The Shadow Of The Crescent Moon (17 page)

He can’t answer. If he tells them, they will execute him.

People coming from Peshawar spoke of drive-by shootings, of men in parrot-green turbans who rode pillion on motorbikes and sidled up next to the cars of well-known Shia businessmen at red traffic lights and opened fire. They gunned down unknown businessmen too – the shopkeepers, the small-time spice traders and glass merchants – in the smoggy city’s bazaars.

It had already spread far and wide, this green-turbaned movement, before the Talib gave them international recognition. In the years before the Talib assumed the mountainside the attacks had not been confined to Peshawar. In Karachi there had been the dark years of targeted assassination campaigns against Shia doctors. By the end of a decade, they had murdered almost two hundred of them. Doctors emigrated in large numbers to Canada and Europe from the country’s other urban capitals, unable to practise their professions or their faiths in safety.

In Quetta they attacked religious processions, killing the faithful in their mosques on their most holy and sorrowful of days. In Multan they planted bombs in the parks and alleyways near people’s homes. They pulled children out of school buses and slit their throats on the roadsides. They murdered men ostensibly to level a millennium-old quarrel over succession, over dynastic rights, armed only with the defensive guilt of those who had usurped a power that was not theirs to take.

Sikandar is not a religious man. He does not have the mark
of prostration on his forehead like many Shias do, marks of devotion from the carved tablets they place on their prayer mats so that their faces are imprinted by the continual soar and surge of their daily orisons. He doesn’t carry too obvious a name, nothing that could betray his family’s following of that correct line of succession. He doesn’t believe in second comings and long-awaited prophets; at the very least he does not think too much about it.

But he is a Shia. In name and in birth. That is enough.

Sikandar raises his palms together and bows his head to the gaunt commander.

‘Brother, I am just a Muslim. Please let me go.’

‘We do not consider infidels members of the tribe.’

The gaunt Talib grows heartier, less anaemic-looking, as he breathes in the exclusive power of his faith. He grips his gun like a sabre, threatening to bring it down over Sikandar, before barking: ‘If you are not a Shia declare it! Who are you hiding your pride from?’

Sikandar bows his head deeper. It is heavy with sweat and blood. Mina begins to mumble under her breath. He lets the blood rush to his ears so her mumblings are drowned out. She rocks back and forth gently in her seat. Sikandar hopes she isn’t praying. He hopes there is nothing that can identify them as separate.

‘I am not, brother. Please. I am not. I am a Muslim.’

In the silence, while his false confession is being considered, while the Talib exchange aggravated glances with one another, Sikandar offers a silent prayer.

He begs for release. He begs, as the thrum emanating from Mina grows louder, as he feels her body toughen with each oscillation of her shoulders, for her to remain calm. She is shaking now. She jerks her back off the seat and moans
a low, guttural sound. They cannot survive an outburst right now. But it’s God’s timing, isn’t it, for Mina’s shallow calm to leave her just when it is most required. Mina beats her chest, her heart, with her open palm. He knows this moment. Sikandar knows that Mina will begin to speak.
Ya Ali, ya Ali
, she will mutter, saying the words to remember that she does not suffer alone. She will say them for strength, for solace. Don’t say it, Mina. He squeezes his eyes tight. Please don’t say it.

The thumping of her hand against her heart is enough. The Talibs can identify heresy through a palm. She groans the words. Sikandar hopes no one can understand them but him. She will get them killed. Mina has never hidden her faith, never lied for protection or for the comforts of assimilation.

The gaunt Talib steps to the front of the van to speak to one of his subordinates. Sikandar doesn’t see him move; with his head hung low he barely registers any movement. The Talib returns now, backtracking three steps. He waves his gun at Sikandar.

‘Take off your
kameez
,’ he orders.

Sikandar can’t process any of the Talib’s thoughts. He doesn’t understand his secret language of us versus us, of what makes you part of them and what makes you their enemy.

‘Brother, I don’t …’

‘Don’t call me brother!’ the gaunt Talib shouts. He doesn’t move his hand off the Kalashnikov, not even to wipe the falling drizzle from his sunburned cheekbones. The rain hangs off him like glycerine.

Sikandar gestures to Mina.

‘I can’t. Please.’

The Talib wants to see his back, wants to check if he has the marks of Ashura on his flesh. They want to see if he whipped a sword across his shoulder blades to commiserate with the
pain the Holy Prophet’s family felt as they were massacred at Karbala.

They want to know if he is one of the men who beat their palms across their chests, like Mina, until their skin is raw. If he is one of those who walk barefoot in processions across unswept streets, pricking their soles with shards of glass and thorns and still-lit cigarette butts.

Sikandar flinches in anticipation of another blow and he begins, in his nervous desperation, to sob. He has no consideration for the mother whose infant is being strangled by its umbilical cord, whose life he has come to this savage wilderness to save, and at that moment, for that cluster of seconds, he can spare no thought for his wife, who will never be able to look at her husband again. Sikandar sobs only for himself, for what he fears is about to happen in the coming minutes when his faith is confirmed and then condemned.

In one hour he has shamed himself more than months of Mina’s hysteria have done. More than his body has ever allowed him to express in grief or in sadness it has let out in fear. He can’t hold back. Sikandar’s tears only anger the commander.

With the hand that doesn’t have its index finger poised on the Kalashnikov’s trigger, the Talib grabs Sikandar’s hair and pulls his head back, holding him against the driver’s seat. The gaunt Talib brings his face to within a centimetre of Sikandar’s. Sikandar can smell him; he can smell the earth and the rain on the Talib’s parched skin.

‘
Kafir
.’

The Talib spits at him.

Sikandar can’t breathe. He chokes on his tears.

The Talib tightens his hand on Sikandar’s head. He straightens himself and chambers a round in the Kalashnikov. ‘
Kafir
,’ he sneers once more. He is lifting the weapon to Sikandar’s heart when he is interrupted by a scream.

It pierces through the light rain, through the tense breath that Sikandar allows his body to release, through the unshakeable anger of the Talib.

The gaunt commander’s face contracts with the scream. Startled, he lets go of Sikandar, whose hair falls out of his clenched fist, and looks at his comrades.

Mina has got out of the van. She opened her door and pushed the Talib with the wispy beard and light-blue turban, who was stationed next to her window. She pushed him hard, touching him against all convention, placing her hands flat on his body and straining her arms to push him as forcefully as her strength would allow. Mina knocked him to the ground and out of her way. The Talib could not defend himself; he could not steady himself by grabbing hold of her wrists, so he fell. She barrelled her way past the man, the teenage boy, guarding the van’s engine as if it too were an animate being, aiming his gun at the hood so he could shoot if the driver revved the van against his permission.

Mina screamed at him when he tried to stop her, and it was this scream that the commander heard.

‘
Zalim!
’ she screams, standing under the rain. Unjust! Mina screams till her voice is hoarse.

He moves. There is no greater slur Mina could have levelled. These men are students of justice. They can be accused of being violent, of being rash, of anything but injustice. They have built their war around the battle of the just against the unjust. People misunderstand them; they assume it’s a war against unbelievers, against disbelief. That has nothing to do with it. Their war was always about justice. They bear its mantle and they drape themselves in its banner.

Mina strides towards the gaunt commander, holding her handbag in her hands. As she reaches him she drops it to the ground as if she only just remembered it, too late to leave it in
the car. She self-consciously pulls on her
dupatta
and, confirming it remains round her neck, Mina shouts. She heaves air up from her lungs and screams.

Hayat kicks the earth with his foot. He doesn’t want it to come to this. The soil he disturbs is tired. Fractured clumps of dirt unable to hold together.

He remembers a time, long ago, when he and his brothers were children. When one insurgency believed their harvest was ready to be reaped, when they felt that the moment was upon them, the feeling infected the town.

People prepared for change, for a reversal of forces and fortune, only to be beaten back harder, more viciously, as punishment for their daring. People laid low, but they did not feel that the harvest had been destroyed. It had simply not been ready. The moon was anxious, the orbit of the constellations falling into place required more time. So they waited.

They waited for one insurgency to pass and for another to take its place. With each battle for Mir Ali they held hope aloft and waited for the moment they would be free.

It never came. It never promised to come.

Hope stemmed purely from the belief that it ought to, that one day it just might.

For Inayat and his fellow men in arms the road to freedom was perilously long but they journeyed upon it confidently. Their losses in the face of superior military might, enhanced state powers and abuses, and national ignorance of their plight, fell off their shoulders. They lived and dreamed and died for the pursuit of that promise. That hope had been enough for them.

But not for Hayat. Not for the generation that came after
and saw their parents’ dreams diminished, methodically squashed by the creation of larger and larger military cantonments where the army could teach schoolchildren how to sing the national anthem and where a larger perimeter of land flew the jungle-green and white flag of Pakistan atop their roofs and gates. The army beat this generation down by being bigger and stronger and faster. They beat them down by being exactly what this generation aspired to.

They wanted phones, computers, access to the world. The military had all those things waiting. Eventually the battle, as they had known, would come down to this: those who wanted to be a part of a global system would not be kept outside it on account of nationalistic beliefs and codes of honour set by their parents. Struggle would be redefined; it would come to mean the length of time you waited for fibre optic cables to be buried in the ground so that dial-up Internet could be replaced by something much, much smoother. This generation wanted scholarships, they wanted to travel for business degrees and seminars, to work at petrol pumps wearing bright orange jumpsuits in Eurozone countries if it meant the chance of a different life, one not ruled by checkpoints and national identity cards and suspicion. They wanted the freedom to travel to Mecca, business class.

It had only been a matter of time for the army. They had known that one day it would come to this. This was a lazy generation. The army had been counting on them. This generation, all spark and sound effects, quickly proved to be much easier than the army had imagined. Barring few exceptions, they didn’t want to fight. They wanted too many things that only the state could give them. Their memories would still be infiltrated by the past, by their ancestors’ grievances and sufferings, but they would recall these comfortably at dining tables and dinner parties as they wore the latest
smart-phones on their belts and compared their children’s private school tuition fees.

They sacrificed nothing of their own; the dreams had been their fathers’.

Freedom meant nothing to this generation. It was easily bartered for convenience.

Hayat holds Samarra’s dry hand in his. Little patches of cold and lack of care have whitened the skin around her knuckles and joints. He rubs her hand quickly with his own.

‘With every escalation they hit us back harder.’

‘We have always been hit,’ she reminds Hayat, removing her hand from his.

‘They will kill Nasir’s family. If you give him the go-ahead, Samarra, they will trace him – whether he lives or dies – and they will torture his family for months before they make an example out of them.’

She is silent.

‘They will leave no one. They won’t spare his siblings, his nieces – his sister’s two children. You know that. They will humiliate his father before they execute him here – on these very grounds. You know what they will do to his mother, Samarra, you above all people should know …’

Samarra stands up and walks away from Hayat. The cold makes her voice sound tremulous when it is not. Although her voice is clear and decisive, the sharp whistle of the rain makes her sound unsure.

‘Stop it.’

Hayat lowers his head. He remembers his conversation with his mother in the kitchen this morning. His heart, he can feel his heart sinking.

‘What’s happened to you? What are you so afraid of?’

Hayat kicks the earth again and again with his foot.

‘You don’t see it, Samarra – you don’t see it any more, do you?’

He burrows and digs his foot into the muddy soil. He can’t stop her. She is so far gone she can’t see anything beyond the white rage she has adjusted all her weight to carry, a rage that has grown to become a part of her. It is built into her like it was built into Ghazan Afridi, into Inayat, transforming itself virally, until Samarra has no immunity left to her anger.

She stares at Hayat, searching his face, waiting for it to break out into something familiar. She doesn’t recognize him either. He’s always been cautious on the eve of operations, treading lightly in the days and weeks beforehand, but there had been anticipation too. Eager anticipation.

‘They’ve destroyed us.’

Samarra scoffs. She makes no effort to hide her reaction. Her voice sounds rough; there is a harshness to it. He can hear it, even in her sneers. Hayat ignores it. He ignores the way she tilts her head and looks up at him, as if she has not considered him before.

‘We’re no better than they are.’

But she won’t let him finish the thought. Samarra shakes her hands at Hayat, waving him down, trying to stop him from starting down this path.

‘Samarra,’ he says.

This is not a meeting she can command.

‘Samarra, listen to me. They killed our heroes, so we stopped making them.’ His voice breaks. She can no longer see him; he knows she has already begun to drown him out. So he shouts. He shouts above the already too-loud decibel he speaks to her in. ‘We stopped living. We stopped our lives to take theirs.’

Hayat looks at Samarra.

‘We became them.’

Samarra sits back down again on the bare, wet earth, agitated.

‘Hayat, that was before. This will change everything.’

Now she takes his hands, his also-cold hands in hers, and squeezes. Hayat looks at her hands. She must have rubbed them against her sweater, against the man’s shawl thrown casually round her shoulders. He can’t see the dry white patches any more. He looks up at her eyes, at the cold beauty mark encased in her iris, and wonders how she warmed her hands.

‘This is what they couldn’t do. They made our fathers old. They robbed our fathers of their youth, of their strength. They had no freedom to make their own rules. We are something stronger, Hayat. We are something that can’t be broken.’

He shakes his head at her.

‘Samarra, we already are.’

Samarra stands up and checks her phone, a black-plastic Nokia with a backlit screen whose light never fully turns off. She doesn’t acknowledge Hayat’s words. In their place, she carries on a conversation they never started.

‘Let’s go.’

Samarra presses two keys to unlock the phone and looks at the time. Nasir will be moving now. He will be preparing his position before the Chief Minister’s motorcade blocks all the routes; he will be making his way to the venue as part of the late morning traffic, ahead of it becoming a high-security zone.

Hayat scrapes the dirt off his shoes. He can’t stop her. He wonders if he tried hard enough. There’s nothing left to do but to go ahead with the plan.

‘We have things to prepare. Nasir will be waiting for my call on the other side.’ Samarra moves her head as she speaks, reassuring herself as though ticking marks off a list. She checks her phone one more time. Hayat takes the keys out of his pocket.

‘Enough battery?’

He knows Nasir won’t move before Samarra’s all-clear. She’s
anxious now, worried her phone will fail her, concerned that all the elements will conspire against her. But she has three bars left on the mobile. Enough to make the call in an hour’s time.

Samarra nods.

Hayat walks towards the motorbike.

‘Let’s go, then. We have things to prepare.’

She notices that he speaks to her over his shoulder. He doesn’t even look at her.