The Shadow Of The Crescent Moon (3 page)

Samarra wouldn’t complain. She would study on her own, at home, reading second-hand physics books bought at the small bookstall at the bazaar that sold comic books and dog-eared copies of Rahman Baba’s poetry, and doing exercises in used exam workbooks until eventually the elders had no choice but to relent and allow her to attend the local university, provided she stopped after a Bachelor’s degree.

Aman Erum had applied, quietly, to the army. It was a secret attempt to flee. He was young, he had no record, his mother’s family was clean. He thought they might take him out of Mir Ali and into one of their cadet colleges. Two things happened. First, he was turned down. The army didn’t want men from these parts; they didn’t even have a recruitment office in Mir Ali then. The officer Aman Erum had spoken to, the lone man in khaki green on duty at the base, had laughed in his face.

So, first, Aman Erum had been turned down, and second, Inayat had found out. Aman Erum never knew how his father discovered his attempt to enlist in the armed forces – he hadn’t said a word to his mother or brothers – but Inayat knew. Discussing his second option, his only viable option, at the kitchen table one evening Aman Erum spoke of studying commerce at the local university.

‘It would be a step, obviously. I’m not going to study commerce just so I can stay in Mir Ali and haggle over the price of carpets. It would give me the foundation to apply for further studies abroad. Yes, fine, it will be expensive but if I work hard here perhaps I can get a scholarship.’

Aman Erum devoted more time to thinking about himself as he grew older and became bolder about expressing his desires. Sikandar, the middle brother, had been listening and holding a broken-off bite of
rotay
in mid-air.

‘How much do you think?’

Aman Erum considered the question. ‘I’d have to pay – it would be lakhs – even with a scholarship, but probably only the cost of housing and living.’

At that, Inayat, who ate very little, only some yoghurt with his
rotay
, pushed his plate away. ‘You will have to pay for your choices, Aman Erum, much more than you realize.’

The words hung between them.

Aman Erum’s heart started to beat fast, too fast. He looked at his own plate, filled with food he hadn’t touched because he’d been so busy talking. He picked up a piece of lamb, a small charred
boti
, and put it in his mouth.

Inayat placed his hands on the table and lifted himself out of his chair. He left the kitchen without another word.

The only way out for Aman Erum, then, was business. He had to earn his way out. Aman Erum was the eldest son, the one who would set the way for his brothers to follow, a way out of the carpet business the family had struggled in for decades – and which was now endangered because of the halting of trade routes and the army’s insistence on being given a share in the transportation of rugs across the Northern Frontiers.

‘
Askari
Carpets!’ laughed Aman Erum’s father, his hair a bright white from the roots of his scalp to the down of his
beard and neatly trimmed moustache. ‘Imagine that,’ he said, and laughed less confidently, more softly.

‘They will have put their fingers everywhere, even on the ground on which we stand and the fibres through which we weave our stories.’

Inayat had fought in the first battle for Mir Ali in the 1950s, and had survived. He had fought amongst the bravest, against the nervous young soldiers of Pakistan’s new army. He had raised his young sons on the stories of Mir Ali’s struggles.

‘After a fortnight of camping in the hills and peaks on our bellies, ducking bullets and trading fire with monstrous machines, we would dust off our shawls that doubled as elbow rests and mufflers and pillows and welcome in the next regiment that came from the city to take our place. After donating our leftover tea leaves and warmest winter protection, we walked an hour and a half to the doorsteps of our mothers’ homes.’

‘Did you go back?’ Aman Erum must have been fifteen. He was only a boy.

For many years after that conversation, Inayat shook with the memory of this question, a query Aman Erum did not even remember making.

‘Did we go back? Did we go back?’

Inayat shook his head and ran his hands through his hair.

Aman Erum did not remember asking if the rebels returned to the battlefield. But later in life, as he began to withdraw from Mir Ali, he remembered other questions from his teenage years.

‘The next two decades we spent in hiding, in torture camps, in unknown and unmarked cells across the country.’ As his body aged, as his shoulders drooped and the white hair of his eyebrows grew, and as Inayat’s lungs strained against his ribcage,
he committed the remainder of his life to passing on the memories of a youth lived in battle, fighting for Mir Ali.

‘The state did not wait, this time, for a rebel band to cross a frontier and plant a flag or issue a proclamation of independence and self-rule. This time they came to us first. They waited for the lull in fighting to settle in fully. For us fighters to take off our magazine clips, our rugged boots and camouflage and return to the daily lives and uniforms that took us to work as professors and shopkeepers and economics students and plumbers. And then they sent the soldiers in.’

Thousands of them, in convoys of armoured vehicles, weighed down with garlands of assault weapons and hand grenades, flooded into Mir Ali. They came in conquering battalions and in plain clothes. Aman Erum knew the story by heart.

Doors were broken down in the dead of night, men were kidnapped from their streets, women were widowed and children were orphaned to teach the town its most important lesson: there was no match for the ruthlessness of the state. Another generation of male warriors would not grow in Mir Ali.

Inayat brought himself to tears as he spoke.

‘Some of the elders were able to escape across the border to Afghanistan; some of their sons joined them and were eventually hunted down – killed and left to bleed on faraway soil and buried in no-man’s-land. For a time, till the late seventies, the state believed – truly believed! – that they had beaten the rebellion out of the people of Mir Ali.’

‘Haven’t they?’

Aman Erum remembered this question now.

‘Haven’t they already?’

And he would never forget the silence that followed.

Inayat did not tell Aman Erum his stories from then on. Inayat was a sentinel of Mir Ali’s history; he checked for those with
whom his nostalgia might be shared and for those to whom it should be denied.

‘Don’t isolate the boy,’ Zainab begged her husband as she watched him take their youngest into his memory, nightly feeding Hayat the stories while Aman Erum was left to his schoolbooks. ‘You’re excluding him.’

‘He’s too angry,’ Inayat would say quietly. ‘He counts my defeats.’

‘Aman Erum is just a boy,’ Zainab argued. ‘He won’t understand why you speak to Hayat about these stories and not to him.’

‘He understands.’

Inayat would shake his head and say quietly, ‘He understands very well, Zainab.’

Mir Ali’s history continued like this.

Most Pakistanis thought of Mir Ali with the same hostility they reserved for India or Bangladesh; insiders – traitors – who fought their way out of the body and somehow made it on their own without the glory of the crescent moon and star shining overhead.

But the shadow of that moon never faded over Mir Ali. It hung over its sky night after night, condemning the town to life under its cold shadow.

Mir Ali had stalled. Aman Erum refused to be stymied alongside it.

Aman Erum wanted to leave. He wanted a stamped passport out of his strangled home. But he said, convincingly, that it was only the opportunity to work freely that he wanted – a living that could not be threatened away.

He could make a business anywhere, he told his mother, who knew nothing about free markets but often dreamed of the world. He could take a flight to Australia and set up
an international travel agency marketing itself towards immigrants, those whose home countries did not feature on routes advertised at Qantas office desks or listed on their computers.

He could go to Canada – there were immigrants there too, living in empty, undecorated homes – and import local handicrafts that would be a reminder of the landscapes left thousands of miles away as they built their new Canadian lives.

England. He had heard of neighbours’ sons who left for England and worked in corner stores and restaurants until they built neighbourhoods out of their enterprise. It would be easy, Aman Erum told his family, his young brothers, once he learned the international language of business.

His brothers, younger by months and then by years, followed his plans avidly. Sikandar even silently marked Aman Erum’s university textbooks as his own for when he also earned a place to study commerce. Together, he and Hayat waited for invitations to be offered, for chances to become partners in Aman Erum’s yet-to-be-named, yet-to-be-established international businesses.

But Aman Erum’s invitations never came without a price.

‘The Pir Roshan road
jumat
?’ the taxi driver says, turning his head so the passenger, who has not stirred in his seat or moved his eyes away from the window, can hear him. ‘It’s not what it used to be. The sermons are short and uninspired. Why don’t you go to the Sulaiman mosque instead? I can drive you there. The imam is very spirited, fiery, much better.’

‘One of my brothers is going there. I’m going to Hussain Kamal
jumat
,’ Aman Erum says, as he follows Mir Ali’s roads intently. He doesn’t look at the taxi driver, a jaundiced-looking fellow with a brown woollen sweater over his wrinkled
kameez
.

‘So why not go with him? What are you doing going to that
far-off mosque when you could be with family at Sulaiman
jumat
?’

‘Too dangerous.’

He turns his head away from the window, just a degree, to meet the frown of the taxi driver’s eyebrows, a look almost permanently stitched to the man’s forehead.

‘In case something happens.’

Aman Erum clears his throat. The sentence is stuck in his windpipe and needs to be ejected properly. Does he sound paranoid?

No one goes to the vegetable market with their mother; she goes alone and carries the thin plastic bags of over-ripened aubergines and salty karela on her own, her arthritic knuckles turning white with the weight of the vegetables.

No one works at the mechanic stall their father built with his sons’ hands, after the death of the family’s old carpet business, a death that came after Aman Erum’s refusal to take it over – as he is often reminded. They take shifts when things pile up for their father’s old manager, who still runs the shop. But no longer do Aman Erum or his brothers stand together over burned engines, smoking cigarettes through fingers stained with toxic grease and sweat.

No one prays together, travels in pairs, or eats out in groups. It is how they live now, alone.

The taxi driver’s forehead falls; his eyes understand.

‘I don’t go for Friday
munz
any more. It’s better not to. Allah will exempt us. He has already exempted us. He has exempted and misplaced and forgotten everything that came to Him from Mir Ali, from the frontiers of this country within a country.’

Aman Erum doesn’t want to get into it.

But the taxi driver has already started. ‘The state lies while promising autonomy – more than autonomy! – and decentralization so that each province can regulate its own affairs. And
now he’s coming here today, that crook of a minister is coming
here
and using words like “democracy”, “reconciliation”, “devolution”. Does he think we are simple people, that we will think those words are promises? Does he think we won’t notice that they have come up with a new way of using our own people against us?’

Aman Erum doesn’t want to talk about the visit. It’s all anyone has been interested in talking about for weeks now.

‘
Khair
,’ the taxi driver continues, ‘at least the media tries not to treat the people of Mir Ali like total barbarians. They at least speak of us with curiosity. That, and pity for our uninspired youth.’

‘What else can we do?’ Aman Erum shrugs.

‘There are some who know.’ The taxi driver’s eyes look at his passenger in the rear-view mirror. ‘Know what to do and how to do it. Believe me,
zwe
, we have legions of them.’

‘What next? What now for Mir Ali?’

Inayat had refused to answer his eldest son.

‘Don’t tell me you think there’s a way out of this? That you can keep going?’

Inayat had always known what would happen next. They all knew, those men who lived out their youth in mud bunkers drinking murky rainwater and tea leaves, what would come of their struggle.

The state would begin to fight its own.

Town by town, civil wars were lit by the wide-scale violence of the army – a violence that spanned decades and finally reached its zenith in the War on Terror. Swat, Bajaur, Deer, Bannu … one by one they all rose up against the state.

‘The army didn’t even see it coming,’ Inayat said as he leaned his body across the kitchen table, taking Hayat’s hand in his own. ‘They cannot see how they created this. How
they gave life to our insurgency.’ Inayat pressed his son’s hand.

Mir Ali, when its moment came, rose to right a historic wrong. The district and the town that was its heart would rally. Mir Ali would fight. ‘Everything we in Mir Ali know about our lives will have to change,’ Inayat said, preparing Hayat for the struggle ahead. ‘We will teach our children to live with curfews and midnight raids, prepare the elderly for moves at three in the morning, abandoning our homes and possessions. Each and every member of the household will know that pain is of no consequence when fighting for the collective.’

Hayat was ready. Hayat had always known it was his destiny above that of all the others. His eldest brother cared for nothing else besides his studies, his business opportunities, his faraway options for livelihood – selling dirt-cheap knick-knacks from his hometown at inflated prices or fleecing visiting tourists when the mountain climate was right and the river was swollen with rainbow trout. He was of Mir Ali but had decided very early on never to make his future here, only his fortune.