They took me by surprise. Totally.” reminisces Nazir Mirza. “One moment I was honking at the car horn for somebody to unlock the main gate so that I could drive into the house, and the next thing I remember was being dragged out from behind the wheel… I didn’t have the time to react because as soon as I regained balance, I realized that there was a blindfold over my eyes. Then I was shoved into another car, my head held down by force and a longish drive…” and thereafter started the bizarre drama that shall remain etched permanently in the family’s collective memory…

It had been like any other working day for Nazir Mirza…an early morning race to supervise over the opening of the store, stock-taking for fresh orders, client servicing and finally the end-of-day cash counting before closing shop. Briefcase on the seat next to him, Nazir pressed down on the accelerator pedal. Weaving his way through the thinning traffic, he mentally counted his blessings for having had the means to be living in this elitist locality with its high security arrangements. Travelling with cash at this late hour …it would be sometime like eleven in the night before he packed up the day’s business… was routine fare. This and the fact that the driving distance between home and his workplace was hardly seven minutes, made him count his blessings; something he was doing almost daily these days, now that after months of breaking even, the department store, the setting of which had been a lifelong ambition, was now bringing in profits.

At two in the morning, exactly three hours after Nazir had been unceremoniously driven away from his gate, his wife Sheba was woken up by the telephone bell. Shaking her head to register the shrill pitch of the ring tone she glanced up at the wall clock. Two o’clock! “My God,” she said to herself, “why isn’t Nazir home yet?” Fourteen-year-old Danish, who had been watching a late-night television show, picked up the handset before his mother could reach it.

Then…“Mama,” he turned around in a trance, “there’s somebody on the line who says they have got Baba and they want to talk to you.” Sheba took the handset from her son. The man at the other end first checked out on her relationship to Nazir Mirza, then began, “Don’t put down the phone. Don’t contact the police. We have your husband with us. If you want him alive, listen carefully to what I am going to say. You will receive another call in ten minutes…” Click. End of conversation. Ten minutes later the phone rang again. This time Sheba was wide awake. “We want you to deliver twenty-five hundred thousand rupees as soon as possible. Otherwise we do not guarantee your husband’s life. After fifteen minutes tell your son to look for a black plastic shopper in the garbage basket outside your gate. Inside will be a note.”

Almost twenty telephone calls later, Sheba, who had in the meantime contacted and called over her sister and a nephew, managed to convince the kidnappers that she had access only to a personal account in which the balance was five hundred thousand rupees. At the other end, Mirza had told his captors since he had put in his total cash assets into the business, his account currently only held three hundred thousand. Another tantalizing hour and the kidnappers were back on the line with instructions. By now Sheba’s thirty-year-old nephew, Faris, had taken charge. The kidnappers briefed him in detail ...Put Mirza’s cheque-book in white envelope. Place it below garbage basket outside the house. Go back inside the house. Draw the curtains. Do not peep out, because your house is under observation. Any tricks and your man is dead…We shall be returning your man’s signed cheque very soon. You will then go to the bank and fetch the cash.

Six trauma-ridden, instruction-obeying hours later, nephew Faris retrieved Mirza’s cheque-book, one page duly signed for the sum total of his bank balance. Faris then followed instructions to go and encash both Mirza’s and his wife’s cheque. In between, as if to reinforce the seriousness of the whole proceedings, phone calls from the kidnappers made it very clear that each and every action of the family was being observed. When Sheba pleaded the case for the family’s overly precarious financial condition, the negotiator on the phone would plead his own case…that he and his team were sorry for what was happening but they needed the money badly. In fact, said the clipped voice at the other end, the amount that the deal had been struck for, was barely sufficient for a day’s expenditure…inflation, you know.

The next few hours were spent in Faris carrying the cash to various locations pinpointed by the kidnappers. Each time nobody turned up to collect the money. Apparently the kidnappers were checking out on the family’s integrity and on whether their instructions about not involving the law enforcing agencies were being followed. Agonizing hours later, the final instructions were communicated. The captive’s family was told to bring the money in a briefcase, to a certain gas station near a city shrine. Once parked amidst the rush of human and vehicular traffic at the designated location, Faris waited agonizing minutes till he heard the rear door of his car open, felt somebody get into the back seat, heard a voice telling him to look back only on pain of death and then ask for the briefcase of money. Seconds later it was all over. A call on the cellphone told Faris to return home and await the arrival of Mirza!

Unbelievably, cool and confident, their conversations laced with grammatic precision, emanating thorough management skills, the kidnappers had been in total control of the situation all along. “They kept us informed of the progress down to the point when three days later they called up to say that Uncle Mirza would be home in fifteen minutes’ time.”

Exactly fifteen minutes just after sunset, Mirza, freshly shaved and wearing a brand new shalwar kameez suit stepped out of a chauffeur-driven Honda Civic that had pulled up to a stop in front of his house. The car had been apparently rented for the express purpose of honouring a commitment! Mirza was under express instructions to forget the incident, while minutes later, the family were called by the captors one last time to check if Mirza had got home.

End of Story.
The Punjab Police deserve special thanks for having acted swiftly. Kidnapping gang was caught with the ransom money in their possession. While justice is expected to take time before it takes its course, society, shaken by rampant insecurity and the abysmal depths to which human beings can sink to, bides its time for justice. According to the Pakistan code of law, kidnapping, if proven, carries a death sentence.