the_taliban_shuffle_-_kim_barker

justice, I watched a window roll down on his vehicle.
“Is something wrong?” shouted one of the lawyers inside.
“Yeah, something’s wrong. These guys keep grabbing me.”
He sighed and whispered something to lawyers outside the Pajero.
Half a dozen then walked over to me, surrounding my rear ank, trying
to protect it. But they were as eective as the country’s legal system.
The hands kept poking holes in their defenses. I kept spinning around,
screaming, gesturing like I was conducting an orchestra on speed,
randomly catching hands mid-pinch and then hitting the offenders.
I was creating a scene. This time, the door of the Pajero popped
open.
“Kim. Get in,” the lawyer said.
This was unexpected. Every journalist I knew had been trying to get
inside this vehicle for months. None had. But somehow, where skills,
talent, and perseverance had failed, my unremarkable ass had
delivered. I climbed into the backseat as another lawyer jumped out of
the vehicle to make room for me. I sat quietly.
“Just sit there. Don’t say a word,” the top lawyer told me, glaring at
me in the rearview mirror. “You can stay in here through the worst of
the crowds. Do not talk to the chief justice. Do not try to interview the
chief justice.”
I waited for a beat.
“But what if the chief justice wants to talk to me?”
Chaudhry laughed. I was in. And pretty soon, Tammy and another
friend were in the car as well, because once I had breached the car, the
others couldn’t be kept out. Especially Tammy, who as a minor
celebrity had a Wonder Woman ability to make men talk, even without
the lasso. As soon as the top lawyer stepped out of the SUV to make a
speech, the chief justice, his minder gone, started gushing to Tammy.
“I’m quite happy, you yourself can imagine,” Chaudhry said, adding
that he felt “wonderful.” He said he never would have imagined such a
scene before being suspended. “Never, being a judge and a lawyer.
Never.”
The top lawyer stepped back into the SUV, looking suspiciously from
the judge to the backseat. All of us sat quietly.
At points the convoy reached speeds of sixty miles per hour. But