A Case of Exploding Mangoes

by Mohammed Hanif

  I thought of distracting Obaid with Yasser Arafat’s pictures, but I looked at his contorted face and gave up on the idea. He opened and closed his fists. There was a fury in his eyes that I had never seen before. I moved towards him to put my hand on his shoulder. He recoiled and turned round, put his hands on his face and started to bang his head against the wall.

  ‘It will be all right,’ I said and felt like one of those doctors who tell you to live life to its fullest after informing you that you have only six weeks to live. He was still for a moment, then he sprang from his position and hurled himself towards Bannon’s bed, bringing down the bamboos hoisting the camouflaged canopy over the mattress. All the books he read hadn’t taught him the basic military rule: you manage your anger by kicking ass, not by rearranging the furniture in your room. He picked up the pillow and threw it at the wall. Disappointed by the lack of impact, he picked up the ceramic Buddha. I lunged forward and stopped him. ‘Not the Buddha,’ I said, taking it from his hands. His fingers were warm on Buddha’s air-conditioned ceramic face. He looked around for something else to throw. The air conditioner’s cold air had dried up some of the sweat patches on his shirt. As I moved closer to calm him down, I picked up the cardamom on his breath and the musky smell of his drying sweat.

  ‘Let’s talk it through,’ I said. That’s what he normally said in such situations.

  ‘You are trying to keep me out.’

  ‘Look, Baby O …’ I fumbled for words and tried to fill the silence by moving my hand from his shoulder to the back of his neck. His hair bristled under my palm, his neck was still warm despite the chill in the room. I felt angry at my own lack of empathy and it came out.

  ‘Look, it’s not a picnic that I am not taking you on. It’s for your own good, Baby O.’

  He ignored my patronising tone. ‘There is a much simpler way,’ he said. ‘What is this place full of? Aeroplanes? What do we need to do? Take a plane and go for the –’

  ‘We are not having that discussion again,’ I cut him off. For a man in uniform his ideas about soldiering were naive. He considered himself some kind of character from Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, the latest addition to the pile of books on his bedside table, and talked about aeroplanes as if they were not million-dollar fighting machines but some kind of vehicle for his spiritual quest.

  ‘The wind was a whisper in his face and the ocean stood still beneath him …’ he said with his eyes closed. ‘I could do it all by myself.’ He patted my cheek.

  ‘You can hardly land that bloody thing. Forget it.’

  ‘Who needs to land?’ He produced a navigation map with coordinates drawn and a red circle around the Army House. ‘Twenty-three minutes, if there is no head- or tailwind.’

  I snatched the map from him, flung it over my shoulder and stared into his eyes. He stared back unblinking. I thought of telling him about Uncle Starchy’s nectar but immediately decided against it.

  ‘Colonel Shigri didn’t kill himself and I am not about to,’ I said. Then put my mouth to his ear and shouted at strength 5: ‘Is that clear?’

  Screw my inner cadence, I thought.

  ‘Is that clear?’ I shouted again.

  He pressed his ear over my mouth, leaned into me, and put his hand on my waist.

  ‘If you want to do it here, you’ve got to have me in the squad. You need a back-up.’

  I removed his hand, took a step back. ‘Listen, stick to your Rilke or whatever you’re reading these days. What are you going to do? Hey, look, this is my sword, here comes the General, look, I am taking a swipe.’ I did a limp-wristed mime with an imaginary sword. ‘Oops, sorry, I missed. Can I have another go?’

  I think I killed him with those words.

  I didn’t see his fist coming at my guts, and as I doubled over, his knee hit my ribs and sent me reeling onto Bannon’s bed, face down. I found myself sprawled on the heap of bamboos and the camouflaged canopy. The surprise of being hit by Baby O was so overwhelming that I didn’t feel any pain. The Bruce Lee poster blurred for a moment. Obaid came and stood over me and looked down as if he had never seen me before. My boot caught him between his shins and he fell beside me.

  I rubbed my lower ribcage and sighed. Obaid propped himself up on one elbow and watched me closely. He sat up suddenly as if he had made up his mind about something. Planting both his knees around my hips, he started to pull my vest out of my trousers. He gently rubbed my lower ribcage with both his hands, all the time looking into my eyes. I didn’t like him watching my reactions so I closed my eyes, my hips raised themselves involuntarily and my starched khaki trousers suddenly felt very tight. I hoped Bannon would take his time filling out that report.

  He moved my vest upwards, the chilled air sent shivers through my chest and my nipples turned shamelessly erect and purple; my belt was unhooked. I sucked my stomach in and held my breath as his hand wandered into my pants. He didn’t hold me, just let the back of his hand rest against my cock as if it was a chance encounter. I was scared of the lips that were gently brushing their way towards my chest. I was scared of being kissed.

  I breathed in the smell of jasmine oil from his hair and sank back into the mattress; a bamboo crunched under me and I tried to get up in a fit of panic. His hand in my pants pinned me down. His lips travelled along the outline of my jaw, his fingertips made tiny, airy circles on the tip of my cock. I groaned and my hips began to move but he pressed me down with his knee. His lips traced my ribcage and kept travelling downward. I did some hard thinking with my eyes shut. There is a stream near my house on Shigri Hill; I found myself standing in it during the winter, testing my first erection against the ice-cold water. My body leapt up and my cock touched the tip of his nose and he laughed.

  There was more surprise for me as he wriggled out of his pants and took my hand to his cock. I found myself tracing a curve, not just a slight curve, but the semicircle of a new moon. His cock was bent like a bow and his erection arched towards his navel. He sighed and lay down beside me. His eyes were shut and a gentle smile was spreading around his lips, a smile so serene, so full yet gentle, that he seemed to have retreated into his world where the wind whispered in his face and the ocean beneath him was still.

  I didn’t dare speak for a long time. The air conditioner turned off at some point and the only sound in the room was that of two scared boys breathing.

  ‘No. No,’ he whispered in the end, cupping me in his hands in a futile attempt at not leaving any traces on the bed. ‘Not on the sheets.’

  He spoke with his face staring up at the ceiling. ‘You wouldn’t do anything stupid.’

  ‘And you will not do anything fucked up,’ I said.

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ he said.

  In the morning he was gone.

  EIGHTEEN

  EVEN IF ZAINAB wasn’t blind she would not have been able to read her own interview in the newspaper because she was illiterate. Her news came from smells, birds, textures of the wind. And this morning she could feel the bad news in the air. She could hear the sound of impatient birds in the wind, she could feel migration and long lonely nights marching towards her.

  She held her breath for a moment, ignoring the portents that floated in the air, and tried to concentrate on the job at hand.

  Zainab stood pressed against the iron bars of her cell, breaking little crumbs from a piece of bread and throwing them to a group of sparrows who descended on the jail every morning. Like many blind people, she could count the number of birds by listening to the fluttering of their wings. There were probably fifteen of them. They were picking playfully at the crumbs, their hunger already satiated because there was enough food for them in the jail. Every morning there were a number of women with pieces of leftover bread, their hands stretching out of the iron bars trying to entice the same set of sparrows, hoping to see them peck at the crumbs, and with some luck to get them to pick the food from the palms of their hands. This morning though, the sparrows were more interested in playing with each other.r />
  Zainab didn’t feel like the other inmates on death row; they prayed, they cried, they obsessively followed the progress of their petitions for mercy, and after their last appeal was denied, they turned their attention to the afterlife and started seeking forgiveness all over again. Zainab had committed no crime and she was comfortable in her cell – called the black cell because it accommodated death-row prisoners – and she lived in it as if it was her home. She had woken up this morning, cleaned her cell, massaged her pregnant cell mate’s feet and put oil in her own hair. After feeding the birds she would visit other cells, which were not black cells, and massage the feet of two other pregnant prisoners. ‘Why would anyone want to kill a poor blind woman?’ was her recurring answer to all the excitement that her lawyer and other women’s groups outside the jail were creating about her death sentence. Even the jailer respected her for her politeness, the way she helped other prisoners and taught their children to recite the Quran. Zainab was the jail superintendent’s favourite prisoner and it was she who had given her the pair of sunglasses that so infuriated General Zia. ‘They will protect you against the sun.’ Zainab had accepted them with a smile without complaining, without showing any self-pity, without pointing out that sunlight couldn’t enter the dead white pools that were her eyes. Behind the plastic sunglasses her eyes were all white. She had been born without corneas. There was the obvious talk of bad omens when she arrived in this world but her face was so luminous and her other faculties so intact that she had been accepted as an unfortunate child and she had made the most of her circumstances. Even now that she had become the first woman to be sentenced to death by stoning under new laws, she had shown a puzzled fortitude that baffled women activists who were fighting her case in the courts and on the streets. ‘Stoning?’ she had asked after she was sentenced. ‘Like they do to the Devil in Mecca during haj? They have been doing it to him for centuries and they haven’t been able to kill him. How are they going to kill a healthy woman like me?’

  After wearing the sunglasses for a few days Zainab had started liking them; they helped her with the headaches she got after standing in the sunlight for too long. And the other prisoners’ children always giggled when she took them off to show them her milk-white eyes.

  Zainab heard a pair of wings flapping, heavier than the wings of the sparrows. She heard her sparrows flutter in a panic but they didn’t fly away. Some hovered in the air, others moved away from her. Her hand stopped throwing the crumbs for a moment, feeling protective towards her sparrows, not wanting to give to the crow what was theirs. Then she remembered a crow from her childhood who had kept her company on many a dark day. Another bad omen, the villagers had said, but it was good company for her and she would always save some bread for him. Could it be the same crow? Her hands started to break the jail bread and throw it out again. What if the crow was really hungry? All the prisoners and even some of the jail staff, she knew, fed these sparrows.

  She heard the jailer’s footsteps coming towards her. She could tell from the way she walked that the jailer was bringing bad news. She tried to ignore the guilt in the approaching footsteps and continued to feed the bird. She could tell that the crow had taken over the area. The sparrows had flown away except for two who were still skirting around the circle claimed by the crow, rushing in to pick on a piece when the crow’s back was turned and dashing back to a safe distance. She could feel on her fingertips that their wings were poised for escape. She could also tell that it was more of a game they were playing, to see, if one distracted the crow, how close the other one could get.

  The jailer’s shadow blocked the sunlight. Zainab could tell from the smell of the jailer’s sweat that she was in trouble. She was breathing heavily, shifting her weight on her feet, pretending that she wasn’t there.

  The news was definitely bad.

  What bad news could you bring to a prisoner condemned to death? She had no hopes about the clemency appeal that her lawyer had filed on her behalf. The other prisoners in her cell had discussed it. They knew that although the General had changed his mind many times over many things, one thing he never did was miss a chance to turn down the mercy plea in a death-sentence case. Something to do with someone called Bhutto who was the ruler before Zia. Zainab knew that Bhutto was hanged and not stoned to death. She didn’t really know what his crime was either. Zainab wasn’t really expecting her sentence to be commuted, so maybe the jailer had received her black warrants and was worried about how to arrange a stoning. Zainab felt bad for the jailer; why did such a nice, competent woman have to go through such trials?

  She heard the crow flap its wings urgently, but instead of flying away it settled down again, probably having chased the last sparrow away.

  ‘Zainab, your picture has been published in a newspaper,’ the jailer said. Zainab knew the jailer was avoiding the subject by telling her about the newspaper instead of giving her the news about her black warrant. ‘You look good in the picture with your sunglasses.’

  Zainab threw the last bit of bread, hoping to hit the crow on its head. She missed.

  ‘They are going to transfer you to another prison. Because of that picture and the interview you gave.’

  Zainab remembered the interview. Her lawyer had read out a few questions to her and she had repeated the same story that she had told at the district court, at the High Court, in the appeal against her death sentence, the same story she had told her fellow prisoners, over and over again without adding or omitting anything despite her lawyer’s best efforts.

  ‘Your picture was printed in America. Apparently the orders have come from the very top to take you to a place where you can’t give interviews.’

  Zainab didn’t know much about interviews or places from where you could or could not give interviews, she had only told them what had happened.

  ‘It was dark but they had torches. There were three of them. There might have been another one outside the door. They smelled of car petrol, their hands were soft so they weren’t peasants. They tied my hands, they hit me when I asked them to let me go in their mothers’, sisters’ names. They were animals.’

  ‘But I like it here,’ she told the jailer. ‘My cell mate is due to give birth in two weeks. I have other friends here. I want to live here.’

  Then she thought about what she had just said.

  ‘I want to die here.’

  ‘The orders have come from the President,’ the jailer said, using a tone that she had never used with Zainab before, making it clear that it was final, even more final than her death sentence. Zainab also smelled fear in her voice and wondered whether the jailer would be punished as well.

  And that thought, her having to leave her friends behind, and the idea that the jailer who gave her the sunglasses might be punished, overwhelmed Zainab for an instant and she did something that she had never done before. Blind Zainab who had listened in silence when a lecherous judge sentenced her to death, she who had not given her tormentors the satisfaction of a scream, she who had spent her life thanking God and forgiving His men for what they did to her: Zainab screamed and Zainab cursed.

  ‘May worms eat the innards of the person who is taking me away from my home. May his children not see his face in death.’

  The jailer felt relieved. She was irritated by Zainab’s reckless fortitude. She didn’t want her to go quietly.

  It is a well-known fact that curses are the last resort of frustrated mothers and useless weapons for people who do not even have the courage or vocabulary to come up with proper invective for their enemies. It is also a well-known fact that most curses don’t work. The only way they can work is if a crow hears a curse from someone who has fed him to a full stomach and then carries it to the person who has been cursed. Crows, notoriously gluttonous, never feel as if their stomachs are full. They are also wayward creatures, their movement can never be predicted. They never bother carrying anything anywhere. Zainab didn’t even notice when the crow, having checked the ground for any le
ftover bits of bread, flapped its wings languidly and took off. When he was high above the jail, from where he could see other groups of sparrows doing their silly dance in front of the prisoners, he felt a western current in the air above him. He flew up, stopped flapping his wings and two days later crossed the border into India where the wheat season starts early and the electric poles are safer.

  Zainab packed her two pairs of clothes and waited for her own journey to begin. She was handcuffed and put in the back of a jeep. She noticed that there were no guards with her. Where was a handcuffed blind woman going to go? She prayed for an easy birth for her cell mate and forgot all about whom she had cursed and why.

  The crow tucked his wings under his body and let the current carry him.

  Crows may not have a conscience but their memory lasts for ninety years.

  It was after the jeep carrying her stopped and didn’t move and nobody came to tell her to get off that Zainab thought she had arrived at the place she was being carried to. She took her clothes bundle, moved aside the canvas curtain and got off the jeep. She smelled a lot of smoke and a lot of men and for a moment she thought they had sent her to a men’s jail. She heard a passing siren and she kept walking, hoping to be led to a cell to live the rest of her life. The people who surrounded her were impatient. In jails people know how to stay still. After walking a few yards and avoiding stepping on anyone’s feet, she held the arm of a man who seemed still and patient and asked: ‘Where am I supposed to live?’