‘The estate begins here,’ he said. The car swung left. ‘This, on both sides, is my estate.’ I looked around and saw that there were only shrubs and small trees on the land, thirsty even in the half-light. ‘This is the land I don’t grow.’
‘Why?’
‘No water.’
‘How big is it?’
‘Six thousand acres.’ By the sub-continent’s standards, this was a large holding.
Then after some silence, he straightened his posture and, with pregnant solemnity, said, ‘This is my territory.’
We passed several acres of dense, low crop, then just before the house, like some last battalion of a great regiment or a vanishing tribe of horses, seeming almost to smile at their own dignity in the desolate fields around them, were the mango trees. The Mango King stared in dull-eyed wonder at the dark green, almost black canopies, heavy with fruit and dropping low in a curtsy against an immense saffron sky.
As we came closer, the trees that seemed to have a single, pointed canopy, concealing their short trunks, were in fact distinct clusters of long, curled leaves, as though warped by the heat. Their contours contained a bewitching interplay of pigment and shadow. The fruit was small and mostly unripe, but the end of each was yellow as though some tropical poison gathered its reserves before overwhelming the whole.
When we got out of the car, I saw that the Mango King was tall and well-built. His cream salwar kameez partially concealed a new paunch, and like the puffiness of his face, it was unattractive on a man of his looks.
A few men were stooped in greeting. The Mango King waved at them, then stumbled through a doorway. We entered a walled garden of palms, droopy ashoka trees and buoyant rubber plants. A cement walkway, like a Pac-man trail, led to the house. The Mango King’s fluttering cream figure reeled, tottered, straightened, and lurched down the narrow path, as his servants and I followed. The walkway finished in front of a low white bungalow. Darkness and a musty stench from thick, beige carpeting hit us as we entered. I couldn’t make out much of the house in the dim morning light. At the far end, there was a square arrangement of low sofas.
The Mango King collapsed into one, and stared vacantly at me, as if only now seeing me. I wondered what he thought I wanted with him. Among pictures of the family, and one of the Mango King in a yellow tie, there were many books: a pictorial biography of Hitler, National Geographics, Frederick Forsyth, Jane’s Aircraft Almanacs, Animals in Camera and dozens on travel. I felt from the books, and from the framed posters of impressionist paintings, a longing for other places; it was like a longing for clemency, in colour, temperature and degree.
‘Did your father read a lot?’ I asked, scanning the shelves.
‘Yes,’ the Mango King replied. ‘He was the sort of man you could talk to about anything and he would always have the right answer.’ The description suggested a nightmare person, but the Mango King hadn’t intended it to sound that way. ‘I used to read,’ he added, ‘but I don’t get the chance any more.’ He showed me a book he’d recently bought. It was a guide to being a gentleman. ‘It says that a gentleman never adjusts his crotch in public.’ The Mango King chuckled and then we fell into silence. He sat there, looking neither at me nor at his men, but ahead, into the gloom, like a man who had just lost all his money. A servant brought him some water and a new AK-47, this time with a drum magazine. He leant it against the leg of his chair and, turning to me, said that this one was Chinese; more than a hundred countries produced them now. He asked me if I’d like to fire one.
‘Yes,’ I said, surprising myself.
‘She wreaks havoc when she opens her mouth,’ he smiled mirthlessly. He was prone to theatrical utterances and to clichés like ‘Different strokes for different folks’ or ‘You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy,’ which he said as if they’d never been said before. The idea of firing the gun was forgotten for now.
My own fatigue deepened just as the Mango King had a second wind. He ordered wine and asked if I’d like some dinner. The wine was unusual in the sub-continent, whisky and soda would have been more standard, but this, like the cigars and brandy that came afterwards, and the guide to being a gentleman, seemed like a recent feudal affectation.
I laughed at the suggestion of dinner, as it was already dawn; he stared at me.
‘No, thank you,’ I replied, more soberly.
‘Yum-yum,’ he said, looking at the feast that was now being laid out before us. There were several kinds of meat, rice, lentils, bread and more wine.
The Mango King rolled up his sleeves to eat and I saw that there were cigarette burns branded into his arm. The cutlery was Christofle, scattered stylishly among the ovenproof crockery and dinner trays.
Two minutes later he asked again. I declined once more and said that I’d like to go to bed. He gestured to a man to show me to my room, and just as I was leaving, he enquired one last time if I wouldn’t have any dinner.
When I awoke a few hours later, I was lying under a wooden fan, with an inbuilt light, and a small chandelier. Next to my bed there was a copy of Time magazine and a guide to nightlife in Thailand. The little room, despite the air-conditioning, was suffocating. From the edges of tightly drawn curtains, a white blaze broke through. It was about ten o’clock and the house was quiet. I stepped into the drawing room and felt a wave of compressed heat. The room could not have been more badly designed for the fierce temperature beyond its darkened, sliding doors. It was low, like a garage, heavy with carpeting and velvety sofas, and without ventilation. I stepped out on to a white tiled courtyard and soon retreated. It was dangerous heat, the worst I’d ever experienced, sharp, unshaded, asphyxiating. It could make you sick if you went unprotected into it. Yet to be back in the room, in the bad, stale air, was hardly better. Outside, buffaloes lay in the shade of trees; little villages of straw, with brambly fences, dotted the Mango King’s lands; and slim, black women, in bright colours, with white bangles all the way up their arms, walked along the edges of mud paths.
After tea, breakfast and a shower, I came into the main room of the house to find that the Mango King was up and inspecting weapons. ‘You can’t get this on licence,’ he said cheerfully, as the man brought out an Uzi. The Mango King was freshly bathed, his eyes alert, his manner sprightly in a way I wouldn’t have thought possible the night before. The deadened glaze had gone from his eyes and his mind made connections easily. He seemed to read my face and sense that I might be a little surprised at the gun parade before lunch. ‘A lot of people in Karachi don’t like farmers,’ he said. ‘They say they’re feudal, but my feeling is that there are good and bad people in every field.’ Still fixing magazines, looking through sights, handing back guns, he said, ‘Can you imagine? Even I was kidnapped.’
I thought he was being deliberately provocative now and, concealing my surprise, I asked casually, ‘How old were you?’
‘I was twelve and when I came back I was thirteen. It was from 1984 to 1985, for six months. I was chained for the last two. My father wouldn’t pay the ransom. When they called he started abusing them so they only called once. After that, they dealt with my uncle.’ The kidnappers had picked him up outside his school in Hyderabad.
The Mango King did not alter his short, offhand style. His point was not to emphasise the violence in his life but to make clear that he had paid his dues.
It was difficult to take anything away from the story. The Mango King drank heavily; he had suspicious cigarette burns on his arms; he played with guns; his father, who knew the right answer to everything, sounded as if he had been difficult; and yet what might have seemed like cause for alarm was presented instead as emblematic of the feudal life. The violence he had experienced, and perhaps inflicted, became like a rite of passage.
‘Was it traumatic?’
‘Yes,’ the Mango King replied, ‘but you get used to anything.’
His reply reminded me of a story my father once told me of being in prison in Pakistan. His jailers
had put him in a metal cage in heat similar to the kind outside. Then they threw a leather blanket over the top and sprinkled it with water so that the humidity made the air even less breathable. They wanted my father to sign an admission of guilt, which they didn’t bring him until several hours into the process of breaking him down. When finally they did bring it, he wouldn’t sign. His explanation was that they tortured him for too long: if they’d brought it sooner, he might have signed, but once he realised he could bear the unbearable, new resolve hardened in him.
Like the Mango King’s, it was difficult to draw a message of courage from my father’s story. At most, and this in part was why my father told it, it could give an idea of what was needed to enter politics in Pakistan. But that kind of mettle could not be asked of everyone. It couldn’t be made a requirement of office, like promising to tell the truth. Most people would bend and enter a state of corruption, which wasn’t really corruption given the duress. In the end, the story could only be seen in its context, a vignette in Pakistan’s Hobbesian political life. The extreme shows of defiance – not signing the admission or not paying the ransom – could also come to seem like bravado rather than courage when the people who endured them saw them as training rather than injustice.
That evening the Mango King suggested I go with him to Mirpur Khas, a nearby town, to meet a lawyer who was working on a case he was fighting. The sun at last was loosening its grip on the day and the land, stunned and silent for many hours, came to life with the screeching of birds and the movement of animals. The evening brought with it colour that, after the white blaze, made it seem as if the sun was sinking behind a mountain of prisms.
Driving out of the Mango King’s gate, I noticed something I hadn’t seen earlier: under the name of the estate, it said, ‘Veni Vidi Vici’.
‘We used to send mangoes to the Queen of England,’ the Mango King said proudly.
‘You should start again.’
‘No,’ he smiled, ‘but we send them to Musharraf.’
In the car, the Mango King and his tall, thin lieutenant discussed feudal revenge. The lieutenant was a muhajjir or immigrant from India. His family came to Pakistan after Partition from Jodhpur in Rajasthan. The feudal life needed men like the lieutenant. He was dark and bald, with the aspect of a grand vizier, and after the Mango King’s father died, he served the son as a loyal adviser. They talked about how another feudal had killed the Mango King’s friend in an argument over 350 acres. The Mango King said that the other landlords still teased the dead man’s son for having been unable to exact revenge. ‘What can he do?’ The Mango King laughed. ‘His father’s killer is hardly in the country, and when he is, he’s guarded heavily.
There’s a Sindi saying: “Love and revenge never get old.”’ ‘Don’t the police ever get involved?’
‘Not in these things. The people come to me with their problems and family matters. If you’re the landlord, you’re politician and policeman too. The landowner’s word is law.’ Then, thinking about it for a moment, he said, ‘In the end, it’s not even about land. It’s about who gets to be head honcho.’ I thought he put it well: land at last was stabilising; this was about arbitrary power and the Mango King was also vulnerable.
The Mango King’s lieutenant had been back to Jodhpur just once, in 1990, and from the moment he heard I was Indian, he could speak of nothing else. He craned his long neck forward and asked if I saw much difference between India and Pakistan.
‘Not much,’ I said, meaning to be polite. ‘There’s more feudalism here.’
‘But between human beings, on a human level?’
‘No, not really.’
‘But there is!’ He smiled.
‘What?’
‘In Pakistan, the clothes people wear are much better. There’s far less poverty. India makes its own things, its own cars, but then you don’t get Land Cruisers. In India, you get Indian needles. In Pakistan, we get Japanese needles!’
In India you now got Japanese needles too. The lieutenant had visited before economic liberalisation, but that was not the point. What struck me was how this man, who would never come close to owning a Land Cruiser, could talk of such things as core human differences. The poverty around him was as bad as anything I had ever seen, yet he spoke of expensive cars. It was as if the mere fact of difference was what he needed. It hardly mattered what the differences meant: that was taken care of by the inbuilt rejection of India. In the confusion about what Pakistan was meant to be, whether it was a secular state for Indian Muslims, a religious state, a military dictatorship, a fiefdom, that rejection of India could become more powerful an idea than the assertion of Pakistan.
‘What other differences did you see?’ he asked.
‘It’s hard to say as there’s so much change within India. There are more differences between the north and the south than there are between north India and Pakistan.’
The lieutenant was not to be put down. He wanted to get something off his chest. ‘The other difference,’ he began, ‘was that while men here wear flat colours, the men there are fond of floral prints, ladies’ clothes.’ Hindus weaker, more feminine, and Muslims stronger, manlier: this was the dull little heart of what the lieutenant wanted to say and a great satisfaction came over his face as he spoke. This was the way he reconnected with the glories of the Islamic past, of the time when the ‘Civilisation of Faith’ remained and the martial Muslims ruled the ‘devious Hindu’.
The heat that seemed inescapable earlier had lifted magically and the din of insects made its way into the car. The land around us was completely dark, but for the occasional tube-light over a small structure somewhere in the fields.
‘Were you scared when they kidnapped you?’ I asked the Mango King, hoping to hear the rest of the story.
‘The first fifteen minutes were scary, but then it was all right.’
After many minutes of silence, the Mango King began again, with a new softness in his voice, ‘They said, “Now, OK, say your last prayers,” but fortunately,’ he chuckled, ‘they did not kill me.’ After four months he had tried to steal a kidnapper’s gun and use it on two of them, but just as he picked it up, the third returned and wrested it from his hands. That was when they chained him as punishment. It was painful to think of the Mango King, so hard now, in so vulnerable a position.
I thought he wanted to say more, but his lieutenant interrupted: ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘why do you wear a kara?’ He was referring to the steel bangle on my wrist.
‘Because my grandmother is a Sikh and wanted me to wear it.’
‘Your mother’s Sikh and you’re Muslim.’
‘No,’ I said, wishing to annoy him, ‘my mother’s Sikh and my father’s Muslim.’
‘Yes, yes, so you’re Muslim.’
‘I’m nothing.’
The lieutenant seemed to ask the question in the most basic sense. He could tell I wasn’t a practising Muslim, but he wanted to know if I was Muslim somehow, in the way that my father was Muslim. My experience with my father had shown that this vague sense contained passions I didn’t share so I thought it better to dissent early rather than have to explain myself later.
‘Come on, you’re Muslim. If you’re father’s Pakistani, you’re Muslim.’
‘If you say so, but don’t you have to believe certain things to be a Muslim? If I don’t believe, can I still be Muslim?’
He looked at me with fatigue. It was almost as if he wanted to say yes. It was as though, once acquired, this identity based on a testament of faith could not be peeled away, like caste in India. And really, I felt that if I could know the sanctity of his feeling of difference in relation to non-Muslim India, and the symbolic history that went with it, I would be as Muslim as he was.
‘It’s his decision,’ the Mango King laughed.
The lieutenant fell into a moody silence. ‘It’s hotter in India than it is in Pakistan, isn’t it?’ he started again.
The Mango King groaned with irritation.
&
nbsp; ‘No, it’s the same!’ I said. ‘You see too many differences.’
Perhaps sensing that he had created bad feeling with a guest, he said, ‘Sikhs have a very sweet way of speaking.’
‘Their way of speaking is the same as ours!’ the Mango King snapped, and the lieutenant retreated with a sad, stung expression.
Pakistan’s economic advantage, the manliness of Muslim men, Land Cruisers and Japanese needles, even an imagined better climate: these were the small, daily manifestations that nourished a greater rejection of India, making the idea of Pakistan robust and the lieutenant’s migration worthwhile. The Mango King didn’t need the lieutenant’s sense of the other. He was where his family had always been, sure of himself and, if anything, he felt the lack of the Hindu middle class that once completed his society. It reminded me of a story of a Pakistani aunt of mine: as a child, she had seen the waves of Muslim migration from India and said, ‘Oh, look, the Pakistanis are coming!’ The Mango King, unlike his lieutenant, hadn’t migrated in search of a great Muslim homeland and found himself, still after six decades, an immigrant.
On the way into town, the Mango King explained the legal dispute. It was a complicated scenario in which the laws of the country, British law, with Islamic accents, came into conflict with the feudal agreements in his family. The Mango King’s aunts inherited a small parcel of the land, which they wanted the Mango King to inherit, but as his cousins – with whom he’d had gun battles – would contest this, a spurious sale of sorts was organised, by which the land would come indirectly to the Mango King. The cousins were contesting the sale and the Mango King was looking for a way out.
The section of town we entered in moonlight had old-fashioned whitewashed buildings and tube-lit streets. Outside the lawyer’s office there was an open drain from which a vast peepal tree grew at an angle, its prehensile roots threatening the foundation of both street and building. In the soft, pale light, the peepal ’s long-stalked flat leaves with their pointed apexes were like little bits of silver foil, flittering noisily in the slightest wind. Under the tree, a man sold hot food from a cauldron of boiling oil and behind him colourful posters advertised a wrestling match. A bright red fire truck, with white Urdu writing on it, blocked the entrance to the lawyer’s office.
Stranger to History Page 23
