The Shadow Of The Crescent Moon (19 page)

The Chief Minister will soon be landing at the military base by helicopter. No one trusts the roads into Mir Ali, so the chief guest has been advised not to come by car. One can’t ensure his safety overhead by airline either – the Miram Shah airport was the scene of a heavy siege only three weeks earlier. Gunmen encircled the small airport and fired at the parked planes, targeting the light-blue-and-white-camouflaged commandos stationed by the hangars. They were the most likely reason for the attack: people had spoken of repairs on military hardware being done on site by these pastel-wearing engineer commandos. It was two and a half days before the renegade gunmen were overpowered.

‘Let us call a spade a shovel,’ the Chief Minister intoned at the press conference he convened to discuss the dastardly terrorist attack. ‘We are fighting forces who are intent on attacking the very people who toil blood and perspiration to protect their rights and their democratic freedoms. We are not going to give in to terrorists. They are envious of our values.’

Once the Chief Minister has landed at the base, he will exit his helicopter and pose for a photograph for the awaiting press. It is understood that he will then direct himself towards the assembled four hundred recruits, shaking hands and pinning medals on a few pre-selected, photogenic breastbones before taking to the podium to give his long-awaited commencement address to the would-be rebels who were being welcomed into the national army.

At the conclusion of the ceremony the Chief Minister has scheduled a session with the press, when he will answer questions and issue a final statement. Nasir will be there, holding a camera, replacing a cameraman who never made it from the capital. All the press today has been parachuted in – no local media outlets passed security clearance – but Nasir is a last-minute necessity. He has a Peshawar identity card and will be cleared by the major channel whose presenter is unable to simultaneously operate the machinery and narrate the day’s proceedings. The anchorman has to be seen by his viewers, adequate face time is imperative. So too, then, is a replacement cameraman.

He must have already received the clearance. Nasir must already be standing in the press line awaiting the helicopter’s landing.

Hayat keeps his hands curled round the motorbike’s handles. His right hand is on the accelerator, pushing the rubber into his palm. Samarra holds his waist as tightly as before. She often rode with her hands burrowed in Hayat’s pockets for warmth, holding onto him at the same time. But today she keeps her hands outside Hayat’s jacket, though she allows her cheek to rest on his shoulder.

He is tired.

Hayat is so tired. He braces himself against the wind, shutting his eyes at traffic lights so that he can imagine that this day and all the others that will follow have already passed and left no perceptible trace upon him.

He wants to be done. It has been a long time coming, this feeling. Though it only recently reached fever pitch. Hayat grew up without a future. It had been denied to him; no one spoke of what he would become and what path would light itself in anticipation of his journey. Hayat had been raised only
in the past – he had only memory, no right to imagination. Hayat spent his childhood at his father’s knees as Inayat spoke to him of past wrongs, past injustices, past errors. There was no future, not for Hayat, not for anybody in Mir Ali, until those long agos could be righted.

And they could only be righted by the sacrifice of everything to come.

Hayat is tired of sacrificing and living among the ghosts of history. He had come of age under their sad shadows, and until now, until recently, until Aman Erum returned with nothing but a future attached to him, Hayat had not realized the volume of the sacrifice he had made so blindly.

Aman Erum swept barrier after barrier aside. He bypassed the deaths that had befallen their family, seeing only prospects for the opening of new doors and new ventures. No space in Mir Ali was forbidden for his growth. Aman Erum welcomed mourners with sombre handshakes and business cards – he did not break for funerals. He did not break for anything. Not for births, not for deaths. Hayat understood that the future was about movement. Ideas, trade, goods – the world and everything in it was in flux, travelling and shifting. It was the opposite of Hayat’s condition. He was stunted by an unmovable injustice. It had grounded him and prevented him from seeing the wide latitude of opportunities ahead.

Hayat occupied the space his father had. The space his grandfather before him had, even Ghazan Afridi’s unmade space. Hayat buried himself alongside them. In all these years he had never left their side.

Hayat had given his life to Mir Ali before he even had a choice. He thought of Zalan and lowered his head so that he would not cry. Not now, not here. Zalan had not given his life. It had been taken from him. There had been too much pain, too much death. Hayat counted his life in the days and months
it had taken to reach this point. He had let too much time pass. He would end all that today.

It would be bigger than anything else.

Hayat did not feel prepared; he had not felt ready in the weeks and months of preparation for this. He could no longer sleep, he had not dreamed for days. Hayat shut his eyes against the wind. He had no choice but to go ahead with the day’s plan.

Samarra shifts behind him. She moves her bracelet along her arm, tucking it under her sleeve as if it too requires warmth. She can’t focus, though she tries, on the timeline in her head.

The winter calm of Mir Ali’s roads, normally crowded with pedestrians and small vehicles, provides few distractions. There are no fruit vendors selling apples cooled in ice water. It’s too early for the man who roasts corn over a sandy pit, plucking the kernels out with his fingernails and tossing them into the
lokhay
, squeezing lime juice and red chilli powder over the kernels, though the tastes in this mountainous area do not favour too much spice. There are few women on the roads this late morning; they are all at home preparing for Eid – dressing the children, plaiting their hair and painting their fingertips and palms with henna while the older women cook the day’s meals.

Samarra thinks of her mother, almost certainly bent over the stove now, stirring too much black pepper into her lamb
saalon
. Samarra smiles. She lifts her face from Hayat’s back and wishes he would look at her. It’s too hard to speak to him over the roar of the motorbike. She wants his assurance.

Samarra thinks back to her phone and its dwindling battery. She wonders if Nasir has managed to record the statement he has prepared, using the same camera that will bring him into the Chief Minister’s press conference. If they’ve searched him,
looking too far into the pouches and pockets of his impressively sized camera bag, he’s already dead.

By now the Chief Minister is making his chief guest’s welcome address.

Security in Mir Ali is murderous, but all manner of rules are relaxed for the press. With ninety-plus channels on television and each station vying for dominance over listless national audiences, the press find few doors closed to their cameras and microphones.

Nasir should have got through after a perfunctory search. He will have been patted down and told to place his wallet and keys in a plastic basket while a bored police official pokes the outside of his camera bag before waving him through.

Samarra’s phone has just enough battery left. She’ll make the call in about twenty minutes. She tucks her bracelet deeper into her sleeve. The iron braid breaks a jasmine bud and cuts her skin. They are close. They have never been so prepared, so ready before.

But something is wrong. Samarra can feel it in her bones.

Hayat parks the motorbike by the mosque, its gate open wide as men begin to filter in, holding hands as they do in these parts, and wishing each other the coming of a happy Eid.

He lowers his foot to the ground and kicks the stand down to steady the motorbike. As the engine runs, his keys still in the ignition, the exhaust coughs out smoke that smells like burning rubber. He rests his hands on the handles.

‘I’m sorry.’ He says it to himself.

‘Forgive me.’ He whispers it to his father. ‘None of us can be free.’

Hayat lifts his head and turns to look across the road. He sees him. Hayat nods his head in confirmation. I have her. She’s here.

Samarra sits on the back seat of the motorbike with one foot perched on the bike’s metal wing and the other placed for balance on the ground. She takes out her phone.

‘I’ll call in ten minutes,’ she says. ‘He’s messaged. He’s in. He’s just waiting for the confirmation. They will have got the warning. They will have printed out the fax by now. They’ll panic for five minutes, then compose themselves and wonder if this is serious. After another five they’ll laugh at themselves for being so easily unnerved. And by the time anyone with any authority realizes that the threat came from us, that it should be sent upwards, it will be too late.’

Hayat is silent. He keeps his head bowed.

Samarra misunderstands the gesture. She assumes Hayat is
listening to her. She thinks he’s keeping their cover and taking in her words.

‘They won’t have even seen it coming,’ she says.

Hayat lifts his leg over the bike and stands on the pavement, broken concrete barely a step above the rocky, pitted road. There are palms here, too. Palm trees grow tall in Mir Ali. Hayat looks at the landscape around him. Including the mosque, it is uniformly grey. One-storey houses, unpainted, their cement dried and disregarded. Small businesses,
hotal
servers waving metal plates over large vats of hot food, roads that have been paved and then unpaved by machines and men.

The palms give dates, small wizened ones. They are not very sweet, but hard and tough to chew. In the summers they cut the fruit, still hanging off their yellow branches, and make a paste from them. But now, in the winter, the palms are bare and the skinny trees look Arabian and out of place.

Hayat understands there is little time.

‘Samarra.’

He speaks to her now but she sees that he still can’t look at her.

‘I’m going round the corner for a minute. Don’t move. Stay where you are, keep your head down. The crowds will thicken in a moment as the men begin to arrive for –’

She interrupts him. ‘Where are you going?’

‘They won’t sound the
azan
till half past.’

He just wants to finish speaking.

‘They come early, to hide their slippers and take seats at the back so they can chat when the mullah begins his sermon. Samarra?’

‘Yes, Hayat
jan
.’

She is the only person, after his father, who calls him that.

He thinks of the insatiable king who lives alone on the
mountaintop because all the diamonds he desired had already been gathered and cleared. He thinks of the story his father always cut off before it reached the end, leaving the fakir stranded atop a cliff, suspended indefinitely. And for a moment Hayat wishes he was the fakir.

Looking around to make sure they are still alone, Hayat leans forward and takes Samarra’s face in his hands. He kisses her on her eyelids, lingering on the one that encases the beauty mark in her eye.

‘Hayat
jan
?’

Samarra looks around, to see if anyone has seen him place his lips on her, but when she looks back Hayat has already begun to cross the road. She watches him pause lightly on his heels, allowing the traffic to pass, before slipping into an alleyway that lies hidden under the low clouds of a rainy Mir Ali morning.

‘Hello?’

‘
Salam, grana.
What can I do for you? It is an honour for me to hear from you two times this Eid.’

Aman Erum holds the phone to his ear as he looks out onto the road.

‘Have you received a fax, Colonel?’

The Colonel doesn’t answer. Aman Erum hears him breathe into the receiver. It is a heavy, laboured sound.

‘It’s been sent by a woman I think you know. You may have met her once. Not so long ago.’

Aman Erum hears the rustling of papers. He turns his back away from the road. He doesn’t want to look at her.

‘I have her. She’s here.’

‘Is this a joke,
grana
? You are giving her to me?’

‘She holds the key,’ Aman Erum says slowly. ‘Not me. I’m done. This is the last for me.’

The Colonel pushes back his chair. It sounds like a scraping, an unseating. The sound of more voices filling the room. The smart crack of ox-blood-heeled boots, the quick slam of doors being shut. A printer is sputtering out paper, maybe even a
photograph. Someone is radioing a car. Aman Erum hears the Colonel clicking the phone onto speaker.

‘No such thing,
grana
.’

‘Did the fax mention who the target is?’

The Colonel falls silent again.

Sikandar drives quietly round the fallen waste of the forest, tree trunks cut down and splintered so that they open like artichokes, and clearings made of scorched earth and neglect.

The damage to the van is minimal, he sees that now as he glances around, noting that the original dents and scratches have been joined by only a few new nicks and marks. Sikandar’s window is broken – this is the most obvious damage. Small shards of glass shimmer across the front seat. His legs shake as he examines the windows, nervously tickling the van’s pedals.

His
shalwar
is sodden. The drizzle of the city falls harder out here as one circles the forest. The roads grow narrower and the air clearer. He is wet from the rain and from fear. But he is alive. They survived.

There is the smell of pine, late into the winter. It fills the air, the mountains, the woods. It has come to be a trademark of this fair tribal city, home for many years to thousands of men and saints, divine sometimes, princely at others. But it is not a kingdom; it is not a bastion of any empire. It has never been. Even centuries ago, when Buddhist avatars and princes walked the muddy tracks of the forest here, even then it was the home of ordinary men.

Fishermen sat on the banks of shallow streams with their
shalwars
rolled to the knees as they pulled in their catch. It was the home of those men.

It was the home of wayfarers and woodsmen, those that simultaneously worshipped the roots of their protective giants
and then gutted them for sale. The wood merchants made key chains, they made plaques, clocks with steel numbers wedged into the pillowy beige bark. Some thought their trade tacky in later years, and of course it was. But they were only simple woodsmen then.

Times change and the forest thins. The pine scent grows familiar enough to be ignored, and the men, they come and go, leaving home for larger cities, for better trade. What more can they accomplish in their small home?

They would not have seen what was coming, not at all.

Sikandar looks at Mina and sees her eyelashes flutter, as if she is dreaming. Her lips murmur her secret prayers, incantations to keep her, at varying points, either brave or calm. She has been both, Sikandar thinks. And as he drives along the winding roads of Mir Ali’s forest paths, the light rain falling on his windscreen, he hears the tap tap tap of tamarind seeds.