Dark Knight of Multan

They had gathered to mourn the passing of their leader: a hateful man who had lived by violence and died by it. The long, wakeful night was spent in discussion and prayer. Daybreak was scarcely an hour away when an explosion ripped through Multan’s Rashidabad Chowk, leaving death and destruction in its wake.

When the dust settled, at least forty were dead, countless injured. The nation was in shock and one question was on every mind: who did it?

The answer was obvious depending on who was asked the question. “Shias are responsible for this bombing,” said Maulana Ludhiyanvi bluntly. Ludhiyanvi is the head of of the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, a banned sectarian organization that boasts such luminaries as Maulana Azam Tariq amongst its deceased members.

Blaming the much-libeled foreign hand, Misinformation Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed was hazy on the identity of the culprits but firmly ruled out a few possibilities. “There is no Shia-Sunni conflict in Pakistan,” he insisted. “They [the perpetrators] are not Muslims and have nothing to do with Islam.”

Muhammed Qudoos, a retired Punjab police official, agreed. “It has to be RAW, Muslims can’t do something like this,” he said, referring to the Indian intelligence service which—in partnership with the CIA and the Israeli Mossad—is rumored to be part of an unholy triumvirate that is close to total world domination.

As the nation relapsed into numb forgetfulness, only one man knew the truth.

That man was Mian Abdul Butt, 29, of Tehsil Shorkot, District Jhang: eccentric millionaire, hereditary landowner, philanthropist. A man with an almost maniacal hatred for bigotry and injustice. A man haunted by the dark demons of his past. A man known to his closest friends simply as Buttmian.

Buttmian’s life began at a simpler time, before the jihad, before the ugly scar of sectarianism had blighted the nation’s face. Young Abdul had led a sheltered life, shielded from the world’s petty cruelties behind the high walls of stately Butt Haveli.

Life took a devastating turn when Abdul lost his parents to one of Jhang’s first incidents of sectarian violence. He was merely fourteen. An ordinary child would have responded with shock, tears, anger. Abdul did none of those things. Instead, he left landowning responsibilities to his father’s faithful munshi, and buried himself in a physical, mental and spiritual education that spanned a decade and took him from an elite college in the United States, to a hidden order of Japanese shoguns, and a mysterious lama atop a frozen Tibetan peak.

Years later, Abdul returned to Jhang and Butt Haveli, a man of culture and erudition, ostensibly to take his rightful place amongst the aristocracy. His peers knew him as a mild-mannered and eccentric young man, with little to offer other than the famed Butt millions. To them, the violent deaths of Abdul’s parents seemed like an event from another life that Abdul had forgotten. The playboy millionaire of today seemed more interested in charming the ladies than brooding on the past.

They were wrong: Abdul had never forgotten. His mother’s last moments, his father’s blood-soaked corpse, the unspeakable terror of the bullets: these were the images that haunted his dreams. The unrelenting specter of vengeance occupied his every waking minute.

Witnesses to the Multan bombing swear that a car approached the hate-filled disciples of Maulana Azam Tariq, ignited a mighty fireball, and drove on undamaged. Perhaps the armament manufacturers of Maitamach, Stuttgart would have recognized the vehicle they had shipped to Pakistan in that tank-like car. Already in Jhang, they speak in reverential tones of a demon that stalks the night, striking down criminals on their turf. And they speak in nervous whispers of the demon’s car, the Buttmobile.

For mild-mannered Abdul—as his alter-ego Buttmian—is also a modern-day Azazel, a vigilante visiting justice upon criminals. By day, he is an eccentric millionaire; by night, a ruthless hunter of terrorists.

The full tale of how Abdul became Buttmian is yet to be told. Myths are seldom known at the time of their birth. What caused Abdul’s psychotic break? What turned an ordinary young man into a cold vigilante killer, scarcely different in his methods from those he sought to destroy? In a corrupt land where terror is practiced for raison d’etat, where justice and men are mere commodities to be bought and sold by the powerful, where the public is as terrorized by the police as it is by the terrorists, where banned hate-preachers fearlessly meet in public, where the activities of sectarian terrorists are winked at by the state, Buttmian is an inevitability.

In fact, the real question is not why Buttmian exists, but why there’s only one of him. Perhaps there are many more and people just haven’t noticed. Consider. Buttmian doesn’t buy the facile argument that the terrorists aren’t Muslims because no Muslim would harm another. Buttmian recognizes the hypocrisy in having killers like Masood Azhar being guests of a state that claims to be combating terrorism. Buttmian wonders why banned terrorist organizations are allowed to resurface with different names. Buttmian knows the foreign hand isn’t so foreign. Buttmian sounds a lot like many of us.

Does Buttmian really exist? Or is he just a mythical comic book character? Does it really matter? For in spirit, Buttmian lives inside every thinking, rational person. He is our collective id, a manifestation of a malevolent righteousness that wants to crush the evil that threatens us, to bring terror to the terrorists.

So beware, terrorists and evildoers. Buttmian will bring upon you that which you deserve. Your time of reckoning is near. Soon, the masses will rise, a Buttmian will emerge from every mohalla. Then you will know the meaning of terror.