The Shadow Of The Crescent Moon (4 page)

Though they all sat with their father at the kitchen table long into the evening, as the old man spoke to them in parables, it was Hayat who understood the meaning of the words and listened beyond the cadence of his father’s voice while the electric heater trembled beside them.

Inayat never spoke to Hayat of the future, he spoke to him of the past, of the obscene projections it had made upon the present and he knew his son, who grew taller and taller and whose hair grew longer and longer if Zainab did not insist upon a visit to the barber, did not need to be inspired.

Hayat did not speak of Mir Ali, he listened for her.

He listened and watched for others who, like him, were waiting to be brought underground so that they could be enlisted to protect her. But when the call came, it came from
home. Mir Ali will not be abandoned by her sons, Inayat told Hayat as he gave the movement his own.

Hayat had already heard in school that men settled far from home, working as kitchen staff and
sokidars
across the country, sent their wages without being asked. Shias who had left, feeling threatened by the Sunni movements that had sprung up around the Northern Frontiers, sent their sons back to Mir Ali. ‘All in the service of brotherhood,’ he told his father. Hayat felt close to the moment. The battle for Mir Ali was no longer restricted to panegyrics at Inayat’s knee.

Sikandar, meanwhile, had given up his borrowed dreams of business for medical school. He studied night and day to pass his board exams. He wanted to make something of himself; he wanted to be a part of something too. But he wanted it to be regulated, secure. Business – Aman Erum’s idea of business at least – was too risky. It dabbled too much in the unknown for Sikandar’s liking. There was no need to travel far from home. Sikandar saw plenty of opportunity here. He was at the top of his class at medical school. There simply wasn’t time, he explained to Hayat, for him to get involved just now.

But Hayat wasn’t looking for company. He only wanted news of the rising rebellion. As the months passed and the fighting intensified, he heard that those who lived abroad, making better lives for themselves, had returned home to fight. Women, men and children, there were no timid souls to be found amongst the hopeful of Mir Ali. Their time, as the generations who had struggled and suffered saw it, had finally come. But not all welcomed the honour to fight, to die, for Mir Ali.

Samarra never travelled out of Mir Ali any more. There were no more summers in Chitral, no more motorcycle drives along the Kunar, no more presents brought from Kohat or Peshawar and wrapped in old newspapers lingering with the scent of Ghazan
Afridi’s winter leather jacket. In the early years of her father’s absence, Samarra dutifully restricted her life to home. She spent her late teenage years tending to her mother, Malalai, and trying to convince her of the things she knew to be true. Uncles – distant cousins and family elders – came with handouts every so often, rupees tied with rubber bands or stapled so that the notes, imprinted with the unsmiling visage of Mohammad Ali Jinnah and soggy with
paan
stains, tore. It is our duty, they said solemnly. A few thousand every month, enough to pay the bills, to keep Samarra in school. But even when the money petered out, even after Samarra’s mother began to teach and cook and sew to supplement their thinning finances, relatives came several times a week, accompanied by neighbours or old associates of Ghazan Afridi. They came to show their faces to Ghazan Afridi’s forsaken family and to condole with them.

At first, Samarra helped her mother receive the visitors politely, bringing them tea upon a tray and tissues to wipe their unnecessary tears. Malalai never failed to cry when receiving her husband’s cousins and their wives.

‘Don’t cry,’ Samarra whispered to her mother as they stood at the door once the guests had left. ‘Don’t cry,’ she whispered. ‘Nothing ever happens to the brave.’

But Samarra could not control her mother’s tears or hem in her mourning. She could not convince her that nobody knew anything, that there was no body, that Ghazan Afridi could only be alive. You don’t cry for a man in hiding. You don’t mourn for a man you have not buried.

Samarra could not stop the visitors from bringing food and comfort every week. So she did the only thing she could. She stopped serving the tea. She stayed in her room and counted time.

Samarra never stopped waiting for Ghazan Afridi to return.

By the time Samarra was twenty-one, it seemed that everyone was fighting to leave Mir Ali. She tried to share in Aman Erum’s excitement when the news spread in Mir Ali that he would be travelling to Islamabad to receive a study visa for America. She told her girlfriends that he would make a new life for himself and that it was what he always wanted. And when he came back she would marry him and they would settle in Mir Ali as a family. Things are changing, she said to the girls, who were already wearing engagement rings on their fingers. She believed it too.

She knew it was the answer to the question of what their lives would be. It is the only way, she told her girlfriends, that Aman Erum will be happy. He had wanted to leave for so very long, from back when poetry wasn’t dangerous if read by an unchaperoned eye and replied to with a touch of the lips. So let him go, she said almost confidently. He will see what’s outside; it’s the only way to get him to come home for good.

Aman Erum wore his bespoke polyester suit, so dark it shone, to his interview at the United States embassy in the menacingly guarded Diplomatic Enclave of the nation’s capital. His heart was beating fast. He tried his best to focus on his suit, his new suit; it was the first time he’d worn it. He thought of Samarra, who would have told him his heart beating fast was a sign that he was afraid. She always knew he was nervous when his heartbeat quickened.

Aman Erum looked at the sleeve of his tailor-made jacket. It was a three-piece suit, a polyester-blend black number cut in the small shop of Zulfikar Sons. The tailor worked under a naked bulb in the basement of a residential building just off the bazaar. The shop was simple – just large enough for a client to stretch his arms out wide – but Zulfikar had a reputation amongst the elders of the city. Mir Ali’s men trusted him to cut
their suits, design
sherwanis
with Nehru collars for nervous grooms, stitch dark vests to be worn over
shalwar kameez
, and stylish leather coats for wealthier gentlemen.

Zulfikar advertised his expertise to both ‘gents and ladies’ on a brightly painted sign but, truth be told, he preferred to work with the gentlemen. When ladies accidentally visited the basement store, clutching their bags of material and patterns torn out of wrinkled copies of
Mag
and
She
magazines and Gul Ahmed textile catalogues, Zulfikar handed them the measuring tape and turned his back while they shyly read out their measurements. As Zulfikar copied the numbers down, he blushed.

Aman Erum had had no cause to visit Zulfikar Sons before. His mother had seen to the stitching of his
shalwar kameez
and the ordering of his school uniforms. But he had often walked down the stairs to the basement shop to touch the leather jackets. Inayat had one, made from delicate calfskin. When his sons were working men, he promised, he would take them to Zulfikar Sons to have them fitted for their own coats. But Aman Erum couldn’t wait that long; he wanted something now.

Aman Erum had never bought a suit before but he had seen photographs in the newspapers of industrialists sitting, one leg casually crossed over the other, in spacious white and gold sitting rooms. They never wore
shalwar kameez
like the country’s feudal landlords did. Their suits were dark and slimline, even though the industrialists themselves were not, and as they sat on gilt sofas receiving foreign investors and government ministers there was no question in Aman Erum’s mind who commanded more respect. More than anything else, he had wanted to look like them.

He wanted to look sharp for his interview. He wanted to be seen in a suit.

Aman Erum had ridden from Mir Ali on a bus that carried workers and those would-be refugees like him, reaching Islamabad at four in the morning. He had been warned of the heavy security in the capital, of the circuitous obstacle course that travel to the American embassy would involve. He would have to present himself at numerous checkpoints and pass through the gated and guarded convention centre, taken over by businesses and buses that ferried ambitious applicants like Aman Erum into the Diplomatic Enclave, depositing them at the embassy of their choice for a fee of one thousand rupees. It was best to arrive early.

‘Good! Get out! The faster you cowards leave the quicker we’ll have everything sorted out,’ the bus driver steering the late-night shuttle had taunted in Urdu. ‘Hundreds of
jawans
– thousands – how many of our men have spilled their blood fighting you terrorists?’

Aman Erum had sat quietly in the bus, keeping his head down and making himself seem small so that the driver would not notice him. This was standard, typical. They had endured a lifetime of this abuse in Mir Ali – from government school teachers, the national media, policemen, soldiers – especially the young men. Aman Erum had learned to say nothing. He knew to look down and listen only to the drumming beat of his heart. The embassy had given him an appointment. He had his papers in order, his new suit freshly pressed. He was going to leave this, all this, behind.

‘Well, let me tell you, blood will have blood. You traitors –’ the bus driver turned in his seat and spat the word out of his betel-red lips – ‘you traitors think we don’t hear your music. That we don’t understand the words to the songs you sing to each other. We do.’ He bobbed his head over his large steering wheel. ‘We know all the words to your traitors’ songs.’

He walked from the bus depot holding his plastic folder – containing his passport, national identity card, application forms to Montclair State University, doctor’s certificates required by the state of New Jersey, bank printouts and diplomas – close to his chest and tried to carry himself confidently, without seeming like too much of a stranger.

The streets were being swept clean by shoeless women wearing fluorescent orange vests. They tucked their saris into their vests and using
jaroos
, twigs tied together like anaemic bales of hay, bent their dark bodies to meet the grime and soot of the streets’ gutters.

Aman Erum had thought that at least those charged with making the state shine would be given modern equipment, proper tools to make the roads gleam in the headlights of diplomatic cars. He had not imagined that the capital was cleaned by a Day-Glo army of Hindu women who wore their saris tied high across their waists to allow for quick movement and limber sweeping.

He had never actually seen a woman in a sari before, not in Mir Ali, only in the films he and his brothers watched when they were young boys, bootleg video cassettes pirated and trafficked through Peshawar. The wives of his father’s Sikh friends, men who had stayed in the tribal belt long after waves of migrations had returned Waziristan’s Hindu and Christian communities across the border, wore only
shalwar kameez
. They didn’t stand out as minorities; nothing about them seemed foreign at all. They spoke Pashto perfectly, with no accent, and looked like all the other ladies in the town with their loose shawls, baggy
kameez
and loud plastic slippers. Aman Erum hadn’t met any Hindus before. This would be the first time, Aman Erum thought, as he and the sari-clad sweepers crept along the forested outskirts of the capital like shadows.

He did not see anyone else on Islamabad’s wide roads and
imposing avenues that morning, only soldiers nonchalantly manning checkpoints until the hum of the morning traffic woke them and reminded them of the seriousness of their country’s security predicament.

Islamabad’s checkpoints were different from Mir Ali’s – there were no tanks here, no camouflaged shooters posted at significant angles so that anyone who tried to bulldoze their way through a checkpoint would be taken out with a clean shot to the head. There was no hostility in the soldiers. Here they picked their teeth with matchsticks and folded their arms behind their backs as they paced up and down pavements until a car honked, proclaiming itself ready for inspection.

At the Shah Sawar net café in Mir Ali a few months earlier, Aman Erum had sat at a computer after handing over his national identity card to the proprietor – a man with thickly rimmed glasses, who copied the numbers down in a large register before assigning him a seat – and searched the Internet for American MBA programmes. The walls of the café were brightly painted in playschool pink. Old ragged Bollywood film posters of chaste heroines with open, pained expressions covered the proprietor’s desk.

The net café was crowded by boys, young men with headphones, their eyes hidden behind dark glasses as they trawled through wallpapers of the new, bolder, midriff-baring, mini-skirted Bollywood starlets. But most of the screens, Aman Erum noticed as he clicked on pages promising low-interest loans to foreign students, weren’t open on softly airbrushed photos of dimpled torsos or the toned legs of the newer heroines, but on embassy websites. They were downloading visa forms, copying down immigration checklists, and gazing at photos of Technicolor college campuses, replete with dewy lawns and sunny Frisbee-flinging athletes.

None of the men engaged in surreptitious Internet searches at Mir Ali’s Shah Sawar net café ever spoke to each other; they never traded information or passed on website addresses to each other. Some walked straight to the back of the room, where Rustam sat, hogging space behind the proprietor’s desk. Rustam wore his light-brown curly hair slicked back with pomade. He carried four different-coloured pens in his breast pocket and provided unlimited form-filling services for a fee. He had templates for the American visa form – no, I was never arrested on a charge of committing a hate crime. No, I am not now, nor have I ever been, a Nazi – as well as the British, Canadian, Emirati, Schengen and Indonesian visas. Any other countries cost extra. Rustam wasn’t an advertised part of the net café. He just sat there unobtrusively, neatly filling out forms in his tidy penmanship while the proprietor signed people onto his waiting list.