by Tariq Ali
As we were leaving the museum I happened to mention to the curator that we were direct descendants of Dù Wénxiù. The old man’s face lit up. He dragged all three of us to his office. He was literally trembling with excitement. I couldn’t fully understand the reason for this till he opened the visitors’ book. This was normally the preserve of visiting dignitaries, and Arab names littered the pages. What he wanted me to read was the following message:
‘We are the descendants of Dù Wénxiù. Our great-great-grandmother was sent by Sultan Suleiman to Cochin China. She settled there as a trader, with her child by him, and was pregnant with another. They all survived. If any other descendants ever visit this museum and read these lines, please get in touch with us in Ho Chi Minh City where we have always lived. There is another branch of the family that moved to California after April 1975, but we do not maintain any contact with them. These are all our phone numbers and my name is a Vietnamese one: Thu Van.’
Now I was trembling. The curator ordered some tea. I explained our roots to him and he asked for all the family photographs to be copied and sent to him as well as the letter the sultan’s sister in Burma had written to Elder Granny. They wanted to display them in the museum. The news of this unexpected discovery caused a big stir in Beijing and in Isloo. Everyone’s first impulse was to hop on a plane to Ho Chi Minh City, but before any of that could happen I had to make the phone call. Would Thu Van speak English or French? They must have stopped speaking Chinese a long time ago. I wanted Hanif next to me when I made the call. I don’t know why, but I wanted him to help us decide what to do. Suleiman was a bit upset and suggested wisely that I wait a while and let the news sink in properly. After all, there was no reason to hurry. We knew where they were. I think he was also concerned that too many shocks were not good for his mother.
Zahid, when I rang him, understood my needs better. I should discuss it with Confucius. Strange how Zahid won’t call him Hanif at all, and, secretly, Chiao-fu would rather be called Confucius. I had already noticed that whenever there was a call from Zahid and once from you, Yu-chih would shout, ‘Confucius! Phone.’ And he would come running with the big grin that I remembered so well.
So I flew back to Beijing, and Yu-chih collected me from the airport. She had never known Chiao-fu/Hanif/Confucius so relaxed and happy. They wanted to adopt a child and had begun to make inquiries. The old couple were fine and they saw them every weekend. More than that she didn’t say. She let Hanif tell me that he was fed up with his job. He didn’t like being an economist and was going to suggest to Henri that instead of writing a sharp academic-style critique of the pitfalls inherent in the Chinese economy or a sociological study of festivals, he now wanted to, reconstruct the path from 1949 to 2009. He would call it ‘Capitalist Roaders and the Road’. When I looked at him critically he grinned. ‘Don’t ring your husband and the one you wanted as your husband just yet. I’m not reverting to any crazy Maoism. I know what all that cost this country, and unnecessarily. They destroyed our hopes. I know that better than most. So it will be very critical of the Great Helmsman, but also of those who came after him. Those who ordered our soldiers to fire on the students in 1989, those who crush peasant uprisings today just like the campaign to rid China of fleas during the Communist period. And those who buy radical intellectuals like we do noodles in Oxen Street.’ I was relieved to hear all this, and I think he will write a good book. He certainly knows both sides. Perhaps Henri should be alerted to the change of plan.
I did ask whether if Hanif gave up his job they would be able to afford the life they were used to now, just on Yu-chih’s salary, a question that provoked only mirth. Like Suleiman, his uncle had played the financial market and accumulated if not vast at least sufficient wealth to live comfortably for the rest of his life. I asked whether he would have gone in this direction had there been no memory lapse. He did not know. Perhaps he would have come back to Lahore and returned to physics. How could he say?
I am still old-fashioned enough to be slightly repelled by this, but both Suleiman and Hanif insist (funny how similar they are in so many ways. My mother used to see it, too) that they exploited the system more than it did them and now they will pay it all back in projects that help people. Suleiman, in particular, is in a state of permanent shock at what he is seeing in Yunnan and elsewhere in the country, the effects of belated industrialization on the ecology of this country. ‘Animals are dying, Mom, and people are being treated like animals, except in theme parks.’ This passionate manner of feeling and expressing feelings is common to both uncle and nephew.
With Hanif seated next to me and listening on the other phone, I made the call to Ho Chi Minh City. Thu Van answered. I asked what language would be easiest for her. She repeated the question to me. She spoke five languages, including Chinese, and worked as an official interpreter. I explained who I was and that I was ringing in response to her message. Her screams could be heard in our kitchen. Then she shouted the news to her mother. She wanted to get on a plane and come over immediately with her mother to see us. We could come to them the following year. There was no stopping her, and so I gave Hanif’s details and said we would pick them up at the airport, but reminded her to bring as many old photographs as possible of the family. They did not put us to the trouble of either picking or putting them up. They arrived within three days and stayed in a hotel they had always used before. They brushed aside all formalities. We looked at each other, but there was no resemblance. Thu Van’s mother did remind me slightly of Elder Granny, but this could just be my overly sentimental and charged imagination.
I had brought my family album to help Hanif. Each side of the family devoured the photographs of the other. On seeing one of my mother at the age of twenty-four, both of our Vietnamese relations laughed with delight. She was very similar to Thu Van’s grandmother. We compared the two side by side. It was the same family. Of this there could be no doubt. Then they unwrapped a large framed sepia photograph of ‘our honoured matriarch’, in Thong’s words. So this was what Li Wan had looked like. She was old by then. The photograph had been taken in 1898. The location was the Saigon studio of a French photographer, Guillaume Boissier, whose name was prominently stamped on the photograph itself. She was approaching fifty, but the beauty and the authority on her face were only too visible. This was a copy made for us, and I will bring it back with me. I love her face. Sultan Suleiman had met her when she was only eighteen. How lovely she must have looked then, and how mature she must have been to play the role she did at the time. There was nothing like this in our family. We had no photographs of Elder Granny’s mother. My mother said some had been taken by an English photographer in Calcutta, but they had disappeared.
Hanif asked whether there were any other documents, but both women shook their head and Thu Van’s and her mother’s eyes became sad. It emerged that there had been papers, including a manuscript written by the honoured matriarch herself, an account of the Dali sultanate and the uprisings in Yunnan, together with her journey to Cochin China and what she had subsequently achieved. This existed but was owned by the family in California. As I imagined, they had split during the long war in Vietnam. One branch, the one with the archive, had collaborated first with the French and later the Americans. And not just collaborated but provided names of the resistance and betrayed the whereabouts of Thu Van’s uncle a few months before Saigon was liberated in the spring of 1975. The uncle was a leader of the resistance in Cholon, a Saigon suburb. He knew the date of the final assault and a great deal else, but revealed nothing. He was tortured to death.
This concludes the memorandum from Beijing. The postscript below concerns only us.
Postscript
Neelam told me how much she liked you, and that was pleasing. She also said that you and Zahid were bonding again and that she heard you laughing together in the manner of Punjabi schoolboys. Hanif will now, no doubt, become part of all that. Since he must have told you that the big problem in our lives was my lac
k of passion—this was a regular complaint—let me now confess something to you, and don’t be shocked if it challenges your image of me as Dai-yu, which was also reported by Neelam, who told me she agreed with you. Just to stop you thanking your stars for sparing you an ethereal, spiritual beauty who felt nothing physical and lived in her dreams, let me tell you that I had two lovers at different times in my life. One didn’t last too long and it’s hardly worth mentioning him. The other I enjoyed physically a great deal and also liked as a person, but not enough to break up my family for him. That affair lasted most of the time we were in DC. I trust that you will not impart this information to anyone, neither my husband nor my brother nor either of my children. The secret must die with you, as it will with me.
You’re wondering who this person was, and I will tell you. He was a Tanzanian agronomist I met in the library at Georgetown. We became friends and I learnt a great deal about Africa from him. One day it happened. And, dear friend, were I to describe the heights that my passion reached you would be the one shouting, ‘Hsi-men, Hsi-men.’ The others I can excuse, but you knew that the Dream of the Red Chamber was not the only novel that I had read. You knew that I was busy reading the Chin Ping Mei at a young age. So why am I Dai-yu? Why not Meng Yu-lo or another character like her from Red Chamber? I often told you that Zahid was a nice man, but I never felt passionately about him. What’s so unusual about that in a marriage? It’s the story of the institution; is it not? He pleasured young nurses. I was pleasured by a middle-aged African professor, but I played the role of Hsi-men. Zahid, as we Chinese-Punjabis say, could see a bee defecating forty miles outside the city, but tripped over an elephant on his own doorstep. I hope you didn’t believe him, but knowing how male camaraderie operates in a Punjabi milieu, I fear you did. You might have discovered the truth for yourself had you not insisted on coffee for breakfast. That opportunity, alas, will never come our way again.
EIGHTEEN
I SENT JINDIÉ AN appreciative e-mail praising her prose to the skies and suggesting a publisher for her musings on Beijing and Yunnan. ‘As for the postscript’, I wrote, ‘I’m delighted to hear you have enjoyed life to the full, though I hope not as fully as Hsi-men Ch’ing, despite your invocation of his name more than once. As for the rest, all I can say is better a middle-aged Tanzanian agronomist than a rapidly aging Punjabi writer who lacks the vigour of youth.’
Zaynab had returned to Fatherland and was asking me each day to set a date so that Plato’s painting could be brought to the house and unveiled. She promised this would not be done till I arrived. Did I think we should invite someone else as well? For Zaynab to ask that meant she already had someone in mind, and even as I was wondering who this could be and from which continent, the phone rang.
‘Alice Stepford here. Is that you, Dara?’
‘Has Zaynab invited you to her country mansion?’
‘Have you decided a date?’
‘Think carefully, Alice. Fatherland is a mess. Americans are not safe there.’
‘Let me know the date, when you’ve decided it, and the flight from London so that we can synchronize watches. Speak soon.’ A frivolous e-mail exchange with Zaynab followed this call:
Good idea to invite a few other people. What about Zahid and Confucius, who were close to him in his Lahore days, as well as Ally Stepford? z.
Will you provide security for the Stepford mistress? D.
You mean your ex-mistress. Why have you gone off her? z.
Could Yu-chih come as well, since she has to be shown Lahore? D.
The party was growing by the minute. Zaynab rang an hour later.
‘Master of the Universe, have you decided on a date?’
‘Mistress of all you survey, what’s the weather like in Sind? Any storms in the offing?’
‘Dara, stop fooling. I’ve got e-mails from all your guests thanking me for the invitation and glad that you invited Mrs Confucius along as well. Ally, my only guest, said you were distinctly harsh and rude to her.’
‘Is there a helicopter service from Karachi Airport to Thanda Gosht Yar, or is it called Sainville now?’
She suppressed a giggle. ‘Behave. Unless you send me dates by tomorrow morning I’ll unveil it on my own.’
And then one day we all arrived in Karachi. Zaynab’s brother had thoughtfully organized a helicopter, and we were met off the gangway by flunkeys. The Confuciuses had already arrived. The flunkeys took our passports and escorted us to the hotel’s VIP suite.
‘Why not VVIP?’ I asked one of them.
‘Permission only for VIP today, sir.’
‘Was the VVVIP full?’
He tried not to smile.
In the VIP room the Bride of the Koran herself, looking ravishable, greeted us. I had missed her. The sun had done her good; she was a few degrees darker. She embraced Alice with a show of real warmth. Then she gave Zahid a salaam from afar and completely ignored me. I embraced Confucius with genuine delight and was introduced to Yu-chih, so well described by Jindié. Breakfast awaited us. It consisted of tinned and slightly mouldy orange juice, which I warned the others to ignore, but Ally ignored me and downed a tumbler of the foul stuff. An hour later she was looking distinctly peaky. The juice was followed by some deliciously stale chicken sandwiches, withered by the overnight heat and not restored to life by the early morning humidity or being sprinkled with water. One sniff and it was obvious that turpentine had been used as a butter substitute. When I pointed this out, Zaynab collapsed in laughter. She asked if we could have a word alone in the neighbouring prayer room.
‘Are you sure your husband isn’t in there?’
Inside she lost control and just roared.
‘Will you please behave yourself? I know you’re in one of your stupid moods, but preserve some decorum. Please try.’
I kissed her on the lips for a very long time. She broke loose; we adjusted ourselves and joined our friends. By the time the helicopter was ready we were in normal Fatherland mode. Zaynab had her head well covered, and, I was pleased to see, so had Alice. She looked very fetching in a maroon Sindhi scarf embroidered with silver stars. I put on my dark glasses. ‘To hide his mocking eyes,’ I heard Zaynab whisper to Alice. The helicopter was well prepared and we were handed a bottle of water each for the forty-minute hop to Pir Sikandar Shah’s helipad.
‘In case you’re wondering why there are no parachutes, it’s because you can’t jump from a helicopter,’ I said to nobody in particular. As the blades began to whirr, I noticed a momentary look of concern on Alice’s face. At this point Zaynab put on her dark glasses. Conversation is always difficult on helicopters, but was more so in this one because the guard accompanying us had forgotten to bring the noise-cancelling earphones on board. I took out mine from my hand luggage and listened to a violin concerto that came to an end just as the helicopter landed on the baronial estates of the Shah family.
Pir Sikandar was at an emergency cabinet meeting in Isloo. His personal assistant and sundry retainers greeted us on landing. Zaynab was surrounded immediately by four maids, and she, Yu-chih and poor Alice retired to the women’s quarter, no doubt for massage and bath respectively. Lucky things. We were taken to our guest cottages, with mine the closest to the house. I was greeted by a refrigerator overloaded with Murree beer but demanded fresh lime juice without sugar and a jug of tamarind juice with ice and honey. We men showered, and then Zahid and Confucius knocked on my door. I offered them beer. Both preferred the tamarind concoction. Confucius appeared slightly bewildered.
‘I hope they haven’t kidnapped Yu-chih for too long.’
Zahid asked whether I had been here before, to which the answer was no. Neither of her brothers was known to me. Most of my Sindhi friends were writers and poets and painters, and I reminded them that it was to see the last work of one of these that we were here.
‘Plato was a motherfucking Punjabi,’ muttered Confucius, in the language he had just mentioned.
‘Glad you’re back on side
.’
He grinned. ‘I want my wife back.’
Lunch was eagerly awaited by all, especially those who had travelled on Fatherland Airlines, but even the Beijing Two were starving. It was served in the pir sahib’s dining room. His wife and kids were in Europe, and Zaynab had to play official hostess. A very elderly gentleman had joined us, a great-uncle who had helped to create Fatherland but whom nobody remembered was still alive. We had no doubt on that score. He drank a couple of beers and ate a healthy portion of each of the seven or eight well-prepared dishes that had been placed before us. When I asked his age he said ‘ninety-two’ in a lively voice. Nobody was disappointed with the food, but the presence of this elder had a slightly inhibiting effect on the conversation.
Every evening, he would lead the prayers in the tiny mosque on the estate, for a congregation of two dozen servants and about fifty serfs who were rustled up to keep the old man happy. The prayer was followed by an improvised exhortation to the assembled to be good Muslims and say their prayers; occasionally he would tell them not to interfere sexually with animals. Such acts had not been sanctioned, and they confused the lesser species. When the service was over his jeep would bring him straight to the house for a Patiala peg of whisky before supper. This daily disjunctive between theory and practice appeared to have kept him alive. Nor was he ungenerous. One reason the servants and serfs didn’t mind him all that much was that he was too old now to demand one of their wives for the night and besides he was doling out money to whoever said they were in want.
He was, of course, a dreadful bore, but this could be said of most people who reach such an age.
During supper that night he remarked, ‘Unless our politicians are led back to decent principles within ten years, we will have a bloody Communist revolution, and all these estates will be distributed to these donkeyfucking peasants.’
