City of Spies Read online

  Table of Contents

  START READING

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  EPILOGUE

  POSTSCRIPT

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PRAISE FOR CITY OF SPIES

  “Through the eyes of a young girl, City of Spies brings to vivid life a crucial episode in the history of the United States and Pakistan, at the moment of the Iran hostage crisis. The tensions and confusions of that time are intensely relevant today. Sorayya Khan’s rich and compelling novel is a gem.”

  —Claire Messud, author of The Woman Upstairs

  ALSO BY SORAYYA KHAN

  Five Queen’s Road

  Noor

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Sorayya Khan

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Originally published by Aleph Book Company, New Delhi 2015

  Published by Little A, New York

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Little A are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  The text of the Intizar Husain epigraph is from Basti, published by New York Review Books © 1979 by Intizar Husain. Translation copyright © 2007 by Frances W. Pritchett

  ISBN-13: 9781503941571 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1503941574 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781503941588 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1503941582 (paperback)

  Cover design by Faceout Studio

  First edition

  For Naeem and our Islamabad,

  and our children, Kamal and Shahid

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  EPILOGUE

  POSTSCRIPT

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  They had left their cities, but they carried their cities with them, as a trust, on their shoulders.

  —Intizar Husain

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This novel is based on real historical events, but for the purposes of the story, certain details have been altered.

  PROLOGUE

  My parents tell me that we are defined by the wars we have lived, regardless of whether we can name them. They did not have the luxury of not knowing their wars. My mother’s war is the Second World War and, as a result, wherever she goes, she carries with her memories of German soldiers, Allied bombings, and the taste of tulip bulbs. My father’s war is the Partition, and despite everything that has gone wrong in Pakistan, his belief in his country remains as steadfast as when he battled the British Empire for it. Currently, we all live the War on Terror, an endless war that will outlive our children. But the war of my story, the war we shared long ago, whether we knew it or not, is the Cold War. And Pakistan, unluckily lodged far from the US and close to the USSR, was but one playground where both superpowers spread mischief.

  This is a story of thirty months that some claim changed the world; I know it changed mine. My name is Aliya and the story happened in Islamabad, a city of spies, when the streets of Pakistan’s capital were emptier than anyone today can imagine. No one I grew up with believed anything worth mentioning could happen in our quiet town. More than thirty-five years have passed. I travel the world as a journalist, and the names tossed around by children on the yellow school buses of my childhood—Addis Ababa, Laos, Jakarta, Teheran—have become places where I’ve lived.

  The beginning of this story is simple if you have an eye for color, a gift for geography, and a mind for fractions. My father, Javid, is brown and Pakistani; my mother, Irene, is white and Dutch; and my siblings and I are half-and-halfs. We lived a quiet life in Europe where my father worked for the United Nations until I was five. Then the 1971 war happened, Bangladesh was born, and the leader of what remained of Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, appointed my father chairman of the country’s Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA).

  I imagine it would have been hard for anyone to say no to a prime minister (or president, which Bhutto was still called in those days), but my father had a more complicated explanation for accepting the job. He shared it with us some months later, after he’d shifted us all to the new capital, Islamabad, and we were able to talk to him about the move without weeping. He explained that when your country called on you, it was your duty to run right back to it with arms outstretched and fall on your knees, ready to deliver whatever it needed—water and electricity, for example. My brother, Amir, who at sixteen was much older than me and had left behind a girlfriend in Europe, told him he was crazy and, consequently, went to bed without dinner. My sister, Lehla, older than me by six years, couldn’t rise above sarcasm and asked my father if he was joking. I was six then. I hear his words as clearly as if he’d spoken them yesterday, but I don’t remember reacting to them. My mother tells me that I was the least unhappy of the three of us, or at least I was wise enough to know I didn’t stand a chance competing against my brother or sister when it came to complaining about the move. They were way ahead in the noise department.

  In those days, Islamabad was an empty city, and the proof of this was the wide streets and large parks that contained neither cars nor people. But if you’d required a photograph for evidence, you would have hiked to Viewpoint in the Margalla Hills. There, from a flat rock that looked out on the sparse city, Islamabad’s two Seventh Avenues resembled airport runways without lights. Each time we hiked the trail during our first summer, I prayed the endless tarmac would reach up and take me away from the “godforsaken” place to which my father had brought us. I’d once overheard my mother use this precise adjective for Islamabad in a late-night argument with my father.

  Amir, Lehla, and I were among the few Pakistanis to attend the American School of Islamabad. My father had tried to get us enrolled in Pakistani schools, but when principals learned we didn’t speak Urdu, our “mother tongue,” we were denied admission. I was glad. We’d gone to American Schools in Europe and, therefore, knew what to expect, but the unfamiliar prospect of going to a Pakistani school as a half-and-half made me nervous. Luckily for us, the government of Pakistan had just permitted the American School to build a large campus forty-five minutes ou
tside the city. In return, the institution was required to admit a handful of Pakistanis on full scholarships because, of course, no Pakistani, except maybe the prime minister, could afford to pay the thousands of dollars of tuition. That’s how we ended up in the American School, spending forty-five minutes every morning riding a yellow school bus to the red-brick buildings on the outskirts of Islamabad.

  All I’ve said above is true, but as a rule, truth is as wide and all-encompassing as you let it be, and there is always more of it.

  ONE

  July 1977

  My story begins on the heels of July 4, 1977, when I was eleven. Without the events of that early Tuesday morning, I wouldn’t have a story to tell—more than that, a prime minister would still be alive, and so, too, would his youngest fan, a little boy I hardly knew. But my summer began as all Islamabad summers once did, with the promise it would never end, and without any of us knowing what was in store.

  My mother was in Cairo visiting Amir, who’d convinced my parents that he would die if they didn’t allow him to attend Al-Azhar and study Islam. She’d been gone only a week when my father decided we should spend the summer in Lahore with our grandfather. It was already so hot in Islamabad that my rubber sandals left marks on the pavement; Lahore would be worse. Lehla wanted to stay home before she left for college in America, because in Islamabad she would be able to sneak out to see her new boyfriend while our father was away.

  But my father resolved that leaving two young girls alone at home all day wasn’t a good idea, and try as we might, we weren’t able to persuade him otherwise. He had our servant, Sadiq, put matching red suitcases on each of our beds, while he stood there with his hands deep in the pockets of his trousers and calmly pointed out, “Either you girls do it or I will ask Sadiq to do it, and I think you’ll want to have a say in what you pack.” Sadiq’s English was worse than our Urdu, but his eyes grew larger and larger, understanding enough to silently plead with us for the scene to end. It was in moments like this that Sadiq seemed more like us than a grown man with a wife, a baby, a toddler, and a young son. But it was the realization that we would have to stand watch while Sadiq counted our underwear that sent us hurrying to the closet.

  My father couldn’t accompany us to Lahore because he was a VIP and always had more important things to do in his capacity as chairman of the Water and Power Development Authority. In fact, WAPDA’s main office was in Lahore, but my father commuted back and forth almost every day on a forty-five-minute Fokker flight. No one talked about it, but we lived in Islamabad so we wouldn’t have to live with my grandfather, who refused to give up his dilapidated house on Queen’s Road in Lahore and move in with us.

  We were driven to the airport, whisked on a VIP shuttle to the stairs of the aircraft by my father, and deposited on the airplane. Messages were crossed, however, and as a result no one was in Lahore to meet us. Lehla and I took a taxi from the airport to the house, an act for which my grandfather never forgave my father. “You let them take a taxi all by themselves? Throwing your daughters to the dogs?” he fumed a few days later when my father visited, as if he were responsible for our resourcefulness. “God help the water and electricity supply in this country with you in charge!” Lehla and I moved closer to our grandfather to make sense of his hoarse whispers. An operation gone awry had damaged his vocal cords and left him with more of a raspy whisper than a voice.

  If she had been there, my mother would have joined my grandfather in his outrage, but she was in Egypt, where, we privately joked, Amir was learning how to become a better Muslim. A few years earlier, when he first returned to Islamabad for a vacation, my mother, a tall woman, crumpled at the sight of him. His head was shaven, he wore a starched white cap to match his shalwar kameez—the baggy pants and long shirt most Pakistanis wore—and he put his arms around her only when it appeared she might fall. “Mannetje,” she murmured, her Dutch endearment for him, although we spoke English. “I hardly recognize you.” My sister and I recognized him all right. He may have been bald and fanatical about saying his prayers five times a day, but he was up to his old tricks, stealing a smoke on the upstairs veranda when he thought no one was looking. He’d tried to convince Lehla to join him in Egypt for her university education, but she stood her ground. “What kind of an education are you getting? Smoke carries! You think Daddy doesn’t know you smoke?” He giggled, then, with a smile as wide as his face and voice octaves lower than ours. He said, “I’ve really missed you two,” and we believed him, even though he tried to force math on us.

  “Why do you like math, anyway? It doesn’t even make sense,” I said.

  “Except for God,” he solemnly said, “numbers are everything.”

  “They aren’t cigarettes, though, are they?” I replied and earned a swat on my ear just as Sadiq walked by. His arms were full of our freshly laundered clothes, but he stopped to gently tell my brother to be nicer to me.

  We spent the month of June and part of July at Five Queen’s Road—a place which, for some reason, we only referred to by its address. We slept on rolled-out mattresses in the living room, where the only air conditioner in the house was installed. The machine was ancient, but in a summer so hot that newspapers were filled with worry that the rain might never come, even barely cool air was welcome.

  One morning when my father was visiting, I woke up just when he rose to say his prayers. He had a travel shortwave radio in his hands and was adjusting its antenna. He was not a tall man; in fact, he was two inches shorter than my mother, but when he stood above us as we lay on our rolled-out mattresses, he was a giant. He tried to hop over both Lehla and me in one go, and I was very lucky his foot missed my head.

  He suddenly called, “Abaji, Abaji,” as if he’d forgotten his father was deaf, and then, remembering, shouted louder and louder as if that would make a difference.

  “What is it?” Lehla cried, annoyed at being woken up so early.

  Knowing I wouldn’t be able to sleep again, I wrapped a chaddar over my pajamas and wandered into the next room. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  My father handed me the newspaper he was holding and said, “Have you seen this?” fully aware that I couldn’t have. Below the large bold print of the heading Pakistan Times, the newsprint was missing. “This is censorship.”

  Lehla groaned from the other room, where she lay with a sheet over her face and complained about early mornings and loud voices.

  “There has been a coup,” my father said after a moment. “The prime minister is in custody and martial law has been declared.”

  Martial law sounded like the Marshall Plan I’d learned about in school, but clearly it wasn’t the same thing. I studied the formal portrait of a military general splashed across the front page of the Pakistan Times. The general’s eyes were cast down, as if he were posing reluctantly, like a Pakistani bride. He had a bushy mustache and sleepy eyes and a row of medals pinned across his shoulders.

  My grandfather had been at the mosque, and when he returned he took a seat at the head of the dining table.

  “Abaji, you have heard?” my father asked. He placed the newspaper near his father’s plate. Without glancing at it, my grandfather pushed it away. He fashioned a bite-size packet of halva and poori on his plate and put it in his mouth, his dentures clicking. I wished I could eat my halva as skillfully. Yunis, Sadiq’s much older brother and my grandfather’s trusted servant, brought him the lukewarm glass of water he consumed at the same time every day. Yunis didn’t look anything like his brother, but the most compelling thing about him was that he was Christian, not Muslim like Sadiq. At Yunis’s bare feet, and half his size, stood Sadiq’s son, Hanif, who spent school holidays with his family at my grandfather’s house. All of us watched my grandfather drain his glass of water in one long gulp.

  The three radios in the house played different newscasts—the BBC, VOA, and Deutsche Welle, offering the news in British English, American English, and German—with equal solemnity.

  “Allah,
” my grandfather finally said.

  “Allah,” my father replied, both men invoking God in what was an ironic precursor to the general’s plans to introduce Him into every aspect of our lives and the country.

  “God save your job,” my grandfather said to my father as he put more halva in his mouth. My father had lain down his cutlery in an effort to listen. “Not that you’re any good at it.”

  My father tried to explain to us what had happened. “The army has taken over. The Constitution has been suspended, the national assembly has been dissolved, and the governors and chief ministers have been fired.”

  “What will there be instead?” I asked.

  “Whatever the general wishes,” he answered without hesitation.

  “What about what I wish? I wish I were in Islamabad,” Lehla muttered later. “Not only do we have to sleep on the floor and share our beds with ants, now we’re stuck in Lahore because of a coup!”

  A little while later, the telephone rang, and I beat Lehla to it. My mother had heard the news in Cairo on Amir’s shortwave radio, which had been a gift from my father.

  “Are you all right?” she asked. “Shall I come home? Is your father there?” In her absence, I’d almost forgotten her Dutch accent that made her fs sound like vs.

  “Mama,” I said to my grandfather, almost apologetically, handing the heavy receiver to my father. We all looked at each other while my father encouraged her not to alter her plans and to enjoy the three remaining weeks of her vacation.

  My grandfather beckoned us. “Your mother has lived under occupation once,” he said and paused. “Your father,” he said, as if he belonged more to us than to him, “should not make her do it again.”

  “Pardon me?” I asked.

  “The Germans,” he whispered. “Don’t you know about her war?”

  “Oh, that,” Lehla said, as if she knew exactly what he was talking about.

  We weren’t interested in my mother’s war or, really, any suggestion that she’d lived a whole life before having us. But my grandfather’s reference melted into our experience of that morning, and by the afternoon, Lehla was claiming to have seen tanks and soldiers in the street. My grandfather went to investigate, with Hanif trailing behind him, but the street at the bottom of his driveway was empty.