A Season for Martyrs: A Novel (28 page)

The years of Zia had been difficult: Benazir was jailed again and again, and then finally she went into exile, but Ali’s father had worked with the PPP and the MRD, the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy, to prepare the ground for her return in 1986. The details were vague—Ali was hardly four or five years old, but he somehow remembered the secret phone calls, the meetings, the times when Ali’s father would come home drunk, his face a blazing blustery red, and he would pace the corridors of the house, shouting that his beloved Sindh would never succumb to the imperialist invaders.

But there was hardly anything left of the Sindh that Pir Sikandar dreamt about. Land reforms instigated by Bhutto had cut everyone’s landholdings dramatically, and few in the interior could get an education or find employment because there weren’t enough schools or jobs. So Ali’s father had moved the entire family to Karachi; even though their income was assured from the lands (he’d been clever about the reforms, managing to put his lands into various family members’ names while pretending to agree with Bhutto that reforms were necessary for Sindh’s progress), he’d wanted his sons to go to good schools—proof, perhaps, of his love for them.

He was so crazy about Sindh that he didn’t even consider the Balochi Sindhis, who’d been settled in the province for the last three hundred years, to be true Sindhis. “Legharis, Jatois, Chandios, pah! Even the Zardaris are not Sindhi!” he’d shout. When Benazir married Asif Zardari in 1987, he’d gotten drunk and stayed drunk for three days. He’d attended their wedding at the racecourse legless. Ali pictured him lurching toward the platform where Benazir and Zardari were sitting, laying his hand on his heart to tell Benazir that her father would have been so happy to see this moment. Then he’d turned to climb back down the three steps, but he’d fallen off the platform and broken his ankle, and had had to be in a cast for three months.

It was always just automatically assumed that Ali would follow in his father’s footsteps: inherit his lands and his title, and continue where he left off when he was too old to look after the farm or his other interests. As the eldest son, Ali knew he would one day be the
sardar
of the extended family. His religious duties would not be heavy: like most Pirs of today, Ali’s father knew little about religion beyond the daily prayers and a few verses of the Quran, which they dispensed like aspirin to the few men who came to him for religious advice. Learning about agriculture was more complicated, but Ali had wanted to study business management and come back from Dubai to help his father shift into a more progressive way of doing things. He would build a school and a hospital for the poor, improve the road system, get sanitation installed in the village.

“It will all cost more money than you’ll be able to afford,” his father had told him when Ali talked to him about his plans. Sikandar was settled in his chair, a whiskey and water by his hand, and he was watching Benazir on the nine o’clock state news as she addressed Parliament, the country’s first female prime minister, the world’s youngest Muslim woman to lead a nation. The sound was turned down low so that Jeandi wouldn’t wake up, but Ali’s father was mesmerized by the expressions on her face—animated and proud, those imperious cheekbones and arching eyebrows screaming privilege and entitlement even as her huge Persian eyes shone with intelligence and determination.

Ali had eagerly turned away from his books and toward his father. “It won’t be that bad. We have to try, don’t we?”

Sikandar nodded at the television. “That’s what her father wanted to do. Give the peasants and serfs power.
Power to the people!
” For a moment, a bitter, wry look crossed his face, but then he shook his head as if clearing it of treacherous thoughts. “
Roti, kapra, aur makan
. Made him popular with the masses. Not a bad idea, but done in the wrong way.”

“You mean the land reforms?” Ali had asked. “They weren’t a good idea, were they?”

“Not for us.”

“So why did you go along with them? Support him so much?”

“We had no choice. We had to do it to survive.”

Ali was too young to know the word
hypocrisy,
and even if he had known it, he wouldn’t have dared apply it to his father. He had believed everything Sikandar told him about politics, Bhutto, Benazir, the way the world worked. He was the ruler of Ali’s world back then; through the filter of his eyes, Ali could take politics, history, economics piece by piece, absorb them, digest the knowledge in morsels until he was ready for the next bite. There was so much more he wanted to talk with his father about; He needed Sikandar to approve of the way his mind worked, to tell him that he would be a prime minister himself one day.

But his silence had intimidated Ali, and the weary way in which Pir Sikandar raised his drink to his lips, the ice rattling inside the glass. Then the news finished, and he switched off the television with a deft flick of his wrist on the remote control, and stood up to go out for the evening.

Looking back, Ali realized now that for all his grand ancestry, his noble traditions, for all that he had been taught how to be a zamindar and a Pir, none of his forefathers had taught Pir Sikandar how to be a father.

The police beat them even after they locked them in the van, taking some sort of sadistic pleasure at having them all trapped in one place, unable to escape their wrath. Everyone else in the van was just like Ali, young and afraid. Ali didn’t recognize anyone, but he felt as though he knew them all. There were no girls in the van; they’d been taken away by women constables in charcoal-gray uniforms, sneers of disdain contorting their faces as they pulled at their hair and ripped their clothes. Ali had no idea what had happened to Salma or Ferzana, but he’d seen Imran writhing on the ground, being clubbed viciously as he clutched at his eyes, one hand flung out in front of him in a mute cry for mercy.

One of the younger men sat quietly sobbing in a corner but the rest were too stunned to even cry. The van sped through the streets of Islamabad, sirens wailing, until it stopped with a jerk that threw them on their hands and knees onto the floor. The doors were wrenched open and men started shouting at them to come out as rough hands reached inside to yank them out, blinking like bats in daylight too strong for their teargassed eyes. They were shoved into the police station at Aabpara where it had all begun.

No matter how macho everyone pretended to be in Pakistan, even the biggest muscle-bound buffoon was frightened of being taken to a police
thana
. It was the stuff of nightmares for couples caught on illicit dates, or women who were raped and stupid enough to report it at a police station. All that happened was that men got thrashed and women got raped again. Through his work at the station, Ali had heard of street children being taken to the police stations and being made to have sex with policemen so that they were allowed to sell flowers on street corners. There was a news item back in January, a report from some human rights organization that made its way to their fax machine, that they’d tortured a man accused of stealing in Larkana, beating him severely, cutting off his penis and leaving him in a cell in a pool of blood. Ali watched Ameena’s face as she read the fax: it drained of all color, leaving her skin looking like cottage cheese, and she hurriedly threw down the piece of paper and ran to the bathroom.

Jehangir picked up the fax, read it, and whistled, then tossed it to Ali. “I guess we’re not going to be running this on the evening bulletin …”

Their knees were knocking as they were herded into the police station and made to stand in front of the desk, bruised and bleeding, while policemen swarmed all around them, shouting and screaming and hurling abuse. They stripped everyone of their cell phones and wallets, and Ali knew he would never see either again. He stared at the dingy cracked walls and the concrete floor, where a puddle of blood trickled past his legs—but when he blinked his eyes, it was only water from a leaking faucet at a filthy sink in a corner of the room. There was a smell like burst sewers emanating from somewhere outside the room, curling into Ali’s nostrils and making him want to vomit.

Two hours passed like this, as they sweated and tried to clean their eyes and begged for a glass of water or to be allowed to use the toilet, requests that were all ignored. Finally a Station House officer showed up and instructed a constable to take down their details while he stood close by, his hand caressing the pistol holstered on his hip, and scrutinized each person with deep-set, shadowed eyes. Each person was registered, fingerprinted, photographed. Abuses were hurled at them and their family members, and if anyone protested, he was caught by the collar and slapped hard on the face.

Then one by one they were taken down the hall to the jail cells. Ali wondered if they would be beaten more in the cells, or just left to sit or stand or lie on the floor until someone figured out what to do with them.

One young man started to gasp and panic when it was his turn to be led away. “Oh my God, oh my God,” he moaned. “My father’s going to kill me! My father’s going to kill me!” It was an odd thing for a grown man to say, but Ali felt an answering spasm in his own chest. Before he’d broken ties with his father, Pir Sikandar’s approval or disapproval was the most important thing in the world to him: he waited for it like a mariner consulting the weather before deciding to take a trip out onto the sea. Since they’d stopped speaking, Ali had learned how to trust his own judgment, checking his own compass instead of someone else’s all the time. But that young man’s fear resonated with something inside him. He reminded Ali of himself when he was seventeen, before he knew the shape of his father’s perfidy.

Suddenly, the officer at the desk was shouting at Ali. “You! You, come here.”

Before the man standing guard could push him, Ali stumbled forward, eyes still smarting. His fingers burned where the baton caught him against the edge of the van door. The SHO cast a glance over Ali’s sorry appearance, his dirtied clothes and swollen, defiant scowl. The register on the desk was filled with the names and details of at least thirty different people. The officer’s pen hovered over the page, ready to add Ali’s name to the list.

“Name?”

“Sayed Mohammed Ali Sikandar.” He scratched it down painstakingly, each stroke of the pen another jab in Ali’s throbbing eyeballs.

“Address?”

Ali mumbled it out. The officer remained impassive when Ali said he was from Karachi.

“Father’s name?”

“Pir Sikandar Hussein Shah.” It came out automatically, as it always did when Ali was asked for his father’s name in a hundred different bureaucratic situations: filling out school forms or applying for a passport, opening a bank account or buying a SIM card for a mobile phone. And even more so in social situations: people always asked Ali who his father was as a way of identifying him on the tree of society. Among Sindhis, Ali was the apple growing off one of the topmost branches, deriving an elevated status from his father’s high position.

The police officer’s pen kept scratching on the paper. But the SHO cocked his head, peered at Ali from underneath bushy eyebrows. Close up, his eyes were not the usual brown of most Pakistanis, but rather a hazel that didn’t match the somber tone of his oak-brown face.

“Wait,” the SHO said to the officer, whose pen froze a millimeter above the page. The SHO beckoned Ali to follow him. Ali strumbled behind him, his legs trembling with weakness. They went to an office, a tiny room just off the main hall fitted out with a wooden desk and two chairs. A ceiling fan whirred uselessly overhead. The SHO clasped his hands behind his back and stared out the window onto a small grassy patch of ground outside. He didn’t invite Ali to sit down.

“Your father is Pir Sikandar Hussein? Of Sukkur?”

“Yes.” Ali’s heart pounded harder than before; his mouth was dry. He wanted to ask for a glass of water but he was too afraid of being shouted at, or worse.

“You are sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

Abruptly, he reached for his pocket, and for one crazy moment Ali was certain the man was going to take out his gun and shoot him, point-blank, right here in this room. But instead, he passed Ali his cell phone with a grunt. “Call your father.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Call your father. If you can get him to come up here, I’ll release you without charge, on his recognizance.”

I don’t want to do this
. Ali longed to tell the SHO that he couldn’t call his father, that he hadn’t spoken to him on his own initiative in two years. He wanted to break down in tears, tell the SHO how his father left them all, found a woman who wasn’t Ali’s mother and slept with her and now Ali had a half-sister whom he’d never seen but who apparently looked just like his sister Jeandi. There was something about this man’s eyes that told Ali he might just understand.

But the man stared at Ali, his hazel eyes with their slightly raised eyebrows expressing the tiniest bit of impatience, and Ali knew that if he didn’t make the call, he’d be stuck in this jail cell and probably beaten up by any police officer who’d had a fight because his wife wouldn’t make love to him, or who didn’t have enough money to get his daughter married and needed to take it out on a rich, spoiled brat like him.

The phone rang a few times, and then that familiar, raspy voice, mellowed by years of whiskey and cigarettes, came down the line and into Ali’s ear, going straight to his heart. “Hello?”

“Baba?”

A pause. “Ali?”

“Baba, it’s me.”

“What is it, Ali?” If he was surprised, he didn’t let it show in his voice.

“Baba, I’m in trouble.”

Another pause.

“Where are you? Have you had an accident?” Ali could hear the breaks where he stopped to light a cigarette, breathe it in, expel the smoke in short strong puffs. Ali’s mother used to beg him to stop smoking, saying that it was terrible for his health, but he never listened to her about anything. Ali glanced at the SHO, who’d turned his face away again, as if to give Ali some privacy, a symbolic gesture Ali was too shaken to appreciate right now. “I’ve been arrested.”