The Islam Quintet

by Tariq Ali

  ‘He’s decorative, shallow, pretentious and this was my opinion long before Plato entered the field. I. M. Malik paints to please and sell. Fair enough, but I can see why it drives Plato crazy. But I can’t totally accept that IMM’s success is the whole cause. Plato knows IMM’s artistic worth perfectly. If you can bear to download images of his latest piece of conceptual art, you’ll see that even old IMM realizes that shit produces money. He has used horse manure, dried cow-dung cakes and pigeon droppings to create a huge birthday cake for his own ninetieth. There is an additional problem. I. M. Malik looks like a shrunken, constipated accountant, which can be slightly off-putting.’

  Alice disagreed with my assessment. She thought it was perfectly possible that Plato had gone into a decline because of the state of global culture. ‘It’s the same everywhere. As a music critic I sit through countless operas and concerts here and at the Met in New York. Tickets are so overpriced that not many music lovers can afford seats. It’s corporate entertainment now and the audiences are very philistine. Directors know this and play to their weaknesses. They laugh at some stupid slapstick in a Mozart opera, they applaud a badly sung aria simply because the star stops and waits for the applause, etc. It is depressing. The ability to discriminate is disappearing fast in Western culture. People like what they’re told to like, and since they’ve paid a high price for it they convince themselves that what they’ve seen and heard was good. The theatre’s no different. Any serious criticism is regarded as disloyal. After a week at work I often feel suicidal.’

  I knew Plato better than either of them did and knew that his depression had little to do with lack of appreciation. That had never bothered him at all. I feared it was his past, and his impotence and his love and desire for Zaynab that he could only partially fulfil. He had refused to see an analyst. Might a chemical do the trick? It seemed cruel, but I wondered whether Zaynab had tried Viagra or one of its equivalents.

  ‘He’d be horrified. He’s always making vicious jokes about the sixty-somethings who cruise nonstop in the Viagra triangle in Clifton. The thought of him ...’

  ‘I wasn’t suggesting you hand him a tablet. But you poisoned the hound, didn’t you? Give it to Plato mixed with what the Bangladeshis refer to as shag gosht. Who knows, both of you may get lucky.’

  Alice backed up this suggestion. ‘No harm in trying it once. If it works and the depression disappears, do it regularly. If it doesn’t, you lose nothing. Why did you never suggest it to me, Dara?’

  ‘We were much younger then and you were still Ally.’

  Zaynab was worried. What if it gave him a heart attack? She’d read that a former president of Nigeria had died of an overdose while on the job. We advised caution the first time. Perhaps just half the recommended dose. She promised she would try when she returned. Before that she planned a trip to Paris. It was her first time and she wanted to see with her own eyes the Latin Quarter where Balzac had lived, worked and staved off his creditors. French novelists had kept her company during the early years of her marriage to the Honoured Classic, and she still returned to them from time to time. Her life had become a never-ending rush. She could never stay in one place for too long. Even when at home she travelled a great deal, seeing parts of the country that were new to her.

  Her sister-in-law belonged to the old ruling family in Swat, and she would often go and stay there in the summer, using it as a base to visit Gilgit. She told me this as I was dropping her off at her hotel.

  ‘Have you ever been to Swat? Strange to think that there’s a war going on now, a war in which Plato and I find it difficult to support either side. One of Plato’s paintings shows both sides as one. A hydra-headed beast.’

  ‘No mermaids on the landscape?’

  ‘None. You haven’t answered my question.’

  I described a trip I’d taken to Swat over forty years before, with a small group of students travelling by a GTS bus from Mardan, where I had been staying with close family friends. Our bus wound its way along tiny roads where one had to pull to the side and stop when a car or lorry approached from the opposite direction. Suddenly an old Rolls Royce pulled up behind us, its driver honking aggressively and gesturing that he wanted the bus to move out of the way. Overtaking was not permitted, and our driver, correctly, refused. Ten miles on there was a broader stretch of the road. The car passed us then and screeched to a halt in front of us. We stopped. The owner of the Rolls was the Wali of Swat, a traditional tribal chief, ennobled and placed in power by the British and mercilessly lampooned by Edward Lear. He walked out of the car. The Swatis sitting in the bus cowered. Men and women covered their heads and tried to hide. The Pashtun driver, now trembling with fear, was asked to step outside. He pleaded for forgiveness. He’d had no idea it was the Wall’s car. His pleas were ignored. The Wali took a rifle from one of his bodyguards and shot our driver dead. Then he drove away. We were stranded for three hours before another driver arrived.

  ‘Allah save us,’ said Zaynab. ‘That was my sister-in-law’s grandfather.’

  I let her out of the car.

  ‘Perhaps we can continue this conversation in Paris? I’ll be staying at the Crillon for two weeks.’

  ‘Enjoy, it was the SS headquarters during the war.’

  ‘Does that mean no?’

  ‘No. But it doesn’t mean yes either.’

  ‘Why? I have much more to tell you, things I didn’t want to mention in front of Alice Stepford.’

  ‘And it has to be in Paris?’

  ‘You must admit it would be more congenial. Where else can I practice that French that Mile Verbizier-taught me in my youth? Vous comprenez?’

  I made neither comment nor commitment, but waved a friendly farewell as she let herself out of the car.

  ELEVEN

  THE NEWS WAS ON the front page of the International Herald Tribune. A former general and two of his guards had been shot dead in the heart of Isloo, the heavily-policed Fatherland capital. From the tone of the report it was clear that he had been genuinely supportive of the West’s efforts in Afghanistan and the killers were assumed to be al-Qaeda or the Taliban, or both, or an offshoot of either. In other words, there were no clues at all. It had not been a suicide terrorist. On the contrary, the report stressed, it had been a well-planned execution by a killer or killers who had escaped and left no traces. Yet another casualty of the Afghan war, I thought, and turned the page to read the rest of the international news, no longer to be found in most British papers.

  Then my cell phone, a little-used object, began to buzz. Jindié was ringing from Isloo. She had to cancel our dinner engagement scheduled for that night. The dead general, she informed me, was her son-in-law. She sounded calm, a bit too calm, I thought, as I offered my condolences. She would ring on her return, which should be within a fortnight. Zahid could stay the forty days if he wished. Not her.

  Paris beckoned. Zaynab would be there for three more days. I rang. She was surprised and, I think, pleased. I reserved a room at my favourite dive in the Quarter and booked a seat on an early afternoon train to France.

  I had been looking forward to seeing Jindié on her own and discussing the events in Yunnan that had transformed her family’s life. The letter describing the last days of the Dali sultanate affected me more than I had realized. At least they hadn’t decapitated his dead body before the eyes of his women and children. Why bother, they must have thought, when we are going to rape and kill them all. What had happened to the beautiful spy and her child? Did they survive in Cochin China? How delicious if one of the descendants had fought against the Americans in Vietnam. I had recurring thoughts about imperial rulers since ancient times who never paid heed to the rest of humanity.

  Jindié, had supplied me with knowledge usually available only to specialist scholars. The Taiping and Boxer rebellions feature in virtually every book on modern Chinese history. Why not Yunnan and Dali? Weighed on any scale, eighteen years of semi-independence defended against repeated Manchu assaults wa
s no mean achievement. I could not fully fathom the reason for disappearing this rebellion from history.

  Deprived of Jindié’s company for another two weeks, I had time to read her diary at leisure and began it as the train moved out of London. She had provided me with photocopied extracts. They were handwritten, but in the neat scrawl that she and others had been taught by the nuns at a Jesus and Mary convent school in Fatherland and that never got better, usually worse, when the luckier girls finished their education at Nairn College. The extracts I was given began on her wedding day. This irritated me greatly, even though the event was given a three-line entry, dated January 1970. Why was she censoring the earlier years? I wanted to compare her version of events with mine. Instead I got a detailed account of the children, the joys of breastfeeding, teething problems, choice of nursery, speaking Mandarin to them as well as Punjabi, the novels she was reading, described without any sustained reflection. Her father had died in 1974. Her mother had sold the shop and the beautiful old colonial apartment in Elphinstone Buildings and joined them in Washington, enabling Jindié to spend more time away from her family chores, in the university library. The entry on Confucius detained me longer than the others. Even though he had become a blowhard Maoist and severed all connections with his counterrevolutionary revisionist friends, I still had a soft spot for him. He was a brilliant physicist and there is little doubt that had he remained in Fatherland he would have been dragooned to work on the Fatherlandi nuclear bomb. The leaders had been desperate for nuclear physicists. But Confucius, like Maoism, had long disappeared. All attempts in DC and Isloo to get the Chinese embassy to help locate him had ended in failure. He was fluent in written and spoken Chinese. Had he taken on a new identity, changed his name, broken with his recent past and gone in search of other roots, or had he been killed in a factional battle with a rival group? Nobody knew. I couldn’t believe he was dead.

  June 1979, DC

  Mother very agitated on seeing the scenes from Tien An Mien Square on the evening network news. She’s sure she sighted my brother. I try to explain that Hanif would have little sympathy with most of these students. He would regard them as ‘capitalist-roaders’ and ‘revisionists’. But she won’t listen. Her eyes are glued to the television nonstop these days. We all worry. No letter from Hanif for nearly four years. Before he used to write at least once every three months. I wish he hadn’t gone to China. ‘I must participate in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Jindié. It’s happening now. History is being made. I can’t stand on one side.’ He pleaded with the Chinese embassy in Isloo for a one-year study visa in 1969 and then disappeared. Did they find him and lock him up for having no legal papers? The Red Guard group he joined was disbanded. He wrote that he was teaching English at a school in Kunming. Then a postcard from Dali. Three letters from Beijing and then silence. I’m sure he would write to our mother if he could. Is he still alive?

  24 January 1984, DC

  Mother died peacefully today. I got a shock when I took her some tea and saw her lying there stiff with her mouth and eyes wide open. I screamed. Zahid felt her pulse. He examined her and thought she must have died a few hours previously. Her heart stopped beating, but no noise, no attempt to shout my name. It was in her sleep and that was nice to hear. I kept thinking of all the things I should have done for her. I don’t think I ever told her how deeply I loved her and how much I had depended on her in my youth. Even in those days she said things only if she had to. It was Father who talked to us a lot and punished us. She would watch, a wry smile on her face.

  It was different with my children. They later told me how she laughed and played with them when Zahid and I were absent. She would talk endlessly about Yunnan and the last days of Dali, telling them the same stories that I had heard from Elder and Younger Grannies, stories that I had put aside, not wishing to burden the children with memories that meant nothing to them. It was after my mother died that Neelam started praying and wearing a hijab.

  Hanif’s disappearance weighed heavily on my mother and not talking about it must have made it worse. Whenever I mentioned him she would ask me to be silent. She simply did not wish to talk about it.

  We’ve all been weeping. The children, who adored her, insisted on staying at home today. We buried her late in the afternoon in the Muslim cemetery. Zahid angrily brushed aside the Imam who said that Neelam and I shouldn’t be present.

  She never said much after Father died, always felt she was a burden on us. How many times did I reassure her that we couldn’t do without her. It was true. She loved the children and cooked for them, went out with them when Zahid and I were out of town. Her only regret was that she had never visited Yunnan to pay tribute to her ancestors.

  I went to the children’s bedrooms in turn to kiss them goodnight. Suleiman was too upset to talk. Neelam asked: ‘Who is Dara?’ I answered quickly. ‘An old, old friend of your father.’ She persisted. ‘And a friend of yours?’ I wondered if my mother had said something, but that seemed so unlikely. ‘Why don’t you answer, Mom? I’ve read your diary.’ I slapped her and then started weeping and hugged her. That night I destroyed the old diary. ‘What difference does it make if she knows?’ was Zahid’s tired response. It made a difference to me. Neelam never raised the matter again. Didn’t sleep all night. I went to the kitchen, made tea the way mother used to and kept bursting into tears as different memories of her queued up in my head. She never lamented the loss of her past, but the children had confirmed that it never left her. I wandered into the attic and opened the suitcase full of old photographs. I was still there when the children woke up the next morning.

  But what had she written in the now destroyed diaries? It was not like her to burn anything related to the past. Her father had impressed on his children that archives were an important part of a family’s history. A family without archives was one that was ashamed of or trying to conceal its past for whatever reason. He said that in my presence on one occasion. This was a sore subject in our household, where the servants without thinking had sold my father’s entire archive to the recycling merchant who came to collect old newspapers every month. It was my father’s fault for not filing them properly, but he blamed my mother for having kept them in sacks that were deposited next to the discarded newspapers. I hoped it wasn’t the trauma of reading the now destroyed diaries that had turned young Neelam towards religion. More likely it was the identity politics that is the curse of American campus, life. I carried on browsing, skipping descriptions of holidays till I saw the word Nathiagali on the page. I hoped this might be a more reflective entry.

  5 July 1986, Nathiagali

  It’s changed. Overcrowded, each new ugly house intruding on another. No planning at all. Depressing being here and this is our first week. The place is full of eyesores. Too much logging has denuded the pine forests. From a distance the mountains look like shorn sheep. The children have heard so many stories about the magic of this place that they’re wondering what it was that Zahid liked so much about it. He was amazed, too; ‘It’s become like Murree and compared to that this was heaven.’ The old club no longer in use. Peeped through the broken window of the Library. The leaking roof was never repaired. Books wrecked. Zahid insisted we walk to the Post Office. Still there but no Younis. The old postman recognised Zahid. Said Younis died a few years ago. Cirrhosis of the liver. There’s a new sub-postmaster. A young man with a flowing beard introduces himself. Tea offered but declined. This young man would never have let D and. Z read letters not intended for them. Yesterday I walked to the Church. Still there as the spot where D and I first felt close. What he would make of this place now? Did he ever return? When? Can’t help thinking about him here ... we all walked across the path to Mokshpuri and came down in Doongagali which was less crowded and seemed much nicer. Would D think that too now? He used to be scathing about Doongagali even though two of his friends lived here. He was always teasing them. The children, too, preferred this gali and Zahid asked the locals about lan
d availability. They clammed up.

  The days creep by and my spirits are low. I want to leave here and go to Lahore.

  I had felt the same about the place when I returned in 1984, even though at the Green’s Hotel end of Nathia the eyesores were some distance away, but even then there was much talk of Afghan refugees and nearby training camps for the jihadis fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. Many locals had complained that the Afghans were wrecking the environment. The region is much worse now. I try not to think about it too much. I was hoping to encounter an arresting penned portrait of Zahid in her diary, something that gave some account of his professional and personal trajectory. Jindié was never overtly political like her brother or like the rest of us, but her sympathies lay on what used to be our side. She would listen carefully, occasionally interject a remark or two and sometimes denounce poor Confucius as a mindless fanatic. The adjective was misplaced. I certainly wasn’t prepared for what I was about to read.

  4 December 1986, DC

  In a few hours today much of what I had built up in my life over the past nine and a half years has collapsed. All that remains are the children. This is much, much worse than the affair with the nurse. That never bothered me. In fact I was relieved, since I could never provide him with the passion that he needed so desperately. But this is unacceptable. He came home at the usual time. Halfway through dinner he tells me in as casual a voice as he can manage that he has decided to join the Republican Party. The Fatherlandi doctors in the United States are divided. The new arrivals gravitate towards the Democrats or are apolitical. The older settler doctors, now earning small fortunes, go in the direction their investments take them. Reagan is better for business so they go with the Republicans. Zahid used to denounce them as tarts. He’s become one himself. It marks a real degeneration and a big shift in sensibilities. How long can I live with him? Till the children have left home? Five more years.