by Sorayya Khan
After lunch, we eavesdropped on my father and grandfather’s conversation. They were in my grandfather’s study, behind French doors that never closed properly, and we were hidden by heavy maroon curtains draped across the arch.
“Yasmin will stay in Pakistan.” My father used my mother’s Muslim name instead of Irene, her real name, as was his practice whenever he spoke to my grandfather, who never used Irene. “I’m not leaving again. She’ll be fine. It may be martial law, but it’s not war.” And after a pause, he added, “If they throw me out, I’ll find another job.” It was obvious he was worried that his job was now at the mercy of the general.
All of us gathered around the black-and-white television for the general’s nighttime address to the nation. We were joined by Hanif, who sat on the floor next to my chair, and except for swollen eyes that gave away he’d been crying, he was a miniature version of his father, with an ironed white shalwar kameez and crew cut to match. My father paid for Hanif’s schooling, and in his presence I always remembered that this boy, named after a famous cricket player and much younger than me, had memorized his multiplication tables to nineteen before I’d mastered the twelves. I was uncomfortable sitting in a chair while he didn’t, but as a rule, servants and their children didn’t sit on an employer’s furniture. And while I could have joined him on the floor, I didn’t.
After months of drought, it was suddenly raining, sheets of water pouring in through the window screens before Yunis could close them. Thunder and lightning shook the grainy picture on the television screen. “I am a servant of God,” General Zia said, before his words were lost on me because my Urdu was so poor and his impeccable.
The general was flanked by a huge embossed Holy Quran on his desk and a Pakistani flag with its white crescent moon above, as if bedecked in a private sky. As he spoke, the hint of a cleft lip peeking out from under his mustache and a finger jabbing in the air, I felt personally scolded. Hanif did, too, because he scooted farther back from the television the longer the scolding went on. I tried to imagine how the coup might affect me. Would my father lose his job? Would we move again? I was certain that the coup, already a household word, directed by the stern man peering at us from behind heavy black glasses, would have repercussions for all of us. The only thing left to chance was whether they would arrive that very night or sometime in the future.
In the three weeks before my mother returned home to Islamabad, the general decreed there would be no political activity and prohibited gatherings of more than five people in public spaces. Newspapers were marked by white columns, but in between sat thin strips of newsprint bland enough to pass a censor’s scrutiny. One day Sadiq brought in a bundle of mail that included an envelope from my mother that had already been opened. When my father pulled out her letter and saw Allahu Akbar written in black marker over her loopy script, he asked, “What’s this?” Sadiq kneeled down to study the letter in my father’s hands, but in the end there was nothing to say.
On the day we picked her up from the airport, Prime Minister Bhutto, the man the general had overthrown, was indicted for the murder of a political opponent.
“Did he do it?” my mother asked my father.
“Of course not,” he answered.
“Maybe the general isn’t such a dimwit after all,” my mother sighed.
My father said that the night before the coup, the prime minister had been a guest at the Independence Day celebrations of the American Embassy. While he stood near the swimming pool, an American official waved a tumbler of whiskey in his face and cried, “The party’s over! The party’s over!”
“The Americans knew?” my mother asked.
“Exactly,” my father said. I didn’t understand how my parents had arrived at that conclusion, but the most interesting detail in my father’s story was the prime minister’s location at the edge of the American Embassy swimming pool. Since I was familiar with it, I could easily imagine the scene with lights flickering on the water and poolside waiters rushing about with heavy trays. My parents continued talking, and as I left to find the letter that the censors had defaced, I held onto the detail of the swimming pool because, unlike what was happening in Pakistan, I could make sense of it.
Holding the letter, my mother rested her head against the back of the rocking chair and addressed my father.
“Your country,” she said, not accusingly, but as if she were stating a simple fact, “has gone mad.”
“You give me too much credit, my darling.” My father smiled, his eyes masking his sadness. “It doesn’t belong to me. There are eighty million of us, you know.”
In truth, there were only three of us: Amir in Cairo; Lehla a week away from arriving in Syracuse, New York; and me. But that was only if you didn’t count Sadiq, who did not sit on our furniture but was family nonetheless.
TWO
September 1977
God was everywhere, but so was the general.
He was proving to be a fast worker when it came to the country, but when the telephone rang in the middle of the night, we learned just how seamlessly he’d reached into our lives. Like me, my parents must have thought something terrible had happened to Lehla or Amir. They were asleep in their bedroom, and I was barely awake, listening to Eddie Carapiet, the only English-music radio show in Pakistan. The fact that the show had evaded the general’s censors made me more of a fan than ever.
There were three telephones on the table, but the short, shrill ring indicated that the call was coming in on our private line. We were forbidden to touch the other two telephones reserved for my father’s use. The gray telephone was his office line, and the rarely used green one, the secret line, had been exclusively for the prime minister’s calls but was now connected to the general’s office. I couldn’t remember the last time it had rung.
The receiver in my hand crackled with long-distance static, and the voice on the other end was unfamiliar. My father came up behind me and quickly took the receiver. He spoke Punjabi, told my mother it was Jamila, Sadiq’s wife, and left to retrieve Sadiq from the servants’ quarters.
“Something must have happened,” my mother said worriedly, stating the obvious.
The nighttime pitch of howling jackals grew higher and longer, an eerily common sound as the animals crept closer to the city in search of food.
Sadiq arrived to take the call with the three of us watching over him. He turned his back and spoke softly, trying to carve out a bit of privacy. My father didn’t take the hint and moved closer. Eventually Sadiq sank to a squat, his elbows on his knees, the telephone receiver pressed hard against his ear. In his chairmanlike way, my father hmmed in agreement at various points and instructed Sadiq to ask questions of his wife, as if he had as much right to the conversation as Sadiq.
At that hour of the night, in a room filled with empty sofas and chairs, Sadiq’s pose on the floor struck me as ridiculous. Jamila’s voice carried to my mother and me, but we could not make sense of the Punjabi. Her tirade went on, her voice rising and falling, unable to settle on either anger or sadness. Sadiq sank deeper, uncomfortable with the news and our stares. Several minutes passed this way until my father took the phone and arranged a consensus between the two of them, and the conversation came to an abrupt end.
After Sadiq returned to the servants’ quarters, my father recounted what he’d heard.
According to Jamila, who’d been with him when he learned the news, Hanif wept on hearing of the general deposing the prime minister, and overnight, a boy who’d had to be threatened to learn his prayers claimed his father’s janamaz, prayer carpet, as his own. Now he spent more time on the janamaz than in school or on the cricket pitch.
My father asked, “You know that Hanif was named for a famous Pakistani batsman, right?”
He said that upon hearing the news of the prime minister’s indictment for the murder of a political opponent, Hanif had given away his cricket bat. My father’s grip tightened on the arms of his chair, and he seethed that our great
chief martial-law administrator’s crimes extended to destroying a young boy’s love for cricket.
“How long has this been going on?” my mother asked, hopeful that Hanif might yet come to his senses.
“Since the day of the coup!”
“While you and the girls were in Lahore? And Sadiq didn’t notice any of this—Hanif giving up cricket, praying all day—when he visited his family afterwards?” asked my mother.
Sadiq had just returned from a weekend spent in Lahore with his family. When we’d first arrived in Islamabad, my mother refused to hire him until my father agreed to permit him to visit Lahore every third weekend.
“How many times a day does he pray?”
“His mother says that he prays all the time,” my father replied.
“The general would be pleased,” my mother muttered, but her half joke fell flat.
My father had directed Jamila to send Hanif to Islamabad. Though Hanif always had a standing invitation, this would be his first visit. He would arrive from Lahore in a few weeks, delivered by his uncle, Yunis.
We weren’t certain of the exact ages of Sadiq’s children. The daughters were young, one an infant, the other, two or three years old. My mother guessed that Hanif was eight.
“Whatever it is, the boy is far too young to be distraught over the country’s politics,” my father declared.
“Do children that young pay attention to the news?” my mother wondered. No doubt, her measure of comparison was her own children, which wasn’t entirely fair, because the coup certainly had captured my attention.
“I don’t get it,” I said, finally voicing my confusion over something everyone else seemed to have missed. “What’s the connection between the prime minister, the general, and the janamaz?”
“She’s quite right,” my mother said. “It is worth thinking about.”
Any mention of the general upset my father. He considered the general a traitor who had usurped power and was sure to ruin the country. He didn’t say it often, but he also believed that the general had conspired with the Americans in a grab for power. He’d once stated as much: “Little men, unelected men, stand no chance without the hand of a greater power.”
Ignoring us both, my father said, “Hanif is far too young to be plagued by such worries. Islamabad will be good for him.” Then he promptly stood and left.
In his absence, my mother attempted an explanation. There was no question that Hanif loved the prime minister. She remembered hearing that as a toddler, he’d sat on his father’s shoulders during an election rally, and it was likely he’d been taken with the prime minister ever since. With such excitement, what child wouldn’t be? The obvious conclusion was that Hanif hated the general because of what he’d done to the prime minister. In this way, he was in good company, my mother said, raising an eyebrow and drawing a connection to my father and the rest of us. So Hanif spent all his time on his father’s janamaz communing with God because, God knows, only He could set things right.
“You believe that?” I asked.
“We all have a right to our prayers.” My mother shrugged.
My prayer was simple. I wanted God to grant me my immediate wish and let me go to sleep.
By then, the general had driven my father to Valium. During their first meeting a few weeks after the coup, my father lost control and couldn’t stop his hands from trembling. Worse, the pounding blood in his head dulled his hearing and prevented him from conversing intelligently. The general’s secretary made immediate inquiries into my father’s competence, which made my father’s heart beat even faster and more erratically than when he’d been in the general’s presence.
“You must find a way to calm down, Javid!” my mother insisted.
“It’s the strangest thing,” he sputtered. “In person, the man is nothing like his finger-wagging television avatar. He is mild-mannered and calls me sir! No wonder he convinced the prime minister to appoint him army chief.”
“The prime minister’s mistake was underestimating the general’s intelligence and assuming he wouldn’t be a threat,” my mother said.
Her criticism of the prime minister further upset my father and, finally, my mother suggested he try Valium before his next meeting with the general.
“Drugs?” my father said incredulously. “In front of my daughter, you are suggesting I use drugs?”
“Valium is not a drug, it’s a sleeping aid,” she started to say, before he cut her off.
“You want me to sleep through my meeting? Are you trying to get me fired?” His hands no longer trembled, but he was close to losing his temper.
She glared at him. My mother had once been a ballerina, but her slender frame could be intimidating when she was angry and leaned into her words. “I want you to live, Javid. That’s all. And if you don’t figure out a way to calm down in the man’s presence, you are going to kill yourself.”
Her outburst convinced my father. Fifteen minutes prior to all subsequent meetings with the general, my father swallowed half a Valium and stowed the other half in his pocket in case of an emergency. So it was that when my father returned from these meetings, he slept longer and more soundly than ever.
Not only did the general introduce pharmaceuticals into our home, he was responsible for altering vacation plans, too. We were expecting Amir and Lehla to visit us over the winter holidays, but Lehla’s first semester at college had barely begun when my parents canceled her airplane reservations.
“There’s no need to tempt fate,” my mother explained.
“What?” I asked.
“Pardon me,” she corrected.
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s safer for your brother and sister to stay where they are than to visit this military dictatorship.” She made it sound as if Lehla and Amir were planning to visit the general.
“But we live here, after all! And you’re saying it’s dangerous?”
Of course, nothing I said ever made a difference, and my parents stood their ground. But living in Pakistan meant living with the general because he was everywhere—in the newspapers, on television, on Hanif’s mind, in our home, on my father’s nerves. Worst of all was that the general’s relentless invocation of God made him think he could compete with Him. He strived to be all knowing, but the difference was that he employed others to do his dirty work.
One afternoon shortly after the school year began, I arrived home to discover Sadiq and the chowkidar having a solemn conversation with a man on a parked motorcycle outside our gate. The visitor was dressed in a black shalwar kameez that blended in with his bike and was wearing leather gloves more suited to a chilly day. He pointed at me when I got off the school bus, and as I walked through the open gates, I tried not to be bothered by his gaze.
After my father returned from Lahore later that night, he explained that the motorcyclist worked for Pakistan’s intelligence agency and was assigned to keep watch on our house. The man had given notice that he would stop by once or twice a month to collect information. Sadiq sought advice from my father on what to tell the intelligence officer in the future, and my father instructed him to convey whatever he liked about our dull lives. He believed that truth alone would rid us of the spy.
“We are reduced to being spied upon. My, how far we’ve come from Vienna.” My mother stared in the window’s direction, as if the city we’d left behind were within reach.
“I hate that man,” said my father.
“You hate the spy?”
“The general, the spy, all of them!” my father replied, and his nostrils quivered as his voice rose.
“Did the general give specific orders to the intelligence officer to spy on our house?”
“What reason would he have for that? I’ve heard that all minister-level personnel are being monitored.” My father was trying to assure us that we weren’t being singled out, but in the next breath he boasted, “Don’t forget that the prime minister appointed me. The general knows my loyalties.”
&
nbsp; My father kissed me good night and forbade me to speak to any stranger at our gate, motorcycle or not. I rolled my eyes, offended at his lack of trust in my good sense.
“Look at me, Aliya! I am serious. Do you understand?”
“Yes!” I groaned.
The next day my father promoted Sadiq from servant to WAPDA employee in order to protect him from the general’s reach. He was proud at having outwitted the general: A WAPDA employee would keep his job even if my father were fired. “We have a responsibility to the man and his family,” my father said, and I was struck by his overly developed sense of duty. My mother was relieved that the new arrangement changed nothing for our family. Sadiq’s WAPDA duties were to serve us in our home as he always had.
In preparation for Hanif’s visit, my mother rummaged through a trunk of clothes in the upstairs storeroom, coughing at the gas-like smell of shrunken mothballs. She did this once or twice a year, going through Lehla’s old clothes, selecting items for which I might still have use. She also saved my clothes for Sadiq’s family; one day his daughters would be old enough to inherit my party dresses, while Hanif might have use for sweaters and socks or jackets that had already been passed on from Amir to Lehla to me. Her frugality embarrassed me. While I didn’t mind wearing my siblings’ jackets, I drew a line at their socks. Further, why did Hanif, a boy, have to wear my old clothes? There was something wrong with that.
Apparently Sadiq and Hanif didn’t think so. A few weeks after his mother’s frantic telephone call, Hanif was on our lawn when I returned from school. I was barely inside our gate, the yellow school bus still rolling away, when he dribbled our soccer ball around me. He was barefoot and dressed in an old favorite, my red tracksuit that had belonged to Amir, which I had expressly asked my mother not to give to Hanif. The good news was that he wasn’t on his father’s janamaz, and when he passed the ball to me, I wondered if simply arriving in Islamabad had cured him.
