The Shadow of the Crescent Moon

by Fatima Bhutto

  At one point he turned to his once caustic and whip-sharp wife and said, ‘Stop it, Mina.’

  Mina had only recently taken to wearing a dupatta atop her head, and she adjusted it then, a cloak she wrapped like sorrow around her, pretending that Sikandar hadn’t said a word. She acknowledged only the noise that came from the cassette deck and the delicate voice of the legend who had sung to troops during the various wars the country had fought with its neighbour.

  Mina pulled out the cassette, hitting the eject button with her bent index finger, and curled the light-brown intestines of the tape round her hand.

  ‘Whose cassette is this?’ she shrieked.

  Sikandar stared at Mina.

  ‘Now we listen to their musicians? To their women who sang morale-lifting paeans to soldiers? Whose tape is this? I won’t have it here, I won’t.’ Mina shook her head, wagging the dupatta off until it fell round her shoulders.

  Sikandar gripped the steering wheel tighter. ‘Let it be, Mina. It’s just music, an old tape – it’s not important.’

  But she wouldn’t let it be, wouldn’t let it hang between them unanswered. The truth was that Sikandar liked the music, he liked the lady’s voice and the way she bunched her sari – it was always a sari – in one hand as she waved a handkerchief in the other, pausing only to dab her eyes in the black and white videos they showed on PTV.

  Mina knew the songs so well that she used to hum the tunes to herself while she worked in the kitchen or as she read her newspapers. She had always kept an eye out for new cassettes. On trips to conferences around the country Mina always stopped at a bazaar and purchased the singer’s latest compilation.

  But now she could not be reminded of that memory. Mina lifted her eyebrows, tidily plucked arcs, and rolled down the window.

  ‘Stop it, Mina,’ Sikandar repeated wearily as he leaned across his wife’s seat to roll the window back up, fighting with her to gain control of the outside world.

  He needed a new car, one of those models with the childproof windows and locks that he could operate from the comfort of the driver’s seat. Mina had managed to open the window, just a crack through which she could hurl the cassette.

  ‘Let it sit on the road, on top of other people’s garbage.’ Mina was no longer shouting, she was snarling now, turning her anger at the tape towards her husband.

  ‘Coward,’ she hissed.

  Sikandar dropped his head. Asserting all his dwindling strength over the rigid gear stick and tight clutch, he pulled the car over to the kerb.

  ‘Mina,’ he said softly, ‘the tape is yours. It was your favourite.’

  Mina stared at her husband, her eyes glowing, glistening.

  ‘You always listened to it in the car; you know all the words of all the songs. You used to beat your chest to the music, like it was devotional. You said that you believed she wasn’t singing for Pakistan. She was singing for us, for the small, for the forgotten. For Mir Ali.’

  Mina’s eyelids fluttered. She remembered the heavily made-up singer, her thick auburn hair woven into a bun starting at the nape of her neck and messily gathered on the crown of her head. She would walk to the stage in tiny steps, like Japanese Geisha girls or Chinese ladies whose feet had been painfully bound. The sari tucked her body into a curvaceous column, Mina remembered. She remembered her hourglass figure. She remembered how she had wished she too could place jasmine buds in her hair and sing of war and death as if they were earthly delights.

  Mina put her fingers through the small crack of the window and gripped her chest with her other hand, beating her heart like she was resuscitating it. Ya Ali, ya Ali. She hit her heart and let her ink-stained tears fall on her white, crumpled shalwar kameez, and repeated the words over and over to herself while Sikandar drove home in silence.

  • • •

  That was months ago. Sikandar has kept his phone on silent since then, a quiet protest against the ongoing funeral invasions. The kitchen boy is sent to collect Mina when she causes a scene and no one speaks of the sari-clad songbird. Sikandar tried to keep Mina’s secret for as long as he could, bringing his wife home and hurriedly sequestering her in their bedroom, locking the door and pulling the curtains shut so no one would see her wail and scream. But Mina’s cries could be heard across the house. For weeks, Zainab stood at the bottom of the staircase, unable and afraid to make the climb, listening to her daughter-in-law sob. Upstairs, Sikandar would open the door only long enough to assure his mother that there was nothing to worry about.

  ‘She just needs rest,’ he would tell his family as they lowered their eyes uncomfortably at the kitchen table. ‘It’s natural, this kind of reaction.’ He was a doctor; he knew these things. Sikandar did his best to cover Mina’s depressive rants, but he could not hide the funerals for very long.

  Zainab started to receive phone calls, too. Women her age, friends and acquaintances, called and besieged her with stories of Mina’s trespasses. Her daughter-in-law was crazy, they said. She should speak to her doctor son about having her committed. She was causing trouble and upsetting good families in Mir Ali. It was simply unacceptable. It simply wasn’t done.

  When Zainab told Sikandar about the phone calls he looked away from his mother and lied. ‘She just needs rest,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘It’s natural, this type of reaction.’

  So now Aman Erum and Hayat keep out of her way. Zainab speaks to her daughter-in-law only at meal times. She does not call Mina to her room and she no longer asks her to shell pistachios for her in the afternoon. Zainab and Mina used to frequent Tabana’s beauty parlour to have their eyebrows threaded and their hair coloured. Tabana had four girls who did the waxing and the hair ironing. She had even begun to offer Japanese bonding, a new fashion from abroad. ‘Instantly straight hair,’ Tabana promised. ‘No more fuss. Very popular.’ Mina had laughed and told her mother-in-law that when Tabana stopped washing her hair in the kitchen sink she might consider the adventurous foreign hair treatments, but not before then. Zainab now goes alone to the parlours run out of women’s kitchens and living rooms, like Tabana’s, that have sprung up all over Mir Ali. And no one mentions Mina’s outings.

  • • •

  The Suzuki pulls up beside the petrol pump and Sikandar gathers his thoughts before he shuts off the engine and pulls his key out of the ignition. As the car falls silent, Sikandar listens to the sound of the rain falling on the car’s bonnet. This will have to be over quickly. Eid prayers are starting shortly. He has two hours to deal with Mina, go to work and get to the mosque – if he wants to do so comfortably. Sikandar simply doesn’t have the energy for a big fight on today of all days.

  09:25

  4

  They meet in the history department of the university. There is no life on campus now, few signs of students or of professors going about their business. It is not just the university that has been snuffed out by the politics of occupation and suspicion. Mir Ali’s schools have also been identified as dangerous. Children, free to congregate in schools and playgrounds, carry home news of comrades on the outside, their fates cryptically sealed in homework assignments and problem sets. Zohran and Zaviyan walk seventy kilometres together and then thirty and fifty-two kilometres separately. Though there is a fork in the road and some delays occur, both men will reach their final destination but who will reach first?

  It does not matter.

  A mark is given for the correct numerical answer.

  They are alive, the boys are alive. This is the message sent and received.

  There are maths classes with no mathematical precepts to be learned. No serious fractions, no solving of any kind to be done, just hope to be relayed.

  But still the children have to be careful. Some of their teachers are paid by the state to report on subversive activities on their campuses and in the classrooms. Not many, but maybe one or two; no one knows for sure at the time. The teachers
are asked to report on students who express separatist views, on those who talk freely about their fathers’ travels. They keep special watch on those prone to boast about a brother’s strength, an uncle’s recent exploits in training, anyone who speaks too fondly of the great state’s neighbours or mentions the years 1947, 1971.

  They are encouraged to provoke students – young, old, it doesn’t matter. All information is legitimate and hungrily sought by the agencies. Assignments, not the kind sent home in maths class, are written on the blackboard: What does Pakistan mean to you? An essay on patriotism handed out during an English literature lesson.

  The question answered correctly earns the industrious student a star marked in red ink at the top of the paper; but answered otherwise it means something entirely different for the pupil and his family.

  • • •

  The university itself is small: a few low-storeyed buildings packed together, the various faculties separated by small av-enues for bicycles and select, stickered cars to pass through. It is a young university, not older than its graduating students. Built by the province, Mir Ali’s university opened itself to the town’s aspiring offspring of traders and smugglers, who would otherwise have to study in distant cities. The education offered ought to have been largely free, but the province’s weak funding and heavy corruption meant that only the district’s wealthy ended up there.

  The university is guarded by large wrought-iron gates. Over time they served not to let students in, but to prevent them from leaving.

  It is almost eighteen months since the university was surrounded and the siege began. The students had been protesting the murder of one of their popular peers, Azmaray, a senior who had four months left to complete his degree in philosophy.

  Azmaray had been tall and lanky, his hair growing past his chin and onto his shoulders. He didn’t look like a troublemaker; he looked like a philosophy student. But he had been a threat.

  Azmaray had been photographed at a rally, a demonstration in the growing slums of Haji Abdullah Shirazi Khan road, holding a photograph of his brother, who had been disappeared by the armed forces.

  Askari disappearances. It was a service, Inayat had said, like termite extermination or pest control. The army had, of course, taken men and held them without warrants before, for weeks or even a few months, but they had not really disappeared before. There was a difference.

  No one in the country waited for Mir Ali’s missing.

  It was the first time the national press picked up on the protests that were held weekly, staged by the Mir Ali families of those invisibly plucked and held by the state. The army, for its part, had been not so quietly disappearing men across its three border provinces – never from the centre – for the better part of the past five years.

  Disappearances, there was a beautiful science to them.

  • • •

  First, they allowed the foreigners to come in and choose who would be arrested with papers and who would be transported over the country’s borders. Young men from isolated frontier towns were taken to cells in nearby Afghan airbases and interrogated by young boys from Oklahoma. There was no need for the army to get involved then; it would only complicate matters.

  Then the Americans took elderly bearded men, the fellows who recited the prayers from the mosque’s minarets. But they weren’t dangerous in the way their captors had been hoping for.

  Suddenly, the army was eager to help out, to be a part of the process and to receive a School of the Americas training at home. You have to look outside the mosques, they whispered. You have to find them where they gather to speak of politics, of the war, of their allegiances. You can’t find them in the mosques; they talk only of God there.

  So the Americans let the Pakistani military in, wiped their hands clean and went back to fighting from the sky.

  While the Pakistani army kept going on the ground.

  • • •

  Azmaray’s brother, Balach, was a known firebrand. He had printed a pamphlet, a charge sheet, detailing Pakistan’s crimes against its people. East Pakistan, Balochistan, Sindhis, Pashtuns, Ahmedis, the minorities. Balach had named them all.

  Balach had been walking to the university, where he taught politics as a junior professor, when it happened. He left his house at a quarter past eleven and began the ten-minute stroll to the tree-lined campus where he would teach an Introduction to International Constitutions class to first-year students. He took out a cigarette as he walked and noticed the green Pajero behind him only as he cocked his head to light it against the wind.

  But there were other cars on the road. Balach exhaled a plume of smoke and carried on walking. Twenty seconds later the green Pajero stopped. A man wearing a pair of finely creased trousers leaped from the back seat and grabbed the junior professor, forcing him to stumble and lose his footing as he was thrown into the Pajero’s spacious trunk.

  People saw what was happening.

  Men driving in different directions thought they witnessed a man being bundled into an official-looking car.

  Children begging on street corners knew what they saw, but pretended they had not understood the physics of a man’s illegal capture. And so the street was unchanged. Life would be easier for those who had seen nothing.

  No blood had been spilled. It was not necessary for uniformed officials to close the road to prevent passers-by witnessing official business. Nothing had happened.

  When the junior professor failed to appear in front of his morning class it was assumed he had been held up with more important affairs, perhaps something to do with his family.

  When Balach did not return home to his family they assumed he had been buried under a deluge of work.

  When the next morning came and there was no sign, either professionally or personally, of the junior professor his father went to the local police thana and asked to file a First Information Report.

  The officer laughed. ‘Come back in a week’s time.’

  In a week’s time the same officer acted as though he had never seen the old man before or heard of his missing junior professor son. His face registered no recognition of the case or of the time lapsed.

  ‘Nothing to do with us. Go sort out your personal issues on your own. We’re not a bloody complaint centre,’ he said this time.

  The police made no reports. They had no warrants out for the junior professor’s arrest.

  The military police suggested to the father, when he approached them timidly with stories of the dropped cigarette and the green jeep with the spacious trunk – stories that had slowly filtered back to the family – that his son had abandoned them to fight at the forefront of Al Qaeda’s jihad.

  ‘But he was a professor; he was not a fighter. He was not religious. He taught a class on the constitution.’

  ‘Maybe he’s run off with his boyfriend, then, hain, kahkah? He doesn’t sound like a fighter, as you say. Maybe he’s not capable of getting along with women and escaped to live a life of – . . . You say he’s not religious, kahkah, look at what these fellows get up to when the fear of the Almighty leaves them.’

  ‘Maybe he’s dead,’ one of them eventually said. If shame and fear did not work, not knowing would be their punishment. There was no final humiliation. It kept going.

  Maybe he’s dead.

  Maybe he’s dead.

  But he wasn’t.

  There was no evidence of the state’s hand in Balach’s disappearance but that in itself – the lack of footprints, of witnesses, of news – was proof enough.

  Azmaray, his philosophy student brother, marched every week with the families of other men who had been taken in the state’s secret war. He marched with children who were cousins and sons and daughters and nieces and nephews of the disappeared. With white-haired mothers and cane-carrying fathers. Across the city’s slums, around the marketplace, and towards the press club. />
  And one day a visiting journalist, who had been sitting in the press club’s canteen drinking a cup of milky tea, watched the protestors go by and asked his colleagues what was happening.

  ‘Happens every week,’ they said, and shrugged.

  The journalist followed the protestors; he took a cameraman from the club with him and photographed the philosophy student, his left arm raised over his head in a fist, his right hand clutching a picture of his brother to his chest.

  Azmaray, the philosophy student, became a hero then. He became the face of the disappeared. His photograph followed the article of the visiting journalist who told the country of these weekly vigils for the un-dead. Azmaray coined a language for them, after providing the country with an eerie visual. Laapata.

  That’s what they called people like his brother, the junior professor.

  The missing. The unknown.

  Three days later, Azmaray, the philosophy student, was found in the middle of the small university campus.

  His long hair, which was growing longer still and gave his wiry body the promise of a coming masculinity, was scorched off. His gut was bloated. His left arm, broken in five different places, was twisted above his shoulder. His right arm, the one that had been holding the photograph of his brother, the junior professor, lay several feet away from the place where Azmaray’s body was found. His teeth had all been removed from his jawbone.

  That afternoon the university held a spontaneous namaz e janaza for Azmaray. Men and women gathered on campus, praying together and weeping in their hundreds.

  They were joined by families from the marches that Azmaray had led. The janitorial staff, mainly poor Christians who forsook their prayers in a different tongue to speak to God for Azmaray, came too. They all gathered to march for Azmaray, who was known, and for Balach, who was not.