Besides being boarded for Toronto instead of Ohio this time, I am also able to stretch my legs and lay down straight on my back in the airplane. It feels like business class: comfortable, dark, quiet and cold. But, it is not; instead, I am lying in my coffin dead, travelling back to meet the rest of my family in Canada. Most likely, brother will receive me at the airport, and for the first time in our lives I will not hug him back or respond to his greetings. How am I going to handle those emotions? My idea is simple: I intend to just watch him shed his tears without showing any of mine. In the next few days, when he buries me in my grave and says the final goodbye to me, I know he will be very sad and upset, wishing he had done enough to hold me from visiting Pakistan, so I would still be alive. However, I am not upset. I am much more peaceful here than I had ever imagined in my life. There is no pain, no anxiety, no one around to find out my religion here, no fear of persecution, no concerns about being looked down upon and no apprehension about my safety. I feel free of all my fears in this seven-foot-long and two-feet-wide dark and cold place.
I decided to leave my body probably after the third bullet when blood started gushing from my chest. I could not stay there any longer, although it was not my plan. The plan was to stay in it for a few more decades and watch my two-year-old son grow older, graduate from college and build his own career. I wanted to encourage him to help others like I do, support his community like I have, and build a bright future for Pakistan like I always wanted to. But, the people who shot me did not think that way. For them, I, my wife, my two-year-old and my whole community are all blasphemous and we do not have the right to live. I cannot say that I did not know about them at all, the extremists who would like to rid Pakistan of all minorities. We, Ahmedis, are well aware of them; rather I should say that no one is more conscious of them than us in the country. We live under their threat all our lives, fearful of being killed anytime. Long before we can even remember our name or gender, they tell us that we are not true Pakistanis. We are the enemies of the state, Islam, and maybe the Ummah (Muslim nation) too. I am not sure what Ummah means and who would be included in it, but I do not intend to dwell on it today and would leave that discussion for another time. Because of that, as we grow up, we learn to hide our faith from others, keeping our guard up on the issue of religion. It is tough; but we do it anyway because it ensures our physical wellbeing but more than that, it also preserves our emotional fettle. We realise that even our closest friends would abandon us for a single slip of our tongue. And in the worse case scenario, they may indeed turn out to be our worst enemy, the source of misinformation and propaganda about our religion, our family lives, financial resources and our ‘anti-Islam’ agenda. All of us in our community have had one or more incidents like this in our lives where people turn against us without giving a proper reason. Suddenly, they just stop talking to us, do not respond to our greetings, refuse to shake hands and do not like us to participate in any activity with them. We are outlawed as if we have contacted leprosy and need to be quarantined or put to sleep. There are only a few, a minority in society, who still want to maintain a normal relationship with us; the majority considers them non-practicing, sinful and superficial Muslims too, but Muslims nonetheless.
In our case, we are not considered the followers of Islam at all. No matter how pious we are, how helpful we want to be, how polite and forthcoming our behaviour is, and no matter how well we have served the country, we are still non-Muslims and unpatriotic Pakistanis. Even the constitution declares our heresy. Now if we want to raise that issue, the religious extremists would label us as traitors since we question the most sacred law of the nation. They would equate our objection with the ideology of the Taliban or military dictatorship that either do not believe in it altogether or abrogate it to come into power through force respectively. Being a non-Muslim, if I ever got killed by an extremist group I have always known — which has turned out to be true as well — that there would be no one in the Pakistani media or politics who would raise a voice of concern for me. I know the reason for their silence too: their souls have been possessed by fear. Their lips are sealed, their tongues tied and their hearts desensitised. They believe a single sentence of support is all it would take to make a fanatic declare them blasphemous, which is a certain death sentence nowadays. And for Ahmedis no one wants to jeopardise his life. “We have no problem in taking a risk for a good cause, where we can be honoured as heroes. But how would we be remembered if we lost our lives for Ahmedis?” they might ask. Even if in private they sympathise with us, they will not stand up in public for our right to live. “If they can kill Salmaan Taseer, who am I to resist them?” they will add later. In response, I can only tell them that when fear takes over the voice of a nation, that nation is already dead like I am.
The writer is a US-based freelance columnist. He tweets at @KaamranHashmi and can be reached at [email protected]