This is the first installment of a new feature I’m going to try to maintain on this blog: an annotated record of my Pakistan-related reading.

This blog will be the home for stories and outtakes from the new book I’m writing, a sequel to Alive and Well in Pakistan based on the six-week trip Pete Sabo and I took through India and Pakistan, overland starting in Mumbai and ending in Karachi, from late February to mid-April 2009. Here’s the first one:

“That was the time I realized that ‘Oh, this is an emergency,’” Vidha Saumya told me in Mumbai, when I asked her about President Musharraf’s declaration of a state of emergency in Pakistan in November 2007. “And the only knowledge of an emergency that I had was of the Emergency that was in India in 1979, I guess.”

“Seventy-five,” I corrected her. Either date was years before Vidha was born.

Vidha (pictured with me) is a young Indian woman who studied at Beaconhouse National University in Lahore in 2007-08. I taught at BNU in 2003-04 and looked up Vidha in Mumbai at the end of February at the recommendation of Salima Hashmi, the Pakistani artist who is Dean of BNU’s School of Visual Arts.

“Seventy-five, yeah,” said Vidha. “So I had heard stories. So I was a little scared then, and I came back, and the warden told, ‘Don’t go out.’ We were going to celebrate diwali in a week’s time, and so I wanted to buy a few things for myself. And I wanted to go to the market just that day. And we weren’t allowed. But then I still took my friend, and the guard said, ‘Don’t go too far away, just come back,’ and all that. And the market seemed quite normal. But just that thought in mind that there’s an emergency, there’s something that has probably changed. And from the next day there were these protests in college, and all that.”

“Protests at BNU?”

“Yes, at BNU. All the students. And there’s this one student. She was in the second year at that time, and in her own way she was somebody who took that responsibility, or just took that charge, of getting things organised, getting talks organised, getting people to come and speak to the students, and organising the silent protests. She was someone from whom we would hear the updates and everything. She’s just this really skinny, thin girl, where you would least expect her to do something like that. And she would have these things written on a t-shirt – I mean, really something.

“AnAnd we were advised, because we were students who had come from outside, to not participate in all that, because if we do that, there’s nobody from family who can take any kind of a measure, and the only person responsible there was Salima Hashmi. She was the only one we could have looked up to, and she was under house arrest. …

“And that was the time I spoke to my father. I was really scared, and he said, ‘You don’t have to get scared. These kind of things keep happening. And don’t worry, they’ll not send you back. And even if they send you back, they’ll send you back. Nobody’s going to attack you, nobody’s going to kill you, nobody’s going to do anything to you, so don’t worry. And it’s a very important time also, something that will teach you a lot. It’s a good time to understand things, to know things. And be prepared for whenever next something like that might happen.’ So then I got a little calm, and I was okay.”