A Case of Exploding Mangoes

by Mohammed Hanif

  The man pressed a soggy two-rupee note in her hand and told her to wait like everyone else.

  ‘I am not a beggar,’ she said, but the man had already walked off.

  A hand gripped her arm firmly. ‘Where do you think you are going, old woman? We are taking you to the Fort. The press won’t be able to bother you there.’

  NINETEEN

  I WAKE UP to my neighbour’s desperate whispers echoing in my cell. ‘Comrade. Comrade.’ My fists are clenched and sand sticks to my sweaty palms. ‘Comrade.’

  It takes me a moment to orient myself, another to recognise the source of these whispers. By the time I rub my palms against the back of my trousers and move towards the hole in the wall I am thinking that it seems I have been accepted back into the struggle.

  ‘Yes, comrade,’ I say with the flourish of a veteran communist.

  His voice is raspy and full of excitement.

  ‘Can you smell a woman?’ he says.

  ‘I can smell them from a mile away, Comrade Secretary General. Specially if they smell nice.’

  ‘No,’ he whispers agitatedly. ‘Can you smell a woman here?’

  I take a deep breath and smell the stench of my own teeth, which haven’t been brushed for I don’t know how many days.

  ‘Did you smell it? She is close, very close.’

  ‘As close as your revolution?’

  ‘This is not the time to make jokes. We need to stick together. I think it might be the cell next to yours.’

  ‘This is the Fort. What could a woman possibly do to end up here?’

  ‘You don’t know these people. They are capable of anything. She is definitely in the cell next to you. Talk to her.’

  ‘I am in no mood for female company, Secretary General. I don’t like women on an empty stomach. You talk to her.’

  ‘The bourgeoisie protect their own even in prison. Why couldn’t they have put her in the cell beside mine? You get chicken to eat and a woman as a neighbour and what do I get? An army deserter as a neighbour and stinking food.’

  ‘I am not a deserter,’ I explain. ‘I am still in uniform.’ There is the silence of two hungry men in the dark.

  ‘You know what you could do, comrade …’ His whisper is suddenly full of genuine longing and his breathing is heavy.

  ‘I am with you, comrade,’ I say.

  ‘You can find the brick in the wall with her cell. You can talk to her. You can ask her to put her tit in the hole and then you can touch it.’

  ‘And what makes you think she’ll do it?’

  ‘Tell her you are in the army.’

  I hear steps in the corridor; they stop in front of my dungeon. I put the brick in the hole and sit down with my back against the wall.

  There is a knock on the door. Who knocks on a prisoner’s door? They probably want to see whether I am dead or alive. I try to stand up without making any sound. My knees tremble, I put a hand on the wall for support, try to moisten my chapped lips with my tongue and say in a faint but firm voice: ‘Yes.’

  The door opens with a creak, the light is dull and faded and the sharp smell of home-made jasmine perfume overwhelms me. The man wielding a pair of handcuffs is not wearing a uniform but I can tell from his civilian hairstyle that he is one of Major Kiyani’s men. No point asking him what his orders are. After starving me in this black hole for eternity they have decided to formally arrest me. Life is not about to get better. I wish Secretary General could see me in handcuffs. He would be proud. The soldier takes his time with my blindfold, adjusting it over my eyebrows and nose, blocking out any stray rays of light, making sure I can breathe. Even from behind my blindfold I feel a surge of bright white sunlight as I am led up the stairs and into the cloister between the Court for the Commons and the Palace of Mirrors. The air in the Fort smells of grass, freshly cut and watered. I wish I could scratch the back of my neck.

  The jeep goes through a crowded bazaar. I smell cakes and cow dung and raw mangoes. I hear the hawkers hawking and traffic police constables whistling at buses and buses honking back, a duet that is melody to my ears after days and nights of the dungeon’s silence. The jeep comes out on a leafy avenue, the air is full of floating pollen, the traffic is orderly, the cars sound new and stop at traffic signals. The trees along the road smell like sunburnt eucalyptus. The jeep stops at a place smelling of metal polish and army boots. A gate opens and the jeep moves forward slowly. In the distance I can hear the rumble of an aircraft preparing to take off. And then the very familiar smell of aircraft fuel, and the sound of idling propellers.

  They want to fly me back to the Academy with honour because they have found no evidence against me.

  Or they want to throw me out of the plane because they have found no evidence and don’t need it.

  I read in Reader’s Digest that in some Latin American country that is what the army was doing: taking prisoners up in a plane and then throwing them from an altitude of twenty thousand feet, over the sea. Handcuffed.

  I flex my arms as a hand grips my shoulder and leads me up a ladder. Anyone trying to throw me off this plane would come with me. I am not going alone.

  I can tell as soon as I step off the ladder and into the plane that I am in a Hercules C130. Why do they need a whole C130 to transport a single person? A C130 is like a huge flying truck, it can take twenty thousand kilograms, the combined weight of an armoured jeep and a tank, and still have space left for their crews. Its backdoor ramp is like the gate of a town house, a vehicle can pass through it, dozens of paratroopers can jump. Or somebody can be thrown out. The man holding my shoulder asks me to sit in a webbed seat, fastens my nylon seat belt, asks me if I’d prefer my hands behind me or in front. In front, of course, you moron. My hands are free for a moment. No time for heroics.

  I smell the animals before I hear their muffled bleating and the sound of their tiny, nervous feet on the metal floor of the cabin. They smell like freshly bathed goats but their bleating sounds oddly strangled. I wriggle in my seat and want to announce that I am on the wrong flight. The back gate creaks shut, the propellers pick up speed and suddenly the cabin is full of the pungent smell of animal piss. As the aircraft’s nose lifts off the runway, the smell becomes even stronger. The animals are obviously not used to flying.

  Distracted by the din of the aircraft and stench of the animals, I jump from my seat when a hand tousles my hair and a rasping voice says, ‘You shouldn’t have done it, sir.’

  ‘What?’ I say, genuinely baffled.

  ‘Whatever you did. They wouldn’t put handcuffs on you if you hadn’t done anything.’

  Fuck off, I want to say. I stay silent.

  ‘Do you want me to remove your blindfold?’

  ‘Are you sure?’ I say, suddenly very courteous.

  ‘They didn’t say anything about you. And we are airborne, what can you possibly see?’

  He tries to move the blindfold above my eyes and his fat fingers linger on my cheeks more than they push the cloth. I bend my head offering him the knot at the back of my head. His attempts to untie the knot are exaggerated. His fingers are straying onto my neck, my shoulders. Then he puts his teeth on the knot and I can feel his slobbering lips at the back of my neck, inches below where he should be directing his efforts. He comes closer and I can feel his cock poking my shoulder. For a moment I think of bringing my handcuffed hands up and strangling his cock with the chain between my handcuffs.

  You might be going to your death, but there is always someone else there pursuing their own agenda.

  I am adjusting my hands for the right angle of attack when his teeth get into the knot in the right place; one hard jab of his cock in my armpit and my blindfold is off.

  He is sweating after all the hard work. His loadmaster’s overalls are olive green and oil-stained and they rise like a little tent over his crotch. Fayyaz, his nameplate shamelessly announces. I stare at his face without blinking as if remembering his pathetic features. He shuffles back to his seat across the cabin.
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  Between us on the floor are nine mountain lambs in various stages of misery, shivering under their tight little woolly curls. Their hind legs are tied with rope so that they can’t move. Some are sprawled on the floor of the cabin, others are on their knees. One of them has thrown up and is struggling to breathe with his face on the floor, others are huddling together. Under their meshed muzzles, their faces are perplexed question marks.

  Since when did the Pakistan Air Force start dealing in livestock? I want to ask Fayyaz, but he is only a fat horny loadmaster.

  ‘Where are they going?’ I ask.

  ‘Same place we are going,’ he says with a coy smile.

  ‘Which is where?’

  ‘I am not allowed to tell you,’ he says, looking at the lambs as if they might hear the destination and not like it.

  ‘Have you ever been to the Lahore Fort?’ I ask him casually.

  ‘No. But I have seen it on TV.’ He is puzzled.

  ‘No, Loadmaster Fayyaz.’ I chew his name before spitting it out. ‘There is another fort under that fort they show on the television. It’s for the collaborators, the likes of you.’ I start looking at the lambs again.

  ‘They are going for the party,’ he says with his hands folded in his lap. It seems he has got a handle on his runaway lust. ‘They can get the finest goat meat in Islamabad, but they want Afghani lambs. I doubt whether these will survive till the fourth of July.’

  ‘The Americans are having a party?’

  ‘It’s their Independence Day. We have been bringing food from all over the country for the past week. It must be a big party.’

  I close my eyes and wonder whether Bannon is going.

  The lambs have just begun to get used to the din of the aircraft and the fluctuating cabin pressure when the aircraft starts to descend steeply. They retch and bleat under their muzzles. The one with his face on the floor gets up and raises his front legs in an attempted capriole but stumbles and falls into his own piss.

  ‘I need to put your blindfold back on,’ the loadmaster says, in a voice full of expectations. I beckon him towards me with my cuffed hands and give him a murderous look. He is a man of the world. He gets the message and puts my blindfold back without touching a single hair on my body.

  The back door opens as soon as the aircraft comes to a standstill. I can hear the lambs sliding down the ramp, their first and last flight probably already a nightmare in the past. Another hand on my shoulder and I am led down a ladder. The air outside smells of hot concrete, burning landing gear and evaporating air fuel. It’s heavenly compared to the smell inside the cabin. A short walk, then a wait under the sun. The jeep I am thrown into smells of rose air freshener and Dunhills. I don’t think I have been brought here for the party.

  TWENTY

  GENERAL AKHTAR’S DEVOTION to his boss General Zia was not the ordinary devotion that a three-star general shows towards a four-star general. Their mutual dependence wasn’t that of two soldiers who can rely on each other to get a piggyback to the base if injured in the battle. Theirs was a bond between two dogs stranded on a glacier, each sizing up the other, trying to decide if he should wait for his comrade to die before eating him or do away with the niceties and try to make a meal out of him immediately.

  But there was a difference between the two: General Zia with his five titles, addresses to the UN and Nobel Prize hopes was satiated. General Akhtar, always playing second fiddle to his boss, was starving, and when he looked around the frozen landscape, all he saw was General Zia – fattened, chubby-cheeked and marinating in his own paranoia. Publicly, General Akhtar denied any ambition; he encouraged journalists to describe him as a silent soldier, happy to command his ghost armies in secret wars. But when he stood in front of the mirror in his office day after day and counted the three stars on his shoulder, he couldn’t deny to himself that he had become a shadow of General Zia. His own career had followed General Zia’s ambitions like a faithful puppy.

  If General Zia wanted to become an elected president, General Akhtar not only had to ensure that ballot boxes were stuffed in time but was also expected to orchestrate spontaneous celebrations all over the country after the votes were counted. If General Zia announced a National Cleanliness Week, General Akhtar had to make sure that the gutters were disinfected and security-checked before the President could show up to get his picture taken. On good days General Akhtar felt like a royal executioner during the day, and a court food-taster in the evening. On bad days he just felt like a long-suffering housewife always clearing up after her messy husband. He had started to get impatient. The title of ‘second most powerful man in the land’, which he had enjoyed in the beginning, had started to sound like an insult. How could you be second most powerful when your boss was all-powerful?

  The puppy had grown up and felt constantly starved.

  General Akhtar had learned to put the puppy on a leash and take him for short walks, because he knew he couldn’t let him run wild. Not yet.

  It was on one of these puppy-on-the-leash walks that he was walking along the corridor of his headquarters, minutes after his camera feed from the Army House abruptly disappeared. He ran his operations from a four-storey, nondescript office block. There was no signboard outside the building to identify it, no postal address for this enterprise; even the white Corollas entering and leaving the car park had no number plates. But still every cab driver in town somehow knew about the occupants of this building and the nature of their business. General Akhtar was walking on a frayed grey carpet, his ears taking in the familiar night-shift sounds; most of the staff had already left for the day but he could hear the muffled voices from behind the closed doors. His night-shift handlers were talking to his operators in distant, unsuspecting countries; Ethiopia, Nepal, Colombia. There was one consolation for General Akhtar: he might be the second most powerful man in a Third World country but the intelligence agency he ran was worthy of a superpower.

  Since no women worked in the office block, the toilets were marked ‘Officers and Men’. General Akhtar passed the toilets and entered an unmarked room at the end of the corridor. More than a dozen telephone operators watched wall-mounted audiotapes connected to telephone monitors; the tapes started to roll as soon as the subject under surveillance picked up the phone. It wasn’t just the usual set of politicians, diplomats and journalists whose phones were tapped; many of General Akhtar’s closest colleagues would have been surprised to find out that their every phone call, their every verbal indiscretion was recorded here.

  The operators working in the monitoring room had strict orders to continue their normal functions regardless of the rank of their visitor. A dozen heads wearing headphones nodded silently as General Akhtar entered the room.

  He tapped the shoulder of the first operator in the row, who seemed completely absorbed in the task at hand. The operator removed his headphones and looked at General Akhtar with a mixture of respect and excitement. During his eleven months at the agency, he had never been addressed by General Akhtar. The operator felt his life was about to change.

  General Akhtar took the headphones from his hands and put them on his own ears. He heard the moans of a man obviously in the middle of pleasuring himself as a woman on the other end urged him on in a motherly voice. General Akhtar gave the operator a disgusted look; the operator avoided eye contact with him and said, ‘The Minister of Information, sir.’ The operator felt apologetic, even though he was only doing his duty.

  ‘I don’t need to know,’ General Akhtar said, removing the headphones. ‘Come to my office. With one of these.’ He pointed to the little black box that connected the phone line to the tape recorder. ‘Bring a new one. The ones Chuck Coogan sent us.’ General Akhtar walked off to a chorus of nodding heads.

  The operator gave his colleagues a triumphant look, strangled the Information Minister’s sighs and started preparing his toolbox for his first ever visit to General Akhtar’s office. He felt like a man who had been personally selected by the seco
nd most powerful man in the country to do a very important job in his personal office. As he shut his toolbox and straightened his shirt, the operator felt like the third most powerful man in the country.

  General Akhtar’s office looked like that of any other senior bureaucrat at the pinnacle of his power; a large desk with five telephones and a national flag, a framed picture of him and Bill Casey laughing as General Akhtar presented the CIA chief with the casing of the first Stinger that had brought down a Russian Hind. In one corner stood a small television and video player. On the wall behind his chair was an official portrait of General Zia, from the time when his moustache was still struggling to find a shape and his cheeks were sunken. General Akhtar removed the picture carefully and punched in the combination for the safe behind it, took out a tape and put it in the video player. The picture was black and white and grainy and he could not see General Zia’s face, but he knew his hand gestures well and the voice was unmistakable. The other voice was slightly muffled and the speaker wasn’t in the frame.

  ‘Son, you are the only person in this country I can really trust.’

  General Akhtar grimaced. He had heard the same thing over and over again for the past two months, minus the word ‘son’ of course.

  ‘Sir, your security is my job and this is the kind of job where I can’t take orders from anyone else. Not from General Akhtar, not from the First Lady and sometimes not even from you.’

  Suddenly Brigadier TM’s head filled the screen. ‘Sir, all these changes, without my security clearance.’

  A hand appeared in the picture and handed General Zia a piece of paper. General Zia looked at the paper through his glasses, put it in his pocket and got up. The other figure entered the frame, they both met in the centre of the screen and General Zia spread his arms. General Akhtar moved forward in his chair and tried to listen to their voices, which because of their embrace had become even more muffled. He heard sobbing. General Zia’s body was shaking. He moved a step back and put both his hands on Brigadier TM’s. ‘Son, you don’t have to take orders from anyone, not even from me.’