FIRST PERSON
The News From Home: How Pakistan Shaped a Wellesley Journey By Mira Sethi ’10
On a sticky night in May 1999, a bunch of armed guards broke into my parents’ bedroom at 3 A.M., tied up my mother’s hands, beat my dad with gun butts, and dragged him away. When my mother asked for an arrest warrant, the officer barked, “I’ll give you a death warrant.” My brother and I were asleep in the room upstairs; we woke up the next morning to a house streaming with people. In 1989, my parents had together launched Pakistan’s first English-language weekly, The Friday Times (TFT). For the next 10 years, my dad penned editorials calling attention to the corruption of the two mainstream political parties, the Pakistan Peoples Party and the Pakistan Muslim League. During Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s last stint in
I knew was that I made my friends laugh by telling them stories about home, and the more stories I told, the happier I was. I took classes in the South Asian studies department, in the French department, and in the English department. I stayed up late at night fussing over my essays, drinking coffee, clicking my way to the New York Times home page in the inky glare of my computer screen. But I was miserable. My relationship with my boyfriend of four years was crumbling, and Wellesley added to my feelings of isolation and melancholy. Every day, the walk from Severance to Clapp and back was the same; every weekend, the line for the Peter Pan bus was long and jostling, Wellesley girls in miniskirts, tights, boots, and woolly caps waiting to be transported, however briefly, to the nearest Neverland. The news from home got progressively worse. During my first year, Pakistan was touted as a “key ally” in the “war on terror.” By the end of sophomore year, Benazir Bhutto had been assassinated and a small insurgency had begun simmering in Pakistan’s tribal badlands on the border with Afghanistan. By the end of my junior year, the northern tribal areas had become a safe haven for the Taliban. The same year, 61 suicide bombings—an unprecedented figure—paralyzed the country. American think tanks repeatedly mulled one question: Was Pakistan not resembling, more and more, a failed state? I was at Oxford for my junior year during this time, and my mother’s phone calls from home became infrequent. “How are things?” I would ask, stretching my neck. “Not good,” she’d say, her voice tight and tiny on the long-distance phone call. Once a week, she’d relate an incident of a suicide bombing in the heart of Lahore, where she and my dad worked and commuted every day. “But
office—from 1997 to 1999—TFT was at the forefront of reporting on the ruling party’s money laundering, land-grabbing scams, and loan writeoffs. A month before my dad was arrested, he made a documentary for the BBC on these subjects. Having done so, he left for a conference in Delhi. In Delhi, he spoke of the recalcitrance of India as a status-quo power that made no concessions to peace with Pakistan; he spoke of Pakistan as beset with crises that were causing it to fail as a state. Prime Minister Sharif’s henchmen seized on this “treacherous” speech—for having spoken ill of Pakistan in arch-enemy India—and arrested my dad. My brother, mother, and I, supported by hundreds of Pakistanis, took to the streets. I was 12, but I remember the heat, the slogans, the marching feet caked in dust. We led protest rallies on Mall Road in the heart of Old Lahore. We protested in front of the imposing sandstone facade of the Lahore High Court. A month later, under mounting pressure from the international community, the Supreme Court ordered my dad’s unconditional release. Eight years later, I arrived at Wellesley College, tall and gawky, knowing somewhere in the pit of my stomach that I wanted to be a journalist. I didn’t really know why I aspired to that career—all 24
Wellesley Summer 2010
RICHARD HOWARD
Once a week, my mother would relate an incident of a suicide bombing in the heart of Lahore, where she and my dad worked and commuted every day.
you’re well?” she’d ask. “Are you eating properly and taking your iron supplements? Are you keeping warm, Mira? I can’t tell you how relieved I am that you’re not here.” Truth be told, I was perhaps more relieved than she—relieved and ridiculously grateful to be buried in a life of books with cracked spines, of pubs and long conversations about the role of art and literary criticism, global politics, and the significance of the election of Barack Obama. I loved being at Oxford, and being immersed, for a whole year, in a single, simple pursuit: reading and writing about books. At Wellesley, a creativewriting professor had encouraged me to pursue my love of prose fiction; in my final semester at Oxford, I did exactly that in a class made up of just me and the instructor. The more I wrote, the more full of possibility life seemed. Back at Wellesley as a senior, I found my thoughts very different from what they had been sophomore year. Although I still mused cynically about the too-verdant landscape, and my friends and I laughed and sighed and snickered about what it means to be a Wellesley Woman, news from home continued to provide context for my life as a Wellesley student. I began a collection of short stories for my senior honors’ thesis; most of them were set in Lahore. One day, I was gazing out the window, frustrated at my inability to write a crowd scene. Then, something rotated and buzzed on the wooden desk. My mother was calling from home. “We led a protest march against the Taliban,” she said, breathless. “Very high turnout, most of them women.” “That’s excellent. Where was this?” “On Mall Road.” “What was the mood like?” I asked. My fingers were poised, stiff, over the keyboard. Mira Sethi ’10 majored in English and creative writing and minored in South Asian studies.