The family had to be told; nobody’s hands were clean. They were all accomplices in the matter of Sufiya Zinobia; and the secret was kept. The ‘wrong miracle’ … she disappeared from sight. Poof! Like so.
When it was announced that the Supreme Court had upheld the death sentence by a split decision, four to three, Iskander Harappa’s lawyers told him that a pardon was assured. ‘Impossible to hang a man on such a split,’ they said. ‘Relax.’ One of the judges who had voted for acquittal had said, ‘All’s well that ends well.’ Legal precedent, Iskander was told, obliged the Head of State to exercise clemency after a vote of this type. Iskander Harappa told his lawyers: ‘We shall see.’ Six months later he was still in the death-cell when he was visited by the unchangingly glum-faced Colonel Shuja. ‘I have brought you a cigar,’ the ADC said, ‘Romeo y Juliettas, your favourite, I think.’ Iskander Harappa guessed as he lit up that he was going to die, and began to say his prayers in beautiful Arabic; but Shuja interrupted, ‘Some mistake, beg for pardon, sir.’ He insisted that he had come for quite a different reason, that Harappa was required to sign a full confession, and after that the question of clemency would receive favourable consideration. On hearing this Isky Harappa summoned the last of his strength and began to swear at the mournful Pathan officer. It was a kind of suicide. His words had never been sharper. The obscenity of his language inflicted stinging blows, Shuja felt them piercing his skin, and understood what Raza Hyder had suffered in Bagheeragali two years earlier; he felt the rage rising within him, he was unable to undergo such humiliation without giving way to the anger, and when Iskander yelled, ‘Fuck me in the mouth, pimp, go suck your grandson’s cock,’ that was it, it didn’t matter that Shuja was not old enough to have a grandchild, he stood up very slowly and then shot the former Prime Minister through the heart.
The Beast has many faces. Some are always sad.
A hanging in the courtyard of the District Jail at dead of night. Prisoners howling, banging cups, sang Isky’s requiem. And the hangman was never seen again. Don’t ask me what became of him; I can’t be expected to know everything. He vanished: poof! – And after the body was cut down, the flight to Mohenjo, Rani tearing the death-sheet from the face. But she never saw the chest. And then blind men seeing, the lame walking, lepers cured when they touched the martyr’s tomb. It was also said that this tomb-touching was a particularly efficacious remedy for disorders of the teeth.
And Pinkie’s suicide; no need to go into all that again. She stayed dead; she never haunted anybody.
President Raza Hyder in a prison courtyard with a dangling corpse remembered what Bilquìs had said. They are falling away,’ he thought, ‘like rocket stages.’ Dawood gone to Mecca, Bilquìs and Sufiya lost behind different veils, Good News and now Isky twirling on their ropes. Distrusting his sons-in-law, but bound to them by necessity, Raza felt around him the enclosing emptiness of the void. It was at this moment, when Harappa hung from a noose with a bag over his head, that Raza Hyder heard Iskander’s voice. ‘Never fear, old boy, it’s pretty difficult to get rid of me. I can be an obstinate bastard when I choose.’
The golden voice, clear as a bell. And Raza Hyder in shock shouted, ‘The motherfucker isn’t dead!’ The obscenity from his lips astonished the still-unvanished hangman, and at once in his ear the laughing Isky-voice: ‘Don’t be silly, yaar. You know what’s going on here.’
O unceasing monologue of a hanged man! Because it never left him, from the day of Iskander’s death to the morning of his own, that voice, sardonic lilting dry, now advising him not to fire his ADC because that would let the truth out for sure, now teasing him, President sahib, you’ve got a lot to learn about running the show; words dripping on his ear-drum like Chinese tortures, even in his sleep; sometimes anecdotal, reminding him of tilyars and tied-to-a-stake, at other times taunting, how long do you think you’ll last, Raz, one year, two?
Nor was Iskander’s the only voice. We have already seen the first appearance of the spectre of Maulana Dawood; it returned to perch, invisibly, on the President’s right shoulder, to whisper in his ear. God on his right shoulder, the devil on his left; this was the unseen truth about the Presidency of Old Razor Guts, these two conflicting soliloquies inside his skull, marching leftright leftright leftright down the years.
From The Suicide, a play by the Russian writer Nikolai Erdman: ‘Only the dead can say what the living are thinking.’
Reappearances of the dead must be offset by disappearances of the living. A hangman: poof! And Pinkie Aurangzeb. And I’ve saved the worst for last: on the night of the Harappa hanging, Omar Khayyam Shakil discovered that Sufiya Zinobia, his wife, Hyder’s daughter, had escaped.
An empty attic. Broken chains, cracked beams. There was a hole in the bricked-up window. It had a head, arms, legs.
‘God help us,’ said Omar Khayyam, in spite of his uncircumcised, unshaven, unwhispered- to beginnings. It was as though he had divined that it was time for the Almighty to step forward and take charge of events.
12
STABILITY
The great French revolutionary hero Danton, who will lose his head during the ‘Terror’, is making a rueful remark. ‘… But Robespierre and the people’, he observes, ‘are virtuous.’ Danton is on a London stage, not really Danton at all but an actor speaking the lines of Georg Büchner in English translation; and the time is not then, but now. I don’t know if the thought originated in French, German or English, but I do know that it seems astonishingly bleak – because what it means, obviously, is that the people are like Robespierre. Danton may be a hero of the revolution, but he also likes wine, fine clothes, whores; weaknesses which (the audience instantly sees) will enable Robespierre, a good actor in a green coat, to cut him down. When Danton is sent to visit the widow, old Madame Guillotine with her basket of heads, we know it isn’t really on account of any real or trumped-up political crimes. He gets the chop (miraculously staged) because he is too fond of pleasure. Epicureanism is subversive. The people are like Robespierre. They distrust fun.
This opposition – the epicure against the puritan – is, the play tells us, the true dialectic of history. Forget left-right, capitalism-socialism, black-white. Virtue versus vice, ascetic versus bawd, God against the Devil: that’s the game. Messieurs, mesdames: faîtes vos jeux.
I watched the play in a large theatre that was two-thirds empty. Politics empties theatres in old London town. Afterwards, the departing audience made disapproving remarks. The trouble with the play, apparently, was that there was too much of ranting Danton and not enough of sinister Robespierre. The customers bemoaned the imbalance. ‘I liked the nasty one,’ someone said. Her companions agreed.
I was with three visitors from Pakistan. They all loved the play. ‘How lucky you are,’ they envied me, ‘to live where such things can be put on.’ They told me the story of a recent attempt to stage Julius Caesar at the University of P. It seems that the authorities became very agitated when they heard that the script called for the assassination of a Head of State. What was more, the production was to be in modern dress: General Caesar would be in full dress uniform when the knives got to work. Extreme pressure was brought to bear on the University to scrap the production. The academics, honourably, resisted, defending an ancient writer with a rather martial name against this assault-of-the-Generals. At one point the military censors suggested a compromise: would the University not agree to mount the whole production, just as scripted, with the single exception of that unpalatable killing? Surely that scene was not absolutely necessary?
Finally, the producer came up with a brilliant, a positively Solomonic solution. He invited a prominent British diplomat to play Caesar, dressed in (British) Imperial regalia. The Army relaxed; the play opened; and when the first-night curtain fell, the house lights went up to reveal a front row full of Generals, all applauding wildly to signify their enjoyment of this patriotic work depicting the overthrow of imperialism by the freedom movement of Rome.
I
insist: I have not made this up … and I am reminded of a British diplomat’s wife whom I mentioned earlier. ‘Why don’t people in Rome,’ she might well have inquired, ‘get rid of General Caesar in, you know, the usual way?’
But I was talking about Büchner. My friends and I had liked Danton’s Death; in the age of Khomeini, etc., it seemed most apposite. But Danton’s (Büchner’s?) view of ‘the people’ bothered us. If the people were like Robespierre, how did Danton ever get to be a hero? Why was he cheered in court?
‘The point is,’ one of my friends argued, ‘that this opposition exists all right; but it is an internal dialectic.’ That made sense. The people are not only like Robespierre. They, we, are Danton, too. We are Robeston and Danpierre. The inconsistency doesn’t matter; I myself manage to hold large numbers of wholly irreconcilable views simultaneously, without the least difficulty. I do not think others are less versatile.
Iskander Harappa was not just Danton; Raza Hyder wasn’t Robespierre pure-and-simple. Isky certainly lived it up, perhaps he was something of an epicure, but he also believed that he was always, unarguably, right. And eighteen shawls have shown us that he wasn’t averse to Terror, either. What befell him in his death-cell befell others because of him. That is important. (But if we mind about the others, we must also, unfortunately, mind about Iskander.) And Raza Hyder? It is possible to believe that he took no pleasure in what he did, that the pleasure principle was not in operation, even though he claimed to act in the name of God? I don’t think so.
Isky and Raza. They, too, were Danpierre and Robeston. Which may be an explanation; but it cannot, of course, be an excuse.
When Omar Khayyam Shakil saw the Sufiya-Zinobia-shaped hole in a bricked-up window, the idea came to him that his wife was dead. Which is not to say that he expected to find her lifeless body on the lawn below the window, but that he guessed that the creature inside her, the hot thing, the yellow fire, had by now consumed her utterly, like a house-gutting blaze, so that the girl whose fate had prevented her from becoming complete had finally diminished to the vanishing point. What had escaped, what now roamed free in the unsuspecting air, was not Sufiya Zinobia Shakil at all, but something more like a principle, the embodiment of violence, the pure malevolent strength of the Beast.
‘Damn it,’ he told himself, ‘the world is going mad.’
There was once a wife, whose husband injected her with knock-out drugs twice daily. For two years she lay on a carpet, like a girl in a fantasy who can only be awoken by the blue-blooded kiss of a prince; but kisses were not her destiny. She appeared to be spellbound by the sorceries of the drug, but the monster inside her never slept, the violence which had been born of shame, but which by now lived its own life beneath her skin; it fought the narcoleptic fluids, it took its time, spreading slowly through her body until it had occupied every cell, until she had become the violence, which no longer needed anything to set it off, because once a carnivore has tasted blood you can’t fool it with vegetables any more. And in the end it defeated the drug, it lifted its body up and broke the restraining chains.
Pandora, possessed by the unleashed contents of her box.
Yellow fire behind her closed eyelids, fire under her fingernails and beneath the roots of her hair. Yes, she was dead all right, I’m sure of it, no more Sufiya-Zinobia-ness, everything burned up in that Hell. Throw a body on a funeral pyre and it will jerk, genuflect, sit up, dance, smile; the fire pulls the nerve-strings of the corpse, which becomes the fire’s puppet, conveying a ghastly illusion of life amidst the flames …
There was once a Beast. When it was sure of its strength, it chose its moment, and sprang through a wall of brick.
During the next four years, that is to say the period of the Presidency of Raza Hyder, Omar Khayyam Shakil grew old. Nobody noticed at first, because he had been grey for years; but once he had turned sixty his feet, which had been obliged for most of their lives to bear the impossible burden of his obesity, staged a revolt, because in the aftermath of the departure of Shahbanou the ayah, when he had been deprived of the mint teas and nocturnal nourishments of her loyalty, he began to put on weight again. Buttons popped off trouser waistbands, and his feet went on strike. Omar Khayyam’s steps became agonies, even when he leaned on the sword-concealing cane which he had carried down all the years, ever since the time of his lecherous alliance with Iskander Harappa. He took to spending hours on end seated in a cane chair in what had once been Sufiya Zinobia’s prison cell, staring out through the window which held, in fantastic outline, the red brick after-image of his departed wife.
He retired from Mount Hira Hospital and sent most of his pension money to an old house in Q. inhabited by three old women who refused to die, unlike Bariamma, who had long since done the decent thing and expired, propped up by bolsters, so that it was almost a full day before anyone saw what had happened … more money was sent to a Parsee ayah, and Omar Khayyam lived quietly under Raza Hyder’s roof, shelling pine-kernels while his eyes, roving outwards through the attic window, seemed to be following someone, although there was nobody there.
Because he was familiar with the theory that susceptibility to hypnosis was the sign of a highly developed imaginative faculty – that the hypnotic trance is a form of inward creativity, during which the subject remakes herself and her world as she chooses – he sometimes thought that Sufiya Zinobia’s metamorphosis must have been willed, because even an autohypnotist cannot ask herself to do what she would be unwilling to do. So then she had chosen, she had created the Beast … in which event, he ruminated in a cane chair with a mouth full of pine-kernels, her case is an object lesson. It demonstrates the danger of permitting the imagination too free a rein. The rampages of Sufiya Zinobia were the results of a fancy that ran wild.
‘Shame should come to me,’ he informed the koel perching on the window, ‘here I sit doing what I’m criticizing, thinking God knows what, living too much in my head.’
Raza Hyder also thought: ‘Shame should come to me.’ Now that she was gone his thoughts were plagued by her. That something-too-loose in her muscles, that something-half-coordinated in her gait had stopped him loving her for a time. She had to almost die before I. And of course it wasn’t enough. His head was bursting with voices: Isky Dawood Isky Dawood. Hard to think straight … and now she would take her revenge. Somehow, some time, she would drag him down. Unless he found her first. But who to send, who to brief? ‘My daughter, the idiot with brain-fever, has become a human guillotine and started ripping off men’s heads. This is her photo, wanted dead or alive, handsome reward.’ Impossible. No can do.
O impotence of power. The President persuading himself not to be stupid, she won’t survive, she hasn’t, nothing heard for some time now, no news is good news. Or she’ll turn up somewhere and then we’ll hush it up. But still there cropped up in his thoughts the picture of a tiny girl with a face of classical severity; it was an accusation … throbbing at his temples, Isky and Dawood whispered and argued, rightleftright. But one can be haunted by the living as well as the dead. A wild look appeared in his eyes.
Like Omar Khayyam Shakil, President Raza Hyder began to shell and eat large quantities of pine-kernels, Sufiya Zinobia’s favourite treat, which she had spent long and happy hours releasing from their shells, with crazy dedication, because the shelling of pine-kernels is a form of lunacy, you spend more energy getting the damn things out than they give you when you eat.
‘General Hyder,’ the Angrez television interviewer asks Raza, ‘informed sources opine, close observers claim, many of our viewers in the West would say, how would you refute the argument, have you a point of view about the allegation that your institution of such Islamic punishments as flogging and cutting-off of hands might be seen in certain quarters as being, arguably, according to certain definitions, so to speak, barbaric?’
Raza Hyder smiles at the camera, a courteous smile, the smile of a man of true good manners and no little decorum. ‘It is not barbaric,’ he replies. ‘Wh
y? For three reasons.’ He raises a finger for each reason and counts them off. ‘Number one,’ he explains, ‘is that, kindly understand, a law in itself is neither barbaric nor not barbaric. What matters is the man who is applying the law. And in this case it is I, Raza Hyder, who am doing it, so of course it will not be barbaric.
‘Number two, let me say, sir, that we are not some savages down from the trees, you see? We will not simply order people to stick out their hands, like this, and go fataakh! with a butcher’s knife. No, sir. All will be done under the most hygienic conditions, with proper medical supervision, use of anaesthetic etcetera.
‘But the third reason is that these are not laws, my dear fellow, which we have plucked out of the wind. These are the holy words of God, as revealed in sacred texts. Now if they are holy words of God, they cannot also be barbaric. It is not possible. They must be some other thing.’
He had chosen not to move into the President’s House in the new capital, feeling more comfortable in the Commander-in-Chief’s residence, in spite of the noisy hordes of motherless children bullying ayahs in the corridors. At first he had been willing to spend some of his nights under the Presidential roof, for instance at the time of the Pan-Islamic conference when Heads of State arrived from all over the globe, and they all brought their mothers along, so that all hell broke loose, because the mothers in the zenana wing embarked at once on a tooth-and-nail struggle for seniority, and they kept sending urgent messages to their sons, interrupting the conference’s plenipotentiary sessions to complain about mortal insults received and honour besmirched, which brought the world leaders close to starting fist-fights or even wars. Raza Hyder did not have a mother to land him in hot water, but he had worries of his own, because he had discovered on the first night of the conference that while he was in this airport of a palace the voice of Iskander Harappa became so loud in his ears that he could hardly hear anything else. The monologue of the hanged man buzzed in his skull, and it seemed that Isky had decided to give his successor some useful tips, because the disembodied voice had started quoting liberally and in an irritatingly sing-song accent from what it took Raza a long time to work out were the writings of the notorious infidel and foreigner Niccolò Machiavelli. Raza lay awake all that night with the spectral buzzing in his head. ‘In taking a state,’ Iskander was saying, ‘the conqueror must arrange to commit all his cruelties at once, for injuries should be done all together, so that being less tasted, they will give less offence.’ Raza Hyder had been unable to prevent an exclamation – ‘Ya Allah, shut up, shut up!’ – from getting past the Presidential lips, and at once guards came running into his bedroom, fearing the worst, namely an invasion by the endlessly complaining mothers of the world leaders; Raza was obliged to say with shame, ‘Nothing, nothing. A nightmare, a bad dream, nothing to worry about.’