The Lost Pearl (2012) (2 page)

To stop worrying was perhaps an unreasonable expectation of a mother. I agreed with my father, though; I did not want to even think about being married. I simply wished my life to continue the same way, the problem-free life of a picture-perfect family. Who knew how my life would change a few days after this conversation took place? Who knew that the princess would fall from her throne, breaking her tiara into a million pieces and letting her heart of gold melt into a sea of sorrow?

February 11 came and it changed my life forever. I had an argument with Sahir, who had torn up the math homework that I had spent more than an hour completing. In a fit of rage, I pushed him, and he hit his mouth against the corner of the center glass table. I immediately regretted what I had done, held his hand, and took him to my mother.

“Ammi, Sahir hurt himself, he’s crying.” By then his upper lip was bleeding profusely, and I noticed it swelling slightly from the middle. My heart was racing, and I was saying a silent prayer: Oh, please make him better, God. Don’t make him have stitches or have any broken teeth.

“Let’s make it better
Beta
, she said, using the oft used endearing term for child, while disappearing into the kitchen to bring some ice. My father arrived at the scene soon after and kissed Sahir before assuming the role of investigator.

“What happened?” he inquired, looking at me.

My eyes downcast, I replied, “He hit his face on the table, Papa.”

When my brother returned after having his lip treated, my father asked him if he had been jumping from the chair, which had, of late, become one of his favorite passions.

“No, Papa. Apa pushed me so hard I hit my face,” he said with an angry expression, still sobbing. Papa turned to me, and guiltily I confessed to the crime.

“I am disappointed that you pushed him, but I am more disappointed that you lied to me,” he said. “In this house, we only speak the truth.”

Papa never raised his voice, but his words were always more powerful than the verdict of a jury. I felt ashamed. Still trying to defend myself, I argued, “I didn’t lie, Papa,” tears welling up in my eyes. “I just didn’t tell you the whole story.”

“Silence can be golden, but remember silence is as bad as a lie if it is used to hide the truth, OK, Princess?”

“I am sorry, Papa; it will not happen again. I am sorry, Sahir. You know I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

To cheer us up, Papa floated the idea of ice cream at Snoopy’s. My mother resisted it mildly, arguing that it was cold and a school night, but her ice-cream-loving family soon outvoted her. “I want blueberry, or maybe I’ll go with coconut,” I said, before even reaching the destination.

“I’ll have chocolate,” chimed in Sahir, forgetting his injury momentarily.

I wondered what would become of my homework but pushed the thought aside. I remember vividly the taste of that ice cream (eventually I had taken both flavors), the cool wind in my face, and the old Indian song “
Bachpan kay din
” or “Days of Childhood” playing in the car on the way home, my father softly humming along with the renowned voice of Lata Mangeshkar.

The standing ritual in our home was to say goodnight and “I love you” to Ammi and Papa and thanking God for all his
blessings before going to bed. The evening of February 11, I got wrapped up in redoing my homework and waited until late at night before approaching my father. He was in his study preparing for an upcoming meeting. I folded my homework neatly and put it in my bag. I was loving algebra; it all seemed to make perfect sense and was so immediately gratifying. The new version was much neater than the original one, so perhaps it was a blessing that Sahir had torn it up. Also, had he not, we might have missed out on the ice cream. Thankfully Sahir’s lip did not look too bad. At least not bad enough to hurt, and hopefully not bad enough for everyone at school to notice the following morning. I was grateful that he had not torn up my English homework, which was an essay entitled “The Best Day of My Life.” It would have been impossible to reproduce the same words. I had described the day when my father had returned from a long official tour. It had also been the day I had shown him my report card and he had said I made him proud and he knew that one day I would do something that would make him the proudest father of all. “You are meant to do great things,” he had said.

I checked that my red-and-white uniform was pressed and my black shoes neatly polished. I checked my pencil box to make sure it had all the pencils sharpened and the pen filled with ink. We had just started using the fountain pen, and I always had marks on my hands and had to be careful not to get blue blotches on my uniform. I had already wished Ammi and Sahir good night. I still had to hug Papa, so I decided to sneak into his office and wait until after he finished his work before startling him with my hug. He was so engrossed in his papers that he did not notice me discreetly climbing under his mahogany desk.

I wondered what my father did that required him to work so many hours into the night. He often talked about his vision for our country. He once told me how many people had sacrificed their lives to build Pakistan and to finally achieve independence from the British in 1947. But this dreamland had unfortunately
been plagued by lack of good leadership. Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who had been the founder of the nation, had died a year after independence was achieved and his successors had struggled to lead this new country amidst the numerous challenges that they faced. In the then-recent history, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s regime had been toppled by Army Chief General Zia-ul-Haq in a bloodless coup. This had occurred in July of 1977, soon after my birth. General Zia had stated that he was “totally committed to reviving democracy, and [planned to] hold fair and free elections.” We do not intend to stay for long, months only, he had said, and here we were, nine years later, and he was still president. Justice must be done, he had said, and even though he denied the allegations of influencing the courts decisions, most believed that he was behind the hanging of Bhutto. My father said General Zia was taking the country in a backward direction, and he was worried about weapons and drugs coming in through the porous Afghanistan border. He had hope for Pakistan but said a lot had to change before we could make global progress.

I changed my hiding place to a more comfortable one behind the curtain, from where I could observe Papa closely. The cool night breeze was coming in through the window adjacent to the desk, which had recently been broken in by a neighbor’s ball and was awaiting repair. A mug bearing the caption “All-Star Dad,” which I had bought for him a year before, sat on his table, filled with tea and he was sipping from it periodically. He had removed his wallet from his pocket, and taken off his wrist -watch, and placed both of them on top of a book titled,
Immigration Laws
. He must have read three fourths of it, I thought, guessing by the placement of the bookmark that was peeking through it. I was happy to observe that the square silver ashtray, which had previously occupied a corner of the table, had moved. My mother had been working on the project of having him give up his cigars for as long as I could remember. A few days before, she had used the powerful tool of “do you want to live long and be there to see
your children graduate from college? And play with your grandchildren?” and it had worked like a charm. The cigars had been thrown away, and the ashtray had been reassigned a new position with other antiques on the shelf.

I would come out from behind the curtain, hug him, we would laugh together at my hiding trick, and we would all go to sleep and dream of happy things that the next sunrise would bring. Tomorrow would be marked by the usual hurried breakfast, with Sahir not finishing his milk fast enough, Ammi not getting the servants to do everything efficiently enough, and Papa not getting to read the newspaper quick enough. Then would come school, which meant seeing Amna, my other friends, and my teachers, all of whom I adored. I was hoping I would get a star for my redone homework. I had studied the spellings for the test the next morning because I had to get them all right, including “receive” and “relieve,” which always confused me, in order to make my parents proud. The many imperfections would define the perfect day ahead.

My thoughts were interrupted by a loud bang, which ripped through my ears like a volcano. I was paralyzed with fear and tried to scream, but my voice was strangled in my throat before it could reach my lips. My heart was racing, and my head was pounding fast, as if it were about to explode. At first I could not comprehend what was happening. Perhaps it was a loud storm? No, it was too loud and too near, just like the television show the week before, in which the police and the criminals had been shooting each other. This had to be the sound of a gun. Someone had given Sahir a toy gun for his third birthday, and Papa had thrown it away. He had refused to have an armed security guard deployed at our gate; that was how much he despised guns. It was dark behind the curtain, and it suddenly seemed like there was no air.

Finding all the courage I could muster, I came out from behind the curtain and witnessed the worst horror of my life. My
father was sprawled on the floor like a helpless child, a bullet in his chest, his starched white shirt covered in a sea of blood. He moaned slightly and then closed his eyes. It was as if he had fallen into a restful sleep. I will never know if he saw me there, whether he felt pain, whether he knew that that was the end. I looked at him in disbelief. This must be a dream, a really bad dream that needed to end. Why wouldn’t someone wake me up? Where was everyone? Ammi, Sakina, Zareen—someone please wake me up. I need to wake up and get ready for school. Papa will drop me on his way to work. I have a spelling test in the first period.

But it was not a dream. It was a harsh reality, rather, and one that would redefine my existence. I did not know whether to cry or scream or run or hug my father’s lifeless body. Who could do this? My father was a loving, giving soul, always doing good in this world—helping the poor, fighting for human rights, preaching the mantra of peace, setting the example of virtue. Who could possibly want him dead? He had refused to have an armed guard, despite my mother’s insistence. He said, “Does that mean the person protecting me should take a bullet for me? Wouldn’t that mean that my life is more precious than his? Every life is equally important, isn’t it?”

I could not breathe. And then I caught a glimpse of a face in the window, the window broken by the cricket ball. The memory of this face would haunt me for a long time. The details of his features would be engraved in my mind forever, much like an ineradicable imprint on a fossil: the square face, the diagonal scar covering a broad forehead, the brown, unkempt hair, the stubble, and the cold, green, merciless eyes. They were the eyes of a killer, my father’s killer, the eyes of my worst enemy, and I would never forget them. This was my unbreakable promise to my father and to myself. He was pure evil, this man who had
taken my father away from me before he had even had the last sip of his tea, before I had had the chance to hug him good night, and before he had been able to call me his princess once again.

I was still in shock when I saw my mother running into the room. I was sweating profusely. I tried to speak but was unable to articulate any words. Sakina and the other servants had been awoken by the noise and had come running in as well. What followed was a series of shouts and screams, with one person calling for a doctor and another saying the word “dead” and then “he is no more.” Much of that moment is blurred in my memory even though the emotions it evoked are still vivid. I remember Papa’s face, white as a ghost, and his white shirt covered in the deepest hue of crimson. My father’s blood was everywhere: on the beige carpet, on the wall, on the family portrait across the desk. Another bullet must have hit the portrait too, for the glass that covered it was shattered into several pieces that lay strewn across the study. No one realized that I had been there all that time or that I had seen my father take his last breath and heard his last moan. They did not know that I had seen the person who had committed this heinous crime. Ammi saw me there and assumed that I had just arrived after being woken up by the commotion. She attempted to cover my eyes and held me in a tight hug. That embrace was the balm I needed, but within minutes I felt my mother’s arms loosen from around me. At that precise moment, I felt her hug vanish, as if her protection had suddenly left me. I looked up and realized that she had fainted. In another room, Sahir was in a deep sleep, surrounded by teddy bears beneath a ceiling covered with glowing stars, peacefully dreaming of a beautiful tomorrow.

My father was “no more,” pronounced the physician who was called in. How could that be? We had just had ice cream. Minutes ago he had been there, seated at his desk, trying to make the world a better place. His mug was still warm from his last sip of unconsumed tea, and the bookmark remained trapped on page 142 of his unfinished book.

How could my papa be gone already? I was not even ten. How could I bear to live my life without him? And what about Sahir, robbed of his father before his fifth birthday, before he could truly understand what a special person his dad was? What would become of my mother, my thirty-year-old beautiful mother, not wise in the ways of the world? She was now a widow. As disbelief transitioned into grief, the tears came and fell like a torrential rainfall.