A Season for Martyrs by Bina Shah

Author:Bina Shah
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Delphinium Books
Published: 2014-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

The Game of Kings

HYDERABAD, SINDH, 1943

“Come, jailer, come and play a game of chess with me.”

Ahmed Damani’s head jerked up in surprise. These were not the words he was expecting to hear from a man condemned to die in the morning, But then neither had Ahmed expected to find himself working in the Central Jail at Hyderabad, a jailer in the feared Death Cell, where he saw men as they faced their last hours on this earth. And Ahmed had certainly never expected that the British would have ever caught the Surhiya Badshah—the Brave King, tried him in court like a common criminal, and then sentenced him to death by hanging. Or that his would be the cell where the Brave King would spend his last night, smoking and contemplating the full moon that glowed through his tiny window. And yet here was Ahmed, dressed in the black uniform of a death watch jailer, and the Pir Pagaro was inviting him to come into his cell and play a game of chess.

It was an eerily compelling invitation: as a young boy growing up in Hyderabad, Ahmed had dreamt that one day he would become the most famous chess champion in the world. He was from a respectable but poor family that had left their village of Tando Allah Yar and settled in Hyderabad, his father hoping to find better employment than tilling the fields of the Talpur zamindar who owned so much land that if you stood along the banks of the main watercourse and turned slowly in a full circle, everything that you saw belonged to that man.

Ahmed’s father, Rahim Damani, decided that a life of labor in the fields, threshing wheat or plowing cotton, sweltering under the unforgiving sun and forever living under the thumb of the zamindar’s strict overseer, was not the life that he wanted for himself or his sons. So when Ahmed was barely four years old, his father loaded their few belongings onto a cart, stacked his family on top of the bundles of furniture and clothes, and drove them to a new life in the city, full of prospects and pleasure.

It was a daring move in those days; most men of the countryside feared the city, clung to what was safe and familiar, teaching their sons that leaving the land was tantamount to dying. For in a sense they did die, cutting themselves off from their roots, and having to be reborn in a place where nobody knew who your people were or where you had come from. Even in the cities—Hyderabad, Sukkur, Shikarpur, Karachi—tribesmen sought each other out, associated with each other or those they knew to be their allies, thus protecting themselves from the vagaries of urban life. Adjusting to the crowds, to anonymity, even to the lack of the zamindar’s oppressive but all-encompassing security, was a task that few men wanted to undertake in Sindh at the turn of the century.

But Ahmed’s father took the risk, and uprooted his small

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