The Lady of Bagram is a work of fiction and must be read and understood as such. It is loosely based on a true story.
Chapter One
Summer 2015
The Call
I almost never answer the phone. The intrusion feels like a poke in the eye and is rarely worth it; whatever it is that other people want, it takes too much from me, from the paragraph that I am always trying to finish, from the thought that I am trying to convert into an idea, or the just the peace, the stillness, I have created with so much effort inside my head.
The exception to my no-phone-call policy is as odd as the rule itself, and in the eyes of some just as self-absorbed. It applies when things are going well, when there are plenty of writing jobs and their proceeds are tumbling into my bank account, when my husband Sean and I are getting along, when my mother is as healthy as an old woman with many chronic illnesses can be and my editors are being kind. On those rare days on which a few of these happy conditions apply, I am filled with dread, convinced that I am hovering on the cusp of catastrophe. The older I get, the less I am able to trust the good times. I expect them to be precursors of something awful, something whose dimensions I, despite my imagination, cannot predict but which I sense acutely anyway. So obsessed am I with the comimg down of things that even the ascent up seems torture, holding me in thrall. I know the down is coming and so I wait and watch and listen, ever-vigilant to the arrival of the tumult and misfortune that always follows the good times.
It was just such a day set in a month in which things had been going suspiciously well that the telephone rang. It was late afternoon and the sun was shining through the window of my home-office in upstate New York and I was communing with a paragraph the last one of an article I had been attempting to finish all day long.
The display screen on my iPhone said the call was from an unknown number and as it rang a familiar series of doomsday scenarios unfurled in my head. It could the police or the paramedics, my brother or Azam could have had an accident, on the brink of death, whispering some last words. Or it could be my father, calling from a borrowed cellphone from some poorly lit Karachi hospital? Wading through this river of dread, I answered the phone.
The good thing about catastrophic thinking is that the ordinary turn of circumstance can deliver tremendous relief to those afflicted by the habit. A call from a telemarketer may be an annoyance but it is also a sort of deliverance. Catastrophe has been averted, the world is okay, at least for a bit, deep breaths can thus be drawn and sighs sent out. The call that came in that afternoon, however, was not so simple in what it delivered. A man’s voice was at the other end, terse and clipped and almost mechanical. “I am calling from Federal Medical Center Carswell,” he said, almost as soon as I had delivered a hesitant hello. “I am calling because an inmate named Aafia S has asked that we send you some of her personal items.” He paused. “Would you like to receive them?” I couldn’t decide if it was a question or an accusation.
I tried to hedge. I tried to ask what the items were and why Aafia was sending them to me. Then I asked to speak to her, a request that was immediately refused. “I don’t know her,” I insisted. The man on the other end of the line did not seem to care: “Would you like to receive them?” he asked impatiently. Stammering, I said yes. It was the summer of 2015 and things had been going well for a long time.
***
I did know Aafia S, or at least I knew of her, in the same way Americans know and have an opinion on O.J. Simpson or Elizabeth Holmes or any other famous person facing a trial. Aafia S, an MIT-trained neuroscientist and the first and only Pakistani woman serving an 86 year sentence for terror charges, was controversial and famous. People either strongly believed in her guilt and the fact that she was a terrorist, or they strongly believed that she was innocent, a pious woman framed by colluding intelligence agencies.
It was not always this way. Pakistanis had paid little attention to Aafia S when she disappeared over a decade ago, in March 2003. The Afghan war was blazing across the border, its conflagrations singeing the hastily drawn boundary that the country shared with Pakistan. Pakistanis were bothered mostly by the hordes of refugees that it sent to their streets and cities. “There they are,” motorists and shopkeepers would mutter as they saw the refugees settle on the sidewalks and slums and road medians in Karachi and Quetta and Peshawar. For their part, they stared back at Pakistanis their faces lined with war and want, as if bewildered at the continuation of normal life, the ordinariness of people still buying mangoes and eating ice-cream.
In those days when the War on Terror was in full swing and Pakistan teemed with CIA operatives or contractors, slinking around cities to smoke out terrorist hangouts. Some, like Shakil Afridi- the doctor who led the Americans to Osama Bin Laden, were enlisted from among the locals, duly bribed and charged with supplying information. These informants watched suspects taking note who came and went from a certain house, who was hosting guests from Afghanistan and who was buying weapons and potentially stockpiling them. These CIA agents thought they were the real thing, white men tanned and bearded, smug in their belief that they blended in with the locals. Some spoke Urdu and also Dari and Pashtun. They wanted, they needed, to catch terrorists and take the trophies back to America.
Some Pakistanis were also watching other Pakistanis. Pakistan’s storied Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, was, at least in theory, trying to aid Americans in their War on Terror, handing up one and then another leader of this or that terror outfit. It was a game for them; they knew that to save the country from greater American intrusions, they had to deliver up some terrorists. They also knew that if they delivered too many, they would no longer have any hold or any say or anything to promise. They doubted the American ability to figure out anything by themselves and so they wrapped and packaged some of their own enemies as terrorists and handed them over.
It was a time when many were disappearing. The people handed off by the ISI, the people carted off by the CIA, and the jihadis, who had fled Afghanistan following the U.S. invasion were all suddenly missing. So too were Osama Bin Laden and his deputies, lesser men of this or that jihadi organization, who needed to retreat and rest for a bit, wed and enjoy their wives and live ordinary lives.
Amid all of these disappearances and so many spies and secrets, it was no wonder that the disappearance of Aafia S raised few eyebrows. In one news report, printed March 20, 2003, just before her abduction, the MIT Tech, the student newspaper of her alma mater, notes that Aafia S and her husband were wanted for questioning by the FBI because of her work organizing various Muslim student groups while she was a student. Aafia S, the article noted, had been an award-winning student at MIT, using her award money for travel so she could research the “Effects of Islamization on Pakistani Women.” While at MIT in 1995, Aafia S had lived in a student dorm and her home address was listed in Karachi.
Ten days after the article’s publication, Aafia S and her children disappeared while on their way to the airport in Karachi.
***
When I found out about Aafia S’s disappearance from Karachi, I rolled my eyes. Her complicity in whatever terror plot or extremist plan would sit as a flat and heavy burden on the shoulders of every Pakistani student who would also be believed to be a terrorist. On the question of her guilt or innocence, I had strong opinions and not positive ones. I knew her type, the headscarf wearing, holier than thou girl of the Muslim Student Associations, busily arranging Quran study sessions, calling everyone brother and sister, insisting on shoving their superior Muslim-ness in the face of everyone they judged as less devout. The lives of those sort of girls revolved around Ramadan Potlucks and the Sisters Game Nights. All through college I had tried to keep my distance from such types. Theirs was a competitive showy piety, an enumeration of who kept up with all five prayers and never flirted and was a model of chastity grated on me.
I had come to America to get away from these sorts of strictures. They were all encompassing; girls shouldn’t do this and they shouldn’t do that, mustn’t appear before male guests, mustn’t go out alone, not talk too much, not laugh too loud, a seemingly endless list of rules. A daughter had to so this and a wife had to do that, the terms of relationships long set by convention and tradition, all of them centered around a hierarchy with men at the top.
As I saw it, women like Aafia S, wanted the same rules enforced even abroad. They wanted to show off their Muslim-ness, their strict adherence to the rules and their consequent “goodness” all the time. American culture was filthy, corrupt and full of temptations, they believed, but they were the pure and untouched, lit from the inside by the light of faith.
I blamed them for Islamophobia, these headscarf wearing evangelists; their persistent desire to be different and separate. As I saw it, Aafia S had been a part that world, partaking of an American education, American opportunities and American everything else, even while having only contempt for American culture. If she had disappeared, well; she must have done something to deserve it.
omg how exciting, is this novel going to be fed to us chapter by chapter, week to week? Yessss I am all for it.
I finished the dishes and now am impatiently waiting for chapter 2! Very compelling! A couple of minor nits (I'm a standards editor): ...Pashtun, some were even. ?? some were even what?
and, handed off by the ISI, -> handed off by ISI. This is great!