The Black Rainbow

by Hussain Zaidi

  “As to your question what I think life is, I would say life is too complex to have a definition. But if you insist on a definition, then a popular definition is that life is constant struggle not only against the external world but also against oneself. I have since long subscribed to this view. But of late I have started to realize the inadequacy of this view. It’s good even necessary to struggle in life. But too much emphasis on struggle or resistance divests life of its beauty, which consists in simply enjoying whatever one has. Besides, equating life with struggle enormously narrows its scope. There are numerous things in life other than struggle, resistance, fight or such other jingoistic terms. Have you studied Zen Buddhism?”

  “A little bit,” Ali, who was amazed at the question, replied.

  “I studied Zen Buddhism long ago. I have been to Japan, where it’s a popular philosophy. I’m afraid most of what I read or heard about Zen has slipped my memory but I still remember a few things. It’s important to find the meaning of life but it’s not by speculation but by living that you find the same. There are many important things in life like wealth and comfort, beauty and love, truth and intelligence, knowledge and wisdom but life is much more than these. It’s good to be wealthy but one can live without wealth. It’s good to be wise but even for a fool there is much in life.”

  “But father Zen is based on the philosophy of resignation. Don’t you think it’s better to make effort than to resign oneself to circumstances?”

  “Now you’re trying to knock me out,” Mr Naqvi raised his hands. “It’s difficult to argue with a philosopher. Yes, it’s better to endeavour than resign, struggle than submit, but there is wisdom in resignation as well, in taking things as they come. Similarly, it’s good to plan for the future but there’s also some wisdom in living in the present. Again, it’s good to change things but there is also some wisdom in quietly accepting things as they are. I may be contradicting myself but this is how it is.”

  “You are a different person than I have known.”

  “You thought a journalist can’t talk like an intellectual — just joking.”

  “Are you satisfied with your life?”

  “Son, there’s no such thing as absolute satisfaction. Man is incapable of two things: One of them is to be wholly satisfied with what he has or where he is. So I’m largely satisfied with my life but of course not completely.”

  “And what is the other thing of which man is incapable?”

  “Unconditional love,” Mr Naqvi replied.

  “I’m sorry I don’t understand? Isn’t love always unconditional?” Ali asked.

  “No my son; love is never unconditional. When we love someone, we come to have some expectations of them — maybe love in return, maybe respect, maybe affection, maybe care, maybe attention, maybe sacrifice. If these expectations aren’t fulfilled, love loses its warmth. Tell me you love me and your mother. If tomorrow you come to know something about us which you never expected, would your love still be the same?”

  “What are you talking about? I don’t expect anything of that sort on your part.” Ali glanced at his father in amazement.

  “Ok, I ask you another question: You loved Sara. Do you still love her?”

  Ali replied in the negative.

  “Exactly! There’s an important lesson in this. If someone loves you, respect their feelings at least even if you can’t love them.”

  At that moment, the door bell rang.

  “Perhaps your mother is back. I go and see,” Mr Naqvi said.

  At that time Ali didn’t realize that it was his last detailed encounter with his father.

  Chapter 35

  “Your husband is dead,” a police officer broke the news to Mrs Naqvi.

  It was five in the evening. Ali had gone to library and Mrs Naqvi was alone at home. The door bell rang and she saw three policemen standing at the entrance.

  “My name is inspector Tanveer Khan,” one of them introduced himself. Does Mr Hassan Naqvi live here?”

  “Yes. But he’s not at home. Is everything ok? I’m Mrs Naqvi.”

  “I’m afraid we have a bad news for you. Your husband Hassan Naqvi is dead.

  “What’s this nonsense? How could it be? I spoke to him barely three hours ago.”

  “Madam he was leaving his office when someone shot at him and he died on the spot. His body is in hospital.”

  The inspector had barely finished when two colleagues of Mr Naqvi reached there and confirmed what the inspector had said.

  Mr Naqvi was a well-known and widely respected journalist and the news of his death spread in the city in a short time. People from various walks of life started to come to his home to condole his death. An inquiry was ordered into the killing. The investigators quizzed Mrs Naqvi and Ali whether they suspected anyone. The mother and the son were shocked at the death of Mr Naqvi. They couldn’t believe that anyone could kill him as he had no enemies.

  However, Manzoor Ahmad, Mr Naqvi’s news editor, had something different to tell. He told the investigators that Mr Naqvi was working on a big story regarding the nexus between the militants and the agencies. “He told me he had some evidence of that nexus. So I suspect that the people he was going to expose were behind his murder.”

  “Did he drop you any hint who those people were,” an investigator asked?

  “No he didn’t. He would never share information unless he had it complete. Not even with his editor.”

  “Anyone else who could be of help to us? I mean the deceased must have some close friends. I’m sorry I’m putting this question to you, because the deceased’s family is too shocked to answer any questions.”

  “I’ll be glad to help apprehend the culprits,” Manzoor Ahmad replied. “No Hassan didn’t have any friends. He was essentially a private person devoted only to two things — his work and family. Even I didn’t count myself a friend of his, though we worked together for two decades. His only friend if I’m correct and I hope the deceased’s family will bear me out is Babu Javed, who is also related to him, and intriguingly enough works for an intelligence agency. I have the feeling that if anyone can help you it’s him.”

  The death of Mr Naqvi was a bolt from the blue for his family. For Mrs Naqvi, he was not only her husband but also her best friend. Throughout, their relationship had remained exemplary and there had never been a shadow between them. But she was also a brave woman and knew that she had to be strong to face up to the world. She was particularly concerned about her son, who needed her support to bear up the loss. Therefore, she put up a brave face and consoled Ali, for whom the loss of his father was too much of a shock given the fact that he was a man of weak nerves and was easily upset when something went wrong.

  One of the people who had come to condole the demise of Mr Naqvi was Farzana. After her marriage she had settled in a distant city. However, she couldn’t get along with her husband, who was fifteen years older than her, and their marriage broke down.

  After spending some time with Mrs Naqvi, Farzana went to see Ali, who was in his room.

  “I’m extremely grieved at the death of uncle Naqvi. He had been very kind and affectionate to me like a father. But it’s the will of God.” Farzana spoke the customary sentences. However, Ali didn’t speak in reply and even didn’t look at her.

  “I also feel sorry that your marriage has ended.”

  Ali remained silent.

  “Perhaps you don’t know but my marriage has also broken down,” she added.

  Again, there wasn’t a single word from Ali.

  “Why don’t you speak? Do you dislike my being here? If that’s the case, then I had better leave.”

  Farzana was on the point of leaving the room when Ali rose from the chair and looking at her abstractly said, “No please stop. Forgive me but I’m too shattered to respond to you. Thanks for coming and for the kind words. I’m sorry that your marriage didn’t work. What happened?”

  Hamid is a nice man but somehow we couldn’t get along. Perhaps we weren
’t made for each other.”

  “How do we know that we aren’t made for each other?” Ali realizing that he and Sara were also not made for each other remarked. “I mean marriage like any other major decision in life is a leap in the dark. You may get into the right place or you may stumble into a pitfall. I know my parents were made for each other. They loved, respected, understood and trusted each other. I don’t know how my mother will bear the loss of my father.”

  “Yes it’s an enormous loss for her but I know she has the courage and the fortitude.”

  Farzana wanted to ask Ali what drove him and Sara apart but she restrained herself from doing so lest it might disconcert him. “If you don’t mind can I see you again,” she asked?

  “Yes. As usual I’m short of friends. But more than I mother needs your company.”

  One person Ali anxiously waited for was Sara. But she neither visited him nor even made a call to condole the death of her former father-in-law.

  “Maybe she doesn’t know that my father is dead,” Ali tried to console himself. “But how could it be. The death has been widely reported in the media. Maybe she is not in the country. Yes she had told me that she was planning to go abroad.”

  Sara had neither gone abroad nor was she unaware of the killing of Mr Naqvi. She was saddened at the tragedy but had decided to stay away from Ali. Ever since she had parted ways with Ali, she was a solitary figure again spending most of her time in the study surfing the Internet or reading. Her father would occasionally ask her to join his business but her answer always was that she wasn’t yet prepared for the same and that she had planned to go abroad for doctoral studies. Those days she, like her other class fellows, was waiting for the assessment of her thesis leading to the award of the degree. She had written on Nietzsche’s theory of transvaluation of values and wanted to do doctorate on the same. The German philosopher had appealed to her enormously for having enthroned strength and intelligence as the greatest of virtues and denounced weakness and foolishness as the most despicable of vices.

  To Sara, weakness and foolishness had their place as well in the moral order, for the strength of one was built on the weakness of many and the intelligence of one was of little avail unless it was used to exploit the stupidity of others.

  “Representative democracy, the cherished political system of the modern world, rests on how successfully the intelligent few exploit the stupid majority in the name of popular sovereignty,” so maintained Sara in the thesis. “The strong need the weak; the genius needs the ordinary mortals, to make their mark.”

  The combination of strength and intelligence, Sara believed, was a lethal one capable of surmounting any obstacle and overcoming any resistance. The most successful people in the world and in history were those who had abundance of both. On the other hand, a person who had neither was doomed to despair and failure, ruin and annihilation.

  Sara considered herself to be strong and intelligent; however, she believed she had one fatal weakness — her love for her father. She thought she could grapple with any problem except a situation in which her father was at the receiving end. It was only for the sake of her father that she had married Ali.

  “Now that that devil called Maulvi Zia is dead, papa is free and I trust he’ll not fall into a similar trap,” so thought Sara.

  However, one question that still troubled her was how Seth Nisar fell into the trap of Maulvi Zia. She believed he must have had some weakness, which the wily maulvi had exploited. But what was that? For her that question was important, because someone else might do the same. So she decided to speak to Seth Nisar firmly.

  “Papa I have one question to ask, which I believe you’ll answer.”

  “Anything for you sweetheart.”

  “How did you fall into Maulvi Zia’s trap?”

  “I believe the maulvi is dead and the chapter is closed. What’s then the point of asking this?”

  “Just out of curiosity.”

  “Then let your curiosity remain unsatisfied.”

  “But what if I insist?”

  “Dear I would have told you much before if I could. However, just to quench your thirst, I did something unworthy of me, which Maulvi Zia documented. More than that, I can’t speak of.”

  “Ok. But that document or evidence will still be available with Zia’s men. They can again use it against you.”

  “Yes they can. But Zia is no more and his movement was so thoroughly dependent upon him that I needn’t fear them. In any event, since his death I haven’t received any message from his men, which means I’m safe now and you can rest assured. By the way did you condole the demise of your former father-in-law?” Seth Nisar asked.

  “Not yet,” Sara said moving her hands. “But coming back to my question, can’t you ask Maulvi Zia’s men to return you the evidence against you?”

  “I might have done so if I knew who to ask,” Seth Nisar replied.

  Chapter 36

  The question for Ali, as for many others, was who had killed his father and why. He recalled how the deceased had talked to him candidly about himself only two days before his death. But he didn’t drop even a hint that his life was in danger. Nor did he share any such thing with his wife, with whom he was wont to sharing everything. This strongly suggested that whatever happened to him was out of the blue.

  Death was one problem on which Ali had never meditated. The demise of his father also opened that window on him and he began to ponder on death. The more he pondered, the more fascinated the problem appeared to him so much so that the question who killed his father appeared to him far less intriguing than the question what death signified.

  “Death is the end of life. But why should life end?”

  The proposition that death was the end of life seemed to Ali no more than a tautology.

  “Yes death is the end of life. But it is also the end of all thoughts and feelings, emotions and sentiments, hopes and aspirations, woes and sufferings, joys and pleasures. It is also the end of the world, because for me the world comes into being and passes into nothingness with the beginning and end of my life. While I’m alive, I have the feeling that I have always been in the world, because I never experienced a moment when I didn’t exist. Though I see the people around me pass away, I continue to live. Life then is being and death nothingness. To die means to pass from being into nothingness.”

  This then is the common fate of all. However powerful and intelligent a person, he has to taste death. No medicine, no mantra, no money, no trick, no prayers will save him from the grave. We are all doomed to nothingness. But is death necessarily nothingness? Isn’t it the beginning of a new life in the hereafter or in this world in a different form? Most religions affirm in their own way that this is the case. But do we have any evidence of this? We see people die but we don’t see anyone come back to life.”

  While brooding over death, Ali fell asleep. He dreamed that it was the Day of Judgment. The Almighty was holding His court assigning people heaven or hell on the basis of their deeds. Everyone was waiting for their turn in absolute fear. Ali himself was trembling badly.

  “So I was wrong,” he admitted to himself. “I doubted the existence of God, of the soul, immortality and the hereafter, because I saw no empirical evidence for them. Woe to me; how mistaken I was that I lived all along on wrong assumptions! But I’m not the only one who was mistaken. Most of the people I knew acted as if they would never be made accountable for their deeds. A similar fate must be in store for them.”