Standing Alone Read Online Free PDF Page B

however, I got the run-around. Meanwhile, in Morgantown my father was so stressed about arranging the logistics of traveling with me in Saudi Arabia that he was driving my mother crazy.

BETRAYAL AND A TURNING POINT
    KARACHI —As the start of the hajj crept closer, I was still desperately trying to pull off the trip when Danny and Mariane came to visit. Mariane was five months pregnant, and they had just learned the day before that their baby was a son. That night we exchanged war stories, quite literally, listened to Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, and a Pakistani Sufi rock band, Junoon, and tried unsuccessfully to watch DVDs on Danny’s laptop.
    The next day, January 23, 2002, Danny left for an interview he thought he was going to have with a spiritual leader named Sheikh Gi-lani. He was investigating reports that Sheikh Gilani had ties to Richard Reid, “the shoe bomber” who had tried to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight from Paris to Miami by lighting a fuse connected to explosives hidden in his sneakers. Unbeknownst to Danny, a Muslim militant by the name of Omar Sheikh had hatched a plot to kidnap him. In the early evening, Danny stopped answering his cell phone. Worried, Mariane and I began a mission that night, searching for Danny. The next morning, after we alerted the Wall Street Journal , the U.S. government, and Pakistani police, my house became a command center for the investigation. My boyfriend had been with us the first night, but when he came over the second night after Danny’s disappearance he told me that Pakistani intelligence officials had visited him to find out what he knew about Danny and me. The visit frightened him as well as his parents and friends. He wouldn’t come around anymore. I wept that night, privately, in a walk-in closet where I knew nobody would find me. And then I wiped away my tears and focused on only one goal: finding my friend. With Mariane, I crossed physical boundaries rarely breached in that culture. We lived alone in that space that women rarely claimed without a chaperone—their homes—and we worked alongside FBI agents and Pakistani antiterrorism specialists trying to piece together the clues left by Danny’s kidnappers.
    As the first week of our search ended, I wrote to my father to assure my family that I was safe, with armed police escorting us everywhere.
    â€œWe will find Danny,” I wrote. “Every day we are one step closer.”
    As Mariane and I entered the third week of our desperate search for Danny, I realized something shocking: I might be pregnant. A pregnancy test confirmed my suspicion. I was shocked. I had never gotten pregnant before. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t wear a wedding ring, but I didn’t feel as if I had done something wrong. I had loved my boyfriend deeply and surrendered myself to him. Even if my assumptions had been wrong, I loved him when I made this baby. He had abandoned me, but that was not because of my failure. It was because of his fears. I called my boyfriend and asked him to visit me. He arrived that night, and I took him to my bedroom. “I am carrying your baby,” I told him, sitting on the edge of my bed.
    He looked at me stunned. In a pause that I filled with so many dreams, he sucked his breath in hard and said, “I have to go.”
    The truth revealed itself. He didn’t want me to keep the baby, and all of his fanciful talk about marrying me disappeared. Despite my intellectual confidence in myself, I felt completely illegitimate. Within me was an American woman who believed in free will and thus knew that I had the right to keep my baby and raise him with my head held high. But the voices of my religion’s traditions also spoke strongly inside of me. I was consumed by the shame of ignoring the rulings of sharia, the “divine Islamic law.” For reporting I had done on the subculture of sex, drugs, and nightclubs in Pakistan, a leader of