A Season for Martyrs: A Novel (22 page)

When Ahmed saw the black gates of the jail, guards in police uniforms wielding rifles outside, he wanted to cry. Sultan and Allah Bachayo, trying to cheer him up, had told him that it would be a great opportunity, that jailers wielded tremendous power over both their charges and those who wished to be in contact with them, but Ahmed wanted no part of that game. He thought for one wild moment of breaking free of his father’s grip, of turning and running away to join the Hurs. He’d happily live in hiding in the Miani Forest, killing and eating the wild animals, give up seeing his family for the freedom a life of crime would bring him. Then they passed through the gates, and Ahmed knew he would be as much a prisoner there as any inhabitant of the jail’s miserable, suffocating cells.

And so Ahmed Damani became, at seventeen, the Central Jail’s youngest jailer’s assistant. Every day he came home from work more and more exhausted; the dark circles grew under his eyes, the lines developed in his face, and he became thin and hollow-cheeked. His mother would cry out and beg him to tell her what ailed him, but how could he talk to her of the things he saw there? The way the men were crowded into cells, eighteen to a room meant for six, iron fetters rubbing sores into their ankles and wrists, the filth, the vermin, the disease … she would not be able to bear it. Nor would she be able to hear of the violence that took place between gangs, the unspeakable acts of depravity that the men visited upon each other, the cruelty and sadism of the guards. And the screams when a political prisoner was being tortured … No. Better he kept silent, visiting the scenes again and again in his nightmares, than tell his poor mother and frighten her to death with the gruesome reality of his new occupation.

Meanwhile, he continued to visit Sultan and Allah Bachayo when he had time off from work, and from them he heard that the Pir Pagaro was continuing on his path of defiance against the British. They played a game of chess once in a while to pass the time, but both of the old men acknowledged that his talent had surpassed their knowledge a long time ago.

One day in 1941, Ahmed came to the café but found only Allah Bachayo sitting at a table, facing a blank space where his friend should have been sitting in his chair.

“Chacha, where is Sultan?” said Ahmed, hesitating before sitting down opposite the old man.

Allah Bachayo looked as if he was in great pain. He stared off into space, his eyes rheumy and tired, and he sat so still for so long that Ahmed wondered if he had just died in front of him. Presently he spoke.

“His son has been murdered.”

Ahmed’s arms and legs jerked involuntarily. He’d grown so close to these two men over the years that it was as if he was being told his own brother had been killed. “How … When?”

“Yesterday. The British caught them in a raid near the Jamrao Canal. He was shot.”

Ahmed bowed his head. It was better than having been captured alive, brought to the jail, and tortured by the British officers and their Indian collaborators to get them to reveal information about Pir Pagaro’s activities, or reveal the location of the special camps where he trained the Hurs to fight the British. Ahmed looked down at the chess table in front of Allah Bachayo. The pieces, for once, lay in perfect rows on the edges of the board, the king flanked by his queen, his bishops, and his pawns in front of him. He blinked his eyes slowly and the pieces turned into the Pir Pagaro and his Hurs, the Pir wearing his royal blue robes encrusted with jewels, the Hurs in white with swords and daggers and rifles at the ready, longing to embrace martyrdom for the sake of the Surhiya Badshah, the Brave King. And Ahmed hated life for having turned into a game where all ended in death.

A few months later the Pir Pagaro was arrested, and sent to Seoni in the Central Provinces.

The Hurs lost all reason, and began to enact a war on the British authorities that terrified both British and Sindhis alike. They murdered anyone who was thought to be helping the British, Hindu or Muslim. They sabotaged railway lines and irrigation canals, severed telegraph lines, raided villages, threw mutilated bodies into empty fields. The Central Jail became a main depot where Hurs were herded and locked away before being sent into exile, to Criminal Tribes Settlements in far-flung reaches of India. And Ahmed Damani was exposed to them all, as he walked the halls of the dank and stinking jail, his keys rattling at his belt.

The Hurs in his cells were fierce, silent men who refused food or drink from him at first. They refused to speak. They would not pray even though they were provided with Qurans and water for ablutions. Once in a while Ahmed could hear one of them chanting in a low voice, while others banged on the bars of their cells in time:

From the North came riding like a black cloud

The “Pagaro” whose followers are angels,

Do not oppose this Syed—you devil and infidel,

You cannot compete with my Beloved. …

Ahmed had been told that if he heard anyone singing the songs that praised the Pir and condemned the British, he was to report it to the head of the jail; and that man would be taken and whipped as punishment for his insolence. But Ahmed never told anyone when he heard them sing; nor about the chills that went up and down his spine when he heard their voices, somber and hard like smoky wood after the trees in a forest are burnt down.

He and all the other jailers were ordered to wear cloths wound around their faces, so that they could not be recognized; if they had discovered Ahmed’s identity, he and his family would have been killed by any number of Hur men still in hiding from the authorities. Ahmed knew the other jailers resented this but were too afraid to use on the Hurs their own particular methods of control: there was no point withdrawing their food or water because the Hurs would happily starve to death; none of them smoked, out of allegiance to the Pir’s old fatwa, so stopping their cigarettes was of no use; and no other prisoners could be persuaded to gang up on a Hur and beat him violently, so terrified were they of that deadly Hur intelligence system that could reach out beyond the walls of the prison and crush a man.

A year passed and the rebellion continued; when news reached Sindh that the Hurs had derailed the Lahore mail train and the son of Sir Ghulam Hidayatullah was killed, martial law was imposed on Sindh. Paratroopers and bombs were used against the bands of Hurs in the lands north of Sanghar and the farthest reaches of the Thar Desert. The British grew desperate in their attempts to contain the struggle, stopping up wells and raiding Hur villages.

The jail continued to fill with prisoners, until the very walls were cracking. And then, in 1943, the unthinkable happened. Ahmed was doing his rounds at three o’clock in the morning, the graveyard shift, when he discovered bodies of prisoners who had committed suicide in the cells. The sound of a tidal wave reached his ears, even though he was in the very depths of the prison. The lights were suddenly extinguished, but he could still feel the rushing wind on his face as dozens of guards and policemen ran down the halls.

“Hurry! Hurry! The colonel is waiting! Guards! Get Cell A ready!”

Ahmed saw one of the other wardens tearing past and grabbed out at his sleeve. “What’s happening? What’s going on?”

“Don’t you know?” the man gabbled as he raced by. “He’s here! He’s been brought here!”

“Who?”

“The
Surhiya Badshah
…”

The month of February was the most terrifying of Ahmed’s life. The security in and around the jail was increased a hundredfold; every day Ahmed woke in fear that the Hurs would try to break into the jail to rescue their leader. The trial began at the court attached to the jail; Ahmed was too lowly to have anything to do with the proceedings, but the news from the courtroom came to him, and everyone who worked or lived at Central Jail, like fire in a forest. He brought that news to Sultan and Allah Bachayo every day, even though all jail officials were sworn to secrecy and if word got out that he worked in the cursed place where Pir Pagaro was imprisoned, his blood would be worth less than the gutter waters that spilled onto the streets from a burst sewer.

All pretense of playing chess was abandoned as the two old men leaned forward and listened hungrily to everything Ahmed had to tell them. “The charge is that he has waged war against the government, but his true crime is wanting to be a king of Sindh. And there is no Jinnah-Sahib to defend him this time. It’s a Mr. Dialmal instead. A Hindu man.”

“Just as well. Jinnah abandoned him last time!” said Sultan.

“No, he said it was a political case, not a criminal case, so he couldn’t defend him,” Allah Bachayo said.

“Still,” sniffed Sultan. “He’s too busy with the Muslim League to help a hero of Sindh …”

“And you should see all the people who come to the court,” added Ahmed.

“Who?”

“The Junejos, the Narejos, Chatomal, and the Sirhindis are witnesses in his defense. Then there are a great many observers, including many British officers. There is a British colonel, a Freddie Young, who they say helped his sons escape arrest. He sent them to Aligarh …”

“Pah! They want to make Aga Khans out of the sons of Sindh!” spat Allah Bachayo.

“But it will not be a fair trial,” added Sultan.

Allah Bachayo scratched his head warily. “How do you know, Bha?”

“It’s only for show. They want to stop the Hurs, so they go to the source to cut the cancer out. They will not give him the benefit of any doubt.”

“Do you know, the prosecution witnesses speak from behind a curtain?” said Ahmed, shaking his head in wonder.

“The Hurs would hack them to pieces if they saw the faces of those who oppose their king. My son would have not even waited an instant,” said Sultan. He looked at Ahmed and Allah Bachayo and smiled. “What, did you think I would mourn my son’s death? Don’t you know that my son is not dead? Martyrs live forever. That is why they are never afraid to die. Would more people live the way my son did, the British would have more than a revolt on their hands. They would have a catastrophe.”

The trial went on. The entire nation came to a standstill; the jail officials had to maintain vigil as the prisoners threatened to riot and burn the jail down. All the while Pir Pagaro spent his days in the court and his nights in his special cell, which was equipped with a small verandah and a bathroom in recognition of his high status. Every morning, when Ahmed had to clear out the Pir’s cell and check that there were no hidden messages in his trash, he found a huge pile of ash from the cigarettes that the Pir smoked all night, the only sign that the trial was affecting his nerves. But in a strange sense of loyalty to the man who had dared to become king, Ahmed spoke not a word about this to anyone.

Then one evening, after the last day in court, Ahmed heard the words that chilled his blood and made his heart almost stop beating in his chest.

“Prepare Cell D, Damani. Have it ready by eight o’clock this evening.”

Cell D. The Death Cell.

Ahmed unlocked the cell and went in to sweep it and arrange bedding on the simple iron cot. There was one small window near the ceiling and Ahmed stood gazing out at a patch of blue sky intersected by the iron bars. This had been his life for the past three years. He was used to the darkness; his eyes hurt when he went out into strong light. He had grown accustomed to seeing men in chains, bowed down by the weight of their own crimes and the punishment visited upon them. He had seen men come into the jail swaggering and bold, and within weeks grow weak and desiccated, like the husks of grain discarded and thrown into the wind. But how would this small, dank cell hold a man greater than life? By now Ahmed had almost come to believe what the Hurs said about their
murshid:
that he was superhuman, that he moved with the stealth of a panther and the speed of a cheetah. Surely some calamity would fall upon them, for daring to take this man and sending him to his death?

When they brought Pir Pagaro to his cell, a flurry of guards dressed in black with their faces covered by black cloth surrounded him, but he was not in fetters. His white clothes and simple turban made him stand out from his jailers, as if he were already an angel—or a ghost. They brought him through a secret passage so that he would not be seen by the other prisoners, but the word had spread that he was being transported to the Death Cell, and the pressure in the air was as heavy and tense as if a great storm were about to unleash its fury on them.

Ahmed, his own face covered, watched him as he walked by. There was nothing supernatural about this man, but he was regal and measured in his steps, a king in every sense of the word. He seemed to move in his own dimension of time and space. As he passed each man standing to attention, they all lowered their eyes. Ahmed thought he heard a whispered “Huzoor” from some of the jailers; but Pir Pagaro acknowledged nobody, met no one’s eyes. He held a
tasbih
in his right hand and fingered the beads, his lips moving imperceptibly in remembrance of God.

Ya-Majid, Ya-Wajid, Ya-Wahid, Ya-Ahad, Ya-Samad, Ya-Qadir, Ya-Malik, Ya-Rehman, Ya-Rahim.

Ahmed watched from a corner as the Pir was led to his cell and locked inside. The jailers tried to get back to their business, but they wandered around aimlessly, meeting each other with haunted eyes and pale faces. As a low rung in the ladder of the men who ran the jail, Ahmed wasn’t even supposed to be in that wing, but recent months had seen several of the other jailers simply refusing to turn up in the morning for fear of the Hurs and their vengeance. Only fear of his father had made Ahmed cling on to his job, but he had never dreamt that he would see this night. Even a man as harsh as Rahim Damani would be terrified of standing where Ahmed was tonight.

Then a cry rang out. “Ahmed! Ahmed Damani! Where are you?”

Ahmed’s breath caught in his throat as he tried to make his legs work. He placed one foot in front of the other and dragged himself slowly to where Omar Bachani, the superintendent, was waiting for him outside the Death Cell. Ahmed had not met the man since the day he had started working at the jail. With a shock he saw that the man’s hair, jet-black and thick when he’d seen him first, was streaked with white, as if he’d aged thirty years instead of three.