by Sorayya Khan
“Daddy’s putting Sadiq under house arrest?” I asked my mother. She was in the pantry opening and closing tin containers of flour and sugar, sounds that augured well for dessert that evening.
“For now,” my mother said, as if restricting a servant’s movement was acceptable.
In the morning, Sadiq burned my toast and then my egg but served them to me anyway because he knew I wouldn’t complain.
“What’s this?” I asked when I added my plate to the stack of dirty ones in the sink and pointed to the brown butter in the frying pan.
“Makhan,” Sadiq simply said, butter.
He was wrong, and I corrected him. But I was required to whisper so my father, who was sitting at the table reading the newspaper, wouldn’t hear my Urdu. “This is the butter that burned when you were frying my egg and making my toast.”
“What did you say?” my father asked, and I knew he’d caught part of what I’d said.
“Makhan,” I said. “I do know the Urdu word for butter, thank you very much.”
He let me get away with speaking to him like that because he was preoccupied, and my mother, thank goodness, wasn’t there to notice.
FIFTEEN
June–Early July 1979
I spent as much time as I could with Lizzy, but not at the American Embassy, which I was boycotting since the prime minister’s hanging. I turned down invitations for movies, lunches, tennis tournaments, and a children’s scavenger hunt, part of a special Thank God It’s Thursday! sponsored by marines, which I especially wanted to attend. I’d made the decision independently of my father’s decree. I’d grown increasingly uncomfortable watching movies or swimming with my classmates in the compound. I didn’t know if their fathers were spies or if they had done anything to conspire against my country, but each time the embassy guard waved me through the gates, my Pakistani half surfaced and made me want to flee from the grounds.
Lizzy’s home was a different matter. I began to accept all of her invitations, but without reciprocating. My house not being air-conditioned was just an excuse; in truth, I didn’t want to remind Sadiq of my friendship with her. I couldn’t do anything about spitballs flying out of the yellow school buses, but I could spare Sadiq this. My mother, on the other hand, argued that my failure to return Lizzy’s generosity was bad manners, and she finally persuaded me to compromise. She wouldn’t demand I invite Lizzy to our house, but I could take her to the Islamabad Club, the only exclusive Pakistani club in the city.
The enormous swimming pool was so impressive, even the Americans talked about it. The high-diving board was one of a kind in the city, and Lizzy, who dreamed of becoming an Olympic diver, loved to jump up and down on it before performing flawless swan dives and somersaults and flips, which despite countless hours of instruction, I could never learn to duplicate. But that was only once a week, on Thursdays, her only completely free day, when Mushtaq drove us to the Islamabad Club and we spent the day lathering baby oil on our skin, wearing identical Thai batik bikinis Anne Simon had ordered for us. “You’re so lucky! You tan so well,” Lizzy would say when we compared our tan lines and she was forced to apply sunscreen to her sunburned body. While my skin darkened to the same shade as my father’s, Lizzy’s hair grew lighter, until my mother described it as platinum blonde, a color most women only achieved with hair dye. Lizzy helped the sun along with frequent applications of lemon juice, which her cook squeezed and bottled for her on Thursday mornings. She was more than glad to share her lemon juice with me, but it did nothing for my brown hair except turn it into a sticky mess. I was relieved to rinse it out in the chlorinated pool.
I spent lazy June afternoons at Lizzy’s house several days a week, air conditioners whirring in every room, including the kitchen. Every so often, Anne Simon, who’d given up her job as a nurse to spend more time with her children and to get ready for the baby, joined us in the den, where her sewing machine sat on a table, the floor around it littered with scraps of fabric and threadless wooden spools. The five-year-old twins were forbidden from playing there, but they tried anyway, knocking things off the table that were immediately retrieved by servants. Anne Simon gave the staff instructions in English, but when I visited, she asked me to translate complicated orders into Urdu. I was pleased to do so.
The coffee table had been moved flush against a wall and was now piled with stacks of gray crates that had contained gallon jugs of milk flown from America to the commissary in Islamabad. Peeking through the crates were baby clothes: tiny cotton jumpers, hats and shirts, miniature pants with belt loops, bibs stitched from multiple fabrics and lined with plastic, crocheted white sweaters, cream booties, and blue hats threaded with satin-ribbon ties. I picked up a green-and-white pair of what we called Kabul socks, woolen slipper socks covered with a geometric-diamond design. When Lehla brought me back a pair from a school trip to Kabul a few years earlier, my mother had stitched leather soles to help me better manage our slippery marble floors.
“How old will the baby be when it walks?” I asked Anne Simon.
“A year maybe. Lizzy walked in twelve months, the twins in ten. Who knows when this little guy will be ready?”
“You know it’s a boy?”
“Mom thinks she knows,” Lizzy said playfully.
“Well, carrying the baby in the front like I am usually means it’s a boy. That’s what people say. But you girls wouldn’t know that!”
“Is that what nurses say?”
“Nurses are people! What do you think?” Anne Simon asked, standing tall and turning in place.
“You were fat with the twins!” Lizzy said.
“What was it you used to say? ‘Your belly is high as the sky.’ Remember? Look. I’m only fat in the front,” Anne Simon said, as if this were something that interested us.
“If she’s right, you’re getting another brother,” I said to Lizzy later, a plate of warm sugar cookies in front of us and a cold glass of genuine American milk in my hand. Lizzy was attacking a bowl of freshly popped and buttered popcorn. “Do you mind if it’s a boy?”
“I don’t know,” Lizzy replied. “A baby is a baby. I guess a girl might be nice. My dad wants a girl, but I don’t really care.”
“He does? Why?” I asked, licking my fingers, stained green and pink from the warm cookie’s melting sugar sprinkles.
“I don’t know. It’s his first child.”
I didn’t know what Lizzy meant until she told me that her real father had died of a heart attack in his sleep when she was seven and the twins had just been born, and that the man she called Dad was really her stepfather. Her mother had met Mr. Simon when he was recovering from an emergency appendectomy in the hospital where she worked as a nurse. Lizzy didn’t mind calling him Dad. She barely remembered her real father and didn’t think about him very much. “Do you think that’s strange?”
“I don’t know,” I said, trying to imagine my father dying and not remembering him. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”
“I don’t think about it a lot.” Picking up a toy-sized wooden sailboat I’d never noticed from the bed’s headboard, she said, “My real father was a carpenter, and he had a shop in Cazenovia. He made this for me.”
I touched the sail, a rough piece of cotton, and ran my fingers over the weave. “It even floats!” Lizzy said.
“Did you try it out on the lake by your grandparents’?”
“Yes. I’ve never been to any other lakes.”
“I thought there were tons where you’re from.”
“There are. I just never saw them. My real father was always working. I don’t know how many he ever saw.”
“He wasn’t a big traveler?” I asked, and Lizzy nodded.
“But Dad has been posted everywhere,” Lizzy said proudly. “He was in Iran before he met Mom. He’s lived in Cambodia, too. And somewhere in Africa . . . Addis Ababa, maybe. Kabul, also, but I don’t know when.”
“All those countries have malaria problems?”
Just then, An
ne Simon called us for dinner. Mr. Simon had come home early from office. He’d changed into jeans and a white polo shirt that made him look younger than his age. I liked his casualness, a stark contrast to my father, who was known to wear suits at home. Anne Simon explained that the dinner was prime rib, and after checking with her that it wasn’t pork, I began to eat. I’d never tasted meat so tender.
“Do you like it?” Mr. Simon asked. “My mother sent it to us from her farm in New York. By the way, Aliya, how’s your sister doing at Syracuse University?”
“She loves it there so much she isn’t coming home this summer.” I smiled without checking with my tongue if I had prime rib stuck in my braces. “How did the meat get here? Without going bad, I mean.”
“Dry ice,” he replied. “It came in the diplomatic pouch, so it was pretty quick.” The term diplomatic pouch was a mystery to me. All I knew was it allowed Americans to receive mail very quickly.
“Were you the malaria specialist in all the other countries you were posted in?” Lizzy suddenly asked. When Mr. Simon looked confused, she glanced at me and added, “We were just wondering.”
“I work on public-health projects specific to countries.”
“It’s malaria here, right?” I asked.
“Yes, mostly malaria,” Mr. Simon replied before Anne Simon noticed the twins playing with their food and told them to stop.
I was curious about Mr. Simon’s job in the way that I was curious about what all Americans were really doing in Pakistan. But I was further intrigued upon learning he’d been to many places, maybe even more than my father, who traveled all the time. When my father returned from Lahore that night, I asked him about Mr. Simon’s job.
“I don’t know exactly. Didn’t you say he was a malaria specialist?”
“He’s lived in a lot of countries. Cambodia, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and Iran, too.”
My father looked up from the newspaper and over the frames of his glasses.
“When you join the foreign service or USAID, you’re posted to many different countries during your career.”
“What do you think he does?”
“Isn’t he a health specialist or something?”
“Malaria expert.”
“Well, he’s been to a lot of important places. He’s probably in Islamabad because the ambassador wants him here,” my father said.
“So the ambassador is also interested in malaria?” I’d never heard of an ambassador interested in illnesses, and after a few minutes, I became suspicious, as the prime minister had in his famous elephant speech in the parliament right before he was deposed. “Who were the elephants the prime minister was talking about?” I asked my father. Mr. Simon, a nice man who asked about Lehla and shared prime rib with me, couldn’t have been an elephant.
My father, irritated at my last question, didn’t respond directly. “It was a metaphor,” he said. “An approximation. The prime minister didn’t mean it literally. He was referring to various foreigners and their interests interfering in the politics of the country.”
“A lot of Americans know each other from before,” I offered. I was making my own observation as I had heard classmates remind each other they were in first grade together at an earlier posting, or their fathers once lived on the same base in California or Virginia for a short while. “In fact, the new principal who’s coming to my school is a friend of Mr. Simon’s. They knew each other in Iran.” I’d learned about the new principal at dinner, when Mr. Simon gave the news to Anne Simon.
My father, not displaying much interest, shook his head in a way that meant he was finished listening.
“Is Mr. Simon CIA?” I asked, repeating the question I’d once presented to my mother, and was immediately rewarded with my father’s attention.
Without much reflection, he said, “He very well could be.”
“What do you think? Does Mr. Simon interfere in the politics of our country?”
“Come on, darling!” he exclaimed impatiently.
“His wife did,” I said, “with Hanif.”
“It was an accident,” he insisted. “It’s a scandal how badly the roads are lit. God forbid, it could have been your mother behind the wheel. And, by the way, that doesn’t qualify as interference in the country’s affairs. Maybe family affairs.”
Overlooking the distinction, I asked, “Would Mama have gone to jail? Even though she’s a foreigner, she wouldn’t have had diplomatic immunity, right?”
“Of course not! Only diplomats have diplomatic immunity, and obviously we’re not diplomats. Go on now, I have work to do,” he said, waving me away.
But I wasn’t finished. I wanted to ask him what sum of money my mother would have had to pay if she had been the driver, but I didn’t want to risk revealing I’d read the settlement papers. Instead, I attempted my own calculations. If an American was charged 50,000 rupees for the offense, would a Pakistani be charged the same amount? But my mother wasn’t a Pakistani. Would she count as a foreigner? What about Lehla? If Lehla ran over an American child in New York, what would her penalty be? Jail time? A fine? How much? More than what Lizzy’s mother had been fined for Hanif’s death? In the end, I lost my way in the calculations and was no closer to understanding the methods or reasons of compensating death.
“What was Anne Simon’s punishment?” I asked.
My father put down his reading glasses and was clearly struggling to be patient. “The lawyers took care of it.”
“Sadiq had a lawyer?”
“Lawyers took care of it,” he repeated. He picked up a pen and began to scribble on the papers in his hand.
I left the room. My father hadn’t lied to me, and I appreciated that. I knew Sadiq did not have a lawyer because my father witnessed his signature on the settlement papers. Anne Simon must have had more than one lawyer.
In the hall, I met Sadiq carrying a heavy brass tray as he made his way to collect empty teacups from the cocktail table. My grandfather had given my parents the antique tray he’d bought in the Old City of Lahore. I suddenly wondered what kept Sadiq in my parents’ home. After what had happened, why didn’t he leave Islamabad and return to be with his family in Lahore?
“You don’t want to go to Lahore,” I said, halfway between fact and question.
“My work is here,” Sadiq responded.
“In this house?” I demanded.
Sadiq slowly blinked his eyes in a private nod of agreement. I allowed the gesture to register, doing my best to believe him. His work was in my father’s house, not on the corner of Lizzy’s street, or anywhere else.
“Manzur,” I said, uttering the Urdu word he’d taught me, agreed, as if it was a pact between us.
He left the room reciting a nursery rhyme to which I only knew the first few lines. “Ek tha larka Tot Batot, Nam tha uska Mir Salot . . .” There once was a boy Tot Batot, His name was Mir Salot . . .
The words fell safely into place like a metronome.
I decided to believe Sadiq. His work was in my father’s house. I wouldn’t worry about Anne Simon going on walks and Sadiq spying on her. Besides, he was under house arrest, which is why it was a Friday and Sadiq was safely home with us.
I didn’t imagine Anne Simon going on walks with a baby in her arms, because August, like Lehla’s highways, was far, far away.
SIXTEEN
Mid-July 1979
My grandfather would never have admitted it, but it was true: Lahore stank, and Islamabad did not. Arriving at Lahore airport was like landing in the belly of an olfactory machine. Dung, charcoal, onions, sweat, garbage, sewage, oranges, and diesel fumes. For the first few minutes on the tarmac and during the car ride home, it was difficult to breathe.
It was the first time I’d visited my grandfather in his new boxlike house, made uglier by wrought iron grills installed across the windows for security. It was ironic because Shadman, the district to which my grandfather had moved, was once a sprawling jail, leveled long ago to make room for a residential area. Yet
, here was the jail, coming to life again in my grandfather’s windows. The mosque across the street made me think my grandfather would have been safe without grills. Who burglarizes a home within sight of one of God’s houses?
After giving me a tour, my grandfather deposited me in the kitchen, then hurried to his new study, already a mess, to listen to the radio news. I waited while Yunis prepared my favorite Lahore lassi, the special one he’d been making for me ever since I could remember. Just as Yunis handed me my glass filled to the brim with the delicious mix of mangoes, yogurt, and shaved ice, the house shook with such shrill shrieks of microphone feedback that I spilled the drink.
“Allah!” Yunis said, using God’s name in vain to complain about the noise and the pool of orange near my feet.
“Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar.” The muezzin’s call to prayer became decipherable. The microphone shot the muezzin’s voice into the kitchen, shaking the single-pane windows and the wooden cabinets and making the teak door between the kitchen and dining room swing slightly back and forth.
“Is the azaan always this loud here?” I shouted in Urdu to Yunis. “How can you sleep in the morning?”
“Our general doesn’t think we should be sleeping,” he joked. “We should all be praying on a janamaz!” Yunis laughed hard and I joined him. Since he was Christian, I’d never pictured him on a janamaz.
My grandfather suddenly threw open the intricately carved front doors. The bolt slammed into the wall, where it had already left countless marks. He stood on the front stoop, waving a flexed palm in a threatening gesture at the mosque across the street. The azaan grew louder.
All across the country, in small and large cities alike, the call to prayer was heard five times a day. The only exception was my school, where not even the slightest echo had ever been heard. But my ears had never been assaulted by an azaan like this, an azaan so extraordinary that it sent my deaf grandfather into a rage.
