Praying to Be Tall
WHEN I WAS thirteen I stopped growing. I had always looked older than I was but suddenly all my friends were taller than me. I was one of the three shortest girls in my class of thirty. I felt embarrassed when I was with my friends. Every night I prayed to Allah to be taller. I measured myself on my bedroom wall with a ruler and a pencil. Every morning I would stand against it to check if I had grown. But the pencil mark stayed stubbornly at five feet. I even promised Allah that if I could grow just a tiny bit taller I would offer a hundred
I was speaking at a lot of events but because I was so short it wasn’t easy to be authoritative. Sometimes I could hardly see over the lectern. I did not like high-heeled shoes but I started to wear them.
One of the girls in my class did not return to school that year. She had been married off as soon as she entered puberty. She was big for her age but was still only thirteen. A while later we heard that she had two children. In class, when we were reciting hydrocarbon formulae during our chemistry lessons, I would daydream about what it would be like to stop going to school and instead start looking after a husband.
We had begun to think about other things besides the Taliban, but it wasn’t possible to forget completely. Our army, which already had a lot of strange side businesses, like factories making cornflakes and fertilisers, had started producing soap operas. People across Pakistan were glued to a series on prime-time TV called
Over a hundred soldiers had been killed in the military operation and 900 injured, and they wanted to show themselves as heroes. But though their sacrifice was supposed to have restored government control, we were still waiting for the rule of law. Most afternoons when I came home from school there were women at our house in tears. Hundreds of men had gone missing during the military campaign, presumably picked up by the army or ISI, but no one would say. The women could not get information; they didn’t know if their husbands and sons were dead or alive. Some of them were in desperate situations as they had no way to support themselves. A woman can only remarry if her husband is declared dead, not missing.
My mother gave them tea and food but that wasn’t why they came. They wanted my father’s help. Because of his role as spokesman for the Swat Qaumi Jirga, he acted as a kind of liaison between the people and the army.
‘I just want to know if my husband is dead or not,’ pleaded one lady I met. ‘If they killed him then I can put the children in an orphanage. But now I’m neither a widow nor a wife.’ Another lady told me her son was missing. The women said the missing men had not collaborated with the Taliban; maybe they had given them a glass of water or some bread when they’d been ordered to do so. Yet these innocent men were being held while the Taliban leaders went free.
There was a teacher in our school who lived just a ten-minute walk from our house. Her brother had been picked up by the army, put in leg irons and tortured, and then kept in a fridge until he died. He’d had nothing to do with the Taliban. He was just a simple shopkeeper. Afterwards the army apologised to her and said they’d been confused by his name and picked up the wrong person.
It wasn’t just poor women who came to our house. One day a rich businessman arrived from Muscat in the Gulf. He told my father that his brother and five or six nephews had all disappeared, and he wanted to know if they had been killed or were being held so he knew whether to find new husbands for their wives. One of them was a
This wasn’t just happening in Swat. We heard there were thousands of missing all over Pakistan. Many people protested outside courthouses or put up posters of their missing but got nowhere.
Meanwhile our courts were busy with another issue. In Pakistan we have something called the Blasphemy Law, which protects the Holy Quran from desecration. Under General Zia’s Islamisation campaign, the law was made much stricter so that anyone who ‘defiles the sacred name of the Holy Prophet’ can be punished by death or life imprisonment.
One day in November 2010 there was a news report about a Christian woman called Asia Bibi who had been sentenced to death by hanging. She was a poor mother of five who picked fruit for a living in a village in Punjab. One hot day she had fetched water for her fellow workers but some of them refused to drink it, saying that the water was ‘unclean’ because she was a Christian. They believed that as Muslims they would be defiled by drinking with her. One of them was her neighbour, who was angry because she said Asia Bibi’s goat had damaged her water trough. They had ended up in an argument, and of course just as in our arguments at school there were different versions of who said what. One version was that they tried to persuade Asia Bibi to convert to Islam. She replied that Christ had died on the cross for the sins of Christians and asked what the Prophet Mohammad had done for Muslims. One of the fruit pickers reported her to the local imam, who informed the police. She spent more than a year in jail before the case went to court and she was sentenced to death.
Since Musharraf had allowed satellite television, we now had lots of channels. Suddenly we could witness these events on television. There was outrage round the world and all the talk shows covered the case. One of the few people who spoke out for Asia Bibi in Pakistan was the governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer. He himself had been a political prisoner as well as a close ally of Benazir. Later on he became a wealthy media mogul. He went to visit Asia Bibi in jail and said that President Zardari should pardon her. He called the Blasphemy Law a ‘black law’, a phrase which was repeated by some of our TV anchors to stir things up. Then some imams at Friday prayers in the largest mosque in Rawalpindi condemned the governor.
A couple of days later, on 4 January 2011, Salman Taseer was gunned down by one of his own bodyguards after lunch in an area of fashionable coffee bars in Islamabad. The man shot him twenty-six times. He later said that he had done it for God after hearing the Friday prayers in Rawalpindi. We were shocked by how many people praised the killer. When he appeared in court even lawyers showered him with rose petals. Meanwhile the imam at the late governor’s mosque refused to perform his funeral prayers and the president did not attend his funeral.
Our country was going crazy. How was it possible that we were now garlanding murderers?
Shortly after that my father got another death threat. He had spoken at an event to commemorate the third anniversary of the bombing of the Haji Baba High School. At the event my father had spoken passionately. ‘Fazlullah is the chief of all devils!’ he shouted. ‘Why hasn’t he been caught?’ Afterwards people told him to be very careful. Then an anonymous letter came to our house addressed to my father. It started with ‘
In those days it seemed like everyone was talking about America. Where once we used to blame our old enemy India for everything, now it was the US. Everyone complained about the drone attacks which were happening in the FATA almost every week. We heard lots of civilians were being killed. Then a CIA agent called Raymond Davis shot and killed two men in Lahore who had approached his car on a motorbike. He said they had attempted to rob him. The Americans claimed he was not CIA but an ordinary diplomat, which made everyone very suspicious. Even we schoolchildren know that ordinary diplomats don’t drive around in unmarked cars carrying Glock pistols.
Our media claimed Davis was part of a vast secret army that the CIA had sent to Pakistan because they didn’t trust our intelligence agencies. He was said to be spying on a militant group called Lashkar-e-Taiba based in Lahore that had helped our people a lot during the earthquake and floods. They were thought to be behind the terrible Mumbai massacre of 2008. The group’s main objective was to liberate Kashmir’s Muslims from Indian rule, but they had recently also become active in Afghanistan. Other people said Davis was really spying on our nuclear weapons.
Raymond Davis quickly became the most famous American in Pakistan. There were protests all over the country. People imagined our bazaars were full of Raymond Davises, gathering intelligence to send back to the States. Then the widow of one of the men Davis had murdered took rat poison and killed herself, despairing of receiving justice.
