Free A Season for Martyrs: A Novel by Bina Shah Page A

harmony with the water.
    They made their way carefully to the edge of the outcrop, and sat with their legs dangling over the side. The tide was gentle at this time in November; it sprayed a little water and foam onto their shins and covered their cheeks in a fine mist. The sun, too, warmed them rather than baking and broiling them as it did for most of the year.
    Ali put his arm around Sunita and she leaned into him, and since there was nobody else around, he started to kiss her. She responded eagerly. Warm and accommodating, her mouth opened under his lips. Their tongues met, and they were both thrilled by the intimacy they were sharing under the open sky. Ali could feel her pressing close, wanting more; he would have loved nothing better than to push her back on the rocks and lie on top of her, take her right here, hiding their bodies in a rocky pool where nobody could see them. But he couldn’t. As much as he loved her, she was not his to have as yet. Not like those two girls Jehangir found—while trying to decide for sure if he was gay. They’d claimed to be students at Karachi University but they must have come from Napier Mole Road; Jehangir went off with the taller one and Ali had the shorter one for an hour in that little apartment in Seaview that belonged to a friend of a friend of a friend. Sunita was different, and Ali owed her more than that, in return for all the love she’d given him.
    The kiss ended and Sunita drew back with a little sigh. Ali leaned his head on her shoulder and she put her arm around him, stroking his wrist with her slender fingers. “Any news?”
    Ali tightened his lips in an unseen grimace and pressed his eyes against her neck. “None yet.”
    “It’s terrible!” she whispered.
    “Two weeks. Can you imagine? Two weeks and not a word.”
    “The police?”
    “They haven’t been able to find anything. There were a lot of people missing,” Ali said. One hundred and thirty-five dead, one hundred injured, at least thirty or forty people disappeared into thin air—no bodies found. Haroon was one of the missing. His father and brother came all the way from Hyderabad, turning up at the office one day last week to beg the station owner, Kazim Mazhar, to use his influence and help them find their missing son.
    They talked to Ali, too, and he explained to them that he didn’t remember much about that night, that after the first explosion Haroon was all right, but after the second one he disappeared and Ali didn’t know what happened to him. They nodded at Ali, their liquid black eyes full of hurt and confusion. They were only simple men from Hyderabad, already scarred by the ethnic riots that they’d had to endure in the nineties. Haroon’s father told Ali that he’d encouraged his son to move to Karachi, that he’d been thrilled when Haroon had been offered the job with the news channel. “I thought it would be a good change for him,” he told Ali, in Sindhi. “I thought he’d be away from all the trouble in Hyderabad. Hyderabad is going nowhere and I wanted my son to go somewhere.”
    Ali clasped his hand and murmured polite words of commiseration, his heart aching for Haroon and for his brother, who looked as if he could be Haroon’s twin. There were Sindhis who were die-hard PPP supporters, who would lay down their lives for Benazir and her father, but Haroon’s family just wanted their son to get a good start, to make something of himself. They’d wanted to stay away from politics, live peaceful lives, earn a little honest bread. And now politics had robbed them of their precious son, and his family could not bury him because his body was nowhere to be found.
    Benazir had appeared on television in the days after the bombing, talking about how it was a deliberate plot on the part of the government. She’d had no proper security, she claimed; the lights had been switched off just before the explosions and the government had refused to give them the electronic jammers that