The Islam Quintet

by Tariq Ali

  ‘I’ve decided. I don’t want to get engaged to you.’

  I seized her hand and kissed it. ‘Why? Why?’

  ‘It’s wrong for us to behave in such a traditional way. My mother says if we love each other we can do what we want. I could go to Leeds University and enrol in the Chinese department and we could see each other every weekend. And if we wanted to, we could get married. Or not? It’s for us to decide. Nobody else.’

  I was in heaven. I put my head on her lap and after a while she began to stroke my hair. ‘It’s done,’ I said. ‘That’s what we’ll do. I’m glad you’ve told your mother. I’ll tell mine.’

  ‘No need to if you don’t want to,’ she replied. ‘Confucius said your mother was very beautiful and open-minded in some ways but also very traditional and conservative in others. She may not like her son marrying a Chinese cobbler’s daughter.’

  I hugged her and kissed her head and hands and cheeks. ‘Jindié, my mother is traditional, but she married my father against her own father’s wishes. They were from the same family, but my father had become a Communist and ...’

  ‘The whole of Lahore knows the story, Dara, but that doesn’t stop people behaving differently when their own children are involved in something of which they disapprove.’

  We carried on talking all the way back. Lailuma told me she agreed with Jindié. No confessions in Lahore whatsoever. In Britain we could do as we wished. Later Plato and Zahid strongly agreed as well.

  ‘You know how headstrong your mother is,’ said Zahid. ‘Don’t say a word. I hope you haven’t kept a diary.’

  ‘I have, but it’s permanently locked and only I know where it’s kept.’

  ‘Don’t be foolish. She’ll have it opened and resealed or relocked. Don’t underestimate Punjabi mothers. They’re just as bad as Jewish ones.’

  Zahid was also preparing to study abroad, but not till the following year.

  Jindié and I would have six more weeks together in Lahore before my departure. When I returned to Lahore, everyone was talking about Tipu’s arrest and disappearance, and within a fortnight Zahid had been accused of betraying him. Now that I think back on those days, I can recall that it was Jamshed who conveyed the news to our household. He boasts of his infamies now, flaunts them shamelessly, but on that day his conscience was on parade. He referred to Zahid’s base character and how he must be punished. Jamshed was always a lowlife, and his brand of amorality became my supreme aversion.

  At first I was devastated and then depressed, but after a few days I was in a rage with Zahid. Who could have guessed that such malignancy was lurking in that heart? Jindié and I would endlessly discuss this event. She was always more careful and warned me not to believe every statement that came from the police. Zahid, meanwhile, had disappeared to Karachi to stay with an uncle, which, as far as I was concerned, was extremely suspicious behaviour. Plato agreed with me, but then he trusted nobody.

  ‘Each of us has the capacity to dissimulate with such profundity that we can often surprise ourselves. Perhaps Zahid thought he was doing you a favour in getting Tipu out of the way. Didn’t you tell me that Tipu was stuck on Jindié?’

  ‘There was nothing in that, Plato, just my diseased brain.’

  While all this was going on, my mother, as Zahid had predicted, had found my diary with the help of her maids, read it, and discussed it at length with my father, who, to his enormous credit, refused to even glance at it. She worked herself into a terrible state. I knew something was wrong the minute I got home that day. My mother was in a sulk, barely replied to my greeting and pretended she was reading a book. A few minutes later she burst into my room in an elemental rage and announced that she hated weak men who fell in love with women and grovelled at their feet.

  I was astonished. ‘Then you must hate my father for falling in love with you. In fact now that you mention it, I wish he ...’

  Before I could complete my sentence she rushed forward and slapped my face. Then so much rubbish began to pour out that I decided there and then that if she ever mentioned the word Chinese or cobbler again I would walk out and seek refuge with Plato at Scotch Corner or flee to the house of a sympathetic aunt. It was almost as if she knew that or, what is more likely, had been warned by my father not to travel down that road, and so she suddenly changed her tack. All her life her feelings about childish trifles had been so violent that in more sane moments she admitted her weakness and reproached herself. Not that day. Now, trembling with rage, she shouted, ‘She’s the same age as you. She should be at least five or six years younger.’

  I was so taken aback that I burst out of laughing, and then pointed out that some of the happiest couples in the family were roughly the same age, including two of her brothers and their wives, whereas Jindié was two years younger than me, not that it mattered in the least. In fact, I told my mother, one of our cousins had married his stepmother’s sister, who was ten years older than he was, and they, too, were blissfully happy.

  In fact, I said, it was a matter of some regret to me that Jindié wasn’t a few years older since I preferred mature women. Unable to respond, she moved forward to assault me once again, but I stepped aside at the last minute and she fell on my bed instead. The next morning she radiated a surface calm, but was still seething. She was sometimes capable of manufacturing the most fantastic untruths, but also specialized in trivial fibs, and was usually caught out because of her inconsistencies. She could never remember what she had said to the same person some weeks previously. As I tucked into my scrambled eggs, I smiled at her to show there was no ill will on my part. She took this as a cue for hypocrisy and a malapropism, another feature of her dialect.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking. You think I’m opposed to her because her father has been measuring our feet for donkey’s ears.’

  I began to laugh. ‘No, mother. He has been measuring donkey’s feet for my father’s and grandfather’s ears.’

  She hurled a boiled egg at me, which missed. At this point I decided it was best to go out for a long walk. As fate would have it, I found myself walking unconsciously in the direction of Nairn College, and just before I reached the gate a car honked at me. It was a cousin. We exchanged greetings. The chauffeur got out and held open the back door. I got in. We drove into the college car park.

  ‘Dara, have you come to see Jindié?’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t planning to, but ... yes!’

  ‘She may have left. I’ll go and see, but if you’re caught, Miss Willoughby-Ashleymore will ring all our parents.’

  ‘Nothing she can do to me.’

  ‘Dara, at least cover your head with a shawl so they’ll think you’re a woman.’

  ‘What about my moustache? Oh, I forgot. Miss Willoughby-Ashleymore sports one as well. I’m happy to put on a disguise. Bring back a bra and some socks.’

  She giggled and walked hurriedly to the girl’s hostel, a veritable harem where we were denied entry, but where mischief of every sort flourished. Within ten minutes she was back with the required items. I was wearing a salwar/kurta and hurriedly assembled a pair of breasts, much to the chauffeur’s amusement, covered my head and half my face with a shawl, put on a slight limp and accompanied my ever-so-sporting cousin to a friend’s room, where Jindié was waiting. She giggled.

  ‘A bit of eye makeup and you’d be a perfect hermaphrodite!’

  The friends scarpered. The minute we were alone I ditched the bra and socks. We fell chastely into each other’s arms. I managed to imprint a tiny kiss on her lips. Believe me, dear reader, it was purely token. Our lips barely touched, but it startled her. She sat bolt upright and rapped me on the knuckles with a fly swat.

  ‘Why do you always make me angry? I’ll never see you alone unless you promise to behave.’

  ‘Have you read the Thousand and One Nights, Jindié?’

  She pushed me away. Wanting desperately to amuse her, I described the conversation with my mother. She instantly became melancholic.


  ‘I warned you not to tell her.’

  ‘She ransacked my desk and bookshelves, then forced open the secret drawer in my cupboard and found my diary.’

  ‘Why did you keep a diary? So immature.’

  ‘Fantasies have to be recorded somewhere.’

  She wanted to know what I had written. I provided a brief summary. She covered her face with her hands.

  ‘You wrote that we spent all night talking?’

  ‘On the phone! I did. It’s true.’

  ‘I know, but it creates a bad impression.’

  ‘Who cares?’

  She became silent. Then she said, ‘Go. Let me think about all this now. And don’t ring me from home. Go to the German café.’

  Our guards were outside, waiting patiently and eavesdropping. They entered the room promptly. Slightly depressed, I resumed my disguise and walked out, moving my buttocks suggestively. As we walked past the tree to which was attached the Nairn College bell—that evil tocsin which summoned the women to class and assemblies and signalled that visitors should leave—I took out my penknife and detached the bell from the rope. My escorts, three of them cousins of mine, were horror-struck.

  ‘Hai Allah, Allah. We’ll all be expelled. You monster. You’re never coming here again. Rude boy. Evil one. Viper!’ And so on. I rushed to the car, clutching the bell to my stomach, and was driven away. Miss Willoughby-Ashleymore, I was later told, instituted a full-scale investigation and even summoned a senior police officer whose daughter was at the college, to frighten the students, but the mystery was never solved. The memento, rusty and worn like the college to which it once belonged, still hangs from the mango tree in my mother’s old garden, where it was often used by the gardener to frighten away the parrots. The following week Jindié and I met at the German café, and she confessed that the theft of the bell had cheered her a great deal, restoring me to her favour.

  But worse was about to happen. As the time neared for my departure, friends organized farewell get-togethers. Those who shared our reserved table at the college café had a special event where fruit juices and samosas were provided free of charge. Respected hugged me with emotion.

  ‘You won’t forget us, will you?’

  How could I forget any of them? With few exceptions they’re all dead now, all the friends who were permitted to sit at our table, whose purity and integrity we guarded so fiercely from fakes, frauds and fools. Professor Junaid drank himself to death. Haroon had a heart attack in his late fifties. Respected disappeared with the old canteen, his later whereabouts unknown. And so it went. Plato, Zahid, Confucius and I are probably the sole survivors of our Atlantis. I saw their ghosts when I visited the college after a forty-year absence. I could almost hear their voices. I realized my eyes were moist. My sentimentality surprised me; sentimentality was something that was brutally condemned by us when we were young. How we hated all those at neighbouring tables who talked about nothing else but the glorious Mughal past of the city, Mughal rule in India and Mughal this and Mughal that; Plato would shout, ‘Mughal wine, Mughal lechery and opium, Mughal fondness for boys ...’ Another of us would interrupt loudly and sing the praises of Lahore under the Sikhs, deliberately exaggerating the virtues of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the one-eyed warrior who had held the British at bay and maintained an independent Punjab. His old palace was not so far away from where we sat, close to the Badshahi Mosque and the Diamond Market—cold during the day, a furnace at night—in the old red-light district where some of the gaudiest courtesans’ houses had been built by a great-uncle of mine. The old Royal district: mosque, palace and brothel all within easy reach of each other and close to the river that no longer flows.

  There were other tables where perfumed young men practised a wit that had been carefully rehearsed, to impress each other and the women students who had their tea and samosas separately in an adjoining garden and whose laughter and tinkling voices enhanced the charm of the place.

  Rehearsed wit was not permitted at our table. Plato detested the practice as a curse of the age and glared suspiciously at any of us if he thought a bon mot lacked spontaneity. This extempore wit could only be a hit-and-miss affair, but it was preferable to the other sort. Plato’s came with an eccentricity that—unlike his wit—appeared to be carefully cultivated. According to some of his own pupils, he had taken to cycling round the school and was often seen precariously balanced as he stood on the seat of a moving bike, arms outstretched, repeatedly shouting, ‘Allahu Akbar’. When we asked if this was true, he nodded. Why? ‘Never heard of satire?’

  Was it old friends I was mourning or an old city, an old world that had since changed so much and for the worse, a world in which expectations for a better future were always high and in which the ultra-Wahhabi beard, gangster politics and cancerous corruption had yet to appear and drown all hope. The Jamaat-i-Islami boys were present in miniscule numbers then, and would sometimes argue with us, replying parrot-like to all our criticisms with a single phrase, ‘Islam is a complete code of life,’ and that was how we used to address them. ‘Tell me something, Islam-is-a-complete-code-of-life, could it be true that we are descended from apes? Have you ever considered the possibility or studied the evidence?’

  As I looked at the faded photographs in the old hall, the scene of so many tumultuous events, I saw a long-forgotten Pashtun face that made me smile. A decent human being but a terrible pedant, he had, to our great surprise, joined the army and risen to become a general. The last I heard of him was a description of his rage at being strip-searched at Dulles Airport while on his way to attend a Pentagon briefing in December 2001. We were all there on that wall, except for Plato, who of course never studied at the college. How strange it seems now, but none of us who congregated at our table each morning were believers. Not a single one. And that was normal. We were not alone.

  A few elderly professors wandered over and greeted me warmly, insisting that they had shared the table. Some remembered defying the injunctions against political demonstrations and marching to the US Consulate to protest the murder of Patrice Lumumba in 1961. Others recounted episodes that had never taken place, an imagined past. I smiled. To each his illusions.

  Before I left Lahore for England, I said farewell to all my old haunts except Zahid’s house, which his treachery had declared out of bounds. I loved and esteemed this city: its courage, which rivalled its cuisine; its wit and self-deprecatory humour; its energy, male and female; its cafés which, even after 1947, preserved a constancy and a depth of ideas; its softness or hard coarseness, depending on the occasion. The new suburbs that were being built when I left housed an altogether different class of citizens. These were young men born of provincial fathers or nouveau riche traders, who had moved to the city to increase their fortunes.

  Plato loathed them as only he could, seeing comedy in what they regarded as virtue. He would insult them to their faces, saying they were the most obtuse and barbaric ruffians he had ever set his eyes on, even though he knew this was a slight exaggeration. He would mock their exaggerated mannerisms and body language, their snobbery and dress codes, their etiolated appearance and abominable egotism, but above all the callousness they displayed towards those they saw as their social inferiors. I knew some of them. In their favour it can be said that they did not yet carry weapons. Their children do.

  At home, my mother was convinced that she had won me over, that there was no further cause for anxiety on the ‘China front’. She boasted to an older sister that everything had been handled with exquisite grace, the sort of remark a torturer might make after a prisoner he’s been working on is found dead. The core of her real world was made up of her sisters, a few younger women who doted on her every word, and her family, which meant my father and, alas, myself. As for my sisters, they were made to look pretty so that they didn’t disgrace her at public occasions, but their future was circumscribed by a single deadly institution: marriage.

  She possessed many virtues, was amiable and generous most o
f the time, but prone, as I have said, to fits of uncontrollable rage. Plato accidentally witnessed one of these while visiting me and was impressed by it. She had assumed he was a tradesman.

  Her own marriage to my father had not been strictly conventional, to put it mildly. An elopement and secret wedding; a scandal in the family; my grandfather threatening to kill her and himself if the marriage were not annulled; the anger of my paternal grandmother, from a more blue-blooded faction of the family and enraged that her son was not considered suitable simply because of his Communist views. It had all worked out in the end, and an official wedding, attended by the city’s notables, had duly taken place. All this should have made my mother more relaxed in her own views, but it was as if, having set an audacious fashion when she was young, she was now surprised by her own boldness, and she often displayed a pseudo-morality that was distressing to all of us. Were there other skeletons in her past of which we had no idea? Her semi-hysterical defence of monogamy, and this in a culture where monogamy is actively discouraged, has left me suspicious to this day. At the time, however, she appeared triumphant. She had wrecked my happiness and was boasting about her success to my father and her circle of intimates.

  How wrong she was and how right as well, but not because of my apparent capitulation. It was Jindié who took my mother’s stupid strictures to heart. Suddenly we were no longer meant for each other. She was too old anyway. Why didn’t I marry one of my delectable cousins, as was the tradition in our family. They were ever so pretty. Surely I could inspect a few fifteen-year-old ones now so that they could be ready in a few years’ time. We belonged to different worlds. It was pointless annoying the family. She would not be seeking entry at Leeds University. We must not see or speak to each other again.