2008 - A Case of Exploding Mangoes (16 page)

I am waiting for the interrogation to start but he doesn’t seem to have any questions.

“Sir, please stand in a corner and don’t touch anything.” He plugs the iron into a socket before leaving the room.

Even professional torturers must procrastinate sometimes, I tell myself. Or maybe it’s some kind of do-it-yourself torture system; you stand and stare at these instruments and imagine how your various body parts would respond to them. I try not to think about the amber light on the iron. Major Kiyani did say no marks.

He returns with the yellow-green file and a new-found interest in my family.

“Are you related to the late Colonel Shigri?”

I take a deep breath and nod.

“I came to his funeral. You probably don’t remember me.”

I search his face for any clues to his intentions.

“I hope you’ll forgive me, sir. I am only doing my duty.”

I nod my head again as if I have already forgiven him. He seems like someone who wants to help but doesn’t want to be misunderstood.

“You know he built this place. On two weeks’ notice. I was the construction supervisor.”

“I thought Mughals built this place.”

A torture chamber is not exactly the right place to discuss the achievements of your ancestors.

“No, sir, this extension, the offices, the barracks and all this stuff underground. He ordered the construction.”

Nice work, Dad.

The file in his hand is marked ‘Confidential’ and carries my air force number. I wonder what it says about me. About Obaid? About us?

“Did he order this as well? Did he use to…?” I wave my hand towards the barber’s chair and chains hanging from the ceiling.

“The Colonel was only doing his duty.” He shuts the file and clasps it to his chest under his folded arms. I knew Dad was running the logistics of guerrilla war in Afghanistan for General Zia. I knew he was liaising between the Americans who were funding the war and the ISI, which was responsible for distributing these funds to the mujahideen. But he never told me his duty involved building and managing facilities like this one.

“We are all doing our duty,” I whisper and lunge towards the table besides the barber’s chair, where I pick up a scythe and hold it to my neck. The metal is cold but it doesn’t seem that it can cut anything.

“Don’t move. If you move you’ll find lots of marks on my body.”

He unfolds his hands, still not sure what I want from him.

“Give me that file.”

He clutches the file with one hand and extends his arm towards me. “Sir, don’t be foolish.”

“For five minutes. Nobody will know.” The threat in my voice is overshadowed by the implicit reassurance.

He moves hesitantly towards me, clutching the file to his side. He probably has no experience of being blackmailed by naked prisoners.

“This is the least you can do after all my father did for you,” I urge him.

I have no idea what Dad might have done for him. But he did say he had attended the funeral.

“Five minutes.” He looks towards the door and scratches the half-moon scar on his cheek, which has suddenly turned red.

I nod energetically and extend my hand towards him, offering him the scythe as a sign of my peaceful intentions.

He takes the scythe with one hand and gives me the file. His hand trembles.

The preliminary report filed by Major Kiyani…

I flip over the cover page. The first report is my own statement. I turn the page and something falls out. I pick up a Polaroid picture from the floor. The picture is fuzzy; a mangled propeller, a smashed canopy, a wing ripped from the fuselage. It all adds up to a crashed MF17. The picture has a date at the bottom; it shows the day Obaid went AWOL. My eyes blur for a moment. I put the picture back in the file. Another form, another statement with Bannon’s signature. “Paper profile: Under Officer Shigri.” Words like
bright officer, personal loss, secretive behaviour
flash in front of my eyes before I hear footsteps approaching the room.

“Later,” says the soldier. He grabs the file from me and before I can anticipate his next move, lifts me up by my waist, shoves my head into the tyre and pulls a metal chain. I find myself hanging halfway between the floor and the ceiling.

Major Kiyani’s voice is hoarse and he is not pleased to see me swinging calmly in the air, my torso balanced on the tyre.

“I said no marks.” Major Kiyani walks below me in a circle. Dunhill smoke wafts into my nostrils and I inhale it eagerly. “I didn’t say, start a picnic here.”

Then he picks up the Philips iron and stands close to my head, his gelled hair and burly eyebrows level with my face. He brings the tip of the iron close to my left eyebrow. My eyes squeeze shut in panic. I smell burning hair and jerk my head backwards.

“Tarzan, people are asking about you. You better start talking before their goodwill runs out. It would take me less than a minute to iron the truth out of you but then you would never want to take your clothes off in front of anyone. I am sure even you can’t live with that.”

Then he turns towards another soldier who has followed him into the room.

“Put some clothes on him and take him to the VIP room.”

C
lutching the rolled-up newspaper in both hands, the First Lady walked across the lawns of the Army House, ignoring the duty gardener who lifted his head from a rose bush and raised his soiled hand to his forehead to offer her salaam. As she approached the main gate of the Army House, the duty guards stepped out of their cabin, opened the gate and got ready to follow her. She waved the newspaper at the guards without looking up, signalling them to stay at their post. They saluted and returned to their cabin. The standard procedures for Security Code Red that the guards were following didn’t say anything about the First Lady’s movements.

She couldn’t remember the last time she had walked through the gate. She always went out in a mini-convoy of two outriders, her own black Mercedes-Benz followed by an open-top jeep full of armed commandos. The road under her feet looked like an abandoned runway, neat and endless. She had never noticed the ancient trees that lined the road on both sides. With their whitewashed trunks and branches laden with dozing sparrows, they seemed like the backdrop for a ghost story. She was surprised when nobody stopped her at the entrance to the Camp Office adjacent to the Army House, where her husband was busy playing the President.

“Get in the bloody queue,” a voice shouted at her, and she found herself standing at the end of a long queue of women, all middle-aged or old, all covered in white dupattas. She could tell from their faces that they were poor but had made the effort to dress up for the occasion. Their cotton shalwar qameez suits were neat and pressed; some had dusted their cheeks and necks with talcum powder. She noticed at least two shades of red nail polish. The First Lady could see her husband at the other end of the queue; teeth flashing, moustache doing its little dance for the television camera, the middle parting in his oiled hair glinting under the sun.

He was distributing white envelopes and as he handed over the envelopes he patted the women’s heads as if they were not poor women getting some much needed cash but schoolchildren at a morning assembly receiving consolation prizes from their headmaster. The First Lady thought of barging forward and confronting him in front of the television crew. She thought of unfurling the newspaper in front of the camera and giving a speech, telling the world that this Man of Faith, the Man of Truth, this Friend of the Widows was nothing but a tit-ogler.

It was only a passing whim, because she realised not only that her speech would never make it to the nation’s television screens, it would also start some ugly rumours in Islamabad which would circulate to the four corners of the country before the day ended: that the First Lady was a lunatic who felt jealous of the poor widows her husband was trying to help. She thought of opening the newspaper and showing the picture to the other women in the queue, but realised that they would think she was overreacting. “What is wrong with a president talking to white women?” they’d ask. “All presidents do that.”

She looked at the long line of women ahead of her, pulled her dupatta over her forehead tightly and decided to wait patiently in the queue, inching forward as the women in the queue moved towards their benefactor. Her hands kept rolling the newspaper into a tighter and tighter cone. The woman in front of the First Lady had been eyeing her suspiciously since she joined the queue. She looked at the First Lady’s diamond ring, her gold earrings, her mother-of-pearl necklace and hissed. “Did your husband leave you all this jewellery, or did you have to kill him to get it?”

With General Zia refusing to leave the Army House even for state functions because of Code Red, his Information Minister was running out of indoor ideas to keep his boss in the television news headlines. When General Zia ordered him to slot in some prime time for the President’s Rehabilitation Programme for Widows, the Information Minister was reluctant at first. “But we always do that during Ramadan, sir,” the Information Minister had muttered apologetically. He was not sure where to get hold of so many widows at this time of the year.

“Is there a law in this country which prohibits me from helping poor people in the month of June?” General Zia shouted back at him. “Has there been an economic survey that says our widows need help during Ramadan but not tomorrow morning?”

The Information Minister crossed his hands at his crotch and shook his head enthusiastically. “It’s a brilliant idea, sir. It would be a nice change for the news agenda. People are losing interest in all the talk about the Soviets going home and our Afghan mujahideen shooting at each other.”

“And make sure that the hundred-rupee notes are new. Those old women love the smell of fresh currency.”

The orders went out to the Ministry of Social Welfare to produce three hundred properly dressed widows for the ceremony. The cashiers at the State Bank clocked up overtime stuffing new one-hundred rupee notes into three hundred white envelopes. A press release was sent out announcing that the President would distribute alms to the deserving widows. The Information Minister drafted an additional note which would be released to the editors after the ceremony. It said that the President mingled with the widows and their courage brought tears to his eyes.

In the morning, a convoy of buses deposited two hundred and forty-three women at the Army House guardroom. The officials at the Department of Social Affairs, despite their best efforts, had not been able to round up the required number of genuine widows and at the last moment had roped in some of their female staff, their friends and relatives.

A panicked major on guard duty called Brigadier TM and told him that there were hundreds of women waiting to get into the Camp Office. He had no means of body-searching them as there were no women police on duty and according to the Code Red standard operating procedures he couldn’t let them in without a proper body search.

“Hold them there,” Brigadier TM said, abruptly, terminating his morning exercise regime of five hundred push-ups. He jumped into his jeep, buckling on his holster with one hand.

The women milled outside the gate of the Army House. Some of them who had attended these ceremonies before threatened the duty guards and said they would complain to the President. “We are his guests, not some beggars off the road.
He
invited us.” The guards, getting more jittery by the moment, were relieved when Brigadier TM jumped out of his jeep and ordered the women to line up in three rows.

For Brigadier TM, an all-women gathering was a security nightmare even when he wasn’t implementing Code Red. All those loose shalwar qameez dresses, all the flowing dupattas, the bags, the jewellery that sent the metal detectors wild and then the bloody burqas! How did you know they weren’t carrying a rocket launcher beneath that tent? How did you even know they were women? Brigadier TM put his foot down straight away on the issue of widows in burqas. He sent for the Information Minister, who was supervising the camera crew on the lawns of the Camp Office. “I know these burqas look good on television and I know the President likes them but our security level is red and I can’t allow in any ninjas whose faces I can’t see.”

The Information Minister, always reasonable when it came to dealing with men in uniform, promptly agreed and ordered the women in burqas to board the bus and leave. Their loud protests and at least one offer to take off the burqa were ignored. Then Brigadier TM turned his attention to the remaining women, now subdued after seeing what had happened to their sisters.

“You will not leave the queue,” Brigadier TM shouted at the top of his voice. “Nobody will bend down to touch the President’s feet. Nobody will try to hug him. If he puts his hand on your head, don’t move abruptly. If anyone disobeys these instructions…” Brigadier TM put his hand on his holster and then stopped himself. It seemed a bit excessive to threaten a bunch of widows with his revolver. “If any of you break these rules you’ll never be invited to meet the President again.” Brigadier TM realised the lameness of his own threat as the rows began to dissolve and the widows started chattering, like students catching up after the summer vacation. He jumped into the jeep and sped away towards the marquee on the lawns of the Camp Office, where the camera crew was getting ready to film the ceremony. Brigadier TM saw a lone woman, with a newspaper in hand, walking towards the widows whom the guards were now trying to form into a queue. He thought of turning round and finding out why the hell she wasn’t sticking with the other widows but then he noticed that General Zia was already talking to the Information Minister. He shouted at her before rushing towards the President.

“Get in the bloody queue.”

General Zia always felt a holy tingling in the marrow of his backbone when surrounded by people who were genuinely poor and needy. He could always tell the really desperate ones from the merely greedy. During the eleven years of his rule, he had handed out multimillion-dollar contracts for roads he knew would dissolve at the first hint of monsoon. He had sanctioned billion-rupee loans for factories he knew would produce nothing. He did these things because it was statecraft and he had to do it. He never got any pleasure out of it. But this ritual of handing over an envelope containing a couple of hundred rupees to a woman who didn’t have a man to take care of her made him feel exalted. The gratitude on these women’s faces was heartfelt, the blessings they showered over him were genuine. General Zia believed that Allah couldn’t ignore their pleas. He was sure their prayers were fast-tracked.