The Good Son

by Michael Gruber

  I attest there is no God but God and Muhammad is the messenger of God. She had recited the Shahada right there in Laghari Sahib’s study, and that was all there was to it, so easy to become a Muslim; she thought she had been as good a Muslim as she had ever been a Catholic, nor were the Lagharis a particularly religious clan. She suspected that Baba had seen his son’s marriage to an American as another mark of modernity and a glancing blow at the stuffy conventions of his social set. In any case, she had been taken into the family and married to Farid; had borne Theo, the necessary male heir, in Lahore; and later on she had produced two lovely if somewhat less satisfactory girls, Aisha and Jamila, and fulfilled the duties of a wealthy Punjabi matron, deferring to Noor, her mother-in-law, and worshipping her father-in-law as a demigod.

  A secure enough life, constrained but more luxurious than anything she had ever imagined, her mother’s aristocratic fantasies lived out on a far shore, until it ended. Until she ended it by an act of outrage. Again she shifts her thoughts away and rests her head against the cool glass and looks down into the dark. They are probably over Turkey now, only a few scattered lights mark Anatolia below. She stares at the sparse twinkles until her eyes grow heavy and she joins the other sleepers.

  Something wakes her in the night-turbulence in the air or in her spirit, she can’t tell-but she has been dreaming. Sonia takes her dreams seriously, and while the rags of it drift from her mind she gropes in her bag for her notebook, opens it, and flicks on her overhead light. The notebook is thick, quadrille ruled, European; she has had it for nearly twenty years; its black pasteboard covers are scarred, gouged with travel and use, its pages marked with grime, wine, tears. She writes down the dream: She is in a farmyard-no, a circus encampment; there is a boy there, who is not quite right, subtly deformed, a crablike stride, his head too large, an avid look on his face. He holds up something for her inspection, a nest of tiny birds or squirrels, she can’t recall which: small, warm, helpless things. He begins to smash them on the ground; they explode with soft pops and gouts of vivid red. He offers her one; she takes it and smashes it. She knows it’s wrong but she can’t help herself; she is carried away by the transgressive excitement. There seems to be an endless supply.

  Then a presence appears, dark, powerful, a woman in a spangled costume. The odd boy cringes before her, hands over the nest. Sonia feels horrible, she wants to undo the carnage. The spangled woman embraces her and tells her she is forgiven; it was the boy’s fault, and Sonia is shown the nest and sees it is still full of tiny birds. Or squirrels. The boy will be punished, but Sonia is loved; she will not be punished, only she will have to take the place of the boy, will have to be deformed too. The dream becomes horrible; the kind stern woman wants to turn Sonia into…

  Sonia finishes writing down what she can recall. It is a significant dream. She often has such dreams when she travels, travel being symbolic of the psychic journey, releasing the collective symbols up through the quotidian sludge to illuminate, to terrify, sometimes to foretell. She wonders what old Fluss would say about it. Not much, he never interpreted but pushed and prodded her into doing the hard work, and she recalls how she resented him and loved him during that year in Zurich at the Jung Institute when he saved her life and became her mentor. Remembering him and neat, snowy Zurich, she smiles; she is going to the opposite of Zurich now, where the archetypes walk the streets in the blazing sun of day. Is this also the reason for taking this somewhat inconvenient flight, instead of going straight from London? She switches off her light, puts in earplugs, falls asleep again, and wakes only when the cart comes around with tea. It is six-thirty in the morning, and an hour later they land in Lahore.

  She sees Rukhsana waiting for her on the other side of the customs barrier, looking nearly the same, a woman ten years younger than Sonia, maybe grown little plumper over the last year or so, startlingly like her father in drag. She is wearing a dark Western suit and blouse with a chiffon scarf draped loosely around her head as a sop to propriety. Expensive sunglasses perch above her broad brow. She is a reporter for the liberal English paper The Daily Times and has seen no reason to quit this job just because she is married and a mother.

  The two woman embrace warmly. Rukhsana says, smiling, “Lahore Lahore hai,” Lahore is Lahore, which is how residents of that city greet one another after a long absence, as if to affirm that there is no other place fit to live in. Rukhsana fights Sonia over Sonia’s bag, wins, links arms with her, and carries her out of the terminal. A sprightly blue Morris is parked right at the curb, in violation of traffic regulations but protected by a large card on the dash that reads PRESS in English and Urdu. The two women drive off into the insane Lahore traffic, west on Durand Road, through the death-defying intersection by the Lahore Press Club, past the Provincial Assembly, and down Egerton Road to the Mall, which no true Lahori ever calls by its new properly Muslim name.

  While they drive, Rukhsana talks; family first. The children, Hassan, Iqbal, and Shirin, are fine in health and accomplishments; husband Jafar is fine too, in health and accomplishments; she speaks also of his defects, which are numerous, both physical and mental. Her brother Nisar remains chubby and sly, mistresses galore, richer than ever although a little nervous now, trying to maintain his place on the spinning circus ball of Pakistani politics. Seyd, the baby brother, recently made major, still a pompous pain in the you-know-where, dreadful politics, a supporter of the recently deposed general. Sonia asks what Nisar thinks about the conference they are organizing, the reason Sonia has returned to Lahore.

  “Oh, you will hear that from his own lips. I suppose he is as interested in it as in anything else that does not immediately put money into his pocket. Or votes.”

  From which they pass to a précis of the current political situation in her nation and the familiar defects of the foreign policy of the United States.

  “No wonder you are losing!” Rukhsana says. “Pakistan is stupid enough, but we are all Bismarck compared to you. Why is this, Sonia? People ask me, because I was educated in America, so I am the expert. What can I tell them?”

  “You can tell them that not one American in ten thousand can distinguish Iraq from Iran or find Pakistan on a map. We are not a subtle people.”

  “Oh, you can say that again! The British were bad enough, but at least they made the effort to understand. They spoke the languages, they knew the history, and still they made terrible errors. But nothing like this. Our country is coming apart, and it all comes from what you are doing. You know how I know this? My brother is moving funds out of Pakistan, so when it collapses we will not be standing in our shirts. This is what we’ve come to.”

  She pauses to honk at a motor rickshaw driver who has swerved into her path, a long blast nearly unheard over the continuous honking of the other traffic.

  To change the subject, Sonia observes, “The traffic has gotten worse. I wouldn’t have believed it possible.”

  “Yes, Lahore is unlivable now, but we still live here. I’m glad I have this Mini. Jafar wants me to use the Mercedes, but can you imagine trying to steer that boat in this mess? Look, there is the High Court. Do remember when you used to drive us children to meet my father there when we had half days at school, and he would take us to the bazaar for ice candy?”

  “Oh, yeah, and other sweets. He had a sweet tooth himself, and your mother would always complain that he was ruining our appetites. And he would let himself be berated and give us a sly wink.”

  A painful silence after this; then Sonia said, “I’m sorry about your mother. I’m sorry I didn’t come to the funeral.”

  “Yes, you should have been there with your husband. She was not very nice to you, but you should have come.”

  “I didn’t think I’d be welcome.”

  “Oh, what nonsense! Because of something that happened twenty-eight years ago? A book? But now you come.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says, and is.

  “I forgive you,” says Rukhsana, “although others may n
ot.”

  “Does that include Nisar?”

  “Oh, no, with Nisar everything is negotiable, even forgiveness. Otherwise we would not be here. Move your ass, you stupid monkey!” This is shouted out the window at a van that has stopped in a traffic lane to make a delivery.

  “Besides, in the family you know what we say: Sonia Sonia hai. You are horrible but we still love you. Here we are.”

  She honks at a gate in a whitewashed wall and a servant opens it and they drive into an enclosed yard shaded by two arching peepul trees, the paving of the courtyard scattered with blue jacaranda petals.

  Sonia climbs from the little car and pauses. “I assume he’s in your father’s library.”

  “It’s his library now,” says Rukhsana, bitterness touching her voice; Sonia walks slowly down the crushed stone path to the house.

  When Sonia comes out of Nisar’s house an hour later, the heat and the ordinary odors of Lahore-spices, jasmine, traffic fumes, sewage, rot-feel welcome, like real life. Nisar has fitted the house with air-conditioning, including a back-up diesel generator, and he keeps his office as cold as his heart. Or so Rukhsana says as Sonia slides into the car.

  “It wasn’t too bad,” says Sonia. “He said we can use Leepa House for the conference. He’ll call ahead to the caretakers.”

  “In return for what?”

  “As you predicted, he wants a meeting with Bill Craig to pitch a scheme for making computer components in one of his Karachi plants. It’s a good deal.”

  Rukhsana starts the car, drives out the gate, and turns north, up to the Mall and beyond it to Ravi Road, passing through heavy traffic along the western edge of the old city. They are going to the studios of Ravi TV to record interviews.

  Rukhsana asks, “And how did he treat you? Was he nasty?”

  “No,” Sonia says wearily, “he was polite and businesslike. He doesn’t seem to dwell in the past.”

  “As I do, you mean?”

  Sonia sighs. “Honestly, Ruhka, I don’t want to dredge up old family fights or take sides.”

  Undeterred, Rukhsana continues. “That’s easy for you to say. You don’t have to live here. Farid is the eldest son, he’s supposed to be the head of the family, but Nisar always gets his way, and-”

  “Yes, but as you well know, Farid has no interest in being the head of anything. Look, there’s the cemetery. Can we stop for a little while?”

  “We’ll be late.”

  “Please.”

  Rukhsana twists the wheel violently and cuts across two lanes of traffic, prompting a chorus of horns. She spits out a skein of curses in the street language of Lahore, and turns into the gate of Gau Shala, the old burial ground of the city.

  She parks. Sonia asks, “Do you know where they are?”

  “Of course,” says Rukhsana stiffly, and leads the way through the thick, dusty, monumented ground, walking ahead like a soldier.

  Sonia stands for a while in front of the simple stone slabs that mark the graves of her father-in-law and her two daughters. Jamila would be thirty and Aisha thirty-four, she calculates, but this thought does not summon a sense of loss. Like the markers, that part of her heart is stone now. Grief among traditional Muslim women is operatic, but they are not allowed to attend funerals. They wail at home. She wailed in the streets of Zurich when she heard the news, when someone (it was in fact Rukhsana) remembered to call her. Farid had suffered a complete collapse and was hospitalized for a month after the event. She has long forgiven him, for that lapse and for what happened at about that time to her son. The many catastrophes in her life have marked her, but not by the manufacture of grudges. She recalls a Yeats line Baba often quoted: “Cast a cold eye on life, on death. Horseman, pass by!” She does that, has done that, for years. The two women walk back to the car, arm in arm. Rukhsana’s cheeks are wet, but she makes no comment.

  After they have taped their interviews, they drive to the Avari Hotel on the Mall. Sonia checks in and learns from the desk clerk that the rest of the members of the conference, except for William Craig, have already arrived. The Avari is a perfectly anonymous luxury hotel of the type found in any major city. One might be in Singapore or Toronto, Sonia thinks, upon seeing her room, except for a discreet plate marking the qibla, the direction of Mecca for prayers. She has selected this hotel on purpose; there will be culture shock enough for the Western conferees when they get to Kashmir.

  Sonia orders tea from room service and sits on the bed with the conference papers spread about her. The conference is called “Conflict Resolution on the Subcontinent: A Therapeutic Approach.” The meeting is actually her idea, although the official sponsor is Amin Yakub Khan, a wealthy Pakistani, once a friend and protégé of B. B. Laghari and now the president of Pakistan’s largest charitable trust. Sonia and he had put together the conference in a flurry of phone calls and e-mails last winter, keeping a low profile because of its controversial nature, designed to discuss the possibility that the kind of ethnic and confessional violence that had characterized the region since the exit of the British Raj was in fact a kind of mass insanity and that the analytical tools that had been used to help many individuals recover from madness might be adapted to the peacemaking process. When Sonia first suggested the project, Amin had laughed and said it might be easier to flood the Indus, the Ganges, and the Brahmaputra with Prozac.

  But she wore him down. It would be interesting, she said. It’s always nice to meet people who are not in the tedious mold of one’s everyday acquaintances, it would be a week out of sweltering Lahore in May, and it would be a sort of memorial for Baba, who was always a partisan of East-West cooperation and a lover of peace. They were coming up on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death. They could write a dedication to him when they published the proceedings. So he agreed, in the end, and it only remained to choose the participants and obtain funding.

  For the latter, Sonia made contact with William Craig, the famously eccentric telecom billionaire, who owned a vast ranch on the New Mexico border not far from where she lived for part of the year. His foundation had been supporting a network of mental health clinics in the region for years; she worked at one of these, and they sat together on the organization’s board. They were not exactly friends, but she was able to reach him directly and thus to have her proposal stand out from thousands of others. He immediately agreed to pay for the thing but he wanted to attend, which she had not expected. Perhaps he would cancel at the last moment.

  The other invitees were a mixed bag. She had let Amin pick them, insisting only that at least one of them be an Indian national. He’d selected Manjit Nara for that slot, a psychiatrist and ethnographer from Delhi, an expert on Kashmir. Besides him, they invited Father Mark Shea, a Canadian Jesuit who had been prominent in several Latin American peace negotiations; Porter and Annette Cosgrove, American Quakers, who had worked to end the conflict in Angola and written some important books on nonviolent political change; and Karl-Heinz Schildkraut, from Zurich, an old friend of hers and a psychotherapist with a long-standing interest in the history of India and Pakistan.

  When the funding came through, Sonia had called her sister-in-law. Rukhsana would be a good choice for the conference rapporteur and could also help Sonia back into the good graces of the Laghari family. Rukhsana had suggested another invitee, Harold Ashton, an Englishman, a former foreign service officer and an expert on the diplomatic history of the subcontinent, who also accepted. Sonia drinks her tea, when it comes, and reads the papers prepared by the attendees until jet lag seizes her and she sleeps.

  She awakens three hours later to the sound of the azan, the call to Maghrib, the prayer at sunset:

  God is great God is great God is great, I attest there is no God

  but God, I attest Muhammad is the messenger of God, make

  haste to prayer, make haste to welfare, there is no God but God.

  The wailing song floats in from a nearby mosque loudspeaker and cuts through the international air-conditioner hum. She
has not prayed as a Muslim for a considerable time, but after hearing the azan she finds herself almost reflexively reciting the du’a, the supplication before prayer, and then she ties up her hair in her scarf and goes to the bathroom and performs the ritual ablution, washing her feet and her hands and arms and running her wet hands over her face.

  She takes the prayer rug the hotel provides and arranges it to face the qibla. Silently she goes through the proper intention for the Maghrib prayer and then enters the prayer state easily, without friction, the ritual words and the prescribed movements, the hands up next to the face, the hands folded, right over left on the belly, the kneeling, the full prostration, the cycle of one raka’ah after another until the three ordained for the sunset prayer are done. Sonia has always been religious in her own fashion. In America, she attends a Catholic church in whatever neighborhood she finds herself, as her mother trained her to do. In Muslim lands she follows her adopted religion. In Europe she presents herself as an adherent of Carl Gustav Jung. Nor is it hypocritical, she thinks, not merely a case of When in Rome. She doesn’t see why her worship should be restricted to one faith, especially as she is devoted to all of them and believes that God understands this peculiarity and approves.

  Now it is time to get ready for the reception. She showers, washes and dries her hair, dresses in her best shalwar kameez, a black number shot with silver threads, and arranges a black silk scarf over her short hair. The wall mirror shows her a thin, slight woman with graying black hair atop a deep-tanned face out of which shine dark, bright eyes. She thinks she looks like an American in costume, so she takes a breath and shifts the tension in her muscles, especially the muscles of her face. She looks again and smiles shyly for effect. Now she is a Muslim lady, probably a Pathan, at home in Pakistan. She is very good at this, and it gives her an absurd and infantile pleasure.