Night of the Golden Butterfly (34 page)

Yu-chih, who had barely said a word since arriving in this backwater, entered the fray. ‘It’s universal. Any gallery with a curator who knows what constitutes artistic merit will not turn this painting down. The Horse Thief is a very large new gallery in Beijing. They would exhibit this tomorrow. I hope slides are being prepared.’

‘Westward or eastward, Zaynab?’ Tasked in a whisper. She looked at me pleadingly. I turned the Fatherland panel to the wall and displayed the next. This was in classic Plato colours. The entire canvas was covered in waves of blue, turquoise and dark green. We were confronted with a turbulent ocean. Please, I thought, no mermaids. Don’t do it, Plato. In the centre of the painting was a large shell-shaped island with six men surrounding a single woman. Plato had clearly had to restrain himself from painting her as a mermaid. The paint used to cover up the tail was in a slightly different shade, and his death had prevented any further retouching. Five of the figures, surprisingly, were painted almost in Socialist Realist style. Only one, like the sea, was surreal. I moved close to examine the subjects and recognized each one. The others followed suit, and a guessing game began. Everyone knew Kemal Ataturk, though his portrait was the only surreal one. The famous hat, the cryptic smile, the cigarette, the tilted face were all his, but what lay below? He was dressed in tights and his legs were posed in a fantastic pirouette. Rudolf Nureyev or a whirling dervish? The choice was ours. I had no idea that Plato had ever been interested in Ataturk, so this was a surprise—or was he trying to imply something that is often discussed in Istanbul but never written or painted?

The other figures were also from the world of Islam, but of a very different time. Intellectual dissidents, like the man who had painted them, and for that reason heroes who had thrilled his artist’s blood. A blind poet is seated at the feet of the others. On his lap lies a famous work that was, in fact, the only parody ever done of Zaynab’s husband, and that, too, in the twelfth century. How we have progressed. The poet, Abu Ala al-Maari, is conversing with fish and birds. Watching him with kindly, amused and protective expressions are three men in robes and turbans, each clinging to his own best-known work as if someone were threatening to snatch it away from him. These three were old friends I had introduced to Plato thirty years ago, when he was in his most nihilist phase regarding the faith of his forebears: the great scholars of al-Andalus and the Muslim world, Ibn Hazm, Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd. The last man, and I chuckled with delight, was the Sicilian geographer Muhammad Idrisi, showing them all his map of the world. I introduced these figures to the others, with Zaynab nodding a bit too vigorously, as if she already knew—one of her few irritating habits, because she only did it when she was surprised but did not wish to admit to her lack of knowledge.

At first the single woman puzzled me. Whom had Plato intended? Then I noticed that the uplifted arm had a sleeve with an Arabic inscription:
Allah, I am fit for greatness and stride with great pride / I allow my lover to reach my cheek, and I grant my kiss to he who craves it.
But it was the hand that seemed odd. It had six fingers. Sixer. It was Wallada! A tenth-century poet in Cordoba who maintained a salon, not far from the Great Mosque, that was the site of many heated debates on art and literature and where gossip-carriers reported each day on the latest goings-on in the city. Sixer was the insult she had publicly hurled at her lover, a truly great poet, Ibn Zaydun, whose love poetry is taught to this day in Arab schools and universities. Zaydun had betrayed Wallada’s love by seducing her maid, and subsequently moved on to young men. The poem she recited against him in public lacked literary merit—unlike her epic in defence of gossip, which only survives in fragments—but was repeated endlessly at the time for its shock value, and poor Ibn Zaydun became known in the city, indeed as far afield as Palermo and Baghdad, as the Sixer:

They call you the Sixer,

Your life will leave you before this name does;

Sodomite and buggered you are, let’s add

Adulterer, pimp, cuckold and thief.

There were ruder epithets as well, but ‘Sixer’ remained stuck to the poet till his enshrouded corpse was lowered into the mud. This panel was obviously ‘The Good Muslim’. I had realized my attention had been so concentrated on the main characters that I had missed a few important details. Just below the surface of the sea, death was lurking in the shape of shark-like creations, a few with long beards. But it was Alice who made the discovery of the afternoon. What I had assumed was just a cloud turned out to be a man’s face. Alice swore loudly that it was James Joyce and repeated the name with incredulity. We inspected the cloud from every distance, and seen from where she was standing, just a few feet from the painting, it was obvious she was right. There was also a number, and Zaynab immediately understood.

‘His first and last present to me was a well-worn edition of
Ulysses
. The Arabic numerals obviously refer to the page number.’

She had to go herself to fetch the book, since the maids could not decipher English titles. All present insisted they had read it, though I knew Zahid and Confucius were definitely lying, unless Confucius had read it during the memory-lapse period. It turned out he had, and Yu-chih informed us that there were two Chinese translations, the older of which was more loyal to the original. Given that some people find Joyce’s later work incomprehensible, I wondered what the Chinese translation might be like. How could JJ possibly be made to work in another language?

An excited Zaynab had found the page and was going through each line. Then she found it and screamed. ‘It’s Stephen Dedalus. He’s just been reflecting on the mathematical discipline of the medieval Arabs, and in particular algebra—al-jabra—and its symbols. He sees them as “wearing quaint caps of squares and cubes”, but listen to this: “... imps of fancy of the Moors. Gone too from the world, Averroes [Ibn Rushd] and Moses Maimonides [Ibn Maymun], dark men in mien and movement, flashing in their mocking mirrors the obscure soul of the world, a darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend.”’

How had I missed that? Was he in Trieste already when the thought occurred? Thinking of the tortured history of his country, his continent and his religion, he had remembered another world. Clever, clever Plato. The panel was unanimously awarded a new title, ‘The Obscure Soul of the World’. JJ’s tribute to an exterminated civilization as recovered by Mohammed Aflatun, deceased. He had never mentioned it to me or to anyone else.

What could the last section of the triptych contain? There was a sense of expectation as we crowded close to examine the work. It was very different from the previous two. This was personal. It consisted of four large and six small panels. Each contained a portrait or a miniature. These were painted short stories. Two small self-portraits of Plato, one showing him as a young man, his face filled with pain, and the other as an old one, with the cancer-ravaged features of the last period. There was the table in the college café in Lahore, around which we were all grouped in the shadows of a pipal tree, with Confucius the most obviously recognizable. Satire had crept in here, with the more reflective types wearing spectacles, the talkative triumvirate with tongues hanging out, and me, licking my spectacles clean. The most straight-laced portrait, and yet funniest for those of us in the know, showed Zaynab covered from head to toe, a pious look on her face, sitting cross-legged on a
takhtposh
. Lying next to her was the Holy Book. She was holding an unlit candle. The fact that it was unlit was remarked on by everyone. Zaynab and I did not dare look at each other.

‘It must mean something, Dara,’ said Yu-chih. ‘You must have some explanation.’

‘Of course there is,’ I said, racking my brains and trying not to laugh. ‘It’s obvious. Even though Plato was not religious, he was understanding of our faith in his last days. You cannot show a lit candle next to the Honoured Classic. The light emanating from the Book is all you need.’

Zaynab sighed with relief. The rest applauded. There were a few vintage Plato paintings. In one, a dwarf with upraised sword was guarding the pudendum of a crowned lady while a crowned male was happily helping himself to her behind. The Punjabis present roared with delight. Plato was reminding himself and us of the famous impromptu remark that had once reduced an entire theatre to helpless laughter and projected its author onto a larger frame. Alice had not heard the story and—by now fully recovered from her stomach problems—laughed without restraint.

A satirical miniature depicted Jindié and me sporting in Mughal costume in the Shalimar Gardens, below the marble canopy, though I had been given a few Chinese features. I’m lying with my head on Jindié’s lap playing with a flower. Sweet birds fly above. A dropping from one of them is headed straight for my face. A sitar player, who looks suspiciously like Plato, is strumming away below us. One of Jindié’s breasts, something I have yet to see, was delicately displayed, causing a bit of embarrassment to her brother and husband. Then I noticed that it wasn’t simply that. A tiny portion of my anatomy was peeping out in hope. Zaynab gave me a quick glance, pretending she was coughing to cover her giggle, and said, ‘I think this is my favourite one in the last panel.’

‘Oh, no,’ said Yu-chih. ‘It’s too obvious. The unlit candle is the one I really like. It’s so subtle.’

I agreed a bit too loudly.

Plato’s favourite poets were represented, too, and unlike his friends, they had been treated with possibly too much reverence. Here they all were. Faiz, cigarette firmly held in the same hand that is close to his mouth, suppressing the cough that often interrupted his readings. The other hand is resisting the overtures of a society beauty, while in the background Plato’s wall of humanity has been miniaturized from the first painting; their faces, filled with agony, plead for something. A homage to Faiz’s most famous poem, whose first line, ‘Lover, do not ask for that old love again’, is the prologue to verses that explain why he should not. Not because the poet has found another lover, like poor Ibn Zaydun, but because ‘there are other ailments in this world outside the pain of love’. Like the pain of oppression, felt by the poor.

And here is Sahir Ludhianvi, from Plato’s old city in pre-Partitioned India. He was not recognized by any of the others, and I only knew him because we used to recite his poetry all the time as young men. It was easier to grasp than Faiz’s, didactic, and had a Brechtian ring to it though it has survived less well than the work of the great German poet. An explanation is unavoidable. Why is Sahir standing with his trousers at his feet? He is facing us with a mischievous look on his face and a drooping little penis. We can’t see his naked backside because he’s busy showing it to the Taj Mahal, which is being photographed by the tourist hordes. One of Sahir’s sharpest poems is a response to his beloved, who suggests a rendezvous in the moonlight outside the Taj. The poet’s reply is at once moving and brutal, denouncing the monument as the indulgence of an emperor who used his wealth as a crutch ‘to make fun of the love that we, the poor, feel’. How many died building this absurdity, asks the poet of his lover. Ever think of them? Were they never in love? Were their emotions less pure? In Plato’s portrait, the Taj is cracked from side to side, and the cracks, tiny impressionist blobs, are painted in similar colours to the cancers depicted in the first painting. As for the penis, here Plato is suggesting, accurately, that the poet suffered from an ailment like that of the man who painted him. I did not mention this, though Ally and Zaynab exchanged a quick look.

The last three figures are much-loved Punjabi poets from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, presented as tribunes of the people. It is the triumvirate of Waris Shah, Bulleh Shah and Shah Hussain, more holy for many Punjabis than the most devout preachers of any religion. No portraits of them were ever made. Plato paints them as angelic Punjabi peasants: Waris Shah is rescuing Heer from the wedding palanquin; Bulleh Shah is frowning at mosque and temple and reprimanding mullah and Brahmin, done in miniature. And Shah Hussain, who publicly flaunted his male Hindu lover Madho Lai in the streets of Lahore and wrote love songs for him, is shown naked in his arms, but not in bed. They embrace in the streets of Lahore as an admiring public, similar to the faces in the wall of humanity in the previous panel, watches the pair. Plato’s imagination here rested on fact. When Shah Hussain died, the mullahs ordered that his body be left to rot in the sun, since he had breached Koranic injunctions. It is written that tens of thousands of the poet’s admirers defied the mullahs. His body was publicly bathed and shrouded in the red colour he loved and buried with great fanfare and singing.

The title for this panel did not require too much thought: ‘My Life’.

It was over.

Lahore—Pelion—Sardinia—

London,

2006–2009

Tariq Ali is a novelist, journalist, and filmmaker. His many books include
The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity
;
Bush in Babylon: The Recolonization of Iraq
;
Conversations with Edward Said
;
Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties
; and the novels of the Islam Quintet. He is the coauthor of
On History: Tariq Ali and Oliver Stone in Conversation
and an editor of the
New Left Review
, and he writes for the
London Review of Books
and the
Guardian
. Ali lives in London.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.