The Shadow Of The Crescent Moon (6 page)

Aman Erum had ignored Hayat’s histrionics; his youngest brother was so excitable. ‘Since when are you so anti,
haan
?’ Aman Erum asked Hayat, winking at Sikandar, who did not look like he enjoyed the prod.

‘Anti?’ Hayat had replied, raising his voice, which had not broken yet. ‘Anti? Aman Erum, they are their patrons. Who do you think made this the seventh-largest military in the world?’

‘Fifth,’ Aman Erum had said, stifling a smile.

I understand, Aman Erum now said solemnly to the glass partition, that we are passing through a dangerous time. It is
unfortunate that America must fight this war, but we are safer for it.

With you. We are with you.

Thirteen days later Aman Erum received a letter informing him that his five-year work–study visa had been approved, with an addendum asking for one more interview.

Samarra’s mother came to visit his family when she heard the news. Malalai offered her prayers for Aman Erum’s successful journey to the faraway continent and handed him some money, a few hundred rupees, discreetly folded into a white envelope.

Samarra and Aman Erum met later, on their own, behind the Ibn e Qasim road mosque and walked together, contemplating the next five years. Prayers had just ended and the
gullies
behind the mosque were empty. A boy in a white
shalwar kameez
and delicate white prayer cap drank from a tap outside the mosque. After three sips, he lifted his feet from his sandals and gingerly washed his toes – a latecomer, he would have to pray on his own. Embarrassed, he looked away from the couple and focused on his feet as Aman Erum and Samarra walked slowly through the alleyways.

‘It will be for our future,’ Aman Erum said guiltily. He could not bring Samarra with him; that wasn’t an option. She smiled and leaned against him. Her slight frame was bundled in layer upon layer of clothes, adding a cushiony bulk to her shadow of a body. She wore
churidar
, tight around her ankles, and had pulled her long hair back so Aman Erum could see her face. Samarra felt her heart slow down, the opposite of Aman Erum’s – his heart always rushed with blood.

She spoke quietly, into Aman Erum’s left ear. ‘I won’t miss you. I won’t even notice you’re gone.’

Now he smiled, careful not to laugh and accidentally bump Samarra’s resting chin off his shoulder.

It was dinner time, the
gullies
were quiet. A skinny pye-dog, its mangy light-brown hair bitten off in patches and its ribs poking through its flesh, ran after a little girl wearing red plastic slippers. A window opened above their heads and a mother called down to the girl, ‘Tashreen, come upstairs. Tashreen!’

The little girl in the slippers hid from her mother, pressing her back against the wall of the building so she couldn’t be seen. She crouched down and stroked the dog on his neck. ‘Tash!’ her mother called from the window, unable to see her daughter beneath her. The dog rested his flea-bitten ear on Tash’s lap. The little girl in the red plastic slippers bent her head down to kiss the dog on its sticky wet nose. Somewhere a sheet hung out to dry on a railing dripped water onto the street.

‘While you’re not thinking of me, will you remember that I’m going for us? So that when your father returns he will have no objections to our marriage, because he will see that I can provide for you outside of Mir Ali, outside of this place where we can’t even sit in public for a cup of tea or walk our children to their school safely?’

Samarra stirred, careful not to lose her place in the crook between Aman Erum’s collarbone and shoulder. She did not like the mention of Ghazan Afridi. She remembered Aman Erum loading the light-blue pick-up truck. Maybe years, he had said, before he got into the truck and drove away. Maybe years.

‘I don’t want to leave Mir Ali,’ Samarra said. ‘I don’t want to walk on roads that have no memory of my life. I want you and me to walk our children to school on streets we know by heart, streets that have known us since we were children.’

She felt his shoulders sag, his back slump ever so slightly. She added, ‘And I already drink my tea outside. Who can stop me?’

Aman Erum laughed, loudly this time. He held her face in
his palms. He told Samarra how he loved her and how he would love her in the years to come.

She wished that they could have married, could have signed their wedding papers before he crossed the Atlantic, but she kept her wishes to herself. Aman Erum’s heart was beating too fast to slow down for anything now. She could hear it against his chest. He was on his way, finally.

The taxi driver punctures Aman Erum’s silence. ‘Radio says they killed three more today.’ He does not need to specify who they are and who they killed. The taxi driver’s inflection says it all.

‘Where?’ Aman Erum asks.

‘At a checkpoint along the Atal Ali market.’

‘Near the mosque?’

‘On the way. They always keep an eye out on that
jumat
, don’t they?’

Aman Erum feels his heart quicken. ‘What happened to the soldiers?’

The taxi driver smiles, showing his
paan
-stained teeth.

‘Our legions,
zwe
, our legions have dispatched them.’

Hayat sits on the motorbike for a moment; he releases the brake with his foot then pauses. He hadn’t heard the rain this morning when he woke up. But now he sits under it, letting the drizzle fall on his shoulders as he rests his feet on the driveway. He runs his hands through his growing hair, hair he shaved off so early in the spring that it now curls in waves at the nape of his neck. Hayat watches as his breath leaves his lips and spirals up like smoke.

He kicks the stand down and flicks off the lights of the motorbike, battered and bruised from three years of Mir Ali’s roads and windswept highway excursions to the edges of Peshawar’s city lines. Hayat stands up and walks back towards the house.

His mother, Zainab, is still sitting in the kitchen, her cheeks resting on her palms. The gesture hides her face and her age, and she looks as if she is posing for a photograph of her younger self as she stares at a framed portrait of her late husband, Inayat, which rests on the sooty wall above the stove. The electric heater, three burning rods, casts an orange glow on her face.

‘
Morey
?’ Hayat breaks his parents’ silent communion.

‘Yes,
zwe
?’ A slow light spreads across his mother’s face as she looks at her youngest child, whose face is pink from the cold and the early morning drizzle. ‘Your eyes,’ she says to him. ‘What’s happened?’ Hayat ignores the question. He involuntarily rubs his bloodshot eyes.

‘Are you sure you’re not going to prayers with the rest of the aunties today?’ Hayat doesn’t know why he insisted on walking back into the house, reacclimatizing his body to the indoor heat before shoving it back onto the motorbike to drive with the rain biting at him under his layers of protective clothing – a
baniyan
under his
shalwar kameez
and a warm jacket, one of Aman Erum’s old leather ones – only to ask such a question.

His mother smiles. ‘
Kha
,
zwe
, I’m too old now to face the endless ups and downs of prayers every week.’

Hayat stands in front of his mother, running his fingers through his wet hair. When he lowers his head, almost touching his chin to his chest, a bead of water falls off the bridge of his nose. Hayat watches it land on the sticky plastic tablecloth.

‘What is it,
zwe
?’ His mother’s voice breaks into the quiet lull that has developed.

Hayat takes his prayer cap out of his coat pocket and places it on the table. Who is going to wear this doily of a cap, a speckled cheesecloth of a cap, when it’s drizzling outside? He walks out of the kitchen and takes a Chitrali hat off the coat rack near the front door, rolling its edges in his hands as he goes back to the kitchen, where his mother is craning her neck and twisting her old body in her chair to follow him.

‘Do you think he will forgive me?’ he whispers, leaning against the door frame, not getting too comfortable in case his mother answers in the negative and he has to make a quick exit back to his motorbike.

‘It’s better not to talk about these things,’ his mother replies, moving one palm over the other as she massages her arthritic hands. ‘Your father never explained his work to me, never really told me what he did or why he did anything. How can I advise you now,
zwe
?’ Zainab nods to herself and concentrates on her hands. ‘It’s better the less I know.’

Hayat lets his body slide against the door until he is crouched
down on the kitchen floor. ‘Life is for us, we should stop living like corpses. We’re not the same as we were seven months ago, three years ago. There is no other way. We keep fighting for the idea that there is another way,
Morey
, but there isn’t. I don’t see it. I don’t feel it any more.’ Hayat pauses. ‘I’ve failed him.’

Hayat’s voice is strong, his mother will remember later that afternoon. It doesn’t waver or tremble but is firm and resolute.

‘How can you, you out of all of them, believe that?’

‘It’s the truth.’

There’s a brief silence as the cook sidles back into the kitchen. He lights a match and turns on the stove. Hayat breathes in deeply.

‘But will he forgive me?’

The cook pounds dough on the kitchen counter, flattening it for
chapatti
with his palms, forgoing a rolling pin.

Zainab reaches out her hand, but Hayat’s knees are too far away for her to touch. ‘His mind was always closed when it came to this, you know that. I cannot speak for him. But perhaps there is logic to what you say. Give it time.’

Hayat nods.

‘
Zoo
, Hayat.’ She pats the table with her extended hand. He hasn’t come closer.

Hayat only wanted his guilt assuaged when he walked into the kitchen, only wanted to be told: don’t be mad, everything is fine. What are you talking about? There’s no problem. He wanted her to say, ‘Oh how sensitive the young ones are,’ and for his mother to tell him that he was wasting his time and was late for his prayers. She only did the latter.

Hayat stands and adjusts the Chitrali pakol, a size too small for his head. He leans down and touches Zainab’s forehead with his lips, grazing if not kissing her wrinkled skin. He wraps his mother in his arms.

Zainab laughs and moves her gnarled fingers to her son’s
neck. Her knuckles ache as she strokes the hair on the nape of Hayat’s neck, and she inhales the smell of the lemon soap that has dried and left a white residue behind his ears.

‘
Za tasara mina kawam
,’ Zainab mouths in Pashto into her son’s citrus-scented ear. I love you.

Hayat hears her.

‘Wale?’
he breathes back. Why?

Sikandar is pulling the small grey Suzuki out of the driveway when his phone rings, vibrating in his chest pocket. He grips the steering wheel with one hand and fumbles in his pocket for the phone. The number calling is unfamiliar, lots of threes in it, no name.

‘Hello,
kha
?’ Yes? He answers cautiously.

‘Is this Mrs Mina’s husband?’ asks the voice at the other end of the call.

What now, Sikandar thinks, catching a quick glance at the digital clock on the dashboard; what has she done now – it’s not even noon yet. Sikandar knew something was wrong when Mina hadn’t come to breakfast. He should have gone upstairs to look for her. He should have had one less cup of tea and checked in on his wife.

Sikandar moves his head yes, and then clears his throat to cover his ashamed nod and rebuild his authority with the man on the telephone. ‘Yes. Is there something I can help you with?’ He tries to sound polite, unassuming. ‘I’m on my way for prayers …’

‘If you could come to house sixty-six C, near the petrol station on Raj Hyderi street, it would be best.’

Sikandar sighs and changes gear, reversing his small car. The rain obscures his view as it collects on the windscreen. Cradling the phone to his ear with his shoulder, he searches for the switch to turn on the windscreen wipers.

‘Is it possible to come after prayers? I have to make a stop at work beforehand, before the hospital goes quiet.’ He mentions
this only to imply that he is an important man. He works at the hospital; he is a doctor.

It isn’t a small operation – the two-storey Hasan Faraz Government Hospital has an emergency wing, an intensive care unit, a children’s surgery ward, an ophthalmology OPD, and a maternity ward – but it is still being run like a dispensary. Doctors, the qualified surgeons and consultants who were Sikandar’s batch mates and fellow residents, all applied for jobs operating x-ray machines in New Zealand or pharmacies in Manchester. They had long since moved on to more lucrative, less conflict-ridden countries.

The medical supplies for Hasan Faraz Government Hospital, when they come at all – when it is safe enough to guarantee delivery – are shipped from Balochistan.

There are pills taken out of their boxes and sold in strips with the expiry date scratched off the foil, a polite gesture from the Chinese distributor who insists on hiding what everyone already knows – that the medicines are older than most of the doctors. Syrups for the children congeal in their dark-brown glass bottles, and antibiotics well past their due date are prescribed to the old and infirm. The very word ‘antibiotic’ is magical. No patient who is prescribed them dares to ask what the effects of ingesting expired antibiotics at double doses might be.

Polio vaccines reach the hospital unrefrigerated, held up for inspection by some politician’s nephew who has been made chief customs officer at the port. The Hasan Faraz Government Hospital has stockpiles of tetanus, measles, BCG and mumps vaccines rendered completely ineffective by bureaucratic delays, but they are relatively new and look good so the doctors snap their fingers on babies’ plump arms and inject them anyway.

Nevertheless, Sikandar works at the hospital. He is a doctor. His medical credentials should have quelled the fast-spiralling
urgency on the line; they should have ensured that the caller’s unceremonious tone was replaced by the polite respect doctors in Mir Ali were accustomed to. ‘If that’s an inconvenience, of course I can be there but if you think there is no immediate need …’

The voice on the phone, still nameless, says it is better to come now – the
dreham
prayers have not started yet and it would be best if Mrs Mina’s husband could retrieve his wife before then.

He is already on his way, he says to the phone. Sikandar jerks his foot off the clutch nervously, causing the car to stall several times as he navigates his way to the house near the petrol station.

It has been nine months since this started. Before then, before the spring, there were no signs of any imbalance. The first time it happened, Sikandar had been on call. He had ducked into the staff room to take a small break, resting his feet after fourteen hours on the floor, when his phone rang. With no introduction or exchange of pleasantries, the strange voice of a crying woman on the other end asked Sikandar to come and remove his wife from her nephew’s funeral.

Mina, who had not told her husband she had any plans that day, had simply risen after her afternoon nap and put on a white linen
shalwar kameez
, covered her head with a thin
dupatta
and instructed the Hazara kitchen boy, little Jahanzeb, who sometimes handled the home’s vegetable shopping, relieving Zainab of the weekly grocery duties, and who was the only one able to drive when the brothers weren’t at home, to take her to the address she had torn out of that morning’s paper.

The obituary had been printed in a small square at the bottom of the paper’s third page. There was no photograph. Perhaps the family could not afford the extra cost or perhaps there hadn’t been time to sift through passport-sized photos
taken over the years. It simply announced that the
namaz e janaza
would be carried out that afternoon at the dead boy’s family home.

Jahanzeb, sitting in the car with Mina, thought she needed him because of an emergency. He could barely handle the car and drove convulsively – he didn’t have a licence. He couldn’t even ride a bicycle without falling off.

Once they reached the house of the recently deceased, Mina told the kitchen boy, whose face was patchy with soft stubble, that he could leave her there and that she would make her own way home. Jahanzeb assumed she meant with friends already gathered at the funeral, but didn’t ask – he didn’t consider such duties towards Mina as falling within his purview. He gladly turned round and drove back home.

The citizens of Mir Ali were not permitted by federal order to gather in groups of three or more in any public space, but the Islamic Republic could not ban people from sending off their dead with a Muslim prayer. Funerals and burials and prayer evenings became the meeting ground for the resistance. Even the dead were enlisted in the battle against the state.

As unwashed bodies were being rolled in their white
kafans
, men spoke in hushed voices of what was to come. Women, pouring tea from family samovars and serving cold almond sherbet to the mourners, passed messages under saucers and in the folds of two-ply napkins.

Even less appealing than minding Mina was the idea of getting caught up in the battle for Mir Ali. Jahanzeb had no interest in either. As he backed away from the house, he looked over his shoulder to make sure no one had seen him or noted down the car’s licence plates.

Mina entered the house, Sikandar was later told, and made her way towards the dead boy’s mother and father, identifying
them by surmising that they were about her and Sikandar’s age.

It was not an easy guess. The house was full of mourners, everyone’s eyes swollen and red. But Mina knew what she was looking for. She strode up to the grieving mother and embraced her.

‘I’m Mrs Mina,’ she told her and turned to the boy’s father to shake his hand, to his surprise. ‘I’m Mrs Mina,’ she repeated.

Mina then sought out the boy’s grandparents, striding towards the shrunken and white-haired, adjusting her
dupatta
and announcing, ‘I’m Mrs Mina,’ while making the rounds among those she assumed were part of the boy’s larger family.

Nobody knew Mina at this funeral; no one heard her name and flashed upon some shared history or familiar background. She was a stranger to everyone present.

After meeting the family and conveying her condolences, Mina sat amongst the cross-legged women on the floor, who were tossing burnished beads into the centre of a white bed sheet, counting off prayers for the dead with each offering. Sometimes they were date pits or uncooked red beans, but most often they were dark-brown tamarind seeds. Mina read stories into the sorts of people who used the different beads and beans. Only misers would use the beans, emptying their kitchen stock rather than going to the local mosque to bring home the seeds of the slightly sweet, slightly sour tamarind. Long, reedy date pits were popular too, but of course they had to be in season, unless the mosque kept a large supply. Among the stones, Mina had her preferences, though she had learned not to speak of this at funerals. She took a handful of the prayer beads and listened to those around her.

Women huddled together whispering about the boy. Karam, they said his name was, and Mina knew this was correct
because of the newspaper obituary in her handbag. Karam’s body had been washed against the wishes of his father, one of the women, a portly figure in a tightly wrapped chador, whispered.

The women clucked their tongues and shook their heads. One must never wash the body of a
shaheed
, someone said, speaking the women’s disapproval out loud. It was his mother who’d insisted. She fainted when she saw her son’s body. She couldn’t bear to see her child like that, his skin blue and covered in blood and dirt. But still, it was wrong to have washed him when earthly appearances do not matter to martyrs ascending to heaven.

All the women agreed.

‘I’m Mrs Mina,’ Mina interjected. ‘Yes, yes, it is very wrong.
Shaheeds
are pure beings, like the saints.’

All the women held their breath and eyed Mina suspiciously. No one had noticed her or her fist full of beads until then.

‘Are you a friend of the family?’ one of the ladies asked carefully.

‘I’m Mrs Mina,’ Mina repeated. ‘Where was the body found? Did the police retrieve it? Or was it the boy’s comrades who brought him home?’

The begums bristled. They were familiar with all the details of Karam’s case, ready to divulge overheard titbits of family gossip and funeral hearsay, but there was something odd about Mrs Mina. Something too curious, they would say later.

But Mina was undaunted. When the women yielded no new knowledge of Karam’s death and delivery, Mina got up, dusted off her clothes, placed the beads on the table and made her way to a group of youngsters. They were crying and echoing the adults’ recitations of Koranic
ayats
calling for bravery and stoicism.

‘I’m Mrs Mina,’ she told the eldest of the girls, possibly Karam’s sister. The girl was in fact Karam’s cousin, and, upon being urgently questioned about the state of her elder cousin’s gunshot wounds, she began to scream.

The girl’s mother, Karam’s aunt, heard her across the house. She was in the kitchen, where she had been helping to unpack food sent across from neighbours who had taken up the Islamic duty of feeding the grieving family during the mourning period. The aunt came running to find her daughter howling, while Mrs Mina stood in front of her, oblivious to the scene she had caused, tapping her fingers on the open surface of her palm and waiting for the girl to stop wailing and answer her question.

People took proper notice of Mina then and adults of varying degrees of patience and distance from the dead boy’s family were called upon to get rid of the funeral crasher, Mrs Mina.

They took her into one of the empty bedrooms and persuaded her to give them her husband’s phone number. They called Sikandar at work, demanding less patiently that he come and fetch his wife, who had caused a great amount of trouble on the day that Karam’s soul would be carried securely to heaven by the prayers of his loved ones.

Sikandar raced over from the hospital. It was near the university, which was the only one in Mir Ali, and was where Mina had been a lecturer at the department of psychology before she stopped coming to work so that she could invade other people’s grief and sit with crying strangers.

This was the first time that Sikandar had any inkling of Mina’s new life since her self-imposed retirement from academia. He imagined his wife at home, in bed, under the covers watching Indian soap operas on cable television or cooking shows on the Pashto channels. Maybe she cooked a bit, inspired by the recipes on television, or perhaps she visited the
tailor to get a
shalwar kameez
stitched, something warm for the winter.

In the car ride home from that first funeral, Sikandar hadn’t asked his wife what she was doing at the dead boy’s home or whether or not she knew the family. He was quite certain she didn’t. He just fixed his hands on the steering wheel and drove while Mina sat beside him and let the tears fall down her face, dragging black tracks of eyeliner and mascara down her cheeks.

At one point he turned to his once caustic and whip-sharp wife and said, ‘Stop it, Mina.’

Mina had only recently taken to wearing a
dupatta
atop her head, and she adjusted it then, a cloak she wrapped like sorrow around her, pretending that Sikandar hadn’t said a word. She acknowledged only the noise that came from the cassette deck and the delicate voice of the legend who had sung to troops during the various wars the country had fought with its neighbour.

Mina pulled out the cassette, hitting the eject button with her bent index finger, and curled the light-brown intestines of the tape round her hand.

‘Whose cassette is this?’ she shrieked.

Sikandar stared at Mina.

‘Now we listen to their musicians? To their women who sang morale-lifting paeans to soldiers? Whose tape is this? I won’t have it here, I won’t.’ Mina shook her head, wagging the
dupatta
off until it fell round her shoulders.

Sikandar gripped the steering wheel tighter. ‘Let it be, Mina. It’s just music, an old tape – it’s not important.’

But she wouldn’t let it be, wouldn’t let it hang between them unanswered. The truth was that Sikandar liked the music, he liked the lady’s voice and the way she bunched her sari – it was always a sari – in one hand as she waved a handkerchief in the
other, pausing only to dab her eyes in the black and white videos they showed on PTV.

Mina knew the songs so well that she used to hum the tunes to herself while she worked in the kitchen or as she read her newspapers. She had always kept an eye out for new cassettes. On trips to conferences around the country Mina always stopped at a bazaar and purchased the singer’s latest compilation.