Night of the Golden Butterfly

by Tariq Ali

  ‘The life of a newsagent was very dull, and between twelve noon and six I had a lot of spare time. I read all the papers and did the Times crossword puzzle. Still I had too much time. One day I bought a hardcover exercise book and in my spare hours I started drawing, but just to occupy myself. There was nothing else to do. Strange people with wounded bodies began to pour out of my wounded heart. It was just like that, and I had no idea what was happening. In my youth, as you know, I was good at equations, and sometimes I played with the figures in algebra, adding a few testicles here and some nipples there, but stopped after being caned by the teacher for my sins.

  ‘One day an English customer saw one of my sketches and said, “These are good. You should show them. Want to sell one to me? How much?” I asked for ten shillings. He gave me a pound. I hoped he would return, but I never saw him again. It was a fluke, but it encouraged me. I carried on drawing. All those sketches you saw today I did in black ink as I waited for people to buy newspapers. I bought larger and better pads from artists’ shops and better ink and did not stop till I had nothing more to say. Sometimes at home I would look at the drawings and think they were rubbish and many times I thought of destroying them, but something stopped me. I know it sounds stupid, but once I thought I heard your voice in my head telling me not to do anything till you had seen them.

  ‘One day a Punjabi boy, a Sikh who used to leave early for work and buy a Mirror from me every morning suggested he could find me a better job as a bus conductor. So I thanked my employer and handed in my notice. After a week of learning I became a bus conductor. That’s when I really got to see this city. No time for sketching, but much better wages and a strong trade union. The Sikh boy was a driver, and we became good friends. He would tell me not to get too worked up by racist abuse unless it was a passenger. Then I should stop the bus and we would throw him off. We did this sometimes, but got no support from any other passengers. They looked out of the window, pretending not to notice.

  ‘I began to look out of the window as well and ignore the abuse. I noticed there was always a long queue in one place on Charing Cross Road, and that some very beautiful young girls and handsome boys always got off the bus to join it. One day I asked one of the boys, and he explained they were art students queuing to paint nudes every Thursday, which is when the queue was longest. I asked if it was free. He looked at me strangely and nodded. This was a real discovery. In Soho they charged ten shillings to see nude women. On Charing Cross Road, just next door, it was free.

  ‘I was owed my holiday, so I took two weeks. On Thursday of the first week I bought a pair of denims and a nice jumper and joined the queue. Nobody questioned me. I walked behind a cute girl with a ponytail and sat at a desk just behind her. In front of me there stood an easel and a small tray full of pastels. As the naked model walked in, my heart started beating so fast I thought the others must be able to hear it. The model came to the front of the room and stood there, taking up different poses. Finally she lay down with her arms outstretched and the beard between her legs glistening. That was how she stayed, stark naked and in that pose for most of the two hours, with small breaks to stretch and drink tea that aroused me even more. I was the only person who appeared excited by the sight of her. She seemed so natural, unlike the naked women I’d seen in Soho. The others started painting. The teacher was looking at me looking at the model and I hurriedly picked up the pastels and began to sketch without thinking. After ten minutes there was a tap on my shoulder. It was the teacher.

  ‘“You have a very good eye for colour.”

  ‘This surprised me since the only colour I had used till then was grey, but I smiled and thanked her and hurriedly added other colours. That finished work is still at home. My first real piece of work. The teacher praised it. The other students congratulated me. That is how I became an artist. I forgot to say that the first time I saw that model’s body hair I imagined a mullah’s beard. And I saw the mullah’s face, but that is what I painted at home. My tiny bedroom was now also a studio. I carried on working on the buses for a few more years, but worked overtime at weekends and took Thursdays off till the teacher told me to go home and paint. I did not need a teacher anymore. One of the girls in my class had become a critic. We became lovers for a short time and some of the women in the mullah paintings are based on her. Another friend of hers is some big editor on the magazine that rang you. What are you going to write? Whatever you do, please don’t blow it up too much. No embroidery on the cloth. Just pure and simple; that’s usually more effective if you have something to say. If they need advertising copy they’ll hire someone.’

  ‘I’m useless at all that, Plato. I’ll just write what I feel. I hope it works for you. But there are some good critics here and I hope one of them likes it.’

  He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Believe me, Dara. I don’t care. There are five other people whose judgement I value. If they like my work, that’s enough for me.’

  ‘You have to make a living, Plato.’

  ‘That is a disgusting sentence. At our table in Lahore you would have been asked to leave for a few days. Please withdraw it immediately.’

  I did, but I was worried about him. At the time he was working as a security guard for a warehouse, and that meant a night shift and wearing a uniform, but all this amused him. When I asked why he had changed his name, he smiled.

  ‘I was told by the girls that Plato sounded ridiculous and pretentious in the West.’

  I disagreed. Why not Aflatun in that case? But he had made up his mind, and it was as Shah Pervaiz Shah that I wrote of him and introduced him to a documentary filmmaker. She wanted to take him back to Lahore and Ludhiana, whence he had made the bus journey etched in his psyche, but Plato wasn’t agreeable to returning anywhere. He refused. Flummoxed by his obstinacy, she ended up making a twenty-minute documentary based on a brief interview and his paintings. A serious art critic reviewed them for the film and it was shown on a well-established arts programme. Plato may have bound himself by the strongest possible vows to resist the passions of the marketplace, but I think even he was pleased by the impact of his first exhibition. The etchings and the mullah paintings all went quickly, and Plato, for the first time in his life, found himself with a healthy bank balance.

  With the help of his new friends and admirers, he found an artist’s apartment near Hogarth’s roundabout on the busy road to the airport in West London. Now he felt oppressed by too much space. It was too grand for him. He paced up and down all the time, watching the traffic go by, but he couldn’t work. He moved back to North London and bought a ground-floor three-room flat in Kilburn. One of the rooms was huge and had French windows that opened into a garden with a crumbling wall and a few apple trees. All this became precious to Plato. He seemed happy whenever I saw him but far from any illusions of being successful in the traditional sense and still prone to fits of a melancholy that went so deep that it frightened me. He really had been carefree in Lahore. The past had been repressed in those early years. He never talked about it, but it had returned to haunt him in middle age. Or had there been something back then, too, that I had completely missed? He was surrounded by women these days, and that was certainly a step forward. In Lahore he had always been lonely and had rebuffed all questions referring to his sexuality, unusual in a city where different parts of one’s anatomy were proudly worn on one’s sleeve.

  He had three more exhibitions over the next few years. I went and bought some of his work. His style had changed. The mullah with exposed genitals and a nude on either arm had given way to imagined landscapes with surreal beasts and mermaids. Always mermaids. I didn’t like them at all. What was going on his head? I might never have known had I not received a phone call from Alice Stepford, a feminist art critic and painter who loathed being referred to as a feminist painter. There is no such thing, she would say. I had met her with Plato and assumed they were together in the way people were without actually sharing the same accommodations. I never questioned hi
m about her. It was obvious he adored her. What she said about his work mattered a great deal to him, and even when she was scathing he tended to agree with her and dump the work. I warned him once, gently, against becoming too dependent on her whims. That she didn’t like all of his paintings was no reason to destroy any of them.

  In return for this unwanted and unwelcome advice he gifted me with one of his old exercise books containing a slightly boring sex story set in ancient Egypt that he had written himself and illustrated with paintings of ancient males with multiple penises engaged in endeavours of various kinds. It did make me smile, but Alice Stepford hated it, and, to be fair, I could understand her reasoning. He could not bring himself to destroy the book, which is why it remains in my possession. On hearing that I was slightly mystified by the present, he said.

  ‘Look at the painting of the priest with three penises. Look at them closely.’

  I did so and realized that all three organs were depictions in various sizes of the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak. Somehow, that made them really disgusting. I managed a weak laugh.

  Alice Stepford had rung to invite me to her studio for lunch, saying, ‘Today, please, if possible.’ It was possible and I motored over to the address in SW3, assuming that Plato would be present. Her Chelsea studio was a revelation, a bit too tasteful for a bohemian pad. Lunch was served soon after I arrived, and Alice wasted no time in sharing her concerns with me. Our conversation turned out to be extremely serious and I was touched by her intensity. Not that it prevented me from wondering what her breasts might be like underneath her sweater, and that was before she uncorked a bottle of Château Lafite and decanted it with an apologetic smile.

  ‘My only weakness apart from painting. Stolen from Daddy’s cellar last weekend.’

  Daddy was Lord Stepford, whose forebears had fought on the wrong side during the Civil War—and he had three beautiful daughters, two of whom were married to their milieu. Alice was the family bohemian, and when she informed her parents that her boyfriend was an Indian bus conductor who was trying to paint she had received a terrible missive from Stepford, who was old-fashioned on the subject of mixed marriages. The letter made it clear that while he did not care who she saw in her own time, he absolutely forbade her to soil the family name by marrying a Hottentot, an Eskimo, a Negro, a Chinaman, a Nip or a Wop and certainly never a jumped-up Indian, let alone a Paki. Plato saw the letter and laughed. He had no thought of marriage and suggested she tell Daddy that she was safe, but Alice was livid. She wrote back asking whether her father was aware that she had been invited to exhibit her work in Sydney and Wellington. And if he was, why had the Maoris and aboriginals been excluded from his otherwise comprehensive ban? He wrote back immediately. When he compiled the list he had assumed that even she would exclude cannibals as potential husbands. Her mother tried to make up by suggesting Alice bring ‘your Indian’ home one weekend. Alice impolitely declined the offer.

  All this I knew, but why were we having lunch? She described her affection for Plato, which was no surprise, but there was clearly a problem.

  ‘Can I rely on your eternal discretion, Dara? Please don’t tell him about this, but I thought you might be able to help.’

  Till now, nobody in my whole life had ever asked me, leave alone with such soft eyes and pouting lips, whether they could rely on my discretion. I was so touched by her trust that I pledged total secrecy and help whenever and however it was needed. The wine, too, was delicious. The hours were gliding by.

  What emerged was that she had been seeing Plato for more than two years. They had painted each other naked. They had sported with each other, but not too seriously, and he had, she now told me, always kept his penis safe from her touch and she had only seen it flaccid. I was seriously taken aback.

  ‘And there I was, so glad that everything had turned out so well for both of you. Work, love and sex in the same space. Purest joy.’

  ‘No. Definitely not.’

  Not once had Plato wanted or attempted to make love to her. All her attempts had been rebuffed. This worried her. It worried me too.

  ‘What is it with him, Dara? Am I that unattractive? It can’t be a religious inhibition, can it? Or is he gay? If so, I wish to bloody God he would just tell me and we could all relax.’

  I was desperate to relax, but the news had stunned me. What the hell was wrong with Plato? Was there someone else?

  ‘You don’t think he’s gone religious?’

  ‘Can’t be religion, Ally. That would be good for you. Islam is truly sensuous. Men who let women down by staying down themselves are considered worse than heretics and unbelievers like me. No, definitely not religion. Could he be gay? It would have been impossible to keep that a secret in Lahore. We would have known. Let me make a few ultra-discreet inquiries and get back to you.’

  ‘Will you, Dara? I’d be so grateful. This is so bad for one’s self-esteem.’

  We finished the bottle, and while she made coffee I inspected her books and paintings and peeped into her bedroom, where Plato had let the side down very badly.

  ‘Would you like some cognac with your coffee?’

  ‘I like your paintings very much. Surprised me. I thought they would be ...’

  ‘More didactic.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Glad you like them. I always feel that financial considerations sometimes necessitate bad art. Never found that tempting and nor does your friend. Affinities.’

  ‘True. But it’s always worth remembering that fine sentiments do not automatically produce good work, either.’

  ‘Do you think melancholy can be contagious? Is it possible that if a friend is depressed you can feel depressed too, even at a distance?’

  ‘Only if the friendship is so deep that a part of it is repressed.’

  She agreed strongly. We looked at each other and it was obvious to both of us what the next step would be. Nor did we let each other down. As the enjoyable afternoon was coming to an end and I was putting my clothes back on, I asked whether she still wanted me to head an unofficial inquiry to uncover Plato’s secret.

  ‘Yes, please. I mean I should know, don’t you think?’

  I was hoping she had moved on already, but hurt egos require nursing. I promised to have a report ready soon. She said she sorely needed my advice as to how she should proceed with Plato. I suggested that given the failure to establish physical contact, a close working friendship might be more appropriate. She nodded eagerly.

  ‘And can we have lots of lunches together, Dara?’

  ‘That is a much simpler request and easy to fulfil.’

  But this is Plato’s story, not mine, and all temptation to describe the idyllic year I spent with Ally Stepford must be resisted. I thought Plato might be more inclined to share confidences in our mother tongue, so I rang him a few weeks later, and we repaired, as usual, to Drummond Street. It was he who began the inquisition.

  ‘Are you fucking Ally Stepford?’

  This straightforward question sounds so crude in Punjabi that even my well-conditioned ears rebelled. I reprimanded him without answering his question. He rephrased it.

  ‘Did her eyes bewitch you? Was it lust at first sight? Was it her paintings or her apartment? Tell me, dear friend. What really attracted you?’

  I decided to answer in the affirmative. It was pointless to lie, but I twisted my response so as to force him on to the defensive.

  ‘Yes, I am seeing her and for none of those foolish reasons, but there were no divided loyalties, Plato. She told me you weren’t lovers at all, not even on a spiritual level. I wasn’t sure whether to believe her or not. Was she lying just to reassure me, or is it true?’

  An embarrassingly long silence followed, and a remorseful look replacing the earlier anger on his face.

  ‘What is it, Plato? Is there someone else?’

  ‘What she said is true. I’ve never told anyone else this before, but I think you should know.’

  I thou
ght this would be a declaration of his coming out and breathed a sigh of relief.

  ‘I’m impotent, Dara. Always have been. My alif won’t stand to attention. It won’t take the meem. It’s never erect. Unlike the sun, I never rise. Understand?’

  How could I not, but I was nonetheless stunned since this contradicted so many earlier stories. I recalled some of the ingénue’s tales we had heard in Lahore. Were they all duplicitous? Or had the fantasy trapped him to such an extent that he found it difficult to back out?

  ‘But Plato, you described your visits to the strip joints and how this was all because you needed a memory enhancer when you masturbated.’

  ‘I did tell you that, and it was true, except that I could never jerk off. I have never had an erection.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell Ally?’

  ‘I was embarrassed. I thought it would disturb her tranquillity.’

  ‘Not telling her disturbed her tranquillity a great deal more. Have I your permission to tell her?’

  He became thoughtful. ‘Okay, but please stick to the facts. Don’t make the story more salty or spicy.’

  ‘I won’t. She’ll feel reassured and will be very sympathetic. She’s a good person. Have you ever thought of seeing an analyst?’

  ‘Greedy charlatans all of them and with very dirty, one-track minds.’

  ‘Plato, be reasonable. You sound like a Punjabi rustic. Not all of them are like that. Let me find a good one for you. If it works, your life could change. If it doesn’t, you certainly won’t be worse off than you are now. The impotence may be psychological, and if so it can be cured. It may well be linked to the horrors of Partition. You were fifteen at the time. So those memories stayed. You saw women being raped and killed. You owe it to yourself to see a good analyst. Tell me something. Before Partition, did you have any experiences in the village?’