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2 Beneath Us the Ground Still Moves Pakistan: April 2006 In the hazy afternoon light I walk past row after row of tan Pakistan army tents, taut and erect and aligned, past row after row of aluminum toilet stalls and water dispensers on parched ground. My translator, Tahir, shoos children away, stops them from clutching my hands, but they follow us anyway, churning dust around their sore-covered feet. “Fifty rupees,” a girl begs, hand cupped out to me. Ahead of us, older kids kick a soccer ball but don’t chase it. We proceed toward them and they part in the still air. Open mouthed and squinting, men and women and more children peer out of their tents in silent confusion, puzzled by the commotion of my passing, and then they too follow us, revived by something that is breaking the humid monotony of the afternoon, suddenly so different from the stagnation of their waiting lives. Waiting for what? Certainly not for me, but for now I will do. “Where you from?” “Who are you?” “What do you want?” A man stops me and shows me a petition. “Help us,” he says. “Sir,” Tahir says, reading it to me, “we are earthquake victims of Azad Kashmir. Sir, we are staying at H-11 tent village in Islamabad. Sir, the 11 12 conflic t zones governments of Pakistan and Azad Kashmir tell us to go back. Sir, our houses and lands are totally destroyed in the earthquake. We don’t want to go there because we are afraid of living there. Sir, after 31 March the government stopped the work of relief in H-11 tent village [in] Islamabad . Sir, that is why we are signing this petition to you of the United Nations for you to help us.” “I am not with the United Nations,” I say and hand the petition back. The man stares at the worn creased paper and its uncertain signatures of people unaccustomed to writing. He watches me, mouth slowly going slack, eyes turned dull. He walks back to his tent, where a woman and some children wait. Together they sit by the open flap and stare out at nothing, eyes immobile and unblinking, the sweat-dampened petition still in his hand. “Who gives these people the darkness? They are not Muslim. They turned away from Islam,” Tahir says. “That’s why they are here.” This is a constant refrain with Tahir, a moralizing drumbeat that gives me a headache: the people have turned from Allah to pursue lives of sin, and for this they are being punished, just as some fundamentalist Christians claimed that Hurricane Katrina was the result of the sinful lives of the people of New Orleans. “Bullshit,” I say. “The Holy Koran says there is a beginning and an end. I think the earthquake was the start of the end of time.” I continue through the dust and the desultory heat toward the administration tent and swat at flies. No breeze. I had not visited Pakistan since the spring of 2004, when President Pervez Musharraf said in a CNN interview that a high-level Qaeda leader was cornered in the tribal territories bordering Afghanistan. Perhaps Osama bin Laden himself. It turned out to be no one of significance, a local criminal at best, but not before I—and dozens of other journalists—descended on Pakistan and chased phantoms for weeks until, exhausted and discouraged and empty-handed, we abandoned our dreams of the story of the century and left for home and tamer fare. When a 7.6-magnitude earthquake struck Pakistan and Kashmir a year and a half later, on October 8, 2005, I saw BBC news reports of the dust and the blood, broken homes and broken bones, landslides and Beneath Us the Ground Still Moves 13 buried villages, wailing mothers and dead children. I frantically e-mailed Yassin, my driver in Pakistan. In the two months we had worked together, I had found Yassin to be a soft-spoken man who adhered to the old school of the British Raj. His graying hair was slicked cleanly to one side, his mustache clipped and dead even over his lip. He called me sir, opened the car door for me, carried my backpack, and refused to state a specific salary but accepted whatever I paid him without counting it in my presence. At first I mistakenly called him “Yeltsin,” which drove him to distraction. “My name is Yassin, sir,” he...

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