Children of Dust_ A Memoir of Pakistan - Ali Eteraz [95]
“Is someone around here involved in drugs?” Ammi asked.
The women shook their heads.
“Who knows what it could be,” my grandmother said.
Just then the phone started ringing again. I told the women to stay put and went to get it. Before picking it up I stared at it for a few seconds, letting the bell drill into my head. If the drive-by and the phone calls were related, then by picking up the phone I’d be putting myself in the middle of it all. Finally I summoned the courage to pick up the receiver.
“Hello?”
There was a pregnant pause on the other end. I heard breathing but it was sporadic, as if the person was surprised by my voice. After a moment or two there was a reluctant reply.
“Hello.”
It was a young man’s voice, but a single word wasn’t much to go on. I tried to open up a conversation.
“Who is this?” I asked. “Are you looking to talk to someone at this number?”
Immediately the caller hung up, and for the rest of the afternoon no one called back.
I remained inside after the call and tried to think with a clear head. Wasn’t it the case that the drive-by and the strange phone calls had started after I’d had my run in with Ittefaq and his aggressive friends? That was definitely a young man’s voice on the other end. Couldn’t it be Ittefaq himself? He had lured me out before; maybe he was now at the center of another, more nefarious game. It seemed like a plausible theory, but it didn’t exactly explain why they would intimidate Dada Abu in the morning. I wanted to go out and share my theory with the women, but I decided against it because I didn’t want to cause them panic.
In the early afternoon Dada Abu and the men came home. When the women told them about the strange phone calls, they didn’t seem overly concerned. Their attention was consumed by something they’d heard while at the bazar.
“Somebody is planning an attack tonight,” Dada Abu said.
“Here? At the house?” Ammi asked.
Dada Abu nodded. “That’s what I heard. I can’t know for absolute certain, but we’re going to have to take precautions.”
“Why is this happening?” Ammi asked. “What does it have to do with us?”
Dada Abu didn’t say anything. He left the house to consult with his brothers about getting some protection for the night and didn’t return for quite some time.
A meeting of all the family men had been called for that evening, and they met in the sitting room. I joined them.
“I’ve asked my friend Majid’s sons to come over for the night,” Dada Abu said. “They have weapons.”
“We’ll post the three of them on the upper walls,” Tau suggested.
“Do we have any weapons?” Dada Abu asked.
“Just this,” my younger uncle said, putting forward a revolver. Then he cracked it open dejectedly. “But I think the bullets are wet, so there’s no way to know if it fires.”
Dada Abu took it and turned it this way and that. “Hopefully we won’t have to use it,” he concluded.
“I have a sword at my house,” my polygamous uncle said jokingly.
“You better hold that instead of one of your wives tonight!”
Instructions were given to all the men: lock up your house early, and don’t let anyone visit.
“You,” Dada Abu finally said to me at the end of the meeting. “Take your brother and mother up to the second roof. Put your charpais in the center, nowhere near a wall.”
This was explicit confirmation that the assailants were after me, or someone in my immediate family. When I told Ammi about Dada Abu’s instructions and the implication that we were the targets of the attack, she took it in stride.
“I know. I heard from one of the milkboys,” she said. “It’s one of the Islamic groups. They’re coming after us because we’re American.”
I nodded and then hung my head. So Ittefaq had ill intentions after all. He and his friends really did hate me. They didn’t care how much love for Islam I had in my heart. I was just an American to them. I was just someone to be abducted. I had come to the desert in search