A Sultan in Palermo

by Tariq Ali

  His name really was Plato. He was born in a village not far from Ludhiana, in East Punjab, now part of India. His precocity as a child and constant questioning had greatly irritated his father, a local schoolteacher, who probably had no answer to some of the boy’s queries. Aflatun, the local version of the philosopher’s name, corrupted from Arabic, was often used pejoratively to describe people who talked too much or repeatedly asked awkward questions or were just too argumentative. And so the three-year-old Mohammed became Mohammed Aflatun, and was registered under that name at the local madrassa and later at the high school in Ludhiana, where a few teachers had actually read Plato. This was a very long time ago. The nickname was meant to ridicule him, but as he grew, Plato took it as a compliment and later immersed himself in the translated editions of the Greek classics. His obsession with Pythagoras led to a lifelong love affair with mathematics, the subject he now taught at an ultra-snobbish Lahore school where entry was based exclusively on class, with preference given to landed families.

  ‘You teach there? Do you dress any differently?’

  ‘Why should I? Don’t they need me more than I need them? Once you live to please others, you live in fear of their displeasure, and fear makes one stupid.’

  Later we discovered from a colleague of his, who loathed him, that had Plato accepted the offer of a stipend from Cambridge to study higher mathematics he would have prospered in that discipline. The offer was made after he sent a well-known Cambridge don some comments on his work, scribbled on the back of an old sheet of answers to an exam he had marked at school. But Plato disliked specialization, and as he told us on one occasion, ‘I did not want to drown in a pool of mathematics for the rest of my life.’ The prospect was unappealing. But why teach at a school? Why not at the college? Offers had been made there, too, and he had turned them down. School was less demanding, he maintained. Furthermore, he had no university degrees at all, never mind a PhD, and, besides, he could educate some of those private school boys in other disciplines, including that of life, with which they were mostly unacquainted.

  The same could not be said of Plato. Life had overeducated him and the marks of its lessons were plain to see. He was light-skinned and thick-lipped, with hollow cheeks that gave him an ageless look, and this attractive ugliness was enhanced by thick black hair that he rarely bothered to groom. His Brylcreemed appearance at Hamlet had been unusual.

  One day he told us how he had escaped from the 1947 pogroms in East Punjab and fled to Lahore. He was in his last year of school when news reached Ludhiana that all of the two hundred or so Muslims in his village, including his parents and three younger sisters, as well as aunts and uncles and cousins, had all been taken to the local mosque and set on fire. There wasn’t a single survivor. A kindly Sikh maths teacher who had befriended Plato hugged him and wept. The same man took him to the centre of town where a convoy of buses was being readied to ferry Muslims across to the other side of the partitioned subcontinent. Plato was dazed, unable to register the fact that he had lost everyone. He was put on a bus that contained mainly women and children; his old teacher explained the circumstances and pleaded with a woman to look after his pupil. She did.

  ‘The two buses in front of us were stopped by Sikhs and I saw the men lined up and killed in the most brutal fashion. Some of them were on their knees pleading for mercy, kissing the feet of those about to massacre them. I thought they would kill us too, saving the women to be raped and slaughtered afterwards. But they were interrupted by a military patrol led by British officers. That in itself was rare, but that’s how we survived.’

  He spoke matter-of-factly, with few traces of outward emotion, but the pain was reflected in his eyes. He went on, ‘Then I reached this great city, the Paris of the East, which Punjabis everywhere used to dream of visiting. He who has not seen Lahore has not seen the world and all that sentimental nonsense. And here Muslims were hard at work killing Sikhs and Hindus and looting their property. I was in a refugee camp, and one of my uniformed protectors, after discovering I had no silver or gold or any money on me, wanted some kind of reward and decided to rape me. I was saved by other refugees, who heard my screams and, Allah be praised, dragged the Muslim policeman off my back. My family had been religious. I was taken regularly to the mosque, learned the Koran by rote without understanding a single word, and participated in all the rituals. When I saw what was being done by all sides in the name of religion I turned my back on religion forever.’

  The table had fallen silent. Respected quietly placed a tray with tumblers of freshly squeezed orange and pomegranate juice before us. There were tears in his eyes. In the early Sixties, the trauma of Partition still affected many in the city, but few wanted to talk about it. The memories were too recent, and parts of the city still bore the scars. The attempt by the generation before ours to suppress the memory of the killings which they had participated in or witnessed had left a deep emotional scar, made worse by never being discussed and dealt with openly. A madness had seized ordinary people and now they were in denial. When Plato told his story, it was the first time anyone had discussed Partition at our table. Afterwards many of us did, and I heard numerous accounts of what had taken place in the heart of this city during the fateful month of August 1947.

  Plato lived in a tiny apartment on the Upper Mall, the main thoroughfare of the city, past the Government House, the old Nedous hotel and the canal, in a block of flats known for some reason as Scotch Corner. During the winter we would often walk up the Mall with him, past the arcades and the old Gymkhana Club, the school where he taught and the Lahore Zoo, which housed the most miserable animals I have ever seen. (It was rumoured that most of the meat rations meant for the lions could be tasted in the café.) The zoo was a halfway point where we paused to sample that day’s gol gappa before parting company close to Scotch Corner. Plato never invited us into his quarters, and despite our burning curiosity, we never asked.

  Zahid and I talked about him incessantly. A member of our clandestine Marxist cell angered us one day by referring to Plato as a ‘petty-bourgeois individualist’. When we told Plato about it he laughed and said the description was accurate. He was never interested in Marxism or the Communist Party and treated them as a form of religion. He had read Marx and admired some of his work, but never admitted it to us, ‘because you idiots treat him as if he were a prophet, and if you’re going in for that, you might as well stick to the real ones: Moses, Jesus and our very own.’

  Discussions became heated when Hanif Ma, a Lahori Chinese studying physics and destined for great things, was accepted at our table as a regular. He was immediately and unimaginatively given the nickname Confucius, which he accepted with good grace but sometimes found irksome. He pretended to be impressed, however: it was sophisticated of us educated Punjabis not to have simply and affectionately addressed him as ‘China’ as the shopkeepers did in Anarkali bazaar. ‘What can we offer you today, China’, ‘Have some tea, China, while you remember what your mother sent you to buy’, etc.

  ‘We are simple rustics, Confucius. Here we wear our arse on our sleeve. And you’re a Punjabi just as much as we are, even if you speak a few more languages,’ Zahid told him.

  Confucius laughed, and we were to discover his stock of bad words had been gleaned on Beadon Road, where gangs of ruffians ruled supreme. I only went there to the sweet shops, to eat gulab jamuns and rasgullas. Confucius was full of fun, but not unaffected by the great transformation in the country of his forebears, which had also touched many of us. We, too, wanted to make revolution and take the Chinese road. It was difficult to be living in the vicinity and remain unmoved by what was being achieved. Confucius would defend his revolution against all of Plato’s taunts. These exchanges gradually weaned us away from Plato, to his great amusement. ‘Busy making the revolution, boys?’ became one of his more tiresome refrains when Zahid, Confucius and I left the table to attend a cell meeting. Confucius developed a real hatred for him and barely spoke when he was
present, even when Plato tried to draw him out on mathematics or physics. Zahid and I could never break with Plato, nor did we want to, even though his cynicism could be extremely corrosive and nerve-racking at times. He had grown so used to being self-reliant that all friendships made him suspicious. It was his intelligence that challenged us all. Even Confucius accepted that this was so.

  One year, as the ten-week summer holidays approached, Plato, hearing Zahid and me plotting our exploits, asked casually where we were going. ‘The mountains,’ I told him, ‘Nathiagali for me and Murree for Zahid.’ He smiled.

  ‘I might see you there.’

  ‘Wonderful,’ said Zahid after a slight hesitation, unsure whether Plato was being ironic. I knew he didn’t quite mean it. It was an intrusion. Our summers were very precious. We felt completely free, and even though we were twenty miles apart one of us would often walk over to see the other. We had other friends there too, not part of the table, summer friends whom we met only once a year. These friendships often became intense, since there were few restrictions in the mountains and gender segregation was frowned upon.

  The thought of Plato being there did strike me as a bit odd. He was part of our grown-up side. The mountain air had a regressive effect on us. We were children again, but children filled with lustful thoughts. Plato, ultrasensitive to any slight, intended or real, looked in my direction. He must have caught the ambiguous note in Zahid’s response.

  ‘And you, Dara Shikoh. Do you think it’s wonderful news as well?’

  ‘Not sure, Plato. Depends on how you behave during picnics. Can you play an instrument? Can you sing or act? This will be your real test. I always know you’re slightly tense when you call me Dara Shikoh.’

  He immediately relaxed.

  ‘Don’t worry. I won’t disgrace you boys. And Dara Shikoh is the only Mughal prince I really admire. Akbar was a total fake. Broadminded as far as other faiths were concerned, but a killer of those he regarded as heretics.’

  In fact, my nickname was my own fault. I had misinformed many a friend that I was named after Dara Shikoh, a sceptic poet and philosopher who should have succeeded Shah Jehan but was brutally brushed aside by a younger brother, Aurungzab, the devout ruler and ascetic who left us the Badshahi mosque, a ten-minute walk from the college, as his legacy. I was actually named after an old friend of my father’s who had tragically drowned while both of them were swimming from one bank of the Ravi to another in the moonlight. Perhaps he had been named after Dara Shikoh.

  Before we left for the mountains, Confucius invited Zahid and me to supper at his house. Neither of us knew where he lived, but he had eaten with us at home many a time and his mother must have insisted he invite us in return.

  ‘Please remember not to call me Confucius at home. Won’t amuse anyone. They’ll just think indigenous Punjabis are stupid.’

  ‘What about Mao?’

  ‘Even worse. My father thinks of him as a bad poet and a philistine.’

  All we knew about Confucius’s father was that he owned the best shoe shop on the Mall. The family had obviously been there for a long time, as testified by the photographs on the wall in which young Mr Ma posed proudly with long-departed British colonial officers. My father and I went there each year to have our feet measured for summer sandals and winter shoes. Nothing ever substituted for that in later years.

  Confucius had agreed to meet us outside the shop, but we waited a while for another guest. He finally arrived. His bike had suffered a puncture and the usual repair stall was not open. This was Tipu, studying physics, at F.C. (Forman Christian) College, run by US missionaries on the other side of the city. Tipu had a soft, dark face and large brown eyes. Confucius had met him at a seminar, discovered he was a Marxist from Chittagong in East Fatherland, and wanted him invited to our cell meetings. Our rules were strict. A cell could not include more than six students at a time and none of the members was meant to know about the other cells. We did, of course, since there were only two others, but we pretended it was a huge secret. It added to the glamour. There were no existing cells at Tipu’s college. He was contemptuous of his fellow students and his eyes blazed as he informed us that no self-respecting college in East Fatherland was without its Communist cells. I did know of one cell in F.C., but it would have been a terrible breach of confidence to inform him of its existence. I made a mental note to let them know of his.

  This conversation was taking place on the Mall, in the middle of a crowd of shoppers. We could have gone on for hours, but were late already. Confucius took us across the road to an old nineteen-twenties apartment block, where he lived and where his mother was patiently waiting to feed us.

  ‘Salaamaleikum, Dara. How’s your father?’

  I didn’t recognize the shoemaker for a minute. Confucius’s father was dressed in a Chinese gown and a finely embroidered skullcap. We were introduced to the rest of his family, and that was the first time Zahid and I saw Jindié, the Golden Butterfly. She stood next to her mother, wearing a traditional but stylish Punjabi salwar/kameez light blue suit, with the kameez just touching her knees. Her silken black hair, covering a head that was an elongated oval, almost touched the floor. The eyebrows formed perfect arches. No makeup disfigured her thin lips. She was a delicate creature, extremely beautiful rather than pretty, but there was not a trace of shyness or affectation as she shook hands, inspecting each of us in turn with a quizzical, semi-humorous look. I never suspected she was a romantic eager for quick results. I found it difficult to concentrate on too much else that evening. What had Confucius said about us? Did she realize I had fallen in love with her? How could she not? It had to be a mandate from heaven.

  After greeting Jindié, I bowed politely to Confucius’s mother. Like her husband, Mrs Ma was dressed in an antique Chinese gown. Her hair was pinned up in a bun and her face showed a touch of lipstick and powder, but at the same time conveyed an impression of prudence and good sense.

  I was so thunderstruck by Jindié that it took me some time to notice that the living room was lined with books, mainly Chinese editions, some of which were undoubtedly very old. Jindié was talking to Tipu, quite deliberately, I think, to punish me for the way I had looked at her. In fact, she ignored me for the rest of the evening, speaking mainly to Tipu and Zahid but occasionally glancing in my direction to see how I was occupying myself. I moved away to look closely at some beautiful ivory objects on the mantelpiece and then the silks that covered the walls, on which hung a plain white plate with blue Kufic calligraphy. Mr Ma sidled up to explain that it was a ninth-century piece made by potters in Yunnan, who produced such ware exclusively for the merchants in Basra, who brought it to Cordoba and Palermo. None of this meant much to me at the time. I smiled politely and asked about the books. He took one out. It looked exquisite, faded gold Chinese calligraphy on even more faded thick leather.

  ‘What is it, Mr Ma?’

  ‘The Han Kitab. You have heard of it?’

  ‘No. I’m sorry. China is a mystery. All we know about is the revolution.’

  That annoyed him and he returned the book to its place. Confucius had observed the scene and came up to reassure me. I wasn’t bothered at all, but was becoming more and more enraged by the way his sister was flirting with Tipu.

  The food, when it was served, was almost as divine as Jindié. The local Chinese restaurants were truly awful, catering to imagined local tastes. Pulp-food is always bad. This was the first time I had tasted proper Chinese food, and I complimented Mrs Ma on the quality of her cooking, the virtual opposite of our Punjabi cuisine. She explained that what we were consuming were Yunnanese delicacies, very different from what was served at banquets in Beijing. I asked if she had received any help from her daughter. The reply was an instantaneous no and a glare in Jindié’s direction. In a bid to attract the latter’s attention, I sympathized loudly, hoping to annoy her and failing miserably. She ignored the bait.

  I did discover from her mother, however, that Jindié attended a wome
n’s college. This was useful information, since the college in question was packed with seven or eight of my cousins as well as daughters of old family friends. It was presided over by a strict Indian-Christian spinster lady who took her job as principal far too seriously when it came to the social life of her students. To say she kept a watchful eye on her girls would be inaccurate. She had created a spy network of favourites who told her everything. Yes, everything, including the dreams that some of their fellow students recounted over breakfast. The college itself had been set up in 1920 by a prim Scotswoman called Rosamund Nairn and bore her surname. The girls at Nairn were considered to be almost as modern as their counterparts at Primrose in Karachi and Ambleside in Dhaka, and that was saying a great deal at the time.

  Apart from my frustration over Jindié, the evening went well. Zahid and I both made sure we called our friend Hanif as often as we could—so often that he began to look annoyed. At this point Jindié addressed us collectively:

  ‘Is it true that you call him Confucius?’

  The whole table erupted in laughter. It was only as we were all leaving and farewells were being said that she walked up to me.

  ‘It was really nice talking to you.’

  ‘But you didn’t.’

  ‘I know.’

  Since my house was not too far from F.C. College, Zahid gave both me and Tipu a lift, dropping Tipu off first so the two of us could have a calm post-mortem. We stopped the car on the unfinished road outside my house. It was a wilderness then, with the only the mausoleum of a Sufi venerable lit in the distance with oil lamps.

  I had liked Tipu instinctively and was determined that he should join our cell even if it meant biking six miles to where we were. He was obviously bright, and better read than all of us. Zahid disagreed and thought it would be better if Tipu were recruited to his local cell. But I wanted to keep an eye on him, in case Jindié really did want him and not me. I explained this to Zahid, who wasn’t surprised in the least.