In the Company of Liars

ONE DAY EARLIER
SATURDAY, APRIL 10

The Pakistani government attributed the bombing at Baluchistan University to an aerial assault by the Soviet Union. The communist-controlled Afghan security service, the KHAD-Khedamat-i-Ettela’at-i-Daulati-had instituted countless air and ground attacks in Pakistan since the country had become the focal point for Afghan resistance to the Soviet invasion. The Afghan refugees had pooled in various parts of Pakistan, including the Baluchistan province. Ram Haroon had seen some of the AfghaniPathansin Quetta; they were generally confined to the refugee camps, but they were sometimes seen in the markets. He remembers their bruised, creased faces, their defeated postures. People who had lost their homes, sometimes their families, clinging to little more than life itself.

Ram’s mother, a university professor, and his four-year-old sister accompanying her mother to class were two of the nineteen casualties of the attack. Ram recalls the moment that he heard the news in utter darkness, his eyes squeezed shut as he and his father sat on the floor of their home.

Mother was gone. Beni was gone.

It was the Americans, they said.

Ram listened to them only because he was looking for magic healing words, and it was only afterward that their words registered in any meaningful way.

Three weeks passed. His mother and sister were buried. Ram’s father did not work, could not work. Father would leave at night and not speak to his son about where he went. Ram saw a change in his father but attributed it to grief, when a part of him knew all along it was something else.

Five weeks after the death of his mother and sister, Ram’s father moved Ram and himself from Baluchistan to Peshawar, ground zero in the arming of the mujahedin against the Soviet aggression. “We must put this behind us,” Ram’s father told him. Ram was hardly able to comprehend, still reeling from the loss of his mother and sister. Now Father wanted to leave the only home he had known?

“Some day I will explain it to you,” Father promised.

Ram Haroon wipes the sweat from his face and focuses on his computer in his student dormitory. He types in the name on the e-mail and thinks hard about the words to write.

Please inform MAB that communication will be sent early next week by mail.

Ram types in the web address-pakistudent@interserver. com-hits the “send” button, and the document disappears. He looks at the photographs by his bed: his father, mother, and sister. Beni would be twenty-two years old if she had survived the bombing. She would be a student, like Mother was, probably a future professor, or a doctor, or lawyer. Everything would be different. They never would have moved to Peshawar.

Ram moves over to his small bed and cradles the photographs in his hand. “My time may be coming, too,” he says to them. At least in his case, it will be his choice.