A Season for Martyrs: A Novel (24 page)

“So,” said Jehangir.

“So.” Ali shook his arms, wringing out his wrists to relieve the tension that was gripping his body.

“You’re off, then?”

“Looks like it.”

They both glanced away. Ali found a point somewhere in the traffic to focus on, while Jehangir stared down at his shoes. The pause grew longer, heavier with their unspoken words. Ali had considered telling Jehangir that it wasn’t what he’d said about Ali’s father that had made him decide to leave. Should he have apologized for revealing Jehangir’s secret? There must have been things Jehangir wanted to say to Ali as well—they couldn’t possibly end their friendship like this, on a busy street, with men staring curiously at them from the tops of buses as they drove by in the evening rush hour.

“
Yaar
…” began Jehangir.

Ali had glanced at him, hungry for the reconciliation he hoped Jehangir wanted as well. It didn’t matter what Jehangir had said about his father. How long would he have kept his father’s second life a secret?

But Jehangir had pointed at the box “What’s in there?”

“Just my stuff, you know … CDs, a few photographs, books … nothing important.”

“Are you sure you aren’t taking your computer with you?”

“I should. It’s the least they owe me. Bastards.”

Jehangir’s lips twisted in a half grin. “So what are you going to do now?”

“I don’t know. I just finished my exams, and then I’ve got one more semester before I graduate in May, so … I’ll just concentrate on university for a while, then look for something more serious next summer.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

Jehangir had scratched his head, fiddled with his mobile phone. Ali was starting to sweat, the fumes from the cars and buses making him feel queasy. He wondered if he should just pick up the box again and start walking to his car. Maybe there really was nothing more to say.

“Heard from Sunita?” Jehangir asked.

“What?”

“I said, have you heard from Sunita?”

“Oh …” If Ali heard her name when he wasn’t expecting it, then he had to press his fists into his eyes to keep them dry. This was one of those unexpected moments, but he kept his fists down by his sides. “No, I haven’t heard from her. It’s been a while.”

“Sorry,
yaar
.”

Ali had nodded. Another pause, filled with beeping horns and squealing brakes from the stop-and-go traffic. Then he decided to ask anyway. What did he have to lose now? “How did you know about my father?”

Ali could still remember how Jehangir had tensed, as if expecting a blow from Ali. When none came, he dropped his eyes to the ground, then raised them again and met Ali’s gaze with half-hidden regret. “You said your father was a bureaucrat but I thought, there’s no way you could have gone to study in Dubai on a bureaucrat’s pension. I thought he was a tax evader. You could have told me, Ali.”

Ali shook his head. “All those things you said about my family … that’s why I didn’t tell you anything. It was exactly what I was trying to avoid.”

“I didn’t mean … I know you’re not like that. You’re different.”

Ali had ignored the usual words that so many meant as a compliment but which always sounded to him like a condemnation. “How long have you known?”

Jehangir had shrugged in his customary way, lips pouting, head bent to the side. “I don’t know. Six months, maybe? There was a picture of your father in the newspaper, attending some PPP function in Hyderabad. He looked just like you. It caught my eye, and then I saw that you had the same last name as him. I did some digging. I didn’t expect to find any of this out.”

Ali knew he had to end the conversation or he would just sink down onto the street and begin to weep. He was tired, so tired of all the pretense, and it hadn’t saved him any trouble in the end. Haroon was still dead and Sunita was still gone and his father still lived in the house in Bath Island, a universe away from him.

He put out his hand to Jehangir. “I’ll see you around.”

Jehangir looked at Ali’s hand as if deciding whether or not to take it. Finally, just when Ali was about to withdraw it and walk away, he leaned forward and shook it. “Good luck, Ali.” Jehangir’s hand was cool and dry, the clasp noncommittal.

“You, too.” They might have embraced had the parting been taking place under different circumstances. But there were no promises to keep in touch. No long goodbyes. Just a severing of connections, almost clinical in its efficiency. Ali watched his friend retreat into the building. Then he bent down and picked up the box, relishing the physical pain that overshadowed the sorrow in his heart.

The police were watching them warily, lined up in ragged ranks on the knolls around the Chowk. The trees behind them formed a second line of defense, casting eerie shadows and filtering the sunlight through branches so that everything appeared somber and gray. Usually traffic would be whizzing by, but they’d cordoned off the roads so that the five hundred protestors had room to gather on the street, their placards and banners at the ready. A few hundred yards away stood the Lal Masjid, an invisible reminder to them all of what the state was capable of doing when its fury was aroused. The state of emergency had been lifted on Saturday night, but they knew that the gesture, aimed at pleasing the Western countries that were pushing Pakistan in the name of democracy, had no real significance.

They were nervously pawing the ground like bulls before the death fight in a Spanish stadium. One of the leaders of the protest, a tall young student from nearby Quaid-e-Azam University, a black band tied around his arm, glanced at his watch, then nodded to the others. On his signal, they raised their placards and began to shout, “Go, Musharraf, go! Go, Musharraf, go!”

Ali, Salma, and the crowd—made up mostly of black-coated lawyers and university students—joined the rising chorus and pushed their fists skyward. The policemen gave them a wide berth, their faces impassive, although their eyes followed the group with suspicion and hostility. There were more than Ali had seen at any demonstration in Karachi. Lined up around the protestors, they were clad in full riot gear, their weapons adding extra tension to the electricity in the air. Some of the students were holding sticks, but Ali and his group had refused the ones they’d been offered. A passing man in a
shalwar kameez
and a thin beard held out a stick to Bilal and nodded at him to take it.

Bilal shook his head. “We don’t want to fight with the police. We just want to make our voices heard.”

The man snorted. “You’ll remember me when the fun starts.” He walked off toward another little group and they could see him offering the stick to other people down the line.

“Maybe we should listen to him,” muttered Ali, standing on Bilal’s left, Salma a few steps behind him, arm in arm with Ferzana.

“He’s MI. Military intelligence. They want us to clash with the police. Makes us look bad,” replied Bilal.

“Oh shit,” said Ali. Then he jerked his head back in Salma’s direction. “Don’t scare them.”

Imran raised an eyebrow. “They’re grown-ups, Ali. They know what this is all about.”

The protestors stood in the same place for about fifteen minutes, raising their signboards and shouting slogans. Then the men in front shouted, “Release the chief justice!” and Ali’s heart began to race.

The crowd took up the cry, a wave that swelled from the beginning of the gathering and rolled powerfully in all directions. And then feet began to follow intention, as the people began to walk. Salma grabbed Ali’s arm and shouted in his ear, “Where are they going?”

“The chief justice’s house!” he shouted back. “Come on!”

They began to move as one, pressing forward, adrenaline surging as they chanted to the rhythm of their marching feet. Ali saw the excitement on the faces around him: they were laughing, smiling, lips parted to take in huge gulps of air, as if tasting oxygen for the first time in their lives. This was the feeling he loved, his senses sharpened, everything looking and sounding clearer and sharper than he’d ever remembered. Nothing before this moment existed; nothing after it mattered. Here, now, they were only of this time, as excited as children on their first day of school, as filled with potential as newborns in their first day on earth.

He knew the beatings had started when the people in front of him began to move in strange, disjointed jerks, the smooth flow of their march disrupted at the front, then ricocheting back like the carriages of a derailed train flying off the rails, one after another.

The police, who had maintained their distance all along, were now in the midst of the protestors, raising their batons and bringing them down onto the protestors’ heads, shoulders, hips, legs. The students tried to raise their sticks in self-defense, but they were no match for the professional fury unleashed upon them. Screams rang out, punctuating the
thwack
ing sounds of metal landing on bone. Ali saw the tall QAU student sinking down under a sweating policeman’s quick, brutal blows. He whirled around to look for Salma, but she had disappeared from view. Another policeman had caught Ferzana in a tight grip, her arms pinioned behind her back, her face twisted into a grimace of pain. Ali lunged forward to try to get her out of the policeman’s grasp, but the crowds surging around him were a thick wall that he couldn’t penetrate.

“Salma! Salma!” Ali screamed. His voice was drowned in the tumult; he desperately scanned the bodies on the ground, but she was nowhere to be seen.

Somehow the crowd gathered strength again and resumed marching toward the chief justice’s house. People were limping, clutching limp wrists, holding hands to their bruised heads, but they still continued to walk. “
Release the chief justice!
” The cry thundered from their throats, made all the more powerful for the raggedness of their voices. Ali was jostled forward; even if he tried to fight against the tide, he would have been pushed until he too fell on the ground and was trampled by their moving feet.

The students pushed the policemen back, gaining a little space to regroup and carry on with the march. They made some headway, gaining about twenty yards or so; Ali hoped they might actually reach their destination. They planned to stand outside the chief justice’s house and continue the demonstration there for at least an hour. He had to find Salma … was that her, over there, in the glasses with a scarf thrown over her head? But the girl who looked like her from a distance turned out to be a lawyer whose black coat had been ripped off by the police.

An armored car drew up alongside the protestors and began to fire tear gas shells. Ali’s eyes began to itch, but he was too far away from them to be blinded as yet. The students drew back, screaming, trying to dodge the shells. One landed directly on a lawyer’s leg and exploded, throwing him to the ground. He lay there, blood oozing into the shreds of his trousers, staining them dark brown. The police lifted their weapons and began to fire on the crowd: rubber bullets that couldn’t kill them but knocked them off their feet and stunned them into submission. Some of the policemen bent down, picked up stones, and hurled them at the protestor’s heads.

Chaos had taken over: students ran in all directions, tear gas rising up from the ground in twisted curls like snakes coiling around their legs and waists. Ali’s eyes were beginning to blister. He reached for his cloth and bottle of mineral water, but was too disoriented to screw off the cap and pour it onto the cloth. The water bottle dropped from his hands; he wrapped the cloth around his mouth and nose, but without the water it was useless, and he too began to choke and cough and retch.

Through the haze, Ali saw a policeman beating a woman next to him, and when the man had finished with her, she was left kneeling on the ground, her hands covering her face, blood seeping from between her fingers. Two students rushed to her and helped her up, but she fainted in their arms and had to be carried to a waiting ambulance. The police charged, gas masks and black riot gear turning them into strange faceless monsters who rushed at them again and again. The terror that had seized them was a dog snapping at Ali’s ankles as he ran from left to right and back again without being able to see where he was going.

Then a strong hand gripped his upper arm, yanking him so hard he thought his shoulder had been dislocated. Ali tried to pull away but was thrown off balance and dragged halfway across the street on the backs of his heels, his arms freewheeling in the air. Strong hands shoved him in all directions; he felt himself being lifted up and launched toward the open doors of a police van. He landed inside, tripping over the legs of the students already rounded up and packed inside like slabs of meat. Policemen screamed into their faces, spraying them with spittle, jeering, calling them foul names. Then the driver started the van, and they were raced away from the street.

Inside the van, people moaned and clutched at their wounds, while others stared straight ahead of them in shocked, terrified silence. Tears streamed from all their eyes. They coughed and choked in agonized whimpers. Ali didn’t know whether he wanted to scream or cry, as he felt their humanity ebbing away with every passing second.

The Living Saints

LARKANA
,
SINDH
, 1979

When you travel to the interior, it seems as though you have stepped back in time; the moment you alight from your car or train, you realize that nothing has changed over the last two hundred years, and nothing ever will. This is what Pir Sikandar Hussein thought as he disembarked from the train in Larkana, in June 1979, seven weeks after Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had been hanged by Zia’s military regime. Sikandar Hussein had come to Larkana to pay his respects at the prime minister’s grave, to meet with his family and offer his condolences. He could not sit still in Karachi and nurse his broken heart; he had to do something, and this seemed the right thing to do.

The entire country was in mourning, as much for their lost son as for their lost freedom; the madman General Zia had stolen from them the idea that ordinary men could have a voice in the destiny of their nation, and murdered its messenger. Democracy is a dangerous beast to those petty men, those tinpot generals, who must draw their weapons and strike it until it is dead, and only then can they sleep peacefully at night, while the rest of humanity suffers, generation after generation.