Men sit on motorcycles, thick scarves wrapped round their faces against the morning’s light rain. They accelerate their engines and let their exhausts burst with a sound that reminds the innocent of firecrackers. Young girls dressed in glossy new shalwar kameez peep out of alleyways, their thin lips painted with purple lipstick and their brows knitted together by small bindis in deep plum colours or the new garish neon designs that match their holiday outfits. Even the town’s transvestites, burly men whose muscled arms strain through their kameez, walk along the damp roads of Mir Ali, arm in arm, clapping their hands and asking passing cars for alms that will shower the generous with Eid blessings.
But the roads beyond Mir Ali are wild. They open up to the northern frontier with miles of pine forest and rocky terrain. Mir Ali had once moved with the tremors of its time, swaying almost – but not quite – to the rhythm of forest reeds. It had nestled shepherds and woodsmen and had been the home of mendicant princes and holy sages. Its people had been ordinary men who lived amongst saints and sovereigns. Mir Ali had been like this once.
But those who knew the enchanting un-kingdom, and those who loved it, watched as waves came and conquered and as partitions made and unmade Mir Ali.
Now many men live on the margins of Mir Ali.
Besides the woodsmen, there are the timber thieves, the gypsies, families living in squalor who warm themselves over open fires and dress their children in rags. There are the throwaways, the stowaways, the forgotten refugees. And then there are those who hide amongst the miserable, men who prey on the desolate and the deprived. Those men hunt for acceptance, feeding off the discarded populations of the periphery. They are strangers amongst their own.
• • •
Mina has not laughed like this in months. Sikandar hasn’t seen Mina’s face sustain a smile for this length of time since it happened. But before, before all that, she had always been like this.
She would click her fingers to the sound of music anywhere. She sang along with the jingle of bicycles as children raced past the front gate on their way to the empty plot nearby to play cricket. Mina used to encourage Jahanzeb, the Hazara kitchen boy, who had a delicate falsetto, to sing while they chopped onions and ground green chillies, and she would tap the splintering kitchen counter with her knife to keep the beat.
The music had been the first to go.
• • •
The colours have muted since they left the city’s main roads, the crowds have thinned and it has grown quieter.
There is something beautiful about the day, something Sikandar hadn’t expected. Something has shifted. The light has lifted through the early morning December fog.
Sikandar is completely absorbed in the moment, by the sight of the clearing view and the sound of Mina’s voice, just seconds before the Hasan Faraz Government Hospital supply van is stopped.
11
Aman Erum adjusted surprisingly well to his new continent. After a journey that dragged on for over two days, the cheapest ticket and the most inspired that Bismillah Travels could come up with, Aman Erum felt that he had never been further from Mir Ali.
He hadn’t, of course. But to leave home was one thing and to leave it on Bismillah Travels’ budget itinerary was quite another thing altogether. First, Aman Erum flew from Peshawar to Doha – where he walked between duty-free perfume counters that bore no trace of Peshawar airport’s body odours and where he first wondered how it was that people travelled beyond airports when there was plenty to keep them occupied inside their fluorescently lit terminals; to Amman – where he burned his tongue on a thimble of Arabic coffee; to London – where he first encountered the misery of a Western toilet with its roll of toilet paper in the place of a lota and walked on moving floors, oppressed by a feeling of uncleanliness, until his feet carried him onto a Swiss Air flight; to Zurich – where he would wait almost half a day until he was interrogated by a large blond man who seemed at pains to extract the precise reason for his travel to the United States before waving him through so he could take his place in another seat that was so small it folded his spine in half, right over his un-halal dinner tray.
By the time he finally reached New Jersey, Aman Erum felt he had left all traces of Mir Ali behind. He did not walk with his head bowed. He looked officials – especially officials – straight in the eye.
He abandoned his accent at immigration. He had been tweaking and amending it over the years, fine-tuning his vowels, sterilizing his inflections. Aman Erum had not come this far to carry Mir Ali with him. He dropped his country like a weight off his back. In a matter of weeks he was telling those who asked that he was a student from India or Dubai, testing out which of the two was more believable. People believed both. Aman Erum never corrected anyone. He cut his hair, bought fleece sweaters from a second-hand store, acquainted himself with toilet paper, read books off the shelves at Montclair’s independent bookstores, ate at Chinese restaurants and shopped at Korean markets.
Aman Erum’s work–study visa allowed him employment at the admissions office five days a week. In order to fund his time in New Jersey, Aman Erum had to work twice as hard as he studied. He stood behind a chest-high desk – always stood – and filed receipts, stamped signatures on official correspondence and stuffed envelopes for hours every morning. He was unused to the dullness of the work. In Mir Ali he consigned such trivial tasks to a younger sibling. But here in America, he was realizing, hard work was everything. It meant mobility.
He watched the women in the admissions office; he saw how a Jamaican assistant dean with a barely decipherable accent scolded a secretary for minor infractions. Aman Erum understood how low the bottom was and how rapid the ascent. Aman Erum would best the assistant dean. In a matter of months he would mimic her patois for his floor mates, who remembered her from her garbled Orientation welcome speech. No amount of mean work would deter him from his foreign dream. Aman Erum was an escapee.
He saved money by reading his textbooks at the library. He would spend his days and nights free from classes there, an alarm clock beside him and a thin razai that his mother had packed into his suitcase draped across his shoulders as he bent his body over a desk in the stacks and studied. The light was dim but the sound of students chattering away on mobile phones carried on through the night.
Some nights he rolled up the razai and placed it between his head and the desk and slept for an hour or two. He had been given student accommodation but it was so expensive he considered asking for a term’s refund on housing and making do in the stacks, living quietly and unobtrusively under the desks on which he worked.
• • •
Some of the Pakistanis who had come on science scholarships and year-abroad programmes, and were too foreign and too self-involved to pay attention to Pakistani politics, didn’t realize that Aman Erum did not consider himself among them. They immediately recognized him as similar, as one of their own. They didn’t buy the disguise. His new inflections and studied mannerisms did nothing to dissuade them from seeking him out. They often approached him to ask if he wanted to join their Muslim Students Association. He politely declined, saying he had too much work.
They invited him to iftar during the month of Ramadan and promised him preferential housing if he joined up with four or five of them who were in the process of applying for funding from a Pakistani Students Housing scheme. The food would be halal, they promised, the toilets equipped with lotas, and the bedrooms constructed so that one’s door faced eastward towards Mecca for easier prayers. Naturally, the sexes would be properly segregated and watched over by righteous brothers and sisters serving as resident assistants and hall monitors.
Politely, Aman Erum always refused. He had no problem with non-segregated living. Over time, Aman Erum’s awkwardness around women in blue jeans waned and Montclair began to feel like home. He liked living in Bohn Hall, on the twelfth floor. He’d never been around so many different people. Th
e self-possessed girls on his floor reminded him of Samarra. They were strong and independent and never put up with his nonsense. Adriana was from New Jersey but had family in Puerto Rico. She and her room-mate, Panthea Denopolous, a first-year student from Greece whose name Aman Erum practised and practised but could never say properly, opting to call her by her initials instead, were his first friends. Adriana chose Aman Erum for her team during a friendly game of Bohn Hall touch football during Orientation. He had never played the game before. ‘Fresh off the boat,’ she called him. ‘Fresh off the boat, it’s simple. We’re all receivers. There are no running backs.’ Aman Erum just stared at her. He hadn’t understood a word of what she said. But by his first Thanksgiving, Aman Erum knew all the rules of the game and had a favourite team in time for the Super Bowl.
PD wasn’t as athletic as her room-mate. She was new to America too, and she and Aman Erum took their letters to the post office together and stood in the interminable queues to send home a few lines scribbled on a postcard. In trying to explain where her country was to the postal clerks, PD didn’t face the trouble Aman Erum did when it was his turn, but she always waited patiently for him while he licked and stuck his two rows of stamps on every letter home to Samarra. ‘First in, last out,’ she would say about their adventures to the post office.
Adriana and PD never babied Aman Erum but left his dirty dishes outside his room when he forgot to clean them in the sink. They taught him how to cheat the laundry machines and how to shut the smoke detectors without sending the alarms into their panicked default settings. Aman Erum told them about Samarra and PD commiserated with him over the loneliness of long-distance relationships. When Aman Erum got stuck working at the admissions office, PD would take his post along with hers and stand in line with his love letters to Samarra.
These were his friends in Montclair.
Aman Erum had not come this far to be so close to Pakistanis and he viewed their constant interest in him with suspicion. Who knew how many of them had received their visas with one extra year over the standard four arranged as a bonus by mysterious American ladies?
Aman Erum had no friends from his summers in Chitral; he had no acquaintances from outside Mir Ali like Hayat did. He did not know which one of the Pakistanis in Montclair approached him out of kindness and which one of them had an ulterior agenda. But he supposed that they all had, as he did, an agenda of some kind.
He sometimes ate at the cafeteria with the Bangladeshi students, whose language he didn’t understand, but who nodded knowingly when he carefully and quietly allowed himself to speak of Mir Ali. They invited him to join them at meal times and spoke in English for his benefit as they complained about the dryness of the fish and the lack of sugar in the fruits, which all tasted of banana in this strange country. Aman Erum felt comfortable among them.
He knew that it would be said by the Pakistanis that he was a self-hater, that he had preferred to dine with Bingos and Hindus rather than with his own kind. They would murmur that their parents had been right. There was something strange about these northerners and their inability to fit in, they would say, but Aman Erum didn’t care.
He had never met anyone else who understood what he and his brothers had known, what all their friends and their parents’ friends had spoken about in hushed tones at wedding parties and late-night dinners in living rooms – that there was an injustice that was swallowing their people whole.
That the men in khaki from the central province absorbed the country as though it was only theirs. They took the water, the food, the electricity, the funds; they occupied all the top places – the only places – in the military and the bureaucracy so that their lopsided dominance would never be in danger of being contested, not now, not sixty more years from now.
No one outside of Mir Ali had understood that. It had been as though the others simply did not know it.
But these people, they understood it. The Baloch understood it, that’s what his father Inayat had said. The Nepalis too, but Aman Erum had never met any of their number. At Montclair State University there were no Baloch and only one Nepali girl. She wore her hair in a tight ponytail high on her head and, it was said, had grown up in India all her life.
Before he was introduced to phone cards, cheaply bought at all-night corner stores and snow-covered kiosks outside NJ Transit stations, Aman Erum spent the majority of his money left over after food and bills on phone calls home that cost one dollar fifty a minute. Mobile phones were too expensive. Adriana considered calling a relative in California long distance. Aman Erum could not imagine how far away Mir Ali would be on a Sprint or Verizon phone line.
In the early mornings and twilight hours of night, he would collect the change in his pocket – five-cent coins, ten cents, whatever he caught amongst the lint and carefully folded receipts he held on to as evidence of his almost beatific frugality – and unload his palms full of copper and silver into the slot of a payphone, whose mouthpiece was always warm, and dial Mir Ali.
Aman Erum spoke to his family once every two or three weeks, to whoever answered the phone, relaying his news. Three minutes, four maximum. It was all he could afford.
But he always called Samarra once a week, every ten days if the week was too short and the change in his pocket too light. He needed to hear her voice. To have her hear his. What if she forgot him? Aman Erum was still that eleven-year-old boy, waiting by the screen door for the sound of her footsteps on the pebbles outside his house. He sent her letters filled with mementoes of his life in America, colourful bus passes, menus from takeaway restaurants, Amtrak advertisements. He wanted her to see something else, something besides Mir Ali. But she never asked for more, never did anything except drop the souvenirs into a box and forget about them. When Samarra replied to Aman Erum she wrote in Pashto, never in English as he had begun to do. So he called her on the telephone to make up for his absence. As she spoke, Aman Erum would close his eyes and try to memorize her laughter. He said her name, repeatedly, so that she never lost the sound of his voice around it. So that every time someone called her name, she would be able to hear only Aman Erum. He told her everything about his life in New Jersey, about his professors, about his new clothes, about his floor mates and study groups and Adriana and PD and how they helped him fit in and feel at home; he spoke to her about his dreams and his business ideas.
Aman Erum spent his first Eid at Montclair’s Masjid Al- Wadud. There were no imam bargah nearby, barely a religious inconvenience for Aman Erum, who saw only business opportunities. What else were suburban American cities missing? Where did the faithful buy their prayer caps? How did they import prayer rugs? The Muslims in Aman Erum’s dorm prayed on bath mats and wore unembroidered, plain taqiyeh. They were too afraid to ask for these things now. ‘You see,’ Aman Erum said to Samarra on the telephone, ‘I understand vacuums. I understand the psychology of the needy.’
But his conversations with his family were made up largely of his academic pursuits and his economizing, and after hearing a few minutes of what his family had been coping with during his remote continental absence, he put down the phone with a feeling of relief.
Every so often he remembered his gentleman’s agreement and would ask his brothers – but never his father, who only spoke to his eldest when he happened to answer the phone, which he did less frequently as he grew more ill and confined himself to his bed – more specific questions about news from Mir Ali. What had happened at the marketplace around the Shirazi slums last Thursday, hadn’t there been a tussle between two traders over one of them benefiting from favourable transport routes – had there really been a connection there?
But he knew the real news would never be so casually transmitted over a telephone. Everyone had ears in Mir Ali. Initially he asked so that it would be heard that he had been enquiring.
Aman Erum asked so he would have something to submit – he needed information that would hold his studies on solid
ground. Aman Erum probed out of desperation. He wanted to keep himself as far away from Mir Ali as his business studies course would allow.
But as the months drew on he may have begun to overreach. Every once in a while, Aman Erum passed on something good. As the praise and thanks swelled and the months grew colder and darker and his distance from Mir Ali deepened, he no longer withheld what he might previously have counted as sensitive information – strands of stories that, woven together, implicated not just the guilty, but the innocent who protected them.
Aman Erum became reckless. He was too far away to realize how quickly he had unbraided secrets and how easily those undone by his loose tongue had been condemned. Eventually, when he was back in Mir Ali, it would seem that he no longer cared. But that was later.
• • •
Aman Erum sent unprompted reports; he did not bother to wait for Colonel Tarik to place his own calls. He pre-empted him, as he had done with the deal in Islamabad.
If he heard from Zainab or Sikandar that a home had seen its son leave on Monday and that by Wednesday his anxious-looking family had packed all their belongings, stuffing old televisions into cardboard boxes and filling blankets with their kitchen cutlery, tightly knotting the home-made bundles so that the dishes and bowls would not break against each other, Aman Erum connected the dots and placed an urgent phone call to the Colonel’s office.
Attack planned, he whispered into the black earpiece. Seems to be imminent, family has fled. Shahzar is expected to target soon. He spoke in dramatic telegram bursts, trying to impress upon the Colonel the gravity of the information he was delivering. In the common room Aman Erum watched police shows on American television where the camaraderie of officials was not broken by fears of informants or counter-information and where men looked out for one another, shielding partners from all manner of distress and instinctively guarding the emotions of a grumpy but entirely well-meaning boss.
The Shadow of the Crescent Moon Page 11
