by Ian McDonald
‘Hopefully not in London, the shopping’s gone to hell. But the Americans . . .’
‘We’re thinking the same thought, Prime Minister. The Special Relationship . . .’
‘Is nowhere near as reciprocal as the Brits like to think. I’ll tell you one thing gives me joy out of this whole mess, Khan. We stuck it up that chuutya Jivanjee. He thought he was so clever, leaking those photographs of his Holy Shopping Trolley; well, now he’s the one running back home with his balls in his mouth.’
‘Still, Prime Minister, he hasn’t gone away you know. I think we shall be hearing from Mr Jivanjee if we get our peace conference.’
‘When, Khan.’
Shaheen Badoor Khan dips his head in acquiescence. But he knows that there is no science in this thing. He, his government and his nation have been lucky thus far. Sajida Rana picks a badly-sewn seam in her combat pants, slouches down in her seat and asks, ‘Anything about me yet?’ Shaheen Badoor Khan flips on his palmer and scans the news channels and agency services. Phantom pages appear before his field of vision. News breaks around him in soft, colourful detonations.
‘CNN, BBC and News International are running it as breaking news. Reuters is just copying to the US Press.’
‘What’s the Great Satan’s general tenor?’
Shaheen Badoor Khan flicks through leader articles from Boston to San Diego.
‘Mild scepticism to outright rejection. The conservatives are calling for our withdrawal, then maybe negotiations.’
Sajida Rana tugs gently at her bottom lip, a private gesture known only to intimates, like her fabulously dirty mouth.
‘At least they aren’t sending the marines. But then it’s only water, not oil. Still, it’s not Washington we’re at war with. Anything from Delhi?’
‘Nothing on the on-line channels.’
Prime Minister Rana drags the lip a little lower.
‘I don’t like that. They’ve got other headlines written.’
‘Our satellite data show Awadhi forces still holding position.’
Sajida Rana lets go her lip, sits up in her seat.
‘Fuck them. This is a great day! We should rejoice! Shaheen.’ The first name. ‘In confidence: Chowdhury, what do you think of him?’
‘Minister Chowdhury is a very able constituency member . . .’
‘Minister Chowdhury is a hijra. Shaheen, there’s an idea I’ve been pushing around the back of my head. Deedarganj will be up for by-election some time in the next year, Ahuja’s putting a brave face on it but that tumour’s eating him from the inside out, poor bastard. It’s a good staunch seat; hell, they’d elect James F. McAuley if he waved a bit of incense at Ganesha.’
‘With respect Prime Minister, President McAuley is not a Muslim.’
‘Well fuck it, Khan, you’re hardly Bin Laden. What are you, Sufi, something like that?’
‘I come from a Sufi background, that’s correct.’
‘Well, that’s my point exactly. Look, truth of it is, you’ve played a good chukka on this one and I need your abilities out in the open. You’d have to serve out your apprenticeship on the backbenches, but I’d certainly be fast-tracking you for a ministerial portfolio.’
‘Prime Minister, I don’t know what to say.’
‘Well, you could start with thank you, you fucking parsimonious Sufi. Strictest, of course.’
‘Of course, Prime Minister.’
Deprecating, bowing, acquiescing; a mere civil servant; but Shaheen Badoor Khan’s heart leaps. There was a time at Harvard after the freshman results when the tension burst and the summer opened free and wide and he forgot both business school virtues and the disciplines of his school of Islam. Under the lengthy guidance of a liquor store owner he had bought himself a bottle of imported Speyside single malt whisky and, in the shafts of dusty light through his room window, toasted his success. Between the creak of the cork in the bottle-neck and the dry retching in the purple twilight had been a distinct period when he felt embedded in joy and radiance and confidence and that the world was his without limit or bar. He had gone to his window, bottle in hand, and roared at the planet. The hangover, the spiritual guilt, had been worth it for that one, charged burn of epiphany. Now strapped in beside his Prime Minister in an army tilt-jet, he knows it again. Cabinet Minister. Him. He tries to look at himself, imagine a different seat at the table in the beautiful, luminous council room; imagine himself rising to his feet under the dome of the Sabha. The Honourable Member for Deedarganj. And it will be right. It is his just reward, not for his diligent, unstinting service, but for his ability. He deserves this. Deserves it, will have it.
‘How long have we worked together?’ Sajida Rana asks.
‘Seven years,’ Shaheen Badoor Khan replies. He thinks, and three months twenty two days. Sajida Rana nods. Then she does the thing with the lip again.
‘Shaheen.’
‘Yes Prime Minister?’
‘Is everything all right?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean, Prime Minister.’
‘It’s just, well, you’ve seemed distracted recently. I’ve heard a rumour.’
Shaheen Badoor Khan feels his heart stop, his breath freeze, his brain crystallise. Dead. He is dead. No. She would not have offered him everything she has in this high, private place only to rip it away from him for a trifle of madness. But it is not madness, Shaheen Badoor Khan. It is how you are. Thinking you can deny it, hide it, is the madness. He moistens his lips with his tongue. There must be no faltering, no dryness or failure in these words he has to say.
‘Government is the province of rumours, Prime Minister.’
‘I’d just heard you’d left some do in the Cantonment early.’
‘I was tired, Prime Minister. That was the day . . .’ He is not safe yet.
‘Of the briefing, yes, I remember. What I heard, and doubtless it’s gross slander, is that there was a bit of . . . tension between you and Begum Bilquis. I know it’s bloody cheek, Shaheen, but is everything all right at home?’
Tell her, Shaheen Badoor screams at himself. Better she finds out now than from some party tout, or, God preserve us, N.K. Jivanjee. If she does not know already, if this is not some test of honesty and loyalty. Tell her where you went, who you met, what you almost did with him. Yt. Tell her. Hand it over to the mother of the nation, let her manage it and spin it and massage it for the cameras, all those things he has done so long, so loyally, for Sajida Rana.
He cannot. His enemies within and without the party hate him enough as a Muslim. As a pervert, a wife-abandoner, a lover of things most of them cannot even regard as human, his career would be over. The Rana government could not survive. Before everything, Shaheen Badoor Khan is a civil servant. The administration must stand.
‘May I be frank, Prime Minister?’
Sajida Rana leans across the narrow aisle.
‘That’s twice in one conversation, Shaheen.’
‘My wife . . . Bilquis . . . well, recently, we’ve been going through a cold period. When the boys left for university, well, we’d never had that much apart from them to talk about. We live independent lives now - Bilquis has her column and women’s forum. But you can be assured that we won’t let that get in the way of our public duties. We won’t embarrass you that way again.’
‘No embarrassment,’ Sajida Rana murmurs, then the military pilot makes a terse announcement about landing at Nabha Sparasham Air Force Base in ten minutes and Shaheen Badoor Khan uses the distraction to look out of the window at the great brown stain of Varanasi’s monstrous bastis. He allows himself a small twitch of a smile. Safe. She doesn’t know. He has spun it. But there are tasks he has to do now. And there, along the very southern edge of the horizon, is that a dark line of cloud?
It was only after his father died that Shaheen Badoor Khan understood how much he hated the house by the river. It is not that the haveli is ugly or overbearing - it is the contrary of all of those things. But its airy cloisters and verandahs
and spacious, highceilinged white rooms are heavy with history, generation, duty. Shaheen Badoor Khan cannot go up the steps and pass under the great brass lantern in the porch and enter the hall with its twin spiralling staircases, the men’s and the women’s, without remembering himself as a boy, hiding behind a pillar as his grandfather Sayid Raiz Khan was carried out to the burying ground by the old hunting lodge in the marshes, and again, walking behind his own father as he made that same, swift journey through the teak doors. He will make that journey himself, through his fine teak double doors. His own sons and grandsons will bear him through. The haveli is crowded with lives. There is no cranny away from relatives and friends and servants. Every word, deed, intention is visible, transparent. The concept of place apart is one he remembers with tight pleasure from Harvard. The concept of privacy, the New England reserve: reserve, a thing set aside, for another use.
He crosses the mezzanine to the women’s half of the house; as always, he hesitates at the door of the zenana. Purdah had been abolished in haveli Khan in his grandfather’s time but Shaheen Badoor Khan had always felt a sense of shame of the women’s apartments; things here, stories in the walls, ways of living that had nothing to do with him. A house divided, like the hemispheres of the brain.
‘Bilquis.’ His wife has set up her office in the screened balcony with its view over the teeming, tumultuous ghats and the still river. Here she writes her articles and radio speeches and essays. In the bird garden beneath she entertains her clever, disenfranchised friends as they drink coffee and make whatever plans clever, disenfranchised women make.
We are a deformed society, the music-loving civil servant had said as Mumtaz Huq took the stage.
‘Bilquis.’
Footsteps. The door opens, the face of a servant - Shaheen Badoor Khan cannot remember which one - peeps out.
‘The Begum is not here, sahb.’
Shaheen Badoor Khan slumps against the sturdy doorframe. The one time he would cherish a few sentences snatched between busy lives. A word. A touch. For he is tired. Tired of the relentlessness. Tired of the appalling truth that even if he sat down and did nothing like the sadhu on a street corner, events he has set in motion will swell behind him, one feeding the other, into a drown-wave. He must always run those few steps ahead. Tired of the mask, the face, the lie. Tell her. She will know what to do.
‘Always out, yes.’
‘Mr Khan?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
The door closes on the sliver of face. For the first time in memory, Shaheen Badoor Khan is lost in his own house. He cannot recognise the doors, the walls, the hallways. He is in a bright room now, overlooking the women’s garden, a white room with the mosquito nets tied up in big, soft knots, a room filled with slants of light and dust and a smell that calls him back to himself. Smell is the key of memory. He knows this room, he loved this room. It is the old nursery; his boys’ room. His room, high over the water. Here he would wake every morning to the salutations of the Brahmins to the great river. The room is clean and pale and bare. He must have ordered it cleared after the boys left the house for university but he cannot remember instructing it so. Ayah Gul died ten years ago but in the wooden slats, the draped curtains, he can smell the perfume of her breast, the spice of her clothing though Shaheen Badoor Khan realises with a start that it is decades since he entered this room. He squints up into the light. God is the light of the Heavens and of the Earth . . . It is light upon light. God guideth whom He will to His light, and God setteth forth parables to men, for God knoweth all things. The sura curls like smoke in Shaheen Badoor Khan’s memory.
It is only because, for the first time in long memory, he feels there are no eyes watching, that Shaheen Badoor Khan can do what he does now. He reaches his arms out at his side and starts to spin, slowly at first, feet feeling for balance. The Sufi spinning dance, that whirled the dervishes into the God-consciousness within. The dhikr, the sacred name of God, forms on his tongue. A bright flash of child-memory, his grandfather holding perfectly in place on the geometric tiled floor of the iwan as the qawwals play. A Mevlevi had come from Ankara to teach Indian men the sema, the great dance of God.
Spin me out of this world, God-within.
The soft mat rucks beneath Shaheen Badoor Khan’s feet. The concentration is intense, every thought on the motion of the feet, the turning of the hands, down to bless, up to receive. He spins back through his memories.
That crazy New England summer when high pressure moored over Puritan Cambridge and the temperature climbed and stuck and everyone opened their doors and windows and went out into the streets and parks and greens or just sat in their doorways and balconies, when Shaheen Badoor Khan, in his sophomore year, forgot what it was to be cold and restrained. Out with friends, coming back late from a music festival in Boston. Then it came, out of the soft, velvet, scented night and Shaheen Badoor Khan was paralysed, fixed like a northern star as he was to be a quarter of a century later in Dhaka airport by a vision of the unearthly, the alien, the unobtainable beauty. The nute frowned at the rush of noisy undergraduates as it tried to sidestep. It was the first Shaheen Badoor Khan had ever seen. He had read, seen pictures, been intrigued, tantalised, tormented by this dream of his childhood incarnate. But this was flesh: real, no legendary beast. He had fallen in love on that Harvard green. He had never fallen out again. Twenty-five years, carrying a thorn in the heart.
Feet move, hands weave, lips shape the mantra of the dhikr. Spinning back.
The wrapping was perfect, simple, elegant. Red black and white koi patterned paper, a single strand of cellophane raffia, gold. Minimal. Indians would have prettied it, gaudified it, put hearts and bows and Ganeshas, had it play tunes and spring out confetti blessings when opened. At the age of thirteen, Shaheen Badoor Khan knew when he saw the parcel from Japan that his would never be a true Indian spirit. His father had brought gifts for all the family back from the trade trip to Tokyo. For his younger brothers, Boys’ Day Carp Kites - proudly flown from the balconies of Haveli Khan ever after. For oldest son, Nihon in a box. Shaheen had goggled at the squeeze tubes of Action Drink, the Boat In the Mist chocolate, the trading cards and Waving Kitty robotpet, the mood-colour scarves and the disks of Nippon-pop. What transformed his life, like a motorbike that turns into an avenging battle-bot, was the manga. At first he had not liked their easy mix of violence and sex and high-school anxiety. Cheap and alien. But what seduced him were the characters; the elongated, sexless teens with their deer eyes and their snub noses and their ever-open mouths. Saving the world, having parent problems, wearing fabulous costumes, sporting fantastic hair-styles and footwear, worrying about their boygirl-friends as the destroying angel-robots bore down on Tokyo but mostly being independent and cool and fabulous and long-legged and androgynous. He wanted their thrilling, passionate lives so badly he had cried. He envied their beauty and sexy sexlessness and that everyone knew and loved and admired them. He wanted to be them in life and death. In his bed in the loud Varanasi dark, Shaheen Badoor Khan would invent on-stories for them; what happened after they defeated the angels streaming through the crack between the heavens, how they loved and played together in their fur-lined battle-dome. Then they pulled him down into the pink fur-lined bulb of the battle-nest and they rubbed together, indeterminate but passionate, for ever and ever and ever. On those nights when he was made a Mage-rider of a Grassen Elementoi, Shaheen Badoor Khan would wake in the suffocating morning with the front of his pyjama pants stiff.
Years after he would sneak those yellowing, soft and fraying comics out of the shoebox. Ever young, ever slim, ever beautiful and adventurous, the boygirl pilots of the Grassen Elementoi stood, arms folded, challenging him with their cheekbones and animals eyes and sullen, kissable mouths.
Shaheen Badoor Khan, whirling on the edge of the transcend, feels his eyes sharp with tears. The sema wheels him back, to the beach.
His mother had complained about the humidity and the socialism and how the fisherm
en would shit on the sand outside the bungalow. His father had been edgy and stuffy and homesick for the searing north. He had fretted about in creased pants and short-sleeved poplin shirts and open-toe sandals in the smothering Keralese heat and it had been the worst holiday Shaheen Badoor Khan could remember because he had been looking forward to it so much. The south the south the south!
In the evening the fisher kids would come in from the sea. Sun-blackened, naked, smiling, they had played and yelled and splashed while Shaheen Badoor Khan and his brothers sat on their verandah and drank lemonade and listened to their mother tell them how terrible those dreadful children were. Shaheen Badoor Khan did not find them dreadful. They had a little outrigger. They would play all day with that boat, in and out of it. Shaheen Badoor Khan would imagine them sailed in from an adventure out on the big water; piracy, rescue, exploration. When they ran their outrigger up on to the strand and played cricket on the beach he thought he would die from desire. He wanted to sail off with black, grinning Keralese boy-girls, he wanted to slip naked into blood-warm water and wear it like a skin. He wanted to run and yell and be skinny and un-selfconscious and free.