2008 - A Case of Exploding Mangoes

by Mohammed Hanif

  The official reason for our regular visit to Bannon’s room was that we were working out the details of our silent drill display for the President’s inspection. We needed to review the squad’s progress, plot every single manoeuvre and work on our inner cadence.

  But we really ended up there every day after the parade because Obaid loved to put his cheeks against the air conditioner’s vent and I wanted to play with Bannon’s Gung Ho Fairburn Sykes knife and listen to his stories of Operation Bloody Rice in Vietnam. He had done two tours of duty, and if he was in the right mood he could transport us to his night patrols and make us feel the movement of every single leaf on the Bloody Rice trail. He embellished his stories with a generous smattering of Cha obo, Chao ong, Chao co, probably the only Vietnamese words he knew. He called his slippers his Ho Chi Minhs. Obaid had his doubts.

  “What was a drill instructor doing hunting down commies in a war?”

  “Why don’t you ask him?” I would say, and then go on to show off my own knowledge of the subject, culled from two classes on the history of the Vietnam War. “It was war, Baby O, the biggest that America fought. Everyone had to fight. Even the US Army priests and barbers were at the front.”

  But today Bannon was in one of his dark, knife-throwing moods. It was difficult to get a word out of him if it wasn’t about the pedigree of his Gung Ho. We lay under the camouflaged canopy. An unlit joint dangled from Bannon’s mouth as he held his Gung Ho from its tip and contemplated its path towards Bruce Lee.

  “Give me a target,” he said to no one in particular.

  “Third rib from the top,” Obaid said without moving his cheek from the air conditioner’s vents. Bannon held the handle of the knife to his lips for a moment. Then his wrist flicked, the knife circled in the air and ended up between Bruce Lee’s third and fourth rib. “Damn. The air conditioning,” he said. “Gung Ho works best outdoors.” He suggested switching the air conditioning off and having another go. But Obaid wouldn’t have any of that. Obaid went for Bruce Lee’s right nipple and drew a blank, hitting the blue space above his right shoulder.

  I removed the knife from the poster and walked backwards, keeping my eyes locked on Bruce Lee’s right eye, my assigned target. When you do short-range targets it’s usually your own eye that fails you, not the way you handle your weapon. The target has to exist in the cross hairs of your eyeballs. If the target doesn’t live in your eye, you can keep your hands as steady as you want and you can hold your breath till you turn blue but there is no guarantee that you’ll get the target. As the knife left my fingertips, I shut my eyes and only opened them when I heard Bannon going, “Oh man, oh man.” I got up from the mattress, walked to the poster, removed the knife from the iris of Bruce Lee’s right eye and threw it over my shoulder towards Bannon. I didn’t have to look back to find out that he had caught it. Obaid shouted: “Don’t be a bloody show-off, Ali. It’s only a circus trick.”

  Bannon put the knife back in its leather sheath and lit his joint. “In Danang we captured this gook who had killed nine of my men with a knife. The man was a fucking monkey. He hid in the trees; for all I know he swung from tree to tree like a fucking Chinky Tarzan. Nobody ever saw him. He got ‘em all in the same fashion, during the patrol. Our guys would be out there with their M16 targeted at the bush, ready for an ambush, they would hear a branch move, they would look up and then swishhhh.” Bannon jabbed two fingers at his Adam’s apple. A red rope was tightening in his eyes, his speech was slightly slurred. The air conditioner was refusing to exhale the thick hashish smoke in the room.

  “I had some landmines planted around our bunker and put up a sign: “Ho Chi Minh sucks running dogs.” To lure the enemy, you know; we did that all the time. But this gook never showed up.”

  The joint was dead. Bannon lit it again and tried to remember where he was.

  “So the point is, when we finally caught him, my boys wanted to make hamburger meat out of him. But I said we had to interrogate him, go by the book. It turned out he was a circus guy. You believe that? He’d travelled up to Taiwan throwing his daggers around his mama-pyjama girl. And then his eighty-year-old dad was killed working in his paddy field, just shot down in one of these raids. So this guy gave up his big-titty woman and circus tent. He didn’t join the Viet Cong, which he would have been justified in doing. He just took to the jungles with his circus dagger.” He took a deep puff and exhaled a spiral. “So there, Baby O, that’s the point of my sorry-ass tale. You can throw a knife in a circus and you can have your big-titty women and you are a fucking freak show. You can have the same knife, polish it up with a bit of purpose and you are a man. A real man, not a fucking air-con soldier like you.”

  I extended my hand towards Bannon. He mimed a question with his joint. “Are you sure?”

  I was very sure. Obaid looked at me with panicked eyes. Bannon handed me the joint and I took a proper puff and held it in my lungs till my eyes watered. It was between exhaling that sweet, acrid smoke and throwing up half an hour later that I got the fucked-up idea that landed me in this shithole.

  TEN

  As he went through the newspapers the morning after broadcasting his special address to the nation, General Zia found himself cheering up. He spread the newspapers on the dining table one by one, till the gleaming mahogany surface was covered with his pictures and his words. He put his red pencil aside, savoured his tea and gave an approving nod to the duty waiter in the corner. The thing General Zia liked about his Information Minister was that although he was a devious bastard with a fake MBA who had made a lot of money ordering useless books that never arrived at the military libraries, he knew how to handle these newspaper editors. General Zia had tried to cultivate these editors himself and found out that they were the kind of intellectuals who prayed with him devoutly then rushed off to get drunk in the hotel rooms that his government provided them, with the booze that the Information Minister bought them. And the following morning their editorials were messy transcriptions of what General Zia had told them between their prayers and the boozing sessions.

  This morning, however, was different. The nation’s press had finally shown some spark. The editors had used their imagination while reporting his speech. Every newspaper had it as the banner headline. The message had gone out loud and clear. “The Battle for Our Ideological Frontiers has begun.” He was particularly pleased with the three-picture strip idea that the Pakistan Times had come up with to illustrate the main points from the extempore part of his speech. First of all I am a Muslim was the caption under a picture of him draped in a white cotton sheet with his head reclining on the black marbled wall of Khana Kaaba in Mecca. Then I am a soldier of Islam appeared under his official portrait, in which he was wearing his four-star General’s uniform. And then, as an elected head of the Muslim state, I am a servant of my people was the caption for the third picture, which showed him in his presidential dress, looking dignified in a black sherwani and his reading glasses, not imposing but authoritative, not a military ruler but a president.

  Heads of state, especially the heads of state of developing countries, seldom get the time to sit back and admire their own achievements. This was one of those rare moments when General Zia could recline in his chair with the newspaper in his lap, order another cup of tea and let the collective goodwill of his one hundred and thirty million subjects engulf his body and mind. With his red pencil he jotted a note in the margin of the paper to tell the Information Minister to nominate the editor of the Pakistan Times for a national literary award. He’d also tell the Information Minister that if you speak from your heart people do listen. He decided that from now on all his speeches would include a section starting with: “My dear countrymen, now I want to say to you something from my heart.” He imagined himself at public rallies flinging his written speech away, into the crowd, the papers flying above the heads of his audience. “My fellow countrymen, I don’t want to read from a written script, I am not a puppet who would parrot page after page of words
written by some Western-educated bureaucrat. I speak from my heart…” He brought his fist down on the dining table with such force that the teacup rattled, the Pakistan Times slipped off his lap and the red pencil rolled off the table. The duty waiter standing in the corner tensed up at first, then, noticing the ecstatic smile on the General’s face, relaxed and decided not to pick up the paper and pencil from the floor.

  On any other day, General Zia would have read the editorials, looked for negative comments, scanned the adverts for female models not properly covered, but he was so content over the coverage of his speech, his heart was so full of tenderness for the newspapers and journalists, that he didn’t see the back page of the Pakistan Times. He missed the picture which showed him in full military regalia, golden-braided peaked cap on his head and a couple of dozen medals dangling from his chest. A silk sash with the emblems of all the armed forces crossed his torso diagonally, his hands entangled over his crotch as if trying to restrain one another, drool forming in the corner of his mouth, his eyes wide open and staring, like the eyes of a child who has wandered into a sweet shop to find its owner fast asleep.

  The First Lady stayed away from newspapers. There were too many words she couldn’t make sense of and too many pictures of her husband. She herself rarely appeared in the papers and if she did she was usually attending a children’s festival or the Quran recitation competitions for women General Zia dispatched her to so she could represent the government and hand out prizes. The Information Minister sent her the clippings of these pictures and she usually hid them from General Zia because he always found fault with her appearance. If she wore make–up, he accused her of aping high-society Westernised women. If she wore no makeup, he said she looked like death, very unlike a first lady. He constantly lectured her that as the First Lady of an Islamic state, she should be a role model for other women. “Look at what Mrs Ceausescu has done for her country.”

  The First Lady had never met Mrs Ceausescu and her husband never bothered to explain who she was or what she did. She did take other visiting first ladies shopping, but it was no fun because the shopkeepers either refused to take money from her or quoted her prices so low that she couldn’t even haggle. The bazaars were cleared of shoppers before her arrival and she felt as if she was on the set of a television soap opera. General Zia did encourage her from time to time to read newspapers to keep abreast of the political and social changes he was bringing about in the country, but she never bothered. “These newspapers are full of what you said and what you did and who you met. And you are always here, lounging around the house. Don’t I see enough of you that I shouldn’t have to see you staring at me from every page of every single rag?”

  With such indifference to the national press it couldn’t be a coincidence that the First Lady found a copy of the Pakistan Times on her bedside table, carefully folded to reveal the picture on the back page, the picture that would destroy her faith in all men forever and result in the unceremonious sacking of the editor of the Pakistan Times.

  The first thing that shocked the First Lady about the picture was the amount of flesh oozing out of the white woman’s blouse. She immediately knew that the woman was wearing one of those new bras with wire construction that pushed the breasts up, making them seem bigger. Many of the other generals’ wives wore these bras, but at least they had the decency to wear proper shirts that didn’t show any flesh, only hinted at their enhanced shape. The woman in the picture was wearing a blouse cut so low that half her breasts were out, pushed up and pressed together so closely that the diamond on her necklace was resting on the cusp of her cleavage.

  And then, there was her husband, the Man of Truth, the Man of Faith, the man who lectured women on piety on prime-time TV, the man who had fired judges and television newscasters who refused to wear a dupatta on their heads, the man who made sure that two pillows could not be shown together on an empty bed in a television drama, the man who made cinema owners blot out any bare legs or arms of actresses from the film posters; the same man was sitting there staring at these globes of white flesh with such single-mindedness that it seemed as if his own wife had been born without a pair.

  The caption said innocuously: The President being interviewed by the famous foreign correspondent Joanne Herring.

  Interview my foot, she thought. It seemed that it wasn’t Ms Herring interviewing him, but General Zia interrogating her breasts. She put the paper aside, drank a glass of water, thought of their thirty-four years together, reminded herself of her five grown-up children, of their youngest daughter still to be married. For a moment she doubted what her eyes had just seen and picked up the paper again. There was no mistaking this. It was not the kind of thing where you can write a letter to the editor and demand a correction. General Zia’s eyes, normally crossed, the right one looking in one direction while the left one wandered away to take in something else, were for once focused in the same direction, on the same objects. The angle of his stare was so obvious that if she drew two lines with a pencil, they would connect the iris of his eyes straight to the two white spheres pushed up and pulled together.

  She tried to remember what this woman was wearing last time she saw her. She remembered very clearly what her husband had looked like when he saw this woman last time.

  The First Lady had started to suspect that her husband was up to something when he asked her to pack his old safari suit for their US visit. Her suspicions deepened when she was told that their first stop would not be Washington DC or New York but Lufkin, Texas, where they were to attend a charity ball. Jeddah, Bejing, Dubai, London, she could understand. These were regular stops for General Zia. But Lufkin? Safari suit? The old man was definitely up to something fishy, the First Lady had thought, checking his beige-coloured, polyester safari suit for any missing buttons.

  General Zia had abolished all types of Western dress from his wardrobe except for military uniforms. He always wore a black sherwani for state occasions and, taking their cue from him, the bureaucrats had all started wearing minor variations of the same dress. The more adventurous ones experimented with cuts and colours, and occasionally their headgear, but basically stuck to what General Zia had started calling the National Dress. But like all men of principle, General Zia was always ready to make an exception for a higher cause. And if the cause was a fund-raiser for Afghan jihad, then no principle was sacred enough.

  The charity ball in Lufkin was being hosted by Joanne Herring, prime-time news anchor on Lufkin Community Television and Pakistan’s Honorary Ambassador to the United States; an appointment made after her four-hour-long, soul-searching interview with General Zia. Joanne was on a mission to rid the world of evil but she insisted on having fun while doing it.

  And God, Lufkin could do with a bit of exotic fun.

  Contrary to popular belief, oil millionaires in Lufkin have dull lives. Their political influence is marginal and only very few of them enjoy the wheeler-dealers’ lifestyle that the media outside Lufkin likes to project. Their ten-thousand-dollar donation to their local Congressman gets them a letter signed by an aide in the White House. Those with deeper pockets can splash out one hundred thousand dollars and get invited to the annual prayer breakfast with Ronald Reagan in Washington DC where the President joins them for the prayer from the podium for fifteen minutes and then leaves them to their tepid porridge and coffee. So the arrival of a president—even if this was the President of Pakistan, a country they knew nothing about—and the fact that the man was not only a president but a four-star general, the chief of the largest Muslim army in the world and one of the seven men standing between the Soviet Red Army and the Free World, as their favourite news anchor reminded them every day, meant it was time to dispatch their tuxedos and ball gowns to the dry cleaner’s.

  Joanne had started using Pakistan’s flag as the backdrop for her show in the run-up to the ball. The creme de la creme of the East Texan community and would-be supporters of the jihad against the Soviets were sent invitation cards
carrying a picture of a dead Afghan child (caption: Better dead than red). Others showed a nameless Afghan mujahid in an old shawl with a rocket launcher on his shoulder (caption: Your ten dollars can help him bring down a Russian Hind helicopter). “Now, don’t that fry your tater? Ain’t that the bargain of the century?” Joanne had followed her invitation with enthusiastic phonecalls, turning the small Texan town into a base camp for the Afghan mujahideen, fighting six thousand miles away.

  The Holiday Inn in the city of Lufkin christened its fourth floor the Presidential Floor. Joanne had provided them with a Pakistani flag and an audiotape of Quran recitation that was promptly forwarded to their meat supplier to be played as the slaughter started. The President would get his halal meat. The waiters were taught to say their salaam in Urdu.

  Despite these efforts, when General Zia’s convoy pulled into the porch of the Holiday Inn he was disappointed to see only a small office-like structure with a Pakistani flag flying over it. He installed the First Lady in the Presidential Suite. She complained about the size of the bedroom, the complimentary toiletries in the bathroom and really lost her cool when she asked hotel reception to connect her to the Army House and she was put through to the local Salvation Army store.