Night of the Golden Butterfly

by Tariq Ali

  Celebdom is the summit of ambition today and is pursued at whatever cost. It’s a world peopled by actors and sportsmen and a few writers and certain politicians who are devoid of any principle except an insensate obsession with multiplying their wealth and fame. Their marketing and publicity advisers work overtime to ensure that our leaders get enough exposure on celebrity talk shows or in the company of other suitable celebs. The appeal of reality television lies in its insistence that anyone can become A-list overnight. Fellini’s brilliant parody of the jet-setter’s world in La Dolce Vita has been superseded, but in ways that would not have surprised him in the least.

  Naughty’s example was a single case in point. Who can blame her for being seduced by the glitter and the cash, when others a hundred times more intelligent and already multimillionaires in their own right were just as desperate to be known to a larger world? This, I suggested to Henri, was the book he should really be commissioning, with the interview as an appendix published in the public interest.

  Henri waged guerrilla war against the spirit of the age. He had published stinging essays on the political culture of his own country, some of them written by him. Now he agreed that this was the best way to publish the book, as a combination of polemic and oral history. Both parts should be exactly the same length to emphasize their interdependence, and which came first could be decided later. Zaynab was not convinced. The interview had to be the heart of the book, and the rest an introduction or an epilogue. There was no changing her mind on this structure. She won the argument. It had turned out to be a convivial and productive evening after all.

  Once we were alone, Zaynab’s customary curiosity took charge. She wanted every detail of the Richmond conversations. To her annoyance I would provide only a bare summary. But Neelam’s role in the saga of Naughty’s rise surprised both of us, and confirmed my impression of her as a warm-hearted and intelligent person, not unlike her mother.

  Zaynab had begun to miss Fatherland. The memory of Plato had become blended with all the other events in her life. She wanted to see how he had left the painting that she had seen in its early stages and disliked. She had found and kept a scrap of Plato’s writing, a diary entry or memo. It was unheard of for Plato to write, so this must have been about something he wanted to paint at some stage.

  Weak Smile: A short talk with I. M. Malik, March 2001.

  Malik came with paintings because I refused to go to his neat, tidy studio that I’ve always hated. There we used to crowd into the middle of the room, and he would light the place with five huge spotlights and display his paintings. Most of them were examples of bad landscape art: mountain streams with a deer watching from above, pine trees and hills with monkeys, portraits of the famous and the rich and copies of countless other paintings that already existed. I stopped going and when he rang I asked him to bring his new wares to my place. He wanted an honest opinion. Malik was an intelligent critic and I always wondered how someone like him who understood other people’s work extremely well had so few insights into his own art. His admirers, and there were many, claimed that his finest work had been done in pre-Partition Lahore in the 1940s, when the city was known as the Paris of the East and intellectual and artistic life had peaked. What use was all that now?

  Before I let him open his case I said, Malik, if they’re money-makers, let’s not waste time. He cursed me and insisted they were good and wanted me to see one in particular. I agreed, looked at it. Really bad. Purely decorative and would probably grace some wall in a vulgar mansion in Defence. He looked at me. I smiled weakly. He said, ‘I know you think it’s ridiculous.’ He waited for my response. I managed another weak smile. ‘You don’t like it?’ Finally I said, ‘No. It’s a very bad painting.’ He got angry. ‘The trouble with you is that you enjoy being out of harmony with the times.’

  I replied: ‘An artist should never be in harmony with the times even if they accord with his beliefs. An artist must always look ahead, live on the edge. Otherwise art would become predictable.’

  ‘You think all my paintings are bad?’

  ‘No. Some of the earlier ones were good. Very good.’

  ‘You’ve always spoken the truth. Like a true friend.’ I did not say anything, which was a mistake because it encouraged him.

  ‘My last painting sold for fifty thousand dollars in Miami. I am a painter in residence in different countries each year. I’ve won six prizes. My new work is not as bad as you think.’

  I smiled weakly.

  This was the inner core of Plato, and the memory moistened my eyes. I remembered his weak smile well. He hated pretentiousness in any form. Even at our table in the college café in Lahore all those years ago, if anybody started quoting couplets from the poets to emphasize a point, a habit common to many in that city, Plato would smile weakly, wait till they’d finished, and his sarcastic one-liner would follow. Why did he have to die? Zaynab came and sat on my lap. She was missing him too.

  ‘Don’t go back just yet,’ I pleaded as I stroked her face. ‘Fatherland is at its most dangerous at the moment. Incessant troubles and unparalleled violence, and your brother is a senior government minister.’

  She promised to think about it, but I knew she wanted to leave Paris for a while without moving to London. I was beginning to understand her changes of mood and her capriciousness. She was feeling restless. Where did she want to go? She didn’t know, but I could decide. Did she like the sea? Only if it was wild. Not to swim in but just to walk along the beach watching the fury of the waves. I explained gently that this would be torture for me. To be near a sea one cannot enter is like being married to the Koran. She laughed, signalling a change of mood.

  ‘OK. A sea you can swim in and I can watch.’

  ‘Zaynab, can you swim?’

  Her face disappeared behind her hands.

  ‘You can learn.’

  ‘Too late.’

  ‘We’re going where there’s a teaching pool and the sea. I’ll teach you and it won’t take long. It would be one thing if the Koran fell in the water, but if I got cramps I’d need you to swim.’

  A week before we were to leave for Greece, there was an agitated phone call from Henri.

  ‘Switch on the news. I’m on my way.’

  Naughty was dead. Her face was being displayed on every channel. She had disappeared from home two days ago. Her former husband and sons had alerted the police, since her passport and belongings had been left at home. The boys, both in their late teens, beardless and wearing T-shirts and denims, were shown weeping copiously. Their father, in uniform, looked drawn and stressed. Her body had been found that day, hacked to pieces and stored in a sack. The police chief told reporters that the killers were probably surprised at their work, or they would have burned the body.

  Tears poured down Zaynab’s cheeks as she watched the news footage. Yet another medieval episode in Fatherland, but this was not a religious murder. That much was obvious to anyone who knew the place. Had it been carried out by a hard-core Islamist network they would have filmed the murder and distributed the video as a warning to others who might be tempted down the same path as poor Naughty. Henri arrived and was clearly agitated. For him the real killers were those who had recruited her to their cause, but before he could expand on this, Zaynab interrupted him. ‘Henri, I know the country well. This is not a political murder carried out by religious fanatics. It feels like something else, I don’t know what, but they will find out. With three generals in the picture as her lovers, military intelligence will want answers.’

  Henri was now convinced that Zaynab’s interview with Naughty should be published on its own, with the voice tapes made available to the media. The global networks had been giving the story of her murder massive coverage, strongly hinting that it was a punishment killing by some terrorist group angered by the success of her book in the West. Colonel Lateef, her former husband, had adopted this refrain on every news channel. The boys, unabashed at meeting the gaze of so many curious journal
ists, told Fatherlandi television that if the police were unable to track the killers, they, as her sons, would avenge their mother’s death. Nobody thought it fitting to inquire what exactly they meant. Meanwhile posters of the martyred Madame Auratpasand appeared on billboards in every European capital, and T-shirts with her image made an appearance in the duty-free shops at Fatherlandi airports. All that was missing was Detectives without Borders to enter the country and nail the killers.

  While this tsunami of emotion and hysteria was drowning other stories in the mediasphere, Editions Montmorency, in a sharply worded press release, announced the Auratpasand interview book. This unleashed a new barrage of interest, but Henri was not prepared to sell serialization rights even though the offers came in millions. He was an old-fashioned publisher and wanted the book to be the only point of reference. The market vindicated his decision. Advance orders in France reached the hundred thousand mark.

  In the face of all this, the police chief in Isloo maintained a calm dignity, and the immobility of his facial expression became the subject of bitter comment in much of the global media. Given such a fearful tragedy, how come the chief investigator showed no emotion? Were Fatherland’s police indifferent to the crime?

  Then, exactly two weeks after the outrage, the unjustly traduced Isloo police called a press conference at 8.30 am that was relayed live on local networks and fed directly to Al Jazeera, CNN and BBC World. There was a stunned silence when the much-maligned policeman, in a calm and still emotionless voice, began to speak.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen. Early this morning we made three arrests. Colonel Lateef and his two sons, Ahmed Lateef and Asif Lateef, have been charged with first-degree murder and are in police custody. The Fatherland Army has authorized me to say that Colonel Lateef has been stripped of his rank and cashiered. He is no longer regarded as a serving officer and can be tried as a civilian. I have nothing more to add at this stage.’

  Since there was worldwide interest in the affair, the impeccable behaviour of the Isloo police surprised and pleased most people in Fatherland. None of the three accused was tortured. The evidence was circumstantial, but deadly. Naughty had signed three separate cheques for a million dollars each to the three men, but even though her account was in her new name, Yasmine Auratpasand, she had signed them Khalida Lateef. Asif Lateef later admitted that when he questioned his mother regarding the discrepancy, she had sworn on the Koran that this was the only signature the bank would accept. They believed her, but she turned out to be cleverer than all of them. Had she perhaps suspected the foul play they had planned? Their mistake cost them their lives. Asif Lateef told the court the murder had been planned as an honour killing. Their mother had disgraced them with too many men. They had invited her back purely in order to despatch her.

  ‘In that case’, asked a judge, ‘why were you so interested in the money? You were her only children, so you would have inherited it automatically. Since your guilt is no longer in doubt, it is in your interest to speak the truth.’

  But the sons would not implicate their father. His version was that he came home and saw they had killed her, and since they were his sons he felt obliged to help them. Police evidence contradicted that story. Three different knives had been used. All three were found in the sack, and the fingerprints of Colonel Lateef had been identified on one of them. Why had they killed her so brutally? The colonel had rifles and two pistols in the house. A single shot would have sufficed. Once again, it was Asif who provided the explanation. All three had to kill her, and this was the simplest way. A bullet was too quick. They wanted to punish her for the shame she had brought on the family. The judgement was delivered promptly and the sentence was carried out the following week. All three men were hanged.

  The saturation coverage given to the murder, of course, contradicted all earlier speculation, but memories are short in the West. Inconvenient truths can be brushed off any fiction. When Editions Montmorency published the interview book with an acerbic introduction by Henri, it was virtually ignored. Despite not being reviewed in the bulk of the media, the first edition of book sold over two hundred thousand copies, and foreign rights were bought like hot gulab jamuns at the Istanbul Book Fair, where Henri had organized an auction.

  A few radio stations played extracts from the tape, and that was the sum total of on-air publicity. Jean-Pierre Bertrand was nowhere to be seen. The celebrities who had clustered around Naughty in Paris and New York did not wish to be associated with her after her death.

  Madame Zaynab Shah was referred to in Marianne as an oral historian, which was news to everyone except me. The book appeared in English, but the New York friends of Diderot chose to ignore its presence. It did not receive a single review, but, as in Paris, sales were brisk. What surprised us all was that Naughty had made a will before returning to Fatherland. In the case of her death, her sons would inherit her apartment in Paris and everything else. If, for whatever reason, including predeceasing her, this was impossible, her entire estate was bequeathed to Editions Montmorency, with the stipulation that they produce three titles a year that were translations from Punjabi.

  I was surprised and pleased to receive a phone call from Neelam. ‘Just got back from Beijing and heard about Mrs Lateef. Then I got a copy of the book. It’s a very good interview. Please congratulate Zaynab khala from me. What an awful end to her life. You know it was I who taught her some basic English.’

  I told Neelam of my meeting with Naughty and how she had told me the same thing and had sung Neelam’s praises and expressed remorse for having helped to wreck her marriage.

  ‘Let’s forget that now, Uncle Dara. Allah’s will must be done. The good news is that Mom and I are friends again after almost fifteen years. I told her you stayed at our house and praised the coffee even when I had asked you not to. It pleased her a great deal. When are you visiting Isloo? Soon, I hope.’

  Slowly everything was falling into place, some of it in the most gruesome fashion possible and some of it in a way that restored a degree of tranquillity to friends and their children. What would become of Zaynab? I had few doubts that our love and friendship, as pleasant and restorative as it had been, could not last too long. I had books to write. She wanted to build an art museum in Sind where ancient and modern works might be shown together. Mohenjo-Daro on the ground floor, Plato near the top. She had talked about this a great deal, reigniting my old fascination with Mohenjo-Daro and the civilization of which the city had been a part in 3600 BCE. Replicas of its stern-faced priests and exquisitely shaped dancing girls are looking down at me from a bookshelf as I write these words. I’d always thought of writing a novel set in that period in the region, but events had intervened and finally the back burner itself had collapsed. Was it time to revive the project? Perhaps, if only to demonstrate that sanitation and the distribution of food was more advanced then than it is in Fatherland today.

  Zaynab knew the state museums were badly funded, run by corrupt bureaucrats, and that as a result many artefacts were already in Western museums or private collections. She was determined to build her own museum. She pressed me repeatedly to become its director, but I could not be part of this project. I could not replace Plato in her life. I told her so and she hugged me tight, but made no attempt to convince me otherwise. We both knew that it was time to move on, and although our friendship was secure for ever, when we would next meet and what we would do were questions that could not be answered. On one issue alone was she intransigent. We had to see Plato’s last painting together. On this there was no dispute.

  ‘Your initial instincts were correct, Zaynab,’ Henri told her at dinner the evening Naughty’s will was made public. ‘She was not a complete monster. Part victim, part monster. That is what this world does to people. Dara, what should we do to thank her for the bequest? A Yasmine Auratpasand Prize sounds exploitative and false.’

  ‘Let me think.’

  Late that night I did think, and while Zaynab was sleeping peacefully, I thought t
hat a school for girls in the village where she was born, and in her real name, to avoid stupid publicity, might be a possible solution, with scholarships for study abroad guaranteed for the top two students each year. Both Henri and Zaynab agreed. Zaynab would speak to her brother to expedite matters. Henri would talk to a friend on how best to invest the money for such a purpose. Meanwhile a Punjabi list had to be organized for Henri’s publishing house, and I promised to suggest six books for it: three classics and three modern novels.

  ‘I wish we could simply call it Naughty School for Girls,’ said Zaynab with a gleam in her eyes after Henri had left. ‘But I fear that might be misunderstood by some of our bearded friends.’

  SEVENTEEN

  DEAR DARA, I’VE ATTACHED Jindié’s report, as promised, on her first three months in Beijing and a trip to Yunnan. I’m now quite hopeful that all will be well in the long run. Remember that song you and Jindié would play all the time when you visited our house: Muddy Waters singing ‘Everything’s Gonna Be All Right’? The music of my life is more organized than that, but I’m singing again. The attachment accompanying this e-mail I have been compelled to edit, since it would fill a book on its own, and so I have left out long descriptions of Beijing, a satirical account—whose ferocity both surprised and delighted me—of Jindié’s visit to the Ethnic Culture Theme Park, entered from a detour off the Fourth Ring Road, of which road, too, she has much to say. Jindié’s daily impressions of Beijing and her lyrical description of Dali and Yunnan deserve to be and will, no doubt, be published on their own, though not in the National Geographic, since there is not a trace of exoticism in what she writes. Without altering or adorning the simple style of her prose, I have merely shortened the text to concentrate on the development of the characters we already know and the appearance of others necessary to our story.