9/11 stories: Our Dead, Your Dead

by
Kamila Shamsie
Tue 6 Sep 2011 09.02 BST First published on Tue 6 Sep 2011 09.02 BST

"Hussain just called. He's been queuing at the petrol pump for the last twenty minutes.
But he says he'll be here before load shedding kicks off."

A sigh went up around the StreetSmart office. Every time the magazine's generator ran
out of petrol the load-shedding seemed to start earlier than scheduled, and the air-
conditioned cool on the twelfth floor wouldn't last more than a few minutes after the
power cut out. The editor's decision, taken on the third day of Ramzan, to start working
post-Iftar and carry on until dawn so everyone could sleep through the hours of
deprivation was considerably less appealing with the prospect of spending it sweating in
the dark until Hussain got back.

And right away it happened, of course. The abrupt silence of the air conditioner shutting
down, followed by a volley of loud beeps as the desktops switched to UPS mode, and the
roar of generators up and down the fifteen-story office block. More and more people
seemed to be working through the night as Ramzan wore on.

"Look at this before the UPS cuts out."

Everyone pushed chairs away from desks and clustered around the designer's massive
screen which was now the main source of light in the open-plan office. The cover mock-
up glowed with a bright blue sky, dark clouds floating across it in letter formation – at
the top, the magazine's title in large billowing puffs; beneath it, smaller clouds spelling
out Guantánamo, Drone Attacks, Waterboarding, Islamophobia, Racial Profiling, Patriot
Act.

The designer was Abrar – a twentysomething LUMS graduate wearing a T-shirt which
showed Mohammad Ali Jinnah saying Dude, where's my country? As he angled the
screen to allow the others a better view, Ayla saw that the clouds weren't clouds at all;
they were smoke trailing from the tops of the Twin Towers.

"This is not a good idea at all. At all."

Ayla was relieved she hadn't had to be the one to say so, particularly because the person
to issue an objection to the cover image was Iqbal Sahib, the marketing man who
obtained his position on the strength of a two-line email: FAMILY IN WAZIRISTAN.
WITH CAMERAS. Any complaints that he'd been hired ahead of graduates with degrees
from American universities had been forgotten as soon as StreetSmart's debut issue
started to attract international attention with its photographs and eye-witness accounts
of civilian casualties in the wake of an army operation against militants. If Iqbal Sahib
was the reason for the success of the first issue, Abrar was the reason the magazine got
as far as a second; his father had used his connections in the intelligence services to
broker a deal for its survival. Issue two led with a cover story about army widows whose
husbands had been killed by suicide bombers, which managed to imply that Indian
agents posing as Taliban might have been behind some of the attacks. All this Ayla had
learnt on her first day at work, just a few weeks ago.

But Iqbal Sahib's objections, it turned out, were not Ayla's own. If American magazines
wanted to observe the ten year anniversary of 9/11, fine, he said. But for a Pakistani
magazine to do that would simply buy into the American story about the attacks: that
they came 'from out of the blue' ; as if Osama hadn't been on the FBI's Most Wanted List
since 1988; as if the whole disgraceful nonsense around propping up jihadis against the
Soviets in Afghanistan, and then leaving Afghanistan to descend into a swamp of civil
war and Pakistani Interference hadn't got anything to do with anything; as if Islam
hadn't already been identified as the next enemy; as if there was something singular –
something exceptional – about suffering when it happened to Americans.

It was singular, Ayla found herself wanting to say. It was exceptional.

The arts editor, Saba, a woman who called herself Vegetarian-Atheist, though she was
neither, dismissed the image on the screen with a wave of her hand and directed
everyone's attention to the print out she'd pinned on to the wall earlier that week.

"If we're going to put words on the cover we should just use my War on Terror glossary."

It was too dark to make out the words but Ayla still found herself looking at the lines of
print, which she was annoyed to find she had memorised.

Guantánamo: Cuban song with various extraordinary (Joan Baez, Buena Vista Social
Club) and rather ordinary (Julio Iglesias and Nana Mouskouri duet) renditions
Drone attacks: what happens when George Lucas gives up on character and plot in
favour of CGI
Islamo-facism: the fall collection's follow-up to heroin chic
Islamophobia: fashionista response to Anna Wintour pursing lips at the above
Terror cells: HIV/Cancer/Man-flu
Racial profiling: sideways mugshots
Abbottabad: if OBL was there, who's in Costelloabad?

It might have been funny, coming from somebody else. But everything she had found
maddening about life in Karachi since returning here after 15 years away was summed
up by Saba's cool cynicism, her been-there-bought-the-T-shirt attitude to all disasters.

"You're such a burger," Abrar said. "Anna Wintour? Joan Baez?"

"I'm not the only one with Western cultural references, young jedi," she replied.
"Don't talk that way, man. Lucas is universal." He locked his fists together and rotated
his wrists, humming and buzzing as he defended himself with his imaginary light sabre.
Saba laughed, and Ayla saw a flash of the friendship she'd been told about – a friendship
founded on a shared desire for Hussain, which had quickly dissolved as soon as the
lanky, sloe-eyed editorial assistant had made his preferences clear.

"The whole point of this cover, Iqbal Sahib, is it says that our story of 9/11 isn't about
what was done to America but about what has been done since, by America, in its
name." The editor-in-chief, known to her subordinates as the General, had entered the
office, a solar-powered torch in her hands.

"Come on people. Back to work." Everyone shuffled back to their desks, lighting candles
or activating torch apps on their SmartPhones. "Oh and Ayla, in response to your email
– no, we don't need a story on how America thinks about 9/11 Ten Years On. We already
know they still think it's the Greatest Tragedy to hit Planet Earth. If you can't figure out
a Pakistan angle for the issue maybe you should head back to Boston."

Our story of 9/11.

Ayla wrote and deleted one bad-tempered sentence after another and thought of that
day when a university friend from Wisconsin responded to the news that Pakistan had
suffered more than 250 suicide attacks since 2002 with a sad shake of the head and a "I
hope your government has learnt the connection between sowing and reaping". It wasn't
the quality of the insight, Ayla had realised, but her own estimation of the speaker's
right to criticise which made her furious with her friend, or indeed with the General.

"Someone call Hussain and find out how much longer he'll be." The question sounded as
though it could have been for anyone at all, but the General was looking straight at Saba.

"I just tried. He's not answering. Maybe he's on the road."

"As if being on the road stops him from answering," Abrar said. "No sense of road safety
that one. I'm going to buy him a Bluetooth earpiece for his birthday."

"Spare my boyfriend your taste in accessories," Saba said.

Whatever tart comment Abrar was about to spit out in response died in his throat as
Iqbal Sahib came hurrying in with a kettle of boiling water from next door. "Didn't you
hear that? Something just exploded on the flyover. Some of the windows on the other
side of the building have shattered."

"Something exploded – or someone?"

Ayla imagined herself saying into the silence: My office was there. In the second tower. I

"Friends" was a lie. She had only been to the office twice, once during the interview
process and once after she'd been offered the job; she hadn't been due to start work until
September 17. "Colleagues" sounded too cold, though. "Colleagues" didn't convey how
the memory of every smile, every word of welcome became magnified in the aftermath,
representing friendships cut off, flirtations crushed, lovers wrenched away. Not lovers,
lover. The man whose direct glance and shy smile had made her heart leap with
possibility in the way that it did on an almost daily basis back then. She didn't know his
name, had no way of telling whether he was one of those who made it out or not, but at
some point she had simply decided that he was the Peter on the list of fatalities. She'd
had no communication with anyone from the office after that day except the HR person
who understood entirely why she moved right back to the familiarity of Boston the week
after the attacks.

No one in the office was even pretending to work – Ayla blamed the combination of
post-Iftar stupor and load-shedding inertia. Abrar was on the balcony, smoking though
he'd supposedly quit at the start of Ramzan, and jabbering on one mobile phone while
stabbing out a text on the other; Iqbal Sahib and the General had left the office,
muttering about "keeping up with developments"; Saba was pressed into the corner of
the office where it was possible to piggyback on to next door's broadband scrolling
through Twitter posts with the hashtag "Karachi".

The intern had stacked a printer and chair onto her desk to make room for her prayer-
mat – she usually waited until much later to say her Ishaa prayers – and was proceeding
through the cycle of standing-kneeling-prostrating with enviable suppleness, her
"Bismillah" and "Aameen" spoken aloud with a fervour which made Ayla wonder if it
was meant as a rebuke to those who weren't similarly genuflecting – since when had the
laid-back intern joined the self-righteous brigade?

What would they say if she told them, Ayla wondered? She looked across the office at the
bumper sticker pasted on the wall under Saba's print out: America had 9/11; England
had 7/7; India had 26/11; Pakistan has 24/7. They were all to-the-marrow
Karachiwallas, steeped in a bitter "survivor humour" which had been refined through
decades of violence. The men who strapped bombs to their chests in the name of God
were just the newest form of attackers, not even the deadliest. Would she be able to
puncture her colleagues' grotesque oneupmanship?

It wouldn't be the first time she'd used that day to improve her own position. In 2002
the Syrian visa in her Pakistani passport was enough to send her to the secondary
examination room at Logan Airport, where the man from Homeland Security – perfectly
polite – started to ask her routine questions. My office was in the second tower, she had
said. Can you imagine how it feels to have to go through this? He couldn't have been
more apologetic, more genuine in his contrition; she, by contrast, was all performance
with her trembling-lipped indignation.
Iqbal Sahib and the General came back in whispering and shaking their heads. Had Ayla
missed an argument? The General sat down next to Saba, who ignored the older woman,
staring at the screen in front of her and steadily tapping refresh. Iqbal Sahib walked
onto the balcony and prised both phones out of Abrar's hand, before giving him a little
push back into the office.

"We could always save the tenth anniversary special until next May," Ayla said into the
stillness of the room. "May 8 2012."

There was silence, slightly aggressive or perhaps that was just her imagination because
how, after all, could silence be aggressive. Finally the editor said, "And that would be the
tenth anniversary of…?"

"The Sheraton attack. The first suicide bombing in Pakistan." She couldn't keep the
slight note of triumph from her voice at being the only one in possession of this
knowledge.

The most unexpected sound followed: Saba, crying – followed by Abrar.

Ayla looked around the office. Everyone except her seemed to understand what was
going on. She tried to make out Iqbal Sahib's expression, but it was lost in the shadows.
If only there were proper light in here. Why didn't Hussain hurry up?

How could it possibly be taking him this long?