A Case of Exploding Mangoes

by Mohammed Hanif

  The study is unlocked but I stay away from it. Obaid wants to see the pictures. They are all there on the wall, all mixed up, out of order, as if Colonel Shigri’s career progressed at random: General Akhtar and Colonel Shigri surrounded by Afghan mujahideen commanders with shawls and rocket launchers draped around their shoulders; Colonel Shigri with his bearded ISI officers in civvies holding the bits from the wreckage of a Soviet helicopter like trophies; Colonel Shigri with Bill Casey’s arm around his shoulder, looking over the Khyber Pass. Then the earlier pictures: his fellow officers are thin, moustaches clipped, medals scarce and not a beard in sight.

  ‘A comrade in uniform is potentially the deadweight that you’ll have to carry one day.’ Colonel Shigri had sipped slowly at his whisky, twelve hours before he was found hanging from the ceiling fan. He had returned from another of his duty trips with a coffin-sized Samsonite and was teaching me Pakistan’s military history through its falling fitness standards. ‘You owe it to your fellow soldiers to stay fit, to keep your weight down because one day you’ll take a hit in battle and somebody will have to carry you on his back. That’s what one soldier owes to another; the dignity of being carried back to one’s own bunker even if near-dead. Hell, even if dead.’ His voice rose and then he went quiet for a moment. ‘But look at them now, look at their bloated bodies. Do you know why they let themselves go?’

  I stared at him. I stared at the suitcase and wondered what he had brought home this time.

  ‘Because they know they are not going to be fighting battles any more. No, sir, they are drawing-room soldiers, sitting on their comfy sofas and getting fat. That is the first thing they think of – that they will never have to be in a battle again. But they also know in their heart of hearts that even if they were to end up in a battle, even if they got hit, nobody is going to carry them back to their bunkers. Do you understand?’

  I didn’t. ‘Why wouldn’t anyone carry them back?’

  ‘Because they are too goddam fat to carry.’

  I had carried Obaid on my back during our jungle survival course after a mock ambush. He dug his heels into my thighs, his arms around my neck kept getting tighter. I flung him down to the ground when he nibbled at my earlobe.

  ‘Cadet Obaid. The first rule of survival is that you shall not screw your saviour.’

  ‘Not even if it feels so good?’ he had asked with his eyes half closed.

  On our last night in the house Obaid discovers a half-empty bottle of Black Label in the kitchen. I stare at him. I don’t tell him that I found the bottle in his study the morning the Colonel was found hanging from the ceiling fan.

  We drink it with large quantities of water. ‘It’s very bitter,’ says Obaid, pulling a face. ‘Can I put some sugar in it?’

  ‘That would be disgusting.’

  He takes a sip, makes a face as if somebody has punched him in the stomach.

  He likes it after the second glass. ‘It doesn’t taste that bad, actually,’ he says. ‘It’s like drinking liquid fire.’

  One more drink and there are tears in his eyes and truth on his drunk lips.

  ‘I gave them your name. I told them about you. I told them you were practising with the sword.’

  I take his hand into my hands. ‘I would have done the same thing.’

  I don’t tell him that I did do the same thing.

  ‘Why did they let you go then?’ he mumbles.

  ‘The same reason they let you go.’

  Stars start to go out one by one as if God has decided to close His parlour for the night.

  ‘They were never interested in what we were going to do and why. They just wanted our names on their files,’ says Obaid, insightful like only a first-time drunk can be. ‘We were General Akhtar’s suspects, General Beg will find his own.’

  ‘What if they actually liked my plan?’ I say, draining the last dregs from the bottle. ‘What if they just wanted to see if I could carry it out?’

  ‘Are you saying that the people who are supposed to protect him are trying to kill him? Are they setting free people like us? Are you drunk? The army itself?’

  ‘Who else can do it, Baby O? Do you think these bloody civilians can do it?’

  Colonel Shigri had kept talking even after his sixth drink. I had tried to interrupt him in the middle of a long story about his latest trip behind the enemy lines in Afghanistan. He had asked me to start a fire in the living room but seemed to have forgotten about it. ‘We don’t have any ice.’

  ‘Water would do,’ he said and continued. ‘There are people out there fighting the fight and there are people sitting here in Islamabad counting their money. People in uniform.’ He paused for a moment and, through his bloodshot and blurry eyes, tried to focus on my face.

  ‘You must think I am drunk.’

  I looked at the glass in his hand and moved my head in a half-hearted denial. How do you talk to someone who has only known you through your public-school report cards and suddenly wants to tell you their life story over a bottle of whisky?

  He tried to hold my gaze, but his eyes were already drooping with the burden of honesty.

  For the first and the last time in his life he talked to me about his day job.

  ‘I had gone to pick up one of my officers, who’d lost a leg planting anti-personnel mines. Then I get this message that I should forget the officer and bring this thing back. This thing.’ He pointed to the suitcase as if he had been ordered to carry a dead pig. ‘Blast your way back, they told me.’

  I think he noticed some interest in my eyes.

  ‘I didn’t kill anyone.’ He looked at me and then laughed a slurred laugh. ‘I mean this time. You know it’s my job,’ he shrugged. ‘The thing about these Afghans is that they are not in it for the killing. They fight but they want to make sure that they are alive after the fighting is over. They are not in the business of killing. They are in the business of fighting. Americans are in it for winning. And us?’

  He realised that he was going off on a tangent and mumbled something under his breath which sounded like ‘pimps and prostitutes’.

  ‘How is the fire, young man?’ He was suddenly practical. Drunk practical. As if I had taken him for a drunkard and was trying to fool him.

  ‘Let’s go then, young man. Let’s do our duty.’

  He picked up his bottle of whisky and poured some into his glass with a tremulous hand. It sloshed, swirled and gurgled in the glass. At the door he turned back and said, ‘Can you get my suitcase?’

  By the time I dragged the suitcase to the living room, he was already sweating. The fire wasn’t such a good idea. The sky was clear and our floating companions, the clouds, had gone back to Siberia or wherever they came from. Even the river down in the valley was silent.

  Why do rivers decide to shut up on certain nights?

  I dragged the suitcase into the middle of the room and fussed over the fire. The wood was dry, the weather was clear, we didn’t need the bloody fire.

  ‘I have saved a few lives in my time. Or I think I have. This whole bloody Afghan thing. I have done more than five hundred trips. All deniable missions. And now I end up with this.’ He looked at the fire appreciatively. I looked at the suitcase.

  My cheeks were glowing. The room was oven-hot.

  ‘I took three days dragging this back,’ he said, his voice full of remorse.

  He stood up with his glass poised in front of his chest. He raised his glass to me and did a 360-degree turn. He seemed to be at a party that had gone on for too long but he was determined to get the last dance in.

  ‘Open the suitcase,’ he said.

  Out of a very clear night sky a grey cloud, its edges bruised orange like a healing wound, appeared at the window as if Colonel Shigri had called in a witness.

  I opened the suitcase. It was full of money. Dollars.

  ‘This was my mission. To retrieve this money from someone who was dead. And I buried my man there and brought this here. Do I look like an accountant? Do I p
imp my men for this?’

  I looked at him. We held each other’s gaze. I think for a moment he realised that he was talking to his son.

  ‘Into the fire,’ he said.

  If I hadn’t been so sleepy I might have tried to reason with him. I might have told him that whatever his ethics of war, the money wasn’t his to burn. Instead I obliged. And soon started taking pleasure in watching hundreds of little dead American presidents, White Houses and In God We Trusts crumpling and turning into stashes of ash. I used both my hands and threw wads after wads of dollars into the fireplace. Soon the room was full of green smoke and twenty-five million dollars’ worth of ash. I peeled off a bill from the last pile and slipped it into my pocket. Just to confirm in the morning that it wasn’t a dream.

  ‘Go to sleep, young man. I’ll keep watch. I have asked them to come and collect their pimp money.’ I looked at him and laughed. His face was covered with the soot flying around the room. He looked like a badly madeup black slave in a Bollywood film. ‘Wash your face before you go to sleep,’ he said. Those were his last words to me.

  * * *

  The rain rattles the window.

  ‘Has the monsoon started?’ Obaid asks, distracted by the sudden lashing of rain on the window.

  ‘Monsoon is for you people in the plains. Here it’s just rain. It comes and goes.’

  The Mango Party

  TWENTY-NINE

  THE FIRST OF the monsoon winds caught the crow gorging on mustard flowers in a sea of exploding yellows in eastern Punjab, just on the wrong side of the Pakistani border. The crow had spent a good summer, grown fat and survived a number of ambushes by gangs of Brahminy kites which looked like eagles but behaved like vultures, ruled this area unchallenged in the summer and, despite their exalted name, showed no interest in the abundant vegetation, preying instead on common crows like this visitor from across the border. The crow obviously credited his own cunning for his survival but the curse that he carried was saving him for a purpose, for a death more dramatic than being eaten alive by a bunch of greedy kites with no respect for dietary rules.

  One hundred and thirty miles away from the mustard field, in Cell 4 of the Lahore Fort, Blind Zainab folded her prayer mat and heard the rustle of a snake. It was a small snake, probably the size of her middle finger, but Zainab’s ears instantly recognised its barely audible scurrying. She stood still for a second, then took off her slipper and waited for the snake to move again. Keeping in mind a childhood superstition, she moved only when she was sure she could target it precisely. She brought the slipper down swiftly and, in three targeted strokes, killed it. Slipper still in hand, she stood still and her nostrils caught a whiff of the pummelled flesh. The dead snake’s blood vapours floated in the dungeon air. Her headache returned with a vengeance, two invisible hammers beating at her temples with excruciating monotony. She reclined against the wall of her cell, threw her slipper away and cursed in a low voice. She cursed the man who had put her in this dark well, where she had nobody to talk to and was forced to kill invisible creatures to survive. ‘May your blood turn to poison. May the worms eat your innards.’ Blind Zainab pressed her temples with the palms of both her hands. Her whispered words travelled through the ancient air vents of the Fort and escaped into the tropical depression that had started over the Arabian Sea and was headed towards the western border.

  The monsoon currents induced a certain restlessness in the crow and he took off, flying into the wind. The air was pregnant with moisture. The crow flew one whole day without stopping and didn’t feel thirsty even once. He spent the night at a border checkpoint between India and Pakistan picking at a clay pot full of rice pudding that the soldiers had left outside in the open to cool down. The pot lay in a basket hanging from a washing line; he slept on the washing line with his beak stuck in the pudding. The next day the crow found himself flying over a barren patch, the monsoon wind turned out to be an empty promise. His mouth was parched. He flew slowly, looking for any signs of vegetation. The crow landed near an abandoned, dried-up well where he picked at a dead sparrow’s rotting carcass. His lunch almost killed him. Dying of thirst and stomach pain, he took off on a tangent and followed the direction of the wind until he saw lights flickering in the distance and columns of smoke rising on the horizon. He tucked his left wing and then his right wing under his body by turns and flew like an injured but determined soldier. In the morning he reached his destination. The lights had disappeared and the sunrise brought with it the wonderful smell of rotting mangoes. He swooped over an orchard, then spotted a skittish little boy rushing out of a small mud hut with a catapult in his hand. Before the crow could take any evasive action, a pebble hit his tail, and he flew up to stay out of the boy’s range. His restlessness was over. His crow instincts and his crow’s fate combined to tell him that he must find a way to stay in this orchard.

  The crow’s fate was intertwined with that of one of the two big aluminium birds being put through the last maintenance checks in the hangar of the VIP Movement Squadron of the Pakistan Air Force, five hundred miles away. The engines had been tested, the fatigue profiles had been declared healthy, the backup systems checked for any malfunction. Both the C130 Hercules aircraft were healthy and superfit to fly. According to the standard presidential security procedures, however, the aircraft for General Zia’s journey to attend a tank demonstration in Garrison 5, Bahawalpur, would not be chosen until a few hours before the flight. A fibreglass VIP pod, twelve feet long, was being put through a very strict hygiene regime by Warrant Officer Fayyaz personally. From the outside the pod looked like one of those shiny capsules that NASA launches into space. From the inside it looked like the compact office of a gangster. Warrant Officer Fayyaz dusted the beige leather sofas with its nova suede head-rests and vacuumed the fluffy white carpet. He polished the empty aluminium bar and put a copy of the Quran in the drinks cabinet. It was mandatory for all vehicles and flights carrying the General to have a copy. Not that he recited it during his journeys. He believed that it added another invisible protective layer to his elaborate security cordon. Now all Warrant Officer Fayyaz had to do was to put new air freshener in the air-conditioning duct and the pod would be ready. For security reasons the pod would not be fitted into one of the two planes till six hours before take-off. Only when this pod had been fitted into one of the two aircraft would it become the presidential plane. At this point it would automatically acquire the call sign Pak One. Warrant Officer Fayyaz had a lot of time on his hands, enough to do a second round of dusting and polishing before he went to pick up the new air freshener from VIP Movement Squadron’s supply officer, Major Kiyani.

  The crow circled above the orchard, out of the range of the catapult, until the boy spotted a red-nosed parakeet and started to prepare an ambush. The crow swooped down and settled on the top branch of the tallest mango tree, hiding in the blackish-green branches, and picked at his first mango. As the smell had promised, the mango was overripe and dripping with sweet, sweet juices.

  When I get the summons from the Commandant’s office I am busy teaching a pair of my Silent Drill Squad members how to be an Indian; it involves completing a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn with their feet and head on the floor and their hands in the air. I caught them whispering during the silent drill practice and now I am administering a lesson on the virtues of silence. They are groaning like a bunch of pansies. Probably the Coke bottle tops that I put under their heads are causing some discomfort. If they thought I would come back tender-hearted from my tribulations, they have definitely revised their opinions by now. Bannon or no Bannon, the rules of the drill can’t change. If they thought a few days in a jail could turn a soldier into a saint then they should try spending a week in the Fort. Only civilians learn their lessons behind bars, soldiers just soldier on. I put my half-smoked cigarette in the mouth of the one making the most noise, his hands flail in the air and his groans become louder as the smoke enters his nostrils. ‘Learn some manners,’ I tell him and star
t marching towards the Commandant’s office.

  The Commandant had accepted us back into the fold as if we were his errant sons. He walked into our dorm on the night we arrived from Shigri Hill and looked at us pensively from the doorway. Obaid and I stood to attention by our bedsides. ‘I don’t like it when my boys are taken away from me,’ he said in a subdued voice, dripping with fatherly concern. As if we were not two just-out-of-the-dungeon prisoners but a pair of delinquents who had arrived home after lights-out time. ‘As far as I am concerned and as far as the Academy is concerned you were away on a jungle survival course. Which is probably not very far from the truth.’

  I have always found his Sandhurst brand of sentimentality sickening, but his words came out unclipped and unrehearsed as if he meant what he was saying. I didn’t feel the usual nausea when he said things like putting it all behind us and drawing a line under the whole episode. He turned to go back and asked in a whisper, ‘Is that clear?’ We both shouted back at strength 5: YES, SIR. He was startled out of his depression for a moment, smiled a proud smile and walked away.

  ‘There goes another general wanting to play your daddy,’ Obaid said bitterly, falling back on his bed.

  ‘Jail has made you a cynic, Baby O. We are all one big family.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, yawning and covering his face with a book. ‘Big family. Big house. Nice dungeons.’

  What could the Commandant possibly want from me now? A report on the progress of the Silent Drill Squad? Another lecture about jail being the university of life? Has someone from the squad been complaining about my new-found love for Coke bottle tops? I adjust my beret, straighten my collar, enter his office and offer an enthusiastic salute.

  His reading glasses are on the tip of his nose and his two-fingered salute is even more cheerful than mine. There is a have-I-got-good-news vibe in his office. Has he got his third star? But he is beaming at me. I seem to be the source of his soaring spirits. He is making circles in the air with a paper in his hand and looking at me with eyes that say ‘Guess what?’