Haroun, realizing that the interview was at an end, turned to go. Iskander Harappa called after him: ‘And if you’re interested in politics you better stop riding sea-turtles and start working for me.’
The transformation of Iskander Harappa into the most powerful new force on the political scene was by this time complete. He had set about engineering his rise with all the calculated brilliance of which Arjumand had always known him to be capable. Concentrating on the high-profile world of international affairs, he had written a series of articles analysing his country’s requirements from the great powers, the Islamic world and the rest of Asia, following these up with an arduous programme of speeches whose arguments proved impossible to resist. When his notion of ‘Islamic socialism’ and of a close alliance with China had gained such wide public support that he was effectively running the nation’s foreign policy without even being a member of the cabinet, President A. had had no option but to invite him into the government. His enormous personal charm, his way of making the plain, bolster-chested wives of visiting world leaders feel like Greta Garbo and his oratorical genius made him an instant hit. ‘The thing that satisfies me most,’ he told his daughter, ‘is that now we’ve given the go-ahead to the Karakoram road to China, I can have fun kicking around the minister for public works.’ The works minister was Little Mir Harappa, his old friendship with the President having failed to outweigh Iskander’s public appeal. ‘That bastard,’ Iskander said to Arjumand with glee, ‘is finally under my thumb.’
When the A. regime started losing popularity, Iskander Harappa resigned and formed the Popular Front, the political party which he funded out of his bottomless wealth and whose first Chairman he became. ‘For an ex-foreign minister,’ Little Mir told the President sourly, ‘your protégé seems to be concentrating pretty heavily on the home front.’ The President shrugged. ‘He knows what he’s doing,’ said Field-Marshal A., ‘unfortunately.’
Rumours of the government’s corruption provided the fuel; but Isky’s campaign for a return to democracy was perhaps unstoppable anyway. He toured the villages and promised every peasant one acre of land and a new water-well. He was put in jail; huge demonstrations secured his release. He screamed in regional dialects about the rape of the country by fat cats and tilyars, and such was the power of his tongue, or perhaps of the sartorial talents of Monsieur Cardin, that nobody seemed to recall Isky’s own status as a landlord of a distinctly obese chunk of Sind … Iskander Harappa offered Haroun political work in his home district. ‘You have anti-corruption credentials,’ he told the youth. ‘Tell them about the Newsweek article.’ Haroun Harappa, offered the golden opportunity of running down his father on their home turf, took the job at once.
‘Well, Abba,’ he thought happily, ‘life is long.’
Two days after Haroun lectured an egg-laying turtle about revolution, Rani Harappa at Mohenjo was telephoned by a male voice so muted, so crippled by apologies and embarrassment that it was a few moments before she recognized it as belonging to Little Mir, with whom she had had no contact since his looting of her home, although his son Haroun had been a regular visitor. ‘God damn it, Rani,’ Little Mir finally admitted through the spittle-heavy clouds of his humiliation, ‘I need a favour.’
Rani Harappa at forty had defeated Iskander’s formidable ayah by the simple method of outliving her. The days of irreverently giggling village girls rummaging through her underwear were long past; she had become the true mistress of Mohenjo by dint of the unassailable calm with which she embroidered shawl after shawl on the verandah of the house, persuading the villagers that she was composing the tapestry of their fate, and that if she wished to she could foul up their lives by choosing to sew a bad future into the magical shawls. Having earned respect, Rani was strangely content with her life, and maintained cordial relations with her husband in spite of his long absences from her side and his permanent absence from her bed. She knew all about the end of the Pinkie affair and knew in the secret chambers of her heart that a man embarking on a political career must sooner or later ask his wife to stand beside him on the podium; secure in a future which would bring her Isky without her having to do a thing, she discovered without surprise that her love for him had refused to die, but had become, instead, a thing of quietness and strength. This was a great difference between her and Bilquìs Hyder: both women had husbands who retreated from them into the enigmatic palaces of their destinies, but while Bilquìs sank into eccentricity, not to say craziness, Rani had subsided into a sanity which made her a powerful, and later on a dangerous, human being.
When Little Mir rang, Rani had been looking towards the village where the white concubines were playing badminton in the twilight. In those days many of the villagers had gone West to work for a while, and those who returned had brought with them white women for whom the prospect of life in a village as a number-two wife seemed to hold an inexhaustibly erotic appeal. The number-one wives treated these white girls as dolls or pets and those husbands who failed to bring home a guddi, a white doll, were soundly berated by their women. The village of the white dolls had become famous in the region. Villagers came from miles around to watch the girls in their neat, clean whites giggling and squealing as they leapt for shuttlecocks and displayed their frilly panties. The number-one wives cheered for their number-twos, taking pride in their victories as in the successes of children, and offering them consolation in defeat. Rani Harappa was deriving such gentle pleasure from observing the dolls at play that she forgot to listen to what Mir was saying. ‘Fuck me in the mouth, Rani,’ he shouted at last with the fury of his suppressed pride, ‘forget our differences. This business is too important. I need a wife, most urgently.’
‘I see.’
‘Ya Allah. Rani, don’t be difficult, for God’s sake. Not for me, what do you think, would I ask? For Haroun. It’s the only way.’
The desperation with which Little Mir stammered out the need for a good woman to stabilize his wayward son overcame any initial reluctance Rani might have felt, and she said at once, ‘Good News.’ ‘Already?’ Little Mir asked, misunderstanding her. ‘You women don’t waste any time!’
How a marriage is made: Rani suggested Naveed Hyder, thinking that a wedding in the family would do Bilquìs good. By that time the telephone link between the two women was no longer a means by which Rani found out what was going on in the city, no longer an excuse for Bilquìs to gossip and condescend while Rani humbly snatched from her friend’s conversation whatever crumbs of life it offered. Now it was Rani who was strong, and Bilquìs, her old regal dreams in ruins since Raza’s sacking from the government, who needed support, and who found in the unchanging solidity of Rani Harappa the strength to sustain her through her increasingly bewildered days. ‘Just what she needs,’ Rani thought with satisfaction, ‘trousseau, marquees, sweetmeats, too much to think about. And that daughter of hers can’t wait to get hitched.’
Little Mir consulted the President before agreeing to the match. The Hyder family had become accident-prone of late: the old rumours from Q. still circulated, and it had not been easy to keep the incident of the dead turkeys out of the papers. But now, in the mountainous coolness of the new northern capital, the President had begun to feel the chilly winds of his unpopularity, and agreed to the marriage, because, he decided, it was time to draw the hero of Aansu close to him again, like a warm blanket or shawl. ‘No problem,’ A. told Little Mir, ‘my congrats to the happy pair.’
Mir Harappa visited Rani at Mohenjo to discuss the details. He rode up stiff with embarrassment and behaved with bad-tempered humility throughout. ‘What a father will do for a son!’ he burst out at Rani as she sat on the verandah working on the interminable shawl of her solitude. ‘When my boy is a daddy himself he will know how a daddy feels. I hope this Good News of yours is a fertile girl.’
‘Proper sowing ensures a good harvest,’ Rani replied serenely. ‘Please take some tea.’
Raza Hyder did not object to the betrothal. In thos
e years when his only responsibility was to oversee the intake and training of raw recruits, when the fact of his decline stared him in the face every day, multiplied, replicated in the gawky figures of youths who didn’t know which end of a bayonet meant business, he had been observing the rise of Iskander Harappa with barely suppressed envy. The time will come,’ he prophesied to himself, ‘when I’ll have to go begging that guy for an extra pip.’ In the turbulent climate of the government’s instability Raza Hyder had been wondering which way to jump, whether to come out in support of the Popular Front’s demand for elections, or to put what remained of his reputation behind the government in the hope of preferment. The offer of Haroun Harappa for a son-in-law gave him the chance of having it both ways. The match would please the President: that much had been made clear. But Raza also knew of Haroun’s hatred for his father, which had placed the boy firmly in Isky Harappa’s pocket. ‘A foot in both camps,’ Raza thought, ‘that’s the ticket.’
And it is possible that Raza was delighted to be able to get rid of Good News, because she had developed, as she grew, something of the full-mouthed insouciance of the late Sindbad Mengal. Haroun’s mouth was also thick and wide, a part of his family inheritance. ‘Two fat-lip types,’ Raza Hyder told his wife in tones more jovial than he normally used when addressing her, ‘made for each other, na? The babies will look like fishes.’ Bilquìs said, ‘Never mind.’
How a marriage is made: I see that I have somehow omitted to mention the views of the young persons concerned. Photographs were exchanged. Haroun Harappa took his brown envelope to his uncle’s house and opened it in the presence of Iskander and Arjumand: there are times when young men turn to their families for support. The monochrome photograph had been artistically retouched to give Good News skin as pink as blotting-paper and eyes as green as ink.
‘You can see how he’s made her pigtail longer,’ Arjumand pointed out.
‘Let the boy make up his own mind,’ Iskander reproved her, but Arjumand at twenty had conceived a strange dislike of the picture. ‘Plain as a plate,’ she announced, ‘and not so fair-skinned as all that.’
‘It’s got to be somebody,’ Haroun stated, ‘and there’s nothing wrong with her.’ Arjumand cried, ‘How can you just say that? Got eyes in your head or ping-pong balls?’ At this point Iskander ordered his daughter to be quiet and told the bearer to bring sweetmeats and celebratory glasses of lime juice. Haroun went on staring at that photograph of Naveed Hyder, and because nothing, not even the paintbrush of a zealous photographer, could mask Good News’s unquenchable determination to be beautiful, her fiancé was quickly overpowered by the iron will of her celluloid eyes, and began to think her the loveliest bride on earth. This illusion, which was entirely the product of Good News’s imagination, entirely the result of the action of mind over matter, would survive everything, even the wedding scandal; but it would not survive Iskander Harappa’s death.
‘What a girl,’ said Haroun Harappa, driving Arjumand from the room in disgust.
As for Good News: ‘I don’t need to look at any stupid photograph,’ she told Bilquìs, ‘he’s famous, he’s rich, he’s a husband, let’s catch him quick.’ ‘His reputation is bad,’ Bilquìs said, as a mother should, offering her daughter the chance to withdraw, ‘and he is bad to his daddy.’
‘I’ll fix him,’ Good News replied.
Later, alone with Shahbanou as the ayah brushed her hair, Good News added some further thoughts. ‘Hey, you with the eyes at the bottom of a well,’ she said, ‘you know what marriage is for a woman?’
‘I am a virgin,’ Shahbanou replied.
‘Marriage is power,’ Naveed Hyder said. ‘It is freedom. You stop being someone’s daughter and become someone’s mother instead, ek dum, fut-a-fut, pronto. Then who can tell you what to do? – What do you mean,’ a terrible notion occurred to her, ‘do you think I’m not a virgin also? You shut your dirtyfilthy mouth, with one word I could put you on the street.’
‘What are you talking, bibi, I only said.’
‘I tell you, how great to be away from this house. Haroun Harappa, I swear. Too good, yaar. Too good.’
‘We are modern people,’ Bilquìs told her daughter. ‘Now that you have accepted you must get to know the boy. It will be a love match.’
Miss Arjumand Harappa, the ‘virgin Ironpants’, had rejected so many suitors that although she was barely twenty years old the city’s matchmakers had already begun to think of her as being on the shelf. The flood of proposals was not entirely, or even primarily, the result of her extreme eligibility as the only child of Chairman Iskander Harappa; it had its true source in that extraordinary, defiant beauty with which, or so it seemed to her, her body taunted her mind. I must say that of all the beautiful women in that country packed full of improbable lovelies, there is no doubt who took the prize. In spite of bound and still-apple-sized breasts, Arjumand carried off the palm.
Loathing her sex, Arjumand went to great lengths to disguise her looks. She cut her hair short, wore no cosmetics or perfume, dressed in her father’s old shirts and the baggiest trousers she could find, developed a stooped and slouching walk. But the harder she tried, the more insistently her blossoming body outshone her disguises. The short hair was luminous, the unadorned face learned expressions of infinite sensuality which she could do nothing to control, and the more she stooped, the taller and more desirable she grew. By the age of sixteen she had been obliged to become expert in the arts of self-defence. Iskander Harappa had never tried to keep her away from men. She accompanied him on his diplomatic rounds, and at many embassy receptions elderly ambassadors were found clutching their groins and throwing up in the toilet after their groping hands had been answered by a well-aimed knee. By her eighteenth birthday the throng of the city’s most coveted bachelors outside the gate of the Harappa house had become so swollen as to constitute an impediment to traffic, and at her own request she was sent away to Lahore to a Christian boarding college for ladies, whose anti-male rules were so severe that even her father could see her only by appointment in a tattered garden of dying roses and balding lawns. But she found no respite in that prison populated exclusively by females, all of whom she scorned for their gender; the girls fell for her just as hard as the men, and final-year students would clutch at her behind when she passed. One lovelorn nineteen-year-old, despairing of catching Ironpants’s eye, pretended to sleepwalk into the empty swimming pool and was removed to hospital with multiple fractures of the skull. Another, crazed by love, climbed out of the college compound and went to sit at a café in the famous red-light district of Heeramandi, having decided to become a whore if she could not have Arjumand’s heart. This distressed girl was abducted from the café by the local pimps, who forced her father, a textile magnate, to pay a ransom of one lakh of rupees for her safe return. She never married, because although the pimps insisted that they had their honour, too, nobody believed she had not been touched, and after a medical inspection the college’s devoutly Catholic headmistress absolutely refused to concede that the wretch might have been deflowered upon her antiseptic premises. Arjumand Harappa wrote to her father and asked him to take her away from the college. ‘It’s no relief,’ the letter said. ‘I should have known girls would be worse than boys.’
The return from London of Haroun Harappa unleashed a civil war inside the virgin Ironpants. His remarkable physical resemblance to photographs of her father at twenty-six unnerved Arjumand, and his fondness for whoring, gambling and other forms of debauchery convinced her that reincarnation was not simply a crazy notion imported by the Hyders from the country of the idolaters. She attempted to suppress the idea that beneath Haroun’s dissolute exterior a second great man, almost the equal of her father, lay concealed, and that, with her help, he could discover his true nature, just as the Chairman had … refusing even to whisper such things to herself in the privacy of her room, she cultivated in Haroun’s presence that attitude of scornful condescension which quickly persuaded him that ther
e was no point in his trying where so many others had failed. He was not insensible to her fatal beauty, but the reputation of the virgin Ironpants, when combined with that terrible and uninterruptedly disgusted gaze, was enough to send him elsewhere; and then the photograph of Naveed Hyder bewitched him, and it was too late for Arjumand to change her approach. Haroun Harappa was the only man, other than her father, whom Arjumand ever loved, and her rage in the days after his betrothal was awful to behold. But Iskander was preoccupied in those days, and failed to pay any attention to the war inside his child.
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