I don’t claim to be better than any of the people who do this — it’s simply that my war story is you, Maheen, and you will not be contained within four lines; instead, you bring up all the memories the rest of us try to forget.
What happens when you work so hard to forget a horror that you also forget that you have forgotten it? It doesn’t disappear — the canker turns inwards and mutates into something else. In this city that we both love and claim — even though our families’ histories lie elsewhere — what will the canker become? This is turning into a diatribe, I know, but I must say it because all the silence around me is so terrifying. Yes, I am terrified, Maheen — because this country has seen what it is capable of, but it hasn’t yet paused to take account.
We should not have kept our name.
Pakistan died in 1971. Pakistan was a country with two wings — I have never before thought of the war in terms of that image: a wing tearing away from the body it once helped keep aloft — it was a country with a majority Bengali population and all its attendant richness of culture, history, language, topography, climate, clothing…everything. How can Pakistan still be when all of that, everything that East Pakistan added to the country, is gone? Pakistan was a nation with an image of itself as a place that was created because that creation was the only way its leaders saw possible to safeguard the rights of a minority power within India. How can Pakistan still be when we have so abused that image — first by ensuring the Bengalis were minimised and marginalised both politically and economically, and then by reacting to their demands for greater rights and representation with acts of savagery? How can Pakistan still be when the whole is gone and we are left with a part? (When we are willing to treat a part as the whole don’t we fall victim to circumscribed seeing, a thing we can ill afford?) We should have recognised that the Pakistan of dreams died and was buried in the battle fields of ’71. Or…
Or, Maheen, is it possible to reclaim a name?
It is a name for which I have great affection, great regard. But what must be done to restore it to what it could have stood for? Perhaps our children will answer that question one day, if we give them the tools — the information — they need for that task.
We act as though history can be erased. Of course we want to believe that — the cost of remembering may break our wilted spirits. But if we believe in erasure we tell ourselves it is possible to have acts without consequences. The finger squeezing the trigger becomes a thing apart from the bullet that speeds across the sands, which becomes a thing apart from the child looking down at his blood pumping out of his heart. And that child, that bullet, that finger, they become things way, way apart from our lives, here, in rooms where we look upon our own sleeping children.
I don’t know if I’ve made any sense, and now I’m blotting the ink with these meaningless tracks of tears.
I will — if you allow it, and I’ll take your silence as ayes — I will tell my daughter what I did — no, let me not phrase that in the past: I will tell my daughter what I have done — when she is old enough to grasp how unforgivable it was. When she is old enough to look within and around, and understand the canker. And this is the form my own canker will take: the fear, the fear always, that when I tell her she will turn away from me.
So here is my promise to you: I will help Yasmin bring up our daughter in such a way that she will have to look at me in horror when I finally tell her the truth of what I said.
There is nothing that gives me more joy these days than looking at you and knowing you are happy. My love always,
Zafar
. .
When I arrived back in Karachi that summer, the summer of 1995, he was waiting for me at the airport. Waiting inside the terminal. Uncle Asif’s contacts again, no doubt.
I walked towards him, jet-lagged, the strap of my carry-on flight bag cutting into my shoulder. ‘I read the letter you wrote Aunty Maheen,’ I said.
‘I know. Did I sound like a self-righteous ass?’
‘Yes,’ I said, and then I quoted the last three paragraphs of the letter back to him.
When he put his arms around me, there was a hesitation on both our parts, but although I didn’t hug him back I didn’t feel the need to pull away either, and that, at least, was a start.
I had read all the papers on the Net, detailing showdowns, stalemates, body counts, analyses, but when I stepped out of the airport and headed home what struck me most was the vulnerability of cars. Glass on all sides, barring neither stares nor fists nor bullets. And was that man criminal, lunatic or immortal angel that he could stand on the pavement, smoking a cigarette, as though life’s greatest danger was falling ash?
Electricity failures and water shortages. Humidity that sheened my skin with sweat, seconds after I stepped out of the air-conditioned car. What water there was, was warm. Electricity repairmen needed police escorts to guard them from Karachiites living in dark and heat for days at a time. But what of those areas the police dared not go to for fear of being attacked themselves? To counter the electricity shortage, there was a ban on neon lights. Driving home from the Club at dinner time was like driving through a ghost town — darkness everywhere save for traffic lights, and who wanted to risk stopping at a red light in those days?
‘Aunty Maheen, have you heard from Karim?’
‘No, darling, just postcards. He’s teaching English in Mexico somewhere. Hasn’t got a phone, and, frankly, sweetheart, the way things are in Karachi, if I do speak to him I’ll do everything I can to dissuade him from entering those city limits.’
Rocket launchers and gunfire in Boat Basin. Sonia’s brother, Sohail, was there when it happened. He told us about the incredible illumination of the night sky when the rocket launchers exploded and how the sound of bullets at first resembled firecrackers. How often we’d stopped in that part of town over the years, after school and after parties, scrounging through one another’s purses and wallets for money to spend on meals at Chips and Mr Burger and Flamingo Chaat. How could the violence reach somewhere so familiar?
‘Why don’t you just stop reading the papers?’ Zia said to me on the phone from New York.
There were mornings when that was a tempting idea, but I found I could no longer say to the world, there’s nothing I can do to change this, so why think too hard about it? I still didn’t think there was anything I could do to change the situation, but now it felt like an abomination to pretend to live outside it.
I learnt about the cyclical nature of violence that summer. Since November when the army had pulled out of Karachi after failing to quell the ‘law and order situation’, law-enforcement had returned to the hands of the Rangers (I had once thought their name amusing, but there was no comedy to be found in the mention of them anymore) and their attempts to bring about security through ruthlessness was only breeding further terrorism. Extra-judicial killings every day. And there was a split in the MQM — the work of the intelligence agencies, so the rumour went, who saw (or thought they did) the efficiency of getting a group to break in two, each side turning bloodily on the other. But all the political analyses in the world couldn’t quite explain what was happening in Karachi — what can explain men on motorbikes spraying bullets everywhere, killing without regard for ethnicity or age or gender?