Lost to the World, page 2
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That was how my father existed for me in those days: an inspiring example of being a trailblazer full of courage, clearly a man with focus and a vision. I often wondered if I could ever live up to his legacy.
As a kid growing up under the safety and comfort of his umbrella, I listened to Guns N’ Roses and dreamed about college in America. Why would I be worried about solitary confinement or smuggling out assurances to loved ones? My carefree teenage life didn’t provide the skill set to cope with a brutal kidnapping.
In hindsight, I realize I’d been living in a bubble. The bubble only became clear to me long after it had burst.
3
In 1961, following an emotional farewell at the Lahore railway station, my father set sail with a one-way ticket via Karachi on a ship that docked at Southampton. This would mark his independent journey toward success. Abba often repeated my grandmother’s words to him that day—“Hard work and perseverance are key ingredients to success, my son”—knowing in the back of her mind that a one-way ticket meant he was now on his own and had to carve out his destiny at the age of seventeen. It was a challenging ask, because in the event of failure they would probably never see each other again.
In 1947, post partition, Pakistan was carved out of the Indian subcontinent and my grandfather found himself among the planners and thinkers of the two-nation theory. He was subsequently invited to head one of Pakistan’s most prestigious institutes, Islamia College. The historic city of Lahore was to play host, and my British grandmother found herself integrating into the local landscape very comfortably. Making the adjustment even easier was that her sister, Alice, was married to Faiz Ahmed Faiz, who was also a dear friend of my grandfather. The city was old, the country was new, and my grandfather had lived to see his dream of Pakistan come alive. But sadly he died not long after, of a heart attack in 1950, at age forty-seven. His beloved country was three years old. His son, Salmaan, was only six.
Christable, my grandmother, a young widow in a foreign land, made the conscious decision to raise three children as Pakistani Muslims and vowed to keep her late husband’s ideals and dreams alive through them. Lahore remained home, and my grandmother’s sacrifices amid her determined struggle to do right by her children remained indomitable. She ensured that her children received a good education, which was of paramount importance. Abba attended Saint Anthony’s College, a school run by Christian missionaries that laid a solid foundation for his quest to earn his chartered accountancy accreditation.
On returning to Pakistan from England he joined A.F. Ferguson and six months later, bored with being employed, he set himself a challenge to take on some of the largest chartered accountancy firms by establishing one of his own. A forward thinker with a penchant for risk, his success crowded the room. What followed was forays into financial services, telecom, real estate, construction, and media, ultimately earning him the reputation of having the Midas touch.
He became legendary for his business acumen, but his underlying passion and core interest lay in Pakistani politics, in paving the path for democracy to thrive. He joined the Pakistan Peoples Party when it was founded as he was an ardent supporter of its chairman and founder, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was hanged by the ruthless military dictator Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. My father authored the first political biography of Mr. Bhutto and took on the power-hungry Zia-ul-Haq. My abba’s uncompromising position resulted in years of jail in solitary confinement and torture at the hands of an illegitimate regime, an embarrassing era mostly excluded from Pakistan’s history books. In 1988, the usurper Zia-ul-Haq, who had outlived his usefulness, conveniently died, ending more than a decade of martial law. An interim government was formed, which gave Bhutto’s stoic and fearless daughter Benazir three months to organize her decommissioned party. My father, who’d worked tirelessly for the restoration of democracy, was awarded a ticket by the Pakistan Peoples Party to contest for a seat in the provincial assembly. His party victoriously swept the election with a two-thirds majority. My father’s hard work reaped rewards, resulting in him achieving the highest vote in the election for the Punjab assembly.
This newly established democracy didn’t come without its problems, however, with the two most popular parties playing musical chairs for the next decade, during which time Abba opted to reestablish himself in business after failing in his bid for reelection.
In 2008, at the top of his game, he was invited by the federal government to take the oath and govern the province of Punjab. To him this was a great honor and possibly the ultimate form of recognition. Among my father’s stellar qualities, the one that stands out with great prominence was his compassion for the underprivileged. One of his first official acts was to pay a visit to Mukhtara Mai, a victim of gang rape who had not received justice. He lent her unconditional support, pledging a grant to her school and vocational center. A few years later the criminal injustice of Asia Bibi’s story caught his attention.
Asia Bibi was a poor Pakistani Christian woman who had been sentenced to death over a petty dispute with a group of female villagers over water. The Muslim village women refused to drink from the same well of water as Bibi, claiming she had made it impure. A heated argument ensued, resulting in the women falsely accusing her of insulting the Prophet, a crime punishable by death under the country’s draconian blasphemy law authored by the cruel and infamous dictator Zia-ul-Haq. Asia Bibi was arrested, and after a one-sided trial, she was sentenced to death by hanging, a verdict that drew ire and disbelief from around the world. Pope Benedict XVI would later plead for her release.
In the course of a TV interview in 2010, my father was asked his thoughts about the case. He did not mince words. He believed all laws should be discussed in parliament and referred to the blasphemy law as a “black law,” which enraged the fanatic right. In November 2010, he held a televised press conference while visiting Asia Bibi in prison, lobbying for clemency, believing strongly that if Pakistan wanted to progress, it had to protect its minorities by revisiting this law.
His comments angered the mullahs, who publicly cried out and placed fatwas on his head demanding his death. Jackals and opportunists in the media leaped on the story, cynically inflaming the controversy, as though his life weren’t at risk. My father worked his entire life, in business and in politics, to better his home country, and now religious zealots and self-appointed custodians of the faith turned on him. Abba never stood down when his principles were at stake. Dark forces were assembling to work against him, but he would prevail. He always had.
I couldn’t imagine a world without him. But then, I would soon learn just how much there was that I had yet to understand.
To give context to my story, I had yet to understand the complexities of this region. In 1979, at the height of the Cold War, the U.S.S.R. invaded Afghanistan, prompting the United States to lend support to a very battered Afghan nation. The United States teamed up with Pakistan to develop a mujahideen resistance force of “freedom fighters,” who, coupled with local knowledge, Pakistani intelligence and training, and U.S. military hardware, sent the Soviets home in 1989. What was a glorious triumph for the allied world against Red Russia turned out to be a hollow victory for the Afghans. Ten years of war had savaged and completely broken down any system of governance, leading to a state of anarchy in which warlords were the rulers of their domains.
A lawless Afghanistan posed an existential threat to Pakistan, which soon recognized this and set the wheels in motion to protect itself on its porous western border, already home to more than a million displaced Afghan refugees. In the mid-1990s, the warlords, along with some Pakhtun religious clerics and former allies from the war with the Soviet Union, collaborated and formed a group called the Taliban and elected Mullah Muhammad Omar as its head. “Amir ul mominneen,” leader of the Muslim ummah—“body of people”— was the title given to him, and using that title he formed a shura or council to oversee a chain of command that had a structured succession plan along with authority passed on with immediate effect, thus creating a heinous and deadly network never witnessed before. The Taliban was so unique and ferocious that it left Pakistan and the most powerful nations bewildered. Around the world, young, highly impressionable Islamic fundamentalists seduced by this ideology traveled great distances to Afghanistan’s most remote and abandoned parts to sign up and dedicate their lives to this cause.
One such man was Muhammad Tahir Farouk, who would become the founding father of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, or IMU. He along with Osama bin Laden conspired to send Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to a previously secular Iraq to sow the seeds of an Islamic jihad. The impact of his efforts brought anarchy and mayhem to Iraq and the region. A reflection of his carnage is what we see today in Iraq and Syria, in the institution informally known as the Islamic State. This powerful trio of bin Laden, Omar, and Farouk proudly bear responsibility for terrorist organizations from North Africa across the Middle East and into South Asia.
I found myself in this minefield of terror and intrigue, a prisoner, helpless and unable to make sense of how my family would fulfill the requirements of these mercenaries.
4
In 2001, I was seventeen, a senior in high school in Lahore, dreaming of attending university in the United States. A number of my close friends were American. We holidayed abroad every summer.
My family was fortunate enough to have traveled the world, mostly to Europe and the Far East, including a memorable safari in Kenya. While it’s hard to imagine any place being more alive than Lahore, at the time a raucous city of 6 million people that was constantly in motion, the draw of a future in America was exciting and appealing. It was definitely where I felt I belonged.
Then 9/11 happened.
This great tragedy occurred a world away from me. As a teenager, watching these events unfold in another country, on another continent, I couldn’t comprehend that this heinous act would have any direct impact on me. It was dark and sinister, but it had nothing to do with me. It appeared that the nineteen terrorists, unstable and brainwashed, were all Muslim. America and its music culture and the American dream was where my interests were focused.
At seventeen, I was young, fearless, and politically naive, but the events of that day impacted both my personal life and the socioeconomic lives of my countrymen. Many foreign families were resettled without notice, as Lahore was deemed unsafe for them.
How had our country suddenly become so dangerous overnight that people were fleeing?
For Pakistan, 9/11 changed everything. It led to the American war in Afghanistan, which sadly continued, with no clear objectives. A common feature of this aggression was drone strikes, which caused thousands of civilian casualties in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, as collateral damage. I say this as someone who is both in favor of drone strikes and a survivor of two of them.
Inevitably, the fighting and chaos in Afghanistan spilled over into Pakistan, across a porous border that was illegally breached by violent militias carrying dangerous weapons, and virulent anger. In Pakistan, 9/11 led to a chilling rise in deadly terrorist attacks, driven by extremists angered that our country had allied itself with the United States. Lahore, the vibrant city of my youth, full of streetlights and colorful flower boxes, along with every other large city in Pakistan, quickly became an intimidating fortress of high walls, barbed wire, and army checkpoints. Suicide bombings at mosques, or crowded markets, became a numbingly common occurrence. Soon, it no longer made sense to talk about any place in Pakistan as a “tourist destination” as this industry had dried up completely. Mention Pakistan now to the average American and they’re most likely to think of rubble and chaos with a travel advisory, which is not the country I grew up in or the one I live in now.
The ascendant religious extremism that led to 9/11 also affected my family in personal and painful ways. The attacks on 9/11 unleashed a dangerous new fervor that eventually, over a decade later, resulted in my father’s assassination. The DNA of my kidnapping harks back to this rise in bigotry.
My family, like many others, paid the highest possible price, unquestionably a direct consequence of what happened in New York City on that day. It was unthinkable that as a naive teenager, watching the news in a city far away from where the terrorist attacks took place, I could have imagined any of the events that unfolded following this.
I know I’m not alone in how that day affected me. Many lives were lost, shattered, and irrevocably changed. But that an event so distant could crumble my world was a rude awakening for my young self. It was the first time that my bubble of privilege and protection started to wobble and threatened to burst.
* * *
Now a huge portion of the world was cut off to me. So, my family decided, I would go to school in London.
My father was the ultimate raconteur, embellishing stories of his travels as a young man, further igniting my desire to seek out accumulated wisdom and discover the riches of the West.
I graduated from school and enrolled at SOAS University of London to begin my foundation year in international law. These were exciting times for me as this would be my first taste of life away from the comfort and security of my parents’ home. Looking into the rearview mirror as I left Lahore eager to take on new challenges and opportunities, I was full of optimism and hope, as the world was my oyster.
But my early days in London were in stark contrast to my expectations, as I only realized then how much the world had changed since 9/11. This was not the United Kingdom offering the opportunities my father and grandfather had enjoyed as students. I was made uncomfortably aware of my skin, my religion, my culture, and my race in a whole new and unwelcome way. In all my years growing up in Lahore, I had never been subject to any form of prejudice or racism.
For the first time in my life, the word “Muslim” was spoken, in many countries, including the United Kingdom, with equal parts hatred, suspicion, and fear. It was widely said all Muslims are not terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslim. I spent many summers growing up holidaying in London. Despite the fact that both my maternal and paternal grandmothers were British, this was the first time I was made to feel like an unwelcome outsider.
Pakistan is the fifth most populous country in the world, with a population of 220 million, ranking just after China, India, the United States, and Indonesia. Pakistan’s customs and culture vary as much as the sandy coastline of Sindh and the deserts of Balochistan differ from the lush plains of Punjab and the jagged snowcapped peaks of the north, some of which are among the highest mountains in the world. Pakistan is a country of multiple ethnicities, but one ideal: people should coexist in harmony.
As with most countries, Pakistan is no exception in not having lived up to that ideal. Patriots such as my father lent their voices to the plight of minorities.
* * *
In 2010, about a year before I was kidnapped, I took my wife on a long-planned trip to California. Overall, it was a wonderful, if slightly exhausting, trip.
The journey from California to Lahore is an especially long haul, almost twenty-four grueling hours in total flight time. We arrived at SFO airport and boarded our plane to New York. The flight was delayed and delayed further. We sat with our fellow passengers, restless and waiting for updates. I tried to settle in and catch some sleep.
FBI agents boarded the aircraft, arrested the two of us, and took us off the plane.
It’s hard to express just how humiliating it is to be led in handcuffs off a plane full of strangers, all of whom assume you are criminals, terrorists, or worse. I’ll always be grateful for one sympathetic young college kid who stood up and started making a video on his smartphone and telling the officers this was an injustice, that we were being racially profiled. He was right. There was no other explanation for it.
They pushed my wife and me into separate cars. I could see Maheen sitting in the back seat of her car, looking confused, outraged, and worried. I tried to mouth some words to her to reassure her, so she wouldn’t feel anxious. But the agents saw us trying to communicate, so they repositioned the cars so we could no longer see each other.
Meanwhile, the remaining passengers were being evacuated. The FBI agent informed us that someone had made an anonymous call about the flight, claiming a bomb threat. By now, a bomb disposal unit had arrived on the tarmac and was boarding the plane with dogs to search the cabin. As far as Maheen and I knew, there might well have been a bomb on board, a terrifying prospect. We also knew for sure that we weren’t responsible for it. Watching all this unfold, both Maheen and I had the same thoughts, in our separate vehicles. Apparently, everyone thinks we were going to blow up this plane. And now they have left us here, parked under the wing, while they search for a bomb. If there is a bomb on board, and it goes off, we’ll not only explode along with the plane, but we’ll forever be blamed for being the ones who planted it. They’d say, “We got the right people. They were guilty all along.”
Maheen and I sat on the tarmac for another hour or so, before the agents finally drove us to the terminal. Again, we were kept separate—I was led to one room while my wife was taken to another; we weren’t given a chance to speak. After sitting in the plane for hours, then on the tarmac, I was beyond embarrassed—I was outraged.
When I reached the small interrogation room, two agents greeted me and pulled the good-cop / bad-cop routine on me. It was like a scene out of Lethal Weapon. The bad cop barked, “Do you know why you’re here?”
“Not really. But I did see a bomb disposal unit.”
“You’re here because we suspect you tried to hijack and bomb that plane. And we’re checking your bags right now for bombs and ammunition.”
“The only thing inside my bag that’s even slightly suspicious is an iPad that I just bought. And it’s still in the plastic wrap. So, if you open it and find a bomb inside, that’s Apple’s fault, not mine.”
