by A. A. Jafri
Biting his lip, Mansoor turned around and dragged himself towards the house next door—the house that had always reminded him of a fortress. He wanted to use the neighbour’s phone to call Haider Rizvi, the only person Mansoor trusted in this city of teeming millions. If his Uncle Zahid were alive, none of this would have happened. But Zahid seemed like a fabricated vision, a surreal character existing only in his mind.
He had never been inside the neighbour’s compound, never played with their children, never even knew their names. Growing up, he was discouraged from playing outside the Kashana’s walls, as if his parents wanted to protect him from the outside world. Mansoor rang the bell and waited, peering through the wrought-iron gate of his neighbour’s house. When no one came out, he rang the bell again and was about to leave when he saw an elderly man, dressed in a kurta and pyjama, and with a prayer cap on his head, limply lugging himself towards him.
‘What is it?’ he asked as he opened the gate.
‘I don’t know if you know me, but I am your next-door neighbour, Mansoor ul Haq. Perhaps you knew my father, Noor ul Haq?
‘I know you very well, you are that djinn,’ the man replied. ‘What do you want?’
‘I am not a djinn, sir. I am a human being, and at this time, I just need to make one telephone call,’ Mansoor replied.
‘Get lost! I don’t even want your evil shadow on my house.’ He slammed shut the wrought-iron gate on Mansoor’s face and walked away. The toxic falsehood spewed by Athanni had reached his door. Old rumours had been given a fresh lease of life.
Disappointed, his hopes dashed, Mansoor decided to take a taxi to the Morning Gazette.
*
When Haider heard about Mansoor’s tribulations, he felt sorry for him. As a journalist, he had witnessed greed first-hand and had written about it. But for it to trek such a distance, and with such wickedness, seemed incredible even to him. Athanni’s intrigues shocked him. Haider took Mansoor to his house and told him that he could stay there for as long as he wanted since his house was practically empty, now that his daughter was married and living in England. Haider’s wife, a gem of a woman, made Mansoor feel at home. She had always been very fond of Mansoor and had secretly hoped that one day he might marry her daughter, Nikhat.
Since his return, each passing moment had felt like a non-stop low-voltage electric shock hitting his body. It took Mansoor a week to restore his sense of self as he slowly reflected on the recent events. As far as he could remember, he was sitting there with Lisa that night, asking her to marry him. The proposal had just come out on its own—no pressure, no push, no nothing—and then suddenly, the telephone had rung, shattering the serenity of the moment, sundering the life he was planning. He had taken an airplane directly from Houston to fly back to Karachi. Hoping to be comforted by his relatives, he had instead been jolted by their pre-emptive strike. But now it was time to get over the inertia, to regroup his thoughts, to plan out a strategy and to get back the Kashana-e-Haq, the Abode of Truth. To him, his house had become the Kashana-e-Jhoot, the Abode of Lies—a name Mehrun had said she would choose for her home in Defence Society. That is what the Kashana was now—the Abode of Lies, the House of Hatred, the Refuge of Scoundrels. He had to cleanse his parents’ home and also his family’s name.
*
Once his sanity returned and he cooled off, he wrote a letter to Lisa. If he remembered correctly, he did propose to her in the wee hours of that morning in Joseph’s apartment. In his letter, he explained the latest complication in his life. Sadly, he would be stuck in Pakistan for several months. He asked her to move his things from his apartment to hers. She wouldn’t have too many things to shift since his had been a furnished apartment, and his most prized possessions were his stereo and his books. He still wanted to marry her and repeated his proposal. Once he was back in America, they could get married.
After a nerve-racking, month-long wait, he got a terse reply from Lisa. She had moved all his things to her apartment and was busy with her final semester. After she was done, she was probably going to settle in Connecticut, near her mother. As a postscript, she wrote, ‘What can I say about your marriage proposal . . . Call me when you’re back in the States.’
In Houston, she had indicated that she would like to try living in Pakistan. Would she still do that? A keen student of Pakistani politics, she knew that living in a country that was fast veering in a dangerous direction would be foolhardy. Settling near her mother in Connecticut made more sense.
*
With intemperate zeal, General Behroopia got busy inverting the clock of progress at a bewildering speed. After executing The People’s Leader, he felt free to corrupt and mangle the Constitution. But with no legal grounds to govern and with no constituency of his own, he began bending the political and legal institutions to suit his own myopic view. Implementing an anger-filled version, he nurtured hate disguised as belief, focusing on the harshest sets of punishments for criminal offences. It was the handiest tool of deception, easily reconditioned and smoothly refurbished as the only true doctrine. In the past, the Doctrine of Necessity had been the ready excuse for military rule. But this general did not feel the necessity of this doctrine at all. He sideswiped the traditional courts and unleashed his terror through religious courts, the likes of which this unfortunate nation had never seen. With obsessive zeal, he focused his wrath on minorities, women and everyone else who did not follow his repugnant belief system.
The general introduced the Hudood Ordinance, sanctioning stoning for adultery, a hundred lashes for fornication, death for apostasy, eighty lashes for drinking and chopping off of the right hand for robbery. Thousands of women were imprisoned for honour crimes under this ordinance. Paving the way for his regressive brand of ideology, which was replete with bigotry and intolerance, he gave a free licence to his vigilantes to do as they wished. These thugs torched cinemas that showed ‘immoral’ movies, destroyed nightclubs that allowed ‘lewd’ dancing and attacked every public entertainment place that involved the mixing of sexes. The religious intelligentsia that replaced the ‘corrupt Western intelligentsia’, commended them and the general on their diligence. The Daily Jadal commented thus:
We need punishments like these and a disciplinarian like him to show the corrupt the true path. The general is a soldier of the true faith and we need to strengthen his hands. General Behroopia is the first ruler who doesn’t drink alcohol. He is the first ruler who prays every waking hour. He is a breath of fresh air. What is so sacred about democracy, anyway?
The English language papers put up a feeble defence using the Doctrine of Doubt. In our faith, they argued, the accused has the right to doubt. But who doubts the accused, and most of all, who read these useless English dailies? After all, they represented the colonial mindset.
Mansoor cringed when he read the shameless validations published in the newspapers. The Orwellian ‘modern past’ was something new. The idea that history is shaped by large, impersonal forces just got gutted by this grinning, grotesque theocratic figure, his name a cruel reminder of the dark reality that had swallowed the country.
When Haider returned from work that night, he invited Mansoor for a drink. Dimming the lights in the room, he took out a bottle of Johnnie Walker from his cabinet and made Mansoor a drink. As he handed him the whisky, he said, ‘The last gift from your late father. I might as well share it with you before they flog us both to death.’
At that moment, Mansoor missed his father dearly, and Haider saw his Noor in Mansoor. After a few swigs, he asked him, ‘So, what do you think of this bastard?’
Mansoor paused for a moment and repeated what his father had once told him, ‘Uncle Haider, whenever you replace any concrete reality with an abstract idea of a homogenized people, you create a passive putty to be kneaded at will by the tyrants. This is the first step towards hell.’
‘I miss your father so much, Mansoor.’ Haider took off his spectacles and began to cry uncontrollably.
*
With his life suddenly interrupted, Mansoor now had to search for a new normal. Money was hardly a problem. His father had taken care of his financial well-being while he was alive. He had opened a joint account with Mansoor at Citibank. The considerable wealth that he inherited from his father was his to spend, but he also had substantial savings of his own in the High Finance Bank. So, after staying at Haider’s house for two months, Mansoor shifted to one of the newer three-bedroom luxury apartments near Clifton Beach, one of the poshest places in Karachi.
He bought a used Honda Civic, and with Haider’s influence, got a telephone line and a temporary job teaching economics at President’s College. Once settled, he hired a young attorney, S.M. Abrar, a protégé of his father, and filed a lawsuit against Athanni and the rest of his family. Athanni had not expected Mansoor to give up his house so meekly, but he had not expected a trial so soon either. The speed with which Mansoor moved had taken him by surprise.
But Athanni had found a new purpose to his life, which did not include resting easy and letting Mansoor’s lawsuit proceed smoothly. He hired his own lawyer, Mushtaq Ahmad, who filed a counter lawsuit in the sharia court, alleging, among other things, that Mansoor was unfit to own his parents’ home because he was an atheist and a blasphemer.
‘How are you going to prove that?’ his lawyer asked, sceptical about the charges.
‘Leave it to me, I will produce the evidence.’
Mansoor had a hunch that his lawsuit would bring about a counter lawsuit from Athanni. So, when he received the court papers for the countersuit, he braced himself for a long-drawn-out battle. Realizing that his stay in Pakistan would now be protracted, Mansoor wrote another letter to Lisa, explaining this added snag. A month later, he received a four-page missive from her. She had finished her PhD and got a job at the University of Hartford in Connecticut. After considering his proposal seriously, she had reached a painful conclusion and wrote, ‘I cannot marry you and let you leave your heart behind in Pakistan. This is your Pakistan, and you need to retake it. I can’t help you with that.’
Like a dagger, the words pierced his heart. Stunned by her words, he ached with an unnerving feeling inside his gut. He had not expected his relationship to end so abruptly, that too by way of a letter. She had laid out her reasons, elaborated her explanations and written her points down logically, but the pages now became blurred, and the details lost all their meaning. He put the letter on the table, closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. Another heartache had invaded his life. All his loved ones gone, he stood there all alone. Amidst all the tragedy and turmoil, Lisa had stayed by his side like an angel of love. She had been his hope, his bliss, his reason for life, but now she had parted company too.
Twenty-Eight
It was General Behroopia who introduced terrorizing despotism in the country. He started every speech in the name of God, but he might as well have started it in the name of repression, for that was his true god. To establish a political base for himself, he fraternized with the new oligarchs, hobnobbed with the lota politicians and flirted with the fundamentalists, whom the people called ‘the fundoos’. His most dangerous act was the toleration of the burgeoning Kalashnikov–heroin culture in the country. In his Pakistan, guns and heroin went hand in hand. Karachi, called the Gateway to the West, by The Great Leader, became the gateway for guns and drug traffickers.
Behroopia’s allies became the animators of his cartoonish but treacherous regime. With their ill-gotten wealth and their rotten riches, they built profane palaces. They threw nauseating parties where they openly paraded their depravity and flouted every Hudood Ordinance with impunity, giving new meaning to the word ‘untouchable’. The draconian laws were imposed only on the poor, the illiterate and the liberal enemies of the state. The obnoxiously wealthy had always had their separate set of rules, but now they stood way above the law of the land. They guarded their self-made rules and broke the decrees for their benefit at every turn. And when Mansoor saw all this, he just shook his head.
General Behroopia rejected intellectual pursuits and cultural values and discarded the rich Sufi tradition that had made the country more humane and tolerant. The display of wealth reached a new altitude, and the age of materialism approached a new normal. His brand of tyranny paled the autocracy of General Dundda.
*
To his surprise, Mansoor found teaching to be a satisfying experience, and he threw himself into it with all his energy and enthusiasm. He busied himself with his life in academia. This was the only way Mansoor could deal with his break-up with Lisa. Thanks to his informal style and the Socratic method of teaching, he became one of the most popular lecturers in the college. But popularity breeds jealousy. The older professors did not like his enthusiasm and his relaxed style. They questioned his coziness with his students. To them, that was a perversion of the student–teacher relationship. In their academic world, professors kept a cold distance from the students and never got involved with them at a personal level. Mansoor, as if to irritate them, did just the opposite and incurred their wrath. By introducing the students to topical materials and fun activities, he created a learning-friendly atmosphere in his classes, and that didn’t go down well either. He called his students by their first names and asked them to do the same with him, thus bringing further derision and condemnation.
With a few like-minded colleagues and progressive students, Mansoor started the al-Ma?arrī Club, named after the eleventh-century blind, heretic poet of Islam. Some nine hundred years before John Lennon wrote his iconic song ‘Imagine’, al-Ma?arrī imagined a world without religion. The name of the club puzzled many in the college. Some thought that it was the Almari Club, the Urdu word ‘almari’ meaning a wooden closet for storing clothes. Others joked that Mansoor was going to teach his students about refining their sartorial tastes. The homophobes dubbed it ‘The Closet Club’, a gathering place for homosexuals. But the club’s mission was to promote intelligent conversations about forbidden topics and to encourage the students to think critically about politics, religion, philosophy and literature. If he had his druthers, Mansoor would have started a chapter of his club in every college in Pakistan.
Every week, the members of the club met in an empty classroom to discuss ‘non-permitted’ topics. With a roguish sense of humour and a caustic logic, Mansoor set out to upset the foundational trajectories of his country’s life—the economy, the beliefs, the government, the class structures and the gender biases. He was at once daring and disarming, his enthusiasm prompted by his aspiration to create students who thought rationally and desired a caring society—one that General Behroopia was hell-bent on destroying.
Mansoor never took attendance and never asked a stranger as to why he or she was there. And so, when Athanni heard about the al Ma?arrī Club and its activities, he planted a mole, Farid Kidwai. A petty thief and a new convert to General Behroopia’s cause, his job was to record anything incriminating on a videotape. Mansoor, in his naiveté, did not think much of that. The videotaping of lectures by students in America was not uncommon. For him, it was just another way to democratize education. So he welcomed Kidwai to make the recording.
But he pushed the objectives of his club a bit too far beyond the acceptable boundaries. For the college administrators, it was too much heresy; it was too much to take. His methods were upending the age-old system that had stood the test of time. Someone reported him to the principal of the college, who summoned him to his office and got right to the point.
‘Mister Mansoor, you are not in Umreeka. You are not going to lead our students down the wrong path. Do you understand?’
‘No, sir, I don’t. All I am doing is trying to teach them how to think critically.’
‘Don’t give me your critical thinking bullshit. If someone reported you to the authorities, you would be charged with blasphemy. Do you know what the punishment for blasphemy is?’
‘Yes, sir, but I have not committed any blasphemy,’ Mansoor replied.
‘Look, Mister Mansoor, I am good friends with Haider Rizvi; he has done me lots of favours, so I will pretend that this never happened.’
‘But, sir—’
‘And here’s a piece of advice for you: don’t walk on a path of no return. You may still have a future at this college.’
‘Thank you for your advice. I will leave now.’
Mansoor got up and left the principal’s office, the fancy trimmings of his idealism pared away by crude triviality.
*
After a hiatus of fifteen months, the hearing on Mansoor’s lawsuit finally began. Much to his disappointment, however, it was held in the sharia court. Although it was supposed to be a case where Mansoor was the plaintiff, the judge, in all his wisdom, decided that the original suit and the countersuit were a waste of everyone’s time. So, ignoring all judicial norms and precedence, he merged both the cases, despite his lawyer’s vehement protestations. Mansoor had suffered a setback even before the arguments began.
On the first day of the hearing, Athanni arrived with his family, steadfast in his hate and resolute in his treachery, convinced that the sharia court would help them dry-clean his loot. To Mansoor, here was another proof that property trumped blood relationships. Ever since Farhat’s death, Athanni made no attempts to hide his feelings towards his cousin. His festering childhood hatred had erupted like a full-blown malignancy. That Mansoor deserved to die because he was a blasphemer had become Athanni’s drumbeat to anyone who would listen. Liberally using pious zeal to condemn Mansoor on every occasion, he lashed out at anyone who spoke favourably of his enemy.