The Lady of Bagram

The Prologue

Dear Readers: You are the first people to read this. As I have mentioned earlier, this work is based on a true story. All the installments to this serialized work will appear under “The Lady of Bagram.” Finally, this material has images of violence.

Prologue

Karachi, Pakistan. March 30th 2003

The yellow Metrocab had been waiting just outside the gate for more than half an hour. The driver, a dark, leather-skinned man with a hennaed beard rang the bell once again. He could have earned a few hundred rupees in the time he had already wasted here, he thought grumpily.  A servant had flagged him down from the main road to this side street and then disappeared into the house. He rang the bell once, and then again, no one answered. The house was small, a squat, single story behind a gray gate and he knew from the looks of it that they would not pay him extra for the wait, the extra trouble. But it was the middle of the afternoon, he consoled himself, there would not be much other business on the main streets. At this hour in Karachi, most people were already where they had to be, the men inside airless offices in crudely constructed high rises, the women cooking evening meals in equally claustrophobic kitchens.

This was not true of the woman who emerged from behind the gate. He heard her before he saw her, her high shrill voice instructing the servant to be careful with her bags as he dragged them out of the small door in the gate.  The woman herself was covered completely in black, a black veil shielded her face, a black tunic came down to her toes, which were covered in black socks fitted into black shoes. Black gloves covered her hands, every scrap of skin save a tiny sliver before her eyes, was covered.  On her hip, she balanced a baby, his bright blue t-shirt a splash of incongruous color against his mother’s austerity. Next to her, another boy of six or seven clutched the hand of his little sister who looked to be about four years old. Brother and sister were clad in jeans, their T-shirts emblazoned with logos for a Disney theme park.  On their backs were identical Disney backpacks. They looked eager and excited; as their mother pushed them into the backseat; “Will this car take us to the airplane”? the girl asked her mother. She never got a response.

 After their battered suitcases had been loaded up into the trunk and they were all crammed in the backseat, the driver waited a while. Women who were so covered up did not usually travel alone with only their children. He assumed that a man, a father or a husband or a brother, their guardian, would be joining them soon, riding up front with him in the front passenger seat.  A few minutes passed and no man came.  From the back he heard the woman say “We need to go to Jinnah Airport.” There must be no man coming he understood as he started up the car and began backing out of the lane on to the main street. The baby started to cry. From the rear-view mirror he could see the mother fumbling in her large black bag, she pulled out a pacifier. He did not see the white SUV that had also been waiting in the lane before the little house, watching and waiting for them to get going.

Twenty minutes later, they emerged from the stop and go traffic of Gulshan-e-Iqbal, the middle-class suburb where he had picked them up and merged onto Sharea-Faisal, Karachi’s main arterial road that leads to the airport.  The baby, sucking on his pacifier had nodded off to sleep. The other two children pressed their faces to the windows of the car. Every now and then, their mother exhorted them not to put their mouths to the dirty glass and all its germs. Mostly she was silent, staring out as the city sped by. Every now and again, she would dig into her purse, check on some document, some piece of paper she worried she had forgotten.

The little family in the metro cab would not make it to the airport. About a mile before the main Jinnah International Terminal, is the entrance to the old terminal of the airport. Shuttered and shut down for most of the year, it is used only during the Hajj season, where the thousands of pilgrims traveling to Saudi Arabia would overwhelm Jinnah International’s main terminal and had to be diverted here. It was not Hajj season now.  As the cab approached the entrance to the old terminal, two white SUV’s appeared on either side of it. The SUV behind them, the one that had followed them to the house, came closer boxing them in. almost touching the fender of the cab. Frightened, the driver looked to his right, only to have the color drain from his face. The man seated in the front of the SUV was holding up a gun and it was pointed at him. He motioned to the cab driver to take the exit toward the old airport. To comply, he had to swerve suddenly and make a sharp turn. “What are you doing?’ the woman screamed from the back as the two older kids were thrown to one side of the back seat.  The cab screeched to a stop. The three white SUVs, covered and unmarked pulled up on the front, back and the right side of them. The first man dragged the cab driver out of the car, the others yelled to the woman to get out.

The cabdriver was thrown down on the ground, his beard and face pressed hard against the asphalt.  Smarting against the fall he felt the man’s heavy foot pressing down on his back, the sharp prod of his gun as he gruffly ordered him to stay down.  The cab driver could not see but he could hear, the woman was screaming and refusing to get out of the car, the baby bawled, the son and the daughter joined him.  “You can’t do this to me” he heard the woman say. “Who are you?” she plead “I will not give you my children, I will die before I give you my children” she wailed. “Get out of the car and come with us?” a loud but measured voice commanded them. “We will not hurt you” it said.

It was the middle of the day, but not a single car passed them on the side road to the abandoned airport terminal. Minutes after they had been stopped, the man with his foot on the cabdriver’s back dragged him over the asphalt to the side of the road, the small sharp pebbles of asphalt clung to his skin, made his face bleed.  The woman was shrieking even more loudly now, her older children had been dragged out of the car. Their voices were more distant now, still begging for their mother. “Give me back my children” the woman plead “God will curse you, you shameless men.”  “Don’t you dare touch my baby” she warned through her hysteria “I will die before I let you touch my baby”

The gunmen mumbled commands among themselves. Their leader ordered one to enter the car from each side and pull the woman that way. It sounded like an organized operation; with clear instructions to capture her alive, to not kill her. After the command to forcibly yank her out of the cab, the woman’s screams became fainter, muffled. There were a few moments of complete silence and then a baby’s piercing cry.  “Suleiman, Suleiman wake up Suleiman” he heard the children yell.  The men barked more orders, “take it away” he heard the commanding voice say. The woman screamed again, a guttural and wild yell, primal in its anguish. “He’s dead” she screamed, her voice piercing through the desolate and overheated Karachi afternoon.  

The cab driver did not understand what was happening, who was this woman and why did the men want her. Frightened, he began to mutter the prayer Muslims are supposed to say in their dying moments. The men remained unhurried and terse, they were professionals, not street criminals who would have taken what they could and been on their way. They had already killed a baby, the cab driver thought, would they kill the others too, would they kill him? He cursed the moment he had stopped his cab for this woman’s servant. He thought of his wife, his newly born grand son, he continued to pray.

The woman was also praying, shrieking and screaming and begging the baby to wake up. He could no longer hear the children. Had they been killed too?  He could not tell. Afraid to move, the weight of the foot on his back stayed steady and unmoving. Then, suddenly,, car doors began to shut, engines started back up and more commands were barked. “Clear out and make sure nothing is left behind” he heard. The heavy foot that had been resting on his back, moved a bit and then lifted. In that one tiny moment, the cab driver took a breath… maybe he would be spared. He was just a poor man, he did not even know who this woman was, who these men were. The words began to form on his lips, a plea for his life. And then the bullets came sharp and swift, the first the second and the third, pop pop and pop, two in the head, one in the heart and the man was no more.

It was dark by the time the time the scene was discovered. The cab driver’s body had stiffened, the blood from his wounds threading a webbed pattern on the gray asphalt. Flies buzzed on his wounds and over the sticky blood. The men who found him, a car full of men leaving for Dubai had taken a wrong turn into the old airport.  Coming from a distant village, they had not known that the old airport was not the new airport. When they saw him they stopped their car and they stood over the body. “It looks like someone had it out for this man, one mumbled”. “Inallah he wa inna illahe rajeoon” they murmured together. It was the prayer for the dead. Frightened themselves, they peered into the back of the car, and then the front.  The meter was still running, it was up to nearly ten thousand rupees, it had been a while since the murder. They missed the small pool of blood on the right side of the car’s passenger compartment. The police, when they arrived to investigate another two more hours later, missed it too.  It must have been some altercation about the cab fare, they decided.