2008 - A Case of Exploding Mangoes (11 page)

Slowly, very slowly, answers begin to emerge in my head, answers to the questions that Major Kiyani will inevitably throw at me. He needs to find out what I know. I need to make sure that every bit I give him widens the gap between what he knows and what he would like to know. The premise for my optimism is a philosophical notion: Major Kiyani would not be taking me away if he
knew
. I wouldn’t be sitting on a starched white cover of the comfy seat of this Corolla listening to ghazals, if he knew. I would be in the back of a jeep, handcuffed and blindfolded and charge-sheeted and sentenced by now. Or maybe hanging from my own bed sheet in my own dorm.

Where is Major Kiyani from?

Inter Services Intelligence.

What does the agency do?

Investigate.

What do they investigate?

What they don’t know.

Before falling off the edge of the cliff, I am sure, everyone tells himself a story which has a happy ending. This is mine.

The optimism goes straight to my bladder and I want Major Kiyani to get us to our destination, wherever it is. The road signs tell me that we are headed towards Lahore, but there are half a dozen turns in the road leading to various parts of the country and Major Kiyani probably travels in the opposite direction to where he wants to take you. We sit for a long time in a traffic jam caused by roadblocks set up by the police, as a convoy of black limousines crawls past.

“Everything I know about this profession your dad taught me,” he says, looking ahead. “But it seems you never learned anything from him. Americans are trouble. I know your friend Bannon is behind this mad adventure.”

“Then why isn’t he travelling with you instead of me?” I ask.

“You know why,” he says. “He is an American, our guest. He shouldn’t be mixed up with the likes of you. Drill is for the parade square. What he does off the square is my business.”

“Have you found the plane?” I say, careful not to mention Obaid.

He turns his face towards me; a truck comes at us; I jump in my seat and hold the dashboard. With the slightest movement of the steering wheel, he swerves the car into a service road and parks at a roadside restaurant. He opens the glove compartment, takes the gun and tucks it under his shirt.

He opens the car door then looks back at me. “You and your friend probably think you invented buggery, but it existed long before you started wearing this uniform.”

He orders food. I order dal, he asks for chicken karahi. “Make his special,” he tells the waiter. “Our young man needs nourishment.” We eat in silence. The food is too spicy for my mountain tastes. I need to go to the loo. I am not sure whether I should just get up and go or ask for his permission.

I get up, pointing towards the loo. He signals with his eyes for me to keep sitting. “Maybe you should wait. We won’t be long.”

I look at the turbaned man guarding the restaurant loo and think maybe he is right. Roadside restaurants’ loos are generally filthy and I’d rather be relieving myself in an open field under a star-filled sky rather than in a room full of piss and the smell of spicy shit.

A waiter hovers around us after we finish our dinner, expecting further orders. Major signs his name in the air, the waiter brings the bill, Major scribbles something on it and gets up to leave without paying anything.

He must be a regular here, I think. He must have an account with these people.

The rest of the journey is a battle between the muscles that control my bladder and Major Kiyani’s sudden fit of patriotism. I nod my head enthusiastically when he reminds me that the last time anyone tried to disappear with a plane the country broke into two. I squeeze my thighs and practically jump in my seat when he talks about my dad’s illustrious career. “You know what they said about your dad? That he was one of the ten men standing between the Soviets and the Free World.” I nod my head enthusiastically when he goes on and on about the sacrifices that invisible soldiers like him and my dad have to make for the sake of national security.

I squeeze my thighs. I want to say, “Can I pee first and then we can save the world together?” Our car takes its final turn into a narrow road that leads to the majestically sombre gate of the Lahore Fort.

In the historic city of Lahore, the Fort is a very historic place. It was built by the same guy who built the Taj Mahal, the Mughal King Shahjahan. He was thrown into prison by his own son, a kind of forced premature retirement. I have never been to the Fort but I have seen it in a shampoo ad.

Do I look like the kind of person who needs a lesson in history at midnight? The Fort is clearly closed to tourists. I am sure the Major can get after-hours access anywhere, but shouldn’t he be taking me to an interrogation centre or a safe house or wherever it is that he takes people when he wants to have a chat?

As the car approaches the gate two soldiers emerge from the shadows. The Major slides his window down and stretches his neck out but doesn’t speak. The gate, probably built to accommodate an elephant procession, opens slowly and reveals an abandoned city dreamed up by a doomed king.

Parts of the Fort are dimly lit, revealing bits of its stone walls so wide that horses can gallop on them, gardens so vast and green that they disappear and appear again after you have driven for a while. The Court for the Commons and the Ladies’ Courtyard stand in their crumbling, faded glory. I wonder where the famous Palace of Mirrors is. That’s where they did the shampoo advert.

The only signs of life in this deserted sprawl of useless splendour are two army trucks with their headlights on and engines idling. Major Kiyani parks the car beside these trucks. We get out of the car and start walking towards the Court for the Commons. It’s dimly lit and I can’t really see the source of the light. I expect spear-carrying Mughal soldiers to appear from behind the pillars to take us to the King, who, depending on his mood, would either ask us to join in his late-night debauchery or have our heads chopped off and thrown from the walls of the Fort.

Major Kiyani takes an abrupt turn and we start descending a stairway made of concrete, definitely not built by the Mughals. We enter a vast, empty hall that looks eerily like an aviation hangar. Right in the middle of the hall, sitting under what must be a thousand-watt bulb, is a subedar major who gets up and salutes Major Kiyani as we approach his metal table, which is piled high with heaps of bulging yellow folders.

Major Kiyani nods his head but doesn’t speak a word. He pulls up a chair, grabs a file and starts flicking through the pages as if oblivious to my presence.

Then he remembers.

“Show Under Officer Shigri to the toilet,” he says without looking up from his file. I walk behind the Subedar Major down a well-lit corridor lined with iron doors on both sides, with stencilled white numbers on them. There is absolute silence in the corridor, but behind the doors I can hear the muted snores of dreaming men. At the end of the corridor there is a small rusted iron door without a number. The Subedar Major produces a key, opens the lock and moves aside. I open the door and take a step inside. The door hits my back and is locked behind me. That terrible smell of the closed toilet which has not seen a drop of water for ages welcomes me, my head hits the wall, a thousand-watt bulb is switched on. So bright is the light, so overpowering the stench, that I cannot see anything for the first few moments.

It is a loo, that much is clear. There is a hole in the ground so full of indistinguishable faeces that bubbles are forming on its surface. The floor is covered with a thick slimy layer of some garish liquid. There is a water tap one foot above the ground but it has stayed dry for so long that it’s rusting. There is a grey WC with a broken chain, I open it and take a peek inside. There is two inches of water at: the bottom, reflecting its inner rusted orange surface.

My need to pee has disappeared forever. The stench is so strong that it’s difficult to think about anything else.

I stand against the wall and close my eyes.

They have a file on me somewhere, which says Under Officer Shigri can’t stand dirty bathrooms. I have done my jungle survival course, I have learned how to hunt snakes in the desert and quench my thirst. No one ever thought of designing a course on how to survive stinking bathrooms.

I charge at the door and start banging with both my clenched fists. “Open this bloody door. Get me out of this shithole. This place stinks.”

I bang my head on the door a couple of times and the stupidity of my actions becomes obvious to me. All the shouting takes the edge off the stench. It’s still the smell of piss and shit but somehow it’s become subdued. Or am I already getting used to it?

They are in no mood to interrogate me at this hour. This is going to be my abode for the night.

My back goes to the wall, I clench my toes in my boots and resolve to spend the night standing up. There is no way I am going to give these butchers the pleasure of watching me lie down in this pool of piss. There is scribbling on the wall but I can’t be bothered to read it. I can make out the words General Zia and his mother and sister, my imagination can connect the dots.

The idea that this place has hosted people who were angry enough at the General to write things about his mother and sister is puzzling. I might be down on my luck but the last time I checked I was still a trainee officer in uniform and the fact that they have put me in this shithole for civilians is the ultimate insult.

Colonel Shigri had tried to talk me out of joining the armed forces.

“The officer corps is not what it used to be,” he said, pouring himself the first whisky of the evening after returning from his umpteenth trip to Afghanistan.

“People who served with me were all from good families. No, I don’t mean wealthy families. I mean respectable people, good people. When you asked them where they were from, you knew their fathers and grandfathers were distinguished people. And now you’ve got shopkeepers’ sons, milkmen’s boys, people who are not good for anything else. I don’t want those half-breeds fucking up my son’s life.”

Daddy, you should see me now.

He knew in his heart that I was not convinced. He called me again when he was pouring his last whisky, his seventh probably. He was a three-whiskies-an-evening man but he felt unusually thirsty when he returned from his Afghan trips. There was bitterness in his voice now that I wasn’t familiar with at that point but which would become permanent.

“I have three war decorations, and wounds to prove them,” he said. “You go to any officers’ mess in the country and you’ll find a few people whose lives I saved. And now? Look at me. They have turned me into a pimp. I am a man who was trained to save lives, now I trade in them.”

He kept twirling his whisky glass in his fingers and kept repeating the word ‘pimp’ over and over again.

I doze off and dream of pissing in the cold clear stream that runs by our house on Shigri Hill. I wake up with my knees trembling and the grime from the floor seeping into my toes. The left side of my trousers is soaking wet. I feel much better.

Stay on your bloody feet. Stay on your bloody feet.

That is the first thing I tell myself before taking stock of my situation. What did they do to the renegade soldiers of the Mughal Army? A swift decapitation or being scrunched under the foot of an elephant would probably be a better fate than this.

The stench has grown fetid and hangs heavy in the air. I close my eyes and try to imagine myself back on Shigri Hill. The mountain air wafts in despite the iron doors and the underground prison and the walls of the Fort. It swirls around me, bringing back the smell of earth dug by goats’ hooves, the aroma of green almonds and the sound of a clear, cold stream gushing past. The silence of the mountains is punctuated by a humming sound, coming from a distance but not very far away. Somebody is singing in a painful voice. Before I can identify the voice a bucket of water is poured over my head and my face is pushed so close to a thousand-watt bulb that my lips burn. I don’t know who is asking the questions. It could be Major Kiyani. It could be one of his brothers without uniform. My answers, when I can muster them, are met with further questions. This is not an interrogation. They are not interested in my answers. The buggers are only interested in sex.

Did Lieutenant Bannon and Obaid have a sexual relationship?

They were very close. But I don’t know. I don’t think so.

Did you and Obaid have a sexual relationship?

Fuck you. No. We were friends.

Did you fuck him?

I can hear you. The answer is no, no, no.

He wasn’t in his bed the night before he disappeared. Do you know where he was?

The only person he could have been with is Bannon. They went on walks sometimes.

Is that why you marked him present in the Fury Squadron roll call?

I assumed he would come straight to the parade square. He did that occasionally.

Did Obaid have any suicidal tendencies? Did he ever talk about taking his own life?

I imagine a two-seater aeroplane going down on all its three axes and the hot white glare of the bulb begins to fade away.

He read poetry. He sang songs about dying but he never actually talked about dying. Not to me. Not in any suicidal way.

T
he large reception room in the Army House was reserved for receiving visiting foreign dignitaries from the USA and Saudi Arabia, the VVIPs. After winning his air dash from Saudi Arabia to Islamabad, Prince Naif was seated on a velvet sofa, smoking Marlboro Reds and boasting about the sound barrier that his F16 broke on his way to dinner. “Our brother Bill is probably still flying over the Arabian Sea.” Laughing, the Prince raised both arms and mimed the flight of a tired bird.

“Allah’s glory,” said General Zia. “It’s all His blessing. I went on a ride in one of ours and my old bones were aching for days. You, by the grace of Allah, are still a young man.”

General Zia kept looking out of the corner of his eyes at Dr Sarwari, who had accompanied Prince Naif at his request but seemed to have been forgotten in Prince Naif’s victory celebrations. General Zia wanted to have a word with the royal doctor about his condition.