The Shadow Of The Crescent Moon (16 page)

‘Bring the boys in.’

He issued the command and released her. He didn’t look at Samarra as he picked his pistol off the chair he had been sitting on and tucked it back into his holster, clicking the safety catch shut, before walking out of the room.

After she had been let go, she tried to clean herself up in the home of a friend so that her mother would not see what they had done to her. After Samarra realized that what they had done could not be cleaned up, not erased or lightened with soap and make-up, she called her mother and told her that she was spending the night at her friend’s home. The room was dark except for the halo of light coming from the TV, switched on to one of the many talk shows aired at night. The volume was low and Samarra couldn’t hear the presenter. Malalai could barely hear her daughter on the line.

Samarra touched her cheek. His ox-blood boots had left an impression on her face. Torn skin, purple bruises, a
constellation of tiny broken capillaries. Samarra held the phone away from her ear. The sound of her mother’s voice hurt. She could feel the blood rushing against her temples.

It was only this time, she promised her mother; it was late and she did not want to travel alone at night – you never knew how safe you were in Mir Ali, Samarra reminded her. And Malalai, fearfully aware, agreed and relented.

Her second call had been to Aman Erum. Samarra dialled his number and, in the clearest English she could muster, she asked the American boy who picked up the phone if she could speak to Aman Erum. It took Aman Erum four minutes to come on the line – no one called him at his hostel, he used the phone at his discretion. And though he had given people in Mir Ali the number in case of emergencies, this was the first call he had received from home.

When Samarra heard his voice she began to cry. She had forbidden herself any tears until then. But with Aman Erum, Samarra let go. She sobbed, he thought he heard her howl. Ghazan, Ghazan Afridi. He thought he heard her say her father’s name. And me. And now me. But her cries tore through the line. It took Aman Erum some time to understand what Samarra was trying to say to him. At first he couldn’t make out the words; they were strangled in her throat and he couldn’t understand what she was saying except for
zalim
. Between her growling cries she repeated the word over and over. The unjust. The injustice. When he understood, when Aman Erum finally understood what Samarra had been saying, he dropped the phone.

Aman Erum stands on the pavement quietly, thinking about what he is about to do. He looks behind once more to make sure he hasn’t been followed. Though half of him hopes that Colonel Tarik has been trailing him all this time. Aman Erum
half hopes that the Colonel will catch him and stop him. He looks at his watch. There isn’t much time left. He has to reach the agreed-upon spot and make the call. Prayers are at noon. He has less than an hour left.

Sikandar keeps his eyes on the Talib speaking to each other. He can see them arguing. When they catch his eye, he lowers his gaze. Mina is deathly still. She has not moved since the man with the light-blue turban backed away from her window. Mina places her hands on her lap and talks to her husband under her breath. Unlike him, she does not lower her eyes. She does not bow her head. She keeps her head upright and looks straight ahead at the unrecognizable wilderness of the forest around them.

‘What are you doing?’

Sikandar can’t answer. He shakes his head slightly, too slightly. Mina doesn’t see the movement. She hasn’t turned to look at him.

‘What are you doing to get us out of this?’

As her voice quickens, her teeth bite against each other.

Sikandar tries to answer. He wants to tell her everything is going to be all right, to look at this as a checkpoint – they have been through hundreds, thousands, of them before – this is no different, only the toll is unusual. But nothing comes out. He shakes his head again. It seems to move on its own, like the nervous tremble of a hummingbird. His neck tightens.

‘Mina –’

She turns towards him, breaking her posture.

‘
Kha
, say something.’

‘I’m sorry …’

He sees her shoulders slump forward before she straightens herself upright in defiance of the betrayal her body feels. He hears her inhale angrily, quickly. Sikandar watches Mina’s body
stiffen again. She turns her torso away from him and towards the dashboard.

‘I’m sorry.’

She closes her ears to him. She moves her handbag off her lap, putting it first between her thighs and the door, crowding her seat, then reconsiders. What if the Talib suspect she’s getting too comfortable? Mina folds the bag so it takes up less space, and just then Sikandar hears the sound again. Beads rolling against each other. He’s almost certain it’s beads.

He listens, not lifting his eyes, for the tapping sound the invisible objects make as they clink against each other in Mina’s moving bag. For the first time that day, he hears the noise clearly. What does she have hidden in there? Sikandar counts the rings on Mina’s fingers: all there. He checks the buttons on her cardigan absent-mindedly. He allows his eyes to graze along his wife’s body before he closes them.

Tamarind seeds.

Counted at funerals. The words of prayers said over them before they’re offered as petitions to God on the behalf of the deceased. She carries them with her.

Sikandar turns his face slightly to look at Mina. Their son had looked like his mother in profile. Small nose, high bones that were almost Mongoloid, silken hair. Hers is now brittle and growing white from neglect. Zalan had looked very little like him. He had not grown old enough to develop the heavier features of his father. But he had been frightened like him. They had their fear in common. Sikandar’s heart sinks with the memory of his son’s inheritance.

For a brief time, when the nights were longer, Zalan was all Sikandar’s. He sat in his father’s silhouette and did not leave him until he closed his eyes for sleep. It was Sikandar who put Zalan to bed with a short story and three kisses, one extra for good luck.

Sikandar has not thought of those nights for some time. He
has stopped his mind from wandering to his son. Sitting with Mina in the van, Sikandar prays for nothing more than quiet so that he can revisit those long-ago evenings.

To him, Zalan always remained that sleepy, frightened but proud boy. He pictures his son, no matter how old, as that unsure little boy.

‘I’m too afraid to close my eyes, Baba,’ Zalan would say, the furry blanket pulled up to his chin, its stray hairs getting caught in his mouth and eyelashes. Zalan would have to free his hands to clear them off.

‘Why?’ his father would ask gently.

‘When I close my eyes at night,’ Zalan would reply, ‘I have bad dreams.’

‘Close your eyes and summon two lions,’ Sikandar would say, his voice so clear with authority that his son sat up to listen. ‘Think of them as statues, as gatekeepers. They will guard the ministries and buildings of your dreams.’

That was all Zalan needed. Comforted by the lions, his own invented guardians, Zalan would drift to sleep in the crook of his father’s shoulder.

Sikandar’s eyes sting with tears.

The men break apart and return to their positions surrounding the van, Kalashnikovs cushioned in their arms and pointed at the driver’s seat. The gaunt commander speaks with a new tremor in his voice.

‘Are you a Muslim?’

Sikandar bows his head as he turns towards his window. ‘Yes, yes,’ he says, and nods in confirmation. ‘Yes, of course, I am a Muslim.’

The Talib wraps his shawl round his neck, freeing his arms which had struggled against the fabric as he rammed the gun into Sikandar’s face earlier.

‘You are a man of the faith?’

Sikandar feels foolish now. He has worried over nothing, over an imagined fear these young boys can’t inspire, not even with assault rifles draped over their shoulders.

The rain, which had let up briefly for the last half an hour, returns. Water falls on the gaunt Talib’s threadbare
kameez
. The wet tunic clings to his skin. It is transparent. Mina thinks she can see the outline of a T-shirt underneath. She sees light colours, faded from wear, shades of yellow and green. She thinks she can see a silhouette of the man on the shirt: Bob Marley. Mina looks at her feet.

‘Yes, yes, of course. I am driving the doctor to the village where she is needed and then I will be returning for my prayers.’

Sikandar smiles at the gaunt Talib, encouraging solidarity. He smiles cautiously, in anticipation of the positive response his prayers will elicit. The Talib does not return the gesture.

Mina breathes quietly in her seat. She shuts her eyes for the first time and focuses on the men’s voices. Sikandar looks at her for approval, for her to issue an apology to him now. She was wrong to doubt him. But he sees that her forehead is still tight, her skin pinched into deep lines. He can hear her teeth grind against each other.

‘You fold your arms when you pray,
drever
–’

Sikandar doesn’t let him finish his sentence uninterrupted. This is a misunderstanding. He hurriedly assures the Talib of his right intentions and his journey on the right path.

‘Brother,
ror
, I am a Muslim. I pray each week. I was first taken for
munz
by my father as a young boy. I learned how to speak to God before I could write. I taught my own son, my own boy, how to give thanks. I pray today for the blessing of Eid.’

The gaunt Talib pushes his gun into the car, stabbing Sikandar’s shoulder.

‘I asked you a question. Answer it.’

Sikandar’s wan smile is cast off by the burn of the Kalashnikov’s muzzle against his
kameez
. It’s hot; it has only just been fired.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,
ror
. I misunderstood.’

‘I asked you if you were a Muslim.’

Sikandar answers carefully, ‘I am. I was five years old when I first said the
kalma
.’

‘You don’t hear me,
drever
. How many times do you pray?’

Sikandar doesn’t want to reveal himself as a once a week, once a month – truthfully, once or twice every year – supplicant but if he lies and says he prays daily they might know. They have men everywhere these days, especially in the mosques, who might out him as a sinner, as a liar. Sikandar weighs the two against each other. There is redemption afforded to lax believers. There is none for liars.

‘I am …’

Sikandar starts, but he can’t say the words with Mina looking at him. He feels her glare upon him. She knows he is a coward.

‘I am only a driver … I do not have the time to live as a good Muslim must … I pray on Fridays whenever I am able to leave work for a few moments …’

The Talib turns the gun with one swift revolution and rams the butt of the rusted Kalashnikov against Sikandar’s temple.

‘
Chap sha!
Shut up! You think this is a joke?’

Sikandar holds up his hands. There is blood on his white
kameez
. Droplets of rich red are falling onto his lap from somewhere, but he can’t feel where the gun has cut him. His face, his head, his neck and shoulder all feel heavy and bruised. He licks his gums. There is no blood in his mouth. He inhales the rich scent of the air, sweetened by pine cones.

‘Do you pray three times a day?’

Sikandar understands now, his meditation interrupted, that it is his eyebrow. The skin above his left brow has been ripped open. His eye stings and he blinks quickly to avoid the blood falling into his eye.

‘Brother, I am sorry. I do not pray daily, but I will. I will.’

Sikandar promises blindly, eagerly. They can’t beat him for that. The gaunt commander looks at the Talib back at his position guarding Mina’s window. He nods at him and the Talib lifts his automatic weapon to place it against Mina’s head. The gaunt Talib leans his body against the van so that his torso is bent over into Sikandar’s window.

‘
Khar bachaya
.’

He whispers the curse at Sikandar.

‘Are you Sunni or Shia?’

Samarra had gone to Hayat when Aman Erum stopped calling her. She could not understand, especially after what had happened, why he no longer called her in the mornings and woke her up with the shrill ring of the phone. Samarra did not understand what had happened to the boy who used to wait for her by the screen door, hobbling over to her, dragging the dead leg that had fallen asleep under his books as he counted the minutes till her footsteps sounded on the pebbles outside his house.

Aman Erum never answered when she called his hostel any more. In the beginning, whoever answered the phone would return after a couple of minutes and tell her in a distracted voice that Aman Erum wasn’t around. But later on, as her calls grew more frequent and more needy, no one even bothered to come back to the phone; they just left her dangling, like the receiver, without answer.

Samarra waited for a letter, a postcard, an envelope containing a museum ticket, a cinema stub. But Aman Erum wouldn’t send a word. Samarra walked past his house in the evenings, hiding her face in the twilight, and looked into the driveway, searching for a sign that something else was wrong. She could not bring herself to talk to his family. Not like this, not with the welt of a smart ox-blood army boot still on her face. But night after night, Samarra saw no extra lights, no bodies moving about hurriedly, nothing.

To her mother, Samarra feigned an accident. It had been so long since she drove a motorbike, she said. Malalai, unable to hear any reference to Ghazan Afridi without tears, asked no
more. But everyone else stared. They looked at her with worry and with fright. As if they knew.

Samarra sat in the Shah Sawar net café with her hair pulled across her face, and searched the world for news of New Jersey. But nothing. She remembered Aman Erum telling her of the café and of its underground curiosities. The men – there were only men at Shah Sawar, at the stations next to hers – moved their monitors. Some stood up and asked the proprietor for another place. Others just stared at the lone woman sitting at a computer with her hair falling over her eyes. She made them uncomfortable. She wasn’t supposed to be there. But Samarra didn’t care. She stared at her computer screen. Nothing. Samarra found no news of Aman Erum.

Samarra finally walked down the driveway and knocked on the screen door of the house on Sher Hakimullah road. She spoke to his mother, but Zainab was too kind to tell the girl that Aman Erum still called home, more often now, to speak to his brothers about his studies and to hear the local news of the town.

‘I don’t understand what I have done,’ Samarra said as she sat at the kitchen table across from the old lady. She kept her eyes on the plastic tablecloth as she spoke.

Samarra was unused to Zainab. It was Inayat she knew from her summer holidays with Ghazan Afridi, but he was on bed rest now. She could not disturb him.

‘Did uncle say anything?’ she asked hopefully. Zainab shook her head no. ‘When Aman Erum left, when he was preparing to leave, he told me he was going for us.’ Samarra was embarrassed by the declaration. She remembered the walk down the deserted alleyways behind the mosque that night. She could smell the laundry drip-drying above their heads. ‘Has he …’ Samarra didn’t know what to ask Zainab. She tried to hide behind her hands, which she raised to cover her mouth as she spoke. ‘Has he changed his plans?’

Hayat stood in the corridor outside the kitchen. He had overheard Samarra’s voice and had come to sneak a glance, but Samarra didn’t resemble the woman he remembered as a boy. He remembered watching her from a window by the staircase. Hayat had watched as Samarra sat with Aman Erum outside the house, laughing and pulling his cheek in her thumb and forefinger, teasing him as she towered over him as a gangly teenaged girl. She had always been beautiful. She was something else now – she seemed anxious, afraid. But Hayat could see that Samarra was working hard to hide her anger. He watched her as she picked at the dry skin on her lips and spoke to Zainab.

Zainab ignored the worry in Samarra’s voice and poured the tea, waving away her concerns. You know how the young are, you know how busy, how far away, how difficult, how many responsibilities. But Samarra was not swayed. Hayat could see it from the corridor.

‘I cannot be left again –’ Samarra started then stopped. Zainab waited for Samarra to finish; she could not guess what lay at the end of the sentence as she got up to rummage for some honey to pour into the tea. ‘I cannot be left again without –’

‘Without what,
bachaya
?’

‘I cannot …’ Samarra’s back swelled with every breath she took.

Hayat could not bear to hear her say it. Zainab returned with the honey and comforted Samarra by lying, patting her hands – scratched by the open wire of her silver thread – and saying that Aman Erum must have been very busy and not to worry. But when Samarra left the house that day, begging leave from Zainab and bolting out through the front door, Hayat followed her. She had lost weight. Her long hair looked heavy framing her drawn face. Her nails were peeled down to their
half-moons. Her lips were bitten and spotted with dry skin and blood. Hayat offered to drive her home on his motorbike.

Samarra felt strange, sitting behind Aman Erum’s younger brother. He was younger, but even as a child he had been taller than his brother. She had played cricket with him when he was small. She didn’t want him to see her like this, confused, bedraggled. She had never been this person, not even when she was seventeen.

She shook her head now so that her long hair moved across her back – she refused to wear a helmet although Hayat had one that he never wore, storing it under the seat, and which he’d offered her out of politeness.

Hayat didn’t say anything till they were driving.

‘He calls, you know.’

Samarra straightened her posture from a side-saddle slump and waited for him to continue. Hayat had almost hoped his words would get lost amongst the sounds of traffic that afternoon. But still he said them. For a brief second Samarra held Hayat’s waist tightly.

‘What does he say?’

‘What he always does: very little. We do the talking mostly. But he still calls.’

Samarra did not cry, she never cries. She simply nodded and rested her face against Hayat’s back.

From then on they started talking. Hayat would drive Samarra home from university, to friends’ houses, to pick up fruit from the market. He never left her alone. At first, Samarra didn’t tell him what had happened to her. She would not place those seven hours of her life. She wished to leave them behind, to re-time her days so that those hours fell off the clock. But he understood. Hayat understood that the more she wanted to lose those hours, the more they followed her.

Aman Erum misunderstood how entrenched Samarra had been. He had thought her to be a pivotal character of some sort, but she wasn’t. She had been a shadow courier – telling this person to leave that safe house, visiting a commander’s mother to bring her food and money while her son or husband was in hiding, taking notes on timings to be coded and then decoded. Errands. Samarra had run intelligence errands. She had not been central. She was inconsequential. But Aman Erum drove her deeper into the movement; it was where she sought her protection after those vanished seven hours.

His brother, Hayat, had been central. Hayat hadn’t spoken a word, hadn’t said anything tantalizing to Aman Erum on the phone – that should have been the tip-off. Aman Erum should have pressed him, but he didn’t. He knew Hayat was popular at university, that he quietly attended protests and demonstrations as if he were merely an observer, rather than a participant. He knew where Hayat had learned his loyalties. He forgave no one their trespasses upon Mir Ali.

Hayat stepped in and took care of Samarra. He comforted her over his brother’s cruel absence and saw how deeply she had absorbed her father’s fury. As they grew closer, Hayat encouraged her to go back to the work she had been doing, back to the men she had couriered for. He spoke to them on her behalf. Samarra could not be doubted. She reported right back to duty and wasted no time in exacting her revenge.

‘Ghazan Afridi is never coming back,’ she said to Hayat as she sat behind him on the motorbike one night. ‘They have had him for over seventy thousand unaccounted hours.’ Hayat listened, hoping she had not really counted. ‘Seventy thousand and eighty hours,’ Samarra said, her voice steady. After years of enduring other people’s empty hope – he will return eventually. Won’t he? He must – she finally had her answer confirmed.

Samarra replaced the men as they fell. She replaced them even when they did not fall. She had become, in the short time that such revolutionary movements allow, being short on time themselves, a leading figure in the battle of Mir Ali.

Hayat had watched her grow, watched her fear slip away into other rooms. He could not have been more encouraging of her. Eventually, even he took his orders from her. He never struggled against her, never questioned her expanding powers. When she moved their meetings away from the open university grounds, where they had assumed the pose of students picnicking innocently under the shaded sun, to the dark tower of the history department Hayat did not ask why she had brought them to their place.

He had first held her there, closing her in his arms as she spoke about that seven-hour day. Samarra stood with her back against the door and told Hayat about the man with the ox-blood boots. Without raising her voice an octave, she told him about the hours that passed before the men let themselves out of the room. She spoke in short sentences. She did not cry. But she did not move her back from the door either. She didn’t leave herself unguarded. Hayat gave Samarra her space. Strands of her hair clung to the door with static as she delivered her précis. Hayat listened quietly, but he knew she was holding back. He could feel her retreat, saw her shiver as she mouthed certain words. Hayat was almost certain he saw her shiver. Ox-blood boots. Hayat moved closer to Samarra in the empty classroom in the dark tower.

It had been their place.

Their dark tower.

Hayat had first kissed her in that very building.

There was no language for it. Hayat had stood before Samarra in the shadows of the dark tower, nervous. There were eyes everywhere in Mir Ali; people watched you even as
you slept, as you dreamed. No conversation was safe from listeners who intruded upon every fleeting thought. Hayat could not say what he felt. He only wanted to be near Samarra, to protect her, to smell the jasmines that had once left their perfume lingering on her wrists.

He said her name, softly. She raised her face to look at him. Samarra tried not to blink. She did not want to stop him, but she was scared. She closed her eyes. Hayat moved closer to her. He couldn’t think clearly. He could only see this stolen moment, robbed from Mir Ali where there was no space for secrets such as these, and Samarra. Samarra with the beauty mark in her eye. He said her name over and over to himself, quietly, until he built the courage to lift her chin to meet his lips.

Hayat had been so anxious, he had paused three seconds too long, the length of two Samarras, silently repeated. In the delay, Samarra opened her eyes. Hayat bent his head and kissed Samarra’s forehead, then her eyes, both left and right, and when she did not flinch Hayat finally kissed her lips.

She brought the meetings here eleven months later. To this very room. She had packed the floor with hunchbacks and positioned herself away from the door.

Hayat deferred to Samarra’s cool judgement more often than he imposed his own. But she had changed in other ways as well. She had hardened. It had happened much too quickly. She became too ambitious. She was no longer, not in any seriously debilitating way, afraid of what might happen to her.

At times she told herself that her imaginings of what more they were capable of doing to her were far worse than what had actually happened. She had endured only seven hours of them, of their power over her. What was that to a lifetime of fear? If they caught her now, what was the worst they could do? Fourteen hours? Twenty-one?

(Seventy thousand and eighty hours. She was no longer afraid of her calculations.)

She bargained with numbers she had no control over. Samarra hid from her memories by driving herself deeper into what they had punished her for. She would never be afraid of them, of the man with the wedding ring, again. Samarra had taken precautions this time. There was no one Samarra loved enough to protect from the consequences of her actions. She had cut those ties and loosened those attachments.

This made her dangerous.

Samarra never suspected this was a battle she could not win. It made her reckless.

‘Samarra,’ Hayat says gently, ‘this will change everything. You know that. You can stop it – you can still change the plan.’ Hayat runs his hands through his hair, holding the soaked Chitrali pakol in his fist.

She smiles. She’s not listening to him. He lowers his hands. He doesn’t know how to reach her any more.

‘You know you will never be able to go home again – are you prepared for that? You’re ready for your life to be taken with the Chief Minister’s?’

Samarra smiles again. She hasn’t taken her eyes off him.

‘What life, Hayat
jan
?’