2008 - A Case of Exploding Mangoes (20 page)

“I wanted to check they have given you food because sometimes they like to starve the newcomers. You can share mine. Lentil soup garnished with gravel and fifty-fifty bread that is half flour and half sand. Your military chefs are very consistent. I have received the same food for nine years.”

I feel the guilt that the privileged prisoners must feel. I put my plate aside. “No. They have given me food.”

We sit in silence for a while. The absence of any prospects of freedom in the near future hangs heavy in the air. Suddenly this plate of rich, hot food seems like the promise of a long sentence. I feel the walls of this dungeon closing in on me.

“Did your strike work then?” I am desperate for conversation about anything that is not the quality of food or the texture of darkness in this part of the Fort.

“The idea was that people faced with so much uncollected garbage would rise up in solidarity with us. But nobody even noticed. Our people get used to everything. Even the stench of their own garbage.”

“I am sure someone must have noticed. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”

“Oh yes, you people noticed. After some intelligence analyst realised that mullahs couldn’t infiltrate our ranks, they started cultivating our own Maoist faction.” His whisper suddenly gets animated. “I wouldn’t say it in public but Maoists really are worse than mullahs.”

I don’t know why he is going on about Maoists, but I know he wants a reaction to his confession. But the only Mao I know is that Chinese guy with the cap and I have no clue what his people are doing in Pakistan, let alone in the sweepers’ union.

“That is probably true,” I say thoughtfully. “China has produced nothing worthwhile since Sun Tzu. Even the fighter jets they give us are flying coffins.”

Secretary General is clearly not interested in the quality of his motherland’s air defences.

“I proved to them, with an empirical analysis of our so-called peasants’ movement, that our modes of production are determined by the petty bourgeoisie and not what they call feudal landlords, but these Maoists are very dogmatic. In Pakistan, you cannot have a peasants’ revolution. Don’t you agree?” He is begging me to agree.

“Yes,” I say. “Of course. Pakistani peasants are happy, no one goes hungry here.”

“Is that what they teach you in the army? That our peasants are well fed and every night before going to sleep they dance their joyous dance around their bountiful crops. You people live on another planet. This is even worse than the Maoist propaganda.”

“They don’t teach us anything like that,” I say, and it’s true. “Just because I wear a uniform, you think that I don’t know anything about our people. I am from this country, I am also a son of the soil. I come from a peasant family.” That may not be accurate, but we did have an orchard in our backyard on Shigri Hill.

“Don’t use your pseudo-feudal jargon with me. That is precisely the problem with our peasants. Maoists think that we live in an agrarian society. But look at our modes of production, look at the land ownership patterns. We live in a pre-agrarian, pre-feudal era. And these Maoists talk of a peasant revolution. It’s the worst kind of bourgeois romanticism.”

I think about the interrogators who have had to deal with him. He probably taught them a thing or two. Secretary General is not finished with me yet. “Have you seen a single peasant in this prison?”

“You are the only person I have met,” I say.

He is silent for a moment, probably suddenly realising that I am very new to this place, and that he doesn’t know all that much about me. But his urge to conclude his argument overcomes the awkwardness of our exchange and he continues.

“There aren’t any. Not real peasants. Not revolutionary peasants. The ones I have met are fighting
for
their feudal lords, not
against
them. They are fighting to preserve the status quo. They are fighting so that their feudal lords can keep them in their shackles. They are subverting the genuine class struggle of workers like me and you.”

I am relieved. I am finally in the fold. I am a worker and my struggle is genuine.

“According to our party manifesto, there is no difference between a sweeper and a soldier,” he says, I think just to underline the rules of our engagement. “These are both forms of exploitative labour that the military-industrial complex thrives on.”

I have no problems being called a worker in a generic sense but I don’t think I would make a very good sweeper.

“Were you a sweeper?” I ask him. “I mean before becoming the Secretary General.”

“No,” he says, in an irritated voice. “I was a mango farmer before I started organising the sweepers.”

“Secretary General, can I raise a point of dissent here? I suspect you oppose a peasants’ revolution because you fear that first of all they’ll take over your mango orchards,” I say in a triumphant tone, as if we were not in an underground prison but at a meeting of his central executive committee. I sigh deeply and imagine smoke-filled rooms, littered with overflowing ashtrays.

Secretary General is silent for a moment, then he clears his throat and speaks in an apologetic voice. “I was a Maoist myself. I organised the mango orchard owners all over the country. I was the founding chairman. Within a year we had formed strategic alliances with mango farmers in India and Mexico. But our members were bourgeois at heart, every single one of them a class enemy. They would attend our study circles during the day and then go and throw mango parties for your generals at night. If only they had understood, we would have become the largest farmers’ collective in the entire capitalist world. Imagine the blow to the capitalist economy.”

“Secretary General,” I address him formally, “can I put another point of dissent on record? Do you really think you can bring the capitalist economy down by fixing mango prices?”

There is silence at the other end. I close my eyes and when I open them again the darkness seems tinged with fluorescent circles dancing in the dead air.

“I realised that. That’s why I declassed myself and started organising the sweepers. But your army people are scared of even the poorest of the poor who clean your gutters.” At this he replaces the brick in the wall.

On the floor, face down, my left cheek on the cool sand, arms stretched out, palms upward, I am trying to clear my head of sweepers and Maoists and peasants and fluorescent circles. Secretary General seems too well read to have plotted anything, let alone a plan involving a bomb in a gutter. Will he believe me if I tell him about my plan? We can probably compare notes. We can probably learn from each other’s failure, share tips about our interrogators. There is complete silence from his side. I guess it’s my turn to make a peace move.

I take the leftover food and push the brick towards him. “I have got some chicken here if you’d like it,” I whisper.

I can hear him sniff the plate. His hand enters the hole and he shoves the plate towards me, spilling the curry over my shirt. “I don’t eat collaborators’ leftovers.” The brick is shoved in with a sense of finality.

I guess I am not going to be part of the revolution.

I take my shirt off and try to clean it, in the blackness, with the blindfold hanging around my neck. There is nothing more disgusting than a curry stain on your uniform shirt.

Someone cares enough about me to provide me with proper food but not enough to set me free or at least put me in a cell with a window.

Secretary General has read my thoughts. The brick scrapes and he speaks as if talking to himself. “You know the most beautiful thing in this fort? Not the Palace of Mirrors or the Court for the Commoners. No. It’s an underground cell with a window. They put me there for a month. You can actually see the sky. The window opens on to the lawns of the Fort. Sparrows sing there all day long. It was the happiest time of my life.”

A prisoner genuinely nostalgic for another prison; it will never happen to me.

“And what did you do to get such a privilege? Named your fellow sweepers in the conspiracy?”

“You have spent too much time on the parade square marching up and down to understand the complexity of the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed.”

“Teach me.”

“They sent in their best man to interrogate me. Zia’s right-hand man. Colonel Shigri. On the very first day he had electrical wires put on my privates, but after he couldn’t break me, he became a friend. He moved me into a cell with the window. A very fine man. He must be a general by now.”

To think that the hands that cradled you also put electrical wires to someone’s testicles is not a very appetising thought. A shudder of loathing runs through my body. My stomach feels bloated.

“They put me back in this dungeon after his transfer. He believed in dialogue. The only man in khaki I have had a decent conversation with. I wonder if he got his promotion or—”

“He is dead. He hanged himself.” I want Secretary General to shut up. He does for a few moments.

“He didn’t seem like the kind of person—” Secretary General’s voice comes out all broken.

“I know,” I say curtly. “They made it seem like he hanged himself.”

“How do you know? They have brainwashed you into believing anything they want you to believe.” I don’t like his dismissive tone.

“Just because I am wearing a uniform, just because they gave me chicken to eat, you seem to think I am a fool. You think I am just another idiot in uniform. Listen to me, Mr Secretary General, I don’t need your lectures. There are certain things in life called facts, empirical realities I think you call them. I do not need to look at some little red book written by a Chink in a funny hat. I don’t need any communist pamphlets to tell me what the facts of my life are. I can find them for myself.”

I slam the brick back in the wall and tell myself that it’s over. I don’t need lectures from a civilian nutter any more. I don’t want one more loser telling me that Colonel Shigri changed his life.

Shirtless, I lie back on the floor. The sand and stone underneath my naked back feel good. I grab sand in both my hands and play the sand clock; I let it trickle out of my fists slowly, trying to coordinate the flow from both my hands. It is difficult, but I have time to practise.

There is a blind spot behind you
, announced a red banner, one of the many dotting the flight line to mark the annual Flight Safety Week.
HIDDEN HAZARDS HURT
, screamed the giant orange letters on the tarmac. There was a bright new take-off line painted down the middle of the runway and new yellow markings for taxi routes. Even the rusting cut-out of the rooster on the windbag sported a new bronze crown.

“Our guest must be getting bored. Take him for a joyride on your next flight,” the Commandant suggested after unveiling a plaque carrying this year’s motto for the flight safety campaign:
Safety is in the eye of the beholder
.

“Love to,” Bannon said. “Show me some of that pilot shit you do.”

“Tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll arrange a picnic for you in the skies.”

It was time to run some safety checks on Colonel Shigri’s past.

I placed an order with Uncle Starchy for one of his specials that evening. Uncle Starchy produced a crumpled cigarette from under his shirt: “Smoke one every day and you’ll never get a headache and your wife will never complain.” Uncle Starchy winked.

I straightened the cigarette and slipped it into the little pocket on the sleeve of my flight suit.

“Uncle, you know very well that I am not married. Hell, nobody is married here.”

“Preparation. Preparation,” he muttered before whipping his donkey gently and driving off with his bales of laundry.

Bannon turned up wearing an orange scarf, a flying jacket and a baseball cap with a bald eagle on it. He watched me closely as I carried out the pre-flight checks and prepared for take-off. Bannon seemed disappointed at the size of the cockpit, but he ran his hand over the canopy and said, “Sweet little bird.” After harnessing his safety belt, he rummaged under his seat then looked puzzled.

“No parachutes?” he said.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “We won’t need them.”

Safety…Here, There and in the Air
another banner greeted us at the end of the runway as we took off and started climbing towards the training area.

Against the backdrop of a cloudless sky-blue sky, our twin-seater MF17 seemed not to move, as if hanging by invisible threads in an aviation museum. I checked with the air traffic control tower. It was one of those rare days when there is no head- or tailwind. Beneath us Pakistan was breathtakingly symmetrical, green squares of vegetation divided by flat rivers reflecting the gentle rays of sun.

“Want to see the Black and White Valley?”

Bannon sat tense in his seat as if not sure whether to trust my flying skills.

“Been in too many whirlybirds with my dead men. Too many memories,” he said, fidgeting with his safety harness.

“This ain’t no chopper and I ain’t dead,” I mimicked him in an attempt to cheer him up. He forced a nervous smile. “Here. I have got your favourite.” I produced the joint from my pocket and held it towards Bannon. “Climbing to ten thousand for manoeuvres,” I said into my mouthpiece, eased the stick backwards and trimmed the controls again. We were now rooted to our seats as the plane climbed steadily. The G meter read 1.5, gravity tugged softly at our cheeks.

Bannon sat there, unsure whether or not to light up. “Go ahead, be my guest,” I said. “Safety is in the eye of the beholder.” I took out a lighter, stretched out my left hand, flipped open the air vent on his side of the glass canopy and sparked the joint. The plane shuddered slightly, the vibration pattern changed, and the sound of the propeller slicing the air at zioo revolutions per minute filtered through.

The Black and White mountain range appeared on our left. The Black Mountains were covered with lush green pine trees and thick shrubs, while the White Mountains formed a series of grey barren ridges. The altimeter read six thousand feet, the propeller pointed just above the horizon; a cow-shaped cloud nudged the tip of our right wing, dived below and disappeared. Bannon, in his nervousness, smoked more than half the joint in two long puffs. The cockpit was full of aircraft fuel and hash fumes. I held my breath. I was responsible for the safety of the ship. He extended the last bit of the joint towards me. “The machine knows who is flying it,” I said, shaking my head. His eyes laughed a stoned laugh.