Two blocks before the university, the professor was still oblivious to the stolen Corolla following him. As the professor unchained his small motorbike and pulled into traffic, the assassin set down the newspaper he had been pretending to read and started the car. He was a man of strict routine and consistency-traits that had served him extremely well as a scientist, but which were about to lead to his undoing. Every Wednesday like clockwork, the diminutive professor from Pakistan’s oldest and largest university-the University of the Punjab-visited the old city for lunch. His target emerged from the building across the street right on time. As horrible as this country was, there was another that was much more evil and in much greater need of an all-powerful, cleansing blow.
Many, many times the man wished his employer’s ultimate target was Pakistan, but it wasn’t. Beyond the fortunate women of the privileged classes who participated in think tanks, ran charity organizations, wrote novels and plays, and even occupied a handful of token positions in General Musharraf’s cabinet, were those who suffered the daily horrors of domestic abuse, gang rape and murder at the hands of small-minded men professing their love of Allah and their devotion to the Muslim faith. Pakistan was a hypocritical tangle of class divisions, and nowhere was that more evident than in the role of women. Their plight was one of subcontinental Islam’s dirty little secrets, and it turned the stomach of the man sitting in the stolen Toyota Corolla outside the tomb of Muhammad Iqbal, poet and ideological godfather of modern Pakistan.Ī devout Muslim, the man was humiliated to see how the promise of Muslim brotherhood had been denied the Punjabis. Smaller and darker-skinned than the rest of Lahore’s populace, the most fortunate among them were doomed to lives of mind-numbing menial labor, while the balance found themselves sucked up into the ranks of street urchins, beggars, and homeless. Filth, squalor, and despair were daily accompaniments to the lives of Pakistan’s lowest of citizens-the poverty-stricken Punjabi Muslims. The narrow streets of the old city contained one of the worst slums in the world.
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