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Boston. I was a first year student at Wellesley College and my future husband a
sophomore at MIT. She was the one who would make hundreds of samosas to
sell at MSA fundraisers.
A passionate activist, she struggled to find Muslim homes for the hundreds of
Bosnian orphans that were brought to the U.S. I could relate to her then, I spent
my childhood in Africa too, and like her had come to study in the U.S. from
Pakistan. She was one of the first women I had met who was brilliant, educated,
‘religious’ and a hijabi – not many of those around in the 1990s. Pakistani
women had been ‘liberated’ in the seventies and eighties, nobody my age, in
our social circle, covered....
They make her sound so scary, ‘neuroscientist’ sounds ominous when linked
with chemical warfare. Brandeis has a world-renowned school for neuroscience
where she studied behavioral sciences, her concentration was children. Our
paths diverged, we both left Massachusetts and for years I did not hear of her.
I was visiting Pakistan and heard about her abduction in the newspapers.
Sheikh Rasheed was then Interior Minister in Pakistan and he claimed (on
television) to have no knowledge of her kidnapping. An internet search of her
name revealed her familiar face but on the FBI’s most wanted list. How did she
end up there? The shock of seeing her face still gives me shudders. It is so
hard for me to believe that someone like her could have become entangled in
anything so terrible as the crimes they accuse her of.
This was 2003, I had just had my second daughter. Her child, Suleman would
have been my daughter’s age, seven. It gives me chills thinking about what
happened to that poor child, to this day no one knows. She was missing for
five long years; her family believes that those years were spent in underground
prisons. Why, why her?
Could what happened to her happen to any one of us?
Recently, she was tried in a court in Manhattan. Her sentence is for eighty six
years – how long is that? Slightly, less than a century.
We will all be dead before that date rolls around. Eighty six years for attempted
murder where no one was hurt except for her. When she was arrested some
of us foolishly hoped that at least now she was in the hands of the American
justice system and the chances of her being released were higher. Eighty-six
years!! I tried to find who else had been meted a similar sentence but was led to
an unfruitful an unfruitful search of child molesters and dads who murder their