A Season for Martyrs

by Bina Shah

  A similar chorus was playing in Ali’s head, a sort of sibling telepathy between the two brothers. He’d whipped himself enough with the same thoughts for many years, knowing full well that as the eldest child, he was in the best position to claim life’s privileges for himself. At first he’d never even thought about it, unconsciously accepting it as his birthright, but over the years his lack of awareness had given way to the realization that his good fortune left only scraps left behind for Haris and Jeandi—scraps of money, opportunity, his parents’ attention and energies. He desperately didn’t want his brother and sister to hate him for it. It wasn’t his fault. But at the same time, he couldn’t give up on his dream.

  “When are you going to Islamabad?” said Haris, who hadn’t looked at the letter; he’d only heard about its contents secondhand.

  “The twelfth,” said Ali.

  “You should be careful,” replied Haris, glancing at his mother, who had turned her back on both of them and was clearing up dishes from the dinner table. “There’s going to be a lot of trouble up there now that the judges have been kicked out.”

  “It’ll be fine.”

  Ali’s mother whirled around from the sink and spoke up again. “And does your father know about this?”

  It was the one question he hadn’t expected from her. She barely mentioned his name anymore around them, seemed uninterested in the contact her children did or didn’t have with him. But of course Sikandar Hussein didn’t know about Ali’s plans to escape this tired, claustrophobic existence that he’d been forced into. There was no question of permission being granted, blessings received. The day Sikandar had walked out from their lives, his authority over Ali’s destiny had withered away, a tree blighted by a life-draining disease.

  Ali rose from the sofa. “I don’t want to discuss this anymore. I’m going to bed.”

  “Does he know?” repeated his mother. “You know he’ll never agree to this.”

  Ali clenched his fists and muttered in a tight voice, “My father is dead!” It was the first time he’d spoken the lie in front of his family, and it gave him a dangerous, dizzying feeling to bring his two worlds so close together. He cursed his luck for having to split his existence in two, between the outside world where his father was a dead bureaucrat and the inside one where his father was very much alive, and a feudal to boot. For a moment he wondered what it might feel like to live in absolute truth, but he pushed away the fantasy like a gift he couldn’t possibly afford.

  “Don’t say such things!” Ali’s mother gave him a furious stare. For a moment Ali thought she might actually slap his face, the way she used to when he was younger and had said or done something unforgiveable—cheated on an exam, lied about being out late at night, smoked cigarettes. He found himself completely flummoxed by her reaction. After everything Sikandar had done to her, why should she care? A sudden feeling of betrayal stung him, made tears spring up unbidden in his eyes. He remembered how he’d had to console his mother through the long months after his father’s abandonment, every month another nail in his father’s imaginary coffin. Why did she harbor such loyalty to him now?

  He dropped his hands, stared at the floor. He wanted to tell his mother he was sorry for upsetting her. But he couldn’t make the words come out of his mouth. Defeated, he turned around and left the room, biting his lip hard so that he would not speak, tasting the blood in his mouth with an almost vicious sense of satisfaction.

  Later, Ali admitted reluctantly to himself that Haris had a point: Islamabad had started to be rocked by the same violence that had convulsed Karachi for decades. Back in January, extremists in the Lal Masjid—the Red Mosque—had started making trouble, first occupying a children’s library, then going into the city and raiding brothels, kidnapping the madams and exposing their clients. Soon they’d be attacking CD stores and women who weren’t veiled; the city was in an uproar, demanding that something be done.

  But the government had adopted a soft approach, hoping to appease them with talks and money. Negotiations hadn’t worked, so a siege of the mosque followed; Ali’s channel had covered the operation, a terrible, bloody night, with SSG commandos entering the mosque to capture those inside, waiting and armed to die in the name of God. Thousands of people tuned in to the station and Ali had to answer phone lines that were clogged with people hurling abuse against the government. Official numbers never revealed how many people had perished in there. But everyone knew that Abdul Rashid Ghazi, the imam heading the mosque, had been killed, along with women and children, and the repercussions had been terrible: suicide attacks on the army and the police in a city that had been so peaceful and calm, people said it wasn’t a part of Pakistan at all.

  The news broadcasts only added to the hysteria that the entire nation was already feeling. Ali had got into an argument with Ameena about it the day before the troops had stormed the building. “Do we really want to show this?” he said, in the middle of a team meeting where they were discussing how they’d cover it when the army finally made its move against the renegade mosque.

  “What do you mean?” Ameena said, in a voice that said I don’t have time for your nonsense.

  “I mean, there are probably going to be a lot of people killed in this,” said Ali, even though Jehangir was poking him under the table to shut up. “Do we really want to show dead bodies on television?”

  “That’s why they call it live television,” said Ameena, completely without irony. And then she added, “Besides, can we afford not to?”

  “But there’s got to be some sort of international guidelines about this kind of thing,” Ali said. “They don’t show dead bodies abroad, or on the international channels.”

  “Well, this is Pakistan,” snapped Ameena. “The advertisers are calling the shots, and they want action. I can’t fight the entire system, especially not now. And if you’ve got a problem with that, you can go work for the BBC.”

  They’d jeered with laughter at him then, but now that the emergency had been imposed and the government had put drastic curbs on the media, they had to consider an even more draconian form of self-censorship than the one that Ali’s protests had suggested. All the news channels were abruptly taken off the air on November 3, their producers instructed that they could no longer show current affairs programs or broadcast any of the protests against the sacking of the judges. Channels that agreed to the conditions were allowed back on, one after the other compromising and slowly flickering back into life; those that refused, like City24 News, were being threatened with permanent shutdown.

  The programs were still being broadcast from the station in Dubai, but Kazim Mazhar was receiving telephone calls and visits from army personnel, pressuring him to back down. Ameena and the other senior producers and management disappeared into his smoke-filled office for daily meetings that lasted hours and produced no resolution. Ali, Jehangir, and the rest of the junior staffers performed their duties as usual, but everyone knew how high the stakes were; they’d seen other news stations come under attack by the police when they didn’t do as they were told. There were rumors that someone might even try to plant a bomb in the building. Ali came home from work completely shattered, suffering from migraines and backaches that made studying for his evening BBA classes almost impossible. He’d had to grovel to Ameena to get even this one day off so that he could go to Islamabad for the precious visa interview.

  Ali twisted his head left and right, seeking relief for his neck as he stood in line for a shuttle bus at the Convention Center, and wondered how long it would be before everything came crashing down around him. He’d flown into Islamabad the night before, checked into a cheap but clean guesthouse in F-4 and slept in a small bed with a lumpy, flat pillow that put a painful cramp in his neck. Now here he was at six in the morning, stripped of his mobile phone and most of his dignity as he went through the turnstiles at the center along with a group of several hundred other people seek
ing visas from the various embassies and high commissions in the Diplomatic Enclave.

  His taxi driver had taken him through a long, circuitous route that went all the way up to the Margalla Road and around the new developments of the E block before swinging back to join the road that came in from Rawalpindi and the airport. It would have taken them five minutes had he been able to drive straight down Constitution Avenue, but the police had cordoned off all the approaches to the Supreme Court in anticipation of the lawyers’ protests against the sacking of the Supreme Court judges.

  “They’ve been here for a week,” said the taxi driver, in Punjabi. “Standing in the roads, wearing their black coats, shouting slogans and raising their fists. Women, too! Can you believe it?”

  Ali, who didn’t understand Punjabi very well, mumbled a reply, too tired to make conversation with the driver. He was nervous about the interview; people loved to scare visa seekers about the US Embassy the same way he loved to scare others about getting root canal treatment. When he’d told Jehangir that he was going to apply for his student visa, Jehangir moaned dramatically, “Oh my God, I had to stand in forty-eight degrees Celsius heat for sixteen hours and when I got to the counter I had to take off my clothes and sing ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ while standing on one foot and then I had to promise my firstborn son to the visa officer and can you believe it: they still didn’t give it to me!!!” Ali couldn’t tell if he was serious or joking, until Jehangir grinned and confessed that he had an American passport.

  Ali got out of the taxi and walked across the open-air parking lot, climbing over a concrete barrier to get to the ticket booth, where he was instructed to leave his mobile phone and bag at the collection booth. The only thing he was allowed to take with him was a plastic file with his papers and passport. Not even a bottle of water was allowed. He followed the people to the turnstiles and got into the line for the US Embassy bus, watching others separate into the lines for the UK High Commission, the Canadian and Australian outposts, and the various other diplomatic missions. His own bus also let people off at the Chinese, Korean, and Iranian embassies; a surprising grouping given the state of relations between all three countries and the United States.

  A child somewhere in the line cried out, “Mama, this is just like when we were in line for the rides at Disney World!”

  “Yeah,” snorted a college student standing just behind Ali. “And now, kids, we’ll all get strip-searched by Mickey Mouse.”

  Finally the bus arrived. The people clambered on, finding their seats in the rackety vehicle. There was no air-conditioning, but the open windows let in the last of the cool morning air. Ali dreaded to think what the journey would be like at ten in the morning, when the sun was baking hot and there wasn’t a whiff of breeze anywhere. He squeezed himself in between three young air force cadets, proud in their starched blue uniforms and smart caps, and watched as a few teenage girls tried to simper at them. The cadets hitched themselves up to full height and one turned to Ali with a friendly smile. “Where are you going?”

  Ali said, “I’m trying to get my US visa. What about you?”

  “We’re being sent to China, on a training course. To Beijing!”

  “What about you?” said the cadet to the college student.

  “I lost my passport so I have to get my student visa reissued,” said the student. Ali noticed the American twang to his accent for the first time. Would he start to sound like that, too, after a few years of living in America?

  The bus set off, then stopped after a short distance. Ali and the other passengers watched as a man in shalwar kameez got onto the bus, holding a video camera. To their astonishment, he held it up to film the faces of each and every single person on the bus.

  “What are they doing that for?” one of the cadets asked Ali.

  “No idea,” Ali shrugged.

  The college student, sitting just behind them, said, “It’s so that if somebody blows up the embassy they can identify the bomber …”

  Ali frowned and edged as far forward in his seat as possible. He didn’t want to be associated with anyone talking about bombings, even if the boy meant it as a joke. The three cadets, too, fell silent, their friendly demeanor replaced by stiff formality. The student shrank back into his seat and stared out the window.

  The man with the camera finished filming and got off the bus, and then they were on their way again, slowly trundling through the gates of the Diplomatic Enclave. Ali felt disoriented: the area beyond the barriers was green and peaceful, full of streams and forests. A few bullocks bathed lazily in one of the streams in a dip beyond the road. Among the pastoral landscape, huge fortresslike embassies loomed up, surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards.

  “Man, this is worse than being a Jew in a World War II movie. I feel like I’m being shipped to a concentration camp,” muttered the college student to no one in particular. “Do you think they’re going to take us and shoot us against a wall if we try to escape?”

  “Will you shut up, you burger?” hissed Ali through clenched teeth.

  The bus, basic as it was, came with one luxury: a conductor in the shape of a young Punjabi man who shouted out the names of the embassies as they passed by, announcing each stop. “Yas, yas, ladeez and gentleman, here is Australia embassy. Australia very nice, good day mate, yas. Okay ladeez and gentleman, here is Korea embassy. Very good thank you, how are you, kim chi?” He hopped off the bus at every stop, helping passengers off, guiding returning ones to empty seats, chirruping all the while like a mad myna bird. Ali tried with little success to tune out his running commentary until he heard the words “Here is US Embassy, George Bush, very good, thank you, goodbye.”

  He roused himself and quickly pushed to the front of the bus, mercifully leaving the college student behind. They’d been dropped on the other side of the road, so he and twenty other people had to dash across to the embassy gates, where they went through body searches, metal detectors, and the ubiquitous turnstiles. At last Ali found himself in an air-conditioned waiting room inside the embassy, along with ninety-nine other applicants packed onto rows of small chairs. The entire process, from Convention Center to embassy, had taken two hours: now all Ali had to do was wait until his turn was called, at 8:30 a.m. He went up to a booth to get electronically fingerprinted and registered before collecting a ticket, then sat down heavily in a chair and tried to nap a little before being called for his interview, his stupor disturbed every few minutes by the PA system crackling into life and announcing the name of the next candidate:

  Riaz Samiuddin …

  Karam ud-Din …

  Ayla Haider …

  On the front wall hung two photographs: one of George Bush and the other of Dick Cheney. Ali tried to not look at them, but it was impossible: their eyes followed you wherever you went in the room. Had either of them known what kinds of horror they were going to subject Pakistan to when they began the War on Terror? In the six years since 9/11, the country had fragmented, a civil war was going on in the northern area, fundamentalists were causing havoc everywhere. Was this what they had envisaged when they’d pressured Pakistan into taking sides?

  Sarwar Patel …

  Ali didn’t know the answers to those questions; nobody in power had the answers either. The Pakistani president was firmly sticking to his position of supporting American policy in the Afghan war, which affected Pakistan much more than the war in Iraq, even though few people in Pakistan wanted to help the Western powers keep bombing the daylights out of the tribal belt. Nobody believed the claims of terrorist training camps the Americans and the Indians kept throwing at them …

  Mohammed Hayat …

  But the judges, who’d been all set to rule that the president’s election was illegal, had been deposed on November 3, the day of the emergency; the chief justice and his supporters—senior judges and barristers—were placed under house arrest. And three thousand people or more h
ad been arrested only a few days after the emergency was declared: civil rights leaders, politicians, lawyers. The government had checkmated those who would want to get rid of them through the courts in a masterful, Machiavellian move—one that many people predicted would be the undoing of the rulers.

  And the so-called democratic forces, what were they doing to try to make sense out of all of this? Nawaz Sharif was still exiled in Saudi Arabia, although he was threatening to fly back to Pakistan any day now. Ali didn’t know if he would have the nerve to actually go through with it; nor whether he would boycott the upcoming elections, which were scheduled for January. The word on the street: all this chaos was being created on purpose so that elections could be canceled. Elections, of course, that the West was forcing on Pakistan in the first place. Democracy was a joke in Pakistan—there was no point to any of it, that was the hideous irony. They’d be rigged so that the president and his party could win. That was how it always went in countries like Pakistan …

  Toobia Khan …

  Benazir Bhutto, away in Dubai during the emergency, flew back immediately—a move Ali did not expect of her, but had to grudgingly admit that he admired. Oh, Sikandar Hussein would be laughing now! But it was true: if she’d wanted to run away, that would have been her chance. Instead she had returned, determined to fight to victory in the January elections, and had been put under house arrest four days earlier, when she’d tried to lead a rally in Lahore. The death threats were still on her head. The government declared that she was free to move the next day, but that no heads of opposition parties were allowed to speak at public gatherings. The rumors abounded that she’d enacted some sort of deal with America, or the army, or both, in order to eventually assume a seat of power, probably with the president right by her side.