My father listened to my travel plans, but there were no questions or comments. Before he hung up, he said, ‘Call if you need anything.’ And that was all.
Four years after our first meeting – and one, since the letter, spent in silence – I felt the thinness of our relationship.
Nerve Blindness
That summer of 2002, I crossed the border and my mother’s friend’s son met me on the other side. I could make him out, standing by his car, in tight jeans and a close-fitting shirt. He had gelled hair and reflective sunglasses.
We drove away from the border in his air-conditioned car. The country that opened up, of mud chimneys, canals full of bathing children and small, congested neighbourhoods, with bright-coloured Urdu writing on the walls, might have been a Muslim neighbourhood in India. It seemed so familiar that one expected the diversity of the Indian scene to reveal itself. And when it didn’t, it was unsettling. It really was an India for Muslims only.
The other feature of the landscape that troubled the eye was the absence of women. On the other side of the border, women had been riding bicycles – some in Punjab, with long plaits, had been on scooters and mopeds – but here, in crowded places, I could see thousands of men, many dressed like the officials at the border in salwar kameez, the same macho ease about them, but few women. When women did appear, they were either with other women, moving purposefully, as if with little time to spare, or with their men on an outing. There were no women waiting at bus stops, on their way to work, or canoodling with men in parks, or leisurely enjoying the weather. Their presence, slight as it was, seemed to be a matter of permission.
As the car entered the sections of Lahore built since Partition, I saw a strong resemblance to Delhi: dusty greenery, lazy flyovers passing from one quiet residential neighbourhood to another, the diffused sense of the city.
I was to stay with Nuscie, a friend of both my mother and my father. She lived in a large, whitewashed house off a main road. It was run the way houses in regional towns in India ran, with many servants, food at all times, long afternoons and family coming and going. Nuscie turned out to be a warm, hospitable woman with a keen sense of intrigue. She had fair skin, bright green eyes, and the lines on her face seemed to come as much from laughter and mischief as age. And like her greying hair, they emphasised her once considerable beauty. She had met my mother through my father and they remained friends despite my parents’ separation. She had always wanted me to meet him, and took me in knowing that he would be furious with her for helping me to do exactly that.
‘Would you like me to call him first?’ Nuscie asked, sipping tea, her eyes dancing with excitement.
‘No, no, no, Nuscie, you mustn’t. It’s very important that an element of surprise works in my favour or he’ll have time to back out.’
‘Yes, of course, that’s what I was thinking.’
I had cast aside earlier notions of just turning up at my father’s house and introducing myself. It was totally impractical: there would be too many servants, guests and family to achieve the result I had fantasised about. In all likelihood, even if I was let into a room in which my father was, it would be full of people where my only line of introduction would be a stammered ‘I’m Aatish Taseer.’ I also found fault with my plan to meet my father on my own terms, anonymously, at a dinner party. I imagined we would spend many minutes talking, before he discovered I was his son. Absurd though they seemed, now that I was really in Lahore, these were some of the bizarre, cinematic ways that, as a child, I imagined our first meeting to be like.
Finally, against my imagination and with the dread of failure still in me, I realised I would have to telephone my father again. The thought of it aroused the worst feelings of disappointment in me. I had a superstitious fear that the bad luck from the time before would work against me. But I could see no way round it. No sooner had I decided on this course of action than, again, the foreignness of the place descended on me. Here I was, having travelled for fourteen hours to arrive at a near-stranger’s house to make one telephone call that could end in anti-climax.
Once I resolved to do it, instinct told me to get on with it, as quickly, and with as little interference, as possible.
I excused myself and asked permission to go to my room.
‘Yes, of course. You must be tired. Have a rest. Tonight we can go to the old city for dinner. There’s a lovely little place there.’
I was not in the least bit tired; I was terrified. With meat patties and tea as the only weight holding down my body, I left the room. No sooner had I let the door close behind me than my eyes raced in search of a telephone, as if it were the antidote to my desperation. I went over the lines I had prepared, not caring any longer for their meaning but only that I was able to say them without my voice wavering. ‘I can understand . . . why you may not . . .’ I mouthed, as I saw the bright red instrument. I had written the number on a small chit, and held it now, tightly pressed between two fingers. I found the phone in a quiet corner between the drawing room and the kitchen. I was too restless to sit so I stood, leaning against the doorway, yawning with nerves. I dialled the number, and again, as I had years ago in my housemistress’ apartment, hoped that there would be no answer.
The number this time, procured from Nuscie, was for a mobile phone. I took advantage of the personal access the technology afforded and began to talk mechanically as soon as I heard a voice.
‘Hello, Salmaan. This is Aatish Taseer. I am in Lahore now and would like to see you.’
There was a brief silence and my father, as if his response had been years in the making, said, ‘What would be the objective?’
I was grateful for the sting it caused. It gave me the indignation I needed. As long as I didn’t give in to rudeness and insensitivity, I would retain the higher ground. It didn’t feel like a tender reunion with my long-lost father but a contest, a Saturn and Jupiter fight to the finish.
‘I can understand,’ I started slowly, ‘why you may not,’ no waver, ‘want to see me, but it is important to me that I see you, if only for a short time.’
He said nothing.
‘Will this be possible?’ I asked, in a still steadier voice.
‘I’ll have to think about it,’ my father said. ‘There are many things to consider.’ He hung up.
I had failed to secure a meeting with my father. The anti-climax I was warned of had come and it felt worse than I imagined. I thought of my mother’s words, ‘Just remember, he’ll always let you down,’ and felt a kind of dread at having to face the other people in the house.
But that night my half-sister intervened. I bumped into her at a ‘GT’ – short in Lahore for a get-together – to which Nuscie’s son had taken me. We spotted each other among a handful of attractive young people, dancing close together in a small, dimly lit, drawing room. I had met her once before in London. It was in 2000 after she sent me an email, having discovered that I was at college with a friend of hers. We met a few months later and liked each other very much. But my father was enraged when he found out. And as my sister was moving back to Pakistan to work for him, she couldn’t afford to be on his bad side. We hadn’t spoken since.
But seeing me now, unexpectedly in Lahore, she was full of warmth and affection. She said we would see each other over the next few days, even if we had to meet secretly. I told her of my conversation with our father; she said she would help, but couldn’t tell how he would react.
Then, two days after my arrival, my sister called to say that my father had agreed to meet me. She would pick me up the next morning and take me to him.
I met my father, for the first time in my memory, at his low, red-brick house in the cantonment area of Lahore. It had a large lawn, and a Land Cruiser brooded outside the front door. My sister led the way in, but disappeared almost immediately, with a smile and a supportive wave. I stopped at a large pencil portrait of my father as a young man. It gave me my first real sense of being in his house. It seemed to have hung there for
years and it emphasised my absence from his life. To see the old yellowing portrait, which had been made at roughly the same time as my pictures of him had been taken, was to know that he had lived and that I had been elsewhere.
A moment later a servant showed me into his library. It was a room with floor-to-ceiling books and windows overlooking a swimming-pool. On a slim, marble table there were family pictures in polished silver frames. The physical resemblance of the people in them to me was another reminder of my absence. It was as if a kink in time and space had air-brushed me out. I didn’t feel emotional or even nervous; I was overwhelmed by the unreality of the moment. Tea and sandwiches laid out on a tray seemed to mock me.
My father walked in a few minutes later with his young wife. Her hair was blow-dried and she had diamonds in her ears. He was in blue, wearing soft boots with tan insides. I noticed them because my mother would tell me he had weak ankles and bought expensive boots. Though I couldn’t have known it at the time, I must have sought to bridge the time when she and I had known him with the time now. It was why I asked his wife if she would leave us alone. It was perhaps also why the pictures and the portrait had unsettled me.
My father’s physical appearance riveted me. The man who walked in was a fatter, balder version of the man from my browning silver frame. I had seen him last when I was not even eighteen months old and had no image of him except from those old pictures. I noticed the light, greenish-amber eyes that my mother had described to me, the lines around the mouth that were like mine, and the way he dropped into his chair, uncaring of where his hands and legs fell. I would have liked to know what he smelt of.
I must have been in some state of shock because I can hardly remember a word that was said. I know that I wanted very quickly to provide him with good reasons for why he hadn’t been in my life and offered his political career, which he took up readily. I also made a point of saying that now that he was no longer in politics, perhaps it would be easier for us to meet, even if we couldn’t have a conventional father–son relationship. This, too, he accepted. And then we spoke of generalities: my journey, the differences between India and Pakistan, how similar the two countries were. I felt the conversation was stilted, but I didn’t realise how much more open it would seem when compared with our later conversations. My father asked after my mother and said he had no hard feelings towards her. It was almost the only time in our relationship that he acknowledged I had known him in the past. It helped me to ground myself in the present situation.
Then, as we got up, he asked if I had any questions for him. I had many, but felt that since the meeting had gone well and he seemed open to seeing me again, there would be time later. But when his life in Lahore, the life I had not been part of, closed around him again, he was less willing.
The Mango King
‘I feel I’ve made a mistake in my attitude to Pakistan,’ I said to the publisher. ‘I arrived treating it as just another country. I was still thinking of Turkey, Syria and Iran when I got here. But I feel now that I’m more invested in Pakistan than I thought. I need to see more of it.’
He frowned and his eyebrows collected tightly above his eyes. He was a heavy man in a white salwar kameez, with short greying hair and moustache. His face was large and pinkish and his eyes intense. He published a major Pakistani newspaper. My mother had put us in touch, and though he wasn’t sure what I was writing about, he seemed to understand my urgency. He did for me what I would have liked my father to have done: he insisted on my connection to Pakistan, the land, deeper than the border that divided India and Pakistan. He made no outward attempt to do this, but by arousing my interest in the cultural bonds that still existed between the two countries, in speaking to me of my paternal grandfather, an Urdu poet, in the pre-Partition years, and, most importantly, by communicating his own feeling for my situation, the publisher gave me the other side of the romance of an undivided India on which my maternal grandfather and my mother had raised me. Here was Pakistan, a whole country of unexplored connections. But where to begin?
Karachi, though it was the closest thing to a representative Pakistani city, was not like Istanbul was to Turkey or Tehran to Iran, not a city where a fifth or a sixth of the population lived. No one knew the exact figure, but a rough estimate put it at 16 million in a country of about 160 million. Pakistan, unlike any other country I had been in so far, was largely rural. People had said to me, ‘You don’t know the soul of Pakistan till you know feudal Pakistan.’ And charged by the desire to see this feudal life, I asked the publisher if he could help.
We sat in his grand old Karachi house. He lay on a very high bed, smoking, dictating itineraries and making phone calls to people who might help me. The most famous twentieth-century Indian and Pakistani artists covered the high walls of his room; boxes and precarious stacks of books lay on the floor. The house had long dark corridors and whole wings seemed to be closed off. After a few hours of messages left, phone calls returned, lists made, lectures on safety and extreme heat, the publisher looked up at me, scribbling as he spoke. ‘Can you leave tonight?’
‘Tonight?’
His fierce, pinkish face, the face of a man used to getting things done, fixed on mine; something twitched. He seemed to show disappointment and anger that I had wasted his time and betrayed his romantic vision of travelling in the country of the Indus, of Mohenjodaro, of Sufi shrines and the oldest Indian civilisation.
‘Yes,’ I stammered. ‘I can leave tonight.’
‘Good.’
It was early evening when I went back to my brother’s to pack my bags. I was to leave late that night with the Mango King for his lands in interior Sind.
I had dozed off on my brother’s beanbag when the Mango King called to say he was outside. I looked at my watch and saw it was well past midnight. I picked up my bag and went downstairs. A warm breeze was blowing and the street, lit with flickering tube light, was quiet. A white car, with heavily tinted windows, stood outside. As I approached, one of its back doors opened, but no one stepped out. Instead, cold, air-conditioned air infused with a faint smell of cigarettes drifted out. I put my head into the car and saw a young man in the back seat, with a black moustache, fair skin and a handsome, slightly puffy, face. He peered at me through a dense haze of smoke and gestured to me to get in.
The chauffeur drove off as soon as I shut the door. I turned now to the Mango King, who lit another cigarette. The air was so smoky, so cold and unbreathable, and the black windows wound up so deliberately, that my first exchanges with him were a series of polite half-smiles, confused looks, gentle prodding, anything to steer the conversation in the direction of why we were driving in these conditions. The Mango King, if he registered my objections, showed no sign of it. He smoked continuously, slowly and deeply, looking out at the deserted streets. I could tell from his eyes and the thickness in his voice that he had been drinking.
‘In the city I am a different person,’ he said abruptly, ‘and, you’ll see, in the village I am a different person. One has to adjust. It gets pretty nasty,’ he added suddenly. ‘People steal water. Typical vadhera.’ A vadhera, or landlord, was what the Mango King had become after his father died; his family were among the largest producers of mangoes in the country. ‘But things won’t change.’
‘Why?’
‘Not for another fifty years. There will still be feudalism.’ I nodded and saw that he was drinking from a hip flask.
‘Do you know why Sindi society is a failure?’ the Mango King asked, in his abrupt way.
‘No.’
‘There’s no middle class. There’s us and there’s them. We had a middle class, but they took off when what happened?’ I thought it was a rhetorical question and didn’t answer, but the Mango King’s gaze held me, expecting a reply.
‘Partition,’ I answered obediently.
‘Exactly. But, you know, life goes on, one day to the next. My father trained me to be a farmer.’ The Mango King spoke in broken sentences, disconnected in thoug
ht and language. After a long silence, he said, ‘Do you know why religion was invented?’
‘Why?’ I asked, wondering if some vague précis of my purpose had been passed on to him.
‘A man can deal with everything but death.’
The Mango King lit up again, but this time my eyes focused on a new discomfort: an AK-47 was placed between him and me, and the ribs of its magazine, its short barrel, and bulbous sight shone in the yellow streetlight. The Mango King was silent now, still drinking and smoking. The car’s cold, fetid air made me feel ill. The gun’s silhouette came in and out of shadow as we left Karachi. I kept catching it in the corner of my eye, and as there was a lull in the conversation, I thought I’d ask why the AK-47, particularly, was so popular.
‘Three things you have to be able to trust,’ the Mango King answered. ‘Your lads, your woman and your weapon. It’ll never jam on you. Anyone can fire it and it’ll never jam.’
I don’t know when I fell asleep, but I woke up once to see the Mango King still smoking. The next time, he was asleep, his head bobbing from side to side, the gun still visible at his feet, matt black with occasional yellow lustre.
I fell into a deeper sleep and woke next when I felt a touch on my hand. It was dawn, and we drove down a deserted country road, amid acres and acres of flat, empty fields.
Stranger to History Page 22
