City of Spies

by Sorayya Khan

  A part of me wanted to pull the briefcase from the cabinet and give it to my grandfather for safekeeping. But if I did, questions about where the money came from would arise immediately, and I was afraid someone would discover my knowledge of the settlement and the money. My grandfather was a kind man, but he was also stern, as I’d seen in his dealings with my father. I couldn’t risk lying to him. Moreover, I desperately didn’t want Sadiq discovering I knew about Anne Simon and the settlement. The shame I felt at my betrayals, more than anything, kept the briefcase in the cabinet underneath the kitchen sink. I was good at keeping secrets.

  The next morning, my last in Lahore, I didn’t go into the kitchen but called out my breakfast order to Yunis from behind the kitchen door. After breakfast, my grandfather took me to the Old City to replace the glass bangles. On the way back, I suggested he keep his house locked during the day. He laughed off my suggestion, claiming there was nothing of value in the house, and as long as that was the case, thieves were welcome to help themselves.

  “Then why did you have grills put in the windows?” I asked.

  “Silly girl . . . to protect us. Not my things.” When he saw my confusion, he offered a long whisper of consolation. “You understand that I lock the door at night when we are home, right?”

  A few hours later, when the early night air was overpowered with the scent of jasmine, Yunis and Sadiq left for the bus station, where Sadiq would catch the express bus to Islamabad. And my grandfather and I left for the airport for my flight. No one locked the doors.

  When I first returned to Islamabad, I worried that someone in Lahore would steal the money hidden underneath my grandfather’s kitchen sink. If that were ever to happen, Sadiq would have lost both his son and his money, which amounted to everything he had. But when he appeared in our kitchen one morning with kohl lining his eyes, I realized I had more immediate cause for concern.

  “Is that Jamila’s kohl?”

  “Don’t you know that kohl wards off evil spirits?”

  I looked at him, a grown man who’d painted his eyes and filled his head with superstition. Right then, it occurred to me that possibly, Sadiq had already lost everything.

  SEVENTEEN

  August 1979

  Welcome home, Mama!” It was early in the morning and I stood in the doorway, gathering my tangled hair into a knot away from my face. I’d missed my mother and was excited to see her, but I was also looking forward to the gifts she would bring.

  The fact that my mother was different always struck me upon her homecoming. Her accent was pronounced and nothing like my father’s or mine. “Lieverd!” she said, beaming, using a Dutch endearment for me. “I missed you so much!” On the steps next to my father, my mother was white. Her dark hair made her less white than Lizzy or Anne Simon, but white nonetheless. She threw her arms around me in an embrace distinct from the fierce bear hugs my father reserved for us. “Amir sent you presents.”

  “Clove cigarettes? The ones you smell of?” I joked.

  “Of course not,” my mother said, briefly annoyed.

  “You’re not smoking those again, are you, Irene?” my father demanded.

  “Of course not.”

  “You know they aren’t even cigarettes, right?” my father asked.

  Most parents prayed for their children to stop smoking, but my mother encouraged my brother, as if the habit would prevent him from becoming a strict Muslim. The only time she smoked was when they were together, and she struggled with the slim clove cigarettes he provided, while he smoked Marlboros.

  Mushtaq, the driver, carried her red hard-shell Samsonite suitcase and matching rectangular beauty case—old gifts from my father—up the stairs as Sadiq came to receive her. He touched his fingertips to his temple in greeting and broke into a wide grin. My mother smiled back just as enthusiastically, pleased to be home and surrounded with this much of her family.

  In the evening, I conveyed the latest to my mother. Anne Simon had selected a name for her baby: Mikail. She reacted exactly the same way I had when Anne Simon told me. “You mean, Michael?” she asked.

  “No. Mikail,” I said, the second syllable rhyming with sail.

  “A Pakistani name?” my mother said, very surprised. “Her child is her responsibility. Names and all, you see.” I’d heard her say, “Her child is her responsibility,” when we’d discussed Anne Simon’s role in Hanif’s death.

  “Yes.”

  “What do you think of that?” my mother asked my father.

  “Forget about it,” my father said, greedily eating his dinner after having fasted all day during Ramadan. “Let them do what they want.”

  Sadiq came in to fill our water glasses. “Giving their son a Pakistani name is just strange,” my mother added.

  “Maybe they’re trying to make amends,” I suggested.

  “They’ll have to do better than that!” my mother said and caught herself.

  All of a sudden I lost interest in the name choice. Plenty of foreigners were caught smuggling crates of antiques and suitcases full of ancient coins out of the country. Some even took their servants back with them, which put stealing a name into perspective.

  Three mornings later, on the day before Eid, our household was fully absorbed in preparations for the celebration marking the end of Ramadan. It was the only time of the year that my mother opened our home to whoever visited, whether friends, relatives, or WAPDA staff. My mother had already made her special marmalade roulade, two loaves of Dutch ginger cake, dozens of chocolate hazelnut cookies, and a cream cheese coffee cake. She’d done all this despite the unbearable humidity the monsoons had left behind. Sadiq had polished the silver and laid out dessert plates and forks, along with the lace napkins my mother used on Eid. The trolley was set with teapots and matching milk pitchers and sugar bowls, ready for the guests the following day.

  When I joined my mother in the kitchen, she’d finished preparing halva and seviyan and had only apple strudel left on her list. I picked out walnuts drenched in lemon and brown sugar from the filling and asked if I could ride my new bicycle to Lizzy’s. My mother said she would drive me to Lizzy’s house so she could drop off something for Anne Simon.

  Once we arrived at Anne Simon’s house, with my bicycle and a picnic basket in tow, she greeted us warmly.

  “Come in! Come in!” Anne Simon’s excitement made her look larger than ever.

  “No, thank you, I know you must be busy,” my mother said. “But tomorrow is Eid, our holiday, and I thought your family might enjoy a few of the delicacies we prepare specially for the occasion.”

  My mother placed the basket on the marble floor just inside the foyer and unwrapped a small bowl of seviyan and another of gajar ka halva from the cloth in which Sadiq had packed them. They were the only two Pakistani desserts my mother could stand. I’d never seen my grandfather do anything in the kitchen, but supposedly he’d taught her the recipes many years ago.

  “I also brought you this.” My mother handed Anne Simon a small box. Inside lay a silver rattle, an ornament from her favorite handicraft store in Covered Market.

  “Oh, my!” Anne Simon cried. “Thank you! Wait till Jack sees this! Girls, look!”

  “Honestly, it’s not much. Just a small thing,” my mother said, and I fidgeted with my earrings. It was unnerving to watch my school life and home life mingle.

  “Don’t be too late this evening, Aliya,” my mother cautioned. My mother had been hesitant to let me have a bicycle, but so far I’d been good about staying off the streets after dark.

  “Why doesn’t she stay for dinner?” Anne Simon asked. “We’ll put the bike in the car after we’re finished and drive her home.”

  “Thank you,” I said but immediately turned to my mother. “I’ll call you when I’m ready.” I’m sure she knew I didn’t want the Simons’ car coming to our house again, for fear of Sadiq seeing it.

  “I wanted to ask you something,” Anne Simon said, walking my mother to the door. “I’m looking f
or a maid to help with the baby. Perhaps you know of someone?”

  “I can’t think of anyone off the top of my head. But if I hear of someone, I’ll let you know.” My mother was friendly, but I knew it bothered her that foreigners seemed to expect her to keep rosters of potential servants to roll out at moments such as these.

  “Maybe you could ask your servants,” Anne Simon said.

  “I will,” my mother assured her, and I was positive she would not.

  A few mornings later, without my father’s knowledge, my mother violated the terms of Sadiq’s house arrest and gave him permission to bicycle to the market to fetch garlic and onions. He was gone longer than an hour and, as a result, lunch was late. I had my suspicions about where he’d been but kept them to myself. After all, he had returned home without incident.

  At the kitchen counter, where the steam from simmering lentils blended into the season’s humidity, Sadiq peeled garlic cloves at a snail’s pace. Once he started slicing the onions, he couldn’t stop, and he minced them so finely they were an unusable soupy mess that upset my mother.

  “Bohot cutting hai,” my mother said in her English-Urdu pidgin.

  “Pyaaz bahut bareek kata hai,” Sadiq responded in Urdu as if he were correcting me.

  “What?” my mother said.

  “Don’t worry about it. He’s talking to me,” I said, trying to cover for him.

  My mother relieved Sadiq from the chore she hated and began to slice the last of the onions he’d brought home.

  Sadiq washed his hands and dried them on the kitchen towel my mother reserved for drying dishes.

  “Sadiq!” my mother cried.

  “Maaf kijiye,” Sadiq said.

  He took the dirty kitchen towel to the laundry room, where he sorted our clothes, preparing for laundry day.

  “Don’t you have homework to do, young lady? Go and get your French book and let’s work on verb conjugation. Vite, vite!”

  I returned as my mother dropped sliced onions in the sizzling oil, the first step in caramelizing them. “Sadiq,” my mother called, already thinking of the next task. “Kitna loads hamare paas hai?” She’d given up being embarrassed by her poor Urdu, as it was sufficient to know Sadiq understood what she meant.

  He appeared in the doorway, holding his back as if it were in pain, and told her there were six loads of wash. His posture reflected what I knew was true: He was breaking under the weight of his burden.

  “Mama, I’ll help him.”

  “Sit down and open your book.”

  My French textbook fell open and I began work on the first assignment, composing a sentence that used two different tenses of to be. “This is how Sadiq’s life is, but it is not how his life was meant to be,” I wrote in French.

  I didn’t mind if my mother saw the sentence, but before I handed the assignment to my teacher, I changed Sadiq’s name. School was school and home was home, even if it no longer felt that way.

  EIGHTEEN

  August 1979

  I delayed visiting Lizzy for as long as I could after the baby was born. She called me the same day with the news that the baby was a boy, and I told her my mother didn’t think it was a good idea for a newborn to have a lot of visitors, so I wouldn’t visit immediately. She called the next day and invited me again, but I repeated the same thing. When she called three days later and said, “Leeeeeya! Come on! Are you scared of babies?” I told her that was not the case, but I was on my way to a doctor’s appointment. The fourth time she called, my mother answered the telephone, and when Lizzy asked her how I was, my mother said, “What do you mean?” and put me on the telephone to explain myself. “I’m coming to see the baby today because I’m fine now,” I whispered. That’s how it happened that I finally went to visit Mikail, even though I didn’t want to.

  Before I left for Lizzy’s house, and with the ease of someone who spent her days compiling lists of instructions for servants, I asked Sadiq to clean my closets and separate my winter clothes from my summer clothes. Winter was months away, but my motivation was to keep Sadiq occupied. I told him to retrieve all my wrinkled clothes and iron them. I thanked him, even though I was aware that unlike the English, the thank-you in Urdu was in the grammar, and it was awkward and redundant if repeated separately. My mother said shukriya over and over again, and it didn’t matter how many times she was corrected. “It’s important to thank people when they do things for you, and I don’t care if it’s already in the grammar of the sentence.” Sadiq had taught me the most polite and formal tense for verbs, so I’d learned not to do it, except that morning, my separate thank-you was appropriate.

  “Does Begum sahib know you are asking me to do all this?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I lied, but it was worth it to pretend my mother knew. I needed to be certain that when I saw Mikail for the first time, Sadiq would be far too busy to wonder where I was or to consider strolling to Embassy Road.

  It took me eight minutes on my new red bicycle to complete the downhill ride from Margalla Road to the corner of 87th Street. It happened to be during a scheduled load-shedding period, and the lack of electricity across the city rendered Islamabad virtually silent. But as soon as I turned into Lizzy’s street, I was greeted with the drone of generators powering air conditioners in bathrooms and bedrooms in all the foreigners’ houses.

  I didn’t see Mikail right away, but Lizzy immediately shared the details. As expected, the baby had been born in Polyclinic, the government-run hospital not too far from Lizzy’s house. This had been the plan all along, but it was still surprising. Months earlier, when Lizzy had told me Anne Simon planned to have her baby in Pakistan and I’d shared this with my parents, my father had laughed. Americans never received medical care in Pakistan if they could help it. In emergencies, they were “medically evacuated” to Germany or other places, and in nonemergencies people made plans for treatment during home leaves or holidays abroad.

  “Who chooses to have their babies in Pakistan if they don’t have to?” he said.

  “What do you mean?” my mother said. “There’s nothing wrong with Polyclinic.”

  “All right, then,” my father said. “I won’t remind you about the time Aliya was admitted to Polyclinic for dehydration, and you swore you’d never go back.”

  “Oh, that,” my mother said. “Having a baby is different!”

  “Yes,” my father said, still laughing. “A lot different than being in the hospital for dehydration, but in Polyclinic it can still kill you!”

  “I hope you have some good PR people working for you,” my mother said, “because you’re one hell of a fan of your country.”

  Lizzy told me her mother’s water had broken, just as we’d been taught in health class. Her father had called the new embassy nurse for help, but by the time the nurse arrived at the hospital, Mikail had already been born. Lizzy said her father was furious at the hospital because it didn’t allow him to be in the room for the birth, and he’d had to wait to see the baby. Lizzy was permitted into the delivery room as soon as the baby was born. She told me that the conditions were gross, the room stank, there were five or six women lying in a row of beds in various stages of nakedness and labor, and their linens were soiled. Both her mother and the baby were fine, but Lizzy said Mr. Simon had been right to say she should have gone to the States to have the baby.

  When I’d been to the hospital, I refused to go to the bathroom because the toilets were so filthy. “You have to bring your own sheets and food and buy syringes from the market to take with you to Polyclinic,” I said, as if there was still time for my advice to be helpful.

  “What kind of hospital is that?” Lizzy asked.

  “Who does the baby look like?” I asked, changing the subject.

  “Like me. Want to see?”

  Mikail lay in a deep sleep while the twins ran around and Lizzy and I studied him. He was perfect except for the purple birthmark on his forehead.

  “He does look like you,” I said to make Lizzy happ
y, but the wrinkled baby did not look like anyone yet.

  Anne Simon was wearing a long-sleeved shirt and what might have been a shalwar. She hugged me when I congratulated her and looked happier than I’d ever seen her.

  “Let’s hear you say Mikail,” she said to me.

  “Mikail.”

  “That’s it! That sounds better than when we say his name,” she said to Lizzy.

  “I say his name right,” Mr. Simon called from the other room.

  “No one’s going to call him that anyway,” Lizzy said, ignoring her father. “They’re just going to say Michael.”

  “Not in this family.”

  “Good luck with that,” Lizzy said. My mother would have sent me to my room if I’d spoken to her like that.

  “It’s not hard,” I told Lizzy, but I knew what she meant. It had been difficult to learn to say the L in Urdu just right. American Ls were sloppy and loose, as if the speaker couldn’t be bothered with the effort.

  “It’s a stupid name anyway,” Lizzy said when we were in her room. “I mean, who’s going to call him that when we get back to New York?”

  She wasn’t interested in an answer, so I asked another question. “Are you going back to New York when your dad’s posting in Islamabad ends?” Generally, foreigners stayed in Pakistan two or three years before moving on to their next post. In the back of my mind, I’d been keeping track of Lizzy’s stay in Pakistan and was sad to realize the Simons had already been in Islamabad for a year and a half.

  “I guess,” Lizzy said. “Will you come visit?”

  “Why not?” I replied, happy to be invited.

  When I got home, my mother was waiting at the front door.

  “Did you give Sadiq all those things to do?” she asked me.

  “Did he do them?”

  “Aliya, he’s not your servant. He only does what I ask him to. If you want him to do something for you, you go through me first. Understood?”

  “Yeeees,” I said, and my irritation crept into my voice.

  “Looks like you’ve been living in Pakistan too long,” my mother said, glaring at me.