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How did Shahbaz Taseer Find Himself Lost To The World?

Discover an extraordinary tale of resilience and injustice with Lost to the World by Shahbaz Taseer. In this gripping memoir, Taseer recounts his shocking encounters of being wrongfully accused by the FBI, enduring racial profiling, and the unimaginable ordeal of being held captive by the Taliban for nearly five years.

Dive into this powerful narrative and witness the author’s unwavering spirit that emerges in the face of adversity.

Lost To The World
Lost To The World || Shahbaz Taseer

***

In 2010, about a year before I was kidnapped, I took my wife on a long-planned trip to California. Overall, it was a wonderful, if slightly exhausting, trip.

The journey from California to Lahore is an especially long haul, almost twenty-four grueling hours in total flight time. We arrived at SFO airport and boarded our plane to New York. The flight was delayed and delayed further. We sat with our fellow passengers, restless and waiting for updates. I tried to settle in and catch some sleep.

FBI agents boarded the aircraft, arrested the two of us, and took us off the plane.

It’s hard to express just how humiliating it is to be led in handcuffs off a plane full of strangers, all of whom assume you are criminals, terrorists, or worse. I’ll always be grateful for one sympathetic young college kid who stood up and started making a video on his smartphone and telling the officers this was an injustice, that we were being racially profiled. He was right. There was no other explanation for it.

They pushed my wife and me into separate cars. I could see Maheen sitting in the back seat of her car, looking confused, outraged, and worried. I tried to mouth some words to her to reassure her, so she wouldn’t feel anxious. But the agents saw us trying to communicate, so they repositioned the cars so we could no longer see each other.

Meanwhile, the remaining passengers were being evacuated. The FBI agent informed us that someone had made an anonymous call about the flight, claiming a bomb threat. By now, a bomb disposal unit had arrived on the tarmac and was boarding the plane with dogs to search the cabin. As far as Maheen and I knew, there might well have been a bomb on board, a terrifying prospect. We also knew for sure that we weren’t responsible for it. Watching all this unfold, both Maheen and I had the same thoughts, in our separate vehicles. Apparently, everyone thinks we were going to blow up this plane. And now they have left us here, parked under the wing, while they search for a bomb. If there is a bomb on board, and it goes off, we’ll not only explode along with the plane, but we’ll forever be blamed for being the ones who planted it. They’d say, “We got the right people. They were guilty all along.” 

Maheen and I sat on the tarmac for another hour or so, before the agents finally drove us to the terminal. Again, we were kept separate—I was led to one room while my wife was taken to another; we weren’t given a chance to speak. After sitting in the plane for hours, then on the tarmac, I was beyond embarrassed—I was outraged.

When I reached the small interrogation room, two agents greeted me and pulled the good-cop / bad-cop routine on me. It was like a scene out of Lethal Weapon. The bad cop barked, “Do you know why you’re here?”

“Not really. But I did see a bomb disposal unit.”

“You’re here because we suspect you tried to hijack and bomb that plane. And we’re checking your bags right now for bombs and ammunition.”

“The only thing inside my bag that’s even slightly suspicious is an iPad that I just bought. And it’s still in the plastic wrap. So, if you open it and find a bomb inside, that’s Apple’s fault, not mine.

I answered all of their questions honestly and forthrightly, but I didn’t react with anything like calm or poise. My anger at being singled out like this—at being hauled from our flight in handcuffs because someone thought a Pakistani man in a Lakers jersey and his wife wearing a beanie must obviously be a couple of terrorists—spilled over. Ever since 9/11, if you fly internationally on a Pakistani passport, you can expect undue attention. You will be pulled “randomly” from lines for extra security screening and be subjected to rigorous questioning by anyone whose job is guarding a border. Still, I’d always thought of myself as westernized, I fit right in. I was Shabby T!
I went to an American school. I listened to American music. I could recite whole Jay-Z albums from memory. My favorite junk food is McDonald’s. There’s nothing quite like twenty pieces of McNuggets.

None of this mattered to the agents questioning me or to the people who’d profiled us and made that call. To them, I was a Pakistani, and that meant a terrorist. We’d come for a relaxing vacation and now we were each stuck in a windowless room, defending ourselves against charges of terrorism.

At one point, frustrated, I may have pulled the “Do you know who I am?” card.
They did not know.

“My father is Salmaan Taseer. He’s the serving governor of Punjab province. Right now, Senator John Kerry is with my father distributing flood relief aid in Pakistan. Hillary Clinton has been to the governor’s house for tea.”

Lest I forget to mention, being the governor’s son, I was entitled to an official passport, known as the blue passport.

Slowly, I could see it dawn on both the good cop and the bad cop that they’d gotten it horribly wrong. It’s one thing to pull a random person off a commercial aircraft and label him a terrorist. It’s another when that person’s father is a high-serving official known to the U.S. secretary of state.

Their whole tone changed. They began damage control. They apologized for the mix-up. My wife and I were reunited; she was equally traumatized.

To compensate for their behavior, the agents picked up our suitcases and led us through an empty luggage hall toward the exit doors. On one level, I understood they were simply doing their jobs, protecting innocent people from real threats. I also accepted that this was a new reality. It evoked mixed feelings of not only anger and resentment but also sadness that the world, as we knew it, had descended into such a dark place where racial profiling had been legalized.

As we were leaving, an agent stopped us and said, “By the way, you guys might get these media people coming at you. Just ignore them. Let that go. Just go home safely!”

My friend Harris and his father met us outside the terminal. Harris’s dad was sympathetic, comforting us as he helped us into the car. Harris, meanwhile, was insisting that he knew a good lawyer if we wanted to sue. Then my phone rang.

It was my father calling, deeply concerned. “I just heard the news, are you okay?”

I was rattled and much shaken, but I didn’t convey that to my father, who always said I was the most stoic person he knew.

Despite all this, my bubble of privilege was more or less intact. I had my family, my home, my work, my life. I thought nothing could shake those fundamental truths.

I was wrong about that too. Even before I was kidnapped, life had one more unfortunate awakening for me

***

Get your copy of Lost to the World by Shahbaz Taseer from your nearest bookstore or on Amazon

Kabul under the Taliban Regime – an Eyewitness Account from Chasing the Monk's Shadow

In 627 AD, the Chinese monk Xuanzang set off on an epic journey along the Silk Road to India to study Buddhist philosophy with the Indian masters. Records of his journey remain a valuable historical source. Fourteen hundred years later, Mishi Saran follows in Xuanzang’s footsteps to the fabled oasis cities of China and Central Asia, now vanished kingdoms in Pakistan and Afghanistan and India’s Buddhist centres. She chronicles her journey in the book Chasing the Monk’s Shadow.
This path breaking travelogue includes an extraordinary eyewitness account of Kabul under the Taliban regime, just one month before 9/11.
Here is an excerpt about this from the book:


Ashraf gave me a few survival tips. ‘At around 1 p.m. and 5 p.m., the ministry to fight vice and promote virtue patrols the city,’ he said. ‘That’s the time to be careful.’’
That was what kept Kabulis cowed, their eyes filled with fear, men and women. This old and gracious city stank of fear.
‘My barber trimmed my beard, but too much. I told him, you idiot, I’m too scared to go out now.’ Men as much as women felt the pressure of strictures imposed by the Taliban.
Tolibohn.
A semblance of calm drifted back into my head, but in thin layers. The Taliban brought peace, Ashraf said. Kabul was so divided among the fighters, divided by ethnic rule. We sipped our tea and chatted, but soon I wanted to take his leave and lie in my bed with the sheets over my head. It was a lot to digest.
‘Come,’ Ashraf said kindly. ‘Let me drop you back, I will show you around Kabul. We’ll say I’m a taxi driver. Actually, I did used to drive a taxi. You sit in the back so they don’t stop us, because men and women don’t sit together.’
As the afternoon faded into evening, we drove around Kabul. Ashraf pointed out from the front seat of his battered yellow car the old Indian embassy, the fortified Iranian one, the Turkish—all gone, all emptied out, locked up behind high walls. We drove by the Kabul Hotel where a bomb had, two weeks ago, smashed a wall in, so that a pile of rubble descended onto the pavement. Was it the opposition? A discontented Taliban faction? Nobody knew. The front line was once again just forty kilometers north of Kabul.
Ashraf harked back to 1994–5, when the two sides fought over Kabul, when shells rang across the city and the inhabitants crumpled in their homes.
‘Here is the office of the justice minister, he’s a hardliner,’ Ashraf lowered his voice. ‘Here’s the office of the finance minister, he’s also a hardliner.’
As we drew up at the Ariana Hotel gate, he pointed to the traffic circle ahead: ‘That’s where Najibullah was hanged from.’ My stomach lurched. There was so much I did not know, but I did know that in 1996 the world saw images of a mutilated President Najibullah hanging from a traffic post, that Najibullah’s widow had fled to New Delhi and still lived there. I tried not to look at the traffic circle, though it was empty and perfectly innocuous. It’s as though places where violence happened bore their traces. Nothing much, only that at dusk that spot was a darker shade of grey. The weekend trickled by. Ensconced in the Ariana, one afternoon, I simply decided not to be afraid. It was crippling me. I had come to Kabul pulling a truckload of inherited fear up the mountains with me. I had come in full mental armour, my mind clogged with walls of it. It was as though, expecting the worst, I had found a few butterflies, a rose garden and some bird droppings.
‘I need to telephone,’ I said to the man in the lobby, mimicking a phone, holding a fist to my ear with thumb and pinkie held out. In Urdu, we made arrangements to go to the public phone booth in the market. One of the Afghans from the hotel would escort me.
I phoned S. in Hong Kong. His voice quickened with worry.
‘I’m okay,’ I said. ‘I’m in Kabul. I’m staying at the Ariana Hotel.’ I got used to broken-down, beaten-up Kabul. I could banish the fear, but not the sadness. I felt wretched all the time, for this country, for the Afghan children who came up, fair, with pointed chins and clear eyes, to beg. They were tiny, their hair mussed and caked. The children, old men and women and sometimes a woman in a burkha lurched towards me, hands held out, whispering. I couldn’t see their eyes, dark behind the lilac net. But I could sense the desperation.
Unlike the Indians, who imbue their begging with a certain professionalism, even humour, these were not people used to supplication. An old woman hobbled up to me, palm held out. I handed her a bag of apples I had bought. She gestured, no.
‘What is she saying?’ I asked the driver.
‘She has no teeth, she says she can’t eat the apples.’
‘Oh.’ I took the apples back and gave her the peaches instead.


With its riveting mix of lively reportage, high adventure, historical inquiry and personal memoir, Chasing The Monk’s Shadow is a path-breaking travelogue. For more posts like this, follow Penguin India on Facebook!

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