And the World Changed (11 page)

We shouldn't have been office mates. We are far too committed to one another as friends, and much more interested in the histories of our families than in some of the academic work we need to complete. After all, we are both Indians and are comfortable enough with one another to make jokes about it. About Columbus refusing to ask anyone the way to the real India, about blankets and sheets and such nonsense. We both love literature. She is completing her dissertation and I read some of the chapters. She is a storyteller telling stories about stories and storytellers in her family, her community, her world. I read her
narrative about her family, the journey on the Trail of Tears and the final arrival in Oklahoma. She writes about the nuanced and multilinear, many-circled techniques of storytelling used by her grandmother. I read about how her grandmother was sent out with food for the wounded warriors hiding in a cave when she was a very little girl. I catch a hint that my friend's grandmother had seen a man die of his wounds when she was a child. Wounds received in defense of his land and his family.

But I don't know how the story really ends. Did her grandmother ever tie up all the threads of the stories about her family, people deprived of their ancestral lands, made invisible in their own land? Can a grandmother's stories be tied neatly—for the sake of an academic dissertation—into the stories of the indigenous women of Bolivia fighting for their land and their lives? And my friend, whom I call Damyanti, the Victorious One—says, “Roshni, there isn't an end to that story.” And I realize that as I live in the Americas, I, too, am implicated in the story of the rape of this land and of the continual attempts at the destruction of the first peoples in this country. I understand the woman in my dream. I had not been forced to walk with my friend's family to Oklahoma. And I feel the pain I felt when I saw Dossa crawl away from our house in Karachi. I don't know if she arrived somewhere safely. I leave the office, drive home, walk to the edge of the Pacific Ocean, stand on the sand, and pray the ancient Zoroastrian prayer of health and safety for everyone who dwells in these lands. I wonder if it will work.

SEPTEMBER 20, 2001

Thursday, a week after. A dear friend whom I call
hermanocito
sent me an email. He had barely escaped being beaten up. He was threatened because he has a beard and wears a turban. Just before I received the email I had been talking with my neighbor
whose wondrous eight-year-old daughter asked, “But why do those people hate me, Mummy? I'm American.” And then I turned on the TV and saw what is now Afghanistan for me. Food was being distributed. Names were being called. The names were of adult males. But most of the adult males were dead or gone and so the children were coming up to collect the food allocations. No women. There were a few little girls. A name was called out. Silence. No one came up. And then one of the men smiled sadly, went to the group waiting for food, and called out a tiny girl. She had wild curly hair and the beautiful eyes of childhood. It seemed as if she were too young to recognize her father's name, who most probably was already dead or fighting toward death. She came forward and picked up the bag they handed to her and began dragging it. Someone showed her how to sling it over her shoulder. And she did. The bag was as big as she was. Maybe bigger. And then they put a cardboard box in front of her. She stood there looking at it and tried pushing it with her feet. The man who had brought her forward smiled sadly again and gestured that he would bring it to her house later. It was that small gesture of compassion, and the tiny girl-child going back into the crowd with her bag over her shoulder, that shattered me. I sat screaming, bleeding from the womb that my body hasn't possessed for over thirty years.

It may be good to write about the horrors we bring upon ourselves. Writing, after all, is a political act. I understand that peace and justice are what we have to keep working toward in our own way to keep from shriveling up in body, mind, and spirit. Compassion. I am haunted by the image of the little girl carrying the bag of food over her shoulder. War—and yet the hope of peace.

AUGUST 2004

Innana is the name we hear. She is—we are told—the Queen of Heaven and Earth. Her older sister, widowed Ereshkigal,
Queen of the “Underworld” recognizes the descent of Innana for what it is. Our bombs have torn the skin off the Earth and Ereshkigal emerges to wander across the land searching for shattered, unburied lovers and murdered children.

The image of the little girl in Afghanistan and the presence of Ereshkigal merge into the woman in the documentary. There is nothing contained, nothing stylized about her grief. It is the scream of the mother who has seen brutal death. She is grandmother, mother, sister, sister-in-law, aunt, daughter,
binti
,
hija
,
beti
, neighbor,
sakhi
,
amiga
, companion who has walked with us since we were born. She curses all of us, the Americans, who have brought death and destruction to her family, her friends, her neighborhood, her city, her country of Iraq. Sitting in the air-conditioned comfort of a theater in an enormous multiplex cinema complex located not that far from San Francisco, once hailed as the City of Flowers, peace and love, we are stunned into silence. The munching of popcorn and chocolates, the bubble of sodas, the soft shuffling of bodies are silenced. I see the woman in front of me trembling violently. We know that we are once again implicated in the creation of sorrow and furious grief. A very old woman enters the theater. She is late and can't see well enough in the dark to find a seat. She begins to wail softly, “I can't find a place. I am lost.” She stops near me and I reach over to help her to the seat next to me. She says, “Oh my, I missed the beginning of the film. Why is that woman screaming? Is that Arabic? Is she mad?” Someone behind her tells her to be quiet.

Mad? In all the senses of the word. As I see bombs falling from the sky and listen to the young men and women ready to unleash their terrifying technology onto those they dare not think of as being human, I am reminded of the history of this particular war. The steady march of greed and the brilliant manipulation of words and ideas that have at last culminated in this war. A war that is once again shrouded in lofty words and promises. I remember the words of Euripides: “Those whom
the Gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.” I know that the woman's curse is on me as it is on all of us who have not yet found a way to stop the insanity called war. War in all its forms.

A few months later, a student stops me before we enter the classroom. She apologizes for having missed one of the classes and explains that she had to go home to her family to take care of her mother. I nod and say, of course, these things happen and one does have to take care of family. I begin to move away. She stops me. She says, “It is because my father died at this time last year.” I look at her and realize that her father couldn't have been much older or much younger than me. Before I can express my condolences, she says, “He committed suicide.” And again before I can say anything, she says, “He was a Vietnam vet. He had been attempting suicide even before he left Vietnam. Years before I was born.”

As I hear about the women in Mexico sending their sons to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq so that they can get the citizenship promised them in exchange for their bodies, and as we continue to call down Peace upon our Prophets—the sung and the unsung ones—the children, the women, the men—I think of the old man who stopped me near my home in Karachi when I was moving toward my ninth year. The air was alive with the sound of the evening
azaan
. The man was a stranger and I never saw him again. He was weeping and he said, “
Beti
, may Allah have compassion on all of us. On all of us. Friends and enemies—there is no difference.”

DECEMBER 22, 2007

OAXACA, OAXACA

I have been trying to read Francisco Goldman's
The Long Night of the White Chickens
. It is difficult reading. The Guatemala of the book is Pakistan to me. Pakistan of military rule supported
by U.S. tax dollars. As I walk through Oaxaca, I am haunted by the sardonic words of one of the characters in the book:
Guatemala does not exist. I know. I have been there
.

I am tempted to write on the page of the novel (in pencil of course):

Guatemala does exist. Pakistan exists. They exist to remind us of what is happening not only in Guatemala and in Pakistan but also in Mexico, in Palestine, in Israel, Iraq, Iran, Burma, France, Germany, the United States, Africa. In our world. Lawyers, students, teachers, human rights activists, men, women, children beaten, killed, disappeared. Nothing new—anywhere in the world. Nothing new except the horrifying intensity and acceleration of violence and just as horrifying an intensity and acceleration of apathy by those who think they are untouched by, not complicit in this violence.

I do not write in the book because it belongs to the Oaxaca Lending Library.

DECEMBER 27, 2007

CALLE ALIANZA, COL. JALATLACO, OAXACA

Chuck/Carlos who has been watching the news wakes me up. “Breaking news. Bad news,” he says. “Benazir Bhutto has been assassinated.”

I feel as if my whole living self were filled with horror, despair, anguish. He says, “Why are you shocked? Didn't you think that something like this would happen to her?” No, I did not expect this murder. I try to meditate. To calm myself, to calm the world that Benazir and I have inhabited. The people and the
tierra
, the
desh
, the
vataan
that in this time of our history is named Pakistan. All I can do is shout, “Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. We have all become inmates, all of us—of an insane asylum.” I am still muttering and crying as I run two blocks to Casa Arnel to phone my cousin in California. Benazir has been murdered
in Rawalpindi but her city—my city—Karachi is blowing up. My cousin in California hasn't heard the news yet. She promises to call her sister in Karachi immediately. The images of the murders, mayhem, and chaos in Karachi that I had just witnessed on television are with me as I call my friend and mentor, Ijaz Syed, in California. I can't finish the message of outrage and grief that I leave on his voice mail. English, Gujarati, or Urdu can't express what I feel and think.

Benazir had returned to Pakistan in the fall of 2007. In the first attempt to assassinate her, she survived but 170 people died. After this I received emails discussing, beating, detailing Benazir's history, her personality, her political and personal goals.

I had stopped respecting Benazir Bhutto early in her first term as Prime Minister of Pakistan. I had actually been wary of her since a brief encounter I had with her in the 60s. She was about twelve years old. I was about twenty-five years old. A friend of my parents who was a supporter and admirer of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had invited me to go with him to the Bhutto residence in Karachi where he had to deliver some papers. He told me that he would like to introduce Benazir Bhutto to me. “She will be our Prime Minister one day,” he said. He did not add, “Inshallah.” The future Prime Minister of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto, came into the room where we had been left standing, looked me straight in the eye and said not a word in response to my greetings or to the greetings of my companion. She had the coldest eyes I had seen in my twenty-odd years. Her eyes, her refusal to greet or thank us, made it clear that she was not interested in “unimportant” people such as us.

Many years later in Oaxaca, on December 28, 2007, the wonderful lady many of us know as Mama Glafira tried to console me after Benazir's murder. According to Mama Glafira, what made Benazir beautiful were her beautiful eyes. I realized that since her father's assassination, Benazir's eyes—in all the
pictures of her I had seen in magazines and on TV—had lost the haughty, cold look. But even if she had retained those cold eyes and her disdain for “unimportant” people, even if she did prove to be a very disappointing and frustrating politician, the threats of violence against her and her cruel, calculated, violent death can never be justified or condoned.

It is January 2, 2008, and as I walk down Macedonia Alcala toward the
zócalo
, I remember that today is my parents' seventieth wedding anniversary. But I am still in mourning for what has happened in Pakistan, what is happening in Pakistan, the senseless and horrifying violence that is consuming our world. I bend down to thank the old, blind man who has been singing on this road nearly every evening for twenty-odd years. About ten years ago, my friend Ofelia and I had accompanied him—off-key of course but with great gusto—as he sang “Naila.” Others had joined us. We had sung the song twice to the great amusement of the singer. On this January day of cold, dry air that reminds me of winters in Karachi, he senses the tears in my voice and says, “
No llores, amiga
” and begins to sing the song of the dying mother to her daughter. The mother who tells her daughter that lamentations and tears will not help. If the daughter cries, the mother is sure to die and remain dead. But on the other hand, if the daughter sings in the face of death, the mother will never die, she will always be alive. It is a song that has always haunted me.

I know—with sorrow—that I will be searching until the day of my death for a melody, a few lyrics that would exorcize the violent deaths, the injustices, the cruelty from our world.

MIRAGE