The Shadow Of The Crescent Moon (18 page)

Aman Erum makes his way on foot through the thinning traffic. He sidesteps boys on bicycles and harried husbands scurrying towards the stores to pick up last-minute packages of rice and sweetmeats before businesses shut for prayers and the Eid weekend ahead.

In Mir Ali’s narrow bazaar, there are several butchers. Four or five at least that sit cross-legged on wooden slabs and tables sharpening their knives (which are not very sharp at all), while they snap orders to their child assistants: cut down two kilos of mutton; wrap up some fat; prepare the lamb hooves and bones for
paiya –
cooked slowly for hours and hours in a gelatinous sauce until you can nibble off just the right amount of cartilage and chew comfortably on what was once an animal’s kneecap or knuckle.

Lamb skulls, deep pink and covered in flies, rest on the butchers’ tables. They price the skulls for the jelly-like eyes, for the gristle of the cheek, for the marrow in the nose. Their clients don’t mind the swarm of insects that crowd round the skulls or the flies that lay their eggs in the warm crevices of the lamb’s face. The meat is easily cleaned out with warm water and lemon, a natural disinfectant.

Two of the butchers keep battery chickens nine to a cage, stacked high on top of each other, opening the rusted cages only to grab a hairless, featherless bird by its neck and cleave it into eatable parts. As a result it isn’t the open ribbed carcasses or the dark-brown blood that slides down the butchers’ tables and onto the streets that draws attention to the meat section of
the market on Eid morning, but the shrieks of the confined birds. Their skin is crusty and scabbed from repeated attempts at escaping their wiry enclosures. They squawk desperately, constantly moving in their cages and flapping their wings, as though it were possible for them to knock down the tower in which their cages are placed, and lift themselves off the ground and upwards into the cloudy sky.

Aman Erum walks amongst the morning’s late risers, keeping track of the time. The drizzle continues. It has barely let up all morning. Now, just before noon, it is a light sprinkling of rainwater that falls timidly, sliding down the windscreens of passing cars and the arms of men wearing crisply starched
shalwar kameez
.

It’s been a long time since Aman Erum was in Mir Ali on Eid. He missed the holiday when he was abroad studying. When he returned to be with Inayat as his father’s lungs filled with fluid, Aman Erum was determined to be with his family for Eid. He wouldn’t leave them for Eid again. At first he imagined he would come home for the holiday, returning to New Jersey as soon as his father’s mourning period had ended, but his family needed him. They needed someone with a steady hand to guide them; it had been such a difficult year. Coming back from America with his overseas contacts and local connections, Aman Erum was a new man. He would return to America eventually, once he had built up certain supply chains he had been working on, but until then Mir Ali would be where he spent his late Eid nights, trawling the markets, and his Eid mornings, bowed down among the bodies of those who gave blessings for a new year.

Aman Erum passes the chicken coops and sees the almost hairless birds beating their wings against their wire cages. If everything goes well today, he will buy two of the fattest to take home.

He will ask his mother to cook them with butter and red chilli powder, the sweetest variety of which comes from Kashmir. When he was in New Jersey, Aman Erum went to Indian restaurants, to small canteens where taxi drivers and migrants huddled under dim lighting and listened to scratchy recordings of old film tunes, sung in the days of black and white Bollywood cinema, to eat the dish.

Aman Erum walks faster as he notices the time, quickening his step while making sure not to trip in the small puddles that have collected in the fissures and fractures of the city’s unpaved streets. The rickshaw drivers honk their horns at him: would he like a ride? Aman Erum waves a hand in the air, no, and then places it over his heart in thanks. The morning’s anxiety lifts off him. After all these years he sees an end in sight. He’ll be free of this soon. There is no other way. It has come to this after much struggle. Aman Erum’s heart hurts at the thought of what he must do, but there is simply no other way. Someone has to make the violence, the constant threat of it, stop. A steady hand is required. He has no other choice.

One of the rickshaws slows down and the driver stretches his thinly shirted body out of the vehicle.

‘
Agha
, you are going far. Let me drive you.’

Aman Erum looks at the decal on the rickshaw’s plastic roof: a map sawn and torn.
May God steal from you what you have taken from Him
. It’s a line from a poem. Aman Erum hops into the back of the rickshaw, its rain-proofed seat covers ripped from wear.

‘
Mehrabani
,’ Aman Erum thanks the driver, his hand still resting over his heart.

They drive past the bazaar as the shop’s shutters fall in unison. Aman Erum averts his eyes as they pass the Haji Abdullah Shirazi Khan slums, broken-down shacks leaning over one another,
like ants crowding for space. He tries not to breathe in the fumes of the sputtering exhaust. He holds out a palm and measures the space between each raindrop. He thinks of Zalan and how the little boy used to cup his palms to catch the rain, squeezing his eyes shut as he tilted his head towards the sky. This morning will be over soon. It will all be over soon.

The rickshaw driver stops just outside the Hussain Kamal street mosque, its garden still free of the plastic
chappals
that will soon be scattered everywhere, haphazardly. It’s early. The Friday congregation has not begun to arrive yet. There is time.

Aman Erum thanks the driver, who refuses his money once and then twice, and gets out of the rickshaw. He looks around him, there’s little movement, almost no traffic. A roadblock is being set up nearby.

Aman Erum walks to a small
hotal
. Long, splintered wooden tables are spread out in the pattern of cafeteria seating and are lined with blue plastic chairs. A man stands on a raised platform, stirring a large saucepan of tea, throwing in sugar by the palmful. Further away, in front of a tandoor oven, a man in a blackened apron pulls out fluffy
rotay
with his uncovered hands, dropping the hot bread onto metal platters before his fingers burn.

Aman Erum sits down at one of the tables at the front, keeping his distance from the others who have gathered here to eat a late breakfast. Men huddle together dipping chunks of hot bread into their sweetened tea, swallowing their soggy meal before the mosques sing the call of the midday
azan
.

Looking across the street, turning his head both ways and seeing no one, Aman Erum orders a cup of tea. He drinks it slowly, blowing air over the milky skin on top. Light-brown film has already begun to cling to the sides of the chipped plastic mug. After scalding his tongue, he beckons the server boy over.

‘
Sa taim dey?
’

The boy has the soft features of those who live in the border town. Hair lightened by sun and wind, and fine, breakable bones. He dries his hands on his stained
shalwar
and tilts his head towards the small colour TV hung under the ceiling’s yellow tube lights, unlit this early in the day. ‘It’s after eleven,’ the delicate server boy says, squinting to read the time.

Aman Erum looks past the boy. He hasn’t arrived yet.

He takes out his mobile phone and places it on the table before him. With one eye on the road he punches in the numbers. All he has to do now is press the button.

The server boy with the fine bones and a small rash along his chin comes back over to Aman Erum’s table with a wide plastic tray gingerly balanced on his bony hip. Aman Erum hasn’t noticed the rash before; it’s so light it might have been caused by heat from the tandoor fire. The server boy lifts a metallic plate laden with hot, buttered
rotay
off his tray, and places it before Aman Erum, bending at the knees to avoid putting the plate down too hard. He moves around Aman Erum’s chair and lays down another plate: deep-fried liver cooked in its juices and garnished with thinly cut slices of soft tomato.

‘The boss sent this over.’

The server boy turns his head towards the man underneath the fourteen-inch TV screen, thumbing through receipts written on scraps of paper stapled together.

‘Said
agha
deserves a proper breakfast. You will starve on just a cup of tea.’

Aman Erum raises his hand in greeting and makes to stand up to thank the proprietor, who waves him back down, patting the air with his palms. He points to himself and then the table – he will come to him in five minutes’ time. Aman Erum smiles and sits down again, checking the road once more as he does so.

He dips his bread into the watery juice the cubes of liver float in and places it in his mouth, sucking on it for a moment and savouring the taste before rolling the lump of bread over to his teeth. He barely ate this morning, and he hadn’t realized how hungry he was till now. The stress of his ill-timed meeting
with the Colonel drifts over him as the morning minutes tick closer to noon.

Aman Erum’s hunger suddenly feels urgent and he wolfs down the soft, smoke-flavoured bites until he notices his hands are shaking. He slows down, putting his hands on the table as the server boy brings a cold metal tumbler of water. Aman Erum picks up the water and drinks greedily.

It has unfortunately come to this.

He tells himself there is no other way, no other way to be free of the Colonel, of his pain. It had been only his and then, without warning, it had infected his whole family. In his absence, the violence had grown. Upon his return, it had met him at home. Aman Erum is hungry and he is tired but he must be clear about his intentions. He looks at his hands. They rest on the table. He lifts his right hand; it is perfectly still.

Since he returned to Mir Ali, Aman Erum has done well for himself. Though he returned out of duty to his father and had planned to stay only the necessary amount of time, Aman Erum has benefited from his delayed return to America. He’s made a name in his business – one that will come with financial advantages when he does go back to America. He has brought comfort to his family during their difficult hours, and he has returned to guide Hayat. But belonging, especially to such ravaged soil, involves much sacrifice.

Aman Erum imagines that his sacrifices would not have been demanded elsewhere. His limited exposure to the rest of the country has told him that the others live well enough. Mir Ali pays the price for the comfort of those strangers; Mir Ali and its men have paid for decades.

‘
Agha!
’ The
hotal
owner clasps his hands together. ‘It is an honour to serve you here.’

Aman Erum wipes his hands free from the
rotay
’s yeast and shakes the proprietor’s hand.

‘What a place you have here, boss. I would have come much earlier but it has been very hectic at home.’

The man bobs his head sympathetically.

‘Of course, of course. You are a pillar of our community. On top of the difficulties of your family’s recent tragedies, you must be overburdened with work,
agha
. We are happy to see you and, please, let me know if ever there is anything I can do for you.’

He takes a pen out of his
kameez
breast pocket and writes down a number on one of the scraps of paper that no longer serve as receipts.

‘I would be honoured to send something for your family on Eid. Please tell someone to call me tomorrow and I will have a parcel of our
kheer
ready to be picked up.’

Aman Erum thanks him and asks for his bill, which is immediately refused. ‘Please, you are my guest,’ he is told by the offended
hotal
owner. Aman Erum smiles, showing his teeth, and places his hand over his heart once more in sincere thanks.

He wipes his hands again on the slip of paper he has just been handed and sits back down to drink his tea, which has only just cooled. Aman Erum thinks of Eid, of the rest of the day and the deliverance it will bring. Looking across the road, Aman Erum sees him reach.

The enormous weight he has carried all morning bears down on his shoulders. Aman Erum’s heart beats fast, so loudly that it drowns out the sounds of the
hotal
. He can no longer hear the slap of the dough on the counter, not the scrape of the
rotay
being pulled out of the tandoor, not the pouring of cups and cups of tea. Everything falls silent. It is time. He is here; they have arrived.

Aman Erum picks up his mobile phone and presses the green button.

The gaunt commander holds his weapon between him and Mina, desperate to keep a barrier between them, but she beats through it. Screaming, she pounds his chest, unconcerned by the Kalashnikov he wears as protection.

‘
Zalim! Der zalim aye! Bey insaf!
’

She cries out all the names she knows to speak of what these men have done. She cries as she thrashes her fists across the Talib’s sinewy chest.

‘
Khaza
–’ Woman. He tries to interrupt her, to remind her of her place and their space but nothing can reach Mina now. Her kohl eyeliner has all but vanished from the rims of her eyes as she cries through her words.

‘It was you, it was your men, your men who took him from us. He hadn’t done anything. He hadn’t even begun to live. He wore his shoes till his toes pushed against them, growing too fast for him to notice. He had blisters on those toes. I saw them. I kissed them, touching each toe to my lips, when I went to identify him. Do you have any shame? Do you have any shame in the face of the mothers you have robbed of their boys?’

Not a noise passes between the Talib.

The one at the front of the van raises an eyebrow at the man Mina slammed herself against. His
shalwar
is covered in rainwater and mud. As he lifts himself off the ground, embarrassed, he hits his thighs, trying to clean himself, as though cleanliness will blot out the fall. But he can’t see how dirty he is. He has mud round his ears. He slaps his thighs angrily, quickly, as he stands.

She is mad. They communicate this to each other with their eyes. The woman is crazy. Let her scream, we’ll overpower her once she exhausts herself. The gaunt Talib takes a step back, away from Mina. She takes a step forward, unwilling to let him go.

When she slid out of the van, Sikandar hadn’t even heard the click of the door handle. He had only heard the Talib’s grunts as he grabbed Sikandar by the hair and held him against the driver’s seat. In those seconds he had not heard Mina leave him, he had barely heard her scream, imagining that he had made the sound. When the commander let go of his head, releasing his grip on Sikandar as aggressively as he had first grabbed him, Sikandar slumped down in his seat and thanked God too quickly, too hopefully, thinking that he had been spared. When he turned to his wife’s seat it was empty and, spinning back, he saw that there was no guard at his window. By the time he knew what was happening, by the time he understood that he had not been the screamer and that the noise had come from outside, Mina was in tears, shouting about their boy.

‘Mina,’ he whispers from his seat. ‘Mina, what are you doing?’

She hears him. She turns angrily to Sikandar and glares at him. At that moment, Sikandar catches the eyes of the Talib. They understand. They look at her like she’s infectious, like her delirium has been brought on by no fault of their own. From the way she responds to the feeble driver, the weary Talib know they have an unhinged woman on their hands. There is no use fighting her back; she is hysterical. The Talib wait patiently, standing perfectly still, while Mina rages, hitting and scratching the breast of the commander.

‘He was there on a Saturday, visiting his father.’

Mina turns back to the window where Sikandar sits, throwing her arms in his direction. Freeing the Talib for a second, she
turns and says those words at Sikandar as if they scorch her throat.

Sikandar feels his eyes well with tears.

‘Mina,’ he whispers again. ‘Mina, don’t tell them.’

‘He had been going there since he was a child, going to the hospital to sit with the nurses who always gave him their time, taking him during their off-duty hours to buy ice cream. He had no school, he had no school that day, and so he went to see his father.’

Mina’s voice cracks as her volume rises.

‘You didn’t care. You didn’t care who was in there. You didn’t even stop to think of the boys.’

The gaunt Talib has had enough. Now he holds his Kalashnikov between his two hands like a shield and pushes Mina with it.

‘
Chap sha!
’

He raises his voice far above Mina’s. She stumbles, one foot hitting the other with the force of the blow. Her sandal slips off her right heel.

‘Shut your mouth. We are the protectors of this region, we are the saviours of Waziristan – what did you people have before we came? Nothing! You lived like animals, afraid of everything but God. Shut up and get in the van before I kill you and your
kafir drever
.’

He pushes her again with the weapon, knocking her on her shoulders for the second time. Mina catches the gun, catches it and pushes it back into the Talib.

‘
Beghairat!
’ she screams. ‘You attacked that hospital – do you even remember its name?’

Both her sandals have fallen off her feet.

‘You attacked the Hasan Faraz Government Hospital. That’s what it’s called. You attacked that hospital – for what? The newspapers told us you hit it because it took its name and
its money from the state, from Pakistan, and from the army. You sent your men, your zombies, with RPGs to destroy it because you thought it treated those soldiers. But you bastards don’t know anything – you don’t know what Mir Ali is. We have been fighting those men since before you grew beards, before you learned how to read the Koran backwards. You didn’t think about the victims of those killers who were treated in that hospital, did you?’

The Talib are hushed. They glance at one another nervously. The one who fell opens his mouth to protest the slight against their indoctrination, if only to reassert himself after such an inglorious injury has been done to him, but he clears his throat only to have Mina pivot and scream at him.

‘Shut up!’ She cries as she yells. ‘I don’t want to hear your sound.’

He steps back and holds his words.

Sikandar lifts his legs, like dead weights underneath him, and gets out of the van. He disturbs nobody and walks towards Mina. She is no longer surrounded by the Talib. They have all edged away from her. The commander signals to his men to back off. But Mina is stalking them now. She is circling the Talib.

The militants hit the operating theatre with the rockets as another man in a car stood watch at the entrance. After the explosion, the survivors in the hospital started to run away from the broken building.

‘Did you watch them run for their lives?’ Mina’s feet slip in the mud as the words leave her mouth.

When those who could walk, who still had legs, began to escape, the Talib blocking the hospital gate exited the car and detonated the explosives packed in the trunk. Mina knows
these facts; she knows the choreography of the attack front to back. She read survivors’ accounts in the newspapers. She cut out articles from the Urdu, Pashto and English press. Mina searched obsessively for stories about the hospital attack. Months later she was still foraging for information, for light. Mina ripped apart newspaper after newspaper. She spent hours on the sports pages reading aloud every word. She even scoured the horoscopes for clues.

‘At the sign of the first man –’ Mina feels she can barely breathe – ‘at the sign of the first man fleeing for his life, you set it off.’

The commander straightens his back. He knows the attack. Mina sees his recognition, she sees it, and as Sikandar approaches her, putting his arms round her to lead her back to the van, she draws a lungful of air and lets it out in a painful cry.

‘You know. You know. You know. I can see it in your eyes. You know.’

Sikandar tries to lead Mina away, but she won’t move. The Talib softens his stance, letting the gun fall to his side.

‘This is a war …’

He tries to finish the sentence, but his tongue stalls.

‘This is a war …’

Mina has no more strength left in her. Her muscles slacken and her face is drawn and emptied of colour.

‘It wasn’t his war. Zalan didn’t have a side in the war.’

Mina speaks to the Talib differently now. She doesn’t shout or yell. She withdraws her fists against him, exhausted by the force it takes to be so angry. The rain falls quietly so as not to disturb her.

‘He died in between. They found his body in the parking lot. He was still alive. The people who lived said he was still alive, still breathing. But no one came. The doctors were pulling
people out of the rubble of the operating theatres. They were moving people into the parking lot before the car exploded. They had to move them back, scattering themselves across the burning hospital compound in search of space to tend to the bodies that had survived.’

Mina’s body heaves with each word.

Sikandar had been searching for Zalan in whatever parts of the hospital still stood. He saw the wreckage of the parking lot from the windows as he ran from room to room, as he looked in smoke-filled stairwells and the crowded emergency areas that were filling up with people.

But he didn’t believe Zalan, little frightened Zalan, would be out there, where the damage had been most brutally inflicted. Sikandar hoped against all hope that he had been inside the hospital. Doctors pulled him into triage areas and tasked him with orders to start treating the wounded but Sikandar wrestled free, at one point stripping off his coat so people would stop grabbing his white sleeves for help. He tore through the grounds until he found himself at the hospital entrance.

He stood before the long driveway and counted the bodies before him. Two, six, eleven, fifteen. Eighteen, twenty, twenty-three.

He could no longer hear the cries around him.

Twenty-four, twenty-nine, thirty.

At thirty-three he saw the Bubblegummers.

At thirty-three Sikandar saw the trainers and moved towards the flashing lights as they flew between red and blue. And then he saw only one of them. Zalan had been moaning for help, the survivors said, but by the time Sikandar reached him he formed only the faintest breath.

Sikandar was on the ground of the parking lot, holding his boy’s head against his body, pulling him, trying not to hurt
him, but pulling him up. Zalan was so small. His limbs hung off his tiny body like strings. Sikandar could not look at him. He could not see what had happened to his son. He concentrated all his strength on lifting him, but he did not realize that he had fallen, too. Sikandar struggled helplessly until one of the nurses saw them and came sprinting over to help. The nurse called over another woman, a doctor, who lifted Zalan up, freeing him from his father’s arms, and ran into the hospital with him. Dr Saffiyeh, one of the nurses told Sikandar, was very capable. She was their most committed paediatric surgeon and she would do everything she could to save Zalan’s life.

But this was a war.

Everything she could do just wasn’t enough.

‘I came to claim the body,’ Mina says to no one. ‘I claimed what was left of him.’

Sikandar opens the door and helps Mina into her seat. He closes it and walks round the back of the van, away from the Talib, and once in his seat he turns the key in the ignition.

The commander raises his Kalashnikov and fires in the air as the Hasan Faraz Government Hospital van drives past the Talib and further into the forest.