by Tariq Ali
After greeting Jindié, I bowed politely to Confucius’s mother. Like her husband, Mrs Ma was dressed in an antique Chinese gown. Her hair was pinned up in a bun and her face showed a touch of lipstick and powder, but at the same time conveyed an impression of prudence and good sense.
I was so thunderstruck by Jindié that it took me some time to notice that the living room was lined with books, mainly Chinese editions, some of which were undoubtedly very old. Jindié was talking to Tipu, quite deliberately, I think, to punish me for the way I had looked at her. In fact, she ignored me for the rest of the evening, speaking mainly to Tipu and Zahid but occasionally glancing in my direction to see how I was occupying myself. I moved away to look closely at some beautiful ivory objects on the mantelpiece and then the silks that covered the walls, on which hung a plain white plate with blue Kufic calligraphy. Mr Ma sidled up to explain that it was a ninth-century piece made by potters in Yunnan, who produced such ware exclusively for the merchants in Basra, who brought it to Cordoba and Palermo. None of this meant much to me at the time. I smiled politely and asked about the books. He took one out. It looked exquisite, faded gold Chinese calligraphy on even more faded thick leather.
‘What is it, Mr Ma?’
‘The Han Kitab. You have heard of it?’
‘No. I’m sorry. China is a mystery. All we know about is the revolution.’
That annoyed him and he returned the book to its place. Confucius had observed the scene and came up to reassure me. I wasn’t bothered at all, but was becoming more and more enraged by the way his sister was flirting with Tipu.
The food, when it was served, was almost as divine as Jindié. The local Chinese restaurants were truly awful, catering to imagined local tastes. Pulp-food is always bad. This was the first time I had tasted proper Chinese food, and I complimented Mrs Ma on the quality of her cooking, the virtual opposite of our Punjabi cuisine. She explained that what we were consuming were Yunnanese delicacies, very different from what was served at banquets in Beijing. I asked if she had received any help from her daughter. The reply was an instantaneous no and a glare in Jindié’s direction. In a bid to attract the latter’s attention, I sympathized loudly, hoping to annoy her and failing miserably. She ignored the bait.
I did discover from her mother, however, that Jindié attended a women’s college. This was useful information, since the college in question was packed with seven or eight of my cousins as well as daughters of old family friends. It was presided over by a strict Indian-Christian spinster lady who took her job as principal far too seriously when it came to the social life of her students. To say she kept a watchful eye on her girls would be inaccurate. She had created a spy network of favourites who told her everything. Yes, everything, including the dreams that some of their fellow students recounted over breakfast. The college itself had been set up in 1920 by a prim Scotswoman called Rosamund Nairn and bore her surname. The girls at Nairn were considered to be almost as modern as their counterparts at Primrose in Karachi and Ambleside in Dhaka, and that was saying a great deal at the time.
Apart from my frustration over Jindié, the evening went well. Zahid and I both made sure we called our friend Hanif as often as we could—so often that he began to look annoyed. At this point Jindié addressed us collectively:
‘Is it true that you call him Confucius?’
The whole table erupted in laughter. It was only as we were all leaving and farewells were being said that she walked up to me.
‘It was really nice talking to you.’
‘But you didn’t.’
‘I know.’
Since my house was not too far from F.C. College, Zahid gave both me and Tipu a lift, dropping Tipu off first so the two of us could have a calm post-mortem. We stopped the car on the unfinished road outside my house. It was a wilderness then, with the only the mausoleum of a Sufi venerable lit in the distance with oil lamps.
I had liked Tipu instinctively and was determined that he should join our cell even if it meant biking six miles to where we were. He was obviously bright, and better read than all of us. Zahid disagreed and thought it would be better if Tipu were recruited to his local cell. But I wanted to keep an eye on him, in case Jindié really did want him and not me. I explained this to Zahid, who wasn’t surprised in the least.
‘I noticed your gaze’, said Zahid, ‘and so did she.’
‘Are you sure she did?’
‘How could she not, catamite? You were staring at her quite obviously. Everyone noticed. That’s why she ignored you the whole evening.’
There was little else to discuss, but we did so anyway for almost two hours. Then I went home and searched my father’s study for translations of Chinese literature and history. The shelves were packed with Europe and South Asia. Chinese civilization was represented by political and history books written by Americans and Europeans, and a few translations of Mao Zedong and Liu Shaoxi. There was a Foreign Languages Publishing House translation of Dream of the Red Chamber, but it was unreadable. Deeply frustrated, I went to bed.
Almost everything lost its importance for me except the memory of Jindié. In the two weeks before the colleges shut down I made desperate efforts to catch sight of her. Zahid had his own problems on this front, trying to see Anjum, the general’s daughter, but was as helpful as he could be, waiting with me outside Nairn to discover how Jindié went home. Many young women biked in those days, and I was hoping she was one of them, but we never saw her leave. I pestered one of the cousins I thought I could trust. She told the others and they would come to stare and giggle at Zahid and me, trying to shame us into leaving. But we had no self-esteem in these matters, and so forfeiting our dignity never posed a problem.
After an hour outside Nairn, we would move on to Gulberg, where the object of Zahid’s love went to a ladies’ college modelled on European finishing schools, where ‘home and social sciences’ were so mixed up that cooking counted as a home subject and interior decoration as a social science. Gulberg trained young women to be housewives. Vogue was the sacred magazine of this establishment, devoured eagerly by teacher and pupil. Zahid swore that Anjum was not empty-headed but had been forced to go there by her parents in order to prepare for marriage.
Zahid wanted the general’s daughter and she wanted him. Letters had been exchanged. They met for coffee in a tiny place run by a kindly old German lady and geared for trysts. It worked like this: Anjum and a girlfriend would be dropped off by the chauffeur; they would get a table. Zahid and I would arrive on his Vespa; we’d get another table. If we recognized anybody, we would maintain the pretence that we were there casually, and move off quickly, but this was rare. I had to entertain Anjum’s friend, who was very pretty and very stupid. She would giggle at the slightest provocation, and I got so fed up that I tried to teach her chess so we didn’t have to speak to each other. She was flattered and learned the moves, which enhanced her status at the finishing school: ‘My, my, you’ve become such an intellectual.’
Occasionally, vile scoundrels on a motorbike followed the girls and blackmailed them for petty cash, but this stopped when the German lady informed her husband, who turned out to be a senior police officer and put a cop on guard duty in that street. He was merely protecting his wife’s business interests, but the gesture was greatly appreciated by her customers.
Mercifully, all this came to an end when Anjum gently broke the news that she was to be engaged to an affected English-public-school-educated feudal idiot from Multan. Zahid’s features assumed a deathly pallor as he rose from her table and staggered over to mine. Speech eluded him for a moment and then in a choked voice he said, ‘Let’s go. Now.’
We left. The soul had been torn out of him. Too many hours were wasted discussing the rejection. The day after, he told me quite seriously that he was having great difficulty in resisting the temptation to blow out his brains. A week later, he was calmer and more reflective.
‘She had such a gentle nature, yaar,’ he would repeat
time and time again.
Perhaps that was the problem, I suggested. Her ‘gentle nature’ prevented her resisting parental pressures as others, we both knew, had done. His heart was sickened by the ease with which her parents had triumphed. I felt a sense of relief. No more playing chess with an aspiring fashion model. I can’t remember her name, but she was modelling two outfits, ‘Naughty Nymph’ and ‘Hello, Officer’, in the Intercontinental in Rawalpindi when the student insurrection against the military began in 1968. As for my friend, he took to wandering about town, full of emotions but avoiding every location that reminded him of her: It seemed as if the entire city had become a sea of bitterness for him. The memory of Anjum haunted him for a long time. The worst possible passion is the passion for a woman one has never possessed. He recovered slowly.
‘There are other sorrows in the world, Zahid,’ I said comfortingly, paraphrasing the words of a much-loved poet, then in prison for the third time.
‘No, there aren’t.’
This should have alerted me. I should have realized that political commitment of any sort was nothing more than a social obligation for him, but it’s easy to say this with hindsight. At the time we all thought of ourselves and of university students in general as the backbone of the country. Its future depended on us, but in the words of the real Confucius, ‘To lead into battle a people that has not first been instructed is to betray them.’ Zahid insisted that the facts proved otherwise and would counter this with the examples of the French and Russian revolutions. He often inclined to more radical solutions than I did and sometimes mocked my caution. Friendship, too, has its illusions, just as strong as those of love.
Three days before we were due to leave for the mountains, our Confucius dropped by for lunch. My mother liked him because he had a pleasing face, was ultra-polite and always made a point of praising the decor of the house and, even more importantly, admiring her rose garden, which was usually ignored by visitors and by us. My father was impressed by his strong support for the Chinese Revolution, not common then in émigré circles. I felt closer to him for obvious reasons. Nevertheless the conversation seemed excessively stilted till my parents left for their siesta. It was late June. The temperature had reached 108 degrees Fahrenheit and the tar on the roads was beginning to melt. I was racking my brains to find a way of asking after Jindié without appearing too eager, but discretion prevailed. He was her brother, after all, and might be offended by an informal display of interest. Then, just before he left, Confucius, trying to sound as casual as possible, said, ‘By the way, we might see you in Nathiagali. My mother is desperate to avoid the heat this year, and we’ve booked a cottage in Pines Hotel for a month.’
I managed to conceal my joy.
‘With all of us leaving, the city of culture will be empty.’
We laughed at our own arrogance.
FOUR
IN THE EARLY DAYS, my father would drive us there, spend a week, and then return to Lahore. The mountain routine in our household was well established. The servants would wake us up at three in the morning, when it was still pitch dark outside. My twin sisters, three years younger, and I would be placed half-asleep in the back of a ramshackle Chevrolet station wagon and by four at the latest my father would be driving northwards on the Grand Trunk Road, which had barely any other traffic at that hour. This was the reason for the pre-dawn departures, which felt like torture at the time. My sisters and I would wake again when the sun rose and wait for the inevitable stop at Wazirabad Junction Railway Station, where they served excellent scrambled eggs on toast, brewed a fine pot of tea and had relatively clean toilets. That was a very long time ago. Soon afterwards we would cross the mighty Jhelum and once again hear the story of how Alexander the Great had found the river too difficult to ford and almost lost his life. We came to know this tale so well that in the years ahead we would repeat it in unison as we approached the bridge, to pre-empt the parental version. The next stop was Rawalpindi, a brief halt to pick up chicken sandwiches and chilled coffee at the Silver Grill before the final stretch, which began on the tarmac road to Murree, the official hill station which my mother loathed because it was not Simla and was overcrowded with the ‘wrong sort’ of people—not counting Zahid and his family, of course, and the many other friends who spent the summers there. In my mother’s imagination Murree was Babylon, to be avoided even as a stopover on the way to our Arcadia.
Beyond Murree lay the rough road to the galis, the valleys between the Himalayan foothills, clothed in pines; soon after leaving the hill station the fragrance of these trees became overpowering. More than a hundred years ago, the British had come to the galis and built hill-cottages with quaint names like Kirkstone, Moonrising, Retreat, etc., to remind them of home. First we passed Khairagali, then Changlagali, then Doongagali, and on a ridge two miles above that lay Nathia, the queen of them all, with its own club and tennis courts and, most importantly, a library filled with books, mainly by authors one had never heard of before or never would again: the literary equivalent of B-movies and sometimes startlingly good.
Heaven in those days was arriving here, inhaling the scent of wild strawberries, sighting the snow-covered peak of Nanga Parbat in the Himalayan distance and wondering which of our summer friends had arrived.
This year, all I could think about was Jindié. When was she arriving? What day? What hour? I have scant memories of that time now, a time of unrequited passions that seemed to be the fate of our generation. To write the life of Plato I have to work hard to collect myself and remember what else happened that summer. It’s easier now, since my memories of Jindié have faded.
When we reached our summer house, the caretaker delivered a number of messages and handed me a scrap of paper. None of the messages were of any significance. Summer friends from Peshawar had already arrived, including two demon tennis players, Pashtun brothers, witty and easy mannered, who usually pulverized their opponents. Zahid and I had beaten them once and that was only because we could see better in the mist that enveloped the court. The note was from Younis, the jolly sub-postmaster who presided over the tiny post office in summer and stayed in the rest house below the bazaar. He wondered when we could meet for a cup of tea. The next day friends from Lahore and Karachi arrived as well. We met and exchanged pleasantries, but my thoughts were elsewhere.
My friends noticed how distracted I had become and assumed that as I was due to leave the country later that year, my mind had already departed and I found their company tiresome. How could I tell them all that I was suffering from love fever? There were also two young women present who were great fun because they never relapsed into coquetry and loathed bourgeois pettinesses and whose company, for those reasons, I enjoyed a great deal. I could only imagine their scathing comments if I admitted to anything that remotely resembled serious passion.
I walked alone to the Pines Hotel and exchanged greetings with the proprietor and staff. Soon after Partition, in 1947, when I was three and my sisters had not yet been born, we began staying at the Pines, and the proprietor, Zaman Khan, a tall, pot-bellied Pashtun with permanently bloodshot grey eyes—the result of an overfondness for the beer produced at the Murree Brewery by one of Jamshed’s more prosperous relatives—had become a familiar and friendly figure over the years. There was little that escaped him. He gave me a hug and immediately offered some information.
‘That green-eyed girl from Peshawar whom you liked so much last year is arriving next week with her mother.’
I feigned delight and then said in a casual tone, ‘A friend of mine, Hanif Ma, told me he was coming this year. They’re a Chinese family from Lahore.’
Zaman grabbed me by the arm and took me to his office. Together we looked at the reservations register. The Mas were due in two days.
‘I didn’t know you were friends. I’ll put them in the cottage where you stayed ten years ago. So I’ll be seeing more of you this year. Good. You know you can always eat here.’
‘Yes, but not in your
dining room where you still serve those disgusting stews the English used to like.’
He pinched me and laughed. Thrilled by the news and on a high I walked down to the bazaar and met old friends, bought an off-white Chitrali hat and warmed my hands on a cup of delicious, if oversweet, mountain tea, a concoction made by boiling tea leaves in milk and sugar till the colour is exactly right. One of the most warming drinks in the world. When I walked into the post office, situated above a sloping ravine leading to the deep-valley villages below, where the local people lived throughout the year, I got a shock. Seated next to Younis the sub-postmaster was Plato. I’d completely forgotten that he was coming here this summer.
‘You didn’t know that we were old friends, did you?’ asked Younis. Younis and his mother had been in the same bus that took the refugees from Ludhiana and it was she who had looked after Plato till they reached the camp. Younis’s father, a night watchman working for a Hindu-owned factory in Ludhiana, had never been seen again. They had family in Peshawar, and Younis had matriculated and become a Grade 6 civil servant.
‘Grade 6’, said Plato, ‘is recognition that you will never rise in the service. Sub-postmaster for life.’
Younis roared with laughter. ‘Better than a peon. I just hope I can spend all my summers here till I die.’
It was barely noon. Younis offered me some locally fermented apricot liquor in my tea. I declined the pleasure, but both of them poured generous helpings into their own bowls. Some friends arrived to post letters and joined us for a while, till their sisters and mothers waiting outside shouted at them. Once they had left, Younis whispered, ‘I hear from Bostaan Khan that the girl from Peshawar will be here next week.’