‘They are coming around to the idea of our marriage,’ he said, ‘but her father still doesn’t trust me. And I really don’t foresee him bringing any documents here at my request. Perhaps...perhaps we should just think of something else, of someone else to approach...separately.’
Nissa was a reasonable person, he had hoped. She would see the futility of it all, see the toll it was taking on his relationship with Haniya. Jettisoned of the need to cultivate her father, Haniya and he could get married in London and get on with life.
Nissa didn’t say anything, except that he should give it some more time.
A few days later, when all seemed hopeless once more, Omar spoke again of cutting his losses.
‘Does Haniya know about our arrangement?’ Nissa asked.
Omar shook his head.
‘Does she know about the money I’ve given you?’ Nissa probed more bluntly this time.
‘She won’t believe it,’ Omar blustered, baring his teeth. He was beginning to glimpse his personal ten thousand hells.
‘How many students can afford a posh flat in Camden, do you suppose?’
Like Faustus, Omar blithely declared disbelief in such a hell as Nissa hinted at.
She smiled. ‘Then there’s the little matter of your breaking into a Pakistani diplomat’s private room,’ she said. ‘I wonder if the police would be interested in that.’
Omar felt a shiver run down his spine.
‘I really don’t want to do this,’ Nissa said in a voice that betrayed no regret at all, ‘and maybe I won’t do anything. You and I have been friends for years, Omar. You know me well. I’m not a cruel person. But the people I work for have spent a large sum of money on your well-being. They will want something in return. If they see no means of getting it, well, there’s no telling what they might do.’
That deflated him noticeably.
‘These are very powerful people, Omar,’ she pressed on. ‘If I were you, I wouldn’t want their anger directed at me...or Haniya.’
Mephistopheles had bullied Faustus away from repentance.
‘Imagine what would happen to her family, to her father in particular, if it emerged that the man she was living with, sleeping with, had stolen information from a Pakistani diplomat. We wouldn’t want that to happen, Omar.’
He was on the verge of tears. She considered going into graphic detail about what happens to South Asian women who indulge in premarital sex when their community finds out, but the possibility of him breaking completely gave her pause. Instead she spent the next hour building up his courage.
‘Listen,’ she finally said. ‘If her father won’t bring the documents here on his own, why don’t you travel to Pakistan? You can tell them you’re there to seek their blessings for your wedding...once they’ve accepted your relationship completely, of course. You’ve already explained why the information is crucial to your thesis, haven’t you?’
He nodded. Every other thought in his head had vanished.
‘Good,’ she continued. ‘Then he shouldn’t suspect you if, during a visit to Risalpur, you prod him about it. Sort it out, Omar. After all, if the mountain won’t come...’
***
Risalpur (Pakistan)
It was a hot and unusually still afternoon. Omar pretended to read One Hundred Years of Solitude in his soon-to-be father-in-law’s study. Not the most fortuitous of titles, he thought in retrospect, but he had picked up the first thing that looked remotely readable in the Brigadier’s bookcase. The ceiling fan struggled against voltage fluctuations, painfully churning the warm air with regular clicks and clacks, and keeping Omar glazed with a sticky sheen. The large windows were shut and obscured by thick, green curtains, keeping him from the heat and life of the rest of the world. Not that there would be much noise on campus among bungalows of the top brass and the faculty. His father-in-law—Papa, as Haniya insisted he call him—had graciously suggested that Omar make himself comfortable in the massive leather throne of a chair, behind the mahogany Bureau Mazarin that had been purchased from an Irish doctor a few decades earlier. But Omar felt uncomfortable with the idea of occupying his chair. He had become acutely aware of how sensitive Haniya’s parents were to every bit of symbolism on this trip and wanted to avoid appearing presumptuous. He also suspected that Papa’s grace was an offering for Ammi’s consumption. Instead, in deference to the old man’s standing in his society, Omar chose one of the two corner chairs in the room. Like many of his peers in khaki, the Brigadier was a bit of an anti-intellectual. The kind for whom Staff College was the limit of acceptable intellectual achievement. Any more than that was an indulgence, and the Brigadier had no patience for the indulgent. Except in the matter of his daughter, of course. Which was why, despite mistrusting and mildly disliking Omar, through the superhuman indulgence of the sort that doting fathers are sometimes capable of, Papa tolerated the academic his daughter insisted on marrying.
‘Research is all well and good, young man, but only as a hobby or a diversion for the rich. Those of us who find ourselves the custodians of the optimistic faith of the weak must embrace action. Not for us the luxury of hypothetical questions, arguments, and caveats,’ he had remarked sharply during their first meeting.
It had been an uncharacteristically hot afternoon in London when the two had first met. Not that the Brigadier’s pride would surrender to a little heat and humidity. He had insisted on wearing an elegant wool suit—the best he had—for the meeting, making Omar feel like a lowly pleb in his causals.
After Haniya formally introduced the two, conversation flowed like molasses.
The Brigadier was uneasy at the manner in which Haniya, after insisting on falling in love with a lecturer of all people, had plotted with her mother and forced him to travel all the way to England to meet the damned chap.
‘Can’t the fool travel to Pakistan to meet the girl’s parents like all decent young men do when they’re seeking permission?’ he had asked when his wife told him that Haniya had asked the two of them to travel to London. ‘I remember begging my CO for leave to travel to Multan to meet your parents.’
‘That was different,’ his wife had replied with a grin. ‘You were a young Lieutenant and my father was an old Colonel. You had no choice.’
‘Won’t you talk some sense into her?’
‘She’s sensible enough to know right from wrong. Remember that when you go meet that boy. Be nice,’ his wife said.
‘When I go meet him? What about you?’
‘I’m not the one who has a problem with her choice.’
‘Outflanked by my own wife and daughter. This is not done, Begum,’ he had remarked.
And yet, here he was, in London, at a cafe, seated at a table with his daughter and the man she wanted to marry. The tension at the table was thick.
To lighten the sombre mood, Omar spoke about the hot and humid weather they were having.
‘You call this hot? What you consider hot here in London is nothing but a pleasant evening breeze in Pakistan. You should visit Larkana in summer,’ the old man remarked.
Haniya rolled her eyes.
‘I would love to do that sometime,’ Omar replied. ‘I’ve never been to Pakistan although my parents were both born there. With London it’s not just heat, sir, but also the humidity. Is Larkana humid too?’
‘No, it’s dry.’
‘That can be endured, I suppose. With the sort of weather we are having, only the Indians can remain comfortable seeing as how they’re quite used to Jahannam already,’ Omar quipped.
That earned him an almost imperceptible softening of the Brigadier’s offended demeanour. The softening did not last long.
‘Papa doesn’t look as uncomfortable as he does today even when Ammi is cross with him,’ Haniya remarked.
Omar couldn’t understand why she would stir the pot when he was trying his best to curry favo
ur. He knew that she had endured a lot of hostility ever since she had told her parents about him, and perhaps this was her way of purging some of her own anger. The timing couldn’t have been worse for him, though, and the old man had spent the next hour skilfully and subtly demeaning every aspect of Omar’s existence with prodigious charm. Every bit her father’s strong-willed daughter, Haniya had returned the favour and, in an unkind cut sure to sting deep, had kissed Omar in the Brigadier’s presence.
Nearly three months after that afternoon in London, Omar looked up from his book and rested his gaze on a portrait of the Chief of Army Staff that adorned Papa’s study. The dual scimitars of the moustache seemed embellished, perhaps compensating for a career undistinguished in gallantry as compared to some of his peers. His vacant eyes, hooded under raised eyebrows, reminded Omar of Peter Manuel, the Beast of Birkenshaw, whose trial and execution he had followed closely in the newspapers as a twelve-year-old kid.
Omar forced himself to look away. Returning to Marquez, his attention lurched from one phrase to another in a game of drunken hopscotch, and his fingers dutifully flipped through the pages one at a time. The lyrical prose should have enthralled him and yet, like a child waking alone in the dark of night, his mind saw demons in the shadows and screamed silently in terror. That morning Papa had been summoned to ‘Pindi for a tête-à-tête with someone on the Engineer-in-Chief’s staff, ostensibly concerning an emerging crisis, possibly in India. Flattered by the attention from the high priests of a three-star God, and exuberant to the point of giddiness while saying goodbye to his wife, the old soldier had grabbed an overnight bag and set off in a staff car, ordering the driver, a Pathan NCO of gargantuan proportions, to take the Grand Trunk Road.
‘Like Napoleon leaving Elba,’ Ammi had remarked as the car exited the large compound.
Omar had laughed amiably, but the abruptness of the departure had left him perturbed and, as time passed, his mind built a vast edifice of suspicion upon it. Since when do three-stars summon sidelined Brigadiers for urgent consultations, he wondered. And what crisis was emergent in India? The newspapers in Pakistan carried no indications, and they would have: half their ink was spilt in warning about the larger country on a daily basis. Had the Iron Lady of India died? Omar dismissed the possibility. Her death, so soon after the humiliating amputation of ‘71, would have been greeted with celebrations in the hyper-jingoistic environs of an army establishment. To assure himself, he spent half an hour scanning various stations on the radio. The Beeb had nothing to say at all about India, unsurprisingly, and neither did the Voice of America. All India Radio was busy transmitting Hindi movie songs and, after two minutes, Omar’s patience with that radio station ran out. By all accounts India had only recently emerged from a dark political tunnel. Even a nation as chaotic and dysfunctional as India couldn’t have rushed into another one so quickly. Giant beasts are slow and cautious. Besides, even if they were on the verge of a crisis—say Manekshaw had betrayed every fibre of his character and launched a coup d’état—the Pakistanis were in no position to take advantage. Even the most reckless commander brought up on the bromide of Pakistani martial superiority—and there was no shortage of such men in ‘Pindi, as Papa had remarked the previous evening—would clap gleefully at India’s misfortune, blame it on the depravity of the cunning Hindoo, and then quietly excuse himself instead of embarking on another adventure so soon after the Blitz in Bangladesh. He certainly wouldn’t invite a one-star, who was in a career cul-de-sac, for consultations.
The distracted silence that Omar had lapsed into after being jovial during breakfast worried Haniya. Had Papa said something before he left? While she had anticipated some resistance to their relationship from her parents, its fervour and endurance had surprised her. It had taken months of negotiations, and the insinuation that they couldn’t do much from another continent if she decided to marry him against their wishes, to bring them around. Through it all, Omar had patiently stood by her, easing her anger, salving her agony, and gently nourishing her spirit. Perhaps tongues were now wagging because she was visiting her parents with her fiancé, and those nauseating chaar log, the proverbial subtle bastards who lived to call attention to less-than-perfect actions of others, may have begun needling Papa about it. Her own aunts had wasted no time in outraging about “that foreign boy visiting with her before marriage?” They had an axe to grind, of course: two of them wanted Haniya to be married off to some favoured cousin or the other, and if they had to break this relationship for that, well, eggs and omelettes and all that. Wouldn’t it blow their narrow minds to know the things she and Omar did in the Camden flat they now shared!
She asked Ammi obliquely, beginning with a generic ‘Are Papa and you happy,’ that her mother saw through as soon as the words had escaped her lips.
It yielded nothing. Ammi was, by then, firmly in Omar’s camp, delighted by his tender-hearted manner and the way he treated Haniya. And when Haniya asked directly if Papa had reservations, her mother simply told her to perish the thought.
‘He won’t admit it, but he is proud of you,’ Ammi assured her.
In Papa’s study, Haniya told Omar about her heart-to-heart with Ammi. He listened, smiled, and said all the right words. But his smile remained frozen, and she could tell that his mind was elsewhere.
‘Have Papa or Ammi said something to you?’ she finally asked.
They hadn’t, he assured her.
‘You have been rather preoccupied ever since Papa left this morning. I was worried that he had said something to you before leaving,’ she said.
Omar laughed it off.
‘Papa and Ammi have been very kind and welcoming. I feel like I’ve known them for years. Stop worrying. I’m fine. Just a little tired, that’s all. It must be this heat. Nothing that an afternoon spent reading won’t fix.’
She didn’t wish to pry further, not with Ammi wandering from one room to another, not even pretending half-credibly that she wasn’t eavesdropping. And maybe he was just tired. It was his first time in Pakistan, in Asia in fact, and perhaps he was a bit overwhelmed by it all.
As she turned to leave, Omar reached out and caressed her hand, but didn’t stop her. He needed her gentle reassurance. But he couldn’t tell her, not now, not ever. Betrayal had to remain buried, or it would destroy both their lives. All he needed to do was keep his head for seventy-two hours until they had boarded their flight to Heathrow. He already had what he had come for and hopefully, this sordid ordeal would soon be behind him forever.
***
The staff car raced towards Risalpur. The burly NCO manhandled the steering wheel with the panache of a pirate steering his brigantine through a storm. In the rear seat, next to Papa—who was frightfully calm—Omar’s insides rattled each time they hurtled past a colourful truck. Despite the beacon flashing on top of the car, trucks ceded the middle of the Sadak-e-Azam rather grudgingly. Corners were taken at speed as they sought to outrun two storms, and those potholes that the NCO couldn’t evade wreaked havoc on a digestive system already under tenuous control. Papa was unaffected by it all and paid no attention to heavy vehicles playing chicken with their car. He had been in an amiable mood all morning as they drove to ‘Pindi—in his case, for the second time in as many days.
‘A course mate of mine from Doon—Dehradoon, now in India—is in ‘Pindi. Brilliant chap. Rising star destined to make chief. He commands the 111th Infantry Brigade at ‘Pindi these days. When I ran into him yesterday and mentioned you, he invited us over for lunch. Said he would love to meet my future son-in-law.’
The visit and lunch had been hastily arranged following Papa’s initial trip to ‘Pindi on Sunday, but the elegance of the occasion showed no signs of being hurried. Like Papa, their host—Brigadier Mohammad Khan—was dressed in uniform—khaki— with rows of decorations. His insignia had a sword and baton. Omar felt uncomfortable in a hastily ironed navy blue suit. The paranoid worry that he was ab
out to be discovered eased as they walked into the opulent Garrison Officers’ Mess, but his heart continued to lurch the first few times anyone in uniform approached their table.
Conversation was easy, and Brigadier Khan showed a keen interest in Omar’s profession. Papa appeared to visibly relax as morning became afternoon. The social approval implicit in his best friend taking to the slightly chubby academic set him at ease. Despite Papa’s statement about having run into him by accident, Omar guessed that this person was Papa’s confidant, doing the old Brigadier the favour of easing his conscience about his daughter choosing her own husband. As long as that choice ticked all the checkboxes of a good Pakistani groom, of course.
The Nihari and Haleem were delectable, and soon Omar had worked his way through four Naans. Dessert was a generous helping of Kulfi buried under a heap of almonds and pistachios. Omar had two of those. He felt comfortable and, when asked about life in London, quipped that the worst part was the sheer number of Indians he had to put up with. That drew laughter from their host. Papa turned the conversation towards politics immediately afterwards. After half an hour of worrying about the wave of civil unrest that had gripped the country, they concluded that sooner rather than later order would have to be restored.
‘For how long are you staying in Pakistan, Omar?’ their host asked. The answer—till Thursday morning—bothered him a bit.
‘Unless you have something important planned for them, an early exit might be in order,’ he said to Papa in a low but firm voice. ‘Triple One may be called upon to mobilize very soon,’ he added in an even lower voice, referring to the brigade he commanded.
Turning back to Omar on whom the reference to the brigade was lost, Khan congratulated him on a fantastic choice.
‘You don’t know how lucky you are. Not only are you marrying a wonderful girl,’ he added, ‘you’re marrying into a very distinguished family. It was a pleasure meeting you, young man, and I would have loved to chat some more, but duty beckons.’
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