Stranger to History

by Aatish Taseer

  The man inside the pistachio green room was like a caricature of a small-town lawyer. He was a squat, smiling man, with dimples, clefts and greasy hennaed hair. His eyes vanished when he smiled and light brown moles dotted his face and neck. His office contained a black briefcase, a glass-topped desk, green metal filing-cabinets and shelves stacked with volumes of Pakistani Legal Decisions.

  He had been briefed about the case and, after offering us tea and soft drinks, he began immediately: ‘You have two options, either of speaking the truth or . . . I’ve heard, sir,’ he said, a smarmy smile lighting his face, ‘that it is hard for you to tell a lie.’

  The Mango King looked sternly at him. ‘No, there’s no such problem.’

  ‘Another situation is that we tell the truth,’ the lawyer said, shaking his head mournfully, as though drawing some pleasure from the foreplay of an illegal act.

  ‘Please leave truth and lies aside,’ the Mango King said. ‘Let’s just do what favours us.’

  The lawyer, bowing from the waist, grinned. ‘Are both women educated?’

  ‘Yes, a little.’

  ‘English-speaking?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The lawyer nodded sadly, feigning gloom.

  ‘What difference does it make?’ the Mango King barked.

  ‘Because we could say the transaction was a fake,’ the lawyer sputtered rapidly. ‘The ladies did not understand what they were doing. We could make the plea that they didn’t know what was in the documents when they signed them.’

  ‘But then, wouldn’t I, myself, end up looking like a fraud?’

  ‘No, no,’ the lawyer assured him, regaining his composure, ‘you weren’t present. We can say the ladies never sold the land.

  They received no monies.’

  ‘But then you’re making me a liar.’

  ‘Just wait,’ the lawyer replied, a tantalising smile coming to his lips. ‘This is our ladies’ plea. The court will accept it. We’ll make this plea, but we’ll have to tell lies.’

  ‘Leave lies aside,’ the Mango King snapped. ‘Let’s do what will help us.’

  ‘See? The ladies will support us in this. We’ll say the ladies knew nothing of this, that they were misguided,’ he added, with relish. ‘We’ll have to interview the ladies beforehand and prepare them. I think this is better. There’s more truth in it.’

  ‘Leave truth—’ ‘No, no. One lie leads to another. Even smart people get caught out.’

  ‘But they’ll lie too.’

  ‘Yes, but they have only one lie to tell.’

  The Mango King looked as lost as I was. ‘Does the judge accept bribes?’ he asked. ‘Can’t we just bribe him?’

  ‘He does in some cases and not in others,’ the lawyer replied, as if delivering an official statement. ‘But the other party can bribe him, too, so it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Yes, but it shouldn’t be that they just bribe him and close the whole matter. Anyway, so you think this is better?’

  ‘Yes, because the women can speak the truth.’

  ‘Leave the truth!’ the Mango King roared. ‘I want to do what will help us win.’

  The lawyer, still smiling, winced. But I could see now that he was only interested in the truth because it made a simpler story for the old ladies to retell. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘This will be easier to prove.’

  ‘All right.’ The Mango King nodded.

  The lieutenant, who watched the rapid exchanges with keen interest, now said, ‘Leave it. The case will keep going. You’ll become old.’

  ‘Can’t we give them a little danda too?’ the Mango King said, using the word for ‘stick’ to mean a beating.

  The lawyer smiled serenely.

  ‘The case will go to appeals,’ the lieutenant said, ‘It’ll take ten years just there.’

  ‘And if in twenty,’ the Mango King asked, ‘the court rules in their favour, how will they take possession of the land?’

  ‘The police will come on order of the court,’ the lawyer replied, defending the system of which he was a part.

  ‘And if I resist?’ the Mango King asked, seeming to threaten the lawyer.

  ‘There will be cases against you, criminal cases.’

  ‘Can the property be put in my mother’s name?’ the Mango King asked, then mentioned she was a German national, which created other problems.

  ‘Why don’t you get married?’ the lawyer suggested.

  ‘I have to find the right girl,’ the Mango King laughed. ‘Then I’ll get married.’

  We stood up to leave and the lawyer rose too, bowing and smiling.

  Outside, the Mango King lit a cigarette. Turning to me, he said bitterly, ‘Bloody feudal family disputes.’ He seemed a little depressed and lonely.

  In the car on the way back his lieutenant tried to convince him to get married. He said it would increase his strength.

  ‘If we lose in the court, how soon can they take control of the land?’ the Mango King asked, thinking aloud.

  ‘We’ll take it to a higher court,’ the lieutenant comforted him.

  ‘And if we lose there?’

  ‘They can take control of the land, but then we’ll bring it back to the lowest court on some excuse. Whole lifetimes go by and these things remain unresolved. You know you’ve done nothing illegitimate. And as long as you have done nothing illegitimate, Allah will protect you.’

  What he could mean by ‘legitimate’ in this legal desert eluded me, but he seemed to summon up some higher notion of legitimacy and justice. The temporal example he gave a moment later was as ambiguous as the circumstances he’d begun with. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’ll give you an example. Nawaz Sharif tried to get rid of Musharraf in Pakistan and now Nawaz Sharif is in the black water.’ But even as the lieutenant spoke, the general seemed to be heading towards ‘black water’ of his own, just one set of illegitimate circumstances replacing another.

  ‘They’ve done a lot to subdue me,’ the Mango King said.

  ‘You just get married quickly,’ the lieutenant said, trying to arrest the gloom that grew in the Mango King, ‘and then you’ll have a wife and an heir and at least they won’t be able to say “he’s all on his own.” Your strength will improve greatly.’ Strength was the right word: it was all that could make sense of the landscape around the Mango King. In the absence of a credible state, crude power, loose and available, was all there was to seize on to. ‘Find a good relationship and get married. Aren’t I right?’ the lieutenant asked me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘People are scared of my house,’ the Mango King replied. ‘Girls run away from it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You know my pool in Karachi, right?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, half expecting him to say it was having its water changed.

  ‘Well, I had a party,’ he said, ‘and a guy drowned in it. And my cousins said that I paid money to the police and to the guy’s family. Can you imagine? You have a party and a guy dies in your pool. It’s terrible. And they say it’s because I’m feudal. I think the guy was on drugs or something.’

  That night I sat with the Mango King on his veranda drinking whisky-sodas and talking. Though occasionally I felt his pain, I didn’t understand his world; I didn’t think it was a world that could be made understandable to someone who wasn’t obliged to work by its arbitrary laws; its brutalities were its own. The Mango King said that things wouldn’t change and that feudalism would go on. He also spoke of the importance of the Hindu middle class who left in 1947 and in doing so identified the key component in the change that came to feudal India but not to Pakistan: the middle class.

  It was India’s middle class, its growth and energy, more than anything else that set the two countries apart. The power of the middle class in India dismantled the old feudal structures. In Sind, the cost of realising the purity of the Indian Muslim state was the necessary departure of Sind’s Hindu middle class. The muhajjir population that arrived in its place had not been able to
replace its social function; the bonds that had held together the diverse society of Muslims and Hindus had not arisen among the co-religionists. And, without its middle class, Sind was not merely unchanged from 1947, not merely feudal: it was lawless, divided acrimoniously within itself; town and country were divorced from each other; ‘the factionalised élite’ that the think tank’s report described had been created; and even men like the Mango King knew insecurity. The society had been dismembered.

  The lieutenant, who had been sitting quietly on the edge of the veranda, now whispered slyly to me that he was a Rajput. This was another reference to the Hindu caste system, in this case high-caste, going deeper than Islam in Pakistan. But the lieutenant didn’t know he spoke of caste. When I suggested to him that Islam, with its strong ideas of equality, forbade notions of caste, he became defensive and said that this was a matter of good and bad families. The Mango King thought it was tribe, but it was really caste.

  ‘If you can have Rajputs, then you can have choodas,’ I said, using the derogatory word for ‘low caste’ that my cousin had used on the night of Casablanca.

  ‘Of course you can have choodas,’ the lieutenant replied.

  ‘Would you let your daughter marry one?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Even if he was Muslim?’

  ‘Even if he was Muslim.’

  On the one hand, there was the rejection of India that made Pakistan possible, and on the other, India was overwhelmingly at play in the deepest affiliations of Pakistanis, sometimes without their knowing it. It made Pakistan a country in which everything just existed because it did, eroded haphazardly by inevitable change. The country’s roots, like some fearsome plumbing network, could never be examined to explain why something was the way it was, why the lieutenant, perhaps centuries after conversion, could still think of himself as a Rajput. And though I, with deep connections on both sides, could see the commonalities, they were not something to be celebrated: we spoke instead of difference. It was a country where you could imagine that, one day, no one would know where anything had come from.

  Before I went to bed, the Mango King came to the end of the story of his kidnapping.

  ‘Were you afraid they would harm you?’ I asked him.

  ‘Twice,’ he said. ‘Once when I tried to escape and the second time after my father had abused them and I heard them saying, “Should we bury his body or throw it in the river?” “I’m still alive,” I was saying to myself, and that was pretty scary.’

  Finally, after six months, the kidnappers gave him a bus ticket and released him in the Sindi town of Sukkur from where he made his way back to his father’s house in Hyderabad. His hair had grown longer and when he got home, the watchman didn’t recognise him. The Mango King said no ransom was ever paid.

  When he was released they danced in the village. He went to get a passport photo taken, and the man in the shop had baked a cake for him. These were the details that remained with him after two decades. The whisky worked on the Mango King, at once deadening his eyes and bringing up unprocessed emotion. He’d gone to get a passport picture because he was going to Germany to see his mother for the first time in fourteen years. His separation from her was another secret in the life of the Mango King, but I had a feeling it was related to the father who always had the right answer for everything.

  The next morning I left the Mango King’s lands for Hyderabad. He was still asleep when I walked out, and even at that early hour, the small, musty house was filling with heat.

  Contact Paper

  The answers to the questions I had wanted to ask my father at our first meeting were a way for me to string the world together. I wanted, with whatever shred of common memory I could find, to close the gap between the world that ended in 1982, when my father left my mother, and the world as it was now that my father and I had met. I was ready to shuttle between two families in two countries, but it helped to know that they had begun as one life, just as it helped to know that the two countries were once the same country. Like slipping a sheet of clear contact paper over another, both with partial images on them, to make a complete one, I sought to stabilise the new world I had gained with the one I had always known.

  Even as our relationship grew, my father seemed resistant to my efforts to bridge the two worlds. Between my first and second visits, a few weeks apart, when he invited me to stay in his house, the initial openness between us had narrowed. I asked him a question about a time when he had known my mother and he reminded me bluntly, ‘I asked you when we first met whether you had any questions for me.’

  On one occasion he mentioned the plane Murtaza Bhutto hijacked and the comment he made to the BBC. I had heard about the event from my mother. To hear of it now from my father filled me with a kind of child’s wonder. It was like hearing about what your parents had been doing just before you were born. In an effort to bring together the two versions of the same story, I asked him where my mother and I were when it happened. My father’s face soured. ‘I don’t know what anyone else was doing at the time. I can tell you what I was doing. I was getting away from the police, who wanted to put me in jail.’

  Despite the gaps and silences, our relationship grew over the next four years, during which I became a regular visitor to Lahore. The more I went, the less I saw of the country or even the city. My father’s house became my world in Pakistan. On my first visit I had met three siblings: my elder sister from my father’s first marriage and a younger brother and sister from his present marriage; over the next few months, I met three more. They, and my father’s young, beautiful wife, were full of goodwill and affection for me. Having grown up as an only child, I was so overwhelmed by suddenly having brothers and sisters that getting to know them took up much of my time in Lahore. I managed to sneak into some of the small, exquisite mosques in the old city, saw the important monuments, the museum and that fine stretch of red-brick British buildings, which were like a lesson in civic planning, but that was all. I went with my sister to many more GTs. I met fashion designers, Lahore beauties, and spent more than a few orange dawns eating hot meat in the old city. In summer, we’d end up in my father’s mango-shaped swimming-pool as the mullah’s cry broke over the dark trees in his lawn. In those twice-yearly visits to Lahore, I felt at home and yet not, as if I was in a place I had been before but couldn’t recall.

  After university in America, I worked as a reporter for Time magazine, first in New York and then in London. During that time, my father and his family paid me a surprise visit in New York, and later I saw them regularly in London. Benazir Bhutto’s self-imposed exile during the Musharraf years and my father’s own electoral failures had distanced him from political life. Though politics was still his passion, he was now a far more successful businessman than he had ever been a politician. Still, some of the old embarrassment at having an Indian son lingered, and he was much more at ease with seeing me abroad than he was in Pakistan.

  His embarrassment in Pakistan surfaced in small, telling ways. He prevented my siblings throwing a party they had planned for me; he rarely spoke to me at social occasions and never introduced me to anyone. I interpreted this as a hint that he didn’t want to see me any more, but his family assured me that it was just his way and he enjoyed my visits. Sitting on worn sofas in his TV room, children and servants coming in and out, a drinks trolley in one corner, with an ice bucket on it, I felt that a kind of closeness had arisen between us. My father would often engage me in some long conversation about the great Punjabi Urdu poets of Lahore. His father was part of this milieu but died when my father was a child. Though it was never expressed, there was irony in our shared experience of absent fathers. He also let it be known that I was his only child who was like him – interested in books, politics and history – and though this also contained irony, it gave me great joy to have a kind of male approval I had never known. One last irony was that during a family holiday in Italy in 2005, a few weeks before the London bombings, before my article and m
y father’s letter, and before the pain of the new silence between us, we were closer than ever before.

  Sind 360: The Open Wound

  It was a great relief to be on the road and independent of the Mango King’s uncertain hours. It was from him that I gained an idea of Sind’s composite society, complete with Hindus and Muslims. That completeness ended with the 1947 transfers of population. I looked now for what had taken its place. My father had spoken of the ‘Pakistani ethos’ in his letter, and with this in mind, I set out for the desert city of Hyderabad. My travelling was to be different from anything I had done so far. I wanted to avoid focusing on any one group but to see an array of life, a panorama, in a typical Sindi town. And for this I was meeting Laxman, one of the publisher’s most trusted managers, on the outskirts of Hyderabad. My brother had arranged a driver, a dark, moustached man with mascaraed eyes.

  The road to Hyderabad through the bleached, shrub-covered country was full of unexpected bursts of colour and activity. There were black flags with gold borders, their masts covered with coloured bulbs, commemorating the Shia mourning; tiny pink and orange figures of women working in sugar-cane fields; and green pools of water with children bathing in them. The shade of mango trees attracted old people in white and animals escaping the heat, including a hennaed donkey, with an impossible burden. The road was crowded with camels pulling carts, cattle crossing from one side to the other, and small, painted mosques, with grey loudspeakers, huddled close to the road.

  We covered the distance at an irregular pace, stopping or slowing for varied traffic. At one point, we hit a little goat that the driver calculated would make way for him. I thought we’d killed it, but it picked itself up and, indignantly, with hardly any change in its pace, made its way across the road to join the herd. We passed a gold-domed and yellow-tiled Shia mosque, whose opulence among the surrounding thatched houses suggested Iranian contributions.