I eyed my rear guard, the wall they formed my only defense against Naani’s men transforming into kings, and tried to figure out if my grandmother was just making all this up, to ensure easier, faster victories. Her advice could just be a ploy. She was not at all a trustworthy person when it came to important things like games.
Then I shrugged, and began to play, for the first time in my life using all the pieces at my disposal. I still lost.
“What was that?”
“What?” Naani asked, the very heart of innocence itself.
“You still beat me.”
“Of course. I’ve been playing the game properly for a lot longer than you have. You just started. You know, someone really wise once said, practice makes perfect . . .”
—
While we played the game of life, the games of death went on around us. Karachi became a casualty of the Kalashnikov effect, a geopolitical twist on chaos theory principles through which an automatic rifle fired in Afghanistan during a Soviet invasion can dramatically alter the character and destiny of the largest city in Pakistan, thousands of kilometers away.
The Kalashnikov effect created the Taliban. It brought down the Twin Towers. It maimed Iraq, and Syria and Yemen, and unleashed a wave of terror on the world it was unprepared to deal with.
Let’s not blame butterflies is what I’m saying.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan created a new front in the Cold War. In response, American money and arms flooded into Pakistan, and from there were smuggled north, across the border, to supply the resistance.
Money and arms alone, however, have never won a fight for freedom. A resistance requires fighters. To boost recruitment, campaigning against the Soviets was advertised as a jihad, a holy struggle. It was billed not as a simple annexation of one country by another, but rather as an invasion of Muslim lands by foreign nonbelievers. Taxpayer dollars, along with Saudi oil money, were used to push this narrative. Madrassas were built to create warriors willing to take up arms for what was declared a holy struggle.
Islam was weaponized for the Cold War.
It probably seemed like a good idea at the time.
The hard-line version of Islam taught by these madrassas, largely foreign to the subcontinent, metastasized. It fed on anxiety and fear created by the Muslim world’s modern decline. It argued that this decline was a direct result of moral decay in society, Allah’s punishment for deviation from the true path. In order to improve their fortunes, Muslims needed to regain God’s favor, and they could do that only by practicing the faith as it had been practiced by the Prophet and his Companions in medieval times.
A return to the way things were done before would surely bring a return to the glory that had come before. It was how, preachers claimed, Muslims could make Islam great again.
Hijabs started appearing in middle-class social circles more often than before. Preachers became icons. I started hearing arguments that music was a forbidden thing. It was even said that miswak, a twig from an arak tree, was better for dental hygiene than toothpaste. After all, miswak was what the Prophet had used. What chemical formula could compete with such a divine endorsement?
When my mother tried to get us to use miswak sticks, my father asked her if she wanted to sell our car and buy a camel instead. After all, he said, a camel was what the Prophet had used to get around.
Simply put, sexy was not back. Islam was back. It was rejuvenated. Tossing out fourteen hundred years of history and progress will do that to a religion, I guess.
Through the early part of the nineties, violence and unrest became common in Karachi, as weapons and returning jihadists flooded in, taking over industries, and bringing with them a gun culture that shifted the tectonic plates of sectarianism the city was built on. The sounds of distant Kalashnikovs being fired became the lullabies I fell asleep to at night.
My mother had always been religiously inclined, but usually reasonable. Unfortunately, as parties where society women would get together to listen to preachers became common, she discovered that what she’d thought was Islam was not Islam at all. She became reeducated and recommitted. It was around this time that she became convinced that wearing a head scarf was an obligation, not an option, after a peddler of piety told her that angels would drag women who did not cover their hair into hellfire by their exposed locks on the Day of Judgment.
My father was different, immune somehow to religiosity and chaos. I always felt safe, despite the growing lawlessness around us, because I knew he was there. He was not physically strong, but he was ideologically sound. The spirit of the age would never possess him.
His appearance was reassuring as well. Imtiaz Faris looked and sounded like a brown Santa Claus, with a deep voice and a big laugh. His presence served as a reminder that there were still solid, pleasant things in the world.
My earliest memories of my father are tied to music. He loved old, classical ghazals—short, poignant poems, usually about love and loss, set to music and sung in crooning, mournful voices. He would sit listening to them on his creaking, discolored teak rocking chair, parked next to an old gramophone, eyes closed, a wistful smile on his face. Sometimes I would sit by his feet. We would not speak but every once in a while, he would ruffle my hair with an affectionate hand.
He had a few English records as well, but broke those out only on special occasions, like a birthday or an anniversary. Then, with Dean Martin or Elvis singing in the background, he would rouse his heavy, pudgy body into a sort of comic jig, shaking his wide hips and wagging his eyebrows up and down, skipping and hopping, occasionally tipping an imaginary top hat to my mother, who often sat by, rolling her eyes but also, I think, trying not to laugh.
I last saw him dance in Pakistan while celebrating New Year’s Eve and the coming dawn of ’ninety-six. It was almost midnight. Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald were belting out “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.” I was singing along. My mother was knitting something and Aamir was shaking his head as my father twirled around the room with a goofy grin on his face.
Shouting erupted nearby. It took me a moment to realize that it was directed at our house. I looked out from a nearby window and . . . well, I don’t know how many people constitute a mob, but there were ten, maybe fifteen men outside our house. They were young, probably in their twenties, and they were loud. A few of them were carrying field hockey sticks with ill-disguised ill intent, and chanting, as if at a rally, demanding that we turn off the music. My father came to stand beside me, the smile struck off his face.
“What’s their problem?” I asked.
My mother answered. “New Year’s is a holiday made up by infidels. We are forbidden to celebrate it. Also, music is the instrument of Shaitan. Those are pious young men.”
Aamir hurried over to the gramophone and turned it off.
My father stood by the window until the mob, satisfied with the silence they had forced upon our home, moved on to shepherd other straying believers back into the fold they were creating.