‘O, Rani, you got your problems, darling,’ Bilquìs sympathizes down the Army telephone line. ‘What do you mean you don’t know? Here I am, stuck away just like you, and even in this zero-town I know what the whole of Karachi is saying. Darling, who hasn’t seen how your Isky and that fat doctor run around, belly-dancer shows, international hotel swimming-pools where the naked white women go, why do you think he puts you where you are? Alcohol, gambling, opium, who knows that. Those women in their waterproof fig leaves. Excuse me darling but somebody has to tell you. Cock-fights, bear-fights, snake-and-mongoose fights, that Shakil fixes everything like a pimp or what. And how many women? O baba. Under banquet tables he grabs their thighs. They say the two of them go to the red-light district with movie cameras. Of course it’s clear what that Shakil is up to, that nobody from nowhere is getting the high life on a plate, maybe some of those women are willing to be passed on, crumbs from the rich man’s table, you understand my meaning. Anyway the point is darling your Isky pinched his cousin’s juiciest little French tart from right under his nose, at some big cultural event, I’m sorry to say it but it was all over town, so funny to see Mir standing there while Isky walked off with the floozy, O God I don’t know why you don’t just cry and cry. Now what’s to get worked up about, honestly you should know who is your friend and who is poisoning your name behind your back. You should hear me on the phone, darling, how I defend you, like a tiger, you’ve got no idea, sweetie, sitting up there and lording it over your antique Gulbabas and all.’
She encounters the ayah clucking ruefully in the wreckage of the dining hall. ‘Went too far,’ the ayah says. ‘My Isky, such a naughty boy. Always always he got his cousin’s goat. Went too far. The little hooligan.’
Wherever she looks are peering faces; wherever she listens, voices. She is watched as, blushing with the humiliation of it, she calls Iskander to give him the news. (It has taken her five days to build up her courage.) Iskander Harappa says just three words.
‘Life is long.’
Raza Hyder led his gas soldiers out to Needle Valley after a week in which their activities had so alarmed the town that State Chief Minister Gichki had ordered Raza to get moving double-quick before the stock of virgins available to the bachelors of Q. dwindled to a point at which the moral stability of the region would be jeopardized. Accompanying the soldiers were numerous architects, engineers and construction workers, all of whom were in a condition of moist-trousered panic, because for security reasons none of them had been informed of the fate of the advance party until they arrived in Q., where they were immediately given magnificently elaborated versions of the tale by every street-corner paan-wallah. The construction personnel sobbed inside locked vans; soldiers, on guard, jeered: ‘Cowards! Babies! Women!’ Raza in his flagbearing jeep heard none of this. He was unable to turn his thoughts away from the events of the preceding day, when he had visited at the hotel by an obsequious gnome whose loose garments smelled powerfully of motor-scooter exhaust fumes: Maulana Dawood, the ancient divine, around whose chicken-thin neck had once hung a necklace of shoes.
‘Sir, great sir, I look upon your hero’s brow and am inspired.’ The gatta, the bruise of devotion on Raza’s forehead, did not go unremarked.
‘No, O most wise, it is I who am at once humbled and exalted by your visit.’ Raza Hyder would have been prepared to continue in this vein for at least eleven minutes, and felt a little disappointed when the holy man nodded and said briskly, ‘So then, to business. You know about this Gichki of course. Not to be trusted.’
‘Not?’
‘Completely not. Most corrupt individual. But your files will show this.’
‘Allow me to benefit from the knowledge of the man on the spot …’
‘Like all our politicos these days. No fear of God and big smuggling rackets. This is boring for you; the Army is well up in such matters.’
‘Please proceed.’
‘Foreign devilments, sir. Nothing less. Devil things from abroad.’
What Gichki was accused of bringing illicitly into God’s pure land: iceboxes, foot-operated sewing machines, American popular music recorded at 78 revolutions per minute, love-story picture books that inflamed the passions of the local virgins, domestic air-conditioning units, coffee percolators, bone china, skirts, German sunglasses, cola concentrates, plastic toys, French cigarettes, contraceptive devices, untaxed motor vehicles, big ends, Axminster carpets, repeating rifles, sinful fragrances, brassières, rayon pants, farm machinery, books, eraser-tipped pencils and tubeless bicycle tyres. The customs officer at the border post was mad and his shameless daughter was willing to turn a blind eye in return for regular gratuities. As a result all these items from hell could arrive in broad daylight, on the public highway, and find their way into the gypsy markets, even in the capital itself. ‘Army,’ Dawood said in a voice that had dropped to a whisper, ‘must not stop at stamping out tribal wild men. In God’s name, sir.’
‘Sir, put your point.’
‘Sir, it is this. Prayer is the sword of the faith. By the same token, is not the faithful sword, wielded for God, a form of holy prayer?’
Colonel Hyder’s eyes became opaque. He turned away to look out of the window towards an enormous silent house. From an upper window of the house a young boy was training field-glasses on the hotel. Raza turned back towards the Maulana. ‘Gichki, you say.’
‘Here it is Gichki. But everywhere things are the same. Ministers!’
‘Yes,’ Hyder said absently, ‘they are ministers, that’s true.’
‘Then I have said my piece and take my leave, abasing myself before you for the privilege of this encounter. God is great.’
‘Be in the hands of God.’
Raza headed for the threatened gas fields with the above conversation in his mind’s ear; and in his mind’s eye the picture of a small boy with binoculars, alone at an upstairs window. A boy who was someone’s son: a drop appeared on Old Razor Guts’s cheek and was blown off by the wind.
‘Gone for three months minimum,’ Bilquìs sighed into her telephone. ‘What to do? I am young, I can’t sit all day like a water-buffalo in mud. Thank God I can go to the movies.’ Every night, leaving her child in the care of a locally hired ayah, Bilquìs sat in the brand-new cinema called Mengal Mahal. But Q. was a small town; eyes saw things, even in the dark … but I shall return to this theme at a later point, because I can no longer avoid the story of my poor heroine:
Two months after Raza Hyder departed into the wilderness to do battle with the gas-field dacoits, his only child Sufiya Zinobia contracted a case of brain fever that turned her into an idiot. Bilquìs, rending hair and sari with equal passion, was heard to utter a mysterious sentence: ‘It is a judgment,’ she cried beside her daughter’s bed. Despairing of military and civilian doctors she turned to a local Hakim who prepared an expensive liquid distilled from cactus roots, ivory dust and parrot feathers, which saved the girl’s life but which (as the medicine man had warned) had the effect of slowing her down for the rest of her years, because the unfortunate side-effect of a potion so filled with elements of longevity was to retard the progress of time inside the body of anyone to whom it was given. By the day of Raza’s return on furlough Sufiya Zinobia had shaken off the fever, but Bilquìs was convinced she could already discern in her not-yet-two-year-old-child the effects of that inner deceleration which could never be reversed. ‘And if there is this effect,’ she feared, ‘who knows what else? Who can say?’
In the clutches of a guilt so extreme that even the affliction of her only child seemed insufficient to explain it, a guilt in which, were I possessed of a scandalously wagging tongue, I would say that something Mengalian, something to do with visits to the cinema and fat-mouthed youths, was also present, Bilquìs Hyder spent the night before Raza’s return pacing sleeplessly around the honeymoon suite of Flashman’s Hotel, and it should perhaps be noted that one of her hands, acting, apparently, of its own volition, continually caressed the region
around her navel. At four a.m. she obtained a long-distance line to Rani Harappa in Mohenjo and made the following injudicious remarks:
‘Rani, a judgment, what else? He wanted a hero of a son; I gave him an idiot female instead. That’s the truth, excuse me, I can’t help it. Rani, a simpleton, a goof! Nothing upstairs. Straw instead of cabbage between the ears. Empty in the breadbin. To be done? But darling, there is nothing. That birdbrain, that mouse! I must accept it: she is my shame.’
When Raza Hyder returned to Q. the boy was standing at the window of the great solitary house once again. One of the local guides, in answer to the Colonel’s inquiry, told Raza that the house was owned by three crazy sinful witches who never came outside but who managed to produce children nevertheless. The boy at the window was their second son: witch-fashion, they claimed to share their offspring. ‘But the story is, sir, that in that house is more wealth than in the treasury of Alexander the Great.’ Hyder replied with what sounded like contempt: ‘So. But if a peacock dances in the jungle, who will see its tail?’ Still, his eyes never left the boy at the window until the jeep arrived at the hotel, where he found his wife awaiting him with her hair loose and her face washed clean of eyebrows, so that she was the very incarnation of tragedy, and he heard what she had been too ashamed to send word of. The illness of his daughter and the vision of the fieldglass-eyed young boy combined in Hyder’s spirits with the bitterness of his ninety days in the desert and sent him storming out of the honeymoon suite bursting with a rage so terrible that for the sake of his personal safety it was necessary to find a release for it as soon as possible. He ordered a staff car to drive him to the residence of Chief Minister Gichki in the Cantonment, and, without waiting on ceremony, he informed the Minister that although construction work at Needle was well advanced the threat from the tribals could never be eliminated unless he, Hyder, were empowered to take draconian punitive measures. ‘With God’s help we are defending the site, but now we must stop this pussyfooting. Sir, you must place the law in my hands. Carte blanche. At certain moments civil law must bend before military necessity. Violence is the language of these savages; but the law obliges us to speak in the discredited womanly tongue of minimum-force. No good, sir. I cannot guarantee results.’ And when Gichki responded that on no account were the laws of the State to be flouted by the armed forces – ‘We’ll have no barbarisms in those hills, sir! No tortures, no stringings-up by toes, not while I am Chief Minister here!’ – then Raza, in discourteously loud tones that escaped through the doors and windows of Gichki’s office and terrified the peons outside because they had issued from the lips of one so habitually polite, gave the Chief Minister a warning. ‘Army is watching these days, Gichki Sahib. All over the country the eyes of honest soldiers see what they see, and we are not pleased, no sir. The people stir, sir. And if they look away from politicians, where will they turn for purity?’
Raza Hyder in his wrath left Gichki – small, bullet-cropped hair, flat Chinese face – formulating his never-to-be-delivered reply; and found Maulana Dawood awaiting him by the staff car. Soldier and divine rode on the back seat, their words shielded from the driver by a sheet of glass. But it seems probable that behind this screen a name passed from divine tongue into martial ear: a name, carrying with it intimations of scandal. Did Maulana Dawood tell Hyder about the meetings of Bilquìs and her Sindbad? I say only that it seems probable. Innocent until proven guilty is an excellent rule.
That night the cinema executive Sindbad Mengal left his office at Mengal Mahal by the back door as usual, emerging into a dark gully behind the cinema screen. He was whistling a sad tune, the melody of a man who cannot meet his beloved even though the moon is full. In spite of the loneliness of the tune he had dressed up to the nines, as was his custom: his bright European garb, bush-shirt and duck pants, was radiant in the gully, and the melancholy moonlight bounced off the oil in his hair. It is likely that he never even noticed that the shadows in the gully had begun to close in on him; the knife, which the moon would have illuminated, was clearly kept sheathed until the last instant. We know this because Sindbad Mengal did not stop whistling until the knife entered his guts, whereupon someone else began to whistle the same tune, just in case anybody was passing by and got curious. A hand covered Sindbad’s mouth as the knife went to work. In the next few days Mengal’s absence from his office inevitably attracted attention, but it was not until several moviegoers had complained about the deterioration in the cinema’s stereophonic sound quality that an engineer inspected the loudspeakers behind the screen and discovered segments of Sindbad Mengal’s white shirt and duck pants concealed within them, as well as black Oxford shoes. The knife-sliced garments still contained the appropriate pieces of the cinema manager’s body. The genitals had been severed and inserted into the rectum. The head was never found, nor was the murderer brought to justice.
Life is not always long.
That night Raza made love to Bilquìs with a coarseness which she was willing to put down to his months in the wilderness. The name of Mengal was never mentioned between them, not even when the town was buzzing with the murder story, and soon afterwards Raza returned to Needle Valley. Bilquìs stopped going to the cinema, and although in this period she retained her queenly composure it seemed as though she were standing on a crumbling outcrop over an abyss, because she became prone to dizzy spells. Once, when she picked up her damaged daughter to play the traditional game of water-carrier, slinging Sufiya Zinobia on her back and pretending she was a water-skin, she collapsed to the floor beneath the delighted child before she had finished pouring her out. Soon afterwards she called Rani Harappa to announce that she was pregnant. While she was imparting this information, the lid of her left eye began, inexplicably, to nictate.
An itchy palm means money in the offing. Shoes crossed on the floor mean a journey; shoes turned upside-down warn of tragedy. Scissors cutting empty air mean a quarrel in the family. And a winking left eye means there will be bad news soon.
‘On my next leave,’ Raza wrote to Bilquìs, ‘I shall be going to Karachi. There are family duties, and also Marshal Aurangzeb is giving a reception. One does not refuse one’s Commander-in-Chief’s invitation. If your condition, however, you will do better to rest. It would be thoughtless of me to ask you to accompany me on this non-compulsory and arduous trip.’
Politeness can be a trap, and Bilquìs was caught in the web of her husband’s courtesy. ‘As you wish,’ she wrote back, and what made her write this was not entirely guilt, but also something untranslatable, a law which obliged her to pretend that Raza’s words meant no more than they said. This law is called takallouf. To unlock a society, look at its untranslatable words. Takallouf is a member of that opaque, world-wide sect of concepts which refuse to travel across linguistic frontiers: it refers to a form of tongue-typing formality, a social restraint so extreme as to make it impossible for the victim to express what he or she really means, a species of compulsory irony which insists, for the sake of good form, on being taken literally. When takallouf gets between a husband and a wife, look out.
Raza travelled alone to the capital … and now that an untranslatable word has brought Hyder and Harappa, unencumbered by spouses, very near to meeting once again, it is time to take stock of the situation, because our two duellists will shortly find themselves doing battle. Even now, the cause of their first altercation is allowing a servant girl to oil and braid her hair. She, Atiyah Aurangzeb, known to her intimates as “Pinkie”, is contemplating, coolly, the soirée which she has decided to arrange in the name of her almost senile husband, the crumbling Marshal Aurangzeb, Joint Chief of Staff. Pinkie Aurangzeb is in her middle thirties, several years older than Raza and Iskander, but this does not diminish her allure; mature women have charms of their own, as is well known. Trapped in a marriage with a dotard, Pinkie finds her pleasures wherever she can.
Meanwhile, two wives are abandoned in their separate exiles, each with a daughter who should have been a son (more ne
eds to be said about young Arjumand Harappa, more will certainly be written about poor, idiot Sufiya Zinobia). Two different approaches to the matter of revenge have been outlined. And while Iskander Harappa consorts with a fat pigment tub named Omar Khayyam Shakil for purposes of debauchery etc., Raza Hyder would seem to have fallen under the influence of a grey eminence, who whispers austere secrets in the backs of Army limousines. Cinemas, sons of witches, bruises on foreheads, frogs, peacocks have all worked to create an atmosphere in which the stink of honour is all-pervasive.
Yes, it is high time the combatants took the field.
The fact is that Raza Hyder was smitten right between the eyes by Pinkie Aurangzeb. He desired her so badly that it made the bruise on his forehead ache, but he lost her to Iskander Harappa, right there at the Marshall’s reception, while the old soldier slept in an armchair, relegated to a corner of the glittering throng, but even in that condition of somnolent cuckolded dotage never spilling a drop from the brimming tumbler of whisky-soda he clutched in his sleeping hand.
On that fateful occasion began a duel which was to continue at least until both protagonists were dead, if not longer. Its initial prize was the body of the Marshal’s wife, but after that it moved on to higher things. First things first, however: and Pinkie’s body, excitingly on display, in a green sari worn dangerously low upon the hips in the fashion of the women of the East Wing; with silver-and-diamond earrings in the form of crescent-and-star hanging brightly from pierced lobes; and bearing upon irresistibly vulnerable shoulders a light shawl whose miraculous work could only have been the product of the fabled embroiderers of Aansu, because amidst its miniscule arabesques a thousand and one stories had been portrayed in threads of gold, so vividly that it seemed the tiny horsemen were actually galloping along her collarbone, while minute birds appeared to be flying, actually flying, down the graceful meridian of her spine … this body is worth lingering over.