‘Very good, sir,’ Shuja controlled himself, ‘I shall convey the General’s view to the polo squad, sir.’
‘What a life,’ Raza Hyder said aloud when he was alone. ‘The higher you climb, the thicker the blasted mud.’ It was lucky for the country, he mused, that Old Razor Guts was accustomed to standing on his own two feet.
The restoration of the Army’s morale, it would be fair to say, was the crowning glory of Raza Hyder’s career – it was a tougher job, in my opinion, than anything he undertook when President. How did he do it? – He lost wrestling matches.
The morning after his conversation with Major Shuja he instructed the ADC to select opponents for him, mostly from the common soldiers, but also from a cross-section of the officers. ‘I am keen on wrestling,’ he lied, ‘and it’s time I saw what stuff our Army phaelwans are made of.’
General Raza Hyder fought with one hundred and eleven soldiers and was thrashed by them all. He made no attempt to win, concentrating, instead, on the far more difficult business of losing against opponents who had forgotten that it was possible to win; of losing, moreover, while giving the impression of struggling for victory with all his might. ‘You can see what good it’s doing,’ he told Omar Khayyam Shakil, who acted as the General’s personal physician before and after each bout, and who was alarmed by the phenomenal battering being given to that forty-nine-year-old body. ‘Yes,’ Omar Khayyam replied, ministering to aching bones and rainbow bruises, ‘any fool can see that.’ Raza Hyder wept freely as he lay beneath Shakil’s probing fingers, but he called them tears of joy.
The wrestling strategy of Raza Hyder gained him a double victory. It helped the Army to accept his leadership, because now he was united with his men in that macabre fellowship of shame. As Old Razor Guts was drop-kicked in the jaw, dumped on canvas with his ankles knotted round his neck, throttled by an infantryman’s arm; as his ribs snapped and his arms left their sockets, the old popularity of the hero of Aansu was reborn; cleansed of the dust and anonymity of his Staff College years, it shone once again, like new. Yes, Razor Guts was back, bigger than ever … but Raza had been after more than that, and his second purpose was also achieved, because as the soldiers in camp after camp participated in, or witnessed from roaring ringsides, the pulverization of the one genuine war hero left in the Army, they began to regain faith in themselves, they began to believe that if they were good enough to dump the General in the dirt they couldn’t be such pathetic fighting men as they had come to imagine. After one year of wrestling Raza Hyder called a halt. He had lost both upper central incisors and sustained countless other injuries. ‘I don’t have to take this any more,’ he told Shuja, whose air of permanent dejection (although somewhat reduced) now stood revealed as a personality flaw and not simply the product of the lost, and now almost forgotten, war.
‘Tell those bastards,’ Raza instructed him, ‘that I expect all personnel to win every competition they enter from now on, or else.’ There followed an electrifying improvement in Army sporting results.
I have lingered on this business of Army morale to indicate why it was that during his years as Commander-in-Chief Raza Hyder did not have the time or the mental energy to pay proper attention to what his daughter Sufiya Zinobia was getting up to in the nights.
The politicos and diplomats were in charge of the new city but the Army dominated the old town. The new capital was composed of numerous concrete edifices which exuded an air of philistine transience. The geodesic dome of the Friday Mosque had already begun to crack, and all around it the new official buildings preened themselves as they, too, fell apart. The air-conditioning broke down, the electric circuits shorted, flush water kept bubbling up into washbasins to the consternation of the plumbers … O vilest of cities! Those buildings represented the final triumph of a modernism that was really a kind of pre-stressed nostalgia, form without function, the effigy of Islamic architecture without its heart, buildings containing more Mughal arches than the Mughals could ever have imagined, arches reduced by pre-stressed concrete to mere pointy holes in walls. The new capital was in reality the biggest collection of airport terminals on earth, a garbage dump for unwanted transit lounges and customs halls, and maybe that was appropriate, because democracy had never been more than a bird of passage in those parts, after all … the old town possessed, by contrast, the confident provinciality of its years. Old, wide, tree-lined streets, chaotic bazaars, slums, the solidly outsized mansions of the departed Angrez rulers. The C-in-C’s official residence was a neo-classical palace of stone porticoes with massive fluted pillars supporting mock-Grecian, friezed pediments, and there were little piles of cannonballs lining the grand steps up to the front door; a wheeled gun apocryphally named ‘Little Zamzama’ guarded the bright-green lawn. The place was spacious that the whole family moved in without any arguments, so that Good News and Talvar Ulhaq, Omar Khayyam and Sufiya Zinobia, Dawood and Shahbanou the ayah, as well as Raza and Bilquìs, pursued their several destinies beneath that ample roof, while the alien gods of Greece and Rome, posing stonily against the high blue sky, looked down on them with supercilious expressions on their faces.
Things did not go well.
‘As if this crazy Army isn’t bad enough,’ Raza told himself in those first northern days, ‘here’s my own house filling up with mad persons,’ and it seemed as though the occupants of that anachronistic palace set about turning his angry exaggeration into the literal truth.
When Maulana Dawood appeared one morning wearing the traditional garb of a pilgrim on the Hajj, in two white cloths, one wound around his loins and the other hooped negligently across his chest, General Raza Hyder was forced to entertain the possibility that the fossilized divine had finally succumbed to the tide of senility which had begun washing over him during their flight into the north. At first he tried to deal kindly with his old ally. ‘Maulanaji,’ he said, ‘if you want to perform the pilgrimage you just have to say the word, I’ll fix everything, plane tickets to Arabia and all,’ but Dawood only replied, ‘Why do I need aircraft when I am already walking upon this sacred ground?’ After that the Maulana took to tottering around town with his hands opened before him like a book, intoning verses from the Quran in an Arabic which the loss of his reason led him to adulterate with other, coarser dialects; and in the grip of that senility which made him imagine that he saw the peaks of faraway Abu Qubais, Thabir and Hira behind the town, and which led him to mistake a bicycle factory for the cemetery in which the Prophet’s wife lay buried, he began to abuse the townspeople for their irreligious blasphemies, because of course the men were improperly attired and the women were a disgrace, they laughed in his face when he called them whores. He was a mad old man asking the way to the Kaaba, a beardy fool in his second childhood who prostrated himself outside fish-shops as if they were the holy places of Mecca and yelled ‘Ya Allah!’ In the end his body was brought back to the Hyder residence on a donkey-cart, whose puzzled owner said that the old fellow had expired with the words, ‘There it is! – And they are covering it with shit.’ He had wandered to the edge of the old town to the place where the new water purification tanks had recently been filled with activated sludge, and Raza Hyder tried hard to pretend that this was the obvious, banal reason for the Maulana’s last words; but in reality he was profoundly disturbed, because being a religious man he had never found himself capable of dismissing Maulana Dawood’s antics as mere senilities; the gatta bruise on Raza’s forehead ached and suggested to him that perhaps the old Maulana really had seen a vision of Mecca, a revelation of holiness in the midst of this unholy town, so that his dying words might contain an awful, cryptic warning. ‘The Kaaba,’ Raza’s own voice whispered tremulously in his ear, ‘it must have been, he must have seen it at last, and they were pouring excrement on it.’ Later, when he was President, he would be unable to get this vision out of his mind.
At the end of the first year of civilian rule, General Raza Hyder became a grandfather. Good News gave birth to fine, healthy
twin sons, and the General was so delighted that he forgot all about Sindbad Mengal. Exactly one year later Good News became a mother again; this time she produced triplets. Raza Hyder was a little alarmed and joked nervously to Talvar Ulhaq: ‘You said you would be the perfect son-in-law, but, baba, five grandsons is enough, maybe you are overdoing your duty.’ Precisely twelve months later Good News brought forth a beautiful quartet of baby girls, whom Hyder loved so much that he decided not to express his concern about the growing numbers of cradles and comforters and washing-lines and rattles clogging up the house. Five more granddaughters turned up one year later to the day, and now Hyder had to say something. ‘Fourteen kids with the same birthday,’ he told the couple as sternly as he could manage, ‘what do you think you’re up to? Haven’t you heard of the population problem? You should take, perhaps, certain steps, but at that Talvar Ulhaq drew himself up until his whole body was as stiff as his neck and replied, ‘Sir, I never thought to hear you say such a thing. You are a devout man, I thought. Maulana Dawood’s ghost would blush if it heard General Hyder recommend such Godless procedures.’ So Hyder felt ashamed and shut his mouth, and in the fifth year Good News’s womb released six more new lives, three male, three female, because Talvar Ulhaq in the pride of his manhood had chosen to ignore Hyder’s remark about too-many-grandsons; and in the year of Iskander Harappa’s fall the number rose to twenty-seven children in all, and by that time everyone had lost count of how-many-boys-how-many-girls.
Begum Naveed Talvar, the former Good News Hyder, proved utterly incapable of coping with the endless stream of humanity flowing out between her thighs. But her husband was relentless, insatiable, his dream of children had expanded to fill up the place in his life previously occupied by polo, and owing to his clairvoyant talents he always knew which nights were best for conception. He came to her once a year and ordered her to get ready, because it was time to plant the seed, until she felt like a vegetable patch whose naturally fertile soil was being worn out by an over-zealous gardener, and understood that there was no hope for women in the world, because whether you were respectable or not the men got you anyway, no matter how hard you tried to be the most proper of ladies the men would come and stuff you full of alien unwanted life. Her old personality was getting squashed by the presence of the children who were so numerous that she forgot their names, she hired an army of ayahs and abandoned her offspring to their fate, and then she gave up trying. No more attempts to sit on her hair: the absolute determination to be beautiful which had entranced first Haroun Harappa and then Captain Talvar faded from her features, and she stood revealed as the plain, unremarkable matron she had always really been. Arjumand Harappa, whose hatred of Good News had not been diminished by the years, kept herself informed of her enemy’s decline. A photographer who had once taken pictures of Pinkie Aurangzeb was employed to snatch images of Good News; Arjumand showed these slides to Haroun Harappa, carelessly, as if they didn’t matter. ‘Poor old bachelor boy,’ she taunted him, ‘to think you could have spent your whole life with this gorgeous floozy if she hadn’t found somebody better.’
The Loo does not blow in the north, but still, on some afternoons, Bilquìs would hold the furniture down to stop it blowing away. She roamed the corridors of her new, palatial home mumbling inaudibly under her breath, until one day she raised her voice loud enough for Raza Hyder to hear. ‘How does a rocket rise to the stars?’ she asked vaguely, because she was really still talking to herself. ‘It is never easy to leave the earth. As the machine rises up, it loses parts of itself, they drop off and fall back, until finally the nose, only the nose gets free of the pull of the land.’ Raza Hyder frowned and said, ‘God knows what you’re rambling on about, woman,’ but in spite of this remark, and his subsequent suggestion to Omar Khayyam that Bilquìs’s mind had begun to wander like her feet, he knew what she had meant, which was that although he had risen, just as she had prophesied, to the very peak of his profession, people had been falling away from him as he rose; other human beings were the burned-out stages of his flight towards shoulder-stars. Dawood, Good News, Bilquìs herself: ‘Why should I feel ashamed?’ he asked himself. ‘I did nothing to them.’
Things had been chipping away at Bilquìs for years, firewinds and pennant-waving knights and murdered cinema managers and not having sons and losing her husband’s love and brain-fever and turkeys and erratum slips, but the worst thing of all was to be there, in that palace, that queenly residence of which she had always dreamed, and to discover that that wasn’t any good either, that nothing worked out, everything turned to ashes. Ruined by the hollowness of her glory, she was finally broken by the decline of her favourite Good News, who lay suffocating beneath the soft avalanche of her children and would not be comforted … one morning they all saw Bilquìs putting on a black burqa, taking the veil or purdah, even though she was indoors and only family members and servants were present. Raza Hyder asked her what she thought she was doing, but she just shrugged and replied, ‘It was getting too hot, so I wanted to draw the curtains,’ because by now she was scarcely capable of speaking except in metaphors. Her mumbles were full of curtains and oceans and rockets, and soon everybody got used to it, and to that veil of her solipsism, because everyone had their own problems. Bilquìs Hyder became, in those years, almost invisible, a shadow hunting the corridors for something it had lost, the body, perhaps, from which it had come unstuck. Raza Hyder made sure she stayed indoors … and the house ran itself, there were servants for everything, and the mistress of the C-in-C’s residence became less than a character, a mirage, almost, a mumble in the corners of the palace, a rumour in a veil.
Rani Harappa telephoned occasionally. Bilquìs would sometimes come to the phone, sometimes not; when she did she spoke so quietly and in such slurred accents that Rani found it hard to understand what was being said, discerning only a deep bitterness, as if Bilquìs had begun to resent her friend, as if Hyder’s almost discarded wife still had enough pride to dislike the way Iskander had picked up her husband and made him great. ‘Your husband, Rani,’ she once said, loud and clear, ‘he’ll never be happy until Raza lies down and licks his boots.’
General Hyder would remember to his dying day the time he had visited Iskander Harappa to discuss the defence budget and been slapped across the face for his pains. ‘Expenditure is falling below acceptable levels, Isky,’ he informed the Prime Minister, and to his astonishment Harappa banged on his desk so fiercely that the Mont Blanc pens jumped in their holders and the shadows in the corners hissed with alarm. ‘Acceptable to whom?’ Iskander Harappa shouted. ‘The Army does not say what goes, mister. No longer. Get that out of your head. If we allot you fifty paisa a year, then that is what you must make do with. Get that straight and get out.’
‘Iskander,’ Raza said without raising his voice, ‘don’t forget your friends.’
‘A man in my position has no friends,’ Harappa replied. ‘There are only temporary alliances based on mutual self-interest.’
‘Then you have ceased to be a human being,’ Raza told him, and added thoughtfully: ‘A man who believes in God must also believe in men.’ Iskander Harappa flew into an even more terrifying rage. ‘Look out, General,’ he shrieked, ‘because I can put you back in that dustbin where I found you.’ He had rushed out from behind his desk and was screaming right into Raza’s face, depositing spittle on the General’s cheeks. ‘God forgive you, Isky,’ Raza murmured, ‘you have forgotten that we are not your servants.’ It was at this point that Iskander Harappa struck him on a spittle-moistened cheek. He did not strike back, but remarked softly, ‘The blushes caused by such blows do not easily fade.’ Years later, Rani Harappa would prove his point, by immortalizing such blushes on a shawl.
And in those later years, when Iskander Harappa was safely under the ground and his tough-as-nails daughter was locked away with her mother, Raza Hyder would find himself dreaming about that slap, and about all those years in which Isky Harappa had treated him like dirt. And Arjum
and had been even worse, she had stared at him with such open hatred that he believed her capable of anything. Once Isky sent her, in his place, to the annual Army parade, just to humiliate the soldiers by making them salute a woman, and a woman, what was more, who had no official status in the government; and Raza had made the mistake of mentioning his worries to the virgin Ironpants. ‘Maybe history has come between our houses,’ he said, ‘and things have gone wrong, but remember we aren’t strangers, Arjumand, we go back along way.’
‘I know,’ she said witheringly, ‘my mother is your cousin, I believe.’
And Sufiya Zinobia?
She was his wife but she was not his wife. In Karachi on his wedding night Omar Khayyam had been prevented by a contractual clause from taking his bride away; instead, he was shown to a room containing a single bed and no Sufiya Zinobia anywhere. Shahbanou the ayah ushered him in and then stood obstinately in the doorway, her muscles tense. ‘Doctor Sahib,’ she said finally, ‘you must tell me what are your intentions.’ The fierce solicitude for Sufiya Zinobia which had driven Shahbanou to commit so outrageous a breach of social law, of the master-servant relationship, also prevented Omar Khayyam from becoming angry. ‘Don’t worry,’ he soothed the ayah, ‘I know the girl is simple. I have no desire to impose my, to force myself upon, to demand my marital,’ whereupon Shahbanou nodded and said, ‘That’s O.K. for now, Sahib, but how long will you wait? Men are only men.’
‘I will wait until my wife is agreeable,’ Omar Khayyam replied angrily, ‘I am no junglee man.’ (But once – we remember – he had called himself a wolf-child.)
Shahbanou turned to go. ‘Remember, if you get impatient,’ she told him in a matter-of-fact voice, ‘that I am waiting to kill you if you try.’