He was pulled from his thoughts by Ruqaiya’s frustrated sigh. “Damned if I knew!” she said, slamming a hand down on the table and making the glass tumblers teeter precariously close to the edge.
“If he’s working with the separatists, he’s playing the long game. And he’s playing it alone. Both Badal and Aheli Mehrin were as shocked as we were by what transpired at that meeting. I’ve known them both for years. Their shock was genuine. Badal had not expected to be discarded like so much trash by some egghead twerp barely out of college. The trauma in his eyes…dear God!” she chuckled. “That was probably the only good thing to come out of that godforsaken day.”
“But you don’t think so,” Abhijat pressed, sensing there was more to this story than Ruqaiya had yet revealed. “You don’t think Fasih is working with the separatists?”
Ruqaiya shrugged. “It seems like the most likely explanation, doesn’t it? I daresay he expected us to come to that conclusion, and plan our counterattack accordingly. That’s why he was able to blindside Badal and Mehrin so easily, I’ll wager. Like us, they went with the most likely solution. They thought he was on their side.”
“And you believe he’s not?”
“I don’t think he’s on anybody’s side, except his own. Listen to me, Abhijat. I don’t think Fasih’s actions are ideologically motivated at all. This isn’t political, at least not for him. It’s personal.”
Abhijat frowned. “Stop talking in riddles, Qia. The hell is that supposed to mean? What personal reason could Fasih have to betray my father? Did they fight?”
Ruqaiya waved an impatient hand. “They always fought. That’s immaterial. And I don’t think it’s your father Fasih had a grudge against. At least not directly.”
Abhijat’s tongue itched with unuttered questions, but he could see that his companion was deep in thought. Despite his curiosity, his self-preservation instinct prevented him from annoying Ruqaiya when she was in such a mood.
Their food arrived, and for the next few minutes, no one spoke as the delicious-smelling dishes were served one by one. When the waitress left, Ruqaiya took a hearty bite of toast along with a spoonful of piping hot soup.
Abhijat followed her example and dug into his own meal. It was delicious. Not that anything would taste particularly bad after the cold airplane lunch he’d had earlier that day.
At length, Ruqaiya sighed contentedly into her cooling mushroom soup and said, “I’ve been doing some digging into Fasih’s background. As you know, he came to the capital when he was fifteen and managed to get himself enrolled into an undergraduate program at Qayit University without so much as a high-school diploma...so profoundly did he apparently impress the professors.” Ruqaiya’s tone said volumes about what she thought of professors who were so easily awed by bookish pipsqueaks barely out of puberty.
Abhijat nodded. He’d never gone out of his way to learn about Jehan Fasih or his personal history, but this much was public knowledge. The fact that he had started university at fifteen and joined the QRI at seventeen – the youngest person to ever be hired as junior researcher to the institute – was almost an urban legend at this point.
“Well, why do you think he came to Qayit in the first place?” Ruqaiya asked.
Abhijat shrugged. He’d never really thought about it, but it wasn’t hard to guess. “For the same reason anyone does, I suppose. Better education, better opportunities. What else?”
Ruqaiya’s lips twisted in a sardonic smile. He didn’t know why, but her expression made him vaguely uncomfortable.
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” She took a sip of her beer and sat back more comfortably into the sofa. The perks of average height, Abhijat thought enviously, but kept his mouth shut. “He was brought to Qayit by his housemaid,” Ruqaiya frowned in an effort of memory. “Or cook, or something of that nature. He came to the capital because he had nowhere else to go. His house had been burned to the ground the day before, and his father had blown his own brains out.”
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Abhijat stared at her. “What?”
Ruqaiya shrugged and took another bite of her cheesy toast. “Believe me, I agree. I’ve no idea how we missed that stuff for so many years. I don’t think your father knew either, not the whole of it anyway. I’m pretty sure he’d have told me if he did.”
“But...I mean...why?” Abhijat bit his tongue, annoyed. He wasn’t used to feeling this way, confused and at a loss for words. Still, that was no excuse for stammering like an idiot. He tried again. “I mean, are you sure about this? How did all this happen? And why did Fasih’s father kill himself? I’m assuming he killed himself?”
Starting in on the main course, Ruqaiya nodded. “That he did. Not very sure why. Didn’t leave a note or anything like that. Apparently, they were some type of rural landlords before the civil war, Fasih’s family I mean.” She paused to swallow a spoonful of fried rice. “Quite wealthy too. They managed to preserve much of their property through the war, mostly because their holdings were so remote nobody really cared. Very far from any of the major areas of unrest.
“Well, that was until your grandfather’s land redistribution drive began years after the civil war had ended, exactly when no one was expecting any trouble,” she chuckled. “It was supposed to end the feudal system and help the peasants get their own land, of course. Very noble and all that. And don’t get me wrong, it did do that, but it’s no secret that Zanyar landlords were disproportionately targeted.”
Abhijat bristled, but said nothing. He had always loved and respected his grandfather. He still did. But even he couldn’t deny that Swamiran had been a tad prejudiced against the Zanyars. Not that that was surprising, considering the times in which he grew up, and his background as a veteran of the civil war.
“Well?” he said at last, interrupting Ruqaiya’s blissful consumption of the chili chicken.
“I wouldn’t feel too bad about it if I were you. Not in the Fasihs’ case, anyway. The senior Fasih was no paragon of virtue wrongfully victimized by the ‘system’. From what I could gather from the old records, he was an incompetent pushover at best, and a greedy asshole at worst. He lived extravagantly and mismanaged his holdings. Became too dependent on middlemen and almost drove his tenants to ruin.
“When the redistribution drive began, he refused to give up his holdings, not unlike many of his peers. Unlike most of them, though, he’d driven his tenants to desperation.
“Skirmishes were breaking out all over the hinterlands around that time, even places that had remained relatively undisturbed during the war. You’ll remember? It wasn’t long before you joined the army that the redistribution drive ended. The newspapers were rife with reports of rural unrest.”
Abhijat nodded grimly. “I was in the last couple years of high school. There were about a dozen violent clashes a day. You couldn’t turn on the TV without hearing about some landlord who’d been lynched. Papa threatened to leave politics if my grandfather didn’t call the whole thing off. It got so bad Maa wanted to send Rito and me off to some boarding school so we wouldn’t be home for those horrible shouting matches.”
“Oh, I believe you,” Ruqaiya laughed, starting in on the dessert. “Rajat was livid about the whole thing. In Swamiran’s defense, though, I don’t think even he imagined it’d get so out of hand.”
Abhijat sipped his coffee. “I don’t think he did. But policy-making was never his strong suit anyway. Papa always says he was more of a warrior than a politician.”
“That he was. And so are you,” she said, pointing a fork at him. “Rajat can say what he wants. I, for one, am glad you didn’t get into politics. It wouldn’t suit you. Anyway, I daresay your grandpa didn’t really think about the logistics of the whole thing.
“But the upshot of all this was that Jehan’s father had managed to piss off a whole bunch of people who now suddenly felt like they could get some revenge. The village where they lived had a sizeable Birhani population. Apparently, Fasih senior had managed to piss them off something spectacular.
“I’m not sure of the exact details. But from what I can gather, they’d been demanding for a while that the Fasihs give up some share of their land to those who worked on the farms. A meeting was called, and apparently Jehan’s father refused point blank to give up so much as a millimeter of land without dragging them all to court. You can see how that might’ve rubbed some people the wrong way.”
“Damned moron! He was inviting disaster.”
“That he was, and a disaster was precisely what he got. The night after the meeting, the estate was attacked by a mob of farm workers. Personally, I don’t think it was a communal thing, but the media did paint it that way at the time, because many of the peasants working for the Fasihs happened to be Birhani.