2008 - A Case of Exploding Mangoes (25 page)

It’s heavenly compared to the smell inside the cabin. A short walk, then a wait under the sun. The jeep I am thrown into smells of rose air freshener and Dunhills. I don’t think I have been brought here for the party.

G
eneral Akhtar’s devotion to his boss General Zia was not the ordinary devotion that a three-star general shows towards a four-star general. Their mutual dependence wasn’t that of two soldiers who can rely on each other to get a piggyback to the base if injured in the battle. Theirs was a bond between two dogs stranded on a glacier, each sizing up the other, trying to decide if he should wait for his comrade to die before eating him or do away with the niceties and try to make a meal out of him immediately.

But there was a difference between the two: General Zia with his five titles, addresses to the UN and Nobel Prize hopes was satiated. General Akhtar, always playing second fiddle to his boss, was starving, and when he looked around the frozen landscape, all he saw was General Zia—fattened, chubby-cheeked and marinating in his own paranoia. Publicly, General Akhtar denied any ambition; he encouraged journalists to describe him as a silent soldier, happy to command his ghost armies in secret wars. But when he stood in front of the mirror in his office day after day and counted the three stars on his shoulder, he couldn’t deny to himself that he had become a shadow of General Zia. His own career had followed General Zia’s ambitions like a faithful puppy.

If General Zia wanted to become an elected president, General Akhtar not only had to ensure that ballot boxes were stuffed in time but was also expected to orchestrate spontaneous celebrations all over the country after the votes were counted. If General Zia announced a National Cleanliness Week, General Akhtar had to make sure that the gutters were disinfected and security-checked before the President could show up to get his picture taken. On good days General Akhtar felt like a royal executioner during the day, and a court food-taster in the evening. On bad days he just felt like a long-suffering housewife always clearing up after her messy husband. He had started to get impatient. The title of ‘second most powerful man in the land’, which he had enjoyed in the beginning, had started to sound like an insult. How could you be second most powerful when your boss was
all
-powerful?

The puppy had grown up and felt constantly starved.

General Akhtar had learned to put the puppy on a leash and take him for short walks, because he knew he couldn’t let him run wild. Not yet.

It was on one of these puppy-on-the-leash walks that he was walking along the corridor of his headquarters, minutes after his camera feed from the Army House abruptly disappeared. He ran his operations from a four-storey, nondescript office block. There was no signboard outside the building to identify it, no postal address for this enterprise; even the white Corollas entering and leaving the car park had no number plates. But still every cab driver in town somehow knew about the occupants of this building and the nature of their business. General Akhtar was walking on a frayed grey carpet, his ears taking in the familiar night-shift sounds; most of the staff had already left for the day but he could hear the muffled voices from behind the closed doors. His night-shift handlers were talking to his operators in distant, unsuspecting countries; Ethiopia, Nepal, Colombia. There was one consolation for General Akhtar: he might be the second most powerful man in a Third World country but the intelligence agency he ran was worthy of a superpower.

Since no women worked in the office block, the toilets were marked ‘Officers and Men’. General Akhtar passed the toilets and entered an unmarked room at the end of the corridor. More than a dozen telephone operators watched wall-mounted audiotapes connected to telephone monitors; the tapes started to roll as soon as the subject under surveillance picked up the phone. It wasn’t just the usual set of politicians, diplomats and journalists whose phones were tapped; many of General Akhtar’s closest colleagues would have been surprised to find out that their every phone call, their every verbal indiscretion was recorded here.

The operators working in the monitoring room had strict orders to continue their normal functions regardless of the rank of their visitor. A dozen heads wearing headphones nodded silently as General Akhtar entered the room.

He tapped the shoulder of the first operator in the row, who seemed completely absorbed in the task at hand. The operator removed his headphones and looked at General Akhtar with a mixture of respect and excitement. During his eleven months at the agency, he had ntver been addressed by General Akhtar. The operator felt his life was about to change.

General Akhtar took the headphones from his hands and put them on his own ears. He heard the moans of a man obviously in the middle of pleasuring himself as a woman on the other end urged him on in a motherly voice. General Akhtar gave the operator a disgusted look; the operator avoided eye contact with him and said, “The Minister of Information, sir.” The operator felt apologetic, even though he was only doing his duty.

“I don’t need to know,” General Akhtar said, removing the headphones. “Come to my office. With one of these.” He pointed to the little black box that connected the phone line to the tape recorder. “Bring a new one. The ones Chuck Coogan sent us.” General Akhtar walked off to a chorus of nodding heads.

The operator gave his colleagues a triumphant look, strangled the Information Minister’s sighs and started preparing his toolbox for his first ever visit to General Akhtar’s office. He felt like a man who had been personally selected by the second most powerful man in the country to do a very important job in his personal office. As he shut his toolbox and straightened his shirt, the operator felt like the third most powerful man in the country.

General Akhtar’s office looked like that of any other senior bureaucrat at the pinnacle of his power; a large desk with five telephones and a national flag, a framed picture of him and Bill Casey laughing as General Akhtar presented the CIA chief with the casing of the first Stinger that had brought down a Russian Hind. In one corner stood a small television and video player. On the wall behind his chair was an official portrait of General Zia, from the time when his moustache was still struggling to find a shape and his cheeks were sunken. General Akhtar removed the picture carefully and punched in the combination for the safe behind it, took out
.1
tape and put it in the video player. The picture was black and white and grainy and he could not see General Zia’s face, but he knew his hand gestures well and the voice was unmistakable. The other voice was slightly muffled and the speaker wasn’t in the frame.

“Son, you are the only person in this country I can really trust.”

General Akhtar grimaced. He had heard the same thing over and over again for the past two months, minus the word ‘son’ of course.

“Sir, your security is my job and this is the kind of job where I can’t take orders from anyone else. Not from General Akhtar, not from the First Lady and sometimes not even from you.”

Suddenly Brigadier TM’s head filled the screen. “Sir, all these changes, without my security clearance.”

A hand appeared in the picture and handed General Zia a piece of paper. General Zia looked at the paper through his glasses, put it in his pocket and got up. The other figure entered the frame, they both met in the centre of the screen and General Zia spread his arms. General Akhtar moved forward in his chair and tried to listen to their voices, which because ol their embrace had become even more muffled. He heard sobbing. General Zia’s body was shaking. He moved a step back and put both his hands on Brigadier TM’s. “Son, you don’t have to take orders from anyone, not even from me.”

There was a knock on the door. General Akhtar pushed the stop button on the video recorder and asked the operator to come in. Then the General stood up and paced the room as the operator got busy with one of the five phones on his table.

General Akhtar stood in front of the mirror and looked at his face and upper body. He was three years older than General Zia but physically in much better shape. Unlike General Zia, who hated the outdoors and had gone all puffy in the cheeks, General Akhtar still managed a weekly game of golf and an occasional field trip to the army divisions posted at the border. The golf gave him the chance to get some exercise and catch up with the US Ambassador on matters of national security.

General Akhtar’s hair was thinning from the sides but his barber did a good job of mixing his crew cut with a clever camouflage for his expanding bald patch. He had stood here many times, in front of this mirror, put a fourth star on his shoulder and struck a pose for the cover of
Newsweek
. He had rehearsed his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize. “All the wars I have fought, all the liberty that the people of the region enjoy, the cold war that has turned into warm, glowing peace…”

“Would you like me to activate the monitor, sir?” the operator asked him. The operator had shown no curiosity, had resisted the temptation to snoop around and had behaved like a professional spy. Never ask why, just who, where and when. The operator was pleased with himself.

General Akhtar gave out a phone number without turning away from the mirror and watched the operator’s face closely. He noticed a shadow cross the operator’s face as he finished writing down the number. His hands, which had been moving with such professional concentration before, shook as he fed the number into the little black box. General Akhtar wondered what the operator would make of it. He was sure that he would not say anything, not that anyone would listen to a telephone operator, but he looked hard in the mirror at the operator’s reflection. The operator was now back to his professional self and busy putting away his instruments in his toolbox.

He was thinking of getting out of this office and then finishing the remaining two hours of his shift before starting his part-time job as a signboard painter at a cinema. He was thinking that even if he was given a full-time job at the agency he would continue painting over the weekend. The operator was not thinking at all about the fact that the second most powerful man in the country had just ordered him to put a tap on the telephone line of the most powerful man in the country.

Many of General Akhtar’s fellow generals described him as cold, calculating, even a cruel man. But in reality, General Akhtar’s cruelty was always a second thought, almost incidental to his job. He didn’t like his job because he could listen to people’s most intimate conversations or get people killed. He didn’t feel any real sense of power when he picked up his phone and gave his agents a list of people who were becoming a threat to national security. But when he did pick up the phone, he liked his agency to respond like a properly oiled weapon. He would have liked it if these situations never arose, but when they needed to be dealt with, he wanted it to be done efficiently. He didn’t like the stories about bullets stuck in the chamber or targets disappearing at the last moment.

When the operator reached the door and put his hand on the handle, General Akhtar said: “Thank you.”

The operator hesitated for a moment, looked back and smiled, and that’s when General Akhtar realised that he didn’t know his name.

“What is your name, operator?”

The operator, who had rehearsed the answer in his mind for the whole eleven months that he had worked here, replied with a flourish, almost sure that he was taking a step further in his life; hoping to be appointed the senior operator, hoping to be embraced by the organisation, elevated to an officer rank, maybe given one of the old Corollas that the officers discarded every year when the new models arrived.

“Same as yours. Akhtar, sir. But with an E. Akhter Masih.”

General Akhtar wasn’t impressed. There are probably a million Akhtars in this country, he thought, and two million Masihs. And this smartass can’t keep his mouth shut about as ordinary a coincidence as that. Could he be expected to keep his mouth shut at all? Could he be expected to forget the numbers, the names, the transcripts of the phone calls that he handled all day? Was it wise to hire a Christian when everybody knows they love to gossip? The only other Christians who worked in General Akhtar’s agency were sweepers. Must be a reason, he thought.

“Do you know what Akhtar means?”

“Yes, sir, a star. A very bright star.”

“You are quite intelligent for an operator. But remember some of the stars that you see at night are not really stars. They died millions of years ago but they were so far away that their light is beginning to reach us only now.”

There was a certain spring in Operator Akhter’s footsteps as he walked to the bus stop after work that clay. He was aware of being alive. The fume-filled air was fragrant in his lungs, his ears were alive to the chirping of the birds, the bus horns were love tunes in the air, waiting to be plucked and put to words. Not only did he share a name with his boss, his inherent intelligence had also been recognised; ‘quite intelligent for an operator’, ‘quite intelligent for an operator’, General Akhtar’s words echoed through his head. Those who thought that the General was arrogant had obviously not been worthy of his attention, Operator Akhter thought.

It can be said that Operator Akhter was a bit careless—careless like people are who have just heard the good news they have been waiting for all their lives. It also must be said that Operator Akhter wasn’t intoxicated, nor was he reckless. He stepped onto the road like a person whose luck had just turned. It can be said that he didn’t look left or right; it was almost as if he expected the traffic to part for him. These are facts and cannot be denied. But the car that came at Operator Akhter was determined, and when it locked onto its target it didn’t hesitate; it didn’t want to punish him for his bad pedestrian-crossing manners, it didn’t want to break his legs or leave him a cripple as a punishment for feeling optimistic. No, the driver of this car was very clear-headed and far too determined for a casual roadkill. Before the life went out of his eyes, after his broken ribs punctured his lungs and his heart frantically pumped blood in a last futile attempt to keep him alive, Operator Akhter was surprised to see, the last surprise of his life, that the white Corolla that crushed him had no number plate.