The Shadow of the Crescent Moon

by Fatima Bhutto

  • • •

  The drive was short; they didn’t follow the convention centre route that Aman Erum’s bus had taken into the Diplomatic Enclave the last time. It was a few minutes, three maybe, before the white jeep pulled up at a small bungalow fronted by a patch of garden.

  A white woman in a severe blue suit appeared at the front door. Her caramel-coloured hair was clipped short, curling over her ears and curving neatly at the nape of her neck.

  ‘Come, please,’ she said as she walked down the hall and into the sitting room. There were no pictures on the walls – it was a waiting room of a house. There was no sense of anyone living there at all. The sofas were a light pink, the walls a dull beige, the potted plants plastic.

  ‘Madam.’ A man in uniform rose to his feet as they entered.

  He was thin. In his younger days his physique might have been described as trim, but there was no hint of muscle tone now. His scalp, balding on top, was lightly covered with strands of mud-coloured hair.

  ‘Yet another one of your great potentials – how you find our best and brightest through your system.’ He smiled and offered his hand to Aman Erum. On his left hand he wore a rose-gold wedding band. ‘Colonel Tarik Irshad, grana. I’ve heard a lot about you.’

  Aman Erum suddenly realized the white woman at the door was not just there to let them in. That there was an army man accompanying her filled Aman Erum with dread.

  Colonel Tarik’s presence, Aman Erum quickly determined, was to play second fiddle to the woman. Whatever she wanted, he asked for. Whatever hopes she had for Aman Erum’s United States sojourn, he expressed.

  Aman Erum was a bright spark, they said. He was blessed with extraordinary advantages: his intelligence, his desire to fit in, his ability to cover up his accent when he spoke to officials and to lie low when he lived amongst his own. They wanted him to do only what he had already been doing. They wanted him to listen.

  ‘Of course, you don’t have to,’ the woman said, shrugging, as she turned towards the Colonel. Aman Erum could stay here, in Mir Ali, they’d keep an eye on him. He was Inayat Mahsud’s son, wasn’t he? How had the last few months been for their family, since his father’s illness? What had he planned to do with his life and his family’s now that things had changed for them? Study, was it? Well, that’s a luxury.

  Aman Erum didn’t want to hear any more. How had they known about his father’s illness? Aman Erum asked the Colonel, his throat eating the words as they came out, why he had been rejected before. ‘I applied, I applied to join you and you turned me away.’ He fussed with his shirtsleeves, pulling them over his wrists as he tried not to sound too petulant.

  The Colonel sat back in his pink sofa. His smile faded. He bared his teeth. ‘Look at what happened in seventy-one,’ he said, ‘when those bastards mutinied and joined the Mukti Bahini. Taking our weapons and ammunition. They killed us with our own hands. Before we could capture them, they took us prisoners.’

  It had been the largest capture of soldiers since the Second World War.

  Colonel Tarik Irshad straightened his posture as he twirled the wedding band on his finger. ‘But we are, are we not, extending to you a new hand, grana?’

  • • •

  Aman Erum made the deal himself. They didn’t even have to lift a finger. He asked if they would expedite his student visa if he agreed, if he signed on to listen and to share the secrets he learned. Would he have more than nine months of paid work on his F-1 visa?

  The power suggested by men like Colonel Tarik was more than those suffocated by it could bear. But Aman Erum was under the impression that he was different. Aman Erum imagined that he understood power. He thought he had cards to play.

  Yes, perhaps they could do that, perhaps such an arrangement could be made, Colonel Tarik said, caressing the arm of the light-pink sofa as he replied, teasing the words out with every movement of his hands, the rose-gold wedding ring turning on his finger.

  And that was that.

  It hadn’t even been a threat – it had been a question.

  A note on a bio data form: he was Inayat Mahsud’s son, wasn’t he?

  His visa would be swiftly issued; he would receive enough money to help him set up accommodation in the student halls.

  But that would be it. This wasn’t a financial arrangement. It was a patriotic one, motivated by duty not profit.

  The Colonel would be in touch.

  10:12

  10

  Sikandar keeps his eyes on the road while Mina fiddles with her phone, then with her bag, then with her shawl that isn’t warm enough until finally she turns towards her driver.

  ‘If you drive any slower, we may as well turn back.’

  He lets it hang in the air between them. He isn’t driving slowly. Sikandar is driving the way one drives in Mir Ali: cautiously. His foot lifts and returns to the pedal, his eyes repeatedly glancing at all the mirrors, dancing back and forth across the glass. He doesn’t wear a seat belt.

  Mina turns the shawl round her throat and repositions herself in her seat.

  The leather of the upholstery is cold and sticky beneath her and she fidgets for warmth, squeaking her thighs across the seat. She checks her window to make sure it is properly shut. There’s a draught coming in from somewhere. She winds the handle until it can’t move. She looks at the small gap of Sikandar’s window. Droplets of rainwater fly in, lightly touching his fingers as they clasp the van’s steering wheel.

  ‘There aren’t any troops anywhere. You think that lazy bunch of conscripts will drag themselves out of bed so early on Eid morning?’ Mina says, trying not to laugh, pulling at her shawl and flapping a hand towards the open and empty road. She can’t help herself. ‘They’re still warming themselves in their barracks. By the time we get to the address, they’ll only just have laced up their boots.’

  Sikandar can’t tell if she’s attempting to make peace and have a conversation that isn’t only accusations and entreaties. He’s had quite enough of those. Sikandar suddenly slams his foot on the gas and the van jerks ahead. Mina holds out a hand and catches the dashboard just in time.

  ‘Is this okay?’

  Mina rests her head on the back of her seat. ‘Kha, za ista der mashkoor aim.’ So good of you. She laughs till black tears run down her cheeks.

  ‘Der manallah,’ Sikandar wheezes back, his words caught between his teeth as he laughs along with Mina, feeling light for the first time today. Any time, you’re welcome any time.

  Mina smiles and wipes her eyes of their charcoal smudges with her thumbs. On her fingers she wears talismans from her husband, her family, siblings, and colleagues. She twists each new amulet on top of a rising tower of rings. Silver rings with prayers written into them and semi-precious gems bulging from their settings.

  Sikandar gazes at Mina as she wipes her face. She catches his eye and chuckles.

  If you like their looks, gaze at them – she sings to him, displaying her heavily jewelled fingers over Sikandar’s hands on the steering wheel – for once they are gone they will never come again.

  Mina moves her fingers like the rain while she sings the verse.

  • • •

  Mina had always been the summer parent. Zalan was truly his mother’s boy from April till September, singing songs with her in the car, brushing her hair when she got her comb caught in a tangle, and keeping her keys safe in his pocket whenever they left the house.

  When there was no longer any threat of the winter’s cold and its curtained evenings, Zalan would accompany his mother on her shopping trips. Or else he would follow his uncles around, hoping to persuade them to take him to the park. Aman Erum had never been very good with children. Even though he adored Zalan, the little boy was always careful around him. Zalan tiptoed around his eldest uncle, never certain when his mood would allow an expedition. But Hayat was the opposite; he never said no to Za
lan. He seated him on his lap and drove him to the park on the motorbike. Zalan loved the motorbike, he loved the noise it made, how it throbbed against his ears and the way the air tasted on his tongue as they sped through Mir Ali.

  Mina looks at Sikandar sideways as she performs, snapping her fingers when they aren’t dancing, making sure that the ice that has been broken does not re-form. She feels assured of its thaw as Sikandar’s foot drums on the gas pedal in time to her music.

  This is the Mina Sikandar remembers from so many months ago. But she comes and goes in waves.

  • • •

  Just two weeks ago, Mina and Sikandar had fought terribly. He had had enough. After being summoned by yet another horrified caller to collect his wife, Sikandar finally decided to deal with this business of the funerals.

  He retrieved Mina from the stranger’s house and didn’t say a word to her on the drive back home. When they pulled into the driveway she slipped out of the car and, hugging herself for warmth, ran towards the house.

  Sikandar sat still for a moment, his fingers holding the handbrake. He turned the engine off and took the keys out of the ignition. He suddenly remembered he had to return to the hospital to deal with the rota of resident doctors. He placed his palms on his lap. He had to go in and speak to Mina first. He had failed before, on previous mornings and afternoons, but he no longer had the patience for defeat.

  She was in their bedroom, sitting on her knees on the floor, in front of the morning’s papers, scouring each page. As she turned the paper, her fingers ripped the edges of the thin sheets.

  ‘Mina.’ Sikandar stood behind his wife.

  She did not respond.

  ‘Mina,’ he said again, lowering his voice instead of raising it. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘You know.’ She turned her face over her shoulder and spat out the words at her husband. ‘You know what I’m doing. I’m the only one with even the slightest interest, aren’t I? I’m the only one who hasn’t stopped looking.’

  Sikandar knew the choreography of these fights. He knew them by heart now. But he didn’t feel he had the strength to keep up with what was expected of him.

  ‘He’s not coming back,’ he said, veering off script. ‘He’s not with them, with these strangers whose lives you keep intruding upon. He was never with them. He’s just gone.’

  Still on the floor, Mina spun on her knees and launched herself at her husband, hissing spiteful, angry denunciations at him.

  He was a blot on his family, she shrieked, waving her hands in the air of their bedroom. How was it that such a cur was born of this family? She was poor in many things, she shouted, but she was not lacking in faith even though she had to heave his disbelief across her back.

  Sikandar watched the raw torment in his wife’s mouth as she abused him. Her words got stuck in her throat; she was at pains to release them. He heard footsteps shuffling outside the door. Zainab. Sikandar hoped his mother, padding around the house in her slippers, hadn’t heard Mina yelling. He bent his head forward hoping that Mina would quieten down, that she would hush her voice. But her injured wails only made him back down. He was unable to speak, forced to agree with her that he was wrong. He was always wrong. Nothing calmed Mina in this mood, not even that admission.

  She pulled the hair off her face, her long once-black hair, now white at the roots and brittle at the ends, and pushed the newspaper that she had been clawing through off the pile, swiftly replacing it with another.

  The presses often shut for religious holidays or national celebrations, but it didn’t bother Mina. She stored and saved and hoarded newspapers for weeks and months on end. She eventually threw them out, after they yielded stale answers or directed her to empty funerals or anniversary prayer meetings.

  She knew what she was searching for, though no one else understood. They thought she had just gone mad. But she knew that the only thing that had kept her from going crazy, that had given her solace, was to be with others.

  She transformed herself between funerals. She had no other outlets or causes during the day. Once she had decided not to return to teaching at the university she divided her time by newspaper obituary boxes.

  Families paid for the obituary boxes by the letter. A grainy photograph of the deceased, captured between tight black borders lined with grief, cost extra. Most of the notices were simple – a date of birth, the names of those left behind, a call to mourners to remember the dead with their prayers. That was all they had left.

  These two on Tuesday, the dreham from Wednesday’s morning edition in the afternoon, the death notices from the Sunday paper collected and saved for various points in the week. She had begun to measure out her days in two-hour slots. In the counting of burnished tamarind seeds across empty white bed sheets. In the memorized mutterings of prayers that moved the body to rock back and forth as the verses were repeated over and over again for the dead. Mina retained a certain calm at these moments.

  She entered people’s homes with a serenity that came with the feeling that she was closer to Zalan. Closer to finding him, to knowing what became and what would now become of her son. It was when she was removed, often forcibly, from those homes that Mina returned vengefully to the wounded woman that spat and swore and paced until she was let out again.

  To look for her grief in the lines of other mothers’ faces, to search for her son amongst other boys taken too soon, to know that there was a community of widows and the bereft who knew how she suffered: this was a comfort to Mina. She had not managed to translate this, to explain how it felt, but other people’s understanding of her rituals was secondary. She did not lose sleep over their misinterpretations.

  It was the hatred, the searing anger that robbed her of her calm. Mina truly believed that he could have been saved. Zalan could have been saved. There were many whom she held guilty for not coming to the call of her young boy’s life.

  At home she wore the same ripped tunic, its threads loosened at the elbows and the collar. She wore through the colour in the knees of her shalwar as she moved ferally on the ground between the piles of newspapers she saved for further investigations and the piles she threw aside once they bore her no fruit.

  Her nails were no longer polished, though at Tabana’s beauty parlour she had once favoured a silvery white. A colour, Mina said, like the snow on the Himalayas.

  She did not think about things like that now. She no longer wore more than a rim of gun-black kohl round her eyes. She bought the kohl in the market, sold in matchboxes whose sticks had been dipped in the strong black powder for easy one-time application.

  She kept them on a table in the bathroom, discarding the matchsticks whose kohl had smudged down the head and those with visible splinters. It was a village tradition, one she had carried with her since she was a girl, never trading in the cheaply bought matchboxes for the popular new eyeliners that came in bright blue and red sticks with detachable tops and mirrors glued on the side.

  She did not look like, nor dress like, nor carry any semblance of the woman she had always been.

  Sikandar had heard this argument before. He had been howled and wailed and snarled at when he made the early mistake of questioning her. He had seen his wife’s hands tremble with conviction, her eyes blink and blink back tears, her voice falter with the deep need for her husband to believe her, to be on her side. To know that she was as close to finding Zalan as they had been in the year since they lost him.

  Sikandar kneeled then, balancing himself on his haunches next to Mina’s discarded newspapers. ‘He’s not coming back,’ he repeated, moving his body closer to hers so that this time she would not have the rustle of the papers to camouflage what he was saying. He spoke loudly, a notch or two above the apologetic whisper in which he had previously spoken to his wife. Sikandar felt his breath leave his mouth. There was gravel in his voice.

  ‘He is gone, Mina.’

 
; • • •

  Driving now into the forest, Sikandar no longer feels annoyed about the disruption to his day. He feels only hunger pangs knocking lightly on his stomach. But he ignores them and laughs and sings with Mina as he drives.

  This detour has knocked Mina out of her slump. Sikandar begins to pinpoint moments of recovery. He realizes he had previously mistaken them for signals of further worry. But now, looking back, Sikandar hopes that these flare-ups – today’s funeral, the fidgeting unhappily with the handbag and the constant checking of the phone – are the death throes of Mina’s grief. Cumulatively, they add up, Sikandar thinks.

  He feels ashamed of how he confronted Mina two weeks earlier.

  Today Sikandar has not spoken to her in anger. He did not speak down to her in the car as they left the funeral. He had shaken her too hard last time. She knew; he knew she did. That was enough for him.

  He drives while Mina sings and shifts about in her squeaky seat. She forgets the rest of the song, but substitutes the missing words with the poetry of Ghani Khan.

  But show me just this one thing, my darling,

  I seek a heart stained like a poppy flower.

  They do not know the remaining poem by heart, so they sing the words they do know over the Mir Ali landscape that pulls them out of the city and into the poor outer settlements.

  Other parts of Mir Ali, even the townships, have had morning facelifts – men carting small carnival rides park their four-seater swing sets and slides outside even the poorest areas and sell turns to the neighbourhood children for two rupees. But outside these newly crowded refugee camps there are no strangers setting up festivities for the days of Eid ahead.

  They pass by the slums on Haji Abdullah Shirazi Khan road: small, bare homes made of rickety shingles with no Eid lights adorning the rooftops.

  The hospital supply van, its windows tightly shut except for one, drives out of Mir Ali, past chaikhanas packed with men nursing steaming cups of cardamom-scented tea, and the dried-fruit vendor and his misshapen jute bags.