After Samad got his car, he figured he had the status to merit a wife. But his older brother said no. So Samad and his cousin/niece had eloped. Samad’s older brother had reacted predictably, vowing to kill Samad for insulting his honor and marrying his eighteen-year-old daughter.
This, also, was typical. Because Samad and his bride had disobeyed their family, both could be killed. So for weeks, Samad and his new bride were on the run, sheltered by friends in Lahore and sympathetic family members. Finally his mother helped broker a truce. Samad and his wife moved back home. And Samad started calling my office manager, begging for his job back.
I felt I didn’t have a choice. I didn’t want to train a new driver. And I blamed myself for tempting Samad, giving him too much trust and responsibility. He had reacted like any young man to an empty house, a pool table, and free booze—actually, he had reacted better than most. And I had bigger issues to worry about than a missing bottle of Midori liqueur. Dave was moving out. We had broken up, and the split was hardly amicable. Just before flying in from Kabul, he sent me an e-mail, apologizing for the hurt he had caused but saying he had wanted to be honest about his feelings. “I have no doubt you’ll be run off your feet when I come through, as it always was,” he wrote. “Maybe I do need someone who has time to tend for me when I come in.”
Maybe so. Samad helped him move out, even though it was confusing for him, a bit like subjecting a three-year-old to a divorce. Samad had bought all three of us key chains, each with our first initial. He had been thrilled when I started dating Dave, talking about my wedding and naming our firstborn before our one-month anniversary. Although divorce and single adults over thirty were quite common in my Pakistani circle of friends, in Samad’s family such things were scandalous.
While packing up, Dave was kind and polite. I wondered if we were making a mistake. But then friends forced me to go out for dinner instead of moping at home, and to go to the UN club for a drink.
“I don’t know,” I said. “That’s where he always goes.”
“That’s where everyone in Islamabad goes,” a friend said, reminding me how miserable our options were. “You can’t let him run your life.”
So we went, hiding in the back garden because Dave had been spotted inside. After a while, my curiosity won out.
“What was he doing?” I asked.
“Singing karaoke,” a friend said.
“What song?”
“‘My Way.’”
Meanwhile, Pakistan started to simmer again. It was August 2008. President Pervez Musharraf, who had managed to hold on to his presidency even as his popularity, power, and army post had been stripped away, finally stepped down. He didn’t really have a choice—his enemies had recruited enough votes in parliament to impeach him. He gave a speech, punctuated with tears. “God protect Pakistan,” he ended it. “God protect you, Pakistan, forever. Long live Pakistan.” And then Musharraf collected his note cards and tried to stand up, with some difficulty. With that, all vestiges of the country’s military rule were finished, at least for now.
Instead of resolving the political quagmire, his move only sharpened it. Pakistan’s fragile new ruling coalition was falling apart. The coalition had agreed to restore the judges fired by Musharraf within twenty-four hours of him leaving the presidency, but that deadline quickly passed. The tiger of Punjab, Nawaz Sharif, still defending the judiciary, threatened to pull out of the coalition. But Bhutto’s widower, Asif Ali Zardari, did not want to restore the judges. He probably suspected that they would throw out Musharraf’s controversial ordinance granting amnesty to hundreds of politicians for past crimes; Zardari had faced accusations of corruption for misappropriating as much as $1.5 billion. Mr. Ten Percent also had his eye on a new prize he had once claimed that he never wanted—the presidency.
The militants exploited the government’s many distractions. Two suicide bombers killed at least sixty-seven people during a shift change at the Pakistani army’s main weapons factory outside Islamabad. The insurgents also spread their control in the tribal areas, where the government had never held any sway. This time the Pakistani army tried to push back, moving into the Bajaur tribal agency and even bombing homes. As many as 260,000 civilians, or almost half the residents, fled Bajaur. Shoddy relief camps were set up, where children died of diarrhea and families slept on the ground. In some areas the militants did a better job of providing relief than the government. At a meeting with top UN refugee agency officials, Zardari offered his own creative solution to the insurgency in the tribal areas: Build a cement factory, where people could work, and build bulletproof homes, where they could live. He had even drawn up the plans for such houses himself, demanding that his minions hand them over to the UN.
Capping the chaos, Nawaz Sharif then dropped out of the government. This shocked me—he had repeatedly threatened to end his party’s support for the coalition, but I didn’t think he would, as this chess move would in effect checkmate himself, eliminating any power he had. I called Sharif for the first time in months, and he invited me over to the Punjab House in Islamabad. He had always been unfailingly polite and soft-spoken with me. He seemed old-fashioned, speaking my name as a full sentence and rarely using contractions.
This time, in a large banquet hall filled with folding chairs and a long table, Sharif told his aides that he would talk to me alone. At the time, I barely noticed. We talked about Zardari, but he spoke carefully and said little of interest, constantly glancing at my tape recorder like it was radioactive. Eventually, he nodded toward it.
“Can you turn that off?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said, figuring he wanted to tell me something off the record.
“So. Do you have a friend, Kim?” Sharif asked.
I was unsure what he meant.
“I have a lot of friends,” I replied.
“No. Do you have a friend?”
I figured it out.
“You mean a boyfriend?”
“Yes.”
I looked at Sharif. I had two options—lie, or tell the truth. And because I wanted to see where this line of questioning was going, I told the truth.
“I had a boyfriend. We recently broke up.” I nodded my head stupidly, as if to punctuate this thought.
“Why?” Sharif asked. “Was he too boring for you? Not fun enough?”
“Um. No. It just didn’t work out.”
“Oh. I cannot believe you do not have a friend,” Sharif countered.
“No. Nope. I don’t. I did.”
“Do you want me to find one for you?” Sharif asked.
To recap: The militants were gaining strength along the border with Afghanistan and staging increasingly bold attacks in the country’s cities. The famed Khyber Pass, linking Pakistan and Afghanistan, was now too dangerous to drive. The country appeared as unmoored and directionless as a headless chicken. And here was Sharif, offering to find me a friend. Thank God the leaders of Pakistan had their priorities straight.
“Sure. Why not?” I said.
The thought of being fixed up on a date by the former prime minister of Pakistan, one of the most powerful men in the country and, at certain points, the world, proved irresistible. It had true train-wreck potential.