It is a loo, that much is clear. There is a hole in the ground so full of indistinguishable faeces that bubbles are forming on its surface. The floor is covered with a thick slimy layer of some garish liquid. There is a water tap one foot above the ground but it has stayed dry for so long that it’s rusting. There is a grey WC with a broken chain, I open it and take a peek inside. There is two inches of water at: the bottom, reflecting its inner rusted orange surface.
My need to pee has disappeared forever. The stench is so strong that it’s difficult to think about anything else.
I stand against the wall and close my eyes.
They have a file on me somewhere, which says Under Officer Shigri can’t stand dirty bathrooms. I have done my jungle survival course, I have learned how to hunt snakes in the desert and quench my thirst. No one ever thought of designing a course on how to survive stinking bathrooms.
I charge at the door and start banging with both my clenched fists. “Open this bloody door. Get me out of this shithole. This place stinks.”
I bang my head on the door a couple of times and the stupidity of my actions becomes obvious to me. All the shouting takes the edge off the stench. It’s still the smell of piss and shit but somehow it’s become subdued. Or am I already getting used to it?
They are in no mood to interrogate me at this hour. This is going to be my abode for the night.
My back goes to the wall, I clench my toes in my boots and resolve to spend the night standing up. There is no way I am going to give these butchers the pleasure of watching me lie down in this pool of piss. There is scribbling on the wall but I can’t be bothered to read it. I can make out the words General Zia and his mother and sister, my imagination can connect the dots.
The idea that this place has hosted people who were angry enough at the General to write things about his mother and sister is puzzling. I might be down on my luck but the last time I checked I was still a trainee officer in uniform and the fact that they have put me in this shithole for civilians is the ultimate insult.
Colonel Shigri had tried to talk me out of joining the armed forces.
“The officer corps is not what it used to be,” he said, pouring himself the first whisky of the evening after returning from his umpteenth trip to Afghanistan.
“People who served with me were all from good families. No, I don’t mean wealthy families. I mean respectable people, good people. When you asked them where they were from, you knew their fathers and grandfathers were distinguished people. And now you’ve got shopkeepers’ sons, milkmen’s boys, people who are not good for anything else. I don’t want those half-breeds fucking up my son’s life.”
Daddy, you should see me now.
He knew in his heart that I was not convinced. He called me again when he was pouring his last whisky, his seventh probably. He was a three-whiskies-an-evening man but he felt unusually thirsty when he returned from his Afghan trips. There was bitterness in his voice now that I wasn’t familiar with at that point but which would become permanent.
“I have three war decorations, and wounds to prove them,” he said. “You go to any officers’ mess in the country and you’ll find a few people whose lives I saved. And now? Look at me. They have turned me into a pimp. I am a man who was trained to save lives, now I trade in them.”
He kept twirling his whisky glass in his fingers and kept repeating the word ‘pimp’ over and over again.
I doze off and dream of pissing in the cold clear stream that runs by our house on Shigri Hill. I wake up with my knees trembling and the grime from the floor seeping into my toes. The left side of my trousers is soaking wet. I feel much better.
Stay on your bloody feet. Stay on your bloody feet.
That is the first thing I tell myself before taking stock of my situation. What did they do to the renegade soldiers of the Mughal Army? A swift decapitation or being scrunched under the foot of an elephant would probably be a better fate than this.
The stench has grown fetid and hangs heavy in the air. I close my eyes and try to imagine myself back on Shigri Hill. The mountain air wafts in despite the iron doors and the underground prison and the walls of the Fort. It swirls around me, bringing back the smell of earth dug by goats’ hooves, the aroma of green almonds and the sound of a clear, cold stream gushing past. The silence of the mountains is punctuated by a humming sound, coming from a distance but not very far away. Somebody is singing in a painful voice. Before I can identify the voice a bucket of water is poured over my head and my face is pushed so close to a thousand-watt bulb that my lips burn. I don’t know who is asking the questions. It could be Major Kiyani. It could be one of his brothers without uniform. My answers, when I can muster them, are met with further questions. This is not an interrogation. They are not interested in my answers. The buggers are only interested in sex.
Did Lieutenant Bannon and Obaid have a sexual relationship?
They were very close. But I don’t know. I don’t think so.
Did you and Obaid have a sexual relationship?
Fuck you. No. We were friends.
Did you fuck him?
I can hear you. The answer is no, no, no.
He wasn’t in his bed the night before he disappeared. Do you know where he was?
The only person he could have been with is Bannon. They went on walks sometimes.
Is that why you marked him present in the Fury Squadron roll call?
I assumed he would come straight to the parade square. He did that occasionally.
Did Obaid have any suicidal tendencies? Did he ever talk about taking his own life?
I imagine a two-seater aeroplane going down on all its three axes and the hot white glare of the bulb begins to fade away.
He read poetry. He sang songs about dying but he never actually talked about dying. Not to me. Not in any suicidal way.
EIGHT
The large reception room in the Army House was reserved for receiving visiting foreign dignitaries from the USA and Saudi Arabia, the VVIPs. After winning his air dash from Saudi Arabia to Islamabad, Prince Naif was seated on a velvet sofa, smoking Marlboro Reds and boasting about the sound barrier that his F16 broke on his way to dinner. “Our brother Bill is probably still flying over the Arabian Sea.” Laughing, the Prince raised both arms and mimed the flight of a tired bird.
“Allah’s glory,” said General Zia. “It’s all His blessing. I went on a ride in one of ours and my old bones were aching for days. You, by the grace of Allah, are still a young man.”
General Zia kept looking out of the corner of his eyes at Dr Sarwari, who had accompanied Prince Naif at his request but seemed to have been forgotten in Prince Naif’s victory celebrations. General Zia wanted to have a word with the royal doctor about his condition.
General Zia’s condition, although he himself preferred to call it an itsy-bitsy itch, had been messing up his prayer routine. He had always been very proud of the fact that he was the kind of Muslim who could do his ablutions for his morning prayers and say his late-night prayers with the same ablutions. All the things that break an ablution had been eliminated from his daily routine; garlic, lentils, women who didn’t cover their heads properly. But since he had confined himself to the Army House this itch had started.
He had called his staff surgeon first, had told him about the tiny drops of blood he had found on the seat of his pants, but couldn’t bring himself to talk about the itch.
“Do you get burning, itching in your rectal passage?” the staff surgeon had asked.
“No,” he had said abruptly.
“Sir, internal bleeding can be dangerous but yours seems like a case of worms, tapeworms. If you let me know when you can come to the Combined Military Hospital I’ll arrange for a full check-up.”
General Zia had mumbled something about Code Red and dismissed the doctor. Although the staff surgeon was security cleared Zia didn’t want him to go around sending his tests to other labs or even consulting his doctor colleagues. His own
daughter had just graduated from a medical school but he could hardly talk to her about something like this.
Then Prince Naif called and General Zia remembered that Prince Naif always travelled with his personal physician, the only person in his entourage who wore suits and carried a black leather bag, and the only one who stayed silent, neither cracked a joke nor laughed at the Prince’s non-stop comedy act.
“I don’t share my doctor with anyone,” Prince Naif said in mock seriousness when General Zia finally asked his permission to have a private consultation with his physician. “He has seen more of me than any of my wives. But anything for you, my brother, anything. Even my secret weapon.” He gestured towards the doctor, who sat pretending they were talking about someone else.
“It’s just a private little matter. I don’t want my military doctor going around discussing my private things. You know our Pakistani people, they love to gossip.”
“He takes care of all my private things,” Prince Naif chuckled. “And he never talks to anyone.” Then he turned towards the doctor and said, “Take care of my brother’s private things as if they were my own private things.” He rolled with laughter. General Zia forced a smile, got up and moved towards his office. The doctor didn’t join in the joke and followed him sullenly.
After spending eight years looking after Prince Naif’s libido nothing about these rulers surprised Dr Sarwari. They all spent too much time and energy keeping their cocks in shape. If they channelled some of this zeal towards their day jobs, the world would be a much better place, Dr Sarwari had thought in moments of despair. He had ordered the livers of so many houbara bustards to make aphrodisiacs for the Prince, he had rubbed so many ointments made from the Bengal tiger’s testicles on the Prince’s member that he himself had lost all appetite for sex. Even his colleagues in the Saudi medical establishment knew his status as the full-time caretaker of the royal member. After all, the Prince had his own heart specialist, skin specialist and even a plastic surgeon on the royal payroll. But what was dearest to the Prince’s heart was his sexual health and Dr Sarwari was the chosen man for the job. The Royal Dick Doctor, they called him behind his back.
With this job description Dr Sarwari could not be faulted when he shut the door to General Zia’s private office and asked: “You wanna a bigger or you wanna a longer?”
General Zia, who had never heard the doctor speak, was baffled both by his mixture of Arabic and American accents and his strange question. He ignored his hand gestures.
Dr Sarwari was pleasantly surprised when General Zia explained his problem. He smiled for the first time.
General Zia was ready when the doctor suggested an on-the-spot probe. He had thought about it so much that he automatically turned his back to the doctor, unfastened his belt and slipped his trousers down. He could feel movement behind him, then a rubber-gloved hand on his buttocks.
“Birather, bend please.” General Zia still couldn’t get over the man’s American accent. He had always heard him speak Arabic with the Prince. He put his elbows on the table. “More,” the doctor ordered. He put his right cheek on the table and tried to think of something to distract himself.
His head was between two flags. Pakistan’s national flag, green and white with a thin right-facing crescent, on one side and on the other side, the flag of the Pakistan Army. He had almost made up his mind to reverse the crescent on the national flag after an Islamic scholar pointed out that it was a descending moon and not an ascending one, but then his advisers reminded him that the flag had been around for forty years and since nobody actually had any problem with the direction of the crescent, it was better to leave the flag alone.
He was relieved to feel that the doctor’s probing finger was lubricated.
He looked at the army flag. Underneath the crossed swords was the famous slogan that the Founder of the Nation had given this country as its birthday present and motto: “Faith. Unity. Discipline.” Suddenly, the slogan seemed not only banal and meaningless to him but too secular, non-committal, almost heretical. Faith? Which faith? Unity? Discipline? Do soldiers need that slogan? Aren’t they supposed to be united and disciplined by the very nature of their calling? He felt the doctor’s breath on his arse. The rubbered finger was replaced by a cold metallic tube which didn’t hurt but caused some discomfort.
It also dawned on him that when the Founder came up with this slogan, he had civilians in mind, not the armed forces. This slogan, he told himself, had to go. His mind raced, searching for words that would reflect the true nature of his soldiers’ mission. Allah had to be there. Jihad, very important. He knew it would please his friend Bill Casey. He couldn’t decide on a third word but he knew it would come.
The doctor patted his buttock and said: “You can get up please.” The General pulled up his underwear before turning round, making sure that the doctor didn’t get a glimpse of his front. He still remembered his first question.
The doctor was grinning. “You eat a sugaa?” The General shook his head in confusion.
“Yes. Yes. I have a sweet tooth.”
“Birather, that’s why you so sweet.” The doctor patted his cheek with his gloved hand and General Zia blushed at the thought of where that hand had just been.
“You’ve worms, sir.” The doctor opened the palm of his left hand and showed him some tiny dead worms.
“Why does it itch so much, then?”
The doctor’s grin broadened. “They like prisoners. They worms. They eat sugaa, they get energy, they wanna out. They wanna find escape. The itch is like…” He tried to think of an expression, then made a shovelling movement with his hands. “The itch is worms tunnelling. Making tunnels.”
General Zia nodded his head slowly. This was the second time in three days that he had been warned about tunnels. Here he was, worried about being trapped in a whale, while the enemy was eating away at his innards. A blasphemous thought occurred to him; what if there was an army of little Jonahs trapped in his stomach praying to get out?
“I’ll cut down on sugar.”
“No cuttin sugaa.” The doctor took out bottle of Canderel. “Sugaa finish. OK? No sugaa. Take this.”
The doctor shut his bag and General Zia held his face in both hands and kissed him on both his cheeks in the customary Arab fashion.
Then he realised his pants were still around his ankles.
Later over dinner, savouring the bitterness of bitter gourd, Bill Casey spoke like a ghost with the enlightenment of hindsight. “Brother Zia.” He dabbed the corner of his mouth with his napkin to wipe off the drool. “You think your folks are tryin’ to kill ya? You should see those vultures at Capitol Hill. They have already killed me.”
NINE
The first light of the day catches me dozing on my feet, my back against the wall, my toes clenched in my boots, my sweat-soaked khaki shirt open to my navel. The light is a long thin shaft coming through the tiny gap where the metal door is clamped against the bathroom wall. The shaft of light illuminates the ancient dust particles of the Lahore Fort prison; it highlights the bathroom wall in front of me, revealing bits of graffiti, something for me to do besides fantasising about impossible escape plans. When my car journey with Major Kiyani ended in the Fort, I expected a prison cell worthy of a trainee officer and an expert team of interrogators. What I got is this shithole and my own company.
The stench has invaded my pores and become a part of me. I am light-headed from lack of sleep, my lips are parched and my feet are swollen after standing all night. Walking half the night—three steps in one direction, two in the other—has obviously not given me the exercise I need. I think about taking off my boots. I bend down to do so, see the yellow muck on the floor closely and give up on the idea. I stretch my arms and concentrate on the reading material instead.
The scribbling on the walls is in three languages and the writers have used a variety of materials. I can read two of the languages, the third I have to guess. I can make out the etchings done with nails. The
dried rust is probably blood, and I don’t want to think what else they might have used.
There are hammers and sickles and date trees and fifteen varieties of breasts. Someone, who seems to have managed to bring in a ballpoint pen, has drawn a driveway, lined on both sides with apple trees, leading to a little house. My predecessors in this place had a lot to say, both personal and political.
I was lashed one hundred times and I liked it.
Pray for an easy end.
Asia is red with the blood of martyrs.
Asia is green and may Allah keep it this way.
Roses are red. Violets are blue. This country is khaki.
Screw the First Lady, not this nation.
Scream on the first lash. And don’t faint because when they start again they will count from one.
Dear son, I did it for your future.
Major Kiyani is my bitch.
Lenin lives.
I love Nadia.
Lenin was a faggot.
A Persian couplet I can only vaguely decipher: the lover, long tresses, snakes. I think I get the picture.
I think about contributing my own two bits. Something like…“On a very hot evening Under Officer Shigri had a flash of brilliance…”
Not enough space on the wall.
The silent drill conspiracy that Major Kiyani is trying to unearth was a fucked-up idea, which, like most fucked-up ideas, was conceived at the end of a very hot day in the Academy. We were taking potshots at a Bruce Lee poster in Bannon’s room after a busy day on the parade square. All the heat that our bodies had accumulated during the drill rehearsal suddenly started to seep out, the starch of our uniforms stuck to our bodies like rough glue, sweat ran like lizards crawling over our flesh, our feet had suffocated and died in their shiny leather coffins. Bannon’s room, with its overefficient, noisy air conditioner, was the obvious hideout. Bannon had designed his room like a bunker; there was no bed, just a king-sized mattress on the ground, covered by a camouflaged canopy he had improvised with four bamboo sticks. On the floor, a little fat Buddha sat on a copy of Stars and Stripes. The Buddha had a secret chamber in his stomach where Bannon kept his supply of hashish. His uniforms hung neatly in the door-less cupboard. The only liberties he had taken with his designer bunker were the air conditioner and a life-size poster from Game of Death, which covered the entire inside of the door. The poster was a shot from the climax of the film, after the last surviving villain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, had managed to get his paw on Bruce Lee’s right ribcage, leaving four neat, parallel scratches. Bruce Lee’s hands, in classic defensive posture, were spotlessly clean; his mouth was yet to bleed.
2008 - A Case of Exploding Mangoes Page 9
