The Shadow Of The Crescent Moon (9 page)

Aman Erum shuts the taxi door, pushing his weight against the dusty yellow car. The office he is about to enter is a travel agency specializing in trips to Saudi Arabia, ferrying poor pilgrims to the Hajj on money they have saved and scrounged. Aman Erum turns the unlocked door handle and steps onto the pale-blue carpet that matches the rest of the office. It curls under his feet. There is no one else here.

Bismillah Travels is the only travel agency in Mir Ali, kept afloat by dedicated pilgrims. There are, at present, three Hajj packages the agency pushes upon its clients. The cheapest is the basic Hajj package, the village package.

It is the village package because only the city’s villagers are too poor to have any other alternatives. They take loans on their cooperatives and pawn meagre jewellery – anaemic threads of gold necklaces or easily bendable bangles – to pay the thirty thousand rupees that would see them flown to the holy land no better than cattle: rib to rib on the cheapest airline possible (Ethiopian Airlines from Peshawar).

They sleep forty to a room full of flies and desert beetles, men lined up like matchsticks, feet to head and head to feet. The women fare no better. If they manage to hold onto it long enough, their luggage doubles as pillows.

Most middle-class families went straight for the mid-range option, Bismillah Travels found. They want spiritual vaccination against any future sins their newly expanding wealth might saddle them with. They have nothing substantial to
atone for so just a spot of prayer, an experimental dip, does the trick, while the rest of the time the children run to Burger King, the mothers flock en masse to the gold souks, and their husbands smoke hubbly-bubbly water pipes in cafés and discuss how much their souls have been strengthened by the experience of Hajj.

The prince’s choice package, on the other hand, runs for over a hundred thousand rupees and then some. Bismillah Travels sells more of the prince’s package than you’d expect, considering the Hajj is a pilgrimage based on the idea of simplicity and equality amongst the faithful.

Business is so good that it allows the owner of the agency to turn a private office over to the local army chief. None of the staff notice the comings and goings of extra bodies in and out of the office. The Bismillah Travels team has superb Ethernet Internet connections, five phone lines, and plenty of space for those who wish to serve their country.

Aman Erum walks towards the manager’s office. He does not want to attend this meeting, not today of all days, but the message that beeped on his phone along with the alarm bell this morning did not ask for an appointment. It announced it.

The office is empty; the staff has been given three days off for Eid. There are four private rooms, their doors pulled shut, while the rest of the office’s semi-private cubicles sit in a quiet darkness as the entire office’s shutters have been pulled down. There is no natural light in the corridors, only a dim phosphorescent light blinking over a rusted ceiling fan. And something else. Aman Erum stops and looks around. There doesn’t seem to be anyone using the Photostat. And the fax machines are unplugged. It takes him a second before he realizes the glow is coming from assorted computer screen savers.

Aman Erum enters the room and presents himself.

‘Good morning, Colonel,’ he says, bowing his head slightly as he speaks.

Colonel Tarik’s hands move from the steeple he has formed under his chin. He pats the desk with his thin, knotted hand and motions for Aman Erum to come closer. ‘Sit, sit,’ he says. ‘Pull the chair round. I want to see you.’

Aman Erum lifts the small leather chair and brings it closer, to the front of the manager’s desk that Colonel Tarik has commandeered this morning.

‘Closer, closer,’ the Colonel says.

Aman Erum pulls the chair round the desk till the Colonel raises his hand. He sits down. His knees, if he does not draw his legs as close to his body as possible, knock against the Colonel’s. Aman Erum uncomfortably folds his legs, mindful that his humiliations have already begun.

‘Tell me,
grana
 …’ The Colonel always uses honorifics, always speaks in their language. It makes Aman Erum nervous. He has not yet learned how to fully read the Colonel. ‘How has your move back home been – you’re settled now?’

Aman Erum answers carefully. ‘Yes,’ he says in a voice so tight it might have come from another man’s lips. ‘Thank you, I am settled.’

‘
Kha, kha
,’ the Colonel says, fingering the calendar that sits on the manager’s desk. ‘And your family? Do they thrive?’

Aman Erum looks at the Colonel’s face, at his eyes weighed down by darkly lined bags and small smatterings of sunspots, and lowers his own eyes. ‘Fine, thank you.’

‘And that young lady …’

Aman Erum feels his ears flood, wishing himself deaf as her name is uttered by the Colonel. The blood rushes across his temples and flushes his ears with white noise. He does not want to hear her name on the Colonel’s tongue, does not want to hear what he will call her, which language he will insult her in.

‘That young lady, is she still causing you trouble?’

Aman Erum’s eyes, fixed on the pale-blue, cerulean almost, shagpile carpet that springs and waves and waffles beneath his dark soles, close. ‘
Mafi ghawaram
,
saib
.’ I’m sorry, sir. His eyes burn. He keeps them shut.

‘Oh ho, don’t be sorry,
grana
. These things happen. Our relationship moves past all these hiccups, don’t you worry.’ Colonel Tariq reaches out his palm and places it on Aman Erum’s knee.

Aman Erum opens his eyes. The Colonel’s left hand lingers; he still wears his wedding ring.

‘There was an attack at the Atal Ali market checkpoint today.’ Colonel Tarik moves his hand from Aman Erum’s knee and places it back on his own lap. ‘Three dead, twenty-one injured.’

Aman Erum pushes his chair back an inch, as if he too is adjusting to the new tone of conversation, making sure the move is not so obvious as to offend the Colonel. The carpet shudders when Aman Erum moves his feet, the tight blue curls retreating and responding to every movement of his feet. If you dropped a penny, a weightless copper penny, it would shrink for a second under the carpet’s mass.

‘It was a woman, did you know that?’

Aman Erum didn’t know that. The taxi driver had been somewhat macho in his description of the soldiers being dealt with. Our legions, our legions have dispatched them. Aman Erum shakes his head no to the Colonel.

‘She was young too, beautiful, from what we could still see of her. Tight figure, nice teeth. We still have her teeth,
grana
. She might have been a student, we don’t know yet. The communiqué left by her handlers, those jihadists –’ he spits out the word and flecks of his spittle land on the manager’s leather diary – ‘is still being checked.’

Colonel Tarik’s hand remains on his lap. He leans forward. ‘She didn’t die with the explosion,
grana
.’ He smiles. His teeth,
in fact, are perfect, marred only by creeping tobacco that climbs round his lateral and central incisors like ivy. ‘So, this is what we want from you,
grana
.’ The Colonel lifts his hands onto the desk, clasping one clammy palm in the other. ‘We want you to use your American education to bring back some information on who is arranging these attacks, who is paying for them, who writes the communiqués.’

Aman Erum nods.

‘Where do they sit? How do they select the target? Why do they notify us beforehand less and less?’

Aman Erum wonders what military intelligence the Colonel possesses. He can’t truly be lacking the answers he seeks. This is one of his tests, one of the common checks they do on their local sources every once in a while – a test of loyalty, of sincerity.

They know the answers already. They know you know them too. They know you can dig them up with minimal effort; you have friends and colleagues and students and intermediaries who believe that your commitment to your people is unimpeachable. They want you to ask the very people who would, once you had been betrayed as working for the state, denounce you. They want to isolate you from your natural protectors, your allies.

‘I will do what I can,’ Aman Erum says.

Today Aman Erum will give the Colonel a gift that he thinks will finally release him from their long embrace. He doesn’t want to say anything yet. Not until there is no chance, not the slightest, of failure.

‘Be sure that you do,’ the Colonel replies.

Aman Erum steadies his legs, careful to avoid contact with the Colonel as he stands up. He doesn’t want his eyes to reveal the information he withholds, the information that he has been holding and protecting. Unsure of what he is doing and
unable to defend it, Aman Erum leaves the manager’s room and Bismillah Travels with his eyes firmly focused on the crimped cerulean carpet beneath his feet until he hits the dusty pavement of Pir Roshan road.

Sikandar offers Habib’s uncle his condolences for the last time. He shakes his hand and repeats all he has said for the last fifteen minutes, weightless words about patience and temperance in the face of grief; formalities one learns to parrot at funerals partly out of politeness and partly to give succour to the grieving.

Mina undoes her hair and pulls her handbag to her shoulder. Her voice is soft, still trapped in the music of the poems she sang and the prayers she mumbled during the pauses of her verse.

Together they walk past the servant girl with the moon-shaped face, down the stairs, out through the front door and into the waiting car.

Sikandar quietly drives his wife towards the hospital. He doesn’t want to take her there. She will have to sit in the car and wait while he takes care of his morning rounds. The morning news has started on the radio and Sikandar quickly turns it off. But Mina doesn’t notice the change in the atmosphere; she is still singing Rahman Baba’s poetry to herself. He keeps his hands on the steering wheel, at ten and two o’clock.

At the traffic light the car is stopped and Sikandar is asked to produce his papers. He reaches over his wife’s lap to open the glove compartment. Mina does not note the disturbance; she does not slow her song.

Mina only lowers her hands to her lap and her handbag to the floor so as to make way for Sikandar to extract the car’s papers and their two photocopied ID cards. Something rolls around in Mina’s bag as she moves it. Sikandar hears it, almost like a jingle. He is relieved the officer doesn’t pick up
on it and prolong the search to find out where the faint carillon sound is coming from. The young officer looks at the sheets of paper, checks the stamps on the car’s window and waves them on.

Mina’s sadness keeps her in a trance. She moves in its company, she sleeps in the surety that it will be with her in the morning, and she journeys from funeral to funeral in the hope that she might come to terms with what happened to her son.

When their son Zalan was six years old Sikandar would put him to sleep most nights. Zalan was afraid of the early darkness of winter nights and would curl up next to his father. As the day began to darken, Sikandar could be found reclining on a chair smoking his evening cigarette and talking to his brothers. Zalan would carry his pencil case and his homework and set them at his father’s feet in the living room and sit there, working quietly, until it was time for bed.

If Sikandar rose to answer the telephone or if he walked to the kitchen to fetch himself a glass of water, Zalan would fold his book shut and follow him. ‘I’m thirsty, too,’ he would say, nodding at Sikandar, explaining his movements. ‘Who is it, Baba? Is it someone for me?’ he would ask, twisting the telephone cord in his small hands, knowing full well that no classmate of his would be on the other end of the line.

Sikandar never let on that he understood Zalan’s anxiety in those months. He merely fetched his young son a cup of water and patted Zalan’s bony little back, his shoulder blades too big for his small frame.

On his birthday they had bought Bubblegummers from the bazaar. The shoes lit up blue and red flashing lights whenever the heel touched the ground. All the children had those trainers that year. Zalan had worn the Bubblegummers home from the bazaar. He begged his parents to let him wear them to bed.

‘They’re so new, they’re barely even dirty,’ Zalan whined.

‘Not after the walk home from the bazaar,’ Zalan’s parents countered.

‘I will wear them until after story time. Just before I fall asleep I’ll take them off.’

They did not relent.

‘I’m scared,’ Zalan finally said. ‘The lights will protect me.’

Sikandar laid down a firm no and the Bubblegummers were taken off. But the shoes were sensitively rigged. Their lights did not die down but flickered gently on the floor. Zalan lay in bed, the covers pulled up to his face in the dark room, with the door ajar so he could watch the lights dance.

There is chaos at the hospital, the usual agitated mothers and angry patients demanding more time and attention from a pool of doctors who don’t have either to spare. Shifts are being rotated for the Eid holidays and attendees have been left to pick up most of the slack, but Sikandar comes into work this Friday morning regardless, with Mina sitting in the front seat of the grey Suzuki in a daze. He does not want to bring her here. She doesn’t want to be here, either. Mina sits in the car and doesn’t move, doesn’t turn her head left or right but just looks straight ahead. Before he gets out of the car, Sikandar turns the radio back on to keep Mina company.

… 
Four hundred of Mir Ali’s young men are expected to be initiated
–

Sikandar turns the dial off. They’re still talking about the visit.

Sikandar walks into the casualty ward at Hasan Faraz Government Hospital this Friday morning before prayers, an act of charity on his part.

He prays only to keep the family happy. He lost the joy of the practice and the comfort of the habit many months ago.

He comes to the hospital to get away, to show his face – though he knows no serious work can be undertaken in an hour – and to wrap up loose ends. His shifts in casualty are typically eight hours long, minimum, without factoring in the ritual of haggling over payment with patients who expect free treatment at the shoddy government hospital. In the good old days, decades and decades ago, and good only for some, government hospitals provided nutritious meals to their in-patients, free care and medicine, electricity and post-operative counselling.

The explosion destroyed the blood bank, significant parts of the ER, and the processing lab. Scrawny cats now prowl the hospital corridors, sneaking in through holes in the damaged walls to scour for food. They make do with discarded placentas, which they eat out of half-open medical waste bins. A sour smell permeates the hospital. Urine tests are collected and stored at the nurses’ station now. Visitors are instantly overwhelmed by a festering odour that no hospital-grade disinfectant can scrub off the walls. The doctors barely notice it any more.

Sikandar moves briskly between beds, surveying patients’ charts and quizzing on-call residents about patient histories.

It is a slow morning. Sikandar expected an Eid rush, but aside from a few road accident cases and general winter-based infections there is no serious administering that can’t wait until after prayers.

He roams through the wards, speaking to several doctors on his way, all of them scoffing at the morning’s low turnout and promising a spike in carbolic acid suicide cases by mid-afternoon.

‘The demand is too high,’ the doctors complain. ‘One has to fork out
Eidi
for all the children in the house and family, fifty fifty notes at a time. Then the Eid clothes for all the women, then the men, then the
daigs
of rice and stewed lamb that have to be served at lunch and dinner time.’

‘Even I want to kill myself, ha ha ha,’ laughs a senior cardiac specialist, who finds any opportunity to bring up his newly purchased Toyota Corolla, a luxury bought from Islamabad with who-knows-who’s money. ‘Maybe I should drink car battery fluid, too,
hain
?’

Sikandar slaps his colleague on the back. ‘No such thing, boss, no such thing. Remember,
malgaray
– car battery fluid is, in fact, sulphuric acid, remember, boss?’ Sikandar says. ‘Our medical books called it the oil of vitriol.’

‘
Nah, baba, za na poy gam
.’ The cardiac specialist doesn’t follow.

‘Vitriol, boss? Vitriol,’ Sikandar explains, ‘because it’s so often employed to disfigure women’s faces.’

‘Kha, kha
, yes, yes, say no more.’

‘No such thing,’ Sikandar repeats, putting his hands to his lips and silencing the doctor before he becomes insistent about his imaginary suicide.

He leaves his fellow doctors and prepares to shut down. This diversion has offered a brief respite from what is still ahead. Sikandar stops smiling as he walks down the corridor towards the car, where Mina sits waiting for him, her
dupatta
pulled tightly round her head. He will drop her home, drive straight to the Bukhari street mosque and then back to the empty casualty ward, to ensure spending as little of the day as possible at home.

As he opens the door, his fingers moistening from the raindrops hidden on the plastic of the handle, Sikandar hears his name being called and the sound of heels clicking against the pavement.

‘Wait!’

It is Dr Saffiyeh, a surgeon on call in casualty. She is a tall woman with short hair she sweeps back under a headband. Dr Saffiyeh squeezes her toes into modest pumps every morning,
often to match the cotton
shalwar kameez
under her cold white doctor’s smock. Somehow she manages to transcend the hospital’s chaotic environment. Sikandar has seen her prowling the wards with several clipboards pressed against her chest and junior doctors trailing behind her.

‘There’s an emergency, past the forest,’ Saffiyeh huffs, out of breath, as she points to an empty hospital van.

‘Where’s the ambulance?’ Sikandar doesn’t understand why Saffiyeh has forced this news upon him.

‘Gone for prayers. All the drivers. Can’t find any of them. There’s a possible stillbirth – the family doesn’t know what’s happening, the midwife is some quack who turned up with crushed dung and chalk to feed to the poor mother in the hopes of producing painless contractions. Maybe the child is just in breach, maybe it’s dead. You have to go and deliver it.’

Saffiyeh doesn’t know his name, does she? She has barely acknowledged Sikandar since accosting him and inviting him to take on an emergency case while his wife sits quietly in his car. She hands him a small leather case.

‘Plus, this is an ambulance.’ She pats the old hospital supply van that has scratches along its side and a metallic Allah swinging on a chain dangling from the rear-view mirror.

‘I can’t help,’ Sikandar protests. ‘What am I supposed to do during the delivery?’ It is a weak attempt, this playing of the
namahram
card, but he really has no time to spare this morning. ‘You know what things are like now – how careful people are. How will they explain a male doctor?’

The brothers all have to be home to eat Eid lunch: freshly spiced biryani with soft lamb
boti
, yoghurt with ice-cold cucumber and mint leaves, milk and pistachio-scented rice pudding. He can still taste this morning’s buttered paratha on the walls of his mouth. It had been an awkward morning at breakfast. His brothers had barely spoken to each other, which was
strange since they had seemed closer these past two months. Hayat had been sullen; his eyes looked like he had not closed them all night. Aman Erum had been more than usually evasive and Mina nowhere to be found. Mina will probably miss lunch too if she takes one of her pills and spends the day floating in and out of sleep. If he is to keep himself Eid-free for the rest of the day, Sikandar will have to make it home for lunch at the very minimum.

‘Who’s asking you for your afternoon agenda,
zwe
? It’s an emergency. Just drive there, correct the problem and be on your way.’ Saffiyeh is all business. She holds her hands above her head, protecting herself against the light drizzle. The rain smells like dry earth, even here in this scarred concrete parking lot.

Dr Saffiyeh calls Sikandar son, yet he is – at least – seven years older than she is, with a light beard marked with patches of white hair on his chin and cheeks. Sikandar snorts, and while still standing in the lot he reaches into the van and turns the key. The van looks old. Sikandar will have to let it warm up for a minute. It sputters and coughs as it comes to life. ‘I’m not opposed to heavy lifting,’ he says, recovering from the slight. ‘I work damn hard.’ Saffiyeh pays no attention to him. She concentrates on the progress of the van’s engine.

‘I’m Sikandar,’ he ventures, not having access to the inner workings of Saffiyeh’s mind, which has already decided that this very sort of exchange is unnecessary.

‘I know.’ Saffiyeh turns to face her reluctant chauffeur. ‘We know who you are.’ She pauses. ‘I was never able to offer my condolences in person.’ Saffiyeh pauses again and studies Sikandar. But this is as far as she can go.

Sikandar nods. ‘
Mehrabani
,’ he says, though she has not offered anything more than a footnote to a condolence oversight.

‘
Zache zoo, baba
.’ Saffiyeh’s eyes are on the road, sweeping
the parking lot before the van has properly warmed up or moved across an inch of concrete. ‘Let’s go,’ she instructs, hitting the hood of the van as if to kick-start it. When it doesn’t move she faces her new ambulance driver and raises her eyebrows impatiently. ‘
Zoo!
’ Go!

Sikandar glances at the van, still sputtering and hacking black air out of its exhaust, and jogs quickly over to the Suzuki. Opening Mina’s door he beckons her with his hand.

‘Come.’ His fingers curl into his palm.

Mina looks at him blankly. The handbag on her lap is pressed into her stomach, the way she holds a hot-water bottle against her during cold Mir Ali winter mornings. She does not want to step out into the parking lot.

‘It’s an emergency, Mina. They need a doctor. We’ll be done soon and I need you to come with me.’

Having her there will comfort the family of the mother in labour. They will never accept a male doctor. Not even in a time of emergency, not in these remote forest parts. But Mina’s presence might make a difference. She can talk to the mother, busy herself distracting the family, so Sikandar can get the business of delivery over with. Mina was once exactly who Sikandar would have hoped for in such a situation. Now he only hopes she will cooperate.

Since the funerals have been demoted to a fortnightly and not a weekly affair – they had been an almost daily headache back when Mina was manic, overwrought with the grief that now seems only to tranquillize her – Sikandar suspects that his wife is finally letting go. He doesn’t know how she will react to a birth; he doesn’t know if it will send her into a rage or break her down. Will it have the same effect as the funerals? He doesn’t know. Sikandar knows very little about his wife these days.