Babylon Act 1: Ghost Protocol

The house on Satellite Town had a particular smell in the mornings.

It was the smell of coal smoke drifting in from the neighbour’s kitchen, mixed with the sweetness of last night’s chai still clinging to the curtains, and underneath all of it, faint as a memory, the cedar oil Fatima’s mother rubbed into the wooden furniture every Thursday without fail. It was the smell of a house that had been lived in for forty years, that had absorbed every argument and every laugh and every late-night prayer into its walls until the walls themselves felt like family.

Fatima had grown up with that smell. She had married inside this house. She had buried her marriage here too.

She was twenty-eight years old and she lived in her parents’ home, and on the mornings when she could convince herself that none of it had happened, that Haider was simply away on a long posting somewhere beyond the reach of phone signals, the smell of the house was enough to almost make her believe it.

Then Zayan would come padding down the hall in his socks, dragging the corner of his blanket behind him, and she would look at his face and see Haider looking back at her, and the believing would stop.

Her son was four years old. He had his father’s eyes and his father’s way of tilting his head when he was thinking, and he asked for Baba sometimes in a voice that had no accusation in it, only genuine curiosity, the way children ask about rain or birds or why the moon follows the car. Fatima would tell him Baba was gone, and Zayan would nod as though this was reasonable, and then he would go back to whatever he had been doing, and Fatima would go to the bathroom and run the tap so no one could hear her.

The Army had sent a letter. Killed in Action, Balochistan Province. The letter used formal language and expressed the nation’s condolences and arrived in a cream-colored envelope, and Fatima’s mother had opened it because Fatima could not make her hands work properly that morning. It had been eleven months since the divorce. Three months since the letter. The math of it felt indecent.

She had divorced a man she believed had betrayed her. Then the nation had killed him. There was nowhere to put the grief that didn’t feel wrong.

So, she lived in the Satellite Town house with her mother and her father and her eldest brother Usman and his wife Hira and her other brother Imran and his wife Mahnoor and their daughter Zara, who was four years old and Zayan’s closest companion and the reason Zayan had not become completely feral in the months since the world had changed. The house was large enough for all of them if no one needed privacy, which no one ever admitted to needing. Pakistani households operated on the agreement that solitude was a Western affectation and grief was a communal project.

Most mornings Fatima managed.

She managed the breakfast and she managed the school preparations and she managed her mother’s questions and her father’s silences and Usman’s habit of leaving the television on at maximum volume throughout the afternoon. She managed the calls from relatives who wanted to know her plans and her future and whether she had considered that a young woman with a child needed to think practically about these things. She managed all of it with the particular competence of a person who has decided that surviving is enough, that surviving is in fact everything, that it is sufficient to get from one end of the day to the other and find Zayan still breathing and still trusting her at the far end.

She managed.

In the mornings especially, with the cedar oil and the coal smoke and the sound of Mahnoor arguing with the vegetable vendor from the kitchen window, she almost managed well.