The hotel has provided a small room set up with a large round table and a bar. As she enters, Sonia sees Rukhsana speaking to a couple of men. One is a slight elfin figure in a cheap tan suit, his blue eyes bright and cheerful behind rimless glasses, his narrow skull clothed with a thatch of sand-colored hair going gray; the other towers over him, a really huge old man, his face decorated by a noble nose and a white brush mustache. Rukhsana gestures her over and embraces her; Sonia can smell liquor on her breath, although the glass she is holding appears to be fruit juice. Rukhsana introduces the smaller of the two as Father Mark Shea, S.J.
“And of course you know Dr. Schildkraut.”
“My dear Sonia,” Schildkraut says, embracing her. “You have not changed even a little bit.”
“Nor have you, Karl-Heinz,” she replies, a lie. Schildkraut is twenty years her senior and now looks it.
“We were just discussing religion,” Rukhsana says brightly. “Perhaps Sonia can add something. She claims to be a Muslim and a Catholic simultaneously.”
“That must be fatiguing,” says Shea. “You actually practice both?”
“I practice,” Sonia replies, “but I’m not good enough to perform either on the professional stage.”
Father Shea laughs, throwing his head back so that he almost faces the ceiling. Sonia thinks he must be a man who likes to laugh but doesn’t get much of a chance in his ordinary work. He says, “I’d be interested in how you get the statement in the Qur’an-that God begets not, neither is He begotten-to play nice with the clear declaration about the nature of Christ in the Nicene Creed.”
Sonia says, “Well, clearly either the Church Fathers were mistaken or the Prophet, peace be unto him, was mistaken, or else-and I think this is most likely-that any statement about God falls short of the ineffable truth and therefore neither is mistaken, but we mortals are incapable of resolving the differences with our puny minds.”
Shea laughs again, more loudly. “Thus you defy the theologians. Well, good for you! We Jesuits, you know, are supposed to be all things to all men, but you put us to shame.”
A man comes by with a tray of drinks. Shea snags a champagne; Schildkraut and Sonia take soft drinks; Rukhsana ignores the man and his tray entirely. Instead she is looking across the room at something, and when Sonia follows her gaze she sees that it is a man heading toward the bar. Rukhsana mutters a brief excuse and walks off in that direction. Soon she is deep in conversation with the man, whom Sonia now recognizes as Harold Ashton, the face familiar from a photograph on a book jacket and a similar one she acquired as she organized the conference. As is usual with authors and their book jacket images, he is jowlier and more worn by time than the image testifies but still handsome in the English style, with a bony high-colored face, long dark hair combed straight back and hanging raggedly over his collar, a strong nose and jaw, and pale imperial eyes. He leans over Rukhsana from his considerable height and touches her arm lightly from time to time.
Now uniformed waiters are passing through the room and laying the first course on the tables, so the conferees do the usual shuffle to find their place cards. Sonia has seated herself between her fellow convener, Amin Yacub Khan, and the Indian psychiatrist, Manjit Nara. Of the other seats, two are occupied by Rukhsana and Ashton, two by Porter and Annette Cosgrove, two by Father Shea and Dr. Schildkraut, and one is empty, its plate of tiny kebab appetizers cooling. Sonia turns to Amin and asks, “Have we heard anything from Craig? Is he going to make it?”
Amin finishes off a kebab, sucking its stick clean. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I heard from him just now on my mobile. His plane is approaching Lahore International as we speak, and he will be here before dinner is over, God willing. I’ve arranged for a car to pick him up and also a police escort.”
“That was thoughtful,” says Sonia.
“Well, yes, we would do the same for any Pakistani billionaire-do we have real billionaires in Pakistan? I suppose we must. I know you have billionaires in India, Manjit.”
The two men banter across Sonia for the next few minutes about the relative wealth of their two nations, which persons have hold of it, and whence it comes. Then the talk moves to globalization, how the free flow of capital is affecting the two countries, how after a long period of stagnation the Pakistani economy seems to be taking off, like India’s did in the final decades of the past century, and what this means for their future relationship. Sonia listens to them talk, glad that they seem to get along so cordially. She is pleased also by their contrast in size, the opposite of their respective nations. Amin is a bear with the shaved head and aggressive mustache of a Mughal aga, a solid cylinder of expensive cloth stuffed with the best Punjab beef. Dr. Nara is a wisp, Gandhi-gaunt, with a flat modest face and the huge liquid brown eyes of a lemur. His motions are quick and precise, birdlike, but like a nice bird in a children’s cartoon, not a bird of prey. The two men seem to be purposely avoiding anything controversial, speaking generalities. Sonia hopes the conference will not be all speaking generalities.
Then Porter Cosgrove speaks up from across the table. “What do you think the effect of all this will be on the Kashmir situation? I mean, there’s no point in becoming increasingly prosperous if you both continue to spend such an absurd amount of your nations’ wealth on arms. Especially as you’re each other’s only likely enemy. I mean, doesn’t anyone in either country think it’s absurd, given present conditions? It’s like France and Germany in nineteen hundred, you know? Anachronistic.”
There is a pause. Then Amin chuckles and says, “Well, you are certainly outspoken, sir. But the actual situation is not so easily dismissed.”
Ah, thinks Sonia, they have already stumbled on the K-word.
“No, the plight of the Muslim majority of Kashmir is not so easily dismissed,” Amin continues, and then smiles down at the Indian. “But perhaps Dr. N and the rest of us can solve it where so many have failed.”
“Stranger things have happened,” says Nara, with his own shy smile. “Although I cannot help but agree with what Mr. Cosgrove says. My thought is that until we recognize violent nationalism as another sort of mental disease we will get nowhere.”
“Yes, but where is the cure?” says Amin. “Who has ever cured it?”
“Well, as to that I have some theories,” the Indian replies, “which I daresay you will hear enough about during the coming week to make you quite ill with the sound of my voice. And while I am not such a fool as to credit the inevitablity of progress, I think that if one hundred years ago you had predicted that Western Europe, the greatest hotbed of nationalism of that era, the very source of the contagion, if you will, would be converted less than a century later into what amounts to a single great country, with a tiny armaments budget and utter peace among all its parts-well, people would have thought you a lunatic. But it occurred. And it can occur in South Asia as well.”
“Yes!” says Amin, “I will drink to that,” and he lifts his glass of soda water.
Sonia appreciates the way Nara has defused the topic and she turns to him and draws him out on his practice of psychotherapy. While she chats, her glance falls frequently across the table, where Rukhsana is sitting next to Ashton and directing nearly all of her energetic attention to him, the two heads leaning at each other like flowers in a bed.
Nara seems to pick up on her thoughts. Quietly he says, “Mrs. Qasir seems to have made a conquest.”
“Yes, or the other way around. Of course, they are old acquaintances.”
“Yes, Harold knows everyone. I myself know him reasonably well.”
“I don’t. What’s he like? I know his books, of course.”
“Yes, a great expert on the subcontinent is Mr. Ashton. As he should be. He is almost the last of his breed, you know; he descends from nabobs, from the white Mughals. I believe his family came to India in the eighteenth century, and they waxed great; his ancestors doubtless ruled mine with an iron hand, though in the famous velvet glove. Very fair, but stern. When we kicke
d them out in ’forty-seven, some few could not quite give us up, and so we have the Harold Ashtons of the world. Speaks all the languages, of course, chats in the bazaars and the chancelleries with equal aplomb, and informs the world of our mysterious Eastern ways.”
“You sound like you don’t care for him.”
A delicate shrug. “Nothing personal, I assure you, and at least he is not an ignoramus in his chosen field. It’s only that… have you ever noticed that when an English person of a certain type-I mean the type represented by Ashton-enters a shop kept by an Indian or a Pakistani, here or abroad, something happens to the shopkeeper or clerk? As soon as that pukka accent emerges the air changes, the clerk stands straighter, he becomes more attentive, perhaps a bit fawning, and other customers are ignored. The clerk is in a sense hypnotized by what we must call racial memory. Colonialism still inhabits our unconscious, even now, fifty years on.”
“And yours too?”
He smiled and sniffed a laugh. “Oh, yes, mine too. I find I start sounding like an old babu, and my English becomes a little tangled. It is humiliating.”
“How do you know him?”
“I am one of his informants. He considers me an expert on the psyche of the various subcontinental races. Which is, I suppose, why I am here.”
He abandons this uncomfortable subject and addresses Amin. “This really is an excellent curry, properly spiced. I always find, don’t you, Amin, that when Westerners are at a dinner they always make the curry tastelessly bland.”
“Yes, indeed!” says Amin. “But not here. All the Westerners must be vetted for proper curry, or they can’t come. Mr. Cosgrove, for example, is passing the test. I see you are enjoying your dish, Mr. Cosgrove.”
Cosgrove swallows his mouthful of incandescent mutton and says, “Yes, delicious. We both like spicy food, don’t we, dear?”
And without waiting for his wife to reply he launches into a presentation of his thermophiliac bona fides. They have been in Haiti and Angola, in Mozambique and Guatemala, all zones where people have learned to mask the taste of slightly off meat with chilies. He actually quotes this theory, unconscious of the pained expressions growing on the faces of the Pakistani and the Indian at the table. “We eat anything,” he asserts with a smile.
A man who enjoys the sound of his own voice, observes Sonia, as Cosgrove reels out a series of amusing and gently self-deprecating anecdotes about culinary disasters in the world’s hellholes. His wife listens with the sort of gelid expression often seen on the faces of loyal wives with older loquacious husbands, even though much of the deprecation involves her: skinning and cooking the capybara, mistaking ipecac for baking soda, and so on.
Sonia has not had much to do with Quakers before now and had imagined them to be severe, taciturn, and dreamy. Apparently not, if the current example is typical. Annette, however, is a little dreamy. Perhaps, she muses, Cosgrove is a Quaker by marriage and Annette is the real thing. Cosgrove has the bland, unobtrusive, forgettable face one sees often in white America, the fruits of genetic homogenization. Annette is from the same stock, but hers is unforgettable; she does nothing with it, but nothing is required: the cheekbones and the clear, lightly tanned skin are marvels. She has a wide mouth, unreddened by lipstick, but red enough without, and an endearing little overbite that enhances her smile. They are both blue-eyed, with fine corn-silk hair, Cosgrove’s neatly trimmed in a ten-dollar haircut and Annette’s kept long but bound up in a crown of braiding. She is slim; he is not, perhaps from eating everything. Sonia wonders what their intimate life is like, whether they have a family or if, instead, they have devoted their all to the peace of the world.
After Cosgrove runs down, the conversation becomes general. They speak of Lahore and the problems of Pakistan; then the issue of America, the great bull of the planet, and how it can be made to tread more lightly upon our common earth. The curry is cleared away and a deep-fried rohu follows, a local fish much prized by the Lahoris, bland and emollient with greases, a rest stop for flaming pharynges, and then a chicken tikka that proves even hotter than the curry. Sonia sees that Annette has become flushed and sweaty but continues to eat manfully, like her husband, soaking up the fiery stuff with handfuls of naan, wisely abstaining from ice water.
The chicken is cleared and dessert arrives: gulaab jamun, pyramids of deep-fried dough balls soaked in rose-flavored syrup. Sonia tastes it and smiles at Amin.
“You remembered,” she says.
“Yes, you reminded me when we were setting this up how Baba used to serve it to his guests, and I thought it would be fitting. Ah, I see they are wheeling in my cross, so to speak.”
Hotel staff have rolled away the bar and set up a podium. When the dessert is finished and the coffee poured out into tiny cups, Amin rises. He is a good speaker, strong-voiced, and the style of his subcontinental English reminds Sonia powerfully of Laghari Sahib, which, together with the taste of roses in her mouth from the gulaab, brings a stab to her throat and a pressure of tears to her eyes. He speaks, in fact, of that gentleman, describing him to those in the assembly who did not know him, his charity, his integrity, his devotion to peace and lawful ways.
It is a bland speech, and short, and after it Amin introduces Rukhsana, who takes his place at the podium and speaks briefly about how happy her father would have been to see this assembly and its mission and to know it was going to pursue its deliberations at his beloved country house. Then some logistics for the following morning: they will drive to the Leepa Valley in a convoy of two minibuses and a car. It will be a long drive but it will pass through some of the most beautiful scenery in the world, and this rarely seen, because the area is normally barred to foreigners. The government has arranged for transit through the military zone.
As she speaks, a thin, ungainly white man dressed in a pair of wrinkled chinos and a short-sleeved blue shirt walks into the room. He peers around through thick glasses, as if unsure that he has come to the right place, until his gaze falls on Sonia, at which point he nods and walks over to her and sits down at the table.
“You missed a good dinner, Bill,” she says. “Spicy, just what you like.”
He smiles and rolls his eyes. William Craig famously lives on cups of yogurt and jam, washed down with Diet Coke.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” Craig says. “I got tied up in Dubai. You know how it is.”
“Exactly. I’ve often been tied up in Dubai.”
Rukhsana has seen Craig enter and now she announces that the author of the feast has arrived after the feast and would Mr. William Craig like to make any remarks? Craig declines. Rukhsana finishes her logistics talk and answers a few questions, after which the meeting breaks up, but not before all the attendees have gathered around Craig to pay their respects. It is perfectly feudal, Sonia thinks, and quite appropriate for the country. As she leaves, she observes Rukhsana and the Englishman, Ashton, again in close conversation. Perhaps there is something going on there, perhaps Rukhsana had a liaison with this man. Sonia understands that she herself has little interest in this sort of thing and is always the last to find out who is sleeping with whom. She hopes it will not affect the conference and is oddly saddened by the knowledge that her sister-in-law may be betraying her husband, a kind but emotionally oblivious physicist. Why the mullahs want to lock up all the women, she thinks as she leaves.
Their departure is scheduled for dawn the next day and she knows she should try to sleep, but she is restless and she is in Lahore. On impulse, she takes from her suitcase a garment she has not worn in over twenty years, a black burqa, and drops it over her head. Now she is invisible. Once she had a fight with her sister-in-law about burqas. Sonia had said casually that she didn’t mind them and Rukhsana had snarled, “Oh, it’s fine for you to say that, you’re a tourist. But imagine having it forced on you!” She understood Rukhsana’s point and was suitably abashed, but she doesn’t think she is a mere tourist. A tourist belongs somewhere and goes elsewhere for amusement, but she belongs nowhere and
amusement is not why she has come to Lahore.
She slips out of the hotel, a darker shadow in the gathering dusk.
When she enters the alley at the side of the hotel she hears Amin’s voice. Coming closer, she sees him standing next to a wonderfully painted minibus, one of a pair parked there, and speaking to a squat, balding man in a mechanic’s coverall. She waits in the shadows and listens. This is the man Amin has hired to take them to Leepa. Amin calls him Hamid.
They are negotiating the fee in the old-fashioned manner, as formal as prayer. Hamid offers his two sons as drivers and guards and five cousins and in-laws as additional spear carriers. Amin says they don’t need a platoon of guards, nor do they need their own small army. After all, they will be traveling through one of the most militarized regions in the world, and there are real soldiers everywhere.
Agreeing to cut the crew down to the sons and two cousins, they shake hands, and Amin hands over a pack of English cigarettes to show grace and favor. Sonia slips away, curiously heartened by the scene she has just observed, the more so because she has done it in secret. Eavesdropping has been a habit of hers since childhood, born in the circus, nourished by Lahore.
She tours the streets, still bustling even now, distributes alms to beggars, and then, suddenly exhausted, returns to her room and packs for the following day. She lays out her traveling shalwar kameez. This is made of stain-resistant burnt-almond fabric and has numerous small pockets in it, some sewn in unlikely places. She fills these with various items, chosen from long experience in traveling through South and Central Asia: a Swiss Army knife, a small flashlight, matches in a waterprooof case, hard candy, a compass, a sewing kit, and, for luck and remembrance, a new deck of cards and a Sufi rosary. She strips and crawls naked between the stiff hotel sheets and is almost instantly asleep.
The Good Son Page 5