The Shadow Of The Crescent Moon (10 page)

Slowly, like she is being led, and for no other discernible
reason, Mina assents and walks over to the new vehicle. Holding her bag against her, she lifts herself into the van and tucks her
dupatta
behind her ears for reassurance, making them stick out clumsily. Sikandar looks at Mina. She suddenly reminds him of the early days of their marriage when they were both so shy around each other. Sikandar resists the urge to reach over to Mina. He hears the rattling sound again as she settles into her new seat.

Sikandar opens the latch to slide himself into the roomy front seat of the van and they start their journey, driving over the speed bumps and pockmarked roads that lead the way out of the parking lot. Chunks of rubble and charred steel columns lie where the gate once was.

Sikandar is careful not to drive too slowly and not too fast either, nothing that might attract the attention of the additional troops sent to man Mir Ali ahead of the minister’s arrival.

Mina folds her arms on top of the bag on her lap and fiddles with her phone. Sikandar reads the address of the house-call several times to himself before he agrees with the directions, silently mouthing street names and left turns. He isn’t nervous, his hands are steady.

The hospital van’s windows are open. There is a chill in the air. Mina continues to check her phone messages. Sikandar mentally sorts through the paltry medical equipment he is carrying and wishes he had thought to bring more of everything and less of one particular passenger.

Sikandar pulls his jacket, lined with itchy sheepskin, closer to him. They pass the hospital’s residential quarters and avoid the main roads, taking side streets whenever possible to lessen their travel time towards the sticks outside Mir Ali where a child is being strangled, born with its umbilical cord wrapped tightly round its neck.

They drive across the city on his motorbike, leaning into each other against the cold. It is safer for them to take small alleyways, revving the motor as they weave in and out of narrow roads. In the shadowed
gullies
between ramshackle homes, children loiter on the streets. They drift around their crumbling neighbourhoods, fluorescent-green snot smeared across their cheeks, their scalps shaved to keep the lice and parasites from feeding on their skin.

Some have sweaters over their filthy
shalwar kameez
. Big woolly ones, ages too old for the children that wear them. The sweaters hang off their shoulders and cover their tummies like ponchos.

They stand there, in pairs, quietly. Gazing at nothing. Some of them carry sticks, tools to sift through the garbage. They are natural garbage-pickers due to their small hands and compact bodies that allow them to submerge themselves beneath the mounds of rot that collect on Mir Ali’s streets.

Hayat slows down through the labyrinths when he sees the children. He doesn’t want to frighten them, to rouse them from their glassy-eyed stupor. He feels Samarra’s hair whip against his neck. He smells her, a delicate scent, as they brace themselves against the light December rain.

She wears a ring of
raat ki rani
on her wrist. A garland of jasmine flowers braided through a wisp of metal that she fastens on her hand. Her silver threads were once unadorned. She used to wear them plain, with the ends of the makeshift
bracelet cutting into her pulse when she wrote or dressed and undressed, pulling fabric over her arms.

But that was some time ago. Now she adorns them with jasmines, like a bride.

Sitting side-saddle, Samarra holds on to Hayat. She doesn’t say a word. Not even when they pause in traffic and make way for larger cars and vehicles to pass. She keeps her silence and buries her face against the back of his neck. It isn’t done. Too conspicuous, Hayat always tells her when she touches him in public. It isn’t done, even if they assume we’re married. But Samarra ignores him, resting her cheek on his back as he drives. Let them assume, she always replies. But Hayat is discreet, as he has always been. He’s secretive about things that are done and things that are not. No public displays. Not in Mir Ali.

Samarra doesn’t drive a motorbike herself any more. Not since Ghazan Afridi left that spring, taking the Chinese motorbike that Samarra learned to drive on Mir Ali’s mountain roads with him. Now she sits behind Hayat and keeps her body still, so as not to tilt the bike left or right, already unbalanced as it is, as they drive down a straight path. She sits behind Hayat and holds him, listening to the rain.

Hayat scans the road ahead, careful not to displace Samarra as he turns his face from side to side to make sure the alleyways are clear. He sees the green and white poster again. This one is loaded with text: ‘Militants must lay down their weapons,’ it says in Pashto. ‘Choose to be a part of the tribal areas’ inevitable progress.’ They have no choice; they have to look at the proud army as their defenders and protectors. Hayat faces away from the posters.

He feels, as she moves with him, that Samarra’s eyes follow his and that she shifts her weight, lifting and dropping her shoulders to meet the motorbike’s subtle bend towards right lanes and left intersections. He wants to speak to her, to say
something, something urgent, but she won’t be able to hear him above the roar of the bike and the hum of Mir Ali’s morning. Samarra does not hear well in any case. He speaks to her at a decibel he prefers not to, too loudly. But she can’t hear out of her right ear. Hayat does not ask why. He keeps his silence too; there is little point speaking to Samarra these days. She seems remote, locked up by her rage. Hayat can’t reach her any more.

He pulls the bike into a small patch of dusty ground near the recently scorched stadium and parks among the cycles and autorickshaws.

Hayat lifts himself off the motorcycle and turns his back as he waits for Samarra to straighten her
shalwar kameez
before walking through the parked vehicles and towards the hollow frame of the stadium.

Her fabric is a crushed yellow, embroidered lightly with faint strands of blue thread. She wears socks, navy-blue ones, with her brown shoes. She covers her toes in the winter, but not her face, not her hair. ‘They can see you,’ Hayat often tells her. ‘It’s dangerous what you do – not covering your hair. They recognize you.’ But Samarra has spent a life lying in wait. She will not hide any more.

Not in any other way is she protected or prepared for warmth. Samarra drapes a dark shawl across her shoulders; she wears it as a man does, casually, carelessly.

She follows Hayat quietly, her feet stumbling over the broken earth beneath her as she balances herself, careful not to make too much noise but not to fall either. Out of the corner of his eye, Hayat thinks he can see her lips part, as though she’s about to speak.

He imagines he sees her start and stop sentences, almost as if she were speaking to herself. Hayat has not let Samarra out of his sight, out of his eye-line, for years. Now and then he
throws a glance backwards to make sure she is following as they walk.

There is a small semi-covered archway that remains upright, untouched by the machinery that felled the structure in which Mir Ali’s men would gather to watch cricket or even hockey when the summer was good and the sun gentle. The archway had been attached to an annex that housed the relatively important entourages of the relatively important athletes or the very important state ministers and governors who came to be photographed on this rotten turf.

The annex had been demolished by the bombing of an unmanned plane. All that remains now is the entrance.

Hayat kicks at the chunks of concrete as he walks towards the biggest blocks. He doesn’t want Samarra sitting on the ground, wet and muddy as it is. With the open palm of her right hand, she wipes the rainwater off a slab of what must have been a roof, a ceiling, a wall, and sits down on it, resting her long canvas bag by her feet. Hayat doesn’t sit. He stands and struggles with his thoughts. It is quiet now, there is no noise around them, but still Hayat cannot find the words. Samarra speaks first.

‘I didn’t think I was nervous in the classroom. I didn’t think it was any different to the other times we’ve met to discuss operations. There was no heating in the building – you know how cold it was in there, even more so with the window open and Nasir smoking cigarette after cigarette. But then, as I spoke, I began to sweat and I could smell my fear.’ Samarra crosses and uncrosses her ankles.

She has forgotten how to meet the eyes of the men she speaks to. She looks away from them, her chin digging into her shoulder as she talks, her eyes fixed on a distant, hazy outline of something no one else can see.

Hayat senses a lull in Samarra’s rambling monologue. He should speak now before she starts up again.

Hayat steps closer to her.

Samarra lifts her eyes from the wretchedness of their surroundings.

‘Stop,’ she says, looking at him for the first time.

Aman Erum met Colonel Tarik at his second interview, when he was called back to the US embassy. On that second visit a polite fellow in plain clothes, who looked foreign but spoke flawless Pashto, received Aman Erum at the convention centre.

He was seated in a VIP room, with leather sofas and VIP wafer biscuits and whirring fax machines, far away from the throngs who pushed and shoved to get through the convention centre and grab good places on the departing embassy buses. He was offered a cup of tea and his choice of chicken or beef patties while he waited, with his escort, for something to happen. Aman Erum removed his scarf and woollen hat as he drank his tea, sipping around the clotted skin of milk, and carefully broke the thin pastry shell of a minced meat pie.

They wouldn’t have brought him back to refuse him, to rescind the work visa, he thought. That could easily have been done by post. Aman Erum had forgotten to bring a handkerchief and his fingers were oily from the patty. He was surreptitiously wiping his hands on his Zulfikar Sons trousers when a white jeep pulled up. It had official licence plates, antennae and a small uniformed driver. The escort informed him that they were ready to be taken to the appointment.

Aman Erum was not nervous; he wanted it too badly.
He wanted to be free, to move without notice, to study, to learn, to expand his life that had so far been restricted to a border town. He had been quarantined in Mir Ali too long. Everything – success, comfort, respect – felt out of reach in Mir Ali. He wanted to be a free man. He wanted a life that was bigger than his father’s, one that came with luxury and comfort and choices. He wanted something better than Mir Ali could offer. He wanted the milky tea and the still-warm patties, too, if he was being honest. He wanted to be received at separate entrances, to be chauffeured by discreet drivers, to be accompanied by foreign contacts who asked him if everything, the tea, the patties, was to his liking.

The drive was short; they didn’t follow the convention centre route that Aman Erum’s bus had taken into the Diplomatic Enclave the last time. It was a few minutes, three maybe, before the white jeep pulled up at a small bungalow fronted by a patch of garden.

A white woman in a severe blue suit appeared at the front door. Her caramel-coloured hair was clipped short, curling over her ears and curving neatly at the nape of her neck.

‘Come, please,’ she said as she walked down the hall and into the sitting room. There were no pictures on the walls – it was a waiting room of a house. There was no sense of anyone living there at all. The sofas were a light pink, the walls a dull beige, the potted plants plastic.

‘Madam.’ A man in uniform rose to his feet as they entered.

He was thin. In his younger days his physique might have been described as trim, but there was no hint of muscle tone now. His scalp, balding on top, was lightly covered with strands of mud-coloured hair.

‘Yet another one of your great potentials – how you find our best and brightest through your system.’ He smiled and offered his hand to Aman Erum. On his left hand he wore a rose-gold wedding band. ‘Colonel Tarik Irshad,
grana
. I’ve heard a lot about you.’

Aman Erum suddenly realized the white woman at the door
was not just there to let them in. That there was an army man accompanying her filled Aman Erum with dread.

Colonel Tarik’s presence, Aman Erum quickly determined, was to play second fiddle to the woman. Whatever she wanted, he asked for. Whatever hopes she had for Aman Erum’s United States sojourn, he expressed.

Aman Erum was a bright spark, they said. He was blessed with extraordinary advantages: his intelligence, his desire to fit in, his ability to cover up his accent when he spoke to officials and to lie low when he lived amongst his own. They wanted him to do only what he had already been doing. They wanted him to listen.

‘Of course, you don’t have to,’ the woman said, shrugging, as she turned towards the Colonel. Aman Erum could stay here, in Mir Ali, they’d keep an eye on him. He was Inayat Mahsud’s son, wasn’t he? How had the last few months been for their family, since his father’s illness? What had he planned to do with his life and his family’s now that things had changed for them? Study, was it? Well, that’s a luxury.

Aman Erum didn’t want to hear any more. How had they known about his father’s illness? Aman Erum asked the Colonel, his throat eating the words as they came out, why he had been rejected before. ‘I applied, I applied to join you and you turned me away.’ He fussed with his shirtsleeves, pulling them over his wrists as he tried not to sound too petulant.

The Colonel sat back in his pink sofa. His smile faded. He bared his teeth. ‘Look at what happened in seventy-one,’ he said, ‘when those bastards mutinied and joined the Mukti Bahini. Taking our weapons and ammunition. They killed us with our own hands. Before we could capture them, they took us prisoners.’

It had been the largest capture of soldiers since the Second World War.

Colonel Tarik Irshad straightened his posture as he twirled the wedding band on his finger. ‘But we are, are we not, extending to you a new hand,
grana
?’

Aman Erum made the deal himself. They didn’t even have to lift a finger. He asked if they would expedite his student visa if he agreed, if he signed on to listen and to share the secrets he learned. Would he have more than nine months of paid work on his F-1 visa?

The power suggested by men like Colonel Tariq was more than those suffocated by it could bear. But Aman Erum was under the impression that he was different. Aman Erum imagined that he understood power. He thought he had cards to play.

Yes, perhaps they could do that, perhaps such an arrangement could be made, Colonel Tarik said, caressing the arm of the light-pink sofa as he replied, teasing the words out with every movement of his hands, the rose-gold wedding ring turning on his finger.

And that was that.

It hadn’t even been a threat – it had been a question.

A note on a bio data form: he was Inayat Mahsud’s son, wasn’t he?

His visa would be swiftly issued; he would receive enough money to help him set up accommodation in the student halls.

But that would be it. This wasn’t a financial arrangement. It was a patriotic one, motivated by duty not profit.

The Colonel would be in touch.