60 Seconds
Shehrbano Minallah
On October 8, 2005, I was woken up early in the morning by my
small room swinging with a force I had never known before. My scrawny teenager
body was flung off the single bed. I tried to stand up but I could not, the ground was
shaking too much. I crawled instead and made my way to the door. Behind me, I
could hear the wooden chimes beating frantically against our second-story apartment
building window in Islamabad, Pakistan. As I reached my bedroom door and left my
room, I saw Bibi, my grandmother, at the threshold of her bedroom door opposite
mine holding onto the door frame.
“Do not move, stay still! It’s an earthquake!” she screamed in my direction.
An earthquake? I thought to myself. I thought it was the end of the world.
I was still on all fours. A crack had begun to form in the middle of our living room,
growing wide enough for me to be able to look into the downstair neighbor’s
apartment. When will it stop?
The family pictures on our living room wall had started coming down. A picture of
Bibi and Daddy on a reunion trip to their old home in the Tea Gardens of Sylhett,
Bangladesh. They were both standing in the middle of the tea bush lanes, smiling
towards the photographer, Bibi’s green eyes full of glee but with a hint of sadness.
Perhaps, I imagined the sadness because Bibi had told me that they were smiling in
that photograph, but it was an extremely difficult trip for her. Returning to the
house where she had given birth to all her four children and then going back in time
after two of them had passed in their youth. The Tea Garden house was her first
marital home after she had been married at the young age of fifteen in 1952; leaving
behind her family in a village in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
She was a painfully shy and thin new bride, completely overwhelmed by the size of
her new home and its thirty-two person staff. A red-orange brick driveway with
perfectly trimmed hedges on each side led to a large single-story Bungalow right at
the center on a raised hillock. The house had a thatched roof which was common for
many tea estates. It was called the Barra (bigger) Bungalow which was reserved for
managers of the tea company.
Years later, when she returned, she could see her children who were no more in
every part of the Barra Bungalow. Her daughter Sheila in a spotless white frock
and a white bow on a mass of light curls on a swing. The swing which hung from a
Lychee tree by the pool, taller than the Bungalow itself. The ground would be full
of Lychees when they were in season, some falling and drowning into the pool. Her
son Shahzad by the pineapple grove, grinning mischievously.
She had hoped the reunion trip would lead to closure since they had to flee
Bangladesh during the 1971 war without any of their belongings. The closets full of
Bibi’s prized sari collection. She would turn heads when she walked into the
gymkhana parties in her kanjeevaram saris with pearls to match. The humidity in
the tea gardens was extreme so the saris were always kept under low voltage bulbs
inside the closets. She had her own personal tailor who sat on the veranda floor
stitching new blouses for her. The cabinets displaying the Gardner Porcelain which
she had kept with such care. The library which was her refuge as a new and lonely
bride; the books which had become her savior in an otherwise lonely existence of
the tea gardens. The drawers full of silverware that she polished herself before
hosting endless dinner parties. The kitchen was a good 30 to 40 meters away from
the main Bungalow, so the assistant chef and wait staff took messages from Bibi to
the head chef. Every morning, the chef was summoned to the breakfast room. Bibi
gave him elaborate notes on what was to be cooked each day and for how many
people. If an overnight guest was coming, two more staff members were added,
and more chickens were slaughtered. A small cow was slaughtered every other day.
The animals were from the Bungalow’s farm and the organic meat meant that they
were tiny, up to five chickens would be slaughtered to host a small dinner party.
Daddy absolutely loved to host and celebrate life and in Bibi he found the most
diligent of hostesses. The gardens were full of her flowerbeds including her favorite
Dahlias. Every single thing was left behind when they fled and went back to
Pakistan, like refugees in our own home she would say. Instead of closure, the
reunion trip had opened up old wounds.
The ground was still swaying, the framed picture of me and my schoolmates from a
newspaper clipping had also come down. The headline read “High Achievers OLevel Examinations.” How fixated I was with getting the perfect grades and how
pointless my grades felt in that moment when I was on all fours in my pajamas at
what I thought was the end of the world.
Then I spotted Daddy at the other end of the living room; ‘Daddy’ was what we
called our grandfather. He was seated in his wheelchair in his grey pajama suit and
his usual grey tweed golfing cap. His Christian home health aide was standing by his
wheelchair, making his final prayers and signing the cross across his chest.
Daddy and I looked straight into each other’s eyes. Never had I known a look of
such absolute terror and helplessness on his face. The stroke had left him mostly
paralyzed and he could hardly speak. When he did speak, there was a disconnect
between his thoughts and words. I could see then how badly he wanted to say
something, to get away, but he remained anchored in his wheelchair, living
through his worst nightmare.
It was difficult to see Daddy like this, Daddy who had dressed up every single day in
his perfectly tailored suits flown in all the way from England. He would sit by his
solid wood antique bar cabinet on a high wooden bar stool every evening. In the
cabinet were crystal decanters and carefully selected liquor for all tastes. There was
always a supply of fresh dry fruit in the drawer section of the cabinet. He always
smelt of bath soap with a hint of alcohol in the evening, courtesy of his evening
drink. He often broke into song or a poem or a quote from a book he had enjoyed. He
loved a good joke-book and would chuckle to himself while reading Khushwant
Singh.
Losing two children had never stopped him from living his life to the fullest,
travelling any chance he got. My room was full of souvenir gifts from his travels: a
wooden giraffe from Kenya, a stuffed panda from China, a decorative plate with
lemons on it from the Amalfi Coast, a small painting of a hunting scene from
England with hunters in red coats. Bibi and Daddy were connoisseurs of flavors,
bringing in exotic spices from all over the world; there was always a different pickle
on the table. At each meal Daddy would comment, “I hope you tried that pesto with
your cottage cheese” or “That dried tomato caprese will go very well with your
bread” or “Try that sambal with your omelet.”
You had to be thick-skinned to be in his company. He was ruthless in making fun
of relatives, giving everyone a nickname or worse, addressing someone with the
entirely wrong name and getting a kick out of it. He would go to the famed
Hayatabad Bara market in Peshawar where smuggled foreign goods came in
from Afghanistan. He would walk confidently in his shorts with tanned legs from
his daily game of golf through a sea of burqas, chadors and men in shalwar
kameez and thick beards. The shopkeepers would call out to him, “Come mister,
this way mister, imported juicer mixer.” They always mistook him for a foreigner
and tried to make a profitable deal. They would be shocked and embarrassed
when Daddy responded in Pashto.
As a twelve-year-old boy, he had left his village in Ziarat Kakasaheb and followed his
father to India where he was working. There he studied at the Raj Kumar College for
Boys. He and his siblings were like two different worlds. Those who stayed back
never showed any interest in leaving the safe confines of the village. When Daddy
spoke, it was as though he had been trained in English by the Queen herself. But his
siblings couldn’t manage to string together one complete sentence in English.
For all his vast verbosity, he sat across me now completely mute as the building
shook. He had always feared earthquakes. What I did not realize then, his face full
of absolute terror, was that he had suffered a silent heart attack during the quake
and that he would pass away soon after. He had survived an anti-tank mine
incident in Bangladesh which blew up his car as he was driving it; he had earned
the nick name of “Anti-tank Minallah”. The anti-tank mine did not kill him that day
in Bangladesh but the 2005 Pakistan earthquake did.
After what were the longest 60 seconds of my life, the earthquake finally stopped.
When we managed to get out of our apartment building, we all looked at each other
too shocked to speak. The neighboring apartment building had collapsed. The sky
was full of smoke, the ground full of debris, every sound was muted by the blaring of
ambulance sirens. Emergency helicopters had arrived on the scene. Everyone was
running towards the ill-fated apartment building that had collapsed. There was a
surge of traffic as people tried to flee the remaining apartment buildings for fear of them coming down too. Yet a smaller group was running back indoors to salvage
their belongings: a pet forgotten in the panic, important documents, and a middle-aged neighbor of mine who ran back up nine stories for her gold jewelry. We did not
dare go back towards the building.
I held Bibi’s hand as we headed towards our car. Once again, she was leaving her
home with only the clothes on her back.
Over 78 of my neighbors died that day–78 life stories, dreams, plans, hopes, love,
fears ended in an instant. This number included a childhood teacher of mine and a
schoolmate who was in the same “high achiever” group photo newspaper clipping
with me. All of this in our otherwise small and safe capital of Islamabad.
In the rest of Pakistan, over 86,000 people had died, and millions were left
injured or displaced.
The rest of the month was a haze of Daddy’s funeral, repeated aftershocks, TV sets
always on, reporting the increase in death tolls and devastation. Most major
buildings were closed for repair work including all our schools. It was a month
shrouded in a thick blanket of grief and renewed fear each time the ground shook
with the aftershocks. It was also a time of intense relief work, people laboring
tirelessly to help the survivors.
When the solid earth under your feet betrays you, an underlying fear becomes
permanently lodged in your body. Home is where you feel safe, but when even your
home can become your coffin, you realize that nothing can be relied upon, and
nothing is certain.
It can take 60 seconds for your world to change completely. And it could be the very
next 60 seconds in which that change can happen.