by Tariq Ali
The next morning over breakfast she asked whether she should move to London permanently. There was no way she was going back to Fatherland. She was fearful that Karachi was going to explode and there would be a civil war between the North and the South, Pashtuns versus Urdu speakers with Sindhis applauding from the side, hoping each would destroy the other but fearful that the Punjabi army would ride to the rescue.
‘And Plato?’
‘Plato is dying. I didn’t want to tell you last night, Dara, and for purely selfish reasons. I did not want you to think of anything else.’
This came as a complete shock and was deeply unsettling. For some time neither of us spoke. Another old friend was about to die and with him a large part of my own past and shared memories of catamites that we had collectively cursed. I felt a single, salty tear creep down my face and Zaynab brushing it away.
‘I did wonder when I heard his voice on the phone. It was hoarse, but he could sound like that after a bad night. What is it?’
‘Lung cancer that has spread. It was diagnosed a few months ago. I pleaded with him but he refused to come abroad. He refused chemotherapy. He lives on painkillers. All he does is paint. He said you would like his last paintings because they are from inside him, like the very first etchings. Except these are huge canvases. There is a ladder in the studio. Before I left he said, “Look at this one. My last work. This huge cat is me and I’m watching Fatherland. Look, here are Fatherland’s four cancers: America, the military, mullahs and corruption. For the cat there’s just a single one, but the cat will die first. Fatherland is on intensive chemotherapy. All sorts of new drugs are being used, but they might end up producing new cancers.” It’s a horrific painting, Dara. The inner circle of Hell. He wants you to write about it.’
‘I will after I’ve seen it, but why didn’t he tell me?’
‘He didn’t want you or Alice Stepford to know. I have no idea why this is so. And that is the real reason he was so desperate that you write about him. It had nothing to do with any request from me.’
When Plato died, Zahid and I would be virtually the sole survivors of the table around which we had all become friends. Of all of us, Plato had had the most extraordinary qualities, and while some of these were visible in his art, one always felt that he had never allowed himself to reach full bloom. He was at once the most honourable and the most unforgiving of men.
I think he felt that loss when I drove him to Cambridge all those years ago; I observed his concentrated gaze as he looked at the latest books in the field that never became his own. He had smiled in a strange way that I interpreted as regret but was probably not.
‘Do you still understand this stuff, Plato?’
‘A little, but it has moved so far ahead. Way beyond me now. The cold would have killed me. Like poor Ramanujan, incapable of tolerating the cohabitation of extremes.’
‘I thought it was repressed homosexuality that sent him scurrying back to India.’
‘Another way of putting it could be that it was the unrepressed homosexuality of the great mathematician who invited him here that frightened the poor catamite.’
‘Both of us could be right.’
‘Let’s avoid Punjabi melodrama. I think he died of tuberculosis that he contracted here, but I’m not sure.’
It was a crisp November day, but bitterly cold. We had walked for an hour by the river and a friendly poet at Kings gave us lunch. Plato never spoke much in company and when he did there was no artifice. That is why I was puzzled by his failure to tell me he was dying. It would have been in character for him to joke about it and regret that he wasn’t a Believer, otherwise he could have looked forward to at least one houri and his ailment instantaneously cured. Ours was a heaven for old men. When we were driving back from Cambridge, he expressed no regrets. All he would say is that one can never completely determine the path that one’s life takes. Other factors always intervene to shape our biographies. I asked if he was thinking of anything specific.
‘If there had been no Partition I might have come here.’
‘But you would never have had time to paint.’
‘I would not have needed to paint.’
Zaynab ordered more coffee.
‘Perhaps you should have left him the poison capsule.’
‘He would be dead by now, and he is desperate to finish the painting.’
‘He never will. He can’t. He knows that and all he’ll do is to carry on enriching the colours.’
‘Listen to me, Dara. I hired two nurses to be with him at all times. There is a doctor on call who has promised me to make his last hours easy. I just could not bear to be there when he died. He knew that, which is why he asked me to leave the country.’
I believed her. Suddenly I had a desperate urge to speak to him one last time. To say a few things I had never said to him. About how important he’d been for all of us. Of how the pleasure he took in defying public opinion had infected us, who were a generation younger, and how his unceasing attacks on time-servers and opportunists during a military dictatorship had given us courage.
‘Zaynab, ring the nurse, please. I want to speak with him.’
She dialled the number. There was no reply.
‘Keep trying, keep trying.’
Finally the nurse answered. She was in an ambulance. Plato had collapsed some hours ago and was unconscious. They were taking him to the hospital. Zaynab and I embraced each other and wept. We spent most of that day in the Louvre, walking in a daze, sitting for a long time in front of a Poussin, thinking of Plato all the time and wondering whether he was already dead. When we returned to her hotel there were dozens of messages. We did not eat, but went straight up. We wept first and then laughed as we sat on the bed and talked about him. We paused to drink some cognac and went to bed, but sleep came fitfully. Images of Plato at different stages of his life kept me half awake, and when I trembled, Zaynab’s soothing hands would massage my head.
Plato had left firm instructions regarding his burial. No protection money was to be paid to secure a place in any graveyard. He was quite happy to be eaten by dogs. Zaynab had suggested that since his painting of the dead hound for her dead brother had enhanced the value of the Shah estates, he should be buried close to where she had first sighted him. Pir Sikandar Shah accordingly arranged for Plato’s body to be transported to his lands and he was Buried in the Shah family graveyard, but without any headstone, as is the custom in that region.
‘I can talk to him when I next visit the prison of my youth. May I ask you something?’
It was obvious that we were going to spend this day doing nothing, but I needed a brisk walk and Zaynab showed no inclination to get dressed.
‘What?’
‘If you were asked to describe me to someone who had no idea of me, what would you say?’
‘A Sindhi matron whose natural beauty is inextricably linked to her pride.’
‘Why matron? Am I really getting plump, you unfeeling hound? Apart from “matron” I liked that description.’
‘“Matron” stays. It denotes maturity and authority more than plumpness.’
‘When the Stepford lady was questioning me about intimate matters you did not speak at all. Does that mean you had no thoughts, or were they repressed?’
‘I did think that, for your peasant paramour, making love to you must be like having a nun for a mistress, not that he would have got the reference. Not that you were a nun. A nun is full of piety, and the sin of having a lover provides her with an exceptional frisson that can’t be faked. The piety produces the passion. In your case, I think, there was neither. Just simple mechanics.’
‘You can think what you like. Was it simple mechanics this morning?’
‘I wasn’t referring to us.’
‘Good. Yesterday was a bit sorrowful. I kept hearing a Sindhi lament in my head as I tried to arouse you. Do you have to leave today?’
‘I must. I have to prepare a talk for a conference. I need a few days
in the library’
‘That seems excessive. When is your Chinese friend returning from the murder inquiry in Isloo?’
‘How did you know about that?’
‘I made it my business. My brother says they have no idea who killed the general. It wasn’t the usual suspects who are blamed for everything these days.’
‘I never thought it was, but why are you so interested?’
‘Because you are, and I feel linked through you. I thought if I discovered something you could pass it on to your friend. What my brother did say was that General Rafiq had several mistresses.’
‘A crime of passion?’
‘Always possible and not just in beloved Fatherland. And there will be another one if you ever turn your back on me. I like you.’
‘Remain calm. We’re both matrons and must preserve a certain decorum. No reason to regress to our teen years. Sorry, that doesn’t apply to you.’
‘When will you be back?’
‘Within a fortnight.’
‘Should I buy an apartment in Paris or London? Has to be a big city.’
‘Berlin.’
‘So I can leave you in peace to take a Chinese mistress in London. No way. I’m buying an apartment in London. Prices are dropping more and more each day, and Alice has sighted a suitable buy.’
I sat down and shook her.
‘Listen to me carefully. Jindié is a friend from the past who lives with Zahid, another friend, whom I once wronged. She is not my mistress.’
‘She will be soon. Of this I’m sure. Let’s not argue. We’ll both know when it happens. As a matter of fact I prefer Paris. Let’s go and see apartments today.’
‘In the Fauborg St-Germain?’
‘Why not? I want something in the Latin Quarter and wouldn’t it be fun if I found something nice on the rue de Balzac. And which of Stendhal’s novels should I read first?’
‘Difficult. Buy them all and toss a coin. How lucky you are to read them in French. I love them all, but if you put a gun to my head I’d say Lucien Leuwen. That and the two best-known ones need to be reread every two years, and at my age every six months. One always learns something new. I would also strongly recommend his thinly disguised memoir.’
‘By the time you return I’ll have finished them. I read very fast.’
‘Does understanding keep up with your pace?’
‘Does insolence keep up with the charm?’
‘Rewrite.’
She was serious enough about buying a flat, and we spent a few hours in various streets looking at available property. She liked one on the rue de Bièvre, and when I pointed out that Mitterand and a Polish Marxist intellectual had once shared the street, adding that Balzac’s favourite eatery was here, she became agitated. The agent was rung. The apartment was huge for such a small street, but she would have friends to stay over and would be entertaining regularly. There was no haggling. She would pay the asking price. The agent gave me an astonished look as if to ask whether she was serious. I suggested that he close the deal quickly before she saw something on the rue de Balzac.
‘Well, that’s settled. Now should we go and inspect some antique furniture?’
Her living room was especially large, and I suggested that the space above the fireplace might be a home for Plato’s unfinished masterpiece. She screamed.
‘Hai Allah, never. Never. It’s a frightening painting. You haven’t even seen it. Anyway it’s too big for this apartment or any other. It should be in a public space.’
‘Where is it at the moment?’
‘At our Sind home, I hope, carefully covered with muslin sheets to dry it properly. He was worried that local hoodlums might raid his studio when news of his death became known. All the other paintings are in a warehouse. This last one is now at home. We need a museum in Europe or North America to give it a home, and someone like you should write an explanation. It really needs one. Can you think of a title?’
‘Canceristan?’
‘Don’t be silly. Something simple and nonprovocative, like Unfinished...’
‘Last Thoughts in a Dying Country?’
‘No. I visit regularly, and Fatherland’s death has been predicted far too often.’
‘Dying Thoughts in the Last Country.’
‘Shut up. One more try, and then I’ll—’
‘Artistic Structures of Political Meaning in an Unknown Country. Unfinished, 2009.’
‘Brilliant. That will be the title. In fact, given that you haven’t seen the work, it’s pretty close to the mark and sounds obscure. “Unknown” in the sense of being unknown to its rulers. Yes? Good.’
I received a kiss on the cheek. It turned out that she was the sole executor of Plato’s estate, and she gave me complete authority to negotiate the sale of ASPMUC to a serious modern museum wherever I wished. She would arrange for it to be photographed and have slides posted directly to me.
‘Unless you want to just fly over and see it.’
‘Not this month, but I might do that sometime. Always helps. In any case the curator of whichever museum takes it will certainly want to see it before the purchase, or at least send an expert.’
‘This book you’re writing. It isn’t just about Plato?’
‘No, and it’s not a biography. It’s fiction.’
‘Allah protect you.’
‘No reason for Allah to be upset. I’m just sad that Plato will never read it. He was one of the sixteen people I was writing it for.’
‘Am I included?’
‘Plato and I went back forty-five years. I’ve barely known you a week.’
‘I feel I’ve known you a long time, and the book was my idea. I will be one of the sixteen. Let the figure remain.’
On the train back to London, I thought mainly about Plato, since I had been asked by a daily paper to write his obituary. His life had rarely been untroubled or happy till Zaynab offered him a haven. But nor had he died a physically or mentally broken man, like so many of his wealthy peers whose lives had been led without a trace of generosity or compassion, men who had justified, for petty gain, some indescribable horrors of the modern world. Plato died with his pride and self-respect intact.
One summer evening in Lahore we were discussing the fate of Islam in the West. Plato first mocked the nostalgia and sentimentality that prevailed on the subject—a sure sign of total ignorance, he remarked. Zahid backed him up, and when another friend said that the decision by Muslims in al-Andalus to eat pork in order to survive was a crime, Zahid defended their right to eat cow dung if necessary in order to survive. A strange, sad smile prefaced Plato’s response.
‘It’s one thing to eat pork in order to survive. I would have done the same. But they wanted us to swallow our history, our culture, our language, our entire past, and all that is not so easily digestible.’
THIRTEEN
ON THE TWENTY-FIFTH DAY after the murder of General Ilyas Rafiq, commanding officer of the Special Services Assault Battalion, I went to have dinner with his mother-in-law. Incapable of stomaching any further hypocrisy, Jindié had refused to stay for the chehlum, the fortieth day after burial that concludes the ritual of official mourning. She left Zahid to console their daughter and returned to London. Her offer to bring the grandchildren back with her to give them and the widowed Neelam a break had been turned down.
The meal she served, unlike the story that accompanied it, was on the skimpy side, a bit too healthy for my tastes, but all I wanted to know that evening was who killed Rafiq and why. No real evidence had emerged so far—though this tiny fact has yet to spoil a good story from circulating in Fatherland. According to Jindié, each of his colleagues suspected different people with varying motives. I rubbed my hands together in delight. It was a classic Fatherland conspiracy. Three versions were floating in cyberspace, she told me, and any of them could be true, but she no longer cared. As far as she was concerned, her son-in-law had been a reprobate and had come to the bad end he deserved. Yet another Rashomon moment f
or our debased elite, I thought to myself. Assassins are rarely uncovered in Fatherland, which adds to its many charms.
The first and most-believed account linked the death to the machinations of a fellow general, Muhammad Rifaat, who commanded a garrison in a crucial town on the edge of badlands where drone-rockets rained down regularly on the villages and the streams had turned red. Reputedly, the two generals, close friends since their school days, were sharing a mistress, Khalida ‘Naughty’ Lateef, the spirited spouse of a junior officer desperate for promotion. Naughty Lateef’s charms had on one occasion led to fisticuffs between the two men, and all this in the presence of fellow officers. Adultery, especially with the wife of a junior officer, and breach of discipline were both punishable offences.
General Rifaat, who had not provoked the assault, had been officially reprimanded, a black mark that presaged early retirement to a foreign embassy, Kazakhstan or, if he was lucky, Austria.
General Rafiq was reprimanded in private by his chief and told in strong language that such clashes were unseemly. Nothing more. He was an important component in the local ‘war on terror’ and a regular at the US embassy in Fatherland. An angry General Rifaat decided that this state of affairs was unacceptable and planned a private revenge with the help of his old schoolmate, General Baghlol Khan, a weak-kneed Pashtun, in command of the Inter-Services Intelligence but famed neither for his own intelligence nor for anything else, except obeying orders from his superiors. Baghlol loathed Rafiq because of departmental rivalries, but there were a few other reasons as well. The latter, soon after taking command of the Assaulters, as his battalion was known, had uncovered two ISI plants amongst his senior officers. He ordered them to be returned immediately to their base with his compliments. These took the form of some choice insults, including a throwaway reference to the ISI chief as General Camel’s Arse, not an indigenous epithet but one which Rafiq had first encountered as a young officer during his days in Saudi Arabia many moons ago, when Fatherland soldiers defended the kingdom against internal threats. News of the sobriquet had spread, increasing Rafiq’s popularity with the soldiery. Camel’s Arse was what they thought as well.