A Holiday in Home

By Tariq Mahmood

Anyone who follows the international news, even casually, is well aware that Pakistan
is one of worlds major trouble spots. This tantalizing novel explores the dynamics
of present-day Pakistani society through the eyes and ears of an expat Pakistani couple
that get stuck there during a vacation due to the kidnapping of their only son. The couple
hails from established military families. However, even after they pay the ransom, their
son doesnt come home due to the inaptitude of their well-placed relatives and the local
police. Spending an extended time in Pakistan after many years of peaceful upper-middle
class life in the US, the couple is able to see how the Pakistani society has evolved over
the years. The rich are more scared in the new Pakistan and the powerless are asking
questions.
The novel is full of colorful characters whose fascinating lives have been masterfully
enmeshed to create a story that remains a page-turner till the end.
Want to guess whose help was needed to bring the boy back home?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Sep 13, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465303837

Tariq Mahmood

Tariq Mahmood is a Telecom Engineer by profession and Pakistani by birth. He is a family man, father of two and currently based in Bristol, UK. This is his fi rst novel.

Book preview

All the thank you’s

I would like to thank Subhana for her lovely cover concept, Samar Ali for his ideas, Behzad Neyabi (the brother) and Doctor Jawad Khan, Shahid and Huma Rauf for their draft readings, Audra for her insightful feedback and Kaz Mehdevy and Lisa Harrisson for their editorial efforts.

I would also thank my lovely wife and son for putting up with me during my literary adventure.

Lastly I would like to thank my mother for giving me the lovely gift of reading all those years ago, without which I may never have been able to write . . . .

Why us?

Shifting sands in Pakistan as the political climate changes yet again. The elite are beginning to feel the heat as the poor get disenchanted further especially after the Lal Masjid encounter.

Such helplessness, such impotence, such dread; he had never felt such a profound mix of emotions before.

Where do I go to now? Who can I approach now? His mind pondered furiously, the only two sane questions among thousands of random scattered thoughts filling his mind, as he sat in his parents house, expectantly scanning the face of each new visitor, every mourner coming to make their own distinctive mark, and to play their part in the evolving local bit of ‘breaking news’ right in their midst. But deep down he knew it was fruitless to hope as most of these visitors were experienced actors playing their part professionally in this reality play. Each and every one of them had mastered a unique character and practiced the role over and over again till even they themselves had forgotten their own original selves and could only relate to their acting selves.

So he sat there and listened; nodding listlessly, to their practised words of assurance and support, making all the right type of perfunctory sounds, all the while looking straight through them. The assembled grievers on their part, did not seem to mind, this blatant demonstration of apathy, as for them, he seemed to be fulfilling his role, that of the grieving dad quite admirably. But lately he had sensed a subtle change, as the relatives, friends and acquaintances returned to their normal lives, they seemed to accept the inevitable outcome, leaving him and Natasha to fend on their own.

It had been two torrid months. Lightening quick months spent in waiting for something to happen, something to give. As the house becomes deathly quite, filling the void with muffled sobs and sustained hum of qirat from time to time, he is slowly filled with a new level of dread. Such a high level of dismay he has never felt before. He knows the source of this misery. It lies in the frustration of not knowing, in his inability to act, to take effective control of the situation; of knowing that his only son is at the mercy of ruthless killers, animals who would kill without remorse, without any second thoughts.

It is the probably the first time in his life that he faces such a situation where he feels completely at the mercy of others. Life had been very kind to him till Haris was abducted two months ago.

It all started forty years ago. Kashif’s father commanded a very respectable career in the prestigious Pakistan Army, ‘the second best army in the world,’ as his Brigadier dad was fond of quoting whenever the opportunity presented itself. His idyllic childhood was spent within the safe and secure walls of various cantonments (army compounds) dotted around strategic places in Pakistan. He and his younger sister were educated in English medium schools which were of very similar standard where ever they happened to be posted. After scoring highly in his Matric exams, the family subtly encouraged him towards opting for the British system of ‘O’ level exams instead of the prevailing local twelve yearly exams in Pakistan being taken by the rest of the population, the other 179 million or so. And why not, as his dad had exclaimed,’ My son is special, bright, articulate, and literate thus destined for great things.’ The Brigadier was himself very proud of his own rise and status in the society and wanted the more from his only son.

‘Greatness today lies in all things of the white man,’ he used to say reassuringly to his family as money was poured into Kashif’s private education with great gusto.

So in no time Kashif found himself on a plane bound to the greatest land of the white man, America. Once in America he progressed swiftly through all the usual gates without hitting any major obstacles. He quickly adopted an anglicized name ‘Kash’ for himself and landed a job with a mobile telecommunications vendor on queue, one of the largest in the USA.

He soon discovered a ruthless streak in his personality as he started to climb up in the management cadre instead of the usual technical type associated with other Pakistani engineers. He even surprised himself with this hitherto unknown quality of hard negotiating, networking, entertaining clients, and information gathering enabling him to win huge contracts for his employers.

Soon the great American corporate machine started to appreciate this much anglicized Pakistani boy who seems to be eagerly making their bonuses larger and larger with his hard work and wily ways. Hell, he was even laughing at their bland jokes, appearing to be genuinely impressed with their comely sides. He was quickly inducted into their social calendars and golf games. Kash found his golfing skills come real handy, as armed with a decent handicap he could perform admirably well under tremendous pressure, making him a choice partner for many an aspiring corporate golfer.

But no matter how much he socialized he craved for his own land, his own culture. No matter how much he mingled and acclimatised in the US, he longed for a married life, for a nice Pakistani family managed by a decent Pakistani girl. On a recent visit to attend his only sister’s marriage, in Islamabad he was quietly betrothed to the lovely Natasha, an extremely voluptuous and able doctor. True to his premonitions, he found that he could not get her out of his head, even though he enjoyed a longish relationship with an American girl around the time, he found himself falling for her fine ways, her well synthesized voice, her sound, proper and prosperous background. She was the only daughter of a recently retired General AtaUllah. The General insisted on carrying his rank even after termination of active service.

‘Any given rank is for life, there is no such thing as a retired General or Colonel for that matter,’ general AtaUllah.

The General had utilized his ‘friendly’ relational contacts with a certain other General; who happened to be heading the whole of the country, along with the Army, to orchestrate lucrative job as the head of the oil refinery for himself, further opening up prospects for even more wealth to follow for his daughter, and of course Kashif, in due course.

Kashif and Natasha were married within a year followed by the birth of a lovely and healthy boy Haris a year or so later. Both Kash and Natasha became the darling of their adopted community. Natasha even tinkered with the protestant work-ethic in following her profession by becoming a Psychiatrist. Her moderate career was good enough as her real passion was raising Haris to follow his father’s very successful footsteps. Haris had to have all the right type of opportunities to find his own unique calling in this creative and rewarding part of the world. The canvas was picture perfect, a house with its own swimming pool, good food, beautiful parents who rarely argued, as there was nothing to argue about anyway and with no major financial or health issues.

Yearly trips to Pakistan were a norm. Three weeks for Kashif and six for Natasha and Haris. They would not go anywhere else, all of their holidays every year had to spend in Pakistan.

Kashif’s parents were settled in Islamabad while Natasha’s dad was based in Attock, as he defied age and refused to be retired even from this job. Kashif had always been amazed to see the fear and anxiety mount up whenever someone was about to retire in Pakistan. Retirement was akin to death, part one; while they would declare, ostensibly their happiness at finally owning time, they would, at the same time would spend copious amount of energy racking their network for any contracts or lucrative jobs. Take Natasha’s dad as an example; the veritable general had managed to demonstrate a very successful transition from retired to hired, as he had managed to land a very important job immediately after his retirement and was now heading the largest oil refinery in the country, moving seamlessly from one sarkari [official] home to another, complete with sarkari cars, sarkari servants, and an army of private sarkari security guards; an absolute necessity to safeguard a vital national asset, and of course himself, the head of this most pivotal resource.

Kashif sympathised with the retiree’s dilemma, for he had experienced his own father’s instant decline in prestige upon retirement from the armed forces. Although Brigadier sahib had done extremely well financially, amassing a number of plots around the various army sponsored land developments around the country, still the loss of his rank and job had introduced a constant gloom in the atmosphere of the home. This constant state of despondency would only disappear whenever General AtaUllah visited them, bringing a plethora of stories, right from the corridors of power. They were stories of royal kings, gods of power, sitting up there, taking all the right decisions for the millions of clueless minions, working hard to sustain them; although in the minds of the gods, it was they who were doing the majority a favour by living among them, deciding for them, and thus taking care of them.

Poor retired brigadier sahib could only dribble now, when hearing these stories from the other world and reminisce.

‘A sarkari Suzuki is far better than your own car, even if it is latest model Mercedes,’ Brigadier sahib would sum up his situation aptly.

Their holidays back home were filled with frequent trips between Islamabad and Attock, which was about one hour away in a chauffer driven sarkari car. It was usually Natasha doing the travelling as Kashif loved to spend every available minute fine tuning his game of golf in the lush green Islamabad Golf Club, for he had no one to socialize with, as he hardly had any school friends left in Islamabad after spending more than twenty years in the USA. Most of his school mates had left Pakistan like him, and were spread all over the world, forming the virtual Pakistan; a Pakistan away from Pakistan. They all loved Pakistan, choosing to talk about Pakistan, its problems, analyzing its politics and debating how things could improve, and demanding loudly for someone to take notice of them. They were desperate for someone in the Pakistan government to consider their very articulate views, based on the very successful experiences accumulated, living in the developed parts of the world. They wrote well presented blogs, columns in the English newspapers and stories of success in weekly magazines, displaying their superior intellectual might. They spend all of their holidays in Pakistan, spending huge sums of money on shalwar kameezes and cheap pirated DVD’s, openly challenging the limits of their digestive systems with all the local savouries which they missed abroad, and tried to indulge purposefully in all of the issues affecting their families and friends, when back home.

But although they found their family and friends receptive to their views, they soon discovered that they were being subtly ignored, and kept away from any of the real decisions affecting their family and friends in Pakistan. After all any issues relating to Pakistan were for the Pakistanis living here not living in virtual Pakistan.

‘How could you live in austerity, with running water, ever present electricity and limitless cooking gas, and claim to know all the answers for our various woes?’ Kashif had constantly been reminded as soon as he tried to get too opinionated on any burning issues.

The result was that Kashif had resigned to just listening and not commenting, adopted a regime of keeping his views to himself whenever he visited Pakistan. Because he had figured a simple fact of life; how could he live in two places at one time? Ergo, he could either be in Pakistan or virtual Pakistan at one time, so why bother?

It was on a similar trip to Pakistan, on a very hot day when after spending nearly all of the day shopping in Islamabad, and Natasha planning to spend the night with Kashif in his parent’s home in Islamabad, that Haris went out to get some driving lessons along with the sarkari driver. Haris was getting into driving as he approached the licensable age of sixteen. The day was short; the weather had been predictably very hot for July as Haris bid adieu to the family sitting in the front lawn having their evening tea in the plush and well manicured front lawn. Rashida, Kashif’s mom was serving tea with one hand and clutching her rosary with the other. As Haris was about to reverse out of the long drive way, she suddenly, based on an ugly premonition waved at him to stop, but it was too late as both Haris and the driver were so preoccupied with the reverse manoeuvre that they could not pick this impulsive gesture. Dad, Natasha and Kashif looked nonchalantly at the grown woman’s strange behaviour as they were used to her occasional outburst of emotion, given the prevailing atmosphere in the country.

‘Ammi is getting paranoid with old age, this constant heat cannot be good for anyone,’ he mused.

Ever since the onset of America’s war on terror in Afghanistan and the uprooting of the Taliban, the relative calm and serenity of Pakistani elite class had taken a heavy drubbing. The writing was on the wall especially after the Lal Masjid operation right here in the heart of the capitol city of Islamabad. Suicide bombs were an every day occurrence and even the most secure General Army Headquarter had been savagely attacked. The level of prestige expected and demanded by the elites was slowly diminishing. Their usual respect and regard was becoming a thing of the past as the dacoits were becoming much more blatant and belligerent with each new incident.

The lower class were becoming more desperate in the face of rising cost of living with the line dividing morality and crime thinning every passing day. Rashida was perhaps the most acutely aware of these changes as she was the one who was in daily contact with all the servants, drivers, gardeners, sweepers, and security guards crawling around the Brigadier’s mansion all day long. Just in the last few years she had noticed an increase hum of resentment against the elites coming from the helper class. Her husband, the venerable retired Brigadier sahib could not take such mumblings seriously as he was not used to the servants talking at him. It wasn’t the brigadier’s fault, as all through his working career he had been used to servants, bairas, and orderlies doing his bidding with seemingly unquestioning loyalty he had never actually befriended any one of them. And so he fully expected them to blend seamlessly into the surrounding innocuously, with their ghosts like silhouettes quietly working away in perfect order. He like most in the elite class had developed this special pitch and tone for talking to the servants. It was crude mixture of Urdu and Punjabi with very little formalities or devoid of any small talk without etiquette. It was a language developed and inherited from the angrez. The newly crowned masters took a page directly from the outgoing angrez masters in 1947, quickly realising the effectiveness of the old system and thus choosing to keep the status quo. And so the majority in the newly liberated Pakistan who had loyally supported their angrez masters for years duly fell in line to support the elite class of Pakistan without much fanfare.

Following the elite queue, the servants also continued with the age-old habit of sitting back and gossiping about their masters. Only after independence from the British in 1947, they started comparing between their past angrez with their new brown angrez variety. All this calumny was done in excellent spirit without any sign of them taking it any further beyond verbal condemnations. Actually, it was their favourite pastime, until quite recently, when these juicy discussions were replaced with advent of cheaply available local TV channels providing other sources of much gossip.

But something had twitched inside them, disrupting the harmless tradition of dissent, ever since the Lal Masjid operation carried out by General Musharraf against a pair of upstart mulavis who had refused to tow the government and army’s line. These poor maulvis had only followed their own creed by voicing dissent against the elite lifestyles and their non-commitment to enforcing the Shariah law in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. But the location of their Maddressah and the timing of their relentless tirade proved to be a potent mixture in inciting thousands to part with their money to fund a strange edifice of building hurriedly built on illegal land right beside the huge Lal Masjid, the very first government sponsored mosque to be built in the capital city of Islamabad. There were literary hundreds of rooms built on top of each other housing hundreds of very eager, young and passionate boys and girls all coming from very humble backgrounds. There was no fee for the degrees being dished out to these students with almost free boarding and lodging.

The only trouble was that none of these so-called qualifications were recognized anywhere and thus could not help these young virtuous students to find any respectable jobs in Pakistan or abroad. It was a recipe meant for disaster from the very start. Once qualified they had no where to go, apart from following the same model of their maulvi teachers by building charitable Maddressah institutions of their own somewhere else in Pakistan, preferably on illegally obtained land. This put them in direct confrontation with the other biggest illegal land grabber of the country. Yes, none other than Pakistan Army. The Army was not used to having any competition so they decided to send a message by starting a campaign to remove all masjids [mosques] and Maddressahs [religious schools] built on illegal land and relocate to legally allocated areas. The maulvis naturally took up arms. They decided to make a stand in Lal Masjid under the leadership of the fieriest orator Ghazi. Ghazi was killed in a firefight in which a countless of his supports and soldiers were also killed among women and children. The Army led government won the battle and the maulvis merged into the population sulking and vowing revenge. The reaction from the general working class religion minded pious Islamic population was immediate and profound.

Would they target the Maddressah in a similar way if their own kids were attending them? This was the most pertinent question coming from the mumblings picked up by Rashida. It was a question, which she had no answer for. Whenever she tried to get answers from her husband and the great General, it was brushed aside with all familiar contempt and derision.

‘Don’t worry begum, these servants have been judging us ever since we replaced the angrez, and we have always come up short in their estimation. But has it stopped them from licking our boots? We are there because of a necessity; they need us to provide jobs and provide for them. Why do you think they are poor? It is because they deserve to be poor for they do not do anything to better their own lot. Their only hobby is sex and producing more kids. Ignorant jahils, how can you support so many kids if you don’t even have enough to feed your self? Haven’t they ever heard