by Bina Shah
Ali’s father could not deny, though, that the leaders of Pakistan had left their country in a mess. A total mess.
As Ali drove his car through the Karachi streets, he had to avoid potholes and ditches because all the roads were dug up, as if land mines had exploded everywhere. He still stopped at red lights, but the rest of the traffic was generally so unruly that nobody even bothered to slow down at the intersections. Before leaving the house, Ali prayed that he wouldn’t meet with an accident, because if you were in a bigger car than the poor bastard you knocked into, a crowd of excited hoodlums would gather around to beat you senseless in the name of vigilante justice. He often came home to a darkened house: the load-shedding guaranteed six, seven hours a day without electricity. He dreamt of being able to afford a generator that ran all their air conditioners, but they only had a UPS system that ran a few lights and fans for an hour, then shuddered and expired like an old ox that had suddenly decided to die in the middle of the road.
They’d just aired a special report at City24 over the weekend: how burglaries, kidnappings, and carjackings had become everyday affairs in the Pakistan of the twenty-first century. They’d opened the phone lines at the end of the show and the boards lit up with the scores of ordinary people calling to tell their stories: how gangs of men Ali’s age or younger pushed a pistol into your face and forced you to give them your mobile phone. Sometimes they would pick you up and drive you around town for a couple of hours, stopping at an ATM machine, making you withdraw and hand over all your money to them. Everyone cursed the police, the administration, the mafia, but nobody held any hope that their laments would be heard by the authorities.
And in this last year, things had just gotten worse. The Supreme Court judges had been deposed; the country suddenly faced a wheat shortage—never before had Ali seen people standing in line behind trucks as bags of flour were thrown down to them, as if they had woken up in some famine-riddled African country. Suicide bombings everywhere, fanatics promising to take over the country, impose Shariah law, and conquer the entire world. Newsweek had recently featured Pakistan on its cover and awarded it the title of “The Most Dangerous Place on Earth”; only a fool would disagree with its verdict.
Just a few weeks ago, at a wedding, Ali was gossiping with a group of friends when one of them, Aziz, interrupted the conversation. “Have you heard what’s been going on these days?”
“Now what?” said Ali, rolling his eyes.
“Well, you have to watch out for this guy. He’ll stop you in the road and ask for a lift. When he sits down in your car, he just opens his vest and you can see that he’s wired with enough explosives to blow you and your car to paradise.”
“Oh my God,” murmured Ali. The other people in their circle clutched at their drinks and bit their lips as Aziz went on.
“Oh God is right. Thing is, he doesn’t look like a jihadi, just an ordinary, pleasant-looking guy. And you know what he says? It’s your lucky day. You’re going to get to be a martyr.”
“God, then what?”
“He gets in and makes you drive around for a couple of hours. But he isn’t looking for an ATM, and he doesn’t want your mobile phone. He wants you to drive until you find a military truck, or a bunch of policemen standing at a picket, and then he tells you to say your prayers and drive straight into them while he blows himself up.”
“No!”
“I haven’t heard of that happening!”
“It wasn’t in the papers …”
“Well, you just have to be smart and drive around aimlessly and avoid anyone in uniform. After an hour or so the guy says, ‘Drop me off here. You don’t get to see paradise today. It’s your unlucky day after all.’”
Ali looked at all their glum faces and said, “How’s that for going out with a bang?” Everyone laughed in a shocked, guilty sort of way, but then a frightened silence descended upon them. Ali wondered out loud if the story was true or not, but Aziz swore that it happened to his friend’s cousin’s brother’s friend, and the following week a newspaper carried the story, so urban legend and fact gelled into one quivering mass of fear and paranoia.
The Letters to the Editor columns in the newspapers were bursting with letters about Benazir’s secret deal with the government and possibly America as well: Make me prime minister and I’ll let you come in and catch Osama bin Laden. But the government insisted they couldn’t ensure her safety, and with the top terrorists of the day promising to kill her on her return, the prospect of following the procession from the airport to her headquarters near Clifton Beach filled Ali with dread.
If he were Benazir, he would just have stayed in Dubai, enjoying the countless millions in the offshore bank accounts and the lavish mansion in Emirates Hills, and the occasional trip to America and Britain to deliver speeches about freedom and democracy.
Benazir claimed she was coming back here for the sake of freedom and democracy. Ali knew she was coming back to obtain the rest of what she had failed to steal last time. And tomorrow Ali would have to be there, doing his job for Ameena, terrorists or no terrorists, trouble or no trouble.
Tomorrow might just be Ali’s lucky day.
“Ali, you are so stupid.”
“Thanks a lot, Sunita.” Ali pressed the mobile phone tight to his ear and closed his eyes in the darkness so that he could better concentrate on the smooth tones of his girlfriend’s voice. “I love you, too.”
“No, I’m serious, Ali.” She blew a sigh down the phone that reached into Ali’s ear and tickled his eardrums. “Don’t you know how dangerous it’s going to be there tomorrow?”
“I heard.” Ali shifted in bed, twisting into the sheets so cool and comforting to his naked skin. He wondered for a moment whether she, too, was unclothed. Ali longed to ask her, but he lacked the courage, even though they had been going out for nearly two years now. There were some things you couldn’t speak of to a girl even if she was your girlfriend and you wanted to marry her someday. Ali needed Sunita to know that he respected her, that he never thought of her as fast or loose or easy; he never even asked that she tell him about any boyfriends she might have had before him; he knew that a girl as good as her would not have let anyone else get as close to her as Ali was now.
Sunita Lalwani had long black hair that fell halfway down her waist, glowing skin just the color of warm sand, and almond-shaped eyes that she lined with heavy kohl even though in Ali’s opinion they needed no adornment. Whenever she walked by, men’s hands would go to their balls before they could stop themselves. Ali saw it happen all the time, which was why he stood extra close to her when they were out together, sometimes putting his hand on her back or stroking her arm. A man had to show that a woman was under his protection if he didn’t want others to leer or sidle up to her and misbehave with her.
They had met when Ali returned to Karachi after his year in Dubai: he was walking out of the university gates on the first day of class when he saw a petite girl, presumably another student, arguing with a six-foot-tall driver who wanted to force a large Land Cruiser into the precious parking spot occupied by her tiny Suzuki. Something about the way she held her ground against the driver caught Ali’s attention, and then he realized that they were arguing in Sindhi. Intrigued, Ali walked over and asked Sunita if he could be of any help. “No, thank you,” she said, in English so the driver, a grizzled man in a white shalwar kameez and a beaded Sindhi cap, wouldn’t understand her. “I can take care of this myself.”
Then she whispered something under her breath, and Ali was unsure whether she meant it for the driver or himself: “Birhna lussi!” The phrase was so vulgar and so unexpected coming from this beautiful girl’s lips that Ali burst into scandalized laughter. Their eyes met: Sunita blinked once, then twice, and on the third blink Ali was hooked. Sunita suddenly relinquished her spot to the driver and allowed Ali to help her find another one; so he liked to think that she, too, had become enamored on that first day.
“They’r
e saying there could be suicide attacks,” Sunita now said to Ali. They were forced to talk in secret, late at night after everyone else was asleep, because Ali’s mother would have a stroke if she knew of his Hindu girlfriend, and Sunita’s brothers would murder her if they knew she had a Muslim boyfriend. They conversed in Sindhi, their mother tongue, which Ali’s father always maintained was the sweetest language on earth. Ali always felt jubilant when he talked to Sunita: her voice made Ali taste mithai in his mouth, freshly made and smelling of rose water and sugar syrup, decorated with silver paper and packed into colored boxes for a great celebration.
“There won’t be,” Ali tried to reassure her, although he quaked inside thinking about it. Only today the news had come through the wires that Baitullah Mehsud himself threatened to have Benazir blown up the minute she set foot on Pakistani soil. “It’ll be fine.”
“And what about the crowds? Anything could happen,” Sunita said.
“It’ll be all right,” Ali repeated, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say. He decided to try to cheer her up a little. “I heard that she might get a helicopter to go from the airport to the mausoleum, at least.”
Sunita snorted. “That’ll be the day. No, it’s going to be a big truck, a shipping container attached to it, and bulletproof screens.”
“And bulletproof cars.”
“And twenty thousand policemen.”
“And bomb squads.”
“And sniffer dogs.”
They both began to laugh, because it all sounded so absurd, this spectacle – a real tamasha. The men and women were on the streets already, thronging the camps that were set up, their faces painted green, red, and black, the colors of the People’s Party. They were pouring into Karachi by the truckloads and busloads all day, villagers from all the four corners of Sindh, celebrating and dancing to loud Sindhi music as if arriving for a wedding, or at least a rukhsati, the ceremony when the bride left her parents’ house and came to live in the house of her groom. Benazir was married to Sindh forever, as some Sindhis said, but now she was staking her claim for her third prime ministership. Two hundred thousand people would be there tomorrow, ready to receive her and accompany her back to Bilawal House.
“The roads are going to be all blocked. How will I get to work?” Sunita said. She worked in a bank near the Hotel Metropole, and so traveled the length of Shahrae Faisal twice every day, but the traffic and the security cordons would make it useless to even leave the house tomorrow.
“Didn’t they give you the day off?” Ali was incredulous.
“No. They expect us to be there on time. It’s a British bank, you know. They have standards.”
“Bastards.”
Another sigh. “I need the job.”
“Why do you think I can’t say no to Ameena? I need the job, too.”
“Oh, Ali …” sighed Sunita. “I’m so sorry.”
“For what, darling?”
“If only … it’s such a shame your father passed away while you were all still so young. You wouldn’t have to work so hard if he were still …”
Ali felt the familiar shame suffusing his body that had driven him toward all the lies in the first place, coupled with the guilt he felt that he couldn’t share the truth even with Sunita, whom he claimed to love more than anyone in the world. That his father was not really dead. But Ali always said he was dead because he had abandoned their family for a second wife, a much younger woman he had met and married five years ago, while he was still married to Ali’s mother. And Ali had concocted this delicate tissue of lies about a dead father who had been a bureaucrat instead of a landowner because he was unable to face the derision of people around him, who jeered at the feudals and asserted that they were the root of all of Pakistan’s problems.
Once, Ali had been in a conversation with colleagues at work; one of the women, a news producer in another department, had been railing about Sindhis: how illiterate they were, how lazy, how uncivilized. It turned out she was angry because her next-door neighbors, minor Sindhi feudals from the interior, had illegally taken over a plot of land next door and were using all their connections in the provincial government to lay claims to her rented house as well.
“Be careful,” said one of Ali’s friends to the producer. “Ali’s a Sindhi.”
The woman had the grace to blush, but then she lifted her chin defiantly and said, “I’m sorry, but I have to say, I don’t like Sindhis at all.”
“I don’t like them, either,” deadpanned Ali, and everyone laughed a little too loudly, the overexcited barking that ensues from an uncomfortable situation that nobody knows how to defuse. Ali had never forgotten the embarrassment of that conversation, and dozens of others like it, and the constant newspaper articles about the feudals being corrupt tax-avoiders with undue influence on the politicians, the calls for separating Karachi from the rest of Sindh, the television dramas depicting all Sindhis as bloodthirsty plantation owners who kept their poor peasants in chains and raped the village girls and chased down runaway bonded laborers with dogs.
He knew that he would never have gotten this job with City24 if they’d known he was the son of a Sindhi feudal. The media took it upon itself to expose the crimes of the landowners; they’d never want one of them in their midst. Far easier to tell people that his father was a bureaucrat no longer among them so nobody would ask him anything more about his family.
Even Sunita had to be kept ignorant of these facts of Ali’s life, because she too would find them so distasteful that she would never have gone out with him in the first place. Sunita was already taking a big enough risk in getting involved with him because of the difference in their religions. To hear that Ali came from a family of feudal landowners, whom people looked down on in disgust, saying that they were dissolute and drunk, that they always had two wives and married their daughters to the Quran in order to keep the land in the family, would drive her away from him completely, and right now she was the only thing in his life keeping him afloat.
There was one more secret Ali was keeping from everyone for now: a letter of admission from Kansas State University lay in his desk drawer, and nobody knew about it yet, not even Sunita. He had an uncle and aunt who lived in Kansas; Ali had written to his uncle secretly last summer and was sent the admission forms. He’d been accepted for a degree course in business administration: a transfer, since he had completed a year of studies in Dubai and two here in Karachi, that required only three more semesters in America in order to graduate with a BBA.
He’d tried once to broach with his mother the subject of going away. “Why do you need to go to America?” his mother said. “You had a year in Dubai before you came back and looked after us—you had to, it was your duty. I know how difficult that was for you. But now you’ve got a good job, you’re studying in one of the best universities in Pakistan. Aren’t you happy here?”
“No,” he said, simply. And he was astonished to realize how true it was. Nothing was making him happy here. Nothing. Not his job, not his studies, and if he was truly honest with himself, not even Sunita, as much as he loved her.
Life in Karachi every day was too much for him. Getting up to face the same family dramas every morning, his life never his own, having to arrange when to pick up and drop off Jeandi from school, Haris from university, his mother from her chores and appointments. Dealing with the no-water-no-electricity-no-driver-no-servant issues, day in and day out. The fear that anyone could break into their house and rob them, rape his sister, his mother. The stress of living in a city that did everything to grind you down and nothing to lift you up.
Ali had never even been to America, but he knew that over there he could be a different person: easygoing, happy, and free. He wouldn’t have to give a single thought to what anyone else wanted, needed to do, had to have. He’d seen his uncle and cousins from Kansas when they came on their now-infrequent vacations to Karachi. They were bigger, stronger, more self-assured. Their Englis
h was impeccable, American and fast. They had wads of dollars in their wallets, rows of credit cards from foreign banks, driver’s licenses that proved their legitimacy in that country. Ali wanted that supremacy so badly that he was willing to turn his back on the remains of his tired little family.
He’d never spoken of it again, after that first unsuccessful attempt. He filled out the forms and arranged for the admissions fees, all the while imagining how his mother would weep, and Jeandi would cower, and Haris would accuse Ali with the dark look in his eyes that said How can you leave us here? And Sunita … Ali didn’t know what Sunita would say, nor did he want to imagine it. All he knew was that he had to go. He could be there for a couple of years, then send for Sunita, and nobody in America would care that he was a Muslim and she was a Hindu. They wouldn’t know what a feudal was, or why everyone hated them so much.
No, Ali couldn’t stand to stay here, in Karachi, in Pakistan, any longer; it would kill him one day or another, one way or another. And in this city, that could happen as soon as tomorrow, if it happened to be Ali’s unlucky day.
The Old Man and the Sea
THE SINDH COAST, A.D. 984
Even the most seasoned sailor must sometimes come ashore, and nobody felt he deserved shore leave more than Khawaja Khizr.
It was never easy being a Sufi saint, even if you were one of the Panj Pir, the Five Pirs. Even if you were regarded as the guardian of all waterways, oceans, seas, and rivers, and loved and worshipped by the people of Sindh—Hindu and Muslim alike—you could tire of riding a palla fish up and down the thousand miles of the Indus River, or become seasick at the sight of the blind Indus River dolphins leaping up and down to herald your arrival.
