A Season for Martyrs: A Novel (2 page)

- It’s easy
, Jehangir wrote in his tenth overexcited email, an hour later, as Ali still sat and stared glumly at his Facebook page.
Just get a webcam, and then when she comes over, turn it in her direction while she isn’t watching and then—

- That’s sick
, Ali fired back, not bothering to read the rest.
But
I can’t believe she’s sending me over to the airport! Two hundred thousand people are going to be showing up there. It’s going to be a mess!

- Stop complaining
, wrote Jehangir.
Always complaining, Ali. You’re going to get to see history in the making.

- History? I could care less about any of this.

- Wait, wait, wait. Wasn’t your father a PPP man?

- He was. I’m not. I’m nobody’s man.

- What about Sunita, aren’t you her man?

- Shut up, loser.

-You first, jackass!

The abusive nicknames were a constant running joke between them, a way to express affection, exasperation, and boredom in the office. But Ali was always careful to keep that one particular insult out of his repertoire—
fag!
—because Jehangir had recently confessed to him that he was, in fact, gay—or at least bi; he wasn’t sure. In return for that particular confidence, Ali had told Jehangir about Sunita. Two young men, needing to appear invulnerable and in control most of the day, ended up telling each other a lot of secrets when they were the only people in the office at three o’clock in the morning, making sure that all the graphics were correct for a program that had to be aired in another four hours, bickering over McDonald’s Big Macs delivered two hours ago, now stone-cold and tasting like congealed cardboard.

Ali clicked back to the Wikipedia website, where he was pulling up information about Benazir Bhutto for the background report:

Benazir Bhutto (Sindhi:
Urdu:
; pronounced
; 21 June 1953—) is a politician and stateswoman who served as the 11th Prime Minister of Pakistan in two non-consecutive terms from November 1988 until October 1990, and 1993 until her final dismissal on November 1996. She was the eldest daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a former prime minister of Pakistan and the founder of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), which she led.

In 1982, at age 29, Benazir Bhutto became the chairwoman of PPP—a centre-left, democratic socialist political party, making her the first woman in Pakistan to head a major political party. …

Benazir Bhutto’s popularity waned amid recession, corruption, and high unemployment which later led to the dismissal of her government by conservative President Ghulam Ishaq Khan.

In 1993, Benazir Bhutto was re-elected for a second term after the 1993 parliamentary elections. …

In 1996, the charges of corruption levelled against her led to the final dismissal of her government by President Farooq Leghari. Benazir Bhutto conceded her defeat in the 1997 Parliamentary elections and went into self-imposed exile in Dubai, United Arab Emirates in 1998.

Ali skimmed the rest of the entry and picked out the important facts, cutting and pasting them into the Word document that was next to the DesiBeauties page that was open beneath the Wikipedia page. Education … family … marriage … Prime Minister … policies … policies for women … It was mindless work; Ali often thought a dog or a robot could do his job, but it was thirty thousand rupees a month—City24 paid that much to their researchers, hoping to lure them away from the older, more established rival channels—so Ali was not, despite Jehangir’s accusations, complaining.

Ali stopped short at the part about all the corruption cases. Ameena had told him to stay away from too much controversy, to stick to the basic facts. “I’m not going to turn this into some kind of tabloid show just to get the ratings,” she told Ali.

“Isn’t that what this business is all about?” said Ali.

Ameena frowned. “We get pressure from the advertisers all the time to make things juicy. They keep saying the viewers need more
masala
. But I don’t want to do that here. Someone has to try to show a little class.”

Ali had a sudden memory of his father shouting that the accusations were all a pack of lies and that Benazir’s father, Zulfikar Bhutto, was the greatest man that ever walked this earth. Ali thought that if Sikandar Hussein were to read the Wikipedia entry about the Dassault case and Surrey palace and Asif Zardari’s polo ponies, he would become apoplectic. It was this image of his father, spluttering and red-faced, that Ali found he missed in an odd way now, even though it had upset the entire family whenever he had exploded like that in front of them.

Ali paused from his work to imagine a conversation with his father: Sikandar would bellow—he always thought that the loudest voice won the argument—that it was all cooked up by the army and the president, who didn’t want Benazir to come back and win the election. Ali, certain that his father didn’t know what he was talking about, would coolly argue that foreign courts wouldn’t file false cases and there was enough evidence to convict a hundred times over. Sikandar would retort, in his raspy, cigarettes and whiskey-raw voice, that anything could be cooked up; even history could be rewritten if you put the right amount of money into the right palms. Just look at 9/11! What proof do we even have that they were actually Muslims? Anything can be made up, anything can be true or not true, depending on whose interests it serves.

Yes, Ali would answer. Just like the National Reconciliation Order the president had signed, which proclaimed all the politicians innocent of crimes of which they’d already been convicted. Even murders.

Then he’d say, “But Baba, we don’t have to defend criminals just because they’re Sindhis like us.”

And Sikandar would have no answer to that.

The conversation would never really have happened: Sikandar would brook no argument about his beloved Benazir. Ali could still remember how his father boasted that he was one of the thousands who accompanied her on the procession when she’d first returned to Pakistan in the eighties. “She was standing on top of that truck for
eighteen hours,
smiling and waving to everyone, like a heroine—a princess. No, a queen. I swear she looked right at me and I started to shout,
Jiye, Bhutto
and everyone began to shout and then the whole crowd was shouting and it was like thunder, no, it was like the roaring of the sea. …”

As Ali grew up, his father kept telling the story over and over again, embellishing it and making it even more mythical with each retelling. “She is amazing. She is beautiful. She is our leader. She is so intelligent. She is …”

“He sounds like he’s in love with her,” Ali whispered once to Haris, more than a little jealous and wishing the praise was being heaped on him instead of on Benazir. Haris signaled
Shut up
with his eyes, knowing that if their father heard him speak with such insolence, he’d get a slap, or more than one slap. And if their mother witnessed that, she would cry. Then his sister Jeandi would also cry, and his brother Haris would shut himself in his room and smoke a whole pack of cigarettes. Ali hated the weeping and the smoking even more than he hated his father’s blows, so he’d controlled himself, even though he was sure that Sikandar had no idea how ridiculous he sounded. And now Ali could not show him that his precious idols had feet of clay, but at least there were no more tears in his household because Ali hadn’t been able to hold his tongue.

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.”