Chapter 1 Chapter 1 One day I see a wild deer. It is evening, the second month of lockdown in the spring of the pandemic. I am outside in my friend MC's garden with my pregnant dog, Coco. She is days away from delivery, her very first, but she doesn't look like she is pregnant at all: her stomach is almost concave, and aside from a week when she was ravenous, her appetite is delicate, her mood strange. The vets in this Oxfordshire village where my best friend, Allegra, and I have decamped to ride out what we imagine will be the only wave of this virus won't give us an appointment. "It's not an emergency," they tell me on the phone, "we are only seeing emergencies during Covid." No one knows what Covid is yet, none of us knows how to behave. What does the virus have to do with a pregnant dog? My dog's stomach is hollow, there is stillness when I place my hand on her belly. It's not a phantom pregnancy, she's had one of those before. We had a scan, and it confirmed that she is carrying a litter of puppies. But something doesn't feel right. "She sounds fine," these new vets--who we don't know and have never met--tell me on the phone. We are not from Oxford--we are far from home. Beyond the lockdown and this new terrain, I am in further limbo because I have spent nearly a decade waiting for a man who has made promise after promise to me and, diligently and with impressive commitment, has broken them all. We are both unmarried. He confesses that he has never met a woman he could settle down with until me, that I am the first woman he has wanted to build a life with. But I come from a public family and have chosen to be a writer, hardly the life of a private civilian. He has his reasons. The man tells me that this public gaze makes him uncomfortable, maybe things will change in the future but for now he wants nothing to do with it. I can't change who I am, but neither can he. He would like it very much if I didn't drag him and our relationship out into the open, where he believes it will lose everything that is special about it. And it is special. I am hypnotized by him. He is unlike anyone that I have ever met: uninhibited, blazingly sure of himself, so much so that he calls his parents "darling" when he speaks to them, as though he is the parent. It also doesn't hurt that he is beautiful, rugged, and old-school masculine. He tells me that we are soul mates. And so I don't resist the hidden quality he demands of our relationship. I just want to be with him. I will do anything. Tell people about us? Why tempt people's envy? Meet my friends? No, he'd rather not, thanks. Meet his? Why? What do you need to meet them for? Live together? Get engaged? Oh no, that's not how things are done. These things take time. Besides, he's not sure he's cut out for that sort of life. He's a free spirit. Marry? Please. But there is so much that is precious about what we have, he reminds me when I despair at the dictates he has laid down, how can I not see that? He persuades me to follow him, to believe in him. I am thirty-eight years old and have no family, no children, no one besides a small Jack Russell as my charge. It feels uncomfortable to say that this man isolated me from my world, but, in effect, I've since realized, he did. The man is older than I am, and initially I believe that he knows so much more about life than I do; after all, he knows how to face all manner of difficulties with calm and sangfroid and always seems to get his way. He expended no effort on how he dressed or looked, wearing the same shirt three days in a row, but was somehow always radiant with a large smile and warm, tanned face and green eyes that crinkled at the corners when he laughed. If he woke up one morning and decided that he wanted to learn how to parachute, he'd just go off and learn, flinging himself off a cliff or out of an airplane as though it were the most natural thing in the world. As a result, there was seemingly nothing that he didn't know how to do--skiing, motorcycle riding, martial arts, tennis, photography, baking. You name it, the man did it. Nothing made him nervous; on the contrary, he seemed to delight in things that would give the rest of us pause--walking through rough neighborhoods late at night, getting lost in unknown places, changing plans and disrupting itineraries midway through travel. He was a terrible dancer, but who cared? He was so confident, if he felt like it, he danced anyway. The established confines that restricted the rest of us from behaving like libertines didn't apply to him. He was a teetotaler who never smoked, but still a pleasure seeker. If he wanted to spend a day in a botanical garden, examining the roots of rare plants, he just did that--no matter what else you might have had planned. If a shop he felt like visiting was closing, he persuaded the owners to keep the shutters up just a bit longer, and before they knew it, they'd changed their opening hours, only for him to mosey around for as long as he liked and leave without buying a thing. He seemed to have no fear, no shame, no embarrassment, and no respect for other people's boundaries, even though he guarded his own fiercely. He could tell you what kind of person a total stranger was by observing them for five minutes--proving himself correct by going up to said stranger afterward and asking them to confirm his private hypotheses--and when he was in the mood, he could be a great mimic and funny, and he was a patient and generous teacher. When he wanted to help you, he would devote hours and days to your problems. When he turned his bright attention to you, you felt as though you had been baptized into some intimate and glorious order. The man had an extraordinary ability to make you feel that he alone understood you and had some unique insight into what ailed you. When I saw his attention drift, when he turned toward someone else who had a problem that needed solving, like a teacher's pet, I became jealous. I wanted his attention, all of it. When he sensed this, he did the opposite of reassuring me: he would cut me off, depriving me of exactly what I wanted. My mood became quickly tethered to his; I needed him to feel safe, secure, to feel good. He was demanding and difficult from the outset, and though he could be dazzling, handsome, and intelligent, he also had an indefatigable capacity to be cruel. Understanding this dynamic, and how much I needed him, he seemed to take a certain delight in putting me down, in disparaging my country or finding positive reviews of my work and asking me, with incredulity, if I really believed any of that praise. I never showed him my writing because no matter what a piece was about, he was always a breath away from telling me that my thinking was facile, or that I was trying too hard to prove I was clever (there was never a bad occasion to remind me that he was smarter than I was), or that I didn't understand the issue I had written about, not deeply, not like he did. He also had fits of rage. Many times, when we were sitting in a restaurant, if I happened to say something he didn't like, he would shout at me, stand up, and storm off. He went through moods that lasted days when he would simply stop talking to me, even if we were out together, as though I no longer existed. He would smile at a waitress and compliment her shoes, or ask her what her name meant and listen with fascination just to show me that he could speak nicely to someone if he wished, he just didn't wish to speak to me. On the occasions when I would tell him I was leaving if he insisted on dragging me around while ignoring me, he would glower at me and threaten me in a low voice: "If you leave, you will never see me again for as long as you live." As an accompaniment to his cruelty and anger, he had a sense of humor that could be childish and mean. He taunted you with exactly what he knew would hurt, laughing in your face as you tried to recover your composure. One day, out of the blue, he bit my hand so hard that I lost feeling in the area where my thumb meets the flesh of my palm. Nothing had happened to provoke the bite (what possibly could have happened?)--I was looking at my phone and he was playing chess on my iPad when he just reached over and bit me so hard that even after the bite marks had faded and the bruise had gone down, I couldn't move my thumb without discomfort. He thought it was funny. Months later, in London, I went to an acupuncturist I sometimes saw for headaches and showed him my hand, as it was still in pain. He looked at it quietly while I thought of what to say. My brother bit me? But one brother was twenty-five then and the other eleven. I walked into a door with my hand? "I, uh, was playing with my dog," I said sheepishly, "and she bit me." "That badly?" the acupuncturist asked. I didn't have the heart to furnish the lie. "Actually, I think it's a damaged nerve from a previous injury." My dog would never, ever bite me. I was always able to excuse the man for some reason or another: he works hard, he has a complex character, he had a painful childhood, he's stressed, he's not used to expressing himself. These were all excuses he had fed me about his behavior, sighing resignedly as he admitted these seemingly unfixable faults. I forgave him over and over because I loved him. And I knew, no matter how he acted, that he loved me too. And admittedly, there was something in me that found our strange, disjointed situation convenient, romantic even, fueled by spontaneity and impulse rather than dreary domestic routine. I am independent and need plenty of room to myself in order not to feel suffocated. In the early years, I didn't mind that we lived in different cities. It suited me. I sensed the man was controlling and I didn't want to be controlled. I was happy having my own life, I had friends and work I loved, and there in my life, the life that was lived apart from the man, there was no one keeping me under surveillance and passing judgment on everything I did. When he visited me, I simply dropped out of my own life and shifted everything around in order to focus all my attention on him. I enjoyed our time together and imagined that this split double life was not only manageable but exciting. Sometimes we would meet every month, other times every three months. Of course, this life by long distance would end one day, one day soon, if only I could just be patient, the man has sworn. One day, we would be together and have a life, a real life, one where secrets would be banished, roots put down, and promises kept. But after nine years I have grown tired of being patient and have begun to suspect that the man lies far too often, about everything, with profound sincerity if not admiration about his own decency and honor. Walking in my friend MC's perfumed garden with my dog in the quiet evenings of April 2020, I sometimes wonder if I can just disappear here, into the Oxfordshire countryside, where the man has never been and will not be able to find me. It seems an attractive possibility. Not least because I still do not have the strength to leave him myself. Coco sees the doe at the same time as I do. She is large, tall, and noble, her skin reddish in the twilight. My dog is small, less than four pounds with the weight of her nonphantom babies. She descends from hunters and ratters and loves to dive into rabbit warrens, run up trees, burrow and dig and pirouette, and, though she is the gentlest creature I have ever known, thrilled by the chase but never by the kill, she took a rabbit by the throat the other day. MC--who is a garden designer, with a heritage garden in which she grows deep purple irises, plump red roses, and perfumed magnolia trees--was thrilled. The rabbits eat all her precious plants. "Well done, Coco," MC cooed as Coco proudly wagged her curly tail over her prey. I didn't praise her, but I understood. She was hunting to be sure there would be food for her young. Now, Coco glares at the wild deer, her spine arched, the hair on her neck standing on end, and her lithe, balletic body trembling, ready to catch and kill the doe too. In his book Of Wolves and Men , Barry Lopez describes the moment a hunter and its prey lock eyes. A decision is made then, Lopez says, in this moment he calls "the conversation of death." There is ritual in the exchange between hunter and hunted: the hunted surrenders his body and flesh and in exchange, receives the hunter's respect for his sacrifice. One animal must kill to live, to feed the old and the young of his pack, and the other must surrender himself to protect his brethren, his old and young, from being taken. There is, Lopez writes in his ethnography of wolves, a dignity in this encounter--both animals, not just the predator, make a choice in this ceremony. They agree on death. "When the wolf 'asks' for the life of another animal he is responding to something in that animal that says, 'My life is strong. It is worth asking for.' The nobility of this death is that it is appropriate, it is a chosen death. Not a tragedy. 'I have lived a full life,' says the prey. 'I am ready to die. I am willing to die because clearly I will be dying so that the others in this small herd will go on living.'?" 1 When I think of the idea of a chosen death, I think of my father, Mir Murtaza. He was a member of parliament in Pakistan and was forty-two years old when he was killed, but he made the decision to give his life long before that, when he was a young man, just after his father was assassinated. My father raised me on his own until I was seven years old. He made our life, lived in exile during the dark days of Pakistan's dictatorship in the 1980s, a game of fun and mystery. He believed the politics that surrounded our family, as well as the deaths and violence, were no reason to live in fear. I may often still have been afraid, suffering stomachaches throughout my childhood that were so debilitating I could barely stand upright until they had passed, but my father taught me to be grateful and to be brave. The world was wondrous and there was curiosity and warmth in all its offerings. Though my father loved his time on earth, he knew that when they came to take his life, he would give them it. There was a beauty to him, a romance to how he saw the world, no matter its cruelties. I think it came from that acceptance, what Nietzsche called amor fati , a love of one's fate. It is a radical choice not to "merely bear what is necessary," Nietzsche wrote, "but love it." 2 The brave meet death with courage, as there is no other choice. My father was killed on his way home from a political meeting on the outskirts of Karachi. All the streetlights on our road had been shut off, and there were a hundred policemen in wait, some high in the trees in sniper positions. When my father, who was a vocal critic of the state's corruption, as well as the extrajudicial killings for which Karachi's police have long been famous, got out of the car, a signal was fired in the air by an officer charged with identifying my father, the single shot an order to commence firing. My father and six of his comrades were killed, all left to bleed to death on the road. I was footsteps away, a teenager waiting for her father to return at the end of the day. The police held us back from coming outside to see what had happened. They never took the men to hospitals with ERs but dropped each of them off at a different clinic around the city, not one capable of saving lives. No matter what people tell me, I know my father suffered and I know he must have been in pain. My father loved animals. They were drawn to him. If there was an animal in the room, it inevitably gravitated toward him, seeking his comfort and attention. He was gentle, devoting his curiosity to the animals as though in conversation with them. When my childhood dog, a Belgian shepherd called Pedro, bit me because I was annoying him by trying to sit on him, I went howling to my father, who picked me up and let me cry into his perfectly ironed shirt. "Hit him," I demanded, between tears, "he hurt me." My father was quiet, ignoring me. When I asked him again to reprimand the dog, he said no. "I won't hit him. You were at fault. Don't be rough with Pedro." Though my father hunted as a young man, going out for shikar with his father and brother in rural Larkana, stalking wild boar, I have no memories of him hunting as an adult. He took my brother Zulfikar fishing but more as a ploy for the two of them to spend nights out on a rickety boat, eating under the stars and singing songs from The Jungle Book . Before my father's murder I thought animals were animals and humans were humans and a gulf separated the enormity between our feelings and experiences. Though I had grown up with the ever-present threat of violence and the understanding that it could come for those I loved at any time, with no warning, as I grew older I started to notice that same threat hovering sharply between humans and animals. We have a horrendous ability to inflict cruelty upon animals at will, without repercussion. You see this on the streets, in the way stray animals shrink from the sight of our shadows. My brother felt this instinctively and deeply, long before I did. He couldn't bear scenes of violence toward animals, not in cartoons or in films, where the violence is presented as comic and casual, or in real life, whether it was the goats lining the streets of Karachi before Eid ul Azha, bleating helplessly, ready for slaughter, or a bird that flew into our window, momentarily stunned from the impact. I notice it all the time now, not just how much animals endure: but how noble they are in surrender, how much dignity they possess in the face of a ceaselessly violent world. To many of us, there is nothing on earth greater or grander or more sophisticated than the self, than ourselves. This is our great failure as a species. We use all our strengths, intelligence, and time in pursuit of the shallow belief that we are special. It is an ancient idea, constantly at war with that essential truth spoken thousands of years ago by Buddha: there is no self. We are not unique, and no essence of ours will remain. Ultimately, we, like everything else on earth, are pure matter, dust. It is how we are born and how we will end, absorbed into the earth and forgotten. Coco is no wolf, no savior, no prince among men. She is a Jack Russell terrier, the size and hysteria of a mongoose, at best. She has no chance against a deer. But she doesn't know that. She is lit by a primal confidence, a natural stalker enlivened by the scent of a beautiful adversary. MC tells me later that the deer, who also devour her plants, are Muntjacs, and that they have come to Oxfordshire from China, introduced in the early twentieth century. But escapes and deliberate releases of Muntjacs into the wild have resulted in feral populations loose across the United Kingdom. I learn later that Muntjacs are known as barking deer because of their unique cries. I think of their impossible journey from Asia to this soggy island for days afterward. What small imaginations we have, shocked and stupefied at how particles and viruses can travel the breadth of the earth while hungry deer make slow processions around the globe under our very noses. Back in MC's verdant garden, Coco holds the doe's gaze for five seconds and then, conversation exchanged, leaps at it, heart pounding, racing, running to be joined in ceremony. But the deer escapes. It doesn't jump over the garden fence, it doesn't hit the brick and mortar of the home, it just disappears, vanishes. We never see it again. Excerpted from The Hour of the Wolf: A Memoir by Fatima Bhutto All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
