Five steps is the regulation distance between the parade commander and the guest of honour inspecting the parade and nobody can change that. I tried throwing the sword. It did pierce the chin but throwing the sword is not a possibility. You can’t do that with a live target because if you miss, then you are left standing there empty-handed. Not that I could afford to miss. Not that I was going to be given a best-of-three-type chance.
I knew what the problem was. It wasn’t the distance. It wasn’t the fact that my target would be moving; the problem was the relationship between my hand as it wielded the sword and the sword itself. These were two different entities. Through practice I could improve my hand–eye coordination, I could make them work together better but sadly that wasn’t enough. My arm and the sword needed to become one. The muscles in my tendon had to merge with the molecules that made up the sword. I needed to wield it like it was an extension of my arm. As Bannon had pointed out again and again in our knife-throwing sessions, I needed to work on my sentiment du fer.
It was time to look for the sentiment of steel within myself.
I took off my sword belt and lay down on the bed with my shoes on and stared and stared at the two small circles on the towel and did Total Detachment, an exercise of my own invention. It’s a slow exercise and few have the mental stamina required to do it because it involves complete abandonment of your thoughts and total control of your muscles. I was able to master it during that holiday when Colonel Shigri sought forgiveness for his sins over the Quran during the day, then plotted his next foray into Afghanistan over Scotch in the evenings. I had a lot of time at my hands.
Starting with my scalp, Total Detachment works its way towards my toes. I contract, hold, and let go my muscles, knot by knot, while the rest of my body stays unaware; both anticipation and longing are counterproductive.
It’s not in the muscles. The sentiment of steel is all in the head. The sword should feel your will through the tips of your fingers.
Obaid was surprised to find me in uniform on his return. I ignored his account of The Guns of Navarone, produced a black leather eyepatch cut out of my old drill boot and asked him to wear it. For once he didn’t ask me any questions, nor did he make any show-off-Shigri jokes. He didn’t say a word when I drew the curtains and switched all the lights off one by one.
He did speak up when he heard the buckle of my sword belt click. ‘I hope you know what you are doing.’ I switched the table lamp on, took out a bottle of white boot polish and dipped the tip of my sword in it. Obaid kept looking at me as if I was growing horns right in front of him but he had the good sense not to speak. ‘OK, Baby O. You can move all you want but if you want to keep using both your eyes stay as still as you can. And yes I know what I am doing. Save your lecture for later.’
I flicked the table lamp off. I walked towards Obaid and stood very close to him, I could smell cardamom on his breath. That was his idea of good oral hygiene and he always carried a few green pods in his pocket. I marched backwards. One, two, three, four, five steps. I put my right hand on the sword hilt, held the scabbard straight and steady with my left. In the darkness the sword caught the moonlight filtering from the slit in a curtain and it glinted for a moment. That’s how it would happen on the day, if there are no clouds, I thought. But what I thought was irrelevant. The command had communicated itself from my mind to the tendons in my forearm and the dead molecules in the sword metal were alive and my will was the tip of the sword that found the middle of the leather patch. I put the sword back in the scabbard and asked Obaid to turn on the light. When Obaid turned around after flicking the light switch, I saw the little white dot in the middle of the black eyepatch on his right eye. My shoulder muscles sagged with satisfaction. Obaid came and stood in front of me, flipped his eyepatch and extended his tongue, offering me the half-chewed cardamom shell: a green fly on the red velvety tip of his tongue. I took it and put it in my mouth, savouring its sweet smell. The bitter seeds had already been eaten by him.
He came forward and put his hands on my shoulders. I stiffened. He put his lips close to my ear and said, ‘How can you be so sure?’
‘It’s in the blood,’ I say, taking out a white hankie from my pocket to polish the tip of the sword. ‘If you ever found your father swinging from a ceiling fan, you would know.’
‘We know someone who can find out,’ he said with his chin on my shoulder. I could feel the heat from his cheek.
‘I don’t trust him. And what am I going to say? “Officer Bannon, can you use your connections to shed light on the circumstances of the tragic demise of a certain Colonel Shigri who might or might not have worked for the CIA, and who might or might not have killed himself?”’
‘You have to start somewhere.’
I wiped the tip of the sword vigorously one last time before putting it in the scabbard.
‘I am not starting anything. I am looking for an ending here.’
He brought his lips to my ear again and whispered, ‘Sometimes there is a blind spot right under your gaze.’ His cardamom breath raged like the waves of a sweet sea in my ears.
* * *
I must have dozed off because when I wake up, the shock of being in the dark is new and someone is trying to prod the back of my head with what seems to be a brick. My initial reaction is that the pitch dark is trick-fucking my brains and I am inventing imaginary company. I close my eyes again and put the back of my head on the same spot on the wall and again it gets a little push from the brick. I turn around and trace the outline of the brick with my fingers. It is protruding half an inch from the wall. As I am tracing its outline, with a heart that desperately wants to believe in miracles, the brick moves again. It’s being pushed from the other side. I put my hand on it and gently push it back. This time, it’s pushed towards me more forcefully. The brick is now jutting halfway out from the wall. I hold onto it and gently ease it out of the wall, hoping for the cell to be flooded with light, with birdsong. Nothing happens. It’s still as dark as the Mughals intended it to be. I squeeze my hand into the gap, my fingers touch another brick. I prod at it and the brick moves, I give it a little push, it disappears. Still not even a flicker of light. I can feel human breath held at the other end, then gently released. I hear a giggle, a well-formed, deliberate, throaty man’s giggle.
The giggle stops and a whisper comes through the hole in the wall; a casual whisper as if we are two courtiers in the Court for the Commons in the Fort, waiting for Akbar the Great to arrive.
‘Are you hurting?’
The voice asks me this as if enquiring about the temperature in my cell.
‘No,’ I say. I don’t know why I sound so emphatic but I do. ‘Not at all. Are you?’
The giggle returns. Some nut they put in here and forgot, I tell myself.
‘Keep your brick safe. You will put it back when I tell you to. You can tell them anything about me but not about this.’
‘Who are you?’ I ask without bothering to put my face near the hole. My voice echoes in the dungeon and the darkness suddenly comes alive, a womb full of possibilities.
‘Calm down,’ he whispers back intensely. ‘Speak in the hole.’
‘What are you here for? What’s your name?’ I whisper, with half my face in the hole.
‘I am not so stupid that I’d give you my name. This place is full of spies.’
I wait for him to say more. I shift my position and put my ear in the hole. I wait. He speaks after a long pause. ‘But I can tell you why I am here.’
I keep quiet and wait for him to read me his charge sheet, but he stays quiet, perhaps needing encouragement from me.
‘I’m listening,’ I say.
‘For killing General Zia,’ he says.
Bloody civilians, I want to shout in his face. Major Kiyani has done it deliberately, thrown me into a king-sized grave and given me a crazy civilian for a neighbour and created a channel of communication. This is probably his idea of torture for people from good families.
‘Really?’ I say with the famous Shigri sneer. ‘You didn’t do a very good job of it. I spoke to him two days ago and he sounded very alive to me.’
For a civilian his response is very measured.
‘So are you his personal guest? What did you do to deserve this honour?’
‘I am from the armed forces. There’s been a misunderstanding.’
I can tell he is impressed because he is quiet for a long time.
‘You’re not lying?’ he says, his voice half-question, half-bewilderment.
‘I am still in uniform,’ I say, stating the fact but it sounds like an attempt to reassure myself.
‘Put your face in front of the hole, I want to see you.’
I put my face in the hole and whisper excitedly. ‘You got a light?’ If he has got a light, he might have a cigarette as well.
I am stunned when the spit hits my eye, too stunned even to respond in kind. By the time I come up with ‘What the fuck?’, he has shoved the brick back in the hole and I am left rubbing my eye and feeling like an idiot, spat on by someone whose name I don’t know, whose face I haven’t seen.
What did I say? I get up in anger and start to pace up and down the room, my feet already know when to stop and turn. I try to remember my last words to him. All I told him was that I am still wearing my uniform. I thought civilians loved our uniforms. There are songs on the radio, and dramas on television and special editions of newspapers celebrating this uniform. There are hundreds of thousands of ladies out there waiting to hand their phone number to someone in uniform. My civilian neighbour is probably suffering from an extreme case of jealousy.
How the hell am I supposed to know about civilians or what they think? All I know about them is from television or newspapers. On Pakistan National Television they are always singing our praises. The only newspaper that we get in the Academy is the Pakistan Times which on any given day has a dozen pictures of General Zia, and the only civilians who figure in it are the ones lining up to pay their respects to him. They never tell you about the nutters who want to spit at you.
I hear the brick scrape against the other bricks. I hear the low whistle from the hole in the wall. I think of replacing my own brick in the wall and turning my loneliness into solitude, as Obaid used to say. But my neighbour is in a communicative mood. I put my ear on the side of the hole, making sure that no part of my face is in his line of attack.
‘Are you going to apologise?’ he whispers, obviously taunting me.
‘For what?’ I ask casually, without putting my face to the hole in the wall, without bothering to lower my voice.
‘Shh. You’ll get us killed,’ he says furiously. ‘You guys put me here.’
‘Who are we guys?’
‘The khakis. The army people.’
‘But I am from the air force,’ I say, trying to create a wedge between the nation’s firmly united armed forces.
‘What’s the difference? You guys have wings? You guys have balls?’
I decide to ignore his jibes and try to have a proper conversation with him. I want to give him a chance to prove that he is not a complete civilian nutcase before I slam the brick in his face.
‘How long have you been here?’
‘Since two days before you people hanged Prime Minister Bhutto.’
I ignore his attempt to implicate me in crimes that I have clearly not committed. ‘What did you do?’
‘Have you heard of the All Pakistan Sweepers Union?’ I can tell from the pride in his voice that he expects me to know it, but I don’t, because I have no interest in the politics of this profession, if cleaning the gutters can be called a profession at all.
‘Of course. The body that represents the janitors.’
‘I am the Secretary General,’ he says, as if that explains everything, from the Mughal architecture of this dungeon to his irrational hatred for his fellow countrymen in uniform.
‘So what did you do? Not clean the gutters properly?’
He ignores my joke and says in a grave tone, ‘They have charged me with plotting to kill General Zia.’
That makes two of us then, I should say, but I can’t really trust this guy. What if he is one of those moles planted by Major Kiyani to gain my confidence? But Major Kiyani’s men would not have either the imagination or the stomach to play the part of a sweepers’ union member.
‘Were you plotting to kill him? How were you going to do it?’
‘Our central committee sent an invitation to General Zia to inaugurate National Cleanliness Week. I was opposed to inviting him because his coup d’état was a historic setback for the workers’ struggle against the nationalist bourgeoisie. It’s all on record. You can read my objections in the minutes of the meeting. The intelligence agencies infiltrated our union, our Maoist friends betrayed us and formed a parallel central committee and invited General Zia. Then his security people found a bomb in the gutter that he was supposed to sweep to inaugurate Cleanliness Week. Look at how the fauji minds work. I was the one opposed to inviting him. I didn’t want him anywhere near our gutters and who was the first person your people arrested? Me.’
‘So did you plant a bomb?’ I ask.
‘Every member of the Pakistan Sweepers’ Union believes in political struggle,’ he says grandly, closing the subject.
We both stay silent for a while and somehow the place seems even darker.
‘Why would anyone want to kill him?’ I ask. ‘I think he’s very popular. I have seen his picture on trucks and buses.’
‘The problem with you khakis is that you have started believing your own nonsense.’
I don’t answer him. I realise that he is a bloody civilian but of a kind that I haven’t met before. He chuckles and starts to speak in a nostalgic tone. ‘You know what they tried with our union before collaborating with the Maoists?’
‘No,’ I say, tired of pretending to know things that I don’t have a clue about.
‘They tried to infiltrate it with mullahs like they have done with every single trade union. They even tried to hijack Cleanliness Week with their slogan: Cleanliness is half the faith.’ He starts to laugh.
‘So what?’ I really don’t get the joke. That slogan is written on half the public lavatories in Pakistan, not that anyone cares, but then no one finds it funny either.
‘All the sweepers are either Hindus or Christians. And you people thought you could send in your hired mullahs and break our union.’
The image of bearded ones trying to infiltrate the ranks of the nation’s sweeping community. OK, not a very bright idea.
‘But let me tell you something that I would never say in public,’ he says in an intense low whisper. ‘The Maoists are probably worse than the mullahs.’
‘Look, I know you are the Secretary General and all, but do you really believe that Zia and his generals are sitting there worrying about how to break the power of the janitors? I’m sure you are far too intelligent to believe that.’
Maybe it’s my patronising tone that sends him into a silence followed by an angry outburst.
‘You are a part of the reactionary bourgeois establishment which has never understood the dialectics of our history. I came this close to bringing down the government.’
I wish I could see him. Suddenly he sounds old and cranky and full of ideas that I don’t understand.
‘We called a strike. Do you remember the 1979 strike by the All Pakistan Sweepers Union? Of course you wouldn’t know. The sweepers in your cantonments are not allowed to join unions. And in three days the rubbish piles were mountain-high and all the gutters were clogged and your civilian bourgeois brothers had to carry their own rubbish to the dumps.’
I want to interrupt him and ask him how that is different from when the sweepers are not on strike, but I hear a scraping sound on my dungeon’s door.
I am quite amazed at the speed and accuracy with which I replace the brick in the wall. I am ready to get out of this black hole. I am certain that Major Kiy
ani’s little game has come to an end. He might be General Akhtar’s personal pet but his leash can’t be this long. I am looking forward to cleaning my teeth, getting into a fresh uniform and above all feeling the sun’s rays piercing my eyes.
The only light I see is a tunnel of brightness that blinds me momentarily as the door opens slightly. The only thing I see is a hand pushing in a stainless-steel plate. Before I can get up, greet the person behind the door, receive or send a message, snatch his gun and take him hostage or beg him for a cigarette, the door is shut again and the room is dark and full of the smell of hot food.
You want freedom and they give you chicken korma.
FOURTEEN
GENERAL ZIA UL-HAQ picked up the photocopied clipping marked New York Times from the stack of his morning papers and sighed. There she was again: Blind Zainab, her head and face draped in a white dupatta, a cheap pair of plastic sunglasses covering her eyes. He knew it was her before he read the caption under her picture, even before he saw the headline: BLIND JUSTICE IN THE LAND OF THE PURE.
The mornings had become unbearable since the First Lady stopped serving him breakfast. With her at the table, he could at least vent his frustration over the day’s headlines by shouting at her. These days, sitting alone at the twenty-four-seat dining table, he looked like a librarian from hell; he picked a paper, underlined the bad news, made circles around any good bits, jabbed at the pictures of the opposition leaders and flung the paper towards the duty waiter who lurked in a corner desperately hoping that at least some of the news was good.
A Case of Exploding Mangoes Page 14