2008 - A Case of Exploding Mangoes (15 page)

Like all good cops, he makes sense.

He pushes a stack of stapled papers towards me, puts a pencil on top and removes his wristwatch.

“There are no right or wrong answers in this,” he says, trying to reassure me. “The only thing that matters is that you finish all sixty questions in twenty-five minutes. The trick is not to think.”

You can say that again. If I wasn’t the thinking type I would still be marching up and down the parade square commanding some respect, not sitting here trying to pass loony tests.

I glance at the paper. The cover page just says ‘MDRS P8039’. There is no hint of what is under that cover sheet.

“Ready?” he asks, giving me a faint, encouraging smile.

I nod my head.

“Go.” He places his watch on the table.

Q1:
Would you describe your present mental condition as (a) depressed (b) mildly depressed (c) happy (d) none of the above

My dad was found hanging from a ceiling fan. Baby O has disappeared with a whole bloody plane. I have spent the past two nights locked up in a civilian shithole. ISI is investigating me for crimes that I have clearly not committed. I have just untied a blindfold from my own eyes with my own hands. What do you think?

There is no space to write, just little squares to tick.

Mildly depressed, it is then.

There are questions about my spiritual health—mildly spiritual; any suicidal thoughts—never; my sexual life—occasional wet dream. Belief in God?

I wish they had an option saying ‘I wish’.

I tick the square that says ‘firm believer’.

By the time it comes down to the questions about whether I’d rescue my best friend’s kitten drowning in a river or tell myself that cats can swim, I have begun to enjoy the test, and my pencil ticks the squares with the flourish of someone celebrating their own sanity.

The good cop picks up his wristwatch from the table and gives me an appreciative smile. He wants me to do well.

There is that inevitable question about drugs. It doesn’t give you the option to say ‘only once’. It doesn’t ask you if you enjoyed the experience.

Never, I tick.

Running back from Bannon’s room, instead of following the Martyrs’ Avenue I jumped over a hedge and started walking in the shrubs that surround the parade square. A lone firefly emerged from nowhere and hovered in front of me as if leading the way. The hedge ran around the parade square like a perfectly formed wall with sharply cut edges. The grass under my boots was damp with early-evening dew. I was thinking hard, like you think when your blood absorbs Chitrali hashish and rushes to your head with urgent messages from beyond, clearing all doubts, transforming your whims into immaculate plans. The messages I was receiving were so loud and clear that I kicked the hedge just to make sure that it was all real. The hedge lit up as thousands of fireflies blinked from their slumber and launched a fated assault on the night. Bloody good, I said; time to wake up and spread the light.

According to the
Reader’s Digest
’s special issue on the War on Drugs, no scientist has ever been able to map the effects of weed on the human mind. They shouldn’t even keep the Chitrali hashish in the same room as their lab rats.

What I saw was this: a shadow flitting around the pole that flies the Pakistani flag on the dais at the edge of the parade square. The man climbed onto the dais, looked left and right then slowly unwrapped the flag from the pole where it had been hoisted down for the night.

What fluttered through my mind was the flag draped around Dad’s coffin. I could hear the funeral prayers in my head, louder and louder. The coffin opened and through the crescent and star on the flag I saw Dad’s face grimacing at me.

What is a Shigri to do?

I obeyed my orders. I went down on my elbows and knees and locked onto my target. Years of taking forbidden short cuts and climbing the walls of the Academy to watch late-night movies had prepared me for this moment. I stayed glued to the hedge and waited.

Some sick fucker was trying to steal our flag. Some fucker was trying to rob my dad’s grave. I was thinking with the clarity that only Chitrali hashish could induce. I crawled on my knees and elbows, moving with the stealth of someone determined to save the country’s honour and his father’s medals. The fireflies swirled around my head. Wet foliage was finding its way into my boots and my uniform shirt, but my eyes were focused on the thief who was crouching on the dais now, struggling to untie the flag from the rope used to hoist it. He seemed in no hurry, but I quickened my crawl, determined to catch him red-handed. A thorn buried deep in the foliage lodged itself just behind my elbow. There was slight burning, followed by wetness on my sleeve. It didn’t slow my crawl.

I jumped over the hedge as I closed in on the dais, and before the thief could see me I had pounced and pinned him to the ground.

“Why are you wrestling with an old man like me?” Uncle Starchy’s voice was calm. He offered no resistance.

I felt like somebody had caught me poking the hole in my mattress. Never smoke that stuff again, was the promise I made myself.

“I thought somebody was messing with the flag,” I said, getting up.

“It’s already messed up, I was taking it for a wash,” he said, searching the dais as if he had dropped something. His hand disappeared under his shirt, fumbled there for a moment, then came out holding a small, empty jute sack.

“You are being foolish, son. Where do you think you are going?” he said, looking around in panic.

For a moment I thought he was talking to me. I was feeling stupid, but I wasn’t going anywhere, so I stood still and followed his gaze. He went down on his knees and put his face close to the dais and started moving around on his knees as if his foolish son was a worm.

Uncle Starchy had the slow grace of a lifelong drug addict.

He moved with such agility and sense of purpose that I joined in the search without knowing what we were looking for. He peered down from the dais and spotted something on the little grass patch between the dais and the edge of the parade square; with the flag wrapped around his hand, he lunged at it. I saw it only for a fraction of a second as it wriggled, raised its jade-green head and its zebra stripes convulsed along its lengths. Then it curled itself into a spiral. Uncle had caught it by the tail and was stroking the back of its head with his forefinger as if caressing a rare jewel. The krait’s head collapsed on itself and Uncle bundled it into the flag and held it with his two fingers, away from his body.

I would have thought I was still hallucinating if Uncle Starchy himself hadn’t launched into an explanation. “There is nothing pure in this country, not hashish, not heroin, not even chilli powder.”

I wondered what Uncle Starchy was on today.

“This is nature’s nectar.” He waved the bundled flag in front of my eyes. The snake seemed to have gone to sleep. The crumpled moon and star on the flag was still.

“Uncle, you need to see a doctor.” I put my finger to my forehead and moved it in a circle. “You’ve been drinking gasoline again.”

“That has a horrible smell and your tongue feels like a piece of dead meat. Disgusting.” He spat in disgust.

“And this?” I pointed towards the bundle in his hand. “That looks like a sharp bugger. It could kill you.”

Uncle smiled a faint smile, felt the bundle tentatively with his hand, then gripped something with his two fingers. He pulled it up gently and I got a good look at the beautiful head on this little beast, his eyes two miniature emeralds, his mouth opened to reveal a gleamy, checkered pattern on the floor of his mouth; his forked tongue lashing out in angry little stabs.

Before I could realise what Uncle Starchy had in mind, he opened the buttons on his shirt, bared his shoulder and brought the krait’s head within striking distance. Its tongue lapped into Uncle Starchy’s shoulder. He jerked his hand backwards, his head tilted left in slow motion and almost fell on his shoulder, his eyes closed and a whimper escaped his mouth. Then his eyes opened slowly. They were alert, like two soldiers starting their watch. His forehead, normally strewn with a network of wrinkles, was relaxed. Even his shadow seemed to have lengthened and ran the entire length of the parade square.

He tied a tight knot on the flag, stuffed it in the jute sack and, having secured his prisoner, looked at me as if expecting a review of his performance.

“It could kill you,” I said, sounding and feeling protective.

“Only if you’re greedy,” he said, and then added as an afterthought, “or if you inject it.”

“What?”

“It’s a medicine if you take it pure. Mix it with metal and it becomes poison. You might feel as if you are drugged for a while, but in the end it will kill you. Try this. Put a drop on the point of a knife, scratch an elephant’s skin with it and the elephant will drop dead. Elephant might dance first. Elephant might think he’s got wings. Elephant might drag his feet. But elephant will drop dead in the end.”

The moon shone through a transparent cloud and Uncle’s shadow shrunk to his own length as if he was being folded into a manageable size.

“How much for a shot?” I said, slipping my hand into my empty pocket, fully aware that Uncle Starchy never charged for his wares.

“Who do you think I am, sir? A drug pusher?” He was back to his usual mumbling self. The light in his eyes was already fading.

“I need to take care of some family business,” I said apologetically.

“He is drained now.” He patted his jute sack. “It’ll take him another week to produce what you need.”

On the seventh day I opened the stack of freshly starched uniforms that Uncle Starchy had deposited on my bed, and a finger-sized glass phial rolled out with a few drops of amber liquid sticking to its bottom.

I am offered tea, probably as a reward for completing the first test two minutes before the allotted twenty-five minutes. I hate tea, but the hot syrup singes the back of my throat and for a moment the smell that had lodged itself on my palate is burnt away.

The second test has no questions, just pictures. Not proper pictures but some crazy bugger’s abstract version of life in which you can’t tell whether it’s an amoeba or a map of India’s strategic defence capabilities.

Careful, I tell myself. I linger over my cup of tea. This is where they can really tell the loonies from borderline geniuses like me.

The first picture, I swear, is of a fox’s severed head.

“Lake. Bermuda Triangle, maybe,” I say.

Every third month there is an article in
Reader’s Digest
about aeroplanes disappearing over the Bermuda Triangle. It has to be the sanest answer. I can see that the doctor is scribbling down my answers; in fact, he is writing down much more than I am saying.

There is a giant bat hanging upside down in the second picture.

“Bow tie.”

“Anything else come to your mind?” he asks.

“A pink-and-black bow tie. A very big bow tie.”

I am shown two penises attacking each other.

“Military boots,” I say. “Military boots at ease.”

A man hunched in the middle of a mushroom cloud.

“A hurricane. Maybe an underwater submarine.”

Bloodthirsty witches are wrestling.

“Horseshoe.”

A pair of baby pigs stare at me.

“Yoda in the mirror.”

The last picture is as clear as the painter of these sick pictures could make them; a pair of testicles placed on a block of pink ice.

“Mangoes,” I say. “Or some fruit. Maybe on ice.”

I sit and stare into the empty cup of tea while the doctor records his last observations feverishly on his notepad.

He is definitely in a hurry. He throws his pictures, papers, pencil in his briefcase, wishes me luck—“Good luck, young man”—and is already standing at the door, adjusting his beret; another Medical Corps insignia, another pair of snakes with their tongues out.

“Sir, why were you sent—?”

“Remember, young man, our motto is
To do or die. Never ask
.”

“Sir. Medical Corps’ motto is to
To serve humanity without
—”

“Look, young man, I have to catch a flight to Islamabad. They want the results back immediately. They are probably trying to find out if you know what you have been doing. Do you?”

“I haven’t done anything.”

“That answer doesn’t figure in this questionnaire so I can’t really include it in my assessment. You can tell him that.”

He signals to the soldier who brought me from the bathroom and who has suddenly appeared in the doorway.

“Good luck. It seems you are from a good family.”

The soldier doesn’t blindfold me. He walks me into a room that is trying very hard to look like a torture chamber. A barber’s chair with rubber straps on its armrests is connected to amateurish-looking electrical devices. An assortment of canes, leather whips and scythes are arranged on a table along with a glass jar of chilli powder. Nylon ropes hang from a hook on a wall and a pair of old tyres is connected to the ceiling with metal chains, probably to hang the prisoners upside down. The only new item is a white Philips iron, unplugged. A torture chamber that doubles as a laundry room, I wonder. It all seems decorative, a bit like an abandoned theatre set. But then I look up at the ceiling, see splashes of dried blood and, looking around again, realise that all the paraphernalia is functional. I still can’t figure out how the hell they managed to splash someone’s blood onto the ceiling.

“Sir, please take off your uniform,” the soldier says respectfully.

I guess I am about to find out.

“Why?” I say, trying to muster up some officer-like dignity.

“I want to make sure there are no marks on your body.”

I take off my shirt, slowly. He takes it from me and puts it on a hanger. My boots are put aside. He folds my trousers carefully. I spread my hands, challenging him to come and do whatever it is that he needs to do. He points to my underwear.

I oblige.

He goes around me. I stand upright, hands folded at the back, not fiddling, not scratching. If he wants to see me naked, he’ll not get the satisfaction of looking at a coy pansy.