Peshawar, Pakistan. 1995
Grant and I are living in a block of flats.
At 11:30 each day, five women gather for morning tea and a chitchat. Five women, with five different backgrounds and five different mother tongues. But each of us knows some Urdu, so it works.
We all love Ayisha from Flat 2, the one with royal blood in her veins. She is refined, educated and quietly elegant. She buys her expensive perfume on visits to Dubai, but she never flaunts her genes or wealth. Ayisha is a member of the old royal family of the small northern kingdom of Swat, which long ago became a district of Pakistan. Her unaffected nature reminds me of Princess Diana.
Right now, Ayisha’s biggest concern is losing young Shahbaz to boarding school.
“Little Shahbaz is so small, and I will miss him so much,” Ayisha confides, “but his father insists that he goes to the same school that he attended in Lahore. That’s hundreds of miles away!”
I can empathise. Eleven years ago, when we came to serve in Pakistan, we left our three children in a boarding school at the other end of the country, a thousand miles away. It was the hardest thing I have ever done.
Ayisha is married to Gul Mohammad, a landlord, whose fertile, irrigated fields are an hour from Peshawar. Gul Mohammad is a rugged blustery type. While his wife is truly a royal, he is more like the frog the princess kissed. A tall, vigorous hunk of a frog, he dotes on his two little froglets. He has firm plans for his small son to start Grade 1 in his Alma Mater in the Punjab. Shahbaz’s name was put on the waiting list the week after his birth.
Gul Mohammad sometimes invites Grant to watch cricket on his big screen TV, and they compare notes on agriculture and life. “When you are away for days on your project trips,” he said to Grant, “I note Mrs Janna is left all alone. Isn’t she afraid?”
“I think she is used to it,” Grant told him.
Gul Mohammad bristled, “If she ever has any trouble, tell her to ring down here and I will be right up there with my new Winchester shotgun.”
On lonely nights, when every unusual noise is magnified, it is comforting to know he’s just below, only a phone call away.
When we gather for our morning gup-chup, chitchat, over tea, I discover all sorts of things. I find out why there are fresh bloodstains on the stairs: Flat 4 has slaughtered a goat as a sacrifice for the health of a sick son. And I learn that Muslim women are not supposed to pray during menstruation.
“Where is Ayisha?” I ask as I arrive late for today’s tea and biscuits.
“She has taken the two children shopping,” Salma from Flat 6 smiles. “She has to get clothes for Shahbaz to go into boarding school in Lahore.”
Salma is on a high; she is going to have her first baby. “Thank you, Sister Janna,” she said to me last week, “thank you. We have wanted a baby for years. I’ve been to many holy men to pray and make offerings, but it’s only since you prayed for me in the name of Jesus Christ that I have become pregnant.”
The mother-to-be cocks her head. “What’s all that noise? Do you think Ayisha is back early?”
Everyone can hear it now. Below, car doors are slamming, and people are rushing into Flat 2. Voices are raised, and then there’s a loud, agonising, masculine wail.
Salma springs to her feet. “That sounds like Gul Mohammad,” and she rushes out.
Two minutes later she reappears, her face ashen and a hand covering her mouth. “It’s Ayisha,” she whispers.
“What has happened, Salma?”
Grant and Janna Lock in Afghanistan.
“A bomb was thrown into one of the clothing shops downtown. There was a terrible fire. People were trapped inside. There was only one way out, and it was cut off by the blaze.” Salma throws her hands over her face. “Ayisha couldn’t get out. She was burned to death!”
We all gasp. “And the children? Shahbaz and his little sister?”
“They … they are gone too.”
We stare at each other, our thoughts full of pictures of their dear friend and her two small children. The air is full of the screams of Gul Mohammad, sobbing and wailing below.
A faint whiff of French perfume no longer drifts up the stairs from Flat 2. The curtains are drawn, and it is empty. Gul Mohammad moved out the day his royal wife from Swat, and his two little children, didn’t come home.
I am so glad that I had opportunities to talk and pray with my good friend Princess Ayisha.
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