It had made him less afraid, more confident and comfortable in his role.
He was doing a service, a long-distance service that only required him to protect the peace.
He had seen his father shout till his voice was hoarse about the cost of life in Mir Ali. How hard it is not to die here, he wheezed, borrowing the phrase from poets past. He had watched Hayat cry at the funerals of his friends, his friends who were his eldest brother’s age and who had died fighting in the insurgencies against the army. It was not that Aman Erum did not understand the war. He did. But Aman Erum also thought he understood how power worked and he had no desire to join his father and Hayat in an unwinnable fight.
• • •
He dialled the 01192 numbers in the evening, cupping the receiver to his mouth while Adriana flung notebooks at him across the corridors as she slouched back from class. Colonel Tarik had initially sounded surprised to hear his new charge on the phone. Aman Erum thought he was taken aback by his initiative.
‘You boys from Mir Ali are not always so cooperative,’ the Colonel had said on the first phone call Aman Erum placed spontaneously. ‘Welcome, welcome on board.’
Aman Erum had not expected to, but he felt warmed by the Colonel’s response. He basked slightly in the approval of the Colonel’s voice over the distant line and felt his anxiety over the deal they had struck recede. He was far enough from Mir Ali that he could help the Colonel without being hurtful to anyone. How much more could he possibly know than the glorious Pakistani army? What amount of insider knowledge could he tap into that the generals and majors and cadets around Colonel Tarik didn’t already know?
Aman Erum mulled over these thoughts. After the first few phone calls they had seemed less urgent in his mind, more obvious. They, the Colonel and the mysterious American lady who arranged the meeting, had only asked him to let them know what he heard. If he heard something, it can’t have been that secret. If Samarra had heard something, it mustn’t have been very carefully hidden. Aman Erum did not, not once, stop to wonder how carefully hidden Samarra was.
He was only confirming what they already knew.
Initially he called the Colonel so that they would not revoke his visa, so that they would know he took their deal seriously and that he valued his opportunity to study abroad. Aman Erum, the eldest and most responsible of his brothers, called so that they could not accuse him of reneging on his promise. But then he called to relay news, to speak in code, to be reassured that the Colonel appreciated hearing from him.
‘Grana, with all this work how are you able to concentrate on your studies?’ It had made Aman Erum uncomfortably happy to hear this. For a moment his stomach turned as he stood in the corridor that smelled of sweaty gym socks, and he held the phone silently.
But then the Colonel clicked the phone off the speaker and asked Aman Erum how the weather was and whether he had managed to keep a heater for himself in the room – sometimes the administration did not allow these things but of course sometimes central heating was not sufficient.
And Aman Erum remembered that there was an intimacy they shared.
The Colonel had left him alone; he had given him his freedom because of these pre-emptive calls. Had he not demonstrated his reliability, the Colonel would have been breathing down his neck.
Aman Erum had heard stories like this as he grew up in Mir Ali, stories of collaborators given jobs in the federal capital who became so comfortable with their new lives that they had to be reminded where they came from and who they were.
There were stories of boys, young men, given scholarships and athletic sifarish into the national hockey team, who over time forgot that these were favours, and soon found themselves, in all cases, fired. But first they were disgraced.
The man in the capital had to come home. He could not drive his Korean-made car back to Mir Ali because it had been impounded by the company. He came in a bus, always looking over his shoulder, wearing the clothes he left in, and sat alone in his home while the neighbours whispered. Eventually he stopped leaving his house altogether, no longer attending Friday prayers or local wedding celebrations. He did not walk past the dried-fruit stand, covered by the shade of the Chilgoza pines, to pick up apricots and talk to the aged seller. He did not marry, as his mother had insisted he would as soon as his busy schedule allowed. He was found hanging from his ceiling fan.
But that would never happen to Aman Erum.
Aman Erum couldn’t really be called an informer. He was a modern necessity. A function of the days and times we live in. He was the passer-on of news. He could not judge the quality of his news, but he delivered it professionally and this the Colonel respected.
‘Der kha, grana. Well done. Nice to hear you. Regards to your family from our side. Akphal khial sata, take care.’
The line went dead as the Colonel moved on to his papers and newspapers and more important intelligence. Aman Erum put the receiver back on the payphone on the wall. Out of habit he made a point to break the line, as if he were still in Mir Ali – as if these superstitions worked – and then picked it up again, inserted more coins and dialled the number that always followed the Colonel’s, the number that wished away the previous call.
‘Salam?’
She had just woken up, he could hear sleep in her voice.
12
‘I’m sorry,’ Hayat says. Stepping back he can feel the earth crumble underneath his feet. ‘I didn’t mean to make you . . . I wasn’t . . . I’m not . . .’ Hayat loses the words on his lips.
Samarra hasn’t lowered her eyes. She stays perfectly still but for a faint movement of her shoulders, which curve slightly as she releases a shallow breath and then straighten as she continues to talk.
‘I’m just jumpy.’
He understands. They have been together for two years now. Hayat has seen Samarra on the mornings of serious operations and on the evenings that follow. They have weathered the hours in between for many months now. Not knowing has an effect on most people that makes them nervous or irritable but Samarra is not flustered, not normally. It’s the knowing, the afterwards, that takes its toll on her. There were successes and there were captures that she responded to equally, without distinction, then, withdrawing into a space only large enough for her, she vanished for a period. Hayat never asked her where she went or what she did, he only waited until she returned. She never spoke of those solitary retreats either. They had learned each other’s codes and adapted themselves to the languages and limitations they required.
‘It’s big today.’ She speaks in empty phrases. She utters only safe sentences on such days, never delivering a hint about the hours ahead. One can track operations in Mir Ali based on Samarra’s syntax. She kicks the dirt with her foot, freeing an ankle from underneath her in the process, as she looks at Hayat. ‘It’s the biggest we have ever attempted.’ He nods. His language on these days is as cryptic as hers.
There is something frail about her this morning, something Hayat hasn’t seen previously. It makes her appear unstable, unpredictable.
‘Do you know what this will mean?’ Samarra is speaking to herself now, sounding jumpier as her words tumble into each other. She talks quickly to get them out. ‘It will change the situation. It will be too large an assault. They will have to reconfigure everything. Every security, every informer, every policy will be unmade by it.’
She doesn’t have stage fright. She is excited.
‘Samarra,’ Hayat begins slowly, weighing his words against her timbre, which he can feel building. He won’t have another moment; he has already disturbed the protocols Samarra insists upon. ‘Are you ready for this?’
She smiles. Hayat looks at her lips as they pull upwards. There had been a different tug, a smaller tilt to her smile when he had first met her.
Mir Ali had always been Hayat’s destiny. This he had always known. As a young man enlisting to fight for
his home he had been carried by the impermeable optimism of revolutionaries. This was a battle for justice. It was a battle that had claimed multitudes, one in which whole generations of men had been sacrificed, but it was one that was waged towards the light. It would lead, a young Hayat fervently believed, to victory. Because it must. Because Mir Ali would soon be free. It would reclaim its own destiny.
But Mir Ali never did transcend its enemies. Its leaders had broken it down, they had become fanatics. Hayat had trouble recognizing Mir Ali in their eyes. He can no longer see anything in Samarra’s. Samarra with the green eyes and the beauty mark trapped inside.
• • •
Of his brothers, Hayat had listened to his father’s stories with the deepest interest. He sat with Inayat while he worked, and concentrated on the tales Inayat traded with his friends over tea, boiled in an aged samovar and spiced with poppy seeds and cardamom in the Afghan style.
Inayat told Hayat fables as they walked in the evenings, preparing to head home for dinner. Hayat always went straight to his father’s carpet store after school, and later, when the family’s fortunes had changed, to his workshop.
Leaning slightly on his son, his elbow bent into a triangle over Hayat’s shoulder, Inayat spoke to his son in parables.
He told him the story of a king so generous he had fed the fish in his kingdom’s river with grain and pressed silver coins into the palms of beggars until one day he discovered that he had been edged out of his own kingdom. The king wandered through the forests until he had resigned himself to the life of a fakir and found himself at the entrance of another man’s kingdom. Approaching the new king, whose people knew him as an avaricious and cruel monarch, the once-royal fakir asked for his help, for a meal and a place to rest his aching soles.
The greedy king agreed, promising to feed and keep the wanderer in luxury for several months after which a service would be asked of him. I am at your mercy, the fakir said, ever so grateful. Some months later, maybe six, maybe seven, the king collected the fakir, well fed and rested from his travels, and took him to be sewn into the hide of a slaughtered ox. When he questioned his lord why he must be hidden in the leather of the ox’s belly, the king reminded the fakir of his generosity and told him this was the deal they had agreed upon.
The fakir submitted himself and, once wrapped, he was carried away by an enormous creature with large claws and long, bristly feathers to the summit of a mountain. You will come down with my instructions, the king bellowed from below, once you have thrown me all the diamonds lying around the mountain.
The fakir obeyed. He nicked his fingers on the uncut stones as he sent them down to the insatiable king, circling the expanse of the mountain while his feet bled. When he had emptied the soil of its jewels he asked the king if he could come back down. As he was pleading to be told how to descend, the king called up one more question to the fakir.
Do you see bones now, uncovered by the gems, on the mountaintop?
The fakir lowered his eyes and saw that the ground was littered with human skeletons. There are many, he shouted back. I see them. But the greedy king had gone, carrying off his diamonds.
Inayat always stopped, he always stopped at this point and removed his arm from his son, who grew taller and taller, making the use of his shoulder as a crutch uncomfortable, and looked at him. ‘Do you see, Hayat jan,’ he said, using his son’s name in duplicate, ‘do you see, Hayat, my life, what they have done to us?’ My soul, my life.
Inayat did not finish the tale, did not end the folk legend with the rest of the story, which saw the fakir throw himself off the mountain into the river below it, where he was saved by the very fish that had fattened themselves on his alms of grain. Inayat did not end the legend with its message of revenge.
The fakir returned to the insatiable king, who was shocked to see him alive. The fakir told the king he would show him the easy way down the mountain if he would sew himself into an ox’s hide and be placed, as he had placed so many others, at the mountain’s peak. Greedily, the king agreed. He couldn’t resist – the diamonds would then be within his direct reach. Once at the summit, the king danced among the diamonds and was hurriedly gathering as many as he could into his hands when he caught sight of the fakir walking away from their deal.
Where are you going? he yelled to the wanderer. You have to show me how to return.
You love nothing more than those diamonds, the fakir replied, now live among them. And he walked back to the kingdom, where he was placed on the throne vacated by the insatiable king.
This part Inayat omitted.
All children knew the tale; it was a popular Pashtun story passed down to remind the young of the consequences of desire and greed. But Inayat never recited the tale’s end. He stopped on the street, the dust swirling round his sandalled feet in the evening breeze, and spoke to his son.
‘You see, you see what they have taken from us?’
Inayat spoke the moral of the story to the one son who knew how precious the summit of Mir Ali was.
• • •
As Inayat felt himself closer and closer to death, he repeated to Zainab the value of the home they had built together and circled numbers and digits into the air so that she would know, after a lifetime together, what it was that he was leaving to her and their sons. As the night blackened over Mir Ali, lighting the sky with nothing save for a constellation of stars so faint you would think they shone over another city, casting a glow on Mir Ali only out of pity, Inayat bade Aman Erum farewell and, suppressing the disappointment in his voice, wished him success in his endeavours. Inayat said he knew his son would do well in business. To Sikandar and Mina he had no final consolations to offer. He had had nothing to say to them for some time. Their grief made him dumb and in his own passing he did not want to aggrieve them further. Inayat saw Hayat last. He had saved him, his youngest boy, so that his lips would close upon the words he murmured into his son’s ear.
‘Come to my grave and tell me Mir Ali is free. Whisper it to me, even when I’m gone.’
10:27
13
Refugees of the drone war in neighbouring Waziristan towns and villages escaped the fighting in their homes by living like ghosts on the outskirts of Mir Ali. They were easily recruited by the militia who lived in the forests and hills, waging their own bloody war against the state. Truth be told, they were the easiest. They were easily recruited because they had nothing left to defend.
The militants, as they were called by journalists and foreigners, were fighting the excesses of a corrupt, godless nation. They did not flinch from violence. They beheaded soldiers and kidnapped brigadiers. We are close, they said, we are so close you can feel our breath upon your neck.
But they were not welcomed, not well received, not initially at least, by the local population. The militants expected to be welcomed like heroes, they thought themselves heroes. And why not? Look at the battles they pitched against the state. The state that everyone hated, that burned everyone’s skin. But they were not heroes.
They received money wherever it presented itself. They confiscated bootleg alcohol, condemning to death the Sikh and Christian minorities that survived on the trade, and sold the rusted cans and glass bottles to enlarge their own caches. They took money from mosques that raised pennies from congregants, and they received foreigners from bright green countries that dutifully supported their cause to the tune of millions.
There was little by way of violence and corruption that separated them from their enemies. They heard what those in the cities said about them – that they paid men to detonate bands of dynamite strapped to their unwilling chests for cash amounts of forty thousand, thirty thousand, twenty, ten.
It was not true per se. The militants did not give the soon-to-be-deceased man a briefcase of money – money that he could never spend should he choose to accept the mission. But they did support the man’s family and
his children for what was deemed to be a suitable amount of compensatory time.
There was one distinguishing feature between the militants and the men they fought: they were true believers. These men were imbued with the message of the righteous and led by the certainty of their faith. They were an army devoted to the sunna. They lived and fought according to the sayings and scriptures of God. Their God was mightier than the fifth-largest army in the world. A nation of one hundred and eighty million people was no match for their God. They saw themselves as holy warriors, they defended a book they had never learned to read in a language they could not speak.
There was nothing godless about the men on the margins of Mir Ali.
• • •
A shot is fired. The sound rings mercilessly in Sikandar’s ears. He slams his foot on the brakes of the van. His body is thrown back against his seat. He can’t tell if the shot was fired at the vehicle, at them – at him or Mina – or as a warning, directed into the sky. Sikandar pats his chest, looks at his legs. He can hear the crunch of the grit beneath the van’s wheels.
He’s fine. He’s not hurt. Mina, also hurled back against her seat, has a look of intense anger on her face. He scans her legs, her arms, until he’s certain she hasn’t been hit.
Sikandar feels an instant relief: it wasn’t them. It was a mistake. It was a stray bullet. The firing must have been directed elsewhere. He is putting his hand on the door when Mina grabs his wrist.
‘Don’t,’ she whispers, her carefully stored anger on the verge of escaping her.
Sikandar turns his face away from the door and looks at Mina. ‘I have to check if the van was damaged.’ He assures her: ‘I’m not leaving you.’
As the muscles in his hand flex to grip the door handle, Sikandar hears a whistling crack. He turns to see his window being smashed inwards and feels the butt of an assault rifle ram into his jaw.
The Shadow of the Crescent Moon Page 12
