Working hard to raise her two boys, Rani Shahnaz, one grim evening, turned in the key to enter her New York home only to find FBI agents sitting in wait
Dressed in prison garb, the middle-aged woman is escorted by the warden to a cubicle from across where sits her younger sister and her two daughters anxiously waiting for a reunion. Sharing the pain and touching the wounds with a gentle and tender hand, the two women are silent in their moment of despair; confusion. The reality of their powerlessness; grief rents the air.
Instinctively, both reach out to touch each other. But the cold glass comes between them. They just look into each other’s blank eyes, a stream of tears is all they can manage.
“Nano, Nano, I want to touch you,” says the two-and-a-half-year-old impatiently. “Nano, Nano, I love you,” she continues.
The sisters sob silently.
Meanwhile, the eight-year-old, who till now has been playing the big sister and calming her hyper sibling, really looks troubled seeing her mom and aunt crying. To hide her confusion, she puts her thumb in her mouth and with the other hand pushes a paper against the glass that has a prayer in Arabic that our Holy Prophet (Peace be upon him) advised Muslims to recite in times of trouble.
Her aunt gently moves her lips to read the prayer through the glass.
Working stiff all these 20 years to raise her two boys, Rani Shahnaz, one grim evening, turned in the key to enter her New York home after a dreary day of slog, only to find FBI agents sitting in wait. The 50-year-old Pakistani woman crumpled with fright.
The inevitable had happened. Her little world that she had so diligently built was collapsing before her eyes.
It was nine at night — darkness had closed its cadaverous fangs around her, “take off all your jewellry and come with us,” barked the men as she struggled to stand up and ask why.
Her pounding heartbeat and the reeling pain menacingly whispered in her ear that she would never again breathe freedom.
The battered wife, who fled an abusive marriage some two decades ago back in Pakistan, had arrived in the “land of the free” tightly clutching her toddlers, ridding herself forever of the domestic violence to begin life all over again.
The transition for Rani was traumatic — a single mom enveloped in an endless struggle to survive as an alien without legal status to work or live in America. But she persevered, never giving up her search for a way to become legal.
Nemesis struck in her choice of an attorney. He turned out to be a shyster and got arrested himself! Rani’s chances of getting her petition for a permanent resident status accepted fell through the cracks. Unsophisticated in immigration laws — aren’t most of us? — she innocently continued to think that her case was still being processed and all was well.
Three weeks ago, the long arm of the law got to her, picked her up and threw her in prison. “My boys know I like to drink tea when I return from work. They had made it for me, but the FBI agents didn’t even let me drink it...they even didn’t let me change my work shoes,” Rani tells me as we talk through the phone. Shabnam, her younger sister, has brought me to meet Rani at the Detention Centre in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
“How are you feeling now,” is all I can mumble.
“Life for me is over after the way I have been dragged around, thrown in jail, handcuffed, finger-printed like a common criminal — they have moved me from jail to jail that I really don’t know if I am living or dead,” Rani says, as she wipes her tears with the edge of her sleeve.
“I have never known enjoyment — all I have done is work, work and work. I didn’t even go to Manhattan for an evening out, always dutifully coming home each night to be with my boys and cook them their meals. They are totally broken now. I cannot bear to leave my children...they are my life.”
Shabnam coos, “Mama, don’t cry...you will Insha-Allah come back to us very soon.”
She calls Rani ‘Mama’ and the girls call her ‘Nano’. “After my parents’ death, my sister raised me up — she’s the mother I have always known, how can I ever leave her now,” Shabnam tells me.
Is Rani’s luck running out?
Hold on....
She would have been sitting in Pakistan by now along with the 48 other miserable Pakistanis deported last week from Buffalo on a chartered Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (BCIS) flight. She was taken to Buffalo for that purpose.
Rani got pulled out of the plane minutes before it was to take off for Islamabad!
“She has got a stay order from the courts for one week only. We’re afraid for her, very worried she will be sent back after that,” says Bobby Khan, a Pakistani activist based in Brooklyn who has helped hundreds of Pakistani detainees and their families. “If she’s sent back, the persecution risk (domestic violence) is still very much there.”
General Musharraf and Prime Minister Jamali don’t like raising the issue of Pakistanis being cruelly deported on minor visa violations with their American hosts when they come here, says Bobby Khan. “The voice of protest from our government is missing, their silence is deafening. The Embassy and the Pakistani community is disinterested and couldn’t care less. All this is so disheartening and frustrating, specially when we see leaders of other countries being so proactive.” However, Bobby is quick to concede that the “Embassy here gives us logistical support, even if the political support is missing.”
Shabnam doesn’t think so. “My sister is suffering and nobody is helping her, nobody has come to our help. The Pakistan Embassy has washed its hands off her,” she tell me when I first call her at her store. “What good will your writing do?” Shabnam asks when I tell her that I write for DAWN Magazine. “I need Rani’s story to appear in the mainstream media here — so that someone with a conscience can help my sister...she is not a criminal, she has always paid her taxes and lived by the law...she is a single mom who has worked to bring up her two sons as good, decent human beings.”
Shabnam’s faith in the Pakistani government in rescuing Rani is zero. “I don’t want Rani to go back to the hell she came from. She’s better off here — even if she is under detention.”
Her words — spontaneous and unmasked — speak volumes of the heart-wrenching sadness, the helplessness and hopelessness faced by Pakistanis in America that never make the headlines in newspapers here or back home.
Rani’s two sons, 21 and 19, are devastated. “I have brought them to my place,” says Shabnam.
Time is up, the two sisters say goodbye. “Mama, I’ll be back on Monday,” Shabnam tells Rani in tears as she gets up to leave, “don’t worry, don’t give up.”
A ray of hope, of fierce determination, crosses Rani’s face, her eyes suddenly spark and her alabaster complexion takes on a beauteous glow, “I am not ready to give up my fight yet — after being humiliated and robbed of my dignity — what else have I left but to fight till the very last.”
Rani Shahnaz’s case deserves sympathy. Doubtless, she has made serious blunders, most of them based on the wrong legal advice she received. If sent back to Pakistan, she’s finished — the domestic tyranny she fled will once again confront her in full — God only know what her fate will be.
Working hard to raise her two boys, Rani Shahnaz, one grim evening, turned in the key to enter her New York home only to find FBI agents sitting in wait 
