The Islam Quintet

by Tariq Ali

  ‘Did anything happen or was it a romance from afar?’

  ‘One evening I walked up while she was washing herself and asked if I could put my hand on her breast and kiss her lips.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She slapped my face.’

  I kept a straight face. ‘I doubt whether that was a real trauma, Plato. Did it never occur to you to just do what you asked permission to do? Then the slap would have been worth its weight in old silver. But this is very promising. Let me find you a good person. We’ll figure out something.’

  He agreed. A few weeks later, I approached a highly regarded analyst on his behalf. She knew his paintings and was quite keen to see him after I had explained the problem. But Plato had disappeared. His phone had been disconnected. The apartment was being let by an estate agent and there was no forwarding address. The rent, I was told, was being deposited in his London bank account.

  I found it odd and slightly upsetting that he had decided to flee without a single word of farewell. Perhaps he resented the fact that he had been forced to reveal his ailment to me. On previous occasions and in relation to other subjects when he found himself trapped he would mutter that he was an unsophisticated provincial at heart and leave the room. But he was always impassioned and slinking away was out of character.

  Ally and I talked about him often. She was quite upset when I told her of the malady that afflicted him. Soon she gave up painting. One day she rang to say that she had realized her real vocation was to study music. She had done so as a teenager and had played the piano reasonably well, but life had intervened and she had changed disciplines and gone to the Slade. Of late the music embedded in her had returned to the fore and she was returning to her first love. She couldn’t see me because she was making hasty preparations to leave for New York and she hated farewells. Years later she was acknowledged a distinguished art and music critic, and one day I received an invitation to her wedding along with a cryptic note:

  ‘Even though the parents wanted a white wedding they’re not coming. Hope you are. Could you give me away? I would like that and it will be wickedly funny.’

  I saw the joke when I reached the church on the Upper West Side. The groom was an African-American violinist. He certainly was on the Lord Stepford banned list, and so I had to give her away, much to the puzzlement of many present, though not of her sisters, who found the whole business hugely diverting. Poor Lord Stepford became unwell soon after this event was widely reported in the English tabloids. Ally’s husband behaved exquisitely when her father passed away the following year. He attended the funeral and played a Beethoven violin solo at the wake that followed in Stepfordshire House, and was, unsurprisingly, a big hit with the Stepford clan and their friends. Then the couple returned to New York and we lost touch.

  As for Plato, after a year I was told that he had resurfaced in Karachi. He refused to live in the Punjab. Too many memories lay buried in that world. Since he had become known in Britain, his work had been exhibited in all the top galleries in Fatherland—all six of them. He returned to the mullah paintings and added a few local politicians to improve the texture of the satire. These were never exhibited, but remained in his private collection, rumours regarding which swept the small world of the native elite. The begums of high society would invite him and his collection to their homes, mostly when their husbands were at work. He became the equivalent of a high-grade dealer in Kashmiri shawls with his illegal shatoosh much in demand. Plato charged a surprisingly high price for these paintings. I suppose he was justified in doing so, since a number of them could have cost him his life. The bearded subjects of his clandestine caricatures had established a strong base in Karachi, and getting rid of Plato would have been part of a day’s work. So Plato bribed the secular gangsters who ran the town, who found him a large house on the outskirts of Karachi where he grew old comfortably and was regularly visited by aspiring painters. Naturally, the gangsters wanted a cut on each painting he sold, but then everyone does that to someone or other in Fatherland. That was the last I heard of Plato till his startling phone call to Zahid.

  TEN

  THE CALL WAS UNEXPECTED. A voice I hadn’t heard for almost fifteen years. The accent was now transatlantic, but it was definitely Alice Stepford. What did she want, why me and why now?

  ‘Greetings, Dara.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘In London. We moved here after the Iraq war, though heaven knows why. It was a mistake. England’s dead. Dead politics, dead culture, servility the norm, even the old Guardian looking more and more like a marketing artefact. The BBC trying hard not to be like Fox TV, but in some ways worse with its hand-wringing conformism. Fake objectivity is the real killer. Anyway, you must have seen that Ell played at the Obama inauguration? Time to return.’

  I hadn’t seen the live broadcast of the inauguration and had missed Eliot Lincoln Little Jr. playing the fiddle. She wasn’t pleased.

  ‘Ridiculous. Where were you? In some remote corner of the Amazon Basin? I thought television was everywhere. A new Roman emperor is chosen and anointed, the world is watching, but not you. You really didn’t see it live? Amazing. Ell was so good. His violin wept with joy. Not a cliché, not a cliché ... anyway I didn’t ring to quarrel. Free for supper tomorrow? Still a bachelor or would you like to bring someone? There’s a lady over from your parts extremely keen to meet you. A friend of old Plato.’

  ‘His latest flame, I hope. I need to speak with her.’

  ‘Cruel choice of words, my dear. No flame without fire, and as we know ...’

  ‘Mean, mean Ally. It may not be physical, but appears to be a very intense affair, according to our old friend. I’m suffering as a result and have to meet her. It will also be good to see both of you again.’

  ‘Ell left last week. And Jezebel, our teenager, went back to Brooklyn a few years ago. Jez is now the lead guitarist in a crazy neo-punk outfit in Brooklyn. She’s only eighteen. You’ll love the band’s name. The Seventeenth of Brumaire, the French revolutionary equivalent of the seventh of November. It’s because they had all just turned seventeen when the band was set up and were flicking through my books and found a reference to the 18th Brumaire and delved deeper. Cool, they all thought. Real hoot. I’ve closed the house. Come to the studio. Eightish? Promise supper will be served promptly. It’ll just be us three.’

  Her artistic energy was now channelled into her husband’s and daughter’s work. As I drove to Chelsea later that day, I made a mental note to ask whether she was painting again. Unlike its owner, the studio had changed little. Ally was elegantly attired as always, but the dyed hair was noticeable, which surely defeated the whole exercise, and she was much bulkier, but then so we were we all. But the continuities outweighed the changes. Ally’s throaty laugh revived old memories, as did the wine.

  ‘George got the buildings; my other siblings got money and pieces of furniture. I inherited the cellar. It was in the will. Naturally, I share it with the siblings, except for pre-1986 wines. Ell doesn’t drink at all.’

  ‘Is he a Muslim?’

  ‘But darling, you know full well he is ... surely I told you.’

  ‘Ally, I gave you away in church.’

  ‘So you did. So you did. Of course, it was some years later that Ell shifted faiths and did the Hajj. I didn’t much care that he found Islam was more congenial than Presbyterianism. All I said was that if he as much as looked at another woman lustfully, I wouldn’t hire a Blackwater mercenary to castrate him, I’d do it myself. Otherwise it didn’t bother me too much. Most Americans love religion, and it’s part of the package if you marry one of them. What did annoy me was that he chose such an unbelievably pompous name. It was only when his agent warned him very firmly that his fame as a violinist had been built wearing the old identity, and that concerts by al-Hajj Sheikh Mohammed Aroma might not appeal as much to the box office, that he decided to carry on under a “false” name. He is so very weak and in so many ways, otherwise he’d have di
scarded the old name like a pair of soiled underpants. After awful 9/11 he panicked yet further and simply stopped using his Muslim name at all. This, I’ve always thought, was utterly pathetic and pandering to Islamophobia. It’s as if Muhammad Ali had reverted to Cassius Clay. But at least he remained a Muslim. I dislike all religions, Dara. I hope you’re not thinking of a late-life conversion.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. And speaking of Islamophobia, why should Ell need a change of religion to be unfaithful?’

  ‘I’m going to make a salad dressing.’

  She could not explain the reasoning behind Eliot’s conversion. It was surprising, since it wasn’t the result of a lengthy stay in prison, where the Honoured Classic has had a magical impact on many young African-Americans and especially on their diet. I made a mental note to delve deeper, but all gloomy thoughts vanished with the appearance of Ally’s other guest.

  Zaynab Shah’s appearance startled me. Her deep brown eyes were not languorous but filled with mischief. Her aquiline nose gave her a haughty expression, but the minute she smiled her entire face relaxed. She spoke in a lively and deep voice, her mind was clear-sighted and, instinctively, I felt that she scorned the mask of hypocrisy. Many women from the same social class are layered in duplicity, a price they pay for living and functioning in Fatherland.

  Whatever the basis of their relationship, Plato had struck gold. Of this I had no doubt. I had done some homework and realized that I knew one of her brothers, the decent one, as she later informed me. The other had laid the abominable trap that wrecked her life.

  I had not been prepared for this combination of intelligence and beauty. Zaynab was dressed in a colourful Sindhi cholo and maroon suthan, or loose cotton trousers. She crossed her legs as she sat down, the Sindhi colours blending well with Ally’s decrepit, faded olive-green velvet sofa. There was not the slightest trace of starchiness in her, of the variety often displayed by society begums in Fatherland when first encountering strangers. Zaynab was informal, and her darting, smiling eyes suggested a free-and-easy approach to life. Outside, I remember, the sky was overcast.

  A writer with no other concerns or preoccupations would have produced a masterwork based exclusively on the tragedy that befell this amazing woman. My version, alas, can only offer a prosaic account as per the strict instructions given me by the progenitor of this book and currently an intimate of the lady. The last thing I feel like doing is questioning her about him, but promises must be kept. I will only provide a basic outline, and here, too, as is my weakness, explain the history and social conditions that produced someone like her and explain why she fell in love with my friend Plato. Or did she? What lay hidden in so lovely a body, or behind so many backward tosses of the head? Did she have an angelic or a devilish soul, or was it a mixture of the two that had affected Plato so deeply? She had not yet looked at me seriously, but concentrated her attention on Ally. An old tormentor, vanity, made a sudden appearance and began to mock at me, at the same time alerting me that any false steps could only lead to the abyss. And the warning irritated me, for I was far from green and hardly devoid of experience, unlike Plato.

  Zaynab looked younger than fifty-two—as if she were in her late forties at most. It was difficult to tell. She’d been born to an extremely wealthy family of Sindhi landowners. These men were the most primitive lords in Fatherland, where competition in the field remains high. To add to the woes of their serfs, for that is what the peasants were, some of the landowners were hereditary saints or pirs, which meant that their word was not simply the law but came directly from the special relationship they enjoyed with God. Challenge this status and they would fight like devils possessed. When the British annoyed a distant cousin of Zaynab’s grandfather, he had replied with a rebellion that had lasted a whole year and forced the empire to deploy troops in the interior of Sind, and this in 1942 when British troops had just suffered a crushing defeat in Singapore.

  Unable to resist the Japanese, they turned with a vengeance on the Hur peasants and crushed them. An English district officer involved in the conflict had written a pretended novel, The Terrorist, really based on his interrogations of Sindhi prisoners, some of them informers. The rebels were depicted as unthinking but courageous men who had blindly followed the pir, their religious leader. This was, of course, an incomplete view, since the colonial officer, found it difficult to acknowledge that there was genuine hatred of the occupying power and that this had merely been used by the pir—in this case, Zaynab’s great-uncle, who was quietly hanged with only a few people watching, probably including the novelist. Unlike the French and Italians, the British rarely showed off in India: they hanged their enemies without fanfare for fear of inspiring new martyrs.

  The event left a mark on the whole family. Zaynab’s eldest paternal uncle, the community’s new leader, spiritual and temporal, decided to follow the fashion of the times and become ultra-loyal to the British. He had never thought much of the various nationalist leaders who were fighting for India’s independence. All the Sindhi primitives—as they were called by peasant activists who escaped to a city—felt threatened by the departure of the British. The only question that worried them was whether their enclosed world of property and serfdom would survive. History has recorded that these institutions survived well, as did such sacred privileges as the droit du seigneur, which is not exactly the same as the Rights of Man, though Ally in her more militant feminist days would strongly dispute this assertion.

  Zaynab was born in one of the many large houses built amid the dozen villages and thousands of acres that made up her family’s estate. This one was not far from the small town of Jamsadiq and a four-hour drive to the satanic city Karachi, so all modern conveniences were available, and some of the primitives affected an ultra-cosmopolitan personality when they appeared at the Sind Club.

  When she was eight or nine, Zaynab’s extraordinary beauty began singling her out for special attention. Her father, who adored her, died when she was twelve. Her older brother, who inherited his father’s share of the estate, was a dour and reactionary primitive. He saw how all who came into contact with her worshipped his young sister. She was singularly devoid of artifice. Her private tutors, all of them female, had educated her well. In addition to Sindhi and Urdu, she could read Arabic and Persian and speak English and French. She possessed a natural grace that was obvious at first glance. Word of her beauty had spread throughout the province. The primitives discussed it often, and many young bloods were determined to win her hand. Which primitive would her family bless? Bets were laid and, unbeknown to Zaynab, a fierce rivalry had already commenced. There were demands from primitives with even more land than Zaynab’s family. They all wanted an immediate engagement, so that as soon as she was seventeen they could pretend she was eighteen and celebrate the nuptials.

  Zaynab’s mother had died giving birth to her, and her father’s second wife was a coldly calculating society woman from Karachi, not in the slightest bit interested in little Zaynab or her older brothers. In fact, she was rarely on the estate. Her main interest was accumulating enough jewellery and money so that she could scarper to a European city after the old man died. This she achieved successfully, if not gracefully, and when last heard of was living in Knightsbridge, close to an Egyptian grocery.

  Samir Shah, the small-minded, bigoted oldest brother, was smitten with jealousy of his sister. He knew that had Zaynab been born a man, she would have displaced him completely. She was still only twelve years of age, and already tales of her small kindnesses to the families of serfs who served in the household had spread throughout the villages, and there were many expressions of regret that she had been born a woman.

  Sámir Shah called a conference of male elders to decide his sister’s fate. These primitives met and agreed that the only bridegroom worthy of her, clearly, was the Koran. Her favourite brother, Sikandar, fought valiantly on her behalf, but he was only sixteen himself at the time. The poor boy was brutally mocked for his immaturity and e
ven more for his disregard for property. He stormed out in tears.

  This was as much as I’d known of Zaynab’s story before she arrived.

  We exchanged pleasantries while Ally laid the table and offered us wine. Zaynab did not refuse. She asked how my life of Plato was proceeding. I muttered a noncommittal reply.

  ‘Tell me honestly’, she asked, ‘is there much to write about? Might it not be simpler for you to just write an essay to go with his paintings?’

  ‘He told me to write everything, and much of that would be unsuitable as an introduction to his paintings.’

  ‘I don’t see why. They’re explicit enough.’

  ‘In a way they are, but they still require a great deal of interpretation. Wait till you see the collection that our hostess wanted him to destroy because it was a complete “male fantasy and totally sexist”. Rather than do that he gave it to me, and I thought you might like to see his earlier work so I’ve brought it along. Ally was unfair. I just think he had seen too many erotic Japanese works, where they draw these things very large. This was Plato’s version of all that and it isn’t without a certain charm. Not that Ally agrees.’

  ‘Dara’, said Ally, ‘I’ve been meaning to say this: Do you mind not addressing me as Ally anymore? Everyone I know calls me Alice.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because Eliot hates “Ally”.’

  ‘Why? It sounds like Ali as it’s pronounced here, and given his own faith it should make him feel closer to you. How pathetic of Plato to call you Alice. And you, Ms Stepford, agreeing to let a male decide how you should be addressed. Shame.’

  Zaynab, clearly feeling that the discussion of nicknames had become tedious, successfully diverted the conversation.

  ‘I love the way you call him Plato so naturally. For me he’s Pervaiz, sometimes Payjee, but I might try Plato. Sounds nice the way you say it.’