Karamat pressed the mute button and watched the doe-eyed girl in white, head covered, surrounded by bloodred rose petals, the park railings looking like a backdrop of prison bars in close-up shots of her. Nothing accidental in any of it, but what was all the iconography of suffering meant to achieve?
James returned to say the Turkish embassy could confirm only that the body had arrived in Islamabad, but had no details of how or when it would be transported to Karachi, and the Pakistan High Commission had made it clear they expected an apology from the home secretary before they would reveal any information about their citizens to him. Karamat handed him the piece of paper with the urbane host’s name and said, “If he has a UK visa, find a reason to cancel it.”
“There are some people who think you’re wanting a reason to strip her of her citizenship too,” James said, indicating the girl on the screen, his accent turning more pronouncedly Scottish and working-class, as it always did when he thought he might be about to enter into a disagreement with Karamat. It was a tic James was almost certainly unaware of, but Karamat had always found it winning that the young man’s unconscious played his outsider status up rather than down when he challenged the home secretary.
“And what do you think of that?”
“I think it’s a terrible idea. Everyone will think it’s because of Eamonn.”
“Everyone should know better,” Karamat said. He stood up and approached the split screen. “Damned if I know what she’s planning next. Would you be standing as near her as all those people in the park?”
“You think she’s wearing a suicide vest under those clothes?”
“No, I think she turns everything around her toxic. Look, it’s all gone a bit yellow around her, hasn’t it?”
“Must be something wrong with the camera lens. I’m sorry, sir, about the suicide vest comment.”
“Don’t be silly, James. These are the times we live in.”
The girl stood up fluidly from her cross-legged posture and stepped off the sheet. A single rose petal adhered to the top of her slim, bare foot. He imagined his son’s mouth pressed where the petal was, made a flicking-away motion with his hand. Both TV channels were showing the same scene, from slightly different angles, the air clearly yellow with an impending dust storm. The park—no more than twice the size of the Lone family garden—was bound in by railings and banyan trees, with an open gate toward which she was walking. A van had pulled up outside—an ambulance.
“No. Oh, come on, no.”
The driver of the ambulance opened the back doors, called out for some of the onlookers to help him. Far more men than was necessary lifted out the unadorned casket and carried it on their shoulders behind the girl, who, pale but composed, led them back to the white sheet and rose petals—the scene of martyrdom now complete. The men laid the casket down, but the girl wanted something more from them. She spoke to the man who had driven the ambulance; he shook his head vigorously, pointed to the hazy sky—indicating either the Almighty or the afternoon sun. She knelt beside the casket, placed the palms of her hands, one on top of the other, against the lid, near the corner, and pressed down with all her weight, her knees lifting off the ground with the effort.
“Move the cameras away,” he heard himself say.
The wood buckled, splintered.
“Jesus,” James said. “Jesus, no.”
The dupatta had fallen from her head, long hair whipping across her face as the wind picked up. The casket revealed its flimsy construction, nails ripping out of wood as the girl set to dismantling it with her bare hands. One by one she collapsed the sides until what remained was a shape sandwiched between the coffin’s base and a top layer of plywood. The girl sat back on her heels, as if only now, at this moment, had she stopped to consider what she was asking her own eyes to look at. Or maybe she was waiting for what happened next: the yellow-brown wind picked up the plywood and flung it into the air with a whipping sound.
The girl lowered herself to her knees, placed her hands on the ground on either side of her, and leaned forward, as a child might examine some unknown animal found in the garden. Her brother, embalmed, looked not right. How else to say it? Dead.
She lifted a hand, looked at it as if she wasn’t sure what it was about to do, and watched as her palm came to rest on the forehead of what had once been her twin. The hand jerked away, settled back down, slid along his skin toward his temple. Karamat and the cameras saw the stitches before she felt them, the place where death entered him. Her expression when she touched the thread was irritated, as if objecting to the untidiness, nothing more. The hand lifted again, moved down to the corpse’s wrist, two fingers pressed against what would have been a pulse point. Her mouth opened and a small word or sound may have come out, nothing the mics could pick up.
James said the words “broadcast regulations” with nothing around them. Every phone in the room was ringing. Someone was knocking on the door. “Shut up,” Karamat shouted, to everything.
The dust storm that had sent its advance guard now arrived in a hurtling, pelting wind. The white sheet flew up at its corners, tossing aside the rectangles of wood that had weighed it down; rose petals pitched up into the air, came down muddied; leaves were ripped from the banyan trees; the world tilted this way and that; the women wound their dupattas around their faces, the men made themselves small. One camera recorded only the flattened grass through a cracked lens. The other, moving closer to the girl, showed her dupatta fly toward it, a close-up of the tiny embroidered flowers on the white cloth, and then a battering darkness.
For a few moments there was only a howling noise, the wind raging, and then a hand plucked away the white cloth and the howl was the girl, a dust mask on her face, her dark hair a cascade of mud, her fingers interlaced over the face of her brother. A howl deeper than a girl, a howl that came out of the earth and through her and into the office of the home secretary, who took a step back. As if that were the only thing the entire spectacle had been designed to achieve, the wind dropped as suddenly as buildings collapse in 3-D models, and the girl stopped her noise, unlaced her fingers. The cameras panned, then zoomed. In the whole apocalyptic mess of the park the only thing that remained unburied was the face of the dead boy.
“Impressive,” said the home secretary.
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The girl licked her thumb, ran it over her mouth, painting lips onto the dust mask. Then she looked directly at the home secretary and spoke:
“In the stories of wicked tyrants, men and women are punished with exile, bodies are kept from their families—their heads impaled on spikes, their corpses thrown into unmarked graves. All these things happen according to the law, but not according to justice. I am here to ask for justice. I appeal to the prime minister: Let me take my brother home.”
Karamat spun the paperweight on the desk, watched the lion and unicorn animate, smiled. After all the noise and spectacle, she was just a silly girl.