CHAPTER 3

Islamabad, 1983

The country, the circumstances, or the distance from the life we had previously lived — none of that mattered once our family arrived somewhere else; whatever disruption it caused soon vanished in reinvention. For days after we landed in Pakistan, none of us could sleep for jetlag. The sudden anomie didn’t help, or being alone in the heat of third-world summer. But when the nights came and the insomnia hit, my dad transformed adversity into adventure. He bundled Janet and me into our little car and crept into Islamabad’s night. Almost immediately we were lost, and we spent the rest of the night trying to find our way back home. I saw darkened streets, with sallow lights and hanging lamppost wires, and figures lingering in the shadows. I loved it that a place you called home could also be incomprehensible.

Eventually we settled into a house, a big white cake of a thing at the end of a long road lined with smaller houses. The embassy employed a guard from Sindh, and the house came adorned with a thick lawn and a rose garden — and for me, a giant bedroom with its own bathroom. As in New Delhi, geckos played on the ceilings. From my window I could see the neighbourhood rooftops, a park filled with palms and hedges and, in the distance, a small mosque, whose muezzin woke me each morning with his call to prayer.

Soon after we arrived, Duke disappeared. At first my father thought he had simply gotten lost, as he had so often before, and that diligent searching would eventually lead us to him. But a week passed without a sign of our golden retriever. My father grew worried and morose. He put up signs in our neighbourhood, but to no effect. He expanded the circumference so that soon the whole city was bristling with the fluttering posters bearing Duke’s baleful, trusting face, and our telephone number.

Days passed. Now and again my dad would get a report of a Duke sighting, and he’d immediately jump in the car to investigate. The trips took him far from home, out to the edges of the city and beyond, to dusty villages that lay on its periphery. Duke was distractible and flighty; he could have wandered into somebody else’s home and, finding it comfortable and sufficiently luxurious, decided to decamp and stay a while. But our thoughts tended toward the morbid. What if he was dead, chopped up for meat? What if he was wandering, alone, hungry, howling for my dad?

As more time passed, I became accustomed to Duke’s absence. Eventually my thoughts returned to my own preoccupations. I started grade four at the International School of Islamabad. I biked around the city, and trawled through the green jungles that abutted my house in G-6/3 (the name given to our patch of Islamabad’s angular grid) on my ten-speed Schwinn. I custom-ordered cassette tapes at the Jinnah Market with the songs of Michael Jackson or the Beatles. At home I ran up the winding staircase to my room, where I played Lego, or sang along with Michael or John, or constructed a pretend science laboratory on a built-in vanity counter, or lounged around on my bed listening to the muezzin sing his mournful prayer.

One of my close friends was an Indonesian boy named Peter. His father and mine were friendly. When my dad and I visited Peter’s family, he and I would race upstairs to his room and watch James Bond movies over and over again. We watched The Man With the Golden Gun and Goldfinger and The Spy Who Loved Me, and we fantasised for hours about being James Bond, the coolest man in the world.

My father and I spent lazy weekends at the embassy pool. He introduced me one day to John, a US Marine who did guard duty at the embassy during the week and worked as a lifeguard on the weekends. At my father’s urging, John and I became friends. I remember his beige uniform — the crisp tightness of it — and the pistol he carried on his waist. John would pick me up and swing me around on his shoulders before throwing me into the pool. I liked watching him salute my father and me from behind the bulletproof glass of the embassy gate.

One day at the pool, my father told me that John and the other marines were there to protect us. I asked why, and he told me that not too long before we had arrived in Pakistan, an angry mob had attacked the embassy. They had tried to shoot people, and had set fire to the embassy. People retreated to the embassy roof. One was killed by a sniper’s bullet. The marines had drained the pool, and people took shelter inside it. But that was all over now, he said. He dangled his feet in the water and challenged me to an underwater race, from one end to the other. I watched him go, thinking of a crowd of people sitting scared where my legs now floated. As we swam I studied his long, powerful kicks; his hair washing backwards and forwards; and the push of his body, surging ahead of me so easily as I struggled to keep up.

On the weekends sometimes, we drove north along the Grand Trunk Road to the North-West Frontier Province, and the border town of Peshawar, which in those years was filled with Afghans — refugees from their Soviet-occupied land. We often stopped at a hotel from the British era called Deans, and there we would have breakfast or lunch, freshly squeezed juice, and warm tea. There is a picture of the two of us in front of Deans on one of those occasions. My father is clean-shaven. He’s wearing a red jumper, smiling, and holding me loosely in his right arm. I am getting bigger by then, still blond, my grin toothy, my hair neatly parted because in those years, like him, I always parted my hair and made sure to get the line as straight as possible.

We drove north from Peshawar, further toward the border with Afghanistan, which I knew was a lawless land of bandits and warriors. I knew there was a war against the Russians there, and that some of these men had come from the fighting. They were all around me, men in long, dusty shalwar kameezes and hectic beards. Most of them were part of the mujahideen resistance army, my father explained.

I have a vague memory of watching a large group of men I took to be Afghans stream down a dusty hillside one day. There was some commotion near the top of the hill — a fight or an argument, I couldn’t be sure. I desperately wanted to know what lay on the other side of that hill: what men, what anger, what was driving them to us. I could see the concern on my father’s face. But even he was hesitant to take us much further up the hill.

Sometimes we’d see light-skinned people, blue-eyed blonds or redheads on the road down, or heading east from, Islamabad. They were travelling toward a town called Murree, a name that some claimed was a bastardisation of Mary — a linguistic holdover from a thousand years ago, when Jesus had apparently visited India, during the missing years of his life. But I was always more curious about those ragged men we had seen along the border, the ones with guns, on a mission I didn’t understand. I pictured them on their hillsides with their weapons, staring at the arcing sun, shaking off the dust, marauding down the hills towards the border — towards us, and safety.

My home life was not completely idyllic. I was terrified of Amy. She was six feet tall, big-boned and mean. I rarely spoke to her unless spoken to, which wasn’t often. She wore her bangs so they covered her eyes, and I remember a face full of hair more vividly than any particular expression. Amy was a teenager in Islamabad, concerned mostly with her Syrian boyfriend Basel and how to sneak in copious amounts of the marijuana that grew outside our house.

Janet and I were on better terms, but she was concerned about, and patient with, her daughter, and for that sleight I did not forgive her. I called her ‘Mom’ because my father thought doing so would somehow fix what was wrong. Even from my boy’s vantage point, I doubted Janet’s enthusiasm for the life she had inherited by marrying my father. She was a painter, and the things she had given up in Manhattan — the Chelsea apartment, the galleries, the café society — were painfully absent in Islamabad. I didn’t know why she had left her fun life. But then, maybe it wasn’t so fun: her first-born, Timmy, had drowned only a few years before, after falling into a river, which led to a divorce and perhaps this remarriage and her current situation. I looked a lot like Timmy, I suppose — a reminder for her of what she had once had, but lost. That seemed to have broken her.

Janet was a terribly proficient and competent mother. She cooked and cared and fretted as only a loving mother could. When I got sick with West Nile Fever that year, Janet spent weeks nursing me back to health. Her ministrations were proof for my father that he had made the correct choice in marrying her. Here was a woman who could fill the void that my mother’s absence had created; a woman willing to follow him around the world and help care for the son that he would never have been able to look after on his own. His love for her, and his vision for our family, though, was wrapped up in the idea that she and I somehow fulfilled and complemented a need for the other. I could become the son that she had lost; she would become the replacement for a mother who was now several thousand kilometres away in darkness. It was a subtle, clever machination. He insisted upon it on a regular basis. ‘Mom sure took care of you, didn’t she?’ he’d say. ‘You know, she really cares about you.’

Looking back, that was the first false note my father ever struck with me. He really wanted to believe it, for both our sakes, but I didn’t. In addition to her ministrations, Janet showed early on that she was capable of great rages, emotional outbursts that left me angry and confused. Even in my child’s mind I knew that my father was trapped between what he wanted and what he had. The perfect life he had wanted to create wasn’t working. Instead, both of them tried to make our lives as expatriates as normal as possible. We ate dinner every night around a table. We entertained, just as we had in Yugoslavia, and went on family vacations: to Goa, India, one year; to a mountain retreat another. My father and I staged elaborate swimming races at the embassy pool. Sometimes in the evenings or on weekends we’d take off into the Margala Hills outside of town and walk up trails dotted with crystalline pools made azure by mineral deposits, take off our clothes, and jump in the water.

What I knew of my father was simple: he loved me. But I knew, too, that there was something unusual in all of this moving and remarrying and constant change — and there was very little I could do about it.

And then, one day, in the midst of all this, my father found Duke. He had wandered off innocently and slipped into another family’s routine. Word had somehow filtered through to him about a golden dog lost in a village. But, somehow, that’s not what I thought had happened. I came up with a much wilder story — a more sinister imagining that coincided with what I might have been starting to suspect about my father. As I saw it, kidnappers had stolen Duke and taken him to a small village on the outskirts of Islamabad, where they were holding him for ransom. Clearly, I thought, the kidnappers didn’t want to run the risk of damaging a potentially lucrative source of revenue.

Then I came to this further erroneous conclusion: Duke wasn’t even the target. I was.