2008 - A Case of Exploding Mangoes

by Mohammed Hanif

  “Thank you, Akhtar,” General Zia said. “I have no words to show my gratitude. This is not the first time you have saved my life.”

  “I was doing my duty, sir.”

  “I have decided to promote you. Four stars.”

  General Akhtar didn’t believe what he was hearing. Would General Zia relinquish his post as the Chief of the Army? Was General Zia retiring and moving to Mecca? General Akhtar didn’t have to wait long to find out. “I have appointed you the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee. In a way, I have appointed you my boss…”

  General Akhtar tried to intervene in a pleading voice. “Sir, my work at the agency is not finished yet. The Americans are talking to the Soviets behind our back…”

  A life of glorified bureaucratic tedium flashed in front of his eyes. He would have three adjutants, one each from the air force, navy and army, but no power over any of the three institutions. He would have his own flagged convoy but nowhere to go, except the inauguration of yet another extension to some housing scheme for army officers. He would stand at the head of every reception line ever organised for every second-rate dignitary visiting from every Third World country. Instead of running his intelligence agency he would be sitting at the head of an outfit as ceremonial as the crown of a fighting cock.

  “This is life, Akhtar, the work will go on. I have asked General Beg to take charge for now.”

  “I would like to request a proper handover…” General Akhtar made a last attempt to hold on to his safe houses, his tapes, his network of spies. Everything that gave him his powers was being taken away from him and he was being put behind a cage—a golden cage, but a cage nonetheless.

  “You have earned it, Akhtar,” General Zia said. “You have really earned the fourth star.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The fort gates fly open, the jeep carrying us sails through the security cordons, salutes are offered and accepted. It’s only when the driver asks my permission to turn on the radio that the facts of my new life begin to sink in: there are no blindfolds, no handcuffs, we are free and we have a week’s leave pass before reporting back to the Academy. If this was the ending of Where Eagles Dare we would be reclining in our seats, lighting up cigars and chuckling over some predictable Nazi joke. But we are quiet; a pair of failed assassins, forgiven by the very person we set out to get. Petty deserters, a couple of kids admonished and sent home; not even worthy of being considered a threat to national security.

  Our faces press against the windows of the jeep, looking out for the next milestone, examining the smoke coming out of the exhaust of overheated rickshaws, looking for objects to recognise. We are looking at the world like children on their first visit to the countryside; the khaki-covered seat between us stretches like the long list of our collective delusions.

  “Are you hurting?” My attempt at starting a conversation is weak but spontaneous. I look out as I speak. A giant billboard featuring General Zia’s picture bids us a safe journey.

  “No, are you?” The jeeps smells of disinfectant and Burnol, the anti-burn ointment they put on Obaid’s head.

  The morning of our release the Fort had woken up in a fit of activity. A team of gardeners ran around with sprinklers, armed commandos were taking positions on the rooftop of the Palace of Mirrors. A three-star convoy came to a screeching halt on the main boulevard between the sprawling lawns.

  Our saviour wears Ray-Bans and doesn’t take them off as we are hauled before him. Major Kiyani and his reformed hoodlums are nowhere in sight.

  General Beg talks like a man whom destiny has chosen to do makeovers. Everything about him is shiny, new, unruffled; his impatient hands scream new beginnings.

  “My plane is waiting,” he says to a colonel who seems to be the new man in charge of the place, and who also seems to have more medals on his chest than brain cells. “This place has been mismanaged badly,” General Beg says, which is not supposed to be an explanation directed at us but a general declaration about the state of the nation. “You.” He points his finger at the Colonel’s chest. General Beg has obviously seen too many baseball-coach-turns-nasty movies. “You are going to clear it up. Do up the whole place. Get an architect to redesign it. Call in an interior decorator if you need to. This place needs a bit of atmosphere. At least open some parts of this thing to tourists. Why do you need the whole bloody Fort to run an investigation centre?” The Colonel takes notes like an apprentice secretary in desperate need of a permanent job. General Beg turns towards us.

  “You guys are our future. You deserve better. You guys ended up here because of a bunch of inefficient idiots. All sorted now, all sorted. What a waste of time. I have to visit three cantonments today. I have my own plane waiting at the airport but still there are only so many hours in a day. Chief sends his good wishes. I’ll have those files closed. Go back and work hard. Tomorrow’s battles are won in today’s drill practice. The country needs you.”

  Just like that. The country suddenly needs us.

  The driver of our jeep is a soldier in uniform and wants to know our destination. I know I can trust him. “Where would you like to go today, sir?” he asks as the three-star convoy departs in a blaze of wailing sirens and commandos rushing down from the roofs. General Beg, it seems, doesn’t want to stay away from his plane for too long.

  There are no signs of the underground jails, the dark dungeons, the blood-splattered ceilings, the poetry in the stinking bathrooms. There is only the smell of freshly watered grass and history turning a new page.

  “Out of here,” I say.

  Obaid is slumped against the glass of his window. His nostrils twitch and he chews on his broken lips; he obviously doesn’t like the Burnol smell that hangs heavy in the jeep. I rummage through my bag and offer him his bottle of Poison. He takes it with a wry smile and rolls it around in his hands as if it’s not his favourite perfume bottle but a tennis ball that I have produced to distract him from our current situation.

  We are like a couple who can’t remember why they got together in the first place.

  “Bannon,” he mumbles. “Do you think they caught him?”

  “Are you crazy?” I sneer at him and then control myself. I don’t know why I feel I should sound polite and courteous and understanding. A newspaper hawker waves a paper at us, another picture of General Zia stares at me. “Diplomatic immunity. They’d never touch him.”

  “Do you think he is still at the Academy? After all this?”

  “There is always some other job for an American. I wouldn’t worry about him.”

  “It was his idea,” Obaid says, as if we are returning from an abandoned picnic on a rainy day and blaming the weatherman.

  “It was a fucked-up idea.” My irritation at his slow, measured sentences gets the better of me. I put my forehead on the glass window and stare at a group of people hanging on the back of a bus. A teenager offers me a mock salute, the man hanging beside him clutches at his crotch and offers to screw my mother. I don’t know why Pakistanis are so passionate about men in uniform.

  One of the fat Indian sisters is singing one of her sad love songs on the jeep cassette player.

  “I like that song,” I shout at the driver. “Can you turn it up?” The driver obliges.

  “We are alive,” says Obaid. I turn round and look at his head covered in yellow paste. He is not in a state where I would want to start a discussion about what it means to be alive.

  “So is General Zia,” I say.

  But Secretary General is dead.

  “That man who asked about your father, who was he? Did you know him?” Obaid’s curiosity is casual. He’s asking me if I had an OK time in the jail, if the food was decent, if I had interesting people to talk to.

  “Have you heard of the All Pakistan Sweepers Union?”

  Obaid stares at me as if I have learned to speak Greek during my short time in the prison. “He was the Secretary General. We were neighbours. And he probably died thinking I killed him. He probably died
thinking I was a bloody spy put in the dungeon by the army.”

  “Why didn’t he recognise you then? If you were his neighbour, I mean.”

  “It’s a long story. It doesn’t matter now.” I reach across the seat and take his hand in mine.

  “Good,” says Obaid, his lips giving the first hint of a smile. “Don’t go all sensitive on me. That’s not the Shigri I know. Or did they manage to change you in a few days?”

  I don’t want to narrate my life-changing experience when I still don’t know how and why has he come back from the dead.

  “How far did you get?”

  “Never took off.”

  “Bastards,” I say.

  “They were there. Before I could even get onto the runway.”

  “Major Kiyani?” I ask and immediately feel stupid. “Has to be him. How do you think he found out?”

  “I thought about it. I knew you would think it was Bannon who told them, but why would he? He was the one who gave me the idea. And he is only a drill instructor.”

  “He is quite an ideas man, isn’t he? Specially for a drill instructor.”

  Baby O believes life is a series of sweet coincidences. Like the poetry he reads, where random sentiments and metaphors walk hand in hand into the sunset while cause and consequence die a slow death on the pavement, like newborn bastard twins. I wish I could show him the world with Colonel Shigri’s dead bulging eyes.

  “Look, Ali.” When Obaid uses my first name, he is usually about to give me a lecture on the meaning of life, but there is none of the intensity that used to make his lectures such a joy to ignore. His voice comes out of an empty shell. “I tried to do it because I didn’t want to see you sticking your sword into him and then getting gunned down by his bodyguards in front of my eyes. I was scared. I wanted to do something.”

  “You did it to save my ass? You just thought you would take off in a stolen plane, head for the Army House and they would all simply sit and monitor your progress? Do you even have any idea how many ack-ack guns there are around that bloody place? They probably shoot down stray crows over there.” I squeeze his hand to emphasise my point.

  Obaid shudders. A whimper escapes his lips and I realise he is in pain. The buggers obviously didn’t keep him in a VIP cell.

  “You are still not listening to me, Shigri. I am not a kamikaze. You have all these expectations of your friends. You think I was going to do it for you? Sorry, I was just providing a diversion. I used your call sign, so that you couldn’t carry out your silly plan. A sword, for God’s sake. A sword?”

  I squeeze his hand again. He whimpers loudly. The bandage slips. His thumb is covered in dried blood and the nail is gone.

  Obaid wants to continue his explanation even though I have lost all my appetite for facts.

  “I wasn’t going anywhere. I was only interested in saving your life and so was Bannon.”

  “I should have warned you about that double-dealing Yankee. I can’t believe you trusted that dopehead instead of me.”

  “It was a decent enough plan. Take off in an unauthorised plane, cause a security alert and the President’s inspection is called off. And then at least I could talk to you. I would at least have the time to drill sense into your head.”

  Thanks a bloody lot. Somebody’s simple plan ruins your life’s work and you are supposed to show gratitude.

  “There is another way of looking at it, Baby O. You snitched on a friend, you almost got killed and you did it all to save General Zia’s life.”

  “No. Yours.” He closes his eyes. I think of telling him about Uncle Starchy’s nectar, about the poetic patterns in my plan; maybe I should spell out the meaning of sentiment du fer for him, but one look at him and I know I shouldn’t.

  I take out the envelope that the blind woman gave me and start fanning his head. I don’t know how it feels but if your skin has been burnt off with a Philips iron, it must hurt.

  “Thank you for saving my life.”

  “Do you think my hair will grow back?” asks Obaid.

  The other fat Indian sister starts singing a new song. Something about a conversation going on for so long rhat it has become a rumour in the night. The envelope is addressed to the All Pakistan Mango Farmers Cooperative. Probably Secretary General’s last sermon to his lapsed fellow travellers.

  “So what did you write in your state…?” We both blurt out the same question at the same time, in the same words. Our questions collide in mid-air and the answer lies wriggling on the jeep floor like an insect trying to take off after breaking a wing.

  What do you do when your only mission in life has failed?

  You go back to where it all began.

  “Have you ever been to Shigri Hill?” I tap the driver’s shoulder. “No? Take the next exit. I’ll give you the directions. Stop if you see a post office. I need to mail a letter.” I turn towards Obaid. “Asha or Lata?”

  “Lata,” he says. “The older one, the sad one.”

  Let’s take you home, Baby O.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Shigri Hill is cloaked in mist. We shiver as the jeep deposits us at the beginning of the narrow pathway that leads up to the house. It’s July and the plains have turned into God’s frying pan but the air on the hill is thin and chilly. As Colonel Shigri used to say, it still carries an occasional message from Siberia. Shigri Hill might be a part of Pakistan but its climate has always been renegade; it’s never shared the meteorological destiny of the plains. The Himalyan peaks surrounding the hill are covered in snow. Kz lords it over the mountains like a sullen white-haired matriarch. Grey transparent clouds float below in the valley. Overgrown almond trees rub shoulders with us as we make our way up to the house. Obaid is huffing with the effort of walking the steep climb to the house. “Why didn’t you people build a road here?” he asks, leaning against the slender trunk of an almond tree to catch his breath. “Never had the time,” I say, holding his hand and moving on.

  We take a sharp turn out of the almond tree grove and there it is, a wooden cottage with the pretensions of a summer palace, a house that nobody lives in. Sloping roofs perched on wooden arches, a long wooden balcony running along the side facing the valley. The lime-green paint has peeled itself over again and again during decades of neglect and now has settled into ghostly patches of turquoise. The house sits on the top of the mountain and from a distance it looks as if somebody stuck a doll’s house on a ridge and forgot to play with it. Look at it up close and it seems sad and majestic at the same time, poised there in seclusion as if looking down on the world with contempt.

  Obaid, who has never been to a hill station in his life, punches a passing cloud and breaks into a grin when his hand turns slightly moist.

  The Burnol on his head has dried up and the burnt side of his scalp appears cobalt blue through the cracks. I wonder if it’s the healing process or the beginning of an infection. Inside, the house is a glorious mess as if kids have had a non-stop party. Carpets are rolled up and thrown about, floorboards have been lifted and put back clumsily. We walk through heaps of clothes pulled out of cupboards and dumped in the corridors.

  Those buggers didn’t leave this place alone even after its occupants did. The only thing I am sure about is that they didn’t find what they were looking for.

  The main living room has a wall-to-wall glass window covered in drapes. I open the curtains and I can feel Obaid catching his breath at what he sees beyond the glass. The window opens on the ridge and the mountain falls away steeply. We are standing on the edge of the deep bowl of a lush green valley through which runs a silver snake of a river.

  “Who built this place?”

  “I don’t know, my grandfather’s father perhaps. It has always been here.”

  “It’s a shame that you’re not interested in your family history,” says Obaid, then probably remembers my family history and doesn’t wait for an answer. “It’s out of this world.” He stands with his nose to the glass.

  We sit in front of the fir
eplace and look at the stars outside the windows. They hang low and burn bright. The mountains sleep like giants who have lost their way.

  “The night is different here,” says Obaid.

  “I know. It’s very quiet. No traffic.”

  “No. It arrives suddenly. Then it travels at a slow pace. It’s like a boat that moves across the valley. Listen, you can hear it move, you can hear it row. The gentle splash of water…”

  “That’s the river below in the valley. It doesn’t sleep at night. But I am sleepy,” I say.

  The day arrives like somebody giving you a friendly thump on the shoulder. The sun is a mirror playing hide-and-seek with the snow-covered peaks; one moment a silver disc ablaze in its own white fire, the next moment veiled in a dark wisp of cloud. Obaid stands in front of the window, contemplating a cloud that is gently nudging at the glass. “Can I let it in? Can I?” Obaid asks me as if borrowing my favourite toy.

  “Go ahead.”

  He struggles with the window latches. By the time he slides the door open the cloud has dissolved into a puff, leaving behind a fine mist.

  “What should we cook today?” Obaid shouts from the kitchen. It wouldn’t have occurred to me but Obaid had bought a month’s worth of groceries on our way here.

  Colonel Shigri stays out of my dreams. Obaid doesn’t ask me about his last night in the house. He doesn’t ask me where and how I found him. I think he knows.

  The study is unlocked but I stay away from it. Obaid wants to see the pictures. They are all there on the wall, all mixed up, out of order, as if Colonel Shigri’s career progressed at random: General Akhtar and Colonel Shigri surrounded by Afghan mujahideen commanders with shawls and rocket launchers draped around their shoulders; Colonel Shigri with his bearded ISI officers in civvies holding the bits from the wreckage of a Soviet helicopter like trophies; Colonel Shigri with Bill Casey’s arm around his shoulder, looking over the Khyber Pass. Then the earlier pictures: his fellow officers are thin, moustaches clipped, medals scarce and not a beard in sight.