by Sorayya Khan
The streets were dark as they often were when WAPDA neglected to fix streetlights. Cars used their high beams, but the flood of light coming and going made things worse and sent the three scrambling off the shoulderless road every time a car passed. The men walked steadily, but Hanif, with his shorter legs, lagged behind. When they were halfway home, on an empty road and not paying as much attention as they should have, they were suddenly caught in blinding headlights. None of them could move to the side of the road quickly enough. The big car lost control and swerved toward them. Yunis, a few steps ahead of Hanif, shouted. Sadiq lunged toward him, but didn’t reach Hanif until it was too late. In the long second between when the headlights fell on Hanif and when the car struck his son, Sadiq saw his face. Hanif didn’t make the slightest sound. There was the thud of a body on steel, the burned rubber smell of brakes, the sound of the shoe box dropping to the side of the road.
Sadiq fell to the ground, crouching over Hanif, softly speaking to the crumpled body while Yunis focused on the car. He plowed his fist into the car’s rear end, shattering a light and bruising his hand. When he tried to open the locked passenger door, the engine that had died with shrieking brakes came to life again.
“No!” he shouted, noting the diplomat’s license plate, demanding the driver remain at the scene of the accident. The car lurched forward and disappeared, leaving in its wake a trail of dust and a dead little boy.
Yunis collected the shoe box from where it had fallen, and Sadiq gathered Hanif in his arms. Yunis suggested they call my father, but Sadiq said there was no need. Yunis hailed a taxi, which Sadiq refused. Sadiq walked along the road, Yunis close behind and at a loss to help. So it went until I saw Sadiq barely on his feet, weaving from side to side in our driveway with the chowkidar on his tail.
All day there were signs it was not a regular Thursday at school. Lizzy was only one of many absentees. Normally, school would not have been in session because of the midsemester recess, but a burst water main a month earlier forced the principal to close the school for repairs for two weeks, and since then all holidays had been rescinded. The empty buses and classrooms were a testament to how few people had bothered with the adjusted schedule, although I was surprised not to see Lizzy. She’d invited me to her house for dinner that night, and I worried that plans might have changed.
As empty as the school was, it was filled with more Pakistanis than I’d ever seen on the premises. This included the time when Begum Bhutto gave the commencement speech at Amir’s graduation, and she’d been accompanied by a security detail of Pakistanis who crowded the oversized parking lot and filled the back halls of our auditorium. Despite repeated announcements, I’d forgotten that the morning marked the start of renovations to the brick walls surrounding the single-story school buildings. The parking lot was filled with trucks, worker crews, and their donkeys, lending the school the feel of a typical Islamabad street rather than the closeted American space it usually was. A caravan of donkeys strapped with jute bags carried piles of bricks from a truck to workers, who slapped cement on the bricks and set new rows on the walls. The work had been necessitated due to the construction of Islamabad’s new railway station a few hundred yards from the school. Months earlier, I’d brought home a memo from the principal announcing the plan to increase by two feet the height of the walls around the school because the Pakistani government was reneging on its promise not to build in the area directly surrounding the school, and the dangers this created had school officials concerned. My mother thought such measures were absurd. “Why don’t they go ahead and top off the walls with broken glass and barbed wire, too?” she’d asked my father who, as usual, wasn’t listening.
I barely noticed the boys being marched into the principal’s office for bumming cigarettes from construction workers. It was hard to think about anything but Hanif. Over the last few months, I’d passed him in the driveway, in the garden, in the kitchen, all the while barely speaking because I didn’t know much Urdu. Had we ever exchanged more than casual greetings? I’d given him Amir’s soccer ball and had intended to let him play with my basketball, but I didn’t really want Hanif to touch it, because my father had bought the premium leather ball in some faraway place especially for me.
Sitting in math class, going through the motions of calculating angles and copying from my neighbor, who was much smarter than me, I could feel the shame set in. It starts at the tips of your ears and takes an eternity to curl around your earlobes, but after it does, it breaks loose and drowns you. It’s like blushing, except it’s not red, so no one can see it. Not sharing the basketball with Hanif was different from other things that made me feel shame: lifting coins from the pile on my father’s dresser, stealing the precious European chocolate he brought back from his travels and giving it to my friends, the smell of caramelized onions in my house that bothered my American friends, and the reality I rarely thought about but which was true, that sometimes I wanted to be white or, at least, American.
I wished I had given Hanif my basketball.
As in the days when there had been three of us returning from school, today my mother was waiting for me at the kitchen table. She’d baked my favorite apple cake, but I wasn’t hungry.
“How was school?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Same.”
“Are you all right?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” I said, daring her to bring up Hanif.
“I mean, are you really all right?” she said, persistent. “A terrible thing happened yesterday. Hanif . . . it might be a good idea to talk about it. If you’d like . . .”
“They started work on the school walls today,” I said in a quick turnabout, changing the subject and momentarily declining to talk about Hanif with my mother.
“Not now, but when you’re ready.”
“When will Sadiq be back?” I relented.
“Your father has given him leave for as long as he needs. A few weeks, I would guess.”
“That long?”
“After all, his son died yesterday, and . . .”
“Was killed,” I corrected her. “His son was killed yesterday.”
My mother, who hadn’t moved since we sat down together, studied me. “It’s good to talk about things when we are sad,” she began, but I’d already tuned her out. There was nothing worse than being told how or what to feel when you recognized that grown-ups were hiding the truth.
“Did Daddy tell you why the driver left the scene?” I eventually asked.
“He doesn’t know, my darling. He wasn’t there.”
It was true. He wasn’t there, but I sensed he knew more than he was admitting.
Later, alone in my room, I thought it was odd how not having spoken much to Hanif bothered me more than being unable to communicate in Urdu with my own cousins, my father’s sister’s children in Karachi, whom I rarely saw. My father had tried. Before Amir and Lehla left for college, he’d insisted on Urdu lessons for all of us. But after Lehla went to America, he resigned himself to my disinterest and terminated Master sahib’s lessons.
Remembering Master sahib, I considered for the first time what learning Urdu might mean, what it would feel like to walk into London Book Co. or A.M. Grocers in Kohsar Market and understand animated conversations or eavesdrop on hushed whispers. I wouldn’t need to ask my father to translate the news, and I would read Urdu newspapers on my own. I would speak to our chowkidar or the motorcycle spy without hesitation. I would make my grandfather, who’d just been visiting, proud by reciting his favorite Urdu poetry. I would have cousins in the true sense of the word, rather than merely people who were related to me by blood.
Was this the time for me to learn Urdu? Wholly and perfectly, like I’d learned to knit cables on sweaters and stitch flowers in the corners of linen napkins or swish basketballs in our driveway hoop? The fact that my world had two universes would never change. But knowing the language would let me decide which universe I wanted to be in and when. Urdu would be the pole catapul
ting me to the other side if I ever needed to be there.
Just then, my mother knocked on the door to tell me Lizzy was on the telephone.
“Liya?” Lizzy said, sounding as if she’d caught a cold. “I’m sorry. You can’t come for dinner tonight. I have the flu.”
“Oh,” I said, trying to hide my disappointment. “Feel better, OK? I missed you at school today.”
“I’ll call when I’m better.” I was surprised when she hung up without asking me for the homework she’d missed, and I almost called her back.
Trying not to be too disappointed, I occupied myself with sorting through a pile of books on the bottom of my shelf. Some of them were mine, while others belonged to Lehla. I found my Urdu notebook and the first- and second-grade readers my father once selected for me in Lahore’s famous Ferozsons bookstore. I couldn’t help feeling there was something perverse about my sudden need to learn Urdu. After all, it had taken the death of Hanif, a boy I hardly knew and whose body I imagined still in the back of a rented minivan, to make me want to learn the language. I sharpened a pencil and slowly sketched shapes in the margins of graph paper in my math notebook. I would learn, I decided, without anyone’s help. It would be my secret. I wasn’t entirely sure why I wanted to keep it a secret, except that I suspected revealing it would somehow change how I was perceived. For example, would I still be half-and-half? I would tell my parents when I was ready. Maybe I’d wait until I could read an entire newspaper page, because that would really impress my father. After years in which my father had hoped we would learn, I would present the language to him fluently, as a gift, but only when I was ready.
Hours after my parents had gone to bed, I practiced words I already knew. Pani was water, darvaza was door, bistar was bed. But I couldn’t conceive of stringing together those few simple words into a sentence to address Hanif. Water near the door got on the bed? What was near in Urdu? And got? What did they use for on? Before I fell asleep with my head on my desk, the letters began to dance in front of me. I tried to keep my eyes focused on them, determined not to let them slip away. I awoke in the middle of the night, after dreaming that Hanif was dribbling pani, darvaza, bistar like soccer balls on a cricket pitch. As I climbed into bed, pulling the blanket over my head to cover my ears, my head ached for Hanif, an eight-year-old boy who had worn my hand-me-downs, loved the prime minister, and who, all of a sudden, was dead.
SIX
March 1978
If my father hadn’t bribed the officer at the Margalla Road police station who had filed the police report on Hanif’s death, no one would have bothered to inform him of the conclusion. Yunis was right. The driver in the hit-and-run accident was a diplomat. And as a result of diplomatic immunity, no charges could be filed against the driver. He had killed someone, and he wasn’t going to jail.
“What happens now?” I asked.
“Will his license at least be taken away?” my mother asked.
“Foreigners don’t need licenses.” My father dismissed her question.
“Too bad the general can’t be bothered to decree anything useful. Like requiring diplomats to carry licenses or, better yet, funding traffic police.”
At the mention of the general, my father muttered a curse, “Ulloo ka patha.” It was his favorite curse—literally meaning “son of an owl,” but in reality, impossible to translate into English. He remembered I was sitting beside him and quickly added, “This isn’t a parking ticket, for God’s sake! There ought to be consequences.”
My mother smiled. “Do they give parking tickets in Pakistan?”
“The driver should be punished,” my father said.
“But he won’t be.”
The accident increased my parents’ paranoia about the blinding headlights of nighttime driving in Islamabad, and they reiterated the rule that forbade me to walk on the street at night. I didn’t think it was the right time to reveal that Lehla and Amir had routinely broken the rule.
“Of course,” I said.
A few weeks later, Sadiq returned from Lahore. I came upon him in the kitchen and was shocked to discover he’d shaved his head and grown a beard. I couldn’t take my eyes off his head, which was white compared to the rest of him and in marked contrast with his straggly black beard. He cut me a piece of almond cake, my favorite dessert, because I’d never developed a taste for gajar halva and gulab jamun or any of the other Pakistani sweets that Lehla and Amir loved. I was halfway through my second piece when Sadiq put a steaming mug of milky tea next to me. He was waiting for me to finish so he could do my dishes, one of his final chores of the night.
“Aap ki biwee theek hain?” I asked if his wife was fine.
Sadiq paused but didn’t look at me. He wasn’t surprised that I’d asked about his family, but that I’d spoken a full sentence with all the words agreeing with one another. “Biwee theek?” is what I would have asked in the past.
“Haan jee,” he answered in the affirmative.
“Aap ke larke ka bara afsos hua.” I’m so sorry about your son. My father had coached me, but I wasn’t confident I’d remembered correctly.
Sadiq didn’t acknowledge me, sweeping imaginary crumbs from the table into his hand. I didn’t move until, finally, he wondered aloud whether Master sahib, my old Urdu teacher, had recently come for a lesson. I shook my head.
Sadiq washed my dishes and put them away. He wrung out a wet cloth with hot water and wiped down the stovetop. Although it didn’t need it, he ran a sponge over the plastic tablecloth and, looking for something more to do, began polishing the silver face of the Zenith radio.
“Tumhari biwee theek hai?” He repeated my question but modified it to reflect the informal case I remembered was reserved for servants, children, and friends.
Someone turned on the television in the family room, and the volume, accidentally set on high, startled us both. I guessed that the Khabarnama newscaster was reciting news that BBC had already reported. In its long-awaited decision, the Lahore High Court had awarded the death sentence to former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the Nawab Muhammad Ahmad Khan murder case.
Sadiq and I stayed where we were until I could repeat the question, Tumhari biwee theek hai? without errors. Then I joined my parents in the lounge and Sadiq returned to the servants’ quarters. It disturbed me that he lived in the room where his son had lain dead.
By the next evening, Sadiq’s shaved head was wrapped in a turban, in the past a look he only sported when he was ill.
“Are you sick?” my mother asked.
He wasn’t, and from then on, the turban was part of his attire.
A few days later, the doorbell rang and a WAPDA messenger teased him about his new look before Sadiq waved him away. My father used a table knife to break open the red-wax seal on the manila envelope he was handed. He briefly peered inside before setting it aside to read later. I saw the envelope next on my father’s bedside table, and its contents were spread like a fan on his lap. I’d stumbled in at the end of a conversation and caught my mother asking, “The driver thinks he can trade life for money?”
“What driver?” I fired.
My father shot me a look that silenced me, at least for a minute.
“What else can Sadiq do but accept the settlement?” my father asked wearily.
“We know that payment is wholly insufficient. The driver owes Sadiq an apology. In person.”
I couldn’t help myself. “Is this about Hanif? You know who killed him? Who’s the driver?” I tried reaching for the single-spaced typewritten pages strewn on the bed. “Does it say who did it?”
My father gathered the papers in a single motion before I could grab them.
“Of course not,” my mother replied, only bothering to answer my last question.
My father rose and slipped the pages back into the envelope.
“No use putting it off,” he said and left.
“What’s Daddy doing?”
“He’s going to tell Sadiq about the settlement tha
t we received in the mail for him today.”
“Settlement?”
“It’s a legal document drawn up by an embassy. In this case, the driver in the hit-and-run accident is taking responsibility for what he did and is offering a sum of money to compensate.”
The only way to understand this was that the driver was paying off Sadiq for killing his son, so I said so.
“Well, because diplomats cannot be prosecuted, they sometimes make goodwill gestures—in the form of money—when they’ve broken the law.”
“Sadiq’s not going to be happy,” I said.
“Indeed.”
It occurred to me quickly. “Then you do know who the driver was!”
“Well,” my mother said haltingly, “. . . yes, but there’s no reason for you to know.”
“You always think I’m too young to know important things. Hanif is my servant’s son. If you know, why can’t I?”
“Aliya! The identity of the driver doesn’t matter. The important thing is that he acknowledged his crime.”
“You said yourself he didn’t apologize! What good is the acknowledgment?”
“It’s something,” my mother said, as if she’d just convinced herself.
“Money can’t replace Hanif.”
“True,” she agreed, and I wasn’t quite as angry.
Later, my mother told me that Sadiq hadn’t wanted to accept the settlement. My father fought to persuade him that one day he might have use for the money. Although he finally did sign the settlement papers, I was proud of Sadiq. He was right to resist. Money couldn’t take the place of Hanif, and, in the end, the only thing it did was help the driver feel less guilty. As far as I was concerned, the driver didn’t deserve to feel the slightest bit better.
SEVEN
June 1978
When Lizzy finally returned to school after two full weeks, she didn’t look like Lizzy. After recovering from what she said was the flu, she had dark circles under her sea-blue eyes and a sheet of gray across her face. If I hadn’t been treated for dehydration at Polyclinic, Islamabad’s government hospital, I wouldn’t have believed you could miss so much school because of vomiting and diarrhea. I brought her up to date on school news, but I decided not to share what had happened to Hanif. It wasn’t that I’d already forgotten him. Quite the contrary. But in the carefully structured compartments that comprised my life, there were specific places for everything, and I couldn’t allow matters—even ones as sad and consuming as Hanif—to spill over from one into the other. Besides, Lizzy didn’t know Hanif, who was dead, or Sadiq, who’d suddenly forgotten that tables were set with forks on the left side and knives on the right and that a napkin lay next to a plate, not wrapped around it.
