The Shadow Of The Crescent Moon (15 page)

‘
Salam, zama khog
.’

Aman Erum always began the phone calls like that, calling her ‘my dear’. He liked that she woke up instantly with the sound of the phone ringing but that she took no trouble to conceal her sleepy voice.

‘It’s you.’

She always sounded surprised.

‘I’ve been in class all day – couldn’t call you late last night but didn’t want to miss you before you started your day.’

‘
Sa masla na dey
.’ No problem. Samarra yawned between the gaps in the words.

He could hear her getting up and imagined her brushing her long hair. While she moved loudly around her room, holding the phone between her ear and her shoulder, Aman Erum told her about his professors, men who asked to be called by their first names, and new clubs he had joined at the start of term – he was most excited by the International Business Society. He thought he might even run to be a part of its council.

She made polite noises and then –

‘When are you coming back?’

‘Coming back?’

‘Home. When are you going to come back home?’

‘Well, I can’t come between semesters; you know that. It costs me so much to be here. Until I can rent a place that’s cheaper, just my housing is the price of two return tickets.’

‘No, I mean, when will this all be over, when will you have the degree that you left everything for?’

She meant herself. Samarra remembered the light-blue pick-up truck and the jerrycan of petrol between Aman Erum’s knees the summer he left her in Mir Ali. The adults were abandoning Ghazan Afridi and Aman Erum comforted Samarra while packing for Chitral. Years, he had said to her. Maybe years. When Samarra walked away that day, when she left in the middle of a conversation she wished he had never started, Aman Erum didn’t follow her. Samarra stood outside the gate protecting the house on Sher Hakimullah road for a minute, waiting for him, giving him time to jump off the pick-up truck and trace her steps. She waited for him to come and apologize to her. To bow his head and say that it would not be years. Not years. He hadn’t meant years at all.

And then she heard the sound of the light-blue pick-up’s engine starting.

Aman Erum was getting tired of this refrain. She always asked when he was coming back home. She never asked when he would return to her, it was always Mir Ali.

‘Samarra,
zama khog
, it’s going to take some time.’

‘I know the business degrees there take three years. Why does yours take longer?’

Aman Erum had not told her that, in fact, it didn’t take longer. He would be done in three years but was planning on working once he was done, on renting a small apartment and making a new life for himself here. He had told her, obliquely, of his plans to settle away from Mir Ali. She had told him, adamantly, that she would not go. Their conversations were beginning to become wearisome.

‘Tell me, what are you doing today?’

She was silent. He allowed her a costly minute of sulking.

‘What have you planned for the day?’ he repeated, as if saying it for the first time.

The sound of movement started again. She put down the phone to get dressed, picking it up again mid-answer.

‘… to Zain ul Abeddin’s mother. She’s in such a state.’

‘What happened to Zain ul Abeddin?’

Aman Erum straightened his back against the wall. He hadn’t heard anything about their classmate. He was a short, rambunctious art student. Always covered in specks of paint and smelling of turpentine.

Apart from Samarra, Aman Erum hadn’t really had friends in Mir Ali. The people who shook his hand as they passed by him in the library or who stopped to chat as they held cigarettes over steaming glass cups of
elaichi
green tea, were Samarra’s friends, not his. He knew people, but he interacted with the world through her.

In truth, he had never really bothered to reach out to new people, not till now. Here in America there were long tables full of eager faces he felt inclined towards. Inspired by Panthea’s nickname – her name turned out to be completely unpronounceable to American tongues, sounding almost rude when they tried – Aman Erum had also started to go by his initials. AE. Aman Erum had never met so many people just like himself.

Here, they thought of nothing but growth. Aman Erum had felt alone in Mir Ali. There had been so few like him; no one who wanted to break free of duty, no one dedicated to the future.

Those young men at the Shah Sawar net café weren’t like him. They were voyeurs, unambitious peeping toms. They just wanted to have a sniff of what lay outside Mir Ali, nothing more. They might bother Rustam to fill out a form and write an application for them but they didn’t have the drive that it
took to get out. They were constantly delayed by their obligations. But here in New Jersey Aman Erum met immigrants with dreams as expansive as his own.

‘No, nothing,’ Samarra said quietly. ‘He’s fine.’

‘What, then? I thought you said something happened to him?’

‘No, he’s just away for some time.’

‘But what happened that he had to travel?’

Aman Erum asked this too eagerly.

‘Why are you so interested? You barely even knew him.’

At home Aman Erum inherited friends, from his brothers, drawn from the children of his parents’ acquaintances, from Samarra, who knew and was known by everybody, and as such they were floaters of friends. He saw them when he had no choice but to be seen by them. They came with other people’s timetables and visiting hours.

But here, Aman Erum sat in the common room with Adriana and PD, eating salty food and watching detective shows that ran on television from five in the evening till seven thirty. When one channel moved to cover the news they would simply switch channels and find a new episode of their show mid-broadcast. When someone correctly guessed the guilty party on the show, usually Adriana, Aman Erum and PD slapped their friend’s hand in the air and cheered.

Here he had friends. Aman Erum felt safe in the common rooms and dining halls and he made his telephone calls freely now, not waiting till the rest of the floor had retired to sleep or gone out for the evening.

‘I knew him.’

Aman Erum felt his throat clench. Unlike his mother, who traded in such gossip freely, Samarra saw it as a needless distraction. Neither of his brothers had mentioned Zain ul Abeddin’s disappearance. Sikandar had said only that some
weeks back there had been a car laden with explosives found near the university. The key had been in the ignition, the driver had left a burning cigarette in the ashtray. He had only just got out of the car when the military police, seeing the car and not recognizing the Charsadda licence plates, approached the vehicle. No one had mentioned to Aman Erum that one of his own classmates had been behind the wheel of the ticking time-bomb car. Had Zain ul Abeddin been behind the wheel? Aman Erum caught himself. It almost didn’t matter. He had a name.

‘Don’t change the subject, Aman Erum. Will you be home next year?’

He demurred. He hoped so, but it was a very tough situation, having to study and work in the admissions office as well as stay in touch with his family. He was doing his best under the difficult circumstances he was placed in. Could he call her next week for a longer talk? He just remembered he had to turn in a recitation assignment before the day’s end, five hundred words on managerial economics.

Samarra wished Aman Erum luck in catching the recitation deadline – she learned all these words with him and adopted them quickly as her own so that they wouldn’t sound as foreign on her tongue as they did when she heard them slip off his. ‘I’m thinking of you,’ she said shyly in English, even more quietly than she had spoken Zain ul Abeddin’s name, copying the words as she had heard them on a television drama filmed in Karachi.

But Aman Erum didn’t hear her. He had replaced the receiver, then counted a second before picking it up again and punching in the twelve-digit number from his frayed phone card.

When they found Samarra, when the Colonel traced the very bountiful information back to the lady with the silver bracelet on her wrist who attended university classes through the winter and Eid and summer holidays, spending two hours at the library when the main buildings were closed, they wasted very little time.

Aman Erum’s information had been too direct, too good. It had to have been coming from the source. He handed over too many half names which led them to many otherwise hidden men. They knew – they were in the business of knowing such things about their informants – that Aman Erum was not involved himself. But what terrorist in this backwoods North Waziristan village could be so stupid as to hand out cadre details – names, not only of those who had recently vanished on medical business or urgent family matters, but also those of recently anguished mothers who had no visible reason to be distressed. Thanks to Aman Erum the Khakis were in possession of small findings, two-hour windows’ worth of leads, noticeably more precise than the empty threats and useless tips normally placed before their telephone operators and fax machines.

Aman Erum had got so good at delivering these timely titbits that they almost reconsidered having the girl picked up. The supply would stop, the thread would be cut. But in the end it was too tempting not to squeeze her.

Aman Erum stands on a crowded street corner. He throws a glance over his shoulder, rubbing his hands to ward off the
cold. He has been walking around Mir Ali for an hour now, circling the area around Pir Roshan road and doubling over his tracks. The Colonel never leaves Bismillah Travels when he does. He manages to be in Mir Ali and to be absent from it, to be unseen and unheard of in the very place his forces control. No one even knows the man’s name here.

When old men in markets and young rebels in underground cells speak of the military, they spit out the name of the Chief of Army Staff, ejecting his name forcefully so that they will not have to linger on its letters. They mutter invectives against famous generals who have been presidents or those who soon will be. But they don’t know the names of the corps commanders or those who serve as unlisted intelligence officials.

Aman Erum looks back once more to confirm he is alone.

Even he doesn’t know what Colonel Tarik Irshad does in the armed forces. He has never seen a designation on a business card, never heard his name pelted like a stone in protests or at press club meets. But he is more powerful than those portly, English-accented generals whose names are spoken on local TV channels. This Aman Erum is sure of.

How they took Samarra he has never found out.

The Colonel never spoke to Aman Erum about what happened, and Aman Erum never dared to ask. She has refused to see him since his return to Mir Ali. She won’t answer his calls or return his letters. Aman Erum stood on Samarra’s doorstep one afternoon and waited for her to come out. After two hours had passed with no movement, he knocked, softly. Her mother, Malalai, opened the door only enough to see who was outside. When she saw Aman Erum, just the same as he had been when he left, Malalai opened the door wide and took him into her arms. ‘Aman Erum,
bachaya
, when did you return?’ She was smiling, happy to see him. Samarra hadn’t told her anything about him, about them. About what had happened.

She had no idea that Aman Erum was back even though for a month he had called every day and pushed letters under the door. How had Samarra kept all that from her mother? He hadn’t felt brave enough to contact Samarra before then. He thought he was making up for his long absence, reaching out to her now that enough time had passed. But her mother didn’t even know he was back.

‘Is Samarra here, Malalai
taroray
?’ Aman Erum asked nervously, after ten minutes of standing at the door. ‘I’d really like to see her.’

Malalai nodded excitedly, ‘Of course, of course.’ She looked behind her. Samarra’s bedroom was shut. Malalai shuffled towards her daughter’s room and leaned on the door. ‘Samarra, Samarra.’ Aman Erum could hear her moving; his heart beat with the certainty that he could hear her footsteps. Slowly, the door opened and Samarra’s mother smiled and clapped her hands with the good news. ‘Aman Erum is here, he’s back.’ She spoke too soon. Samarra heard her mother only once she’d stepped outside her room. She stood there for a second. She saw him standing at the front door. Aman Erum saw that she saw him. He opened his mouth to speak, to say something, anything.
Salam
, maybe, like he had once done as a young boy, but before he could think of the words, Samarra looked back at her mother. ‘Tell him I’m not here,’ she said calmly, then she shut her bedroom door and turned the lock.

All Aman Erum hears of her now is through Hayat. He hears of Samarra only through his brother. His Samarra. Samarra Afridi with the messy hair and the footsteps, the sound of which, pounding on the pebbles outside his house, he never forgot. He could not bear to think of the pain he had caused her. In the small of the night, as Aman Erum lay in bed thinking about Samarra, he comforted himself with
the hope that one day he might convince her to speak to him again, to see him, and to forgive what he had done. He would write her letters, more letters, and he would speak to her mother. He would sit by his screen door and wait. Aman Erum took solace, for a time, in the unsaid. But he knew, in those late hours before twilight, that he had lost her for ever. And, at that moment, he hated Mir Ali for what they had both become.

She had been walking home in the afternoon – no later than four, just as the sun had begun to descend over the pass. It had a curious effect, burning the gravel and the dirt floors of Mir Ali’s foundation and warming the ground before the cool evening air appeared to distort the temperature.

Two cars stopped, one in front of her and one alongside her on the road. They were unmarked, but they did not bother to tint their windows. There was no need for such flourishes. There was no one the state needed to hide from, not here in Mir Ali. The soldiers were not the same as the ones who manned the checkpoints and interrogated drivers on the particulars of their identity cards. They were not the same, certainly not the same, as the men stationed at roundabouts and mosques ahead of important and inflammatory holidays. They were better. They were stronger. They swooped in on Samarra with the delicacy of fireflies.

Samarra felt their breath behind her ears before she heard their footsteps. Their boots had not disturbed the sand on which she stood. Their soles had barely stirred the earth.

The car doors were kept open. Before she understood what was happening, she had been lifted off the ground. The sound of the engine starting vibrated against her cheeks. Her hands had been bound and a filthy rag, smelling of sweat and of diesel, had been placed over her like a shroud.

Samarra didn’t scream. She didn’t utter a word.

‘
Zache zoo
,’ a voice behind her said.

Another voice laughed. ‘What’s the rush?’

‘I want to get a look at her before the boss does.’

Another voice. It was closer than the first.

They were speaking in Pashto. They weren’t locals – she could hear their stumbling. They tripped over the language, stubbing their feet against it as they talked. They spoke her language so she’d understand them. They weren’t locals. But they pretended they were. They thought they could make her believe that everyone was a collaborator, that everyone around her was theirs.

The drive wasn’t long – they had houses and offices everywhere – and as the car shut off its engine, Samarra was pushed out of the car, and pulled by her clothes to a standing position and into a warm room. The chair she was placed on was foldable, cold, and Samarra attempted to stretch her fingers across her seat to see how much space she occupied. She had no sense of whether she was alone or not. The gunnysack that covered her face and torso stank of others, of people before her. It confused her. Was that her sweat that smelled so rancid? Was it her breath that clung to the fabric? She couldn’t tell.

‘
Zama lur, zama lur,
what sort of young woman finds herself in a police cell?’

Samarra could not see the face of the man who called her his daughter. She only felt him move round her chair, circling her slowly before taking a seat across from her. As he sat down she felt the air round her compress. There was no table between them.

‘What sort of woman, tell me, knows things that she shouldn’t? Matters that don’t concern her. How do you know those things,
zama lur
?’

Samarra shook her head. She shook the fabric from side to
side but its heavy knit didn’t provide space for her eyes to see through. She felt his knees rub against hers.

‘Is that bothering you? I will have it removed at once.’

He reached over and tugged at the cloth, not too hard, not so much that her body jerked forward, but not so gently either.

‘It has your scent on it now.’

He touched it to his nose. He hadn’t taken his eyes off her.

Bags under his eyes, darkly lined as if the sun had shaded in his skin, drew down his thin face. Smatterings of sunspots gave the impression of middle age. Benign, a soon-to-be-retired military man. She could not tell his rank, but he wore medals upon his breast.

‘Why am I here?’

She had no other words.

‘My dear, you are here because you have betrayed your people. What does a beautiful young girl like you gain from attacking our country?’

‘It is not my country.’

Samarra flinched as she said the words, she flinched as she heard them spoken aloud, and she braced herself to be hit. She had heard enough stories to know the tempo of these meetings. Samarra knew from cousins and comrades and classmates how dangerous uncensored, impolite voices had become in Mir Ali.

But he laughed. He leaned forward and laughed at her.

‘Do you think yourself greater than it? Do you think that this nation will fold up simply because two hundred border peasants wish to belong to Afghanistan?’ He spat the words at her. ‘It is not your country, you are right. You are not fit for it.’

Samarra lowered her eyes. And just as her lids closed, the split second in which her lashes locked and became tangled with each other, the instant her eyes closed in a blink, she was blown off her chair. She would never hear out of her right ear again.

As Samarra lay on the floor, twisted onto her side with her
hands still bound behind her back, the man stood up. He unbuckled or unbuttoned something. She heard a click and waited, holding her breath. The sound was followed by a small thud, something being placed on one of the folding chairs, and then the sound of him walking towards her. He stood on her hair in his standard-issue ox-blood boots. From where she lay, Samarra could see how his leather boots shone against the grime of the floor.

‘What do you think we do with women like you?’

Samarra could not see his face; she could only feel the pull of his boots. Her scalp throbbed as he squatted down to speak to her.

‘What do you think happens to
baghi
like you?’

‘I’m not a rebel.’

She closed her eyes in preparation for the second strike. How had they found her? Who had been careless enough to expose her to these men? Everyone knew what they did with women like her. Not so many years before, they’d read in the papers of women doctors and secretaries raped in Balochistan’s Sui gas fields because they had spoken too loudly of the state’s pilfering. A consultant who had been hired from her southern city to come and put together a report on the gas fields was raped and beaten in her official bungalow, the home let to her by the government, and left for dead one November.

But she survived and accused one of her superiors of ordering and orchestrating the twenty-three hours of abuse that ought to have killed her questioning spirit. She was later admitted to an asylum for the infirm and insane.

Her rapists never made it to court.

Who could have been treacherous enough to name her when they knew – in Mir Ali everybody knew – what these men did to women like her? She could not think of a single soul.

‘How do you know the things you do?’

He cocked his head to the side, looking at Samarra. Her cheek was pressed against the floor and her skin was red and torn from his hand.

He stood up again and dug one of his ox-blood boots into her face. She bit her tongue involuntarily. Her jaw clicked against his heel.

‘How do you know who is no longer enrolled in university before the registrar does? How do you know which families have closed their shops to retire to the mountains before they pass our checkpoints?’

He pressed his boot against her cheekbone and waited for her to talk but she kept silent.

‘Do you know the force of what you are dealing with? Do you know how small you are,
zama lur
, underneath me?’

She could not open her mouth to speak. Samarra twitched, indicating that she wanted to talk, that she had something to say. He removed his boot from her face, but her hair, fanned out on the floor, pulled at her scalp as his feet readjusted themselves. Samarra licked the inside of her cheek. She tasted the dirt of the floor.

‘I know who you are.’

Her voice was quieter than she imagined, as if she still had the rag over her mouth suffocating her.

The man smiled. He played with a wedding ring on his left hand. She saw it for the first time as he twirled it once and then counter-clockwise twice, as though he was opening the combination to a safety deposit box. She waited for him to twist it a third time.

‘I know that you are the ones who have sold everything in this country you defend so urgently. You sold its gold, its oil, its coal, its harbours. I know you are the first in these sixty-six years of your great country’s history to have sold its skies. What have you left untouched?’

Samarra’s voice rose. She felt her strength return, she even thought she could hear the blood rushing against her right ear.

‘Who are you to sell the sky?’

His face contorted. His wedding ring stopped its twirl. His hands fell to his sides. With her one eye that was not closed against the dark crevice between her face and the floor, she saw him lunge towards her. His hands closed upon her face and he pulled her off the ground, her neck straining, her body falling loose so that the pain of what came next would be lessened by her weaker resistance. Having lifted Samarra, the army man held her against the wall, his palms against her forehead, her neck. She promised herself that she would not cry; she promised herself, as she began to feel her eyes burn, that she would not scream.