Of Smokeless Fire A.A. Jafri (books to read to improve english TXT) 📖

be Mansoor, but at least for that moment, she wanted to have absolute power over her own life story. She typed up a brief resignation letter addressed to the personnel administration manager and asked one of the clerks to drop it off at his office.

*

Alvi made two conditions for the wedding ceremony. First, he wanted no guests, only two witnesses; and second, the nikah would be performed by a Shia maulvi. Mehrun accepted both. The first condition gave her an excuse to not invite Mansoor, and she had no objection to the second condition either. Although she was Sunni, or so she thought, she didn’t care who performed the ceremony. The forceful, practical imperative to get married trumped everything.

In a service that mixed simplicity and speed, Mehrunnissa and Ameer Abbas Alvi were religiously and legally married. Their mehr, or dower, was set at a meagre one hundred and twenty rupees, of which sixty-two rupees and eight annas were to be paid promptly and the other half was to be deferred. The amount calculated by the maulvi was one-third of the median religious dower. But Mehrun could not dispute it since Alvi said nothing and the money was promptly paid to her. Was that bride money? she thought.

Hasan Ali, a banker friend of Alvi, and Jumman were the two official witnesses of the nikah. When Hasan Ali, at Mehrun’s urging, had taken the formal marriage proposal to Jumman, he did not know what to do. That protocol had not existed in his family as far as he could remember. To him and his dead partner, marriage remained an extraterrestrial concept, and the idea of Mehrun’s marriage had never come up when Kaneez was alive. So when the unexpected proposal came, he kept looking outside the window, busy in his distempered thoughts. Mehrun, listening to her father’s continued silence, came out from her room and accepted the proposal on his behalf. Jumman asked no questions and got no answers. It did not matter to him that his daughter was twenty years younger than Alvi, and it was inconsequential that he was Shia.

*

Mehrun was not attracted to older men, but it seemed as if they gravitated towards her. To her, they were a source of wisdom and stability, and she could benefit from both. Her faith was essential only in the sense that it provided protection against churails and djinns. On the other hand, material culture and social status had always fascinated her. They were the real things. The time she spent at the Kashana, observing those high-society begums display their cultural capital, had made her hungry for the good life. And with Alvi as her husband, she had come one step closer to achieving it.

Two days after their wedding, Mehrunnissa and Ameer Abbas Alvi left for Dubai—she to start her new life and he to launch his new bank. Jumman vacated the apartment, sold all the furniture and moved into the servants’ quarters at the Kashana.

*

Since the 1950s, the religious parties of Pakistan had tried to build a campaign against the minority Ahmadi sect to declare them non-Muslims. They finally succeeded in 1974, when the Pakistani Parliament passed the Second Amendment to the 1973 Constitution. Noor heard the news from Haider even before it became official. Haider’s sources had told him that The People’s Leader’s wife, who belonged to the minority Shia community, vehemently opposed this. His sources said she feared that Shias would be the next to be declared heretics. The amendment deprived the Ahmadis of the right to bury their dead in a Muslim graveyard, to have any Qur’anic inscription on their tombstones, to use Islamic greetings, and to call their place of worship a mosque. Hell-bent on dividing the already divided nation, the so-called representatives of the people eviscerated a belief system with a simple vote. By stigmatizing their otherness, they had hoped to eradicate a group of people. For these brutal lawmakers, the process of cultural extermination started with constitutional extermination. And in this nefarious scheme, The People’s Leader was the prime offender—a willing abettor and a cheerer in this crime against a weak minority, his wife’s concerns notwithstanding. No one dared to question this injustice. There were no protests; there were no op-eds in even the most liberal of newspapers. People carried on as if this was no big deal.

‘We are now the only Muslim country that has institutionalized discrimination,’ Haider told Noor.

‘The Second Amendment of America gave guns to the people; the Second Amendment of Pakistan stripped the Ahmadis of their right to call themselves Muslims. And I thought that was the sole prerogative of God,’ replied Noor.

‘No, the mullahs are the new gods.’

‘Haider, you better watch out. You could be next.’

‘Don’t worry, I know how to play this game.’

*

Years before the passing of the constitutional amendment, Noor had warned Sadiq about this possibility. But Sadiq had been in denial about such a thing ever happening, believing that there were too many good people in the country who would rise up against such an injustice. In any case, the man was not really a believer, so why should he care? Noor tried to deflate the professor’s optimism and even advised him to leave the country at the first opportunity he got. But Sadiq had migrated to Pakistan from India, believing that he would be safer here. Fleeing the country again, that too at his age, held no appeal to the professor. And where would he go? Going back to India was no longer a possibility. He never believed in organized religion; he never practiced his faith, but now, what was trivial to him would become deathly consequential. Noor knew that Sadiq would be stigmatized, harassed and hounded because his parents were practicing Ahmadis. When his fellow professors had first learned about his love of Scotch and secularism, they had dismissed him as an angrez ashiq, an anglophile. But now, with his Ahmadi roots exposed, they began shunning him as they would a contagion.

So, after Noor heard