On all fours, the calluses thick on her palms and soles. The black hair, once shorn by Bilquìs Hyder, long now and matted around her face, enclosing it like fur; the pale skin of her mohajir ancestry burned and toughened by the sun, bearing like battle scars the lacerations of bushes, animals, her own itch-scratching nails. Fiery eyes and the stink of ordure and death. ‘For the first time in her life’ – he shocked himself by the sympathy in the thought – ‘that girl is free.’ He imagined her proud; proud of her strength, proud of the violence that was making her a legend, that prohibited anyone from telling her what to do, or whom to be, or what she should have been and was not; yes, she had risen above everything she did not wish to hear. Can it be possible, he wondered, that human beings are capable of discovering their nobility in their savagery? Then he was angry with himself, remembering that she was no longer Sufiya Zinobia, that nothing was left in her which could be recognized as the daughter of Bilquìs Hyder, that the Beast within had changed her for all time. ‘I should stop calling her by her name,’ he thought; but found that he could not. Hyder’s daughter. My wife. Sufiya Zinobia Shakil.
When he decided he could not keep his secret any longer and went to inform Raza Hyder of his daughter’s activities, he found the three Generals, Raddi, Bekar and Phisaddi, emerging from the President’s office wearing identical expressions of slightly stunned beatitude. They had been walking on cloud nine ever since Hyder promoted them to his inner cabinet in the aftermath of the Tughlak coup, but on this occasion they were intoxicated by an excess of prayer. They had just told Raza that the Russians had sent an army into the country of A. across the north-west frontier, and to their astonishment the President had leapt from his chair, unrolled four prayer-mats on the floor and insisted that they all give thanks, pronto, fut-a-fut, for this blessing that had been bestowed on them by God. They had been rising and falling for an hour and a half, developing on their foreheads the first traces of the bruise which Raza wore with pride, when he stopped and explained to them that the Russian attack was the final step in God’s strategy, because now the stability of his government would have to be ensured by the great powers. General Raddi replied a little too sourly that the Americans’ policy was centred on staging a dramatic counter-coup against the Olympic Games, but before Raza could lose his temper Raddi’s friends Phisaddi and Bekar began to shake each other’s hands and congratulate themselves noisily. ‘That fat-arsed Yankee,’ Phisaddi shouted, referring to the American Ambassador, ‘he’ll have to foot the bills now,’ and Bekar began to fantasize about five billion dollars’ worth of new military equipment, the latest stuff at last, missiles that could fly sideways without starving their engines of oxygen and tracking systems that could detect an alien anopheles mosquito at a range of ten thousand miles. They were so carried away that they conveniently forgot to tell the President the rest of the news; but Raddi remembered, and blurted out before anyone could stop him the intelligence that Mr Haroun Harappa had taken up residence in an elite apartment block situated in the centre of Cabul, the capital city of A. His colleagues, alarmed by Raddi’s second misjudgment of the President’s mood, tried to cover for him again, reassuring Raza that the report was unconfirmed, all kinds of disinformation were emerging from Cabul in the wake of the Russian occupation; they tried to divert his attention to the question of refugees, but the President just beamed and beamed. ‘They can send us ten million refugees,’ he cried, ‘because by taking that one in they have completed by royal flush.’
Now all three Generals were confused; all three felt obliged to explain that their best information was that Haroun Harappa was being given the full and active support of the new Russian-backed regime over the border, that he was assembling a terrorist group which was being given Soviet arms and Palestinian training, and which he had named Al-Iskander in memory of his beloved uncle. ‘Excellent,’ Hyder grinned, ‘now at last we can show the people that the Popular Front is nothing but a bunch of assassins and badmashes,’ and he made the three Generals get down and give thanks to God all over again.
So it was that Raza Hyder saw his colleagues to the door of his office with true happiness in his heart, and as the dazed triumvirate staggered off the President greeted Omar Khayyam Shakil with genuine warmth: ‘Well, you old dog, what brings you here?’
The appalling good humour of Raza Hyder stirred up curious emotions inside Omar Khayyam, so that it was almost with pleasure that he answered, ‘A most delicate and confidential matter’; and behind the locked doors of the President’s office a mood of grim contentment settled on him while he advised Raza of his speculations and researches and watched the good news drain out of the President’s face, to be replaced by a grey pallor of fear.
‘So, so,’ Raza Hyder said, ‘I had almost deceived myself she was dead.’
‘ “I would compare her to an impetuous river,” ’ Iskander Harappa whispered in his ear, ‘ “that, when turbulent, inundates the plains, casts down trees and buildings; everyone flees before it, and everything yields to its fury without being able to oppose it. So it is with Fortune, which shows her power where no measures have been taken to resist her, and directs her fury where she knows that no dykes or barriers have been made to hold her.” ’
‘What barriers?’ Raza Hyder cried aloud, convincing Omar Khayyam that the President was cracking up under stress. ‘What walls can I build against my child?’ But Maulana Dawood, his angel of the right, said nothing.
How does a dictator fall? There is an old saw which states, with absurd optimism, that it is in the nature of tyrannies to end. One might as well say that it is also in their nature to begin, to continue, to dig themselves in, and, often, to be preserved by greater powers than their own.
Well, well, I mustn’t forget I’m only telling a fairy-story. My dictator will be toppled by goblinish, faery means. ‘Makes it pretty easy for you,’ is the obvious criticism; and I agree, I agree. But add, even if it does sound a little peevish: ‘You try and get rid of a dictator some time.’
When Raza Hyder had been President for nearly four years, the white panther started coming closer to the capital. That is to say, the murders and animal-slayings grew closer together, the sightings grew more frequent, the stories linked up with each other and formed a ring around the city. General Raddi told Raza Hyder that it was clear to him that these acts of terrorism were the work of the Al-Iskander group commanded by Haroun Harappa; whereupon, to his great surprise, the President thumped him heartily on the back. ‘Good show, Raddi,’ Hyder roared, ‘you aren’t such an idiot as I thought.’ Raza convened a Presidential press briefing, at which he pinned the blame for the so-called ‘headless murders’ on those infamous dacoits and gangsters who were being backed by the Russians and acting under the orders of the arch-bandit Haroun, and whose purpose was to sap the moral fibre of the nation, ‘to weaken our Godly resolve,’ Raza said; ‘destabilization is their intention, but I tell you they will never succeed.’
Secretly, however, he was aghast at this latest proof of his helplessness to resist his daughter. It seemed to him once again that the years of his greatness and of the construction of the great edifice of national stability had been no more than self-delusory lies, that this nemesis had been stalking him all along, permitting him to rise higher and higher so that his fall might be greater; his own flesh had turned against him, and no man has a defence against such treason. Yielding to a fatalistic melancholy born of his certainty of approaching doom, he left the day-to-day running of the government in the hands of his three elevated Generals, knowing that if Sufiya Zinobia were killed by the large search parties which were now scouring the countryside for terrorists, she would also be identified, and the shame of that naming would bring him down; but if she eluded her pursuers, that would be no help either, because he saw that what she was doing was moving slowly inwards, spiralling inexorably in to the centre, to the very room in which he paced, sleeplessly, crunching with every step the carpet of pine-kernel shells covering the floor,
while Omar Khayyam Shakil, similarly insomniac, stared out through the attic window at the menacing night.
Silence in his right ear. Maulana Dawood had vanished, never to speak to him again. Plagued by this silence, which was now as oppressive as the increasingly gloating sibilances of Iskander Harappa on his left side, Raza Hyder sank ever deeper into the quicksands of his despair, understanding that he had been left to his fate by God.
I have not changed my opinion of Mr Haroun Harappa: the man was a buffoon. Time inflicts strange ironies on its victims, however, and Haroun, who had once mouthed insincere revolutionary slogans and cracked jokes about Molotov cocktails while he perched on a sea-turtle’s back, was now the incarnation of the thing he had once despised, a notorious gang-leader with a band of desperadoes to command.
Both Rani and Arjumand Harappa were permitted by the authorities to issue public statements from Mohenjo deploring terrorist activity. But Haroun had developed the unstoppable mulishness of the genuinely stupid man; and the death of Isky Harappa had finally cured him of his obsession with the memory of Good News Hyder. It is not uncommon for a dead love to be reborn as its opposite, and nowadays the name ‘Hyder’ made Haroun see nothing but red. It was a further irony, therefore, that his hijacking of a civilian aircraft on the tarmac of the airport at Q. only served to distract attention, for a few moments, from the scandal of the white panther murders and the crisis of the Hyder regime.
When General Raddi was alerted to the seizure of the aeroplane at Q., he initiated a remarkable plan, instructing the local police authorities to flatter Harappa’s men as effusively as possible. ‘Tell them that a coup is in progress,’ Raddi suggested, amazing himself by the inspiration of his idea, ‘that Hyder has been seized and the women of Mohenjo will soon be free.’ Haroun Harappa fell for it, the fool, and he kept the aircraft on the ground, with its full complement of passengers, and awaited the call to power.
The day grew hotter. Condensation formed on the roof of the passenger cabin and fell on the occupants like rain. The aircraft’s supplies of food and drink ran low, and Haroun in the impatience of his naïvety radioed the control tower and demanded to be sent a meal. His request was greeted with great politeness; he was told that nothing was too good for the future leader of the people, and very soon a banquet of lavish proportions was sent to the aircraft, while the control tower begged Haroun to eat and drink his fill, assuring him that he would be informed the minute it was safe for him to emerge. The terrorists gorged themselves on that food of dreams, on the meatballs of hope-beyond-hope and the fizzy drinks of delusion, and within an hour of finishing they had all fallen fast asleep in the heat, with the top buttons of their trousers open. The police boarded the aircraft and manacled them all without firing a single shot.
General Raddi searched the C-in-C’s residence for Hyder, and found him in the attic of his despair. He entered to discover Raza and Omar Khayyam lost in silences. ‘Wonderful news, sir,’ he announced, but when he had completed his report he realized at once that he had somehow managed to put his foot in it once again, because the President rounded on him and roared: ‘So you’ve got Harappa in the lock-up, eh? So who do you propose to blame for the panther killings now?’ General Raddi blushed like a bride and began to apologize, but his puzzlement got the better of him, and he blurted out: ‘But sir, surely, the elimination of the Al-Iskander threat means that the headless murders will cease?’
‘Go, go, get away from me,’ Raza muttered, and Raddi saw that the President’s anger was muted, distant, as if he had accepted some secret fate. Nutshells crackled beneath Raddi’s departing boots.
The killings continued: farmers, pie-dogs, goats. The murders formed a death-ring round the house; they had reached the outskirts of the two cities, new capital and old town. Murders without rhyme or reason, done, it seemed, for the love of killing, or to satisfy some hideous need. The crushing of Haroun Harappa removed the rational explanation; panic began to mount. The search parties were doubled, then doubled again; still the slow, circling pattern of blood continued. The idea of the monster began to be treated with incredulous seriousness by the newspapers. ‘It is as if this beast can bewitch its victims,’ one article said. ‘Never any sign of a struggle.’ A cartoonist drew a picture of a giant cobra mesmerizing heavily-armed, but powerless, mongoose hordes.
‘Not long now,’ Raza Hyder said aloud in the attic. ‘This is the last act.’ Omar Khayyam agreed. It seemed to him that Sufiya Zinobia was trying her strength, testing the powers of those hypnotic eyes on larger and larger groups, petrifying her adversaries, who stood incapable of self-defence as her hands closed round their necks. ‘God knows how many she can take on,’ he thought, ‘maybe by now a regiment, the full Army, the whole world.’
Let us state plainly that Omar Khayyam was afraid. Raza had become fatalistically convinced that his daughter was coming for him, but she might just as easily be searching out the husband who drugged and chained her. Or the mother who named her Shame. ‘We must run,’ he told Raza, but Hyder seemed not to hear; the deafness of acceptance, of silence-in-the-right-ear and Isky-in-the-left had stopped his ears. A man abandoned by his God may choose to die.
When the lid blew off their secret, it began to seem like a miracle to Omar Khayyam that the truth had been kept hidden so long. Asgari the sweeperwoman had vanished without giving notice, unable, perhaps, to put up with the proliferation of pine-kernel shells; or maybe she was just the first of the servants to flee the terror, the first of them to guess what was likely to happen to anyone who stayed in that house … it seems probable, at any rate, that it was Asgari who spilled the beans. It was a sign of Raza’s declining power that two newspapers felt able to run stories hinting that the President’s daughter was a dangerous madwoman whom her father had permitted to escape from his residence some considerable time back, ‘without even bothering to advise the proper authorities,’ one journal cheekily said. Neither the press nor the radio went so far as to link the disappearance of Sufiya Zinobia with the ‘headless murders’, but it was in the wind, and in the bazaars and at the bus depots and over the tables of cheap cafés the monster began to be given its true name.
Raza summoned his triumvirate of Generals. Raddi, Bekar and Phisaddi arrived, to hear Hyder dredge up, for the last time, a few shards of his old authority. ‘Arrest these subversives!’ he demanded, waving newspapers at the Generals. ‘I want them in the darkest jail, I want them finished, defunct, kaput!’ The three officers waited until he had finished and then General Raddi said with the utter delight of a man who has long looked forward to such a moment: ‘Mr President, we do not believe such action would be wise.’
‘House arrest will follow in a day or two,’ Hyder told Omar Khayyam, ‘when they have prepared the ground. I told you: the final curtain. That Raddi, I should have known, I’m losing my grip. When a General dreams up a coup in this blasted country, you can bet he’ll try and carry it out, even if he only meant it in the beginning as a sort of joke, or trick.’
How does a dictator fall? Raddi Bekar Phisaddi lift journalistic embargoes. Certain fatal connections are hinted at in print: the dead turkeys of Pinkie Aurangzeb, Good News Hyder’s wedding-day fiasco and the stiff neck of Talvar Ulhaq, theories about the dead boys in the slums make the news at last. ‘The people are like dry wood,’ Raza Hyder says. ‘These sparks will start a fire.’
Then the last night comes.
All day a crowd has been gathering around the compound walls, growing angrier as it grows larger. Now it is night and they hear it milling around: chants, shouts, jeers. And sounds from further away like whistles, the glow of fires, shrieks. Where is she, Shakil wonders, will she come now, or when? How will it end, he muses: with the mob surging into the palace, lynchings, lootings, flames – or in the other, the stranger way, the people parting like mythological waters, averting their eyes, allowing her through, their champion, to do their dirty work: their Beast with her fiery eyes? Of course, he thinks insanely, of course th
ey have not sent soldiers to guard us, what soldier would set foot in this house of imminent death … and then he hears in the corridors below the soft rat-like sounds, the susurrations of servants fleeing the house, their bedrolls on their heads: bearers and hamals and sweeper-boys, gardeners and odd-job men, ayahs and maids. Some of them are accompanied by children, who might in the daylight look too well-fed for their ragged clothes, but who will pass, in the night, for the offspring of the poor. Twenty-seven children; as he hears them go he counts, in his imagination, their padding steps. And feels, from the invisible night-mob, an expectancy, filling the air.
‘For pity’s sake,’ he pleads with Raza, ‘let’s try and get out.’ But Hyder is a crushed figure, incapable for the first time in his life of producing moisture from his eyes. ‘Impossible,’ he shrugs, ‘the crowds. And beyond them there will be troops.’
The door creaks; a woman’s feet crush scattered empty shells. Approaching across the pine-kernel droppings is – is the forgotten figure of Bilquìs Hyder. Who is carrying a heap of shapeless garments, a selection from the work of her isolated years. Burqas, Omar Khayyam realizes, as hope bursts inside him; head-to-toe cloaks of invisibility, veils. The living wear shrouds as well as the dead. Bilquìs Hyder says simply, ‘Put these on.’ Shakil seizes, rushes into his womanly disguise; Bilquìs pulls the black fabric over her husband’s unresisting head. ‘Your son became a daughter,’ she tells him, ‘so now you must change shape also. I knew I was sewing these for a reason.’ The President is passive, allows himself to be led. Black-veiled fugitives mingle with escaping servants in the darkened corridors of the house.