather leashes, leading them to ankles to sniff and to handbags to slobber over, seemed to be locals. Aman Erum watched the handlers as they passed by, hoping the dogs would not be brought over to dirty his newly tailored suit. Ahead of him a young woman wearing blue jeans and high-heeled boots smiled at one of the guard dogs as she chatted on her mobile phone. ‘They’re so cute,’ Aman Erum heard her say in English. ‘Yah, totally tall. No yaar, they’re not Pakis. I think they’re marines or something.’

  Aman Erum felt embarrassed. The women he knew in Mir Ali didn’t talk like that – provocatively, eagerly – not about anything and certainly not about men. Samarra never spoke like that. He felt his face flush as the young woman in the blue jeans carried on her phone conversation until a patrol guard with a dimpled right cheek and slightly crooked teeth came close enough to her for a chat. Aman Erum had been mistaken earlier. The patrol guard was white, a foreigner, but even so Aman Erum couldn’t tell him and the woman apart. Though she was Pakistani, the woman in the blue jeans – with her indiscriminate smile and lazy confidence – seemed more foreign than the American guard. When she spoke her accent was almost stronger than the guard’s, almost more American.

  Aman Erum noticed that, with her high-heeled boots, she stood almost a foot taller than he did. He shifted uncomfortably, straightening his posture and smoothing his now-creased suit. He couldn’t tell where anyone belonged. For a brief moment, standing outside in the cold, under the gaze of guard dogs and snipers, Aman Erum wondered what the woman in the blue jeans and her foreign guard would make of him. He was surprised by just how much it mattered to him. As he stood on the threshold of the American embassy, it mattered deeply to Aman Erum.

  • • •

  Later, having received his interview number, Aman Erum wound his way through the security check to the interior of the building, wallpapered with ageing posters of America’s most wanted – young men with brown skin and beards so fine they barely withstood the repeated Xeroxing of their features – alongside bounty information written neatly in Urdu script, then into the fingerprinting room where he was given a swipe of cold cream to rub into his dry palms before submitting his digits to the biometric fingerprint scanner.

  There were no heaters, but there was a television, tuned to a local news channel with the sound turned off.

  It was curious to Aman Erum that such a powerful embassy would neglect to have heaters for its visitors, who had spent four hours that early December morning crawling into the visa section. His Zulfikar Sons polyester suit was beginning to feel thin, to collapse into his skin from cold and exhaustion. He had not listened to the tailor’s suggestion of lining the suit jacket with some natural material. He thought it would make him look bulky, ungainly.

  And so Aman Erum had not brought a shawl to wrap round his shoulders. He had thought it provincial, visa-inappropriate. He had worn thin socks, dress shoes, no gloves. Visa-appropriate.

  Aman Erum wanted to show the visa officer that he was already halfway to America. But he was cold. He cursed first himself and then the embassy for its lack of warmth.

  Eventually he reached the interview room, the penultimate room, with plastic seats strung in rows and packed by young men in uncomfortable suits, grandfathers, and single girls with hooded sweaters and nose rings, more demure, more sullen than the woman in the blue jeans and high-heeled boots had been. Aman Erum looked around for her, scanning the room quickly. She was seated at the front, in front of the interview windows, talking away on her phone and smiling at the embassy staff. Aman Erum noticed there were no heaters here either. But the embassy interviewers and staff behind their double-paned glass windows wore T-shirts and silky blouses. They looked balmy, tropical almost.

  On the television screen mounted on the wall, a mute broadcaster flicked the hair off her face and shuffled the papers on her desk as the cameras turned away from her to an aerial view of Pakistan’s mountainous frontiers.

  Fourteen killed as US Predator drones strike North West Frontier Province village north of Bannu.

  Aman Erum read the ticker silently, his heart quickening. He breathed slowly, waiting to see if any news of Mir Ali would follow, but nothing came. He thought of Samarra and tried to calculate how long they would be apart. He didn’t want to leave her, but there was no other way.

  President Obama says his country will strike terror wherever its tentacles appear. Pak President approves operation, confirms alliance to remain strong.

  Aman Erum remembered sitting back in his warm seat on board the convention centre bus. Walking their dogs, the ticket collector had laughed. These people in the capital, the bus drivers and the ticket collectors and the peons, the girls with the hooded sweaters and blue jeans, they were anxious trespassers in the heart of their own country.

  It wasn’t like in Mir Ali; it was worse here. The army was both an invisible and an omnipresent force in Mir Ali. On the mornings of important religious holidays, y
ou could hear their armoured vehicles squeeze through the bazaar, parking themselves at busy intersections, searching the dedicated throngs, just in case. Their black boots left large footprints outside the houses they entered in the late hours of the night, dragging out suspected militants to be interrogated at General Headquarters. The suspects’ feet were never shod in shoes; you knew their footprints from the deep furrowed lines of disturbed earth, traces of people whose shoeless feet had been pulled, not walked, through the dirt.

  There was no respite from the politics, none from the struggle of Mir Ali.

  But these people in Islamabad lived on the periphery of their land so as not to disturb their guests. They lived as an aside, on timings that wouldn’t ruin daily exercise or the scenery that a diplomat’s dog might enjoy on his morning constitutional. Aman Erum hadn’t laughed along with the ticket collector.

  He had been trying all day to fit in, to sound the part, to look like an insider here, and now he realized there had been no point. He would never look or sound like them. But America was too important. Aman Erum would not be isolated by Mir Ali; he would not be held back by Pakistan. He wanted the visa too much. He would not be kept outside. He would work harder to fit in, to remove what was alien about him – his accent, his badly imagined polyester suit, his awkwardness around those women in the high-heeled boots and hooded sweatshirts.

  • • •

  Aman Erum’s number, fifty-seven, was called non-consecutively, three hours past his appointment time and nine hours since his arrival in the capital.

  Hungry and tired, Aman Erum walked to the glass window where he would be questioned by a woman with mousy-brown hair who spoke a coarse, heavy Urdu and who paused her rapid-fire interrogation only to slurp liquid from a large plastic mug filled with ice cubes that clinked together every time she lifted the container to her ample, unremarkable face.

  Aman Erum answered questions about his schooling, his degree, his hopes for higher education in business in the birthplace of world capitalism, his aspirations, his understanding of the American dream. On the face of it, he appeared calm. No one could hear his heartbeat behind the double-paned glass partition. He used all the vocabulary he’d learned in his B.Com courses to demonstrate his awareness of the American tax system. He confidently related details pertaining to his family background, his mother’s maiden name, maternal and paternal family histories, his father’s non-suspicious career changes, and so on.

  What was the applicant’s intended length of study and work in the United States, how many siblings did he have, what were his prospects for marriage, his reasons for remaining unmarried currently?

  What did he think of 9/11?

  Aman Erum lowered his eyes. He had mud on his shoes. He took a deep breath and tried to figure out when he had dirtied them.

  Two aeroplanes hit foreign buildings, this is what people in Mir Ali heard. What they knew about the new war, what they understood about the events that turned their town into a battlefield once more, was this: those planes were flown by heroes.

  But this is also what they heard: the wounded empire was waging a war against Islam. They heard that the war was a form of what the empire called infinite justice – it was infinite justice when they were the ones piloting the planes, but not when they were the victims of such just violence.

  They heard that the men who flew the planes were from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but that the empire was going to strike Afghanistan first. When it became known one October morning, via radio and the local television channels, that Afghanistan had been hit and was in the throes of a foreign occupation – even though, it was noted, none of the men on those furious aeroplanes were Afghans – the men of Mir Ali understood that the state, Pakistan, had aided the attack on their brothers.

  Pakistan had opened its air space to the empire, closed Quetta airport so that foreign soldiers could use it as a makeshift base, allowed them access to their intelligence files, and put their invasive agencies at America’s beck and call.

  Aman Erum looked up and nodded gravely at the visa officer’s round face. ‘It was a terrible thing,’ he said. ‘A terrible thing.’

  How did he feel about the fall of the Taliban, she asked, between sips.

  Aman Erum remembered Hayat, his hair long and uncombed, blistering with anger. Before ‘you are with us or against us’ was translated, Mir Ali chose a side. They were against.

  ‘We men of Mir Ali knew that Pakistan would show its colours eventually,’ Hayat had shouted at Aman Erum across the teenaged brothers’ bedroom, where Sikandar was lying in front of his books. ‘We always knew that they would enter the fray in a conflict so unprincipled and so bloody, just like they did in the first Afghan adventure in the eighties, only this time they would do it openly. With us or against us,’ Hayat had scoffed. ‘Against, against you, till we have broken you.’

  Aman Erum had ignored Hayat’s histrionics; his youngest brother was so excitable. ‘Since when are you so anti, haan?’ Aman Erum asked Hayat, winking at Sikandar, who did not look like he enjoyed the prod.

  ‘Anti?’ Hayat had replied, raising his voice, which had not broken yet. ‘Anti? Aman Erum, they are their patrons. Who do you think made this the seventh-largest military in the world?’

  ‘Fifth,’ Aman Erum had said, stifling a smile.

  I understand, Aman Erum now said solemnly to the glass partition, that we are passing through a dangerous time. It is unfortunate that America must fight this war, but we are safer for it.

  With you. We are with you.

  • • •

  Thirteen days later Aman Erum received a letter informing him that his five-year work–study visa had been approved, with an addendum asking for one more interview.

  Samarra’s mother came to visit his family when she heard the news. Malalai offered her prayers for Aman Erum’s successful journey to the faraway continent and handed him some money, a few hundred rupees, discreetly folded into a white envelope.

  Samarra and Aman Erum met later, on their own, behind the Ibn e Qasim road mosque and walked together, contemplating the next five years. Prayers had just ended and the gullies behind the mosque were empty. A boy in a white shalwar kameez and delicate white prayer cap drank from a tap outside the mosque. After three sips, he lifted his feet from his sandals and gingerly washed his toes – a latecomer, he would have to pray on his own. Embarrassed, he looked away from the couple and focused on his feet as Aman Erum and Samarra walked slowly through the alleyways.

  ‘It will be for our future,’ Aman Erum said guiltily. He could not bring Samarra with him; that wasn’t an option. She smiled and leaned against him. Her slight frame was bundled in layer upon layer of clothes, adding a cushiony bulk to her shadow of a body. She wore churidar, tight around her ankles, and had pulled her long hair back so Aman Erum could see her face. Samarra felt her heart slow down, the opposite of Aman Erum’s – his heart always rushed with blood.

  She spoke quietly, into Aman Erum’s left ear. ‘I won’t miss you. I won’t even notice you’re gone.’

  Now he smiled, careful not to laugh and accidentally bump Samarra’s resting chin off his shoulder.

  It was dinner time, the gullies were quiet. A skinny pye-dog, its mangy light-brown hair bitten off in patches and its ribs poking through its flesh, ran after a little girl wearing red plastic slippers. A window opened above their heads and a mother called down to the girl, ‘Tashreen, come upstairs. Tashreen!’

  The little girl in the slippers hid from her mother, pressing her back against the wall of the building so she couldn’t be seen. She crouched down and stroked the dog on his neck. ‘Tash!’ her mother called from the window, unable to see her daughter beneath her. The dog rested his flea-bitten ear on Tash’s lap. The little girl in the red plastic slippers bent her head down to kiss the dog on its sticky wet nose. Somewhere a sheet hung out to dry on a railing dripped water onto the stre
et.

  ‘While you’re not thinking of me, will you remember that I’m going for us? So that when your father returns he will have no objections to our marriage, because he will see that I can provide for you outside of Mir Ali, outside of this place where we can’t even sit in public for a cup of tea or walk our children to their school safely?’

  Samarra stirred, careful not to lose her place in the crook between Aman Erum’s collarbone and shoulder. She did not like the mention of Ghazan Afridi. She remembered Aman Erum loading the light-blue pick-up truck. Maybe years, he had said, before he got into the truck and drove away. Maybe years.

  ‘I don’t want to leave Mir Ali,’ Samarra said. ‘I don’t want to walk on roads that have no memory of my life. I want you and me to walk our children to school on streets we know by heart, streets that have known us since we were children.’

  She felt his shoulders sag, his back slump ever so slightly. She added, ‘And I already drink my tea outside. Who can stop me?’

  Aman Erum laughed, loudly this time. He held her face in his palms. He told Samarra how he loved her and how he would love her in the years to come.

  She wished that they could have married, could have signed their wedding papers before he crossed the Atlantic, but she kept her wishes to herself. Aman Erum’s heart was beating too fast to slow down for anything now. She could hear it against his chest. He was on his way, finally.

  • • •

  The taxi driver punctures Aman Erum’s silence. ‘Radio says they killed three more today.’ He does not need to specify who they are and who they killed. The taxi driver’s inflection says it all.

  ‘Where?’ Aman Erum asks.

  ‘At a checkpoint along the Atal Ali market.’

  ‘Near the mosque?’

  ‘On the way. They always keep an eye out on that jumat, don’t they?’