'Crescent Moon' Counts Down To Political Mayhem
But Bhutto's as interested in the psychology of the brothers as she is in building suspense. The eldest, Aman Erum, has recently returned from college in the United States, where he studied business and marketing. In order to start a business in his home town, free from the constrictions of life under military rule and terrorist threat, he's made a dangerous bargain with an officer from the occupying national army.
Hayat, the youngest brother, is currently enrolled at the local college, which since the arrival of the army in Mir Ali has become a haven for political resistance. His life as a radical has become intertwined with that of Samarra, a bright, beautiful and rebellious young woman, once the childhood friend of Aman Erum, now estranged.
The middle brother, Sikander, is an overworked physician on the staff of the local hospital with, as it happens, problems more personal than political on his mind. His wife Mina, unhinged by the death of their six-year-old son in a Taliban attack on a local hospital, has made it her duty to attend as many funerals around town as will allow her entrance.
With the clock ticking, Aman Erum takes a rattle-trip taxi on a trip to pray — safely, he hopes — at a mosque some distance across town. Hayat, with Samarra perched behind him, hops on his motorbike and heads out for a fateful rendezvous with other members of a conspiratorial group of students. Sikander, after retrieving his wife from yet another funeral where she has created an unwanted stir, puts her in the passenger seat of a hospital van and sets off on a mission of mercy to deliver a child in difficult labor, a mission that takes him directly into a melodramatic encounter at a Taliban checkpoint.
Even as these distinct but intertwined motives build in the actions of the main characters, Crescent Moon rises above melodrama, tying us to the page at the same time it presents us with larger questions about the troubled people of this troubled region. Bhutto works with the delicacy of a poet and the prime-time urgency of a front-line correspondent in order to capture these tortured cries of her beloved country.