I Embrace What is My Destiny
India Abroad · November 7, 2003
Mariane Pearl has found courage and victory in her husband's death
Mariane Pearl is a determined woman. A woman with a purpose and a goal. It has been nearly a year and a half since confirmation of the death of her husband Daniel Pearl, Wall Street Journal's Mumbai-based, South Asia bureau chief. During this time Mariane delivered her son Adam (she was pregnant at the time Danny was kidnapped in January 2002) and continued her battle -
pursuing world leaders, diplomats, FBI and Pakistani government and police officials, to bring to justice those who kidnapped and killed Danny.
In Danny's death Mariane found courage and victory. She found the strength to get up and walk out of Karachi where she had been staying as a guest at the home of Danny's friend and WSJ colleague Asra Nomani. Last month Mariane, a freelance writer for French public radio and a documentary filmmaker, published her book, an account of her life with Danny and a narrative of the efforts to find him.
Through the book - A Mighty Heart: Life and Death of My Husband, Danny Pearl (Scribner, 2003), she takes her story to the public - one more stage in the battle that she continues to wage in search of justice. The book, co-authored with former Newsweek journalist Sarah Crichton, is a moving tale of Mariane's ordeal. It often reads like a thriller. It is also a brilliant reflection of post 9/11 Pakistan, especially the city of Karachi where Islamic, pro-Taliban and Al Qaeda forces coexist with the young elite who take drugs, party late into the night and imitate nearly all the traits of their Western counterparts.
"When we realized that Danny had been kidnapped, I knew that I couldn't be overwhelmed," Mariane, 36, says, as she sits in a French bistro in New York City's Greenwich Village, just blocks away from the apartment where she lives with her 16-month-old son.
She is dressed in an orange sweater, with an orange and white embroidered scarf wrapped around her neck. The light from the candle on the table reflects on her face. She looks radiant and beautiful. For a woman who became a widow under immensely trying and tragic circumstances, she seems very well-grounded, and in control of her surroundings.
"I knew if I had became overwhelmed, they [the kidnappers] would win. This clear understanding of the nature of what we were facing, gave me a lot of strength. I had to concentrate on my mind. I was in a conflict, a war. When I learned they had killed Danny, I knew exactly what was going on, what I had to do, what was my challenge. I didn't need therapy to tell me what was going on."
Though Mariane has nothing against therapy, she finds her energy and comfort in her belief in Buddhism. Born in France to parents who did not emphasize religion in her upbringing - her mother was Cuban with a passion for dancing and music, and her father a Dutch Jew, who professed to be an atheist - Pearl converted to Buddhism when she was 17, just out of high school.
"It is a very down to earth philosophy where they basically say that life is an eternal cycle," Pearl says. "An individual is at the same time the author and actor in his life. It is the empowerment of the individual. When you are chanting you realize all the resources you have in terms of wisdom, good fortunate and other things."
"I had Buddhism," she says in explaining how she survived the ordeal of waiting to hear news about Danny. "I chanted a lot and so that kept me alive."
"What Buddhism brings me is the possibility, when all door are closed, Buddhism opens a door," she adds. "I knew when Danny died, and I knew how he died, through Buddhism I got this victory. I could get up and walk, deliver my son, raise him, write this book and do everything I want to do in my life. That is my victory. That's what Buddhism brings me."
This summer, a court in Pakistan sentenced Omar Saeed Sheikh to death and three others to life imprisonment for their role in Daniel Pearl's kidnapping and murder. Sheikh, a chess-loving English public schoolboy who turned Islamic holy warrior while he was a student at the London School of Economics, was an expert in luring and kidnapping foreigners. On New Year's Eve 1999, he was released from an Indian prison and exchanged for the passengers of the hijacked Indian Airlines Flight 814.
Currently the sentences are under appeal and Danny's real killers are still at large (a recent report in The Wall Street Journal suggested that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the senior Al Qaeda operative in the US custody and suspected mastermind of the 9/11 may have actually killed Danny).
Through all of this Mariane remains hopeful. Her Buddhist beliefs do not teach her to forgive, she says. "It's not forgiveness, but the possibility of ultimate victory, because for me, my goal is never to forgive those guys. Buddhists are probably against the death sentence, but in this case I am not. I think they should die. It is my own thing."
While Mariane has anger towards Danny's kidnappers and killers, she does see a bright side of the ugly situation. "Good things also came out of the whole event," she says. "I met the most remarkable people ever in my life."
One such person was the chief Pakistani police investigator who became a close and trusted confidant of Mariane and Nomani. To protect his identity, Mariane identifies him in her book as Captain.
"A lot of people sympathized with me, but never risked their lives. He [Captain] did. He had no assurance of fame or glory or recognition. It was his conviction that Danny was innocent. This man happens to be Pakistani.
He is a man of faith. But he was pissed off because these people [Danny's kidnappers] had hijacked his country and his religion."
The other person Mariane became close to was Nomani, the India-born and US-raised journalist. "If I hadn't been staying at her place - it would have been much more of hell," Mariane says.
Mariane describes Nomani as a "very good friend" and an "exotic and crazy friend" of Danny's. The Pearls spent the evening of December 31, 2001 with Nomani and her then boyfriend - a young Pakistani man, who Mariane did not like from the beginning.
"We [Mariane and Nomani] talked a lot and I was getting into her life," Mariane says. "I didn't like the man she was dating. Before Danny's kidnapping, I was trying to talk her out of the relationship. She was very confused, but I could tell that she was going to get hurt big time."
A few weeks into Danny's kidnapping Nomani realized she too was pregnant.
Although her relationship with the Pakistani man ultimately ended, Nomani decided to keep her child, partly because of Mariane's encouragement. Her son Shibli is now a year old. "We both left Pakistan with babies in our bellies," Mariane says with a laugh.
Ultimately this group of people who surrounded Mariane - Nomani, an Indian-American Muslim woman, Captain, a Pakistani man, and a group of FBI personnel - became a force to reckon with. "We all came from different parts of the world and we developed such strength," she says. "We were feeding each other. We were creating such a force. We were in a war. It was extraordinary how we managed to put it together, considering when we started, we were two women, and both pregnant."
The Pearls moved to India in October 2000. It was an important promotion for Danny, but Mariane herself never took to India.
"I had never seen poverty at such a scale," she says. "It was very overwhelming. I was taking it personally. You had kinship, at the same time you are overwhelmed by your own powerlessness. I come from a Latin background - where there is a lot more interaction with poor people, but India it is different, the class distinctions."
She says she always felt like an outsider. In Mumbai, they took up an apartment on Walkeshwar Road in Malabar Hill, where some of the city's wealthiest people live. The Pearls were the only foreigners on the street.
"Whenever I went, everybody was staring at me," she says.
"[Mumbai] has a lot of foreigners, but it is very relative. On our street there weren't any diplomats and people couldn't figure me out. Danny was an American and that was fine. But me, whether I am an Indian or not? I could pass for an Indian, but not always. So I was very isolated."
Her work situation was also complicated. While Danny had a clear role, reporting for the Journal Mariane realized that the French media was less interested in India.
"If I had a job, it would have been easier as most of my energy would have gone there. I was trying to do stories and France wasn't interested. It took a long time for us to set up our home. I wrote a whole story about getting phone lines."
Back in New York, in her quest to spread the word about Danny's kidnapping, Mariane recently sold the rights to her book for a six figure sum to a film company headed by Hollywood's celebrated star couple Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston. The film version of her book will be produced by the couple's company Plan B, under the auspices of Warner Brothers.
"There was a lot of hesitation initially of course," Mariane says about her deal with Pitt and Aniston. "It seemed scary. But then I watched some really good films made by Hollywood, I realized if they make a good film, it will be an extremely viable and powerful means to communicate with people."
The movies she saw included All The President's Men, the Watergate story based on the book by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, and Z and Missing -
two political thrillers by Greek-French filmmaker Costa-Gavras.
"When I thought about it, if they [Pitt and Aniston] make a movie like Missing, then it will be great," Mariane says. She adds that the director and cast for the film have still to be selected.
Meeting celebrities and political leaders has not changed Mariane's life perspective. Her focus, she says is not to shake the hands of presidents and neither is she star struck in the presence of the likes of Pitt and Aniston, and Oprah Winfrey, who visited her apartment to interview her for Oprah magazine.
"I had a very clear agenda," she says. "I just want to tell them what I thought, and what I saw and learnt."
Time may have passed but Mariane is not ready to close the chapter on her husband's kidnapping. "Closure means that every single person involved in that kidnapping has been brought to justice," she says. "When that happens, I can say it's over, justice has been done, which may enable me to start another state of my life. But before that no."
While she does cry sometimes and still holds anger - "that is natural and it is healthy," she says - she certainly does not feel helpless.
"I embrace what is my destiny," she says. "It is the reality."
"Asra and I are very strong people. We are very determined. The situation is very difficult, but at no point have we lessened our determination. We will get to where we need to get to."
