Outside, there is war. The night sky above Paidara is studded with aircraft of all types, the Americans are not stinting on the Invasion of Pakistan. Sheets of fire rain from above, overwhelming the few feeble green tracers that rise from the guns of the mujahideen. They pass exploded, burning houses; by the light of one of them Sonia sees Amin’s stunned expression, his mouth gapes open.
“What are they doing?” he cries out. “This is insanity. They are killing everything.”
“It is the bomb, Amin,” she says. “There was a nuclear bomb in the village, made with material stolen from Pakistan. It gives them all the excuse they need.” Amin, that strong confident man, bursts into tears.
They are hustled into an intact house some streets away, the door forced open, the terrified family confined to one room, and the hostages are examined by a Special Forces medic, who recommends the immediate evacuation of Dr. Schildkraut. The old man is carried off and flown away.
The others are interrogated by men in jumpsuits without name tags or military insignia. Sonia tells her story to one of these. Not the true story, of course; he is not cleared to hear it. Has she ever told the true story? Probably not. Would she even recognize the true story if she heard it? Probably not. It is, she concludes, like the advice she received when first learning how to ride the circus horses. If the horse bolts, they told her, hang on and ride it out. Eventually the horse will get tired and stop. No matter how frightened you are, never try to jump off. Sonia has been riding this particular runaway for over twenty years, and she detects a slowing in the pace; these last events have an air of sweat and hard breathing. Soon, she thinks, she will step lightly off the steaming back and resume her real life. Her interrogator wonders why she smiles like that.
She passes Annette Cosgrove in the hall of the house of interrogation and offers a friendly look, but Annette stares straight ahead and passes by without a word. Someone not dead must take the blame for all this, Sonia thinks, and Annette has apparently included her in this group. Somewhat later she happens upon Father Shea and Manjit Nara. They are cordial but distant. There will be no joyful hugs among the released, and Sonia accepts this. No one wants to touch the death dealer.
The sounds of battle fade. The dawn comes, a chill one, with a wind that fills the air with the stink of burning and tosses the rich drifts of fresh debris into stinging clouds. Sonia and the other hostages are led out to view the prisoners and the wounded and slain, to identify those who were involved with the mujahideen and the kidnapping. They have placed the corpses in neat military rows in the street in front of the ruined mosque, where Sonia has twice been whipped. Mahmoud is there, and the man who cut Cosgrove’s head off, and the older man with the hennaed beard who wanted Rashida, and many other mujahideen, who were just faces in the crowd to the hostages but obviously had been wicked indeed, deserving of this fate. Rashida, who was not a mujahid, is also there, a little pile of bloodied rags, her wedding bangles gleaming on her thin wrists, and there is her father too, and a woman who may have been her mother or someone else’s mother, lines and lines of collateral damagees lying under a shifting, buzzing scrim of flies.
Idris Ghulam is not there, however; he has survived. He was blown through a window in the first moments of the battle and landed well; he has broken bones and his body is peppered with pieces of metal, many and painful, but he is not dead. She identifies him to her interrogator like a good citizen, and then kneels beside him.
“Peace be with you, Idris, and I am sorry to see you hurt,” she says in Pashto, “but I am happy to see you alive.”
He glares at her for an instant, then looks away. “Did you see this in your dreams?”
“Oh, yes,” she replies, “and if you recall I tried to warn you, but, as Rahman says, Like a child you put your hand in the fire, hoping for something good, unconscious of the pain to come.”
“They did all this, made all this death, just to save you?”
“No, there was another reason, but what does that matter? The dead are still dead, including those you killed yourself. It would have been better not to start the killing.”
“Will they kill me?”
“No, they will confine you, and perhaps you will be tortured in some way, not as badly, however, as what awaits you in Hell, unless you repent and change your life. There is still a lot of time. When I was your age I was a begum in a great house in Lahore, but after that I led a very different kind of life. Trust God and follow His commandments, Idris, and may you have peace.”
Now the interrogator demands to know what they’ve been saying. “We were just discussing religion,” says Sonia, and walks away.
22
Night in Lahore at the start of Ramadan. The Muslims have been fasting all day, and roasting too, because it’s August, and the crowds are thick, up and down the Mall and in Anarkali, where I am. I live here now, working for the family business. Like I figured, the army tried to stop-loss me when my enlistment ran out, but a call to Major Lepinski fixed that up pretty good. I was not that indispensable for national security, it turned out, and I was able to take Uncle Nisar up on his standing offer.
We’re sitting in Koh’s Tea Shop in Anarkali, on the terrace there, down the Mall from the museum. Koh’s is a tourist trap-no Lahori with any pretension to elite status would be caught dead there, among the Japanese tour groups and the backpacking blond girls-but I like it. I like it because it is near my house in Anarkali, and because if any of the elite ever do show up at Koh’s it’s because they want to see me without an appointment, in a place where none of their peers would be caught dead, and because the barman has an American generosity with the ice, which he makes from distilled water, and because if you look down the Mall you can just pick out through the haze the great gun Zam-Zammah on its stupid little traffic island across from the Lahore Museum, and also because Koh’s terrace has a low wall of solid concrete separating it from the street and affords excellent fields of fire in several directions.
I look down the road and see that, as usual, some kids are climbing on the gun, as is forbidden. It warms my heart, after a lifetime of following orders, to be in a place where laws are barely suggestions, are more like lists of actions that you can get rich by transgressing.
Yet we are not lawless here in Pakistan, we are feudal, a big difference, although our many lawyers don’t see it that way. Everyone loves feudalism in their hearts, which is why The Godfather and The Sopranos were huge hits; there is yet to be a movie about legislative markup or the courageous agents of the federal elections commission. We also have democracy here now, which means I vote for whomever Nisar tells me to, along with all the other thousands of his people, and I make sure my people vote right too. Nisar is a genius with the smooth aspects of the business world, while I am in charge of the rough parts.
Every big Pakistani firm does some rough work or has to defend against the rough work of rivals. There is extortion. Everybody has trucks, for instance, and what do you do if somebody wants money for not burning your trucks or beating your drivers? Forget the cops; the cops have been paid off or maybe they’re moonlighting as muscle in the same racket, so you have to show you’re tougher, that you won’t be intimidated. Maybe you make an example of the extortionist. Maybe you bribe a senior police official to pull the protection the extortionist is buying. It depends on the situation. I try to avoid violence where I can, but where I can’t I go in with the max, shock and awe, just like I learned from the Americans. I had to do a lot more of it when I first got here, so no one would think I was an asshole who just got the job because he was the sahib’s nephew. During that period I introduced kneecapping as a tool of Pakistani commerce, and it has worked pretty well for us. I am known around town as Bhatija Sahib, which means Mister Nephew-without irony, I believe.