On Dangerous Borders

When you loved someone, it didn’t matter who they were or where they were, right? It only mattered that those involved were of age and that no one was being forced to do anything they didn’t want to do. Correct? So what if you met under some pretty terrifying and unexpected circumstances? So what if you were from two totally different worlds? So what if you were in a country that would probably kill you if they could see into your mind and into your soul? I, twenty-two-year-old American-born Keri Warner, wasn’t exactly in love with one of the Pakistani guards who watched over me in Multan’s dark, gloomy jail, but I sure did have something going for her. No doubt about it. Deliciously dark and tall was the guard I only knew as E. Ahsad at the time. Although I would miss seeing her and the talks we sometimes shared, however brief they may be, I believed she was my only real hope of freedom. It would be nearly half a year before I learned just how right I was on that one. I just never would have guessed how I would be right. My mind reeled back to last September. My parents had been unexpectedly killed in a car accident. I had no siblings and wasn’t close to the few aunts, uncles, and cousins I had. I also didn’t have that many friends since I tended to be a loner. Not antisocial. Just someone who liked to spend most of her time alone. Using some of the money that was left to me by my parents, I decided to venture beyond U.S. borders for the first time in my life. After giving it much thought, I settled on India. I don’t know why India called to me, since there were so many places I could have gone to instead that were probably a lot safer, but it did. I’d heard pleasant reviews of northern India hiking just south of the Pakistani border, and so I went with my gut feeling. Weren’t we supposed to trust those things anyway? Where most people went to Europe or South America, I thought India would be both a fun and unique experience. The idea of traveling to foreign lands alone scared me at first. But I wasn’t going to let the fact that I was young, female, small, and not too bad looking, if I did say so myself, stop me from doing what I wanted to do. And so I left for India one winter day in early January. I’d been in India for a week hiking, enjoying nature, and having a blast. I felt so happy, free, and alive. The journey helped get my mind off the loss of my parents. I stayed in cheap hotels at night and hiked along some touristy trails during the day. A few times, I stopped to browse an outdoor shopping market that was much like an American swap meet and as close to the border as one could get. Early one morning, I headed onto one of the trails with the few measly belongings I’d taken with me packed tightly in my backpack. I was slowly moving along the deserted trail at a relaxed pace. I never heard anyone approach me from behind because music was blaring through the earbuds in my ears. All I remember was feeling an arm grab me around the waist while a hand pressed a damp, smelly rag to my face. I had no time to scream, much less kick, struggle, or put up much of a fight. The next time I opened my eyes, my world had forever changed, and life as I’d known it would exist no more. The police dragged me into jail. The Pakistani police, that is. For some reason, my abductor—who did God knew what to me when the chloroform had knocked me out—dumped me just over the border in an area known as Lahore. I was first brought to a hospital and checked out by a doctor once I’d come to and found myself in a trashy alley. The alley was narrow and flanked by old, crumbling buildings in which the paint was so faded that I couldn’t really tell what color the buildings had once been. I stumbled onto the streets with my backpack, which I was surprised to find was still in my possession and not stolen. People looked at me funny. People who looked different all of a sudden. They hadn’t been wearing hijabs like this before. And where was the little red dot on many of the women’s foreheads? It was with a sickening dread that I began to suspect where I was. Yes, there I was, very terrified and out of place in Pakistan in my jeans and T-shirt, which bore the American flag. As I stood there in a country that was notorious for hating Americans, I feared someone would run up and either shoot or stab me, but no one did. Instead, they just eyed me with a mixture of curiosity and hate. Brown eyes bore into my blue ones as I stood there helpless. Who brought me there and why? My mind was racing as far as how to go about finding the police when a couple of officers beat me to it and quickly approached me. “Oh! Oh, thank God!” I exclaimed with relief. “Please help me.” “Who are you and why are you here?” I was asked, surprised that they spoke English. But I would later learn that the vast majority of them did. “I don’t know,” I told them and quickly explained what had happened. “And you suddenly awoke right here?” I nodded, knowing how ridiculous it sounded, dismayed to know I wasn’t believed. “How do I get back to Atari?” I asked as the two officers quickly escorted me to their vehicle which was parked just around the corner of one of the dumpy buildings. “We will take you to get the matter cleared up.” “Where am I?” I asked. But instead of receiving an answer, I was gazed at with cold, dark, unreadable eyes and then placed in the back seat of the police car. “Where are you taking me?” “First the hospital, then to jail,” said the officer who was behind the wheel. “But I didn’t do anything wrong!” I pleaded and begged that day, but after I was checked out by a doctor and his nurse and made to feel like a strange and gross specimen from outer space, I was brought to and deposited in what seemed like a surprisingly cold and damp jail cell for what was a relatively warm and dry part of the country. The tiny, windowless cement room had one narrow cot with a torn mattress on it. The sink and toilet were just inches away from the cot. This was when I was surprised to learn that the Urdu-speaking country had many English speakers. They began making it mandatory in school, as they had in India and other countries, so most of the younger people knew the language. I had no knowledge whatsoever of how the justice system worked, and what I did know was horrifying and rather barbaric compared to even the harshest states in the U.S. People were killed for the dumbest, cruelest, and most unfair reasons. Women were treated like second-class citizens, and gays didn’t even stand a chance. If you wanted to survive in Pakistan, you had to be what society ordered you to be and not yourself, unless you happened to be what society expected of you. To know that I was trapped in a country that killed gays, raped women as a means of settling “disputes,” and that robbed people of the right to be who they were, was simply terrifying. Now, who could I turn to for help? I was all alone in a country that hated Americans. I had very little money left—assuming my backpack was ever returned to me—and no clue as to how I would return to India in time to catch my flight back home. And so I waited and waited and waited. But then the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months. I was promised over and over that I would get to “tell my side of the story” and that the situation would be “resolved.” But I had told my side of the story, which was the only side I knew of, yet nothing had been resolved. Instead, I continued to sit alone—lonely, isolated, scared, and confused—in my tiny little cell. I was segregated from the other inmates due to my nationality, but I could hear their chants and cries, some in English, but mostly in Urdu. Of all the languages I’d studied, Urdu wasn’t one of them, and that would never change. I simply had no interest in it. Someone had been sent to represent me, sort of like a public defender in the States, only he had no real info to give me. All he would say was that it was unlikely that the courts wouldn’t believe my story; it just may be a while before I got to have my day in court so I could then go home. What worried me was not being believed, because if they didn’t believe me, then what would they believe? And how would I get back home, since my flight had long since come and gone? I could only hope the country would buy me a ticket out of there. They had to! I didn’t know how big the jail was, and I didn’t care. I was just thankful that, in the midst of being stuck there, I didn’t have to deal with dangerous inmates on top of it all until I could get the hell out. I was barely five feet tall and a hundred pounds soaking wet. I’m sure that alone was enough to get me segregated, though I wasn’t about to complain. Instead, I worried and wondered how long things would take and what the outcome would be. I didn’t have to deal with as many guards as I thought I would have to. This wasn’t my first time locked up, either. I’d actually done time in the U.S. for kiting checks once before. It was just for a few months, but during that time, I saw a lot of detention officers, as they were called, come and go. Sometimes you’d see the same ones a few times a week, others a few times a month. But this wasn’t Florida. There was no such thing as a commissary. There was no such thing as radios. The only thing better about the jail in Pakistan was that I didn’t have to deal with cellmates, the food wasn’t too bad, and the showers weren’t always ice cold. The area I was in, known as the west wing, didn’t seem to house many people, from the sound of it and from what I could see when I was let out to shower and spend some time outdoors. I was at the very end of the wing, and there were two other cells next to mine of the same size. Across the hall were two larger cells that each had two sets of bunk beds in them. The door on the end closest to my cell led to what I thought would be a fenced-in courtyard when I was first led to it, but it was actually a large field of sorts. It seemed to have high chain-link fences surrounding its perimeters from what I could see, but it wasn’t what I expected at all. On the other end of the wing was a solid metal door that led to other parts of the jail, and then there was a room that was sort of off a small branch of the wing where the guards hung out. Across from that was a door to what could have been anything. The guard’s bathroom. A supply closet. Anything. I found it odd that the guards couldn’t see the cells from the room they sat in. The cells didn’t seem to have any cameras in them, though the wing had one aimed at the length of it as well as one on the short branch where the guard’s room was. I only had to deal with about a dozen guards, all of whom were women. Unlike in the U.S., the same pairs worked first, second, and third shifts during the week, while the same pairs worked weekends. If it weren’t for the circumstances at hand, I’d have laughed at their “uniform.” They seemed absurdly ridiculous in their hijabs and dark blue skirts worn over matching blue pants. I was surprised they were allowed to wear pants and the black work shoes they wore, like you’d find on many American workers. I would have thought they’d be in skirts and heels, if only an inch or so high. They also wore dark blue long-sleeved sweaters. The hijabs were light blue but not all the same. Some were fastened snugly around the neck, while others were loosely tied, exposing the neck. They wore thick black belts that emphasized the slim waistlines most of them had. You knew you weren’t in the U.S. when most of the people you saw were thin. Most of the guards weren’t friendly, but they weren’t abusive like I feared they would be. They simply accepted my presence and only spoke to me when necessary. I didn’t speak to them much either, especially since I knew they couldn’t really help me. They were only there to watch over me, not to decide what happened to me in the end. There was only one guard I found myself looking forward to seeing. She was the only one who actually seemed to like me, too. Knowing it was a change of shift on a weekday was the only thing that could put at least a slight smile on my face, for soon Officer E. Ahsad would make her rounds and take my mind off my situation, if only for a while.