EXISTING AT THE CENTER, WATCHING FROM THE EDGES: MANDALAS

Roshni Rustomji

Born in Bombay (now Mumbai), Roshni Rustomji (1938– ) grew up in Karachi and was educated there at the Mama Parsi High School and the College of Home Economics. She graduated from the American University at Beirut and earned further degrees at Duke University, and the University of California at Berkeley.

Rustomji lives between the United States and Mexico and is a professor emerita from Sonoma State University, where she taught from 1973 to 1993. She has been an adjunct faculty member at the New College of California, San Francisco, since 1997 and was a visiting scholar at the Center for Latin American Studies at Stanford University from 1997 to 2005.

She has coedited the anthologies Blood into Ink: South Asian and Middle Eastern Women Write War (Westview, 1994), Living in America: Fiction and Poetry by South Asian American Writers (Westview, 1995), and (with Elenita Mandoza Strobel and Rajini Srikanth) Encounters: People of Asian Descent in the Americas (Rowman and Littlefield, 1999). She has also written a novel, The Braided Tongue (TSAR, 2003).

“Existing at the Center, Watching from the Edges: Mandalas” knits together the many cultures and countries in which Rustomji has lived to describe the war, prejudice, and violence that she has experienced across half a century. The memoir begins in Mexico, framed by the image of la llorona, the timeless weeping woman of Mexican lore and Rustomji’s own tears at the news of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination in Pakistan. Rustomji sets two of her entries against the horror of the twenty-first century’s savage new weapon—the suicide bomber. Other entries include Rustomji’s childhood memory of Partition in Karachi 1947, which becomes a metaphor for the conflicts that Rustomji has experienced during her many migrations. She cleverly interweaves the images of the anti-Vietnam protests and popular culture of that era with references to the battles of ancient Greece and India—and of the great discourses of Hindu philosophy in the sacred text and epic, the Mahabharata, between the God Krishna and the warrior Arjun, who reluctantly fights his kinsmen on the field of Kurukshetra. “Mandalas,” the word of Sanskrit origin in the title signifies both the universe and the quest for unity, while Rustomji’s friend, Mama Glafira, is an important maternal figure in Oaxaca, who embodies humanity and compassion. Rustomji says, “Mama Glafira is a very real person and this is the title that I and many others use for her. She is also known as madrina [Godmother] or Doña. She is a woman held in great respect and affection by many people in Oaxaca because of the care and support she gives to nearly everyone she knows.”

The USIS is the United States Information Service, the overseas version of the United States Information Agency that fostered cultural activities and cultural exchange, and was once very active in Karachi.

• • •

For the last fifteen years I have been writing down notes and sketches of some of the wars I have lived through and yes, often with a survivor’s guilt. Notes on the back of receipts, scraps of paper, note cards, letters, books, bookmarks, whatever has been at hand. I find it difficult to put them together in any formal, traditional format as I attempt to make some kind of sense of the unending wars I have watched and lived through. Wars that have taken the shape of an adult’s slap on a child’s face, of the red, orange, green, blue, and yellow flames engulfing the body of a monk or the body of a woman, of the stooped shoulders and traumatized eyes of a man or woman whose dignity has been broken through conquest and poverty, and of the corpses, the obscene slaughter of human beings and the earth in the name of God, truth, revenge, and justice. Seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching war, sometimes from the very center and sometimes from the sidelines, that leads to a pattern of war existence that seems terrifyingly close to that of walking within a mandala. It continues to be a journey without any detachment or insight that might lead to any kind of understanding, wisdom, and action against the very nature of war and toward the essence of peace. Wars remind me of age-old hauntings begging to be exorcized from the body of our planet.

OCTOBER 31, 2001

EL DÍA DE LOS MUERTOS. THE DAY OF THE DEAD

The two little girls sat beside me, laughing, as we made silly sentences out of words. They in English and I in Spanish. When we came to the words, ghosts and fantasmas, they became very serious. They asked me, “Tía, why does that ghost woman make awful noises and carry away children so that we can never see our families again?” One of their teachers had gone in for a multicultural Halloween. She had turned off the lights and told them the story of la llorona—the weeping woman who haunts so much of Mexico and the southwest of the United States, which was of course taken by force from Mexico, which was of course taken by force by the European conquistadors, which was of course taken by force by—and so on and so forth.

According to the accepted legend, la llorona wails as she wanders all over the countryside and through desolate places in towns, searching for naughty children she can take away. She cries and looks for children because she has, through pride and insanity, killed her own. I have heard men talk about how they, too, have encountered la llorona when staggering home from an evening of drinking. Some survived, others never reached home again. One of the men who had seen her told me, “Una guerra. Una mujer contra todos los hombres.” Why, I asked, was it a war? Why did he say that she was a woman against all men? Because, he said, one man dishonored a woman and made her so loca, so insane, that she killed the children she had had by him.

The summer after the Zapatista uprising, a Zapoteca selling shawls across from my mamacita’s house in Oaxaca stopped me. She asked me if I had heard the cry of la llorona the evening before. I told her that I had heard the woman who sold tamales crying out her wares late into the night throughout Colonia Jalatlaco, the colonia where the house is located. Her cry, “tamaaaaleees, tamaaalees” was so triste, full of sorrow and anxiety, that it reminded me of the laments of women all over the world as they try to sell what little they have, what little they can make in order to feed their children. The woman selling shawls told me her version of the la llorona legend. It is a version I have not yet encountered in any book.

According to the woman, it was the rich and powerful European lover of the beautiful Indian woman, she who was later called la llorona, who killed the two children she had borne him. He had done it to prove his love to his European novia. To prove that the two children and “that” woman were of no importance to him. As far as the storyteller was concerned, la llorona had never raised her hand against her children. When I asked her about the version where la llorona killed her children rather than see them slowly starve to death, the woman shrugged and said, “It may have been a blessing. Have you ever seen a child slowly die of hunger?”

I tried to tell my two little companions this version of the story. They were still afraid. It did not matter who killed the children, the children were still dead. And la llorona was still searching for children to carry away to the land of ghosts, never to see their families again. One of the girls remembered a priest telling her about the children’s crusade, “many hundreds of years ago” and how brave those children were. The other little girl described the children soldiers she had seen on TV, “nearly as old as we are.” Before we continued to create more sentences, the two girls decided that no one had killed la llorona’s children. They had just run away and hidden so that they wouldn’t have to go and live in a war. “In wars,” said the older girl, “people are hungry. They die. By bombs, by being hungry.”

1947

I was moving toward my ninth year. One evening, the bells of the Hanuman Temple—at the end of the road, across the maidaan where the dust rose and blew toward all our houses in summer—stopped. Just like that. They stopped and I haven’t heard them since. A silence without a past, present, or future.

The next morning, the past and the future became the now. The “there” of the rumors of a savage war became the “here” of refugees. People, strangers, suddenly appeared, flooding the streets of Karachi. My mother said, “To count them as if they are numbers is wrong. Each one is a single person. Think, Roshni, think what each person must be feeling!” I saw tears in my beloved grandmother’s eyes as she spoke of orphans, children born of rape, women who would die of rape or be forced to live with the memory of violence and the reality of abandonment. I tried very hard to understand. Looking back after nearly fifty odd years, I don’t know what I understood. I did realize that now we were independent. The land had been divided and there was bloodshed.

My friend Asha told me about how her favorite aunt had wept as the red tilak on her forehead and the red sindhur in the parting of her hair were rubbed off when she was widowed. All that red of marriage and of families joining together turned to blood across the land. One morning, Asha didn’t come to school. I asked when she would come back. Was she ill? Had she gone to visit her grandparents in Lahore? The teacher just shook her head. Asha disappeared from my life. I learned about a new flag, and we were given sweets in school for our newly won independence and the birth of a new country.

A week later, about lunchtime, my grandmother and mother spread their much-cherished white damask tablecloth, elegant with its finely darned patches, across our big dining table. A few years ago, I went to Karachi to empty out the old house because the landlord had sold it to be demolished for a parking garage. I refused to watch as the dining table was taken away. I remembered the day my grandmother and mother spread that tablecloth and asked me to sit at the table on a chair that could be seen from the front door. My grandmother sat at the head of the table and could also be seen from the front door. We were to carry on conversations with imaginary people on the table. I already had a reputation for holding long conversations with myself and with people no one else could see. My mother and father went to the front of the house and spoke to the crowd that had gathered there. “No, she isn’t here,” they said. “She didn’t come to work today. She spoke about leaving for India. We can’t help you.”

I felt someone’s head against my legs and my grandmother warned me with her eyes not to raise the tablecloth. I reached down and felt the head and face of Dossa, one of my favorite, most-loved older persons. She had come to our house every morning to sweep the floors, and she and my grandmother were the only people in the house I wasn’t allowed to question, answer back, or tease. A few days earlier, she had arrived at our door with two policemen. Karachi was under curfew from night to dawn. When the policemen tried to stop her from coming to the house early in the morning, she wouldn’t stop walking. When one of the policemen tried to explain “curfew” to her, she beat him up with her broom and lectured him on the sanctity of work. They accompanied her to the door to protect her from any harm. And now she was hiding, her face pressed against my legs, trembling as her pathetic, alcoholic son led a group of men to our door demanding that we give him his mother so that she, too, could be converted and not have to leave their land. After all, he said, God was God no matter what He was called.

I felt something break inside me when I saw Dossa crawling out from under the table and through the back corridor, as my grandmother walked behind her to shelter her until they both reached the back door. I saw my grandmother bend down and help Dossa stand up. My uncle who was right outside the back door nearly picked up Dossa as he led her away to what we hoped was safety in India.

A month later, I stood at the same back door holding my father’s hand. We were facing a man holding the hand of his daughter. The man was begging my father to find him some space for his family. My father was explaining that he couldn’t. The girl was younger than me but I knew we could be friends. She looked as if she liked reading and listening to stories and making them up. The man wept as he turned away. The girl turned around and we waved at one another. My father was crying. His beautiful dark face looked as if someone had smeared dead gray ashes across it. Many years later I learned that my father had turned the top floors of the school where he was the Principal into a place of sanctuary for refugees.

My mother told us about the horrors that the refugees who were now citizens of Pakistan had lived through. She was among the many citizens of Karachi—old and new—who set up work places where women who had become refugees could work and make new lives for themselves. There was agony but there was also hope. One of the first Pakistani patriotic songs I heard (I think it was the National Anthem for a brief time) was composed on our piano. People question that but I remember sitting quietly in a corner listening to the different variations of the melody and the words. But the wars continued and my mother got tired of trying to explain to me why people kill one another, why people hate, why we didn’t stop such things and other such questions. One day she said, “Find the answers for yourself.”

1958–1961

I used to imagine that Nasima and Arjuman, who had traveled with me from Pakistan to Lebanon, were somehow two parts of the little girl at our back door. It was their gift of friendship and laughter and serious discussions about the what and the why of Pakistan that made Pakistan truly one of my lands, a desh for me. I don’t quite understand the concept of nations. Lebanon was the heartbreakingly beautiful land where I saw a boy, his face masked with blood, leap from a balcony moments after men in uniforms had entered the building. I stood below, surrounded by the aroma of strong coffee and the smell of freshly shaved wood, a loud thud interrupting the sounds of Fairouz singing as the boy fell to the sidewalk. That day I learned about the cruelty of men toward boys who could be their sons. It was the first time I heard the indescribable scream of a woman as she watches her child being killed.

Beirut was the city where I passed a wall of lemon trees on my way to the lighthouse and saw two women embracing and weeping. I wanted to console them but didn’t know how and for what. One of them turned to me and said, “Binti, daughter, we cry for our lemon trees we will never see again in our home. Our Palestine.” The other woman showed me the key to the house she had left behind. The house, she had just learned, didn’t exist anymore. I didn’t have any words, so I did what I had seen a woman do to another woman who had lost her husband, her two children and her old father on their way to Karachi from Bombay. She had wiped the grieving woman’s face with her bare hands. Six months later, I tripped and hurt my knee. I went to the student health services and the nurse who treated me was the woman with the key.

The campus of the American University of Beirut was where a young woman was pointed out to me on my first day at the University. I was told, “She was there. She watched as her father was hanged. She insisted on going. She is carrying on the fight.” I don’t remember her face but she had a body that said, “I refuse to break.” And yes, I often saw her laugh and smile. And then there was the funeral of a classmate that I didn’t attend. One of my friends told me that the mother had screamed at the corpse of her son, not only for dying but also for having killed other mothers’ sons. Later, I heard the same story during the Nicaragua war between the Sandinistas and the Contras, and then during the Zapatista uprising for justice.

1962–1963

From the Cedars of Lebanon where the gatekeeper Humbaba fought Gilgamesh and his beloved companion, Enkidu, to Durham, North Carolina, and a campus graced with “ye olde Europeanne” buildings that reminded me of the castles and churches of my childhood fairy tales. A beautiful campus with a glorious library. I boarded a bus to go to the house where I had been invited for tea. Being a rather nervous rider, I sat in one of the first rows of the nearly empty bus. The driver pulled over, came to me, and said quite gently, “Don’t you know the rules?” I shook my head. He bent down, picked me up, 78 pounds of a sari-wrapped bewildered graduate student, and placed me most carefully on a seat at the back of the bus. The books and movies at the USIS in Karachi and the professors from the United States in Beirut had not told me about segregation. I told my hostess about the incident. She said, “Oh dear, I am sorry. Only colored servants take that bus.” I showed her my brown hand. She smiled, shook her head, and remarked that she was surprised that the bus driver hadn’t realized that I was a foreigner. Foreigners were to be treated with the same respect as whites. Otherwise there would be international incidents.

One Sunday afternoon, late in the summer of my year in Durham, I stood on a sidewalk on the main street next to an African American family—a grandmother, a grandfather, a father, a mother, and two boys. Both boys had their grandmother’s smile. The mother admired my sari and asked me if it was handwoven. We carried on a conversation as we watched a phalanx of policemen approach the group of young people trying to enter a restaurant across the street. When the first “thwack” of a baton against human flesh reached us, the grandma moaned and nearly fell over. The mother held her up. The four men stood still, their fists so tight that their arms were shaking. I remembered standing on the terrace in my mother’s home in Mumbai (that is how my grandmother always pronounced the city), watching the police beating up processions of people calling out for freedom, calling out Gandhiji’s name. Neither the people being beaten up in that procession in Mumbai, nor the people on that street in Durham raised a hand against their attackers. I haven’t yet decided if that is really the only right way to defend ourselves.

When I ended up at the Duke Hospital after completing my thesis, the bus driver who had placed me so gently but firmly at the back of the bus came to visit me with a bunch of hand-picked flowers. He said that I should get well soon and that he was very sorry to hear about the war between India and China. I told him that my paternal great-great-grandmother was Chinese, and ever since I heard about the war, I had chilling nightmares about dragons and tigers tearing at one another.

1968–1970

BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA

Memories for stories

1. Demonstrations against the War in Vietnam. I meet a man at a party who has walked in all the antiwar demonstrations in Berkeley. At the same party, his son tells me with great delight that whenever a woman teacher in Mexico was mean to him and his other American friends, they would call her “an ugly puta.” According to him, they should know that Americans are to be respected. Disrespect toward Americans would earn them the title “whores.”

2. People in Karachi have a difficult time believing my letters about Berkeley. Especially when I write that there are gora, “white” young men and women in ragged clothes (some deliberately torn or patched) begging in the streets around the University.

3. Coming out of the library one evening with no one around, I see a lone policeman enter the lane. He lobs a canister of tear gas at me and laughs. The horrific sound hastens the notorious “Rustomjis always get deaf as they age” process for me.

4. Entering a women’s restroom in Dwinelle Hall at the University of California late one evening, I find a woman with a mop in her hand. She has tears on her face. She turns to me and asks, “How is this going to help end the war? I won’t be paid extra for this extra work. The war won’t end. My boys will die in that place while you march and dance in the streets.” She points to the row of toilets. They are filled to overflowing with garbage, with rotten fruit, newspapers, old clothes, chicken bones, even pages torn out of books. Angry students have filled up the toilets as a sign of protest against the war-mongering authorities. The woman throws down her mop and walks away.

4. Bumper stickers. “Mary Poppins Is a Junkie.” I have to have this one deciphered for me. “Question Authority.” I am confused. Is this a car driven by a person who is an authority on questions or is the person telling us to question people in authority? I am told that Berkeley is a War Zone.

5. Sitting in a professor’s office translating the Gita with other students as a car comes hurtling down across the green lawn and stops just short of plowing into the office window.

6. Walking down University Avenue in a sari. A young woman stops me and says, “Free yourself. Get rid of all those yards of clothing.” The woman is wearing a long skirt from India. Is she a friend or foe?

7. Listening to Joan Baez and Bob Dylan at Jock and Emily Brown’s house where I live. Jock Brown goes to Vietnam to protest the war his country is waging against Vietnam.

8. Reading James Baldwin and learning more about the war I saw in North Carolina.

9. The smoldering anger, fear, frustration in Lebanon turns further inward. Civil War. One more motherland that has nurtured me in flames. Blood doesn’t put out fire. I read: The Worst Wars Are Civil Wars. And later: All Wars Are Civil Wars. I still wonder at the different uses of the word “civil.”

10. I watch televised images of the American war in Vietnam as I learn to translate the Mahabharata and Iliad. Women from both fighting sides stream onto the battle field of Kurukshetra, mourning their dead. Achilles mourns the death of his beloved companion and drags Hector around in the dirt as his old parents watch in horrified grief, and Vietnam is transformed into a blazing fire of trees and human flesh. There must have been sounds with those images but all I remember is silence as the pictures flashed across the screen while I translated, word by word, the stories of other times, other places where fires of wars raged, the innocent and the guilty were killed and glorious words were spoken. One night, after completing a very long paper, I dream that I am running with the women on the field of Kurukshetra, I am screaming, my hair is unbound, I wear no ornaments. Hecuba appears calling for her son. A woman stops me and says, “Who are you on this land? You were not walking with us to Oklahoma.”

1975

A student sat in my office at Sonoma State University. He looked like a grown-up version of a Renaissance cherub. There was a sweetness to him that needed protection, yet there was nothing childish about him. He told me the following story. After his first tour of duty as a Marine, he had volunteered to go to Vietnam again. He couldn’t remember what fired his zeal. Yes, he said, he had seen war, both the inhuman and the human side of it. Toward the end of his second tour of duty, he and his buddies were pulling out bodies from a village set on fire by the Americans. He said, “We burned it by mistake and we were now trying to save as many of those villagers as we could. We were carrying the burned but alive bodies to the boats. I was carrying someone very light. I looked down and saw that I was carrying an old woman. She looked exactly like my grandmother back in Michigan. Old, wrinkled, wiry, and beautiful. She died in my arms. I went out of my mind. I was sent back home.”

He made me realize how some people eat war and grow fat and greedy for more, how others eat war and are killed and how some transform the poison of war into amrit, nectar, not only of immortality but also of peace. And then he and his wife gave me a beautiful silkscreened banner with the image of our Lady of Guadalupe. They had decided to earn their living making and selling banners with the symbols of all the world’s religions.

The last time I saw the student, he had graduated and was selling his banners on Telegraph Avenue. He no longer reminded me of a cherub. He had the detached, loving look of a bodhisattva.

1987

My mother died. The day after the funeral we found out that the Karachi policemen had towed away the cars parked outside our house during the funeral. The mourners weren’t happy but they will most probably recall the day my mother was taken to the dukhmo, the Tower of Silence, as the day the police towed away their cars, and hopefully they will smile even as they shake their heads.

As I touched my mother’s wedding ring and her glasses—I had never seen her without the ring and seldom without her glasses—I could hear her talking to me. And what struck me was how often she had spoken to me about the utter horror and uselessness of war and the evils of injustice. She never said, “That’s how the world is.” She always implied that our lives would be rather worthless if we didn’t work against evil. I was six years old when the United States dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I looked at my mother. Her calm, rather stern face was absolutely still. Absolutely without a trace of emotion. I remember thinking that this was how my mother would look when she died. My mother was born in Japan.

SEPTEMBER 2000

We shouldn’t have been office mates. We are far too committed to one another as friends, and much more interested in the histories of our families than in some of the academic work we need to complete. After all, we are both Indians and are comfortable enough with one another to make jokes about it. About Columbus refusing to ask anyone the way to the real India, about blankets and sheets and such nonsense. We both love literature. She is completing her dissertation and I read some of the chapters. She is a storyteller telling stories about stories and storytellers in her family, her community, her world. I read her narrative about her family, the journey on the Trail of Tears and the final arrival in Oklahoma. She writes about the nuanced and multilinear, many-circled techniques of storytelling used by her grandmother. I read about how her grandmother was sent out with food for the wounded warriors hiding in a cave when she was a very little girl. I catch a hint that my friend’s grandmother had seen a man die of his wounds when she was a child. Wounds received in defense of his land and his family.

But I don’t know how the story really ends. Did her grandmother ever tie up all the threads of the stories about her family, people deprived of their ancestral lands, made invisible in their own land? Can a grandmother’s stories be tied neatly—for the sake of an academic dissertation—into the stories of the indigenous women of Bolivia fighting for their land and their lives? And my friend, whom I call Damyanti, the Victorious One—says, “Roshni, there isn’t an end to that story.” And I realize that as I live in the Americas, I, too, am implicated in the story of the rape of this land and of the continual attempts at the destruction of the first peoples in this country. I understand the woman in my dream. I had not been forced to walk with my friend’s family to Oklahoma. And I feel the pain I felt when I saw Dossa crawl away from our house in Karachi. I don’t know if she arrived somewhere safely. I leave the office, drive home, walk to the edge of the Pacific Ocean, stand on the sand, and pray the ancient Zoroastrian prayer of health and safety for everyone who dwells in these lands. I wonder if it will work.

SEPTEMBER 20, 2001

Thursday, a week after. A dear friend whom I call hermanocito sent me an email. He had barely escaped being beaten up. He was threatened because he has a beard and wears a turban. Just before I received the email I had been talking with my neighbor whose wondrous eight-year-old daughter asked, “But why do those people hate me, Mummy? I’m American.” And then I turned on the TV and saw what is now Afghanistan for me. Food was being distributed. Names were being called. The names were of adult males. But most of the adult males were dead or gone and so the children were coming up to collect the food allocations. No women. There were a few little girls. A name was called out. Silence. No one came up. And then one of the men smiled sadly, went to the group waiting for food, and called out a tiny girl. She had wild curly hair and the beautiful eyes of childhood. It seemed as if she were too young to recognize her father’s name, who most probably was already dead or fighting toward death. She came forward and picked up the bag they handed to her and began dragging it. Someone showed her how to sling it over her shoulder. And she did. The bag was as big as she was. Maybe bigger. And then they put a cardboard box in front of her. She stood there looking at it and tried pushing it with her feet. The man who had brought her forward smiled sadly again and gestured that he would bring it to her house later. It was that small gesture of compassion, and the tiny girl-child going back into the crowd with her bag over her shoulder, that shattered me. I sat screaming, bleeding from the womb that my body hasn’t possessed for over thirty years.

It may be good to write about the horrors we bring upon ourselves. Writing, after all, is a political act. I understand that peace and justice are what we have to keep working toward in our own way to keep from shriveling up in body, mind, and spirit. Compassion. I am haunted by the image of the little girl carrying the bag of food over her shoulder. War—and yet the hope of peace.

AUGUST 2004

Innana is the name we hear. She is—we are told—the Queen of Heaven and Earth. Her older sister, widowed Ereshkigal, Queen of the “Underworld” recognizes the descent of Innana for what it is. Our bombs have torn the skin off the Earth and Ereshkigal emerges to wander across the land searching for shattered, unburied lovers and murdered children.

The image of the little girl in Afghanistan and the presence of Ereshkigal merge into the woman in the documentary. There is nothing contained, nothing stylized about her grief. It is the scream of the mother who has seen brutal death. She is grandmother, mother, sister, sister-in-law, aunt, daughter, binti, hija, beti, neighbor, sakhi, amiga, companion who has walked with us since we were born. She curses all of us, the Americans, who have brought death and destruction to her family, her friends, her neighborhood, her city, her country of Iraq. Sitting in the air-conditioned comfort of a theater in an enormous multiplex cinema complex located not that far from San Francisco, once hailed as the City of Flowers, peace and love, we are stunned into silence. The munching of popcorn and chocolates, the bubble of sodas, the soft shuffling of bodies are silenced. I see the woman in front of me trembling violently. We know that we are once again implicated in the creation of sorrow and furious grief. A very old woman enters the theater. She is late and can’t see well enough in the dark to find a seat. She begins to wail softly, “I can’t find a place. I am lost.” She stops near me and I reach over to help her to the seat next to me. She says, “Oh my, I missed the beginning of the film. Why is that woman screaming? Is that Arabic? Is she mad?” Someone behind her tells her to be quiet.

Mad? In all the senses of the word. As I see bombs falling from the sky and listen to the young men and women ready to unleash their terrifying technology onto those they dare not think of as being human, I am reminded of the history of this particular war. The steady march of greed and the brilliant manipulation of words and ideas that have at last culminated in this war. A war that is once again shrouded in lofty words and promises. I remember the words of Euripides: “Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.” I know that the woman’s curse is on me as it is on all of us who have not yet found a way to stop the insanity called war. War in all its forms.

A few months later, a student stops me before we enter the classroom. She apologizes for having missed one of the classes and explains that she had to go home to her family to take care of her mother. I nod and say, of course, these things happen and one does have to take care of family. I begin to move away. She stops me. She says, “It is because my father died at this time last year.” I look at her and realize that her father couldn’t have been much older or much younger than me. Before I can express my condolences, she says, “He committed suicide.” And again before I can say anything, she says, “He was a Vietnam vet. He had been attempting suicide even before he left Vietnam. Years before I was born.”

As I hear about the women in Mexico sending their sons to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq so that they can get the citizenship promised them in exchange for their bodies, and as we continue to call down Peace upon our Prophets—the sung and the unsung ones—the children, the women, the men—I think of the old man who stopped me near my home in Karachi when I was moving toward my ninth year. The air was alive with the sound of the evening azaan. The man was a stranger and I never saw him again. He was weeping and he said, “Beti, may Allah have compassion on all of us. On all of us. Friends and enemies—there is no difference.”

DECEMBER 22, 2007

OAXACA, OAXACA

I have been trying to read Francisco Goldman’s The Long Night of the White Chickens. It is difficult reading. The Guatemala of the book is Pakistan to me. Pakistan of military rule supported by U.S. tax dollars. As I walk through Oaxaca, I am haunted by the sardonic words of one of the characters in the book: Guatemala does not exist. I know. I have been there.

I am tempted to write on the page of the novel (in pencil of course):

Guatemala does exist. Pakistan exists. They exist to remind us of what is happening not only in Guatemala and in Pakistan but also in Mexico, in Palestine, in Israel, Iraq, Iran, Burma, France, Germany, the United States, Africa. In our world. Lawyers, students, teachers, human rights activists, men, women, children beaten, killed, disappeared. Nothing new—anywhere in the world. Nothing new except the horrifying intensity and acceleration of violence and just as horrifying an intensity and acceleration of apathy by those who think they are untouched by, not complicit in this violence.

I do not write in the book because it belongs to the Oaxaca Lending Library.

DECEMBER 27, 2007

CALLE ALIANZA, COL. JALATLACO, OAXACA

Chuck/Carlos who has been watching the news wakes me up. “Breaking news. Bad news,” he says. “Benazir Bhutto has been assassinated.”

I feel as if my whole living self were filled with horror, despair, anguish. He says, “Why are you shocked? Didn’t you think that something like this would happen to her?” No, I did not expect this murder. I try to meditate. To calm myself, to calm the world that Benazir and I have inhabited. The people and the tierra, the desh, the vataan that in this time of our history is named Pakistan. All I can do is shout, “Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. We have all become inmates, all of us—of an insane asylum.” I am still muttering and crying as I run two blocks to Casa Arnel to phone my cousin in California. Benazir has been murdered in Rawalpindi but her city—my city—Karachi is blowing up. My cousin in California hasn’t heard the news yet. She promises to call her sister in Karachi immediately. The images of the murders, mayhem, and chaos in Karachi that I had just witnessed on television are with me as I call my friend and mentor, Ijaz Syed, in California. I can’t finish the message of outrage and grief that I leave on his voice mail. English, Gujarati, or Urdu can’t express what I feel and think.

Benazir had returned to Pakistan in the fall of 2007. In the first attempt to assassinate her, she survived but 170 people died. After this I received emails discussing, beating, detailing Benazir’s history, her personality, her political and personal goals.

I had stopped respecting Benazir Bhutto early in her first term as Prime Minister of Pakistan. I had actually been wary of her since a brief encounter I had with her in the 60s. She was about twelve years old. I was about twenty-five years old. A friend of my parents who was a supporter and admirer of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had invited me to go with him to the Bhutto residence in Karachi where he had to deliver some papers. He told me that he would like to introduce Benazir Bhutto to me. “She will be our Prime Minister one day,” he said. He did not add, “Inshallah.” The future Prime Minister of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto, came into the room where we had been left standing, looked me straight in the eye and said not a word in response to my greetings or to the greetings of my companion. She had the coldest eyes I had seen in my twenty-odd years. Her eyes, her refusal to greet or thank us, made it clear that she was not interested in “unimportant” people such as us.

Many years later in Oaxaca, on December 28, 2007, the wonderful lady many of us know as Mama Glafira tried to console me after Benazir’s murder. According to Mama Glafira, what made Benazir beautiful were her beautiful eyes. I realized that since her father’s assassination, Benazir’s eyes—in all the pictures of her I had seen in magazines and on TV—had lost the haughty, cold look. But even if she had retained those cold eyes and her disdain for “unimportant” people, even if she did prove to be a very disappointing and frustrating politician, the threats of violence against her and her cruel, calculated, violent death can never be justified or condoned.

It is January 2, 2008, and as I walk down Macedonia Alcala toward the zócalo, I remember that today is my parents’ seventieth wedding anniversary. But I am still in mourning for what has happened in Pakistan, what is happening in Pakistan, the senseless and horrifying violence that is consuming our world. I bend down to thank the old, blind man who has been singing on this road nearly every evening for twenty-odd years. About ten years ago, my friend Ofelia and I had accompanied him—off-key of course but with great gusto—as he sang “Naila.” Others had joined us. We had sung the song twice to the great amusement of the singer. On this January day of cold, dry air that reminds me of winters in Karachi, he senses the tears in my voice and says, “No llores, amiga” and begins to sing the song of the dying mother to her daughter. The mother who tells her daughter that lamentations and tears will not help. If the daughter cries, the mother is sure to die and remain dead. But on the other hand, if the daughter sings in the face of death, the mother will never die, she will always be alive. It is a song that has always haunted me.

I know—with sorrow—that I will be searching until the day of my death for a melody, a few lyrics that would exorcize the violent deaths, the injustices, the cruelty from our world.