‘Sorry, Raza,’ Iskander whispered, ‘only trying to help.’
The moment the conference was over and the mothers had been pulled apart Raza rushed back to his other home, where he could relax, because there Maulana Dawood’s voice in his right ear was louder than Isky’s in his left. He learned to concentrate all his attention on his right side, and as a result it became possible to live with the ghost of Iskander Harappa, even though Isky kept trying to make his points.
In the fifteenth century General Raza Hyder became President of his country, and everything began to change. The effect of the ceaseless monologue of Iskander Harappa was to drive Raza into the ectoplasmic arms of his old crony Maulana Dawood. Around whose neck had once been placed, by mistake, a certain necklace of shoes. Raza Hyder with his gatta bruise was, you recall, the type of mohajir who had arrived with God in every pocket, and the more Iskander whispered the more Raza felt that God was his only hope. So when Dawood whined, ‘Here in holy Mecca much evil can be seen; the sacred places must be cleansed, that is your first and only duty,’ Hyder paid attention, even though it was clear that death had not managed to disabuse the divine of the notion that they had come to the holy heart of the faith, Mecca Sharif, the city of the great Black Stone.
What Raza did: he banned booze. He closed down the famous old beer brewery at Bagheera so that Panther Lager became a fond memory instead of a refreshing drink. He altered the television schedules so drastically that people began summoning repair men to fix their sets, because they could not understand why the TVs were suddenly refusing to show them anything except theological lectures, and they wondered how these mullahs had got stuck inside the screen. On the Prophet’s birthday Raza arranged for every mosque in the country to sound a siren at nine a.m. and anybody who forgot to stop and pray when he heard the howling was instantly carted off to jail. The beggars of the capital and also of all the other cities remembered that the Quran obliged the faithful to give alms, so they took advantage of the arrival of God in the Presidential office to stage a series of enormous marches demanding the establishment by law of a minimum donation of five rupees. They had underestimated God, however; in the first year of his rule Raza Hyder incarcerated one hundred thousand beggars and, while he was at it, a further twenty-five hundred members of the now-illegal Popular Front, who were not much better than mendicants, after all. He announced that God and socialism were incompatible, so that the doctrine of Islamic Socialism on which the Popular Front had based its appeal was the worst kind of blasphemy imaginable. ‘Iskander Harappa never believed in God,’ he declared publicly, ‘so he was destroying the country while pretending to hold it together.’ The incompatibility doctrine made Raza very popular with the Americans, who were of the same opinion, even though the God concerned was different.
‘ “Of those who have attained the position of prince by villainy,” ’ Iskander’s voice whispered in his ear, ‘Il Principe, chapter eight. You ought to read it; it’s very short,’ but by this time Raza had worked out how to ignore his sinister or left-sided dead angel. He blotted out Isky’s mischief-making, and instead of noting the historical precedents offered by the histories of Agathocles the Sicilian and Oliverotto da Fermo he listened to Maulana Dawood. Iskander refused to give up, claiming that his motives were selfless, trying to remind Raza of the difference between well and badly committed cruelties, and of the need for cruelties to diminish with time, and for benefits to be granted little by little, so that they might be better enjoyed. But by now Dawood’s ghost was in its stride; it had gained in confidence, on account of its preferential treatment by the President, and ordered Raza to ban movies, or at least imported ones for a start; it objected to unveiled women walking the streets; it demanded firm measures and an iron hand. It is a matter of record that in those days religious students started carrying guns and occasionally taking pot-shots at insufficiently devout professors; that men would spit at women in the street if they went about their business with their midriffs showing; and that a person could be strangled for smoking a cigarette during the month of fasting. The legal system was dismantled, because the lawyers had demonstrated the fundamentally profane nature of their profession by objecting to divers activities of the state; it was replaced by religious courts presided over by divines whom Raza appointed on the sentimental grounds that their beards reminded him of his deceased adviser. God was in charge, and just in case anybody doubted it He gave little demonstrations of His power: he made various anti-faith elements vanish like slum children. Yes, the bastards were just rubbed out by the Almighty, they vanished, poof, like so.
Raza Hyder was a busy man in those years, with little time for what remained of his family life. He ignored his twenty-seven grandchildren, leaving them to their father and ayahs; but his devotion to the concept of family was well-known, he made much of it, and that was why he saw Bilquìs regularly, once a week. He had her brought to the television studios in time for his broadcast to the nation. This always began with a prayer session, during which Raza knelt in the foreground renewing his bruise, while behind him Bilquìs prayed too, like a good wife, in soft focus and veiled from head to foot. He would sit with her for a few moments before they went on air, and he noticed that she always brought some sewing along. Bilquìs was not Rani; she embroidered no shawls. Her activities were both simpler and more mysterious, consisting of sewing large expanses of black cloth into shapes that were impossible to decipher. For a long time the awkwardness between them prevented Raza from asking her what the hell she was up to, but in the end his curiosity got the better of him, and when he was sure nobody else was within earshot the President asked his wife: ‘So what is all this stitching? What are you making in such a hurry that you can’t wait till you get back home?’
‘Shrouds,’ she answered seriously, and he felt a chill on his spine.
Two years after the death of Iskander Harappa the women of the country began marching against God. These processions were tricky things, Raza decided, they needed careful handling. So he trod cautiously, even though Maulana Dawood screamed in his ear that he was a weakling, he should strip the whores naked and hang them from all available trees. But Raza was circumspect; he told the police to avoid hitting the ladies on the breasts when they broke up the demonstrations. And finally God rewarded his virtuous restraint. His investigators learned that the marches were being organized by a certain Noor Begum, who was going into the tenements and villages and whipping up anti-religious feelings. Still Raza was reluctant to ask God to make the bitch disappear, because you can’t ask the Almighty to do everything, after all; so he felt profoundly justified when he was given evidence that his Noor Begum was a notorious character with a history of exporting women and children to the harems of Arab princes. Only now did he send his men off to seize her, because nobody could object to such an arrest, and even Iskander Harappa complimented him: ‘You’re a quick learner, Raza, maybe we all underestimated your skills.’
This was Raza Hyder’s motto: ‘Stability, in the name of God.’ And after the Noor Begum business he added a second maxim to the first: ‘God helps those who help themselves.’ To achieve stability-in-God’s-name he placed Army officers on the board of every major industrial enterprise in the country; he put Generals everywhere, so that the Army got its fingers deeper into things than it had ever done before. Raza knew his policy had succeeded when Generals Raddi, Bekar and Phisaddi, the youngest and ablest members of his general staff, came to him with hard and fast evidence that General Salman Tughlak, in cahoots with Police Chief Talvar Ulhaq, Raza Hyder’s son-in-law, and Colonel Shuja, his long-time ADC, was planning a coup. ‘Stupid fools,’ Raza Hyder murmured, regretfully. ‘Whisky addicts, you see? They want their chota pegs and so they are ready to unmake everything we have achieved.’ He put on a lachrymose expression as tragic as any of Shuja’s; but he was secretly delighted, because he had always been embarrassed by the memory of his inept nocturnal telephone call to General Tughlak; and he had been trying to find
a reason for disposing of his ADC ever since the business in the death-cell at the District Jail; and Talvar Ulhaq had ceased to be trustworthy years ago. ‘A man who will turn against one boss,’ Raza said to young Raddi, Bekar and Phisaddi, ‘will turn against two,’ but what he really meant was that the clairvoyancy of Talvar scared him stiff, and anyway the fellow knew all about Sufiya Zinobia, and that meant he knew too much … Raza clapped the young Generals on their backs and said, ‘Well, well, now it is all in the lap of God,’ and by the next morning the three conspirators had vanished without even leaving behind the tiniest little puffs of smoke. The twenty-seven orphans of Talvar Ulhaq filled the C-in-C’s residence with a curious harmonized scream, all of them shrieking at exactly the same pitch and pausing for breath at the same time, so that everyone had to wear ear-plugs for forty days; then they realized that their father wasn’t going to return, and shut up completely, so that their grandfather never noticed them again until the last night of his reign.
The loyalty of his junior Generals showed Raza Hyder that the Army was having too good a time to wish to rock the boat. ‘A stable situation,’ he congratulated himself, ‘everything tickety-boo.’
It was at this point that his daughter Sufiya Zinobia re-entered his life.
May I interpose a few words here on the subject of the Islamic revival? It won’t take long.
Pakistan is not Iran. This may sound like a strange thing to say about the country which was, until Khomeini, one of the only two theocracies on earth (Israel being the other one), but it’s my opinion that Pakistan has never been a mullah-dominated society. The religious extremists of the Jamaat party have their supporters among college students and so forth, but relatively few people have ever voted Jamaat in an election. Jinnah himself, the Founder or Quaid-i-Azam, doesn’t strike me as a particularly God-bothered type. Islam and the Muslim State were, for him, political and cultural ideas; the theology was not the point.
What I am saying will probably be anathematized by the present regime in that hapless country. Too bad. My point is that Islam might well have proved an effective unifying force in post-Bangladesh Pakistan, if people hadn’t tried to make it into such an almighty big deal. Maybe Sindhis, Baluchis, Punjabis and Pathans, not to mention the immigrants, would have sunk their differences for the sake of their common faith.
Few mythologies survive close examination, however. And they can become very unpopular indeed if they’re rammed down people’s throats.
What happens if one is force-fed such outsize, indigestible meals? – One gets sick. One rejects their nourishment. Reader: one pukes.
So-called Islamic ‘fundamentalism’ does not spring, in Pakistan, from the people. It is imposed on them from above. Autocratic regimes find it useful to espouse the rhetoric of faith, because people respect that language, are reluctant to oppose it. This is how religions shore up dictators; by encircling them with words of power, words which the people are reluctant to see discredited, disenfranchised, mocked.
But the ramming-down-the-throat point stands. In the end you get sick of it, you lose faith in the faith, if not qua faith then certainly as the basis for a state. And then the dictator falls, and it is discovered that he has brought God down with him, that the justifying myth of the nation has been unmade. This leaves only two options: disintegration, or a new dictatorship … no, there is a third, and I shall not be so pessimistic as to deny its possibility. The third option is the substitution of a new myth for the old one. Here are three such myths, all available from stock at short notice: liberty; equality; fraternity.
I recommend them highly.
Afterwards, during his terror-stricken flight from the capital, Raza Hyder would remember the story of the white panther that had been in circulation at the time of Iskander Harappa’s arrest, and would shudder with recognition and fear. The rumour had died down quickly enough, because nobody ever reported an actual sighting of the fabulous animal, except for one rather unreliable village boy named Ghaffar, and his description had been so cock-eyed that people had decided that the panther had sprung from inside Ghaffar’s notoriously untruthful head. The improbable beast of the boy’s imagination had been, he said, ‘not white all over, it had a black head and no hair anywhere else, like it had gone bald; also, it walked funnily.’ The newspapers had reported this statement jokily, knowing that their readers had a tolerant fondness for monster stories; but General Hyder, recalling the affair, was seized by the fearful notion that the white panther of Bagheeragali had been a proleptic miracle, a minatory prophecy, Time’s ghost, the future stalking the forests of the past. ‘He saw her all right,’ Raza bitterly thought, ‘and nobody believed.’
She reappeared in this way:
One morning Omar Khayyam Shakil was sitting looking out of the attic window as usual when Asgari the sweeperwoman, who had been driven wild by this habit of his, which obliged her to come up and sweep the floors of that forgotten room, and also by his absent-minded way of dropping pine-kernel shells on the floor while she worked, muttered under her toothless old woman’s breath which smelled strongly of the disinfectant fineel: ‘That beast should come here and finish off all inconsiderate persons who won’t let an honest woman finish her job.’ The word ‘beast’ penetrated the mists of Omar Khayyam’s reverie, and he alarmed the old lady by demanding loudly, ‘What is the meaning of that remark?’ Once she had been convinced that he wasn’t going to have her fired like Shahbanou, that he did not think of her harmless sourness as a curse, she relaxed and scolded him, in the manner of old retainers, for taking things too seriously. ‘Those stories have started up again, that’s all,’ she said, ‘idle tongues need exercise. No need for the big sahib to get so hot.’
For the rest of that day Omar Khayyam was buffeted by an inner storm whose cause he did not dare to name, even to himself, but at night during his forty-odd winks a dream of Sufiya Zinobia came to him. She was on all fours and stripped as naked as her mother had been by the legendary firewind of her youth – no, more so, because there was nothing clinging to her shoulders, no dupatta of modesty-and-shame. He woke up, but the dream refused to leave him. It hung before his eyes, that spectre of his wife in the wilderness, hunting human and animal prey.
In the following weeks he threw off the lethargy of his more-than-sixty years. In spite of bad feet he became a familiar, eccentric figure at the bus depot, where he would limp up to fearsome Frontier types and offer them money in return for certain information. He hung around the halal slaughterhouses, leaning on his cane, on the days when the peasants brought animals in from the outlying districts. He frequented bazaars and ramshackle cafés, an incongruous figure in a grey suit, supported by a swordstick, asking questions, listening, listening.
Slowly it became clear to him that the stories of the white panther were indeed being told again; but what was remarkable was that they had begun to come from all over the country, in the bus-top bundles of gas-field workers returning from Needle and in the cartridge belts of rifle-toting tribesmen from the north. It was a large country, even without its East Wing, a land of wildernesses and marshy deltas studded with mangrove trees and mountain fastnesses and voids; and from every out-of-the-way corner of the nation, it seemed, the tale of the panther was travelling to the capital. Black head, pale hairless body, awkward gait. Ghaffar’s derided description was repeated to Omar Khayyam, over and over again, by illiterate voyagers, all of whom believed the rumour to be unique to their own part of the world. He did not disabuse them of this belief.
Murders of animals and men, villages raided in the dark, dead children, slaughtered flocks, blood-curdling howls: it was the time-honoured man-eater scare, but with a new and terrifying twist: ‘What animal’, a six-foot Frontiersman asked Omar Khayyam with the innocent awe of a child, ‘can tear a man’s head off his shoulders and drag his insides out through the hole to eat?’
He heard of villages that had formed vigilante groups, of mountain tribals who had placed all-night sentries on the lookou
t. Tales of sightings were accompanied by boastful claims of having winged the monster, or even less credible yarns, you’ll never believe it, sahib, I hit it right between the eyes with a shikar rifle, but the thing is a demon, it just turned round and vanished into the air, you can’t kill such creatures, God protect us … so it appeared that the white panther was already being mythologized. There were those who said it could fly, or dematerialize, or grow until it was bigger than a tree.
She grew, too, in the imagination of Omar Khayyam Shakil. For a long time he told nobody about his suspicions, but they swarmed round his sleepless nocturnal form, they surrounded the armchair of his pine-kernel-shelling days. He imagined her, it, the Beast, choosing in the craftiness of its spirit to distance itself from cities, knowing, perhaps, that in spite of its, her, colossal strength she was vulnerable, that in cities there were bullets, gases, tanks. And how fast she had become, how much ground she covered, spreading herself so widely across the peripheries of the land that years had passed before her various legends had been able to encounter one another, to be united in his thoughts, forming the pattern which uncovered her night-obscured shape. ‘Sufiya Zinobia,’ he said to the open window, ‘I can see you now.’