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

would stop any bombs from detonating near her cavalcade.
    Ali didn’t want to be anywhere near her image; he couldn’t stand to hear her voice. It made him feel as though ants were crawling underneath his skin. But he couldn’t avoid it; her face was everywhere, on the television, in the newspapers, on the posters that came up all over the city like mushrooms after a monsoon. Her voice, strident and demanding, boomed out from speakers everywhere, in people’s cars, in restaurants, and most of all at the news station, where the programmers broadcast repeatedly the clips that they’d compiled from Ali’s reports filed earlier in the day, before the explosion.
    “Is it true?” Haris had asked Ali, as he sat on the couch with their mother and sister, watching the scene of the bombing repeated over and over again on all the channels. “Did they switch off the lights before the bomb went off?”
    “Stop that, Haris!” exclaimed Ali’s mother. “Don’t you think he’s been through enough already?” She’d nearly fainted when she’d seen the bombs on television. Ali called her on his mobile to tell her that he was fine, and she wept down the phone, uttering prayers for his safety and offering thanks that he was unharmed.
    Ali didn’t feel unharmed as he stood shaking in the chaos, people running around him, the ambulance sirens wailing, the smell of explosives and blood settled around him. The streetlights were flickering on and off. Broken glass from cars and nearby shops sparkled everywhere on the ground, and people who’d lost their shoes in the explosion were cutting themselves as they stumbled around, screaming out loud in pain and terror. Ali’s heart was throbbing in his chest as though a strong fist were squeezing it unevenly, and for a minute he wondered if he was going to have a heart attack from fright.
    He found Ram and they walked for a mile, away from the crush, holding hands. A doctor glanced at them as he ran by; they were covered in soot and grime but no blood, so he decided that they didn’t need his help, even though Ali wanted to reach out and clutch at him as if he were a plank of wood and Ali a drowning man in the middle of a swirling river. Ali and Ram walked and walked, not saying a word, just wanting to put distance between them and the terrible thing they had just seen. They didn’t talk about Haroon, they didn’t know what to do, because he had vanished and there was no way they could find him in the darkness and the confusion. In those moments they were as lost as he was; the only difference was that they would come back eventually and he never would.
    “So did they, Adda?”
    “Did they what?”
    “Turn off the lights?”
    Ali wanted to reach around and slap Haris. Instead, he frowned and reached for the remote, switching off the television, ignoring the shocked looks of his mother and sister, the open-mouthed idiocy of Haris’s face. “I don’t know what she’s talking about. They didn’t turn off any lights. She’s a bloody liar.”
    And now Benazir had gone to Dubai for a few days to see her mother, who they said was dying of Alzheimer’s. It was only an hour and a half by plane; she could go and come in a day if she wanted to. Everyone was saying that she’d been frightened by the attempt on her life, that she wouldn’t return. The president and his cronies were overjoyed with what they thought was their victory over her, contradicting all their statements that they’d had nothing to do with the bombings. They’d warned her not to come, they said. Something like this was bound to happen.
    “And how would they know that unless they’d planned it themselves?” Sunita said to Ali, echoing what everyone was saying in the streets, in offices everywhere, in drawing rooms all over the country.
    But Ali was tired of talking about it, of thinking about it. It was like being lectured nonstop by his father. He glanced back at the beach hut, thinking that they should