A Season for Martyrs

by Bina Shah

  Ali was unable to speak. Two patches of heat burned on his cheeks, and although he was too dark to blush, the blood rushed to his face, then to his stomach, leaving him lightheaded. He wanted to rise and walk away, but he found his legs paralyzed under the table.

  Jehangir went on. “What is your father again? A zamindar? A Pir? Or is it both? I can never quite remember.”

  “I think you’ve remembered plenty,” whispered Ali. His voice barely escaped the confines of his throat.

  “But Ali,” said Ameena, “I thought you told me your father was—”

  “Oh, he’s very much alive,” said Jehangir. “Owns half of Sukkur, but lives in Bath Island, I think. With his other family. Not Ali’s. But then, that’s what feudals do, isn’t it, Ali? Marry two, three times?”

  Ameena’s eyes traveled from Jehangir to Ali’s face. He thought he could see sympathy in the downcast turn of her mouth—then again, it could be any of a half dozen emotions: disappointment, cynicism, anger, condescension. He could stand to look at her no longer, and bowed his head, defeated. There was no point asking Jehangir how he knew, either. Working at a television station, where information could be bought and sold for the price of a carton of cigarettes, Ali knew Jehangir could find anything out about anyone, and what money or his connections couldn’t discover wasn’t worth finding out in the first place.

  “Don’t you think the feudals should be paying income tax like the rest of us, Ali?”

  “That’s enough, Jehangir,” said Ameena softly.

  Jehangir shrugged and turned back to his desk, and Ameena made some excuse about having to make a phone call. Before going back to her office, she shot Ali a glance that said, Are you okay? It was the concern of the powerful, who could afford to be solicitous in front of those that they pitied.

  Ali refused to meet her eyes. Nor did he acknowledge the half-defiant, half-terrified expression on Jehangir’s face, the one that said they’d both gone too far. But Ali realized, with the same certainty that told him he’d never see Sunita again, that Jehangir’s betrayal was only a part of the self-destruction Ali had brought upon himself with his secrets and lies.

  The Game of Kings

  HYDERABAD, SINDH, 1943

  “Come, jailer, come and play a game of chess with me.”

  Ahmed Damani’s head jerked up in surprise. These were not the words he was expecting to hear from a man condemned to die in the morning, But then neither had Ahmed expected to find himself working in the Central Jail at Hyderabad, a jailer in the feared Death Cell, where he saw men as they faced their last hours on this earth. And Ahmed had certainly never expected that the British would have ever caught the Surhiya Badshah—the Brave King, tried him in court like a common criminal, and then sentenced him to death by hanging. Or that his would be the cell where the Brave King would spend his last night, smoking and contemplating the full moon that glowed through his tiny window. And yet here was Ahmed, dressed in the black uniform of a death watch jailer, and the Pir Pagaro was inviting him to come into his cell and play a game of chess.

  It was an eerily compelling invitation: as a young boy growing up in Hyderabad, Ahmed had dreamt that one day he would become the most famous chess champion in the world. He was from a respectable but poor family that had left their village of Tando Allah Yar and settled in Hyderabad, his father hoping to find better employment than tilling the fields of the Talpur zamindar who owned so much land that if you stood along the banks of the main watercourse and turned slowly in a full circle, everything that you saw belonged to that man.

  Ahmed’s father, Rahim Damani, decided that a life of labor in the fields, threshing wheat or plowing cotton, sweltering under the unforgiving sun and forever living under the thumb of the zamindar’s strict overseer, was not the life that he wanted for himself or his sons. So when Ahmed was barely four years old, his father loaded their few belongings onto a cart, stacked his family on top of the bundles of furniture and clothes, and drove them to a new life in the city, full of prospects and pleasure.

  It was a daring move in those days; most men of the countryside feared the city, clung to what was safe and familiar, teaching their sons that leaving the land was tantamount to dying. For in a sense they did die, cutting themselves off from their roots, and having to be reborn in a place where nobody knew who your people were or where you had come from. Even in the cities—Hyderabad, Sukkur, Shikarpur, Karachi—tribesmen sought each other out, associated with each other or those they knew to be their allies, thus protecting themselves from the vagaries of urban life. Adjusting to the crowds, to anonymity, even to the lack of the zamindar’s oppressive but all-encompassing security, was a task that few men wanted to undertake in Sindh at the turn of the century.

  But Ahmed’s father took the risk, and uprooted his small family—wife, two sons, two daughters—replanting them in city soil and hoping they would bloom there. He found work as a gatekeeper with a well-to-do Sindhi family, sent his sons to school, and worked hard, enjoying the heady taste of self-direction. And to the surprise of everyone, who had predicted a dire fate to repay him for his hubris, they were happy.

  Young Ahmed went to school, growing from a chubby child into a tall and lanky teenager who paid the minimal amount of attention to his lessons. He rushed out of the gates each day at noon, and ran to a teahouse not far from his home, where he would spend the next several hours watching the old men play chess. He had discovered them one day shortly after he’d turned fifteen, when he’d taken a detour from his usual route home; the old men were ensconced in front of the dhabba; so comfortable were they in their seats that Ahmed half expected to see moss growing over their feet and birds constructing nests in their turbans. Over grimy cups of tea that they could make last for hours, they bent over the board, reenacting the battles of their youth within the confines of the black and white squares on the ancient board that looked as if it would turn into dust if you sneezed on it.

  Ahmed was entranced as one old man, Sultan, moved his pawns around the board in wild circles. His opponent, Allah Bachayo, refused to give up a single piece, guarding them as closely as if they were gold coins. The men didn’t mind Ahmed’s close scrutiny of their game; they even offered to teach him how to play, and he learned quickly, playing against one of them when the other tired of the game. They said he had a gift, but he didn’t believe them: he would never be as good as these two, who’d been playing for the last fifty years.

  “Harah—I take your rook,” Sultan crowed. “With my pawn, no less!”

  Allah Bachayo grumbled, “Gaddha jho phar! For that I shall have your queen!”

  “You cannot—I have protected her with a phalanx of guardsmen—see!”

  “But you overlook my knight, who sits in wait for your next step, so!”

  “Shabash!”

  And on and on. Ahmed never tired of their parrying or their verbal jousting. They were like the grandfathers he’d never had—his own grandfathers, maternal and paternal, had died before he was born. He grew immensely fond of these two old men, grizzled bearded Sindhis who wore mirrorwork caps and jackets over their shalwar kameez in winter, and turbans made of ajrak cloth and simple cotton lunghis in the summer. As they fought and argued over the chessboard, they spoke to him of their villages, of the people they’d known and the places they’d traveled, giving him a sense of continuity and connection to the village life that his father had forced them all to leave behind.

  They loved to tell him of history, of battles long past, illustrious people who had been born and died centuries ago. Sultan regaled him with tales from Shah Abdul Latif’s Risalo: the mythical kings, the Seven Queens, the journeys and separations from the Beloved, the deserts of Thar and the waters of the Indus. Allah Bachayo told him about the old days under the British Raj, how the British had gained illegal access to the Indus and used the excuse of bringing a gift of horses to Ranjeet Singh in Lahore as a way of spying o
n the forts on the river. Ahmed listened, fascinated, as Sultan told him about the Hur rebellion of the last century, and how those fearsome warriors, followers of the Pir Pagaro, roamed up and down the countryside, holding entire villages ransom, proud and unafraid in their devotion to their murshid.

  “They say,” said Sultan, drawing close to Ahmed and whispering in his ear, “that the Hurs are gathering in strength and are preparing for a second uprising.”

  “Ssshhhh!” hissed Allah Bachayo. “Someone will hear you. The angrez spies are everywhere!”

  “Well, it’s true! Ever since they released the Pir Pagaro from jail—not that one, young Ahmed, his grandson, Pir Sibghatullah Shah the Second, the sixth Pir Pagaro—he’s become even more bold in his stance. He’s had the Hurs released from their settlements, and now he’s on tour in Hur country, and I hear that his coffers are full to overflowing with their tributes …”

  “Nothing like a full pocket to put a fire in your belly, eh?” cackled Allah Bachayo, who was rewarded with a dirty stare from his friend.

  “It’s not about money, it’s about prestige. When they put him in jail, the Hurs went mad at the insult to their Godhead. But jail has only made him stronger. And now he says he can make or break any ministry, so all the politicians, and yes, even the governor of Sindh are groveling at his feet!” said Sultan.

  Ahmed sucked in his teeth. This was truly a position of power: to have the great families of Sindh under your control, and to even have the British eager to please you. But the Pir Pagaro commanded such power as his birthright. His was a bloodline that went six generations back; the Pirs of Pir-Jo-Goth could trace their lineage all the way back to the Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him; Sultan had explained to him that the first Pir Pagaro had defeated all the scholars of Sindh with his own religious knowledge, earning the right to wear their turbans, or pags, and his repute had grown from then on. All his followers were devoted to him, but that small subsection of his murids who swore allegiance until death had taken the protection of his honor as their blood quest, and his personal army, it was said, now numbered six thousand ghazis, soldiers who were ready to fight to the death and become martyrs for the cause.

  “And how does Sultan Chacha know all of this?” asked Ahmed, after Sultan had gone home, pleased with having defeated Allah Bachayo in the last game.

  “His son’s a Hur,” muttered the old man, his eyes remaining guarded. For although it was not yet illegal to be a Hur, it was a dangerous business, and to have any association with the Hurs these days, when the Pir was challenging the authority of the British rulers of Sindh, could always be used against you. For the British were suspicious of everyone and everything, with the grumblings of the All-India movement threatening, in 1937, to grow into a roar. Yet they still gave the Pirs of Sindh a long leash, sticking to their policy of allowing them to do whatever they wanted locally, as long as they cooperated with the British when it came to ensuring their murids’ support of the government.

  Ahmed decided not to ask any more questions: his father had always told him to stay away from politics, to concentrate on his studies. The less he knew about politics, the safer it was for a young boy like him. “Do you think I’ll ever become a great chess player?” he asked Allah Bachayo instead.

  Allah Bachayo grinned, revealing a gap-toothed smile. “Inshallah, son, inshallah! And why not? You have the intelligence, the reasoning, and we’ve taught you the strategy. Listen to me and Sultan, and you could go far!”

  Ahmed treasured the men’s encouragement over the next few years, and more so while he was completing his final exams. His father was hoping for good results, so that he could find a good job—a government post, as a clerk or even a very junior secretary, was not out of the question if he scored top marks. Ahmed wanted nothing more than to become a chess champion and travel the world, playing games and defeating men from many countries. While he studied math or geography, he thought about Allah Bachayo and Sultan, how they’d taught him to mount an aggressive attack using bishop and pawns, defend a king with a queen and a rook, checkmate an opponent in merely four moves.

  But while he studied and dreamt of chess, Ahmed could not help hearing things about the Hurs and the Pir Pagaro. It was what everyone was talking about: how the man who had ascended to the most powerful throne in Sindh at the age of twelve had defied the British, been sent away to jail in far-off Calcutta a youthful brat, and returned a hardened, wily man with the ambition to rule Sindh as an independent king. How the Hurs had managed to stick together in undying unity, to the dismay of the British, who attempted to break them by sending them to guarded settlements and jails in far-off Indian states. And how the Pir was playing a dangerous double game: assuring the British that they had his cooperation, while at the same time intimidating the mullahs who opposed his religious rule and tightening the rope around his political rivals’ necks. Everyone whispered about how, when he’d been in jail, he’d smuggled out secret messages between the pages of magazines and the lines of books. The messages were virulently anti-British: they described how the British treated the Indians like donkeys, and how the Indians themselves were cowards for submitting themselves to British occupation.

  Ahmed found himself caught up in the thrill of it all: he heard that leaders from all over India came to attend conferences at Pir-jo-Goth, where the Pir’s shrine and palace were located; they said it was vital that Hindus and Muslims stayed united against the oppressors. So exciting was the news of his speeches, his orders to his murids to wear khaddar cloth and give up smoking that Ahmed and his schoolmates, too, began to wear khaddar at home and never even touched a cigarette.

  Ahmed passed his exams in the summer of 1940 with unremarkable results. Rahim Damani blamed it on Ahmed’s daydreaming, his hours wasted playing chess, and the political gossip surrounding them like a swirling desert dust storm. His father’s own dreams of Ahmed becoming a clerk or joining the civil service had to take a backseat while he went out and used what little influence he had to try to seek a suitable alternative for his son.

  “Central Jail,” Rahim Damani announced one evening when he returned from a round of job-seeking among his friends and contacts. The whole family was sitting in the main room while Ahmed’s elder sister Marvi pressed their mother’s feet and his younger sister Surraya served everyone cups of tea. His youngest brother, Junaid, was fast asleep in the bedroom that he shared with Ahmed.

  “What?” said Ahmed, wondering what his father was talking about.

  “I’ve fixed it. You’ll start work at the Central Jail.”

  “As what?” said his mother.

  “As a jailer. What else?”

  At this, Marvi pinched a nerve in their mother’s feet, and the lady let out a scream. “My son, a jailer? You must be mad!”

  “Woman, what else do you expect when he’s hardly managed to clear his subjects? It was the best I could do, and only because Omar Bachani owes me a favor. He’s the superintendent of the jail and the only reason this spot opened up is because the previous man just died, all right?”

  “But … jail … he’ll be exposed to those criminals, it’s dangerous, it’s too much!”

  “Baba,” said Ahmed, “I don’t want to be a jailer.”

  Rahim Damani gave his son a baleful stare. “And why not?”

  “Well … I don’t want to be on their side …”

  “Whose side?”

  Ahmed cleared his throat, but the words came out in a whisper. “The British … I don’t want to be on their—”

  At once Rahim Damani took three long strides toward his son and slapped him hard on his face, first with the front of his hand, then the back. Marvi and Surraya both gasped, while Ahmed’s mother burst out wailing. Rahim said, “I don’t ever want to hear you talking like that again, do you understand? This is serious business, not some kind of crazy dream about being a hero. I know what you and your school friends t
alk about all day long. Hurs, Hurs, Hurs! Do you know what they’re doing to the Hurs and anyone else who’s opposing them? Well, do you?”

  “Yes, Baba,” said Ahmed, hanging his head. He’d heard about the arrests, the deportations, the heavy hand of the British clamping down on them and their families.

  “And rightly so. They’re criminals, those Hurs. They’re creating havoc for poor people like us, they’re robbing honest people, they’re even catching women and …” Rahim Damani glanced at his wife and daughters, realizing that they were listening to the conversation, which was not suitable for female ears. “This isn’t about being on anyone’s side. This is about earning money, feeding your family. You’ll report to Omar Bachani in the morning. Now go to bed.”

  Perhaps a boy of sixteen could one day think of disobeying his father, but for Ahmed it was unthinkable. He went to bed and woke despondently in the morning, and when he walked with his father to the Central Jail, he could barely lift his head or his feet; both felt as though they were weighed down by rocks. They stopped for a few moments at the shrine of Ghulam Shah on the way, where his father purchased a garland of roses and laid it on the saint’s tomb, asking the holy man to help his son be successful in his first job. Ahmed prayed that the dead man whose job he was getting would somehow come back to life and greet them at the gates, telling Rahim Damani there was no vacancy for his son.

  When Ahmed saw the black gates of the jail, guards in police uniforms wielding rifles outside, he wanted to cry. Sultan and Allah Bachayo, trying to cheer him up, had told him that it would be a great opportunity, that jailers wielded tremendous power over both their charges and those who wished to be in contact with them, but Ahmed wanted no part of that game. He thought for one wild moment of breaking free of his father’s grip, of turning and running away to join the Hurs. He’d happily live in hiding in the Miani Forest, killing and eating the wild animals, give up seeing his family for the freedom a life of crime would bring him. Then they passed through the gates, and Ahmed knew he would be as much a prisoner there as any inhabitant of the jail’s miserable, suffocating cells.