by Sorayya Khan
“What’s that?” my grandfather whispered near my ear. Startled with fright, I jumped and banged my knee hard against the cabinet. The briefcase fell open, exposing carefully packed bundles of money.
“Pardon?” I asked. We stared at each other until my grandfather leaned down to match my height and took my face in his hands. I was so close to him, I could hear the click of his dentures when he began to speak.
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. We both turned to the overstuffed briefcase. Since the last time I’d seen it, some of the money had grown a film of mold.
My grandfather let go of my face and picked up a packet. “Money?” His single word conveyed alarm. “Whose money?!” and his whisper may as well have been a shout.
“I don’t know,” I lied.
I tried to close the briefcase, but my grandfather’s hands were much larger than mine, and he gathered them inside his own.
In the afternoon, when my parents returned, the briefcase was waiting on the dining room table. They drew chairs around the table and stared at the briefcase before my father broke the silence and asked me, “You want to tell me what this is?”
I shook my head.
My grandfather opened the briefcase without laying it flat, and several bundles of moldy money fell out.
“What’s this?” my father said sternly.
“Yes. What is this?” my grandfather whispered.
“It’s a briefcase of money. I found it last time I was here. It belongs to Yunis.”
“Yunis?” my father said, and then he erupted in shouts. “Yunis! Yunis! Yunis!” and when he came running, my father demanded, “Is this yours?”
“No,” Yunis said.
“No?”
“No.”
“Do you know whose it is?”
“Yes,” Yunis replied.
He looked at the ceiling, the walls, the single window, his feet, anywhere but my father, while he uneasily related the story. He recalled how Sadiq had brought the settlement money from Islamabad to Lahore on the train and deposited it with Yunis, and the two had decided that the money would be safer from prospective thieves inside my grandfather’s house than in the adjacent servants’ quarters. The briefcase had sat untouched beneath the kitchen sink since then. Yunis glanced at me and must have immediately regretted it.
“You knew?” my father said to me.
“By accident. I found it when I was visiting in the summer.”
“And you didn’t tell us?”
“What was wrong with the briefcase being there?”
“The money was supposed to be in the bank!” my mother exclaimed. “With Sadiq. Not here in Lahore!”
Yunis went to fetch Sadiq.
Several minutes later, both men appeared. They stood next to my grandfather for a minute or two without anyone speaking. “What’s this money doing here?” my grandfather demanded.
“Growing moldy,” Sadiq replied, and I smiled.
“What about your daughters?” my father said. “They could use it for school and . . .”
“Fees, medical treatment, hospital bills, unforeseeable emergencies, surprises that make up life . . .” Sadiq sounded like he was repeating something my father had told him, or else he’d once given a lot of thought to what the money might have bought.
“Does your wife know?” my grandfather asked.
“She never knew about the settlement money.”
“You never told her the Americans gave you money after they killed your son?”
How could Sadiq not tell his wife about the settlement? Didn’t it belong to her as well? Evidently my mother agreed with me, because she told Sadiq as much while my father patiently translated for her.
“We’ll clean off the money and you can take it to the bank,” Sadiq was told.
“No,” Sadiq replied.
The back and forth went on for a long time, but no one was able to change Sadiq’s mind, and in the end, even my mother had difficulty remaining angry with him. She finally just shook her head until Sadiq admitted he was sorry to have upset her. I don’t know if anyone else felt the way I did, but I was proud of Sadiq. His resolve confirmed the obvious: A little boy’s life couldn’t be bartered for money.
“After letting your riches rot, don’t think you’re getting a raise from me,” my grandfather whispered, a halfhearted attempt at continued irritation.
“No, sir.”
Later, my grandfather asked me privately, “Why didn’t you tell me when you found it last summer?”
“I don’t remember,” I said.
“Is that the truth?”
“The money just seemed like a raaz is all,” I clarified, using the Urdu word that had become my word for all the deceit surrounding Hanif’s death: Anne Simon’s identity as the driver, the 50,000-rupee settlement, the briefcase in my grandfather’s kitchen cabinet, and on and on.
“How much of a raaz is it?” my grandfather gently prodded.
“I didn’t count it. But if Sadiq didn’t spend any of it, it’s fifty thousand,” I replied. “Not a very high price for a dead son, don’t you agree?”
My grandfather moved his head in a gesture that was both a nod and a shake. Almost immediately, I realized my mistake, but my grandfather did not question my knowledge of the amount, and I was grateful that he did not make me confess I’d snooped in my mother’s desk and read the settlement papers.
The next day was Christmas, my mother’s holiday. Although she’d converted to Islam before marrying my father, her Christmas baking was legendary in our family and also in Yunis’s, because over the years she’d made a habit of preparing extra cookies for his children. Since Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, shared his birthday with Jesus Christ, Christmas was a holiday in Pakistan. As a rule, we celebrated a day late on Boxing Day, a British holiday, so my mother could spend the day working without being bothered by servants. She’d brought some ingredients with her, like her homemade vanilla essence, and my grandfather had scoured Lahore’s bazaars to find others, like colored sprinkles and hazelnuts. On principle, my grandfather had little appetite for celebrations or the British, but he said that it was a good thing the British had the sense to set aside an entire day to celebrate my mother’s baking.
For the holiday meal, my mother prepared Wiener schnitzel, a dish she’d adopted in Vienna as the hallmark of her festive day. Yunis made vegetable pulao with cinnamon sticks that unwound into flat bark; toasted cumin seeds; fat green peas I helped shell; sweet, shiny carrots my mother had grated; whole almonds; and perfectly caramelized onions. We ate dinner early, and everybody but my mother slathered chutney on the breaded veal cutlets.
“It’s very good like this,” my father said, passing her Yunis’s renowned peach chutney.
“No, thank you,” my mother said, a predictable response. “It’s perfect the way it is.”
Because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, I served myself mashed potatoes and shook pepper and salt all over the yellow mass.
“You’re ruining it! You won’t be able to taste the butter,” my mother exclaimed.
“I taste the butter. I really do.”
Dessert was the highlight, as it always was on holidays. My mother served Salzburger Nockerl, a delicious soufflé of eggs, butter, and sugar, of which there were never enough servings to please us all. At the same time she served us, she set aside helpings for Yunis and Sadiq.
Eventually, we retreated to the living room to sit in front of the black-and-white television for Khabarnama, the nightly newscast. I nibbled on Lehla and Amir’s favorite cookies, and the announcer, with a dupatta covering her head, began the newscast with the religious preamble the general had made mandatory.
There was only one item of interest in the newscast besides the number of days, fifty-two, that the Iranians had held the American hostages. The newscaster announced that the Soviets were sending troops into Afghanistan. Estimates suggested that tens of thousands of soldiers had a
lready been airlifted into the country, and fuzzy black-and-white footage showed convoys miles long crossing the border.
Watching the television news with us, Yunis turned to Sadiq and said, “The Soviets are godless, aren’t they?”
“So is the general,” my grandfather said and made my mother laugh.
“But he’s a lucky man,” my father added, waving at the television. “If the Russians stay, Pakistan will have lots of friends.”
Either Sadiq or Yunis made the standard joke about General Zia’s direct telephone line to God. There was mention of a new directive the general had issued, and it prompted my grandfather to whisper a more recent joke: The general telephones God with the latest update, and in response God pleads, “For God’s sake, you’re busier than I am. Don’t you ever take a break?!” It was my favorite general joke, but at that moment it failed to amuse my mother, who chided my grandfather for trivializing war with humor.
After a while, I gave up trying to understand the fuss about the Soviets entering Afghanistan. As the television droned on with official Soviet statements that they were the guests of Afghanistan’s government, I sank deeper into the sofa and craved Lizzy’s chocolate chip cookies. I recalled my farewell with Lizzy as if it were a movie, slowing it down frame by frame, making it last, keeping Lizzy in our Margalla home. I imagined my friend tucked between flowing hills and crystal-clear lakes in New York, as far away from Lahore as possible, and wondered if I would ever hear from her again.
Then, at prayer time, the azaan rattled the windowpanes, my deaf grandfather cursed, my mother slapped her knee in frustration, and my father, unperturbed by the commotion, remained as focused on the television as ever.
EPILOGUE
My rule as a journalist these days is simple: I don’t tell Pakistan’s stories. Now, more than ever, they make people throw their arms up in despair. To this day, the same unsatisfactory explanations for who attacked the US Embassy and why are bandied about, and the only truth agreed upon is that anything can happen in Pakistan. In reality, today’s War on Terror means that the country has much more immediate worries, including whether it survives tomorrow. A newspaper account comes and goes, but when it interrupts your life, it keeps you in its grip. This story of Islamabad, those thirty months during the Cold War that changed my world, made me who I am. Rules aside, I wrote what I remembered and found the other truth.
I first imagined telling this story when I was visiting New York, toward the end of 1989. Ten years had transpired; I was in my twenties and living in Islamabad, having cobbled together a number of part-time journalism jobs. However, every year I set aside four weeks of vacation time to alternate between visiting my sister, Lehla, in Syracuse and my brother, Amir, in Cairo. Lehla was a perpetual student at Syracuse University, where I, too, had studied, accumulating advanced university degrees the way some people accumulate cars. Amir was in Cairo, where he’d originally gone to study before settling there to make documentary films when he fell in love with his wife and the city, which my father says is Amir’s second wife.
I had been in Syracuse only hours before I remembered its proximity to Cazenovia and fantasized about traveling the twenty miles to visit Lizzy’s grandparents’ home on the lake and finding Lizzy there, but our paths never crossed again. As it always did, travel sharpened polarities, and I was struck virtually mute by the different worlds in which my sister and I lived: I, back in Islamabad, trying to make a life writing about Afghan refugees, and Lehla, trying to teach her students where to find Pakistan on a globe. Every time I visited, I was amazed by the fact that it was almost impossible to conceive of a more disparate reality from Islamabad than Syracuse. In those days, Islamabad was still a relatively new, carefully planned city, where the green of the Margalla Hills and the blue of the crystal-clear sky looked like freshly painted scenery, and the scent of raat ki rani flowers on certain winter evenings was strong enough to pretend someone had just sprayed the streets with perfume. In contrast, Syracuse was a city rusting from the inside out, adjacent to a poisoned lake, and home to a merciless winter that seemed to last most of the year.
It was a few days before Thanksgiving. Whenever I happened to be in the United States during that time of year, my memory went into overdrive, bits and pieces of it shooting into awareness like determined swimmers coming up for air. Timing was everything: It was the day before another anniversary of the 1979 attack on the US Embassy in Islamabad, when it was burned, as it is commonly said, to the ground.
On this particular night, I found myself in a solitary cubicle in the basement of the Syracuse library, where I often spent the evenings when Lehla was in class. The place was badly lit, and the frigid winter wind might as well have been blowing drifts of snow on my already numb feet. The library was thousands of miles away from London Book Co., the English bookstore in Islamabad, where Lehla and I once spent our summer afternoons sitting on rickety shelves, poring over Archie comic books and driving the bookstore owner mad. But memory is slippery and plays tricks with us, and in a corner of the building thick with the smell of damp steel and must, I was suddenly transported to that dusty bookshop in Kohsar Market. I could smell the lingering cardamom and cinnamon of the owner’s Kashmiri tea, mixed with the unmistakable scent of yet-to-be-opened glossy magazines. Suddenly, at that moment, the contrast between these worlds transformed into a specific and concrete urge. I had an essential and immediate need to read about what I had lived through in those thirty fateful months in Pakistan. I didn’t need any confirmation; instead, it was critical to make my memories real, to see them before my eyes as I sat in a freezing, disintegrating city that rarely saw sunshine.
In the university’s microfilm station buried in a corner of the library, turning a miniature wheel with a cool handle, I searched for an account of the day the US Embassy in Islamabad was attacked. The pages of the New York Times, reduced to a two-inch-wide strip of film, became a fast-forward blur of time on display: There were articles on General Zia’s coup d’état, Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian revolution, Prime Minister Bhutto’s hanging, the Iranian hostage crisis, the siege of Mecca, and Russians occupying Afghanistan. I scrolled backward and, to my surprise, the film stopped on an old photograph of a teenager hugging his mother upon landing in Washington, D.C. The lanky teenager was a schoolmate of mine who rode my yellow school bus in Islamabad. The photograph was juxtaposed with an article about the body of the marine killed in the embassy attack being received by his grieving mother. Scrolling 444 days into the documentation of the US hostages’ captivity in Teheran, I found a photograph of the day they were released. It took me a moment to make sense of the grainy image, but buried in it was my former principal, Mr. Hill, his broad shoulders towering above everyone else’s.
I stayed in the library deep into the night. On a long table, under a fluorescent light that turned the dark library windows into mirrors, I leafed through a heavy periodical index for 1979 that contained unbelievably detailed lists of bold and italicized subjects under the heading of “Pakistan.” I found a listing for what could prove to be a useful piece in a magazine and retrieved the requisite leather-bound volume from the stacks.
The essay was actually a letter of sorts, cleverly titled “Missive from Islamabad.” I didn’t notice the byline at first, but as I began to read, an unexpectedly familiar voice and cadence, soft and loud at the same time, reverberated in my head. By Anne Simon. My breath quickened as I stared at the name. Could it be? Was the author the Anne Simon I knew? Indeed, the contributors’ notes confirmed she was: “Anne Simon spent a year and a half in Islamabad, Pakistan, and now lives in Cazenovia, New York, with her thirteen-year-old daughter, a set of five-year-old twins, and a baby boy, while her husband, Jack Simon, is a public health officer in a hardship post in West Africa.”
It took me a few minutes to recover from the byline. Wasn’t Anne Simon a nurse? When had she become a writer? Since when did my best friend’s mother use British words like missive? How long after the evacua
tion had she written the piece? Had Lizzy read it? I shook my head to clear my racing thoughts, ran my trembling hand over the page, and read it again.
I laid down the volume on the solid oak table at which I sat and contended with memories I’d let slip—a long white Buick, the corner of 87th Street. The synchronicity of my memories with the details revealed in the essay was dizzying. This is what Anne Simon had written in her detailed account of the day the US Embassy in Islamabad was attacked:
As she was finishing lunch with her friend in the dining room of the embassy, a security alarm sounded, and she was forbidden to return to her friend’s apartment, where her maid was watching her baby. She was herded into the vault with everyone else, and over the next few hours, tiles cracked and carpets smoldered from the heat of the fire. She held wet paper towels to her mouth to protect herself from the smoke, and her husband’s voice finally trickled in over a radio, promising that her three children, but not her baby, were safe with her daughter’s Pakistani school friend. As the 137 people stood shoulder to shoulder in the vault, the Pakistani staff prepared to prostrate themselves at prayer time. Someone muttered curses at the muffled Allahu Akbars with which prayers began. She did her best to save a dying marine, but blood pumped out of him faster than she could stem it. Crowds chanted outside, and no one came to help. It was almost dark when they climbed out of the rooftop hatch of the vault and descended the tilted bicycle racks laid out like ladders to the ground. Her baby was found in the arms of the wondrous maid, who had saved him in a bathtub of water during the siege.
It was a strange place, this city she’d lived in, hemmed in by mountains on one side and the long expanse of plateau on others. And in her whole life, she’d never felt more out of place, despite the kind chowkidars who greeted her with salutes on her daily walks. On the morning the Americans left aboard a yellow school bus that had been quickly painted the pale blue of the morning sky, with her children and husband at her side, she felt her family had never been more complete. She stared from the bus window, contemplating a small part of her that was disappointed to be getting out and saddened that the rushed circumstances couldn’t help but leave some business undone. She caught the back view of a young girl, vaguely familiar in a simple chaddar (the cloth made them all look alike), helping a man cross the street. After the two people put a bicycle between them, she assumed they were going home. Smoke was still rising from one corner of Islamabad as the airplane climbed into the sky, and the one thing the nurse-cum-writer was absolutely certain of was that she would never, ever, be back.
