The Islam Quintet

by Tariq Ali

  ‘He told me so himself.’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘The network teaches us that we must utilize every possible method to gain information without arousing suspicion. Ma Rulong sometimes visited our household. I saw him looking at me in the way old men do. Then he asked my mother whether I would come and keep his daughter company. She resisted, but I stood up with a smile and said I would like that very much.’

  ‘Enough. I don’t want to hear any more.’

  ‘You should. It concerns you. After he had his way with me, and I should report that he had the violent and rough manner of a shepherd locked in a mountain hut with only his sheep for the winter, and believe me, it filled me with revulsion, but afterwards he spoke openly in my presence. He spoke of having you killed and your head sent to Beijing in a diamond-encrusted silver basket as a gift to the emperor. He spoke of becoming an ally of the Manchu and ruling Yunnan from the Forbidden City in Dali. His allies tell the people that Dù Wénxiù is not a proper Hui, that he eats pork, does not say his prayers and has no concubines, that they alone are the real defenders of the Honoured Classic. All this is being said even now.’

  She provided the Sultan with a complete picture of what the traitors were planning. For days Suleiman was busy and did not see her, but he could not forget her features nor the soft skin that he had bandaged. Together with her obvious intelligence, they weighed on him a great deal. Since this is not a story of personal passion but a history of political defeat I will not dwell on every detail except to say that she became his favourite lover. They were inseparable, and since she knew the enemy so well she was often present at meetings of the Grand Council that organized the defence of the city.

  When this news reached Ma Rulong he panicked and is reported to have considered suicide, since he thought that Suleiman would send assassins to kill him. Men who plot murder always believe that it is being plotted against them. Suleiman was generous. He sent a messenger to plead with Ma Rulong not to commit treachery but to share power in Dali. Suleiman suggested that their children should marry each other to cement the alliance, but Ma Rulong was too far gone in his intrigues and was afraid that this offer was a trap, that Suleiman meant to ensnare and kill him.

  Suleiman was dominated by one idea, and that was to never let the Manchu retake Dali and Kunming and to remain free of the Qing court. For a while it seemed he would succeed. Of the governors-general despatched by Beijing to Yunnan, one was assassinated, another committed suicide, one lost his mind completely, several were fired for incompetence and one refused to take up his position in the rebel region. Even their policy of using Hui to fight Hui had failed, and Ma Rulong was becoming increasingly isolated as more and more of his Hui soldiers deserted him. But fate was against us. There were too few of us and just too many Qing soldiers, and they were now all united to crush Dali. Incapable of defeating the Europeans, they wanted to prove they were still capable of some victories against us.

  The rest you know. Our council met and the Sultan told them that further resistance was impossible. The Manchu would kill every person and every animal in the city unless he, Dù Wénxiù, gave himself up. He had decided to go to the Qing encampment early the next morning and surrender. Your father wept, Qin-shi, and begged to go with him, but he refused. He would go alone. The next morning he put on his sultan’s robes for the last time and seated himself in his sedan chair. Thousands of people rushed out of their homes to say farewell. Many were weeping. At the Southern Gate he got out and thanked the people for the way they had supported him for eighteen whole years. Once inside his chair he swallowed a fatal dose of opium and was dead by the time he reached the enemy camp. His corpse was dragged in front of the Qing army and he was decapitated.

  His surrender was a mistake, because the Manchu were determined on revenge. They persuaded our generals to disarm, and three days later they assaulted the city. Your father died defending his people. Thousands of innocent Hui were slaughtered. Women and children still alive were given as war booty to the Qing soldiers.

  And Li Wan, with her heavenly beauty? Several months before the surrender, she had given birth to a daughter and was pregnant again. She was greatly vexed and even offended when Suleiman insisted she had to leave the city and seek safety elsewhere. She did not want to go, but he insisted and became angry, reminding her of her duty to the higher cause, to their lofty principles and the questions and answers. He said, ‘One day you or your daughter or the child inside you now might be needed to continue the fight for Yunnan.’ Then for the last time he asked her a question from the great work.

  ‘Why is this place of worship called Clean and Aware?’ She sobbed. ‘When water is clean, fish appear.’

  ‘What is water? What are fish?’

  Tears poured down her cheeks. ‘The True Teaching and Real People.’

  ‘Never forget that, my dearest woman whom I have loved more than anything in this world.’

  Still she resisted the idea of leaving him, and then, finally, much against her own will, she agreed to accompany her parents in a heavily guarded caravan ordered by the Sultan to take them to Cochin China. He promised he would join her there; she knew it would never happen. Fifty soldiers escorted the family to their safe haven, where some of our people were already living. The soldiers, too, had orders not to return.

  I made some inquiries in Burma and offered money for any information, but never heard anything about them. Perhaps one day Li Wan’s daughter, or, who knows, her son, will find you, and then you two cousins will have much to discuss.

  Qin-shi, memory is the preserve of the victors, but wherever you go, I never want you or your children to forget who we were and what they did to us. They say that the grass grows stronger on plains enriched with blood, but sometimes nothing will grow on that soil.

  NINE

  A QUARTER OF A century had elapsed since I had left Lahore, and then fate placed a painter in my way. Plato re-entered my life in 1988, but in such a unique fashion that at first I didn’t recognize him. A London newspaper rang to ask if I would write about an unusual exhibition of paintings by an unknown Fatherland artist in an obscure East End gallery. The gallery was housed in a former medieval nunnery and only exhibited new work. From first-time sinners to first-time artists, said the woman on the phone to amuse me. The painter’s name, Shah Pervaiz Shah, meant nothing to me, and that in itself was intriguing, since I thought I knew every serious painter in Fatherland. He must be a new young thing, and I wasn’t in the mood. The woman persisted. It was his first exhibition. It would mean a great deal to him if I went, and the painter had wanted me to know that it didn’t matter if I hated the paintings. He never painted to please, and if I chose to ridicule his follies in print that was fine by him. This injunction had the desired effect. I decided to go the following morning, and it was agreed that I would write a piece only if I liked the work. They rang me back and told me that the caretaker would let me in and turn on the lights.

  It was a beautiful November morning, cold, crisp and cloudless. I got off at Mile End and walked to the old nunnery. The Bengali caretaker was waiting patiently. He was dressed in a slightly eccentric fashion: a bright red beret covered his head and huge dark glasses concealed most of his face. Perhaps he, too, wanted to be an artist. Neither of us spoke as he unlocked the door and turned on the lights. The place was horribly lit, perhaps in homage to its past, but extremely unfair to the poor painter. To my great irritation, the caretaker hung around in the background, watching me closely as I began to look at the works. They were black and white etchings and they depicted pure agony, which was what the exhibition should have been titled. It took me some time to study each frame. The figures depicted were in different stages of despair. Munch’s Scream multiplied by a hundred.

  Some years ago, after giving a lecture in Oslo I dragged a group of newly arrived Punjabi migrants who attended my talk to the Munch museum to show them their new country’s greatest artist. Some were reluctant to waste preciou
s time but came anyway. All of them were stunned, and one, Salah, who became a dear friend, had moist eyes as he whispered in Punjabi, ‘This is an artist who knew inner pain. Our Sufi poets say, that the cure for that lies in oneself. Neither Allah nor a psychiatrist can help.’

  I was reminded of that remark now as I studied each etching closely. This painter had experienced more than inner pain. He was bearing witness to a terrible tragedy. Men, women and children stood dying, together in three of the pictures, separately in the others. One showed a child stuck to its mother’s breast. Their eyes were gazing in different directions. Both were dead. After an hour I slumped on a bench. It was not what one expects so soon after breakfast. I looked for a catalogue or the sheet of paper detailing the work and the painter. There was nothing.

  The caretaker, whose presence I had by now completely forgotten, muttered in broken Urdu, ‘Upstairs, more. No rush. There are no limits on time.’

  Upstairs? I was not sure I could take any more, but as he turned on the lights I staggered up the winding stairs to another space. What had the nuns done here? It was obvious. This had been a primitive chapel, with a tiny confessional in a corner for the mother superior to console her charges in whatever way she considered fit. Nunneries always make me think of the Decameron.

  Then I looked at the pictures. Colour! These were not etchings but vibrant paintings: watercolours and a few oils, though miniature in size. As for the subject matter, we had gone from Munch to Grosz, though in reality this artist was like neither. Shah Pervaiz Shah, or SPS, as he signed himself, was an original. I had no doubt on this score. My mood changed and I began to laugh loudly. These were the most savage caricatures of mullahs that I had ever seen. The literary tradition in the Punjab and elsewhere in the Islamic world had, of course, never spared the rod when it came to the mullahs, but this was something new and refreshing. Virtually every painting made me laugh. Here was a mullah walking with his veiled wife, but in his mind’s eye he was seeing naked houris with huge breasts. Another bearded venerable was holding an erect friend in his hand as he enviously watched two young men pleasuring each other. I roared with delight. I wanted to meet SPS or whatever his real name might be, since it was obvious now that he painted under a pseudonym, and who could blame him? I would do more than just write about it. I would get his work filmed and shown on television.

  The caretaker had been following me as I studied each of these masterpieces, but I hadn’t noticed him. As he saw me laughing at a sketch of a mullah absentmindedly stroking his penis while he gazed longingly at the forbidden apple on the celestial tree, he addressed me in Punjabi.

  ‘Like them?’

  ‘They’re brilliant. Do you know the artist?’

  ‘I am the artist. Don’t you recognize me?’

  He took off his stupid beret and dark glasses. Even then I had some difficulty, since he was bald as a turnip. Then I realized.

  ‘Plato? Can it be?’

  ‘So now you don’t recognize me.’

  We embraced each other. My failure to recognize him was an even bigger shock than his actual presence. It worried me. The only explanation was that I had not looked too closely at the caretaker unlocking the gallery and later it was the paintings that had demanded all my attention. I apologized profusely but he was triumphant.

  ‘How long have you been in Britain, Plato?’

  ‘I came some years after you, but I had to find work and so I had no time to look for you or Zahid Mian or anyone else.’

  ‘Zahid was here?’

  ‘Yes, and the Butterfly, but not for long. He’s a heart surgeon in Satan’s city now. Washington, DS, District of Satan.’

  I managed a weak smile, wondering, as usual, how Jindié’s heart had survived the marriage. Plato had returned with unwelcome memories.

  ‘This is amazing work, Plato. In Lahore you never spoke about painting. A leap from mathematics.’

  ‘You really like it?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Then I’ll paint more. I had decided that if you thought it wasn’t worthwhile I would stop.’

  ‘I’m not an art critic’

  ‘If it was one of those I wanted, I would never have pushed them to invite you. You understand. By the way. That woman from the magazine wants me to paint her.’

  It wasn’t ‘by the way’. Something was up and it was Plato. He smiled at me.’

  ‘Now you understand the etchings.’

  ‘Partition?’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘The pain expressed is universal. War. Famine.’

  ‘Partitions. Always partitions. Whenever they divide, we suffer. Have you time? Should we find a teahouse?’

  ‘Yes, but not here. Let’s go to Drummond Street.’

  I inspected his bald head and told him that would have been a better disguise than the beret, but irritatingly, now that we were in a public space, he insisted we only speak English. His aversion to mixing languages was as strong as ever, and he reacted angrily when I pointed out that every language was a mixture. Had he counted the number of Sanskrit words in Punjabi, or Persian and Arabic derivatives in Urdu or Arabic in Spanish? He brushed Urdu aside with a rude gesture.

  ‘What else do you expect from a courtier’s language?’

  ‘Ghalib, Iqbal and Faiz ... all courtiers?’

  ‘Iqbal and Faiz were born in Sialkot. They should have written in Punjabi.’

  ‘But Plato, Faiz explained why he didn’t write in Punjabi. Baba Bulleh Shah had said all there was to say in Punjabi. There could be no other.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Plato. ‘He could have equally said that Ghalib and Mir had said everything in Urdu.’

  ‘But they hadn’t, don’t you see? Faiz used the model, refined it with political imagery. Politics as love. Love as politics.’

  ‘Please speak in English.’

  ‘Can’t discuss our poets in English, Plato.’

  ‘Then save talk till later.’

  He had shrunk a little and walked with a slight stoop. And there was something else. Perhaps it was because I was so much older now that I noticed, but Plato appeared lost in a way he had never done in Lahore. Would he have prompted Hamlet’s ghost at the RSC? Since I was going to review his work, I needed to know why and how he had become a painter. That was the surprise. Mathematician, literary critic, cycling acrobat, conversationalist, bon vivant and now a painter and a very unusual one, too. But he had to tell the story in Punjabi, and so had to wait till we reached Punjabi space in Drummond Street.

  I said in English, ‘Is there anything you want to do here that for some reason you haven’t yet done?’

  ‘Yes. I want to see Cambridge and the mathematics section of their library. So I can see a world that offered me attention, but that I rejected. No hurry, understand? When you have a free day, take me there.’

  By the time we reached the Indus café in Drummond Street it was almost time for lunch. I asked for a corner table in the recess near the back, close to the ‘family tables’ where women were accommodated and where we wouldn’t be disturbed, and ordered kebabs and tikkas and the haleem for which the place was famous. It was cheap food infinitely superior to the trendy Indo-Pak eateries that catered to indigenous tastes and would do anything for a Michelin star.

  It was here that Plato reverted to Punjabi and described his life since he had left Lahore, two years or so after me.

  ‘We were lucky in those days. We didn’t need visas. I borrowed money and left. Why? Because things were changing. Life at our table died soon after you left. They were planning to demolish Babuji’s cafe and Respected’s fruit juice parlour and replace them with something modern and ugly. The college centenary was approaching, and they thought they should tart up. They put on too much lipstick and face powder, like the girls in the Diamond Market. Also I was no longer happy with just teaching rich kids. The quality of my pupils was not improving. If anything, the opposite. I don’t know. Many reasons. I got fed up. Some of our friends were cuddlin
g up to the military dictator, just like all the newspapers. I was disgusted. I reminded myself that, after all, this wasn’t my country. Lahore wasn’t my town. I was a refugee from another Punjab. The only friend I had left from those days was Younis the sub-postmaster. Remember? Of course you do. You had your own relationship with him. But he lived in Peshawar and loved the place. He was married. Children. Very different from me. I left.

  ‘When I arrived in London I had the name of one contact, a cousin of Younis who was married to a Mirpuri girl, and worked on a building site carrying bricks for the bricklayers all day long. He lived in Ealing, in a house filled with others like him. He greeted me warmly but said I would have to find a night job, so I could sleep in his bed during the day. Later I could find a room. I got a job within a week, working as a waiter in an all-night place where trucks stopped regularly for petrol and I made tea or coffee. I lived on baked beans and white bread every day and for many months. The body suffered. Not interesting.

  ‘Then Fate dealt me a slightly better hand. A cousin of the petrol pump’s owner fell ill. He had a franchise selling newspapers outside a tube station in North London. They asked me whether I would work there till he recovered. So I became a newsagent. It was better work, even though I had to start at five in the morning and finish at six-thirty in the evening. Morning papers till last editions of the evening papers for final rush hour. I now had a room of my own in a boarding house near Kilburn High Road. I earned enough to eat two meals a day and go to the cinema. Also, I must be honest, to strip joints, which were very expensive for me, but I had to make those visits, otherwise I’d have gone mad. Ten shillings entry it was, but I needed the images to comfort my seekh kebab at home. I was paid ten pounds a week, which was a lot in the early Sixties in London. One pound on strip shows twice a week, but still I saved three pounds each week.

  ‘The life of a newsagent was very dull, and between twelve noon and six I had a lot of spare time. I read all the papers and did the Times crossword puzzle. Still I had too much time. One day I bought a hardcover exercise book and in my spare hours I started drawing, but just to occupy myself. There was nothing else to do. Strange people with wounded bodies began to pour out of my wounded heart. It was just like that, and I had no idea what was happening. In my youth, as you know, I was good at equations, and sometimes I played with the figures in algebra, adding a few testicles here and some nipples there, but stopped after being caned by the teacher for my sins.