2008 - A Case of Exploding Mangoes

by Mohammed Hanif

  “You mean they can get ideas by reading newspapers? Have you seen our newspapers? I think you need to revise your guidelines.”

  “Any man who has the ability to read a newspaper cannot have the will to throw himself between you and your assassin’s bullet,” said Brigadier TM. He was still trying to solve the sofa-curtain-carpet-portrait mystery.

  Brigadier TM’s boys were recruited from remote villages and trained so strenuously that by the time they finished their training—if they finished at all, as more than two-thirds begged to be returned to their villages—they had a vacant look on their faces. Unquestioning obedience was drilled into them by making them dig holes in the earth all day only to fill other holes the following day. They were kept away from civilians for so long that they considered anyone in civvies a legitimate target. General Zia spread his hands in exasperation and waited for TM to say something more.

  “These are my procedures,” Brigadier TM said, getting up, “and they seem to have worked so far. If you’ll allow me, we can bring back the K-9 Platoon.”

  General Zia noticed with satisfaction that he hadn’t used the word ‘guard dogs’.

  “Why do we need those filthy dogs? Are they better than your commandos?”

  Brigadier TM put his hands behind his back, looked above Zia’s head and gave the longest speech of his career. “We have got air cover. We cover all the access points to the Army House. We monitor all movements within a five-mile radius. But what if someone outside that radius is digging a tunnel right now, long and deep, which leads up to your bedroom? We have got no underground cover.”

  “I have cancelled all my public engagements,” said General Zia. “I won’t go to the President’s House even for state functions.”

  And suddenly Brigadier TM felt like a civilian. Too slow to understand the obvious, to see what stared him in the face. The carpets, the curtains and the sofas were from the newly built President’s House. He still couldn’t figure out where he had seen the portrait.

  “I am not leaving the Army House until you find out who it is. Go through General Akhtar’s files. Major Kiyani has got a suspect, talk to him.”

  “I need a day off, sir,” Brigadier TM said, coming to attention.

  General Zia had to muster all his self-control to remain calm. Here he was, worrying about all these threats to his life, and his Security Chief wanted to get away for some rest and recreation.

  “I am leading the para jump at the National Day Parade, sir,” Brigadier TM explained.

  “I was thinking of cancelling the parade,” General Zia said. “But General Akhtar keeps insisting we can’t have a National Day without the National Day Parade, so I am thinking of cutting down on the ceremonies. We won’t have the post-parade mingling with the people. But you can do your jumps if you want. I am not going to the Academy either. They were planning some kind of silent drill display. Do you know what that is?”

  Brigadier TM shrugged his shoulders and his eyes scanned the room one last time.

  Before leaving the room Brigadier TM didn’t forget to point out the security breach. “Sir, if you want anything transported from President’s House, do let me know and I’ll arrange the security clearance.”

  General Zia, still thinking about the tunnel under his bedroom, threw his hands in the air and said, “The First Lady. I don’t know what that woman wants. You try talking to her.”

  FIVE

  I stay still in the bed, eyes shut as I listen. Someone is moaning in the adjoining room. I can hear the faint sound of the Academy band practising a slow march. Every sound is filtered, muted; the light seems to be fading away. This is just like the afternoons I remember at our house on Shigri Hill, where a bright puddle of light on a mountain peak tricks you into believing that there is still a lot of daylight left. One moment the sun is a juicy orange dangling low on the horizon and the highest mountains are awash in bright sunlight. The next moment the only light is a flicker from a fire on a distant peak. Night on the mountains is a black sheet flung from the skies. The day packs up and leaves without giving anyone any notice, without any formal goodbyes.

  Just like Baby O.

  I try to banish the mountain dusk from my mind and focus on my current plight. There is sadness about the lost day, but there is a phone on the other side of the curtain and Obaid is not the kind of person to scrawl numbers on his favourite hankie if they don’t mean anything.

  I open my eyes and see the silhouette of the duty nurse bent over a newspaper on the other side of the curtain. I let out a slow moan to see if he is alert. He lifts his head from the paper, looks vaguely towards me, then gets busy with his newspaper again.

  In his yogi phase Obaid claimed that if you meditated regularly you could will people to do things—small things usually. If you stare at a stranger’s neck long enough he is bound to turn and look towards you. Obaid had demonstrated it a number of times. The success is random at best, and making them move from point A to B is an altogether bigger challenge. I don’t have much experience, but I stare and stare, and after about half a century, the nurse gets up and leaves.

  I can’t be sure whether he has gone for his prayers or for an early dinner. Maybe his shift has ended. All I know is that this is my only window of opportunity.

  As my limbs go into action, everything happens very fast; shirt, boots, belt, sword, cap find their place on my body like rifle parts coming together in the hands of an experienced soldier. The tone on the telephone is loud and clear and I start dialling the number urgently, as if Obaid is going to pick up the phone at the other end.

  As I am dialling the last two digits my nose catches the faint smell of Dunhill. My first thought is that some cheeky bugger is smoking in the sickbay. My morale gets a boost with the thought that I can probably get a cigarette off him after I finish the phone call.

  The phone is answered on the second ring. The operator, used to receiving too many calls, replies in a neutral tone; he will only decide what to do with me after he can identify my rank, and can establish my status in the scheme of things.

  “Asslam u alaikum, Army House,” the operator says, and the shock of being connected to that place is mixed with relief that the operator seems to be a civilian. It’s usually easy to impress them.

  “Khan sahib,” I start. “I’m a relative of General Zia. I know you can’t put me through to him, but can you take an urgent message?”

  “Your name, sir?”

  “Under Officer Ali Shigri. Son of Colonel Quli Shigri. The late Colonel Shigri.” I always find this the hard part, but the name works and I suddenly feel I am being listened to. Not that he actually believes that I am related to the General, but he has obviously heard of Colonel Shigri. Who in the Army House doesn’t know the late Colonel Shigri?

  “Do you have a pen and paper?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Write: Colonel Quli Shigri’s son called. He gives his respects. He gives his salaam. Did you get that? Salaam.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “He says that he wants to pass on some very important, very urgent information about the missing plane. It’s a matter…did you get that?”

  He replies in the affirmative and I think hard about an attention-grabbing end to my message:

  My only friend in the world is in danger. If you guys have him, be nice to him.

  I have some top CIA info that I can’t trust anyone with.

  Save my ass.

  “It’s a matter of national security,” I say. “He must get this directly from you.”

  I smell the Dunhill smoke in the room before I hear the voice. I would recognise it from my coffin.

  “Under Officer Ali?”

  The fact that the voice has used my first name makes me put the phone down abruptly.

  Major Kiyani of the Inter Services Intelligence is standing in the doorway, one hand leaning on the frame, the other holding the cigarette in front of his chest. He is in civvies. He is always in civvies. A cream-coloured sil
k shalwar qameez, neatly pressed, his gelled hair glistening under the bulb’s light, a curl carefully arranged in the middle of his forehead where his burly eyebrows meet.

  I have never seen him in uniform. I am not even sure whether he has one or knows how to wear one. I saw him for the first time at Dad’s funeral; his cheeks were slightly sunken and his eyes seemed sincere. But then there were so many people there and I had assumed he was just another one of Dad’s disciples swarming around our house, fixing things, taking care of his papers.

  “I realise that it’s very painful for you, but the Colonel would have wanted this done quickly,” he had said, dabbing his eyes with a white hankie, after we deposited Dad’s flag-draped coffin under his favourite apple tree on Shigri Hill.

  In ten minutes he had drafted a statement on my behalf and made me sign it. The statement said that as the only male member of the family, I didn’t want an autopsy, I didn’t suspect foul play and I had found no suicide note.

  “Call me if you ever need anything,” he had said and left without giving me a phone number. I never needed anything. Not from him.

  “I see you are all dressed up and ready to go,” he says.

  With people like Major Kiyani there are no identification cards, no arrest warrants, no pretence at doing something legal or for your own good. There is a cruel stillness about him. The stillness of a man who lights up in a hospital room and doesn’t even look around for something to use as an ashtray.

  “Where are we going?” I ask.

  “Somewhere we can talk.” His cigarette makes a directionless wave in the air. “This place is full of sick people.”

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “Don’t be so dramatic.”

  A Toyota Corolla without a number plate is parked outside, a white, early-1988 model. It is still not available on the market. The car is gleaming and spotless white, with matching starched cotton seat covers. As he starts the car I realise we are headed out, out of here, somewhere not very close, somewhere not very pleasant.

  I am already missing my dorm, my Silent Drill Squad, even 2nd OIC’s sad, tired jibes.

  The car is very empty. Major Kiyani doesn’t carry a briefcase or a file or a weapon. I look hungrily at his packet of cigarettes and gold lighter lying on the dashboard in front of him. He sits back, his hands resting lightly on the steering wheel, ignoring me. I study his pink, manicured fingers, the fingers of a man who has never had to do any real work. One look at his skin and you can tell he has been fed on a steady diet of bootleg Scotch whisky, chicken korma and an endless supply of his agency’s safe-house whores. Look into his sunken cobalt-blue eyes and you can tell he is the kind of man who picks up a phone, makes a long-distance call and a bomb goes off in a crowded bazaar. He probably waits outside a house at midnight in his Corolla with its headlights switched off while his men climb the wall and rearrange the lives of some hapless civilians. Or, as I know from personal experience, he appears quietly at funerals after accidental deaths and unexplained suicides and wraps things up with a neat little statement, takes care of any loose ends, saves you the agony of autopsies and the foreign press speculating about decorated colonels swinging from ceiling fans. He is a man who runs the world with a packet of Dunhills, a gold lighter and an unregistered car.

  He reaches into his glove compartment and starts rummaging for a tape.

  “Asha or Lata?” he asks.

  I see a palm-sized holster and the ivory handle of a grey metal pistol and suddenly feel at ease. The presence of a gun in the glove compartment justifies this journey. He can take me wherever he wants to take me.

  To tell you the truth I really can’t tell the difference between Lata and Asha. They are old, fat, ugly Indian sisters who both sing like they were teenage sex kittens. One probably sounds sexier than the other, I can never tell. But across the country battle lines are drawn between those who like Asha and those who like Lata. Tea or coffee? Coke or Pepsi? Maoist or Leninist? Shia or Sunni?

  Obaid used to say it’s all very simple. It all depends on how you are feeling and how you would rather feel. That was the most fucked-up thing I ever heard.

  “Lata,” I say.

  He says I have got my dad’s good taste and inserts a tape into the player. It’s a male folk singer singing a ghazal, something about erecting a wall in the desert so that no one can bother the wandering lovers.

  “Don’t worry,” he says. “We know you are from a good family.”

  SIX

  One person in Islamabad hoping to improve the quality of his life after General Zia’s disappearance from public life was a newly married, balding, forty-five-year-old diplomat, a man who would not live to celebrate his forty-third birthday.

  Arnold Raphel was washing a bunch of arugula in his kitchen, a part of the house he was not very familiar with. Like any US ambassador’s kitchen, it was designed for a team of chefs, waiters and their helpers, not for the brightest star in the State Department trying to prepare a supper for two. Arnold Raphel wanted to surprise his wife Nancy, referred to as Cupcake in moments of intimacy, by giving her a Foggy Bottom evening in Islamabad. He had asked the domestic staff to take the evening off, ordered his communication room to reroute all important calls to the First Secretary’s residence and shut the doors to his vast drawing rooms, dining halls and guest suites. On her return from her weekly tennis game, Nancy would find that there were just the two of them, in their own living area, no servants milling about waiting for dinner instructions. For one evening they would live the life of a newly married couple; an early supper just like they used to have in their two-bedroom condo in Washington and then spontaneous love-making after watching the Redskins triumph over the Green Bay Packers in a crucial NFL play-off.

  The beers were chilling in the morgue-size fridge, the Hawaiian steaks marinating in white ceramic dishes. Arnold had already programmed his dish antenna to receive the game and now he was going through the kitchen shelves looking for olive oil and a pepper grinder. He was determined to create a little bit of the East Coast behind the barbed-wire-topped walls of his eighteen-bedroom ambassadorial mansion. He was trying not to think of the three different layers of security surrounding his residence, the numerous antennae and satellite dishes stuck on the roof and colour-coded telephones dotting the whole living area.

  Arnold wanted to make it a memorable evening. He wasn’t a domestic type of diplomat but he was acutely aware that Nancy had put her own career in the State Department on hold so that she could be with him in this blasted city. For one evening, it’d be just like the old days when after putting in long hours at their Washington office they would take turns doing meals, Nancy cooking yet another variation on lasagne and Arnold when it was his turn getting a sudden urge to order Chinese takeout. Islamabad was a whirl of conspiracies and dinner parties; there were more CIA subcontractors and cooks per household than meals in a day. Nancy had started referring to herself as Nancy begum, the housewife with no housework.

  Arnold had abandoned his search for olive oil and was taking a Budweiser out of the fridge while humming the Redskins’ anthem when the red phone rang. There were only three people who could call him on this phone and he couldn’t pass any of them on to his First Secretary. It was most probably his boss from Washington, George no-lunch Shultz. It was lunch hour in Foggy Bottom and the Secretary of State kept his calls brief so Arnold picked up the phone without thinking, ready for a quick diplomatic update.

  It was General Zia ul-Haq, the President of his host country, on the line, polite and pointless as ever: how’s Nancy’s health, how was she adjusting to the local weather, was she getting along with the servants, were they planning to have babies soon? Arnold went along: Nancy loved Islamabad, she had started taking Urdu lessons, she was getting used to having so many servants, she would love to call on the First Lady sometime.

  “Arnie, why don’t you bring her over?” When General Zia called him Arnie, he always wanted Arnold Raphel to do something beyond the
call of his diplomatic duty.

  “Sure, Mr President. No true diplomat should ever eat at home. Just waiting for your invitation.”

  “I know that these things should be arranged in advance, but we are having another American friend over for dinner and he would like to see you very much.”

  Arnie looked at his Hawaiian steaks and panicked. Not another brainstorming session with a visiting delegation of the Pakistani Association of North American Doctors, Arnie thought. Not another wasted evening discussing models for some proposed mosque in some godforsaken New Jersey neighbourhood. Not another debate about how a minaret can be adapted so that it reflects true Islamic architectural sensibility without clashing with American aesthetic values. He was wondering how to make it clear to the General that his brief as the ambassador didn’t include being used as a guinea pig for spreading Islam in North America. He was thinking about a diplomatic enough excuse, something about Nancy having a stomach bug or entertaining a group of local newspaper editors; both useless, he knew. His domestic staff had probably already reported to the General that Ambassador Sahib was planning a honeymoon at home, and the General himself would definitely know who was entertaining local editors and where.

  Before Arnie could come up with something, General put an end to his dreams of a cosy domestic evening. “Bill is coming over for dinner,” he said.

  “Bill Casey?” Arnie asked, feeling very unlike the Ambassador of the United States. He wondered whether his friends in Langley were planning to put the boot in after entrusting him with the biggest assignment since Saigon. “The only difference is you’ll be managing victory rather than a defeat,” Bill had told him. The embassy was full of Bill’s people anyway, from the trio of cultural, commercial and military attaches to the political officers and the communication analysts. Sometimes Arnold wondered whether his cook was also getting his recipes from Langley. He realised the need for this, as Bill always kept reminding him that the CIA was running the biggest covert operation against the Soviets from Pakistan since their last biggest covert operation against the Soviets from somewhere else. Bill kept reminding everyone that he had the Russkis by their balls in Afghanistan. Bill was always telling his old chum Ronald Reagan that it was the Wild West all over again, that the Afghans were cowboys with turbans and that they were kicking Soviet ass as it had never been kicked before.