Night of the Golden Butterfly (6 page)

‘And you, Dara Shikoh. Do you think it’s wonderful news as well?’

‘Not sure, Plato. Depends on how you behave during picnics. Can you play an instrument? Can you sing or act? This will be your real test. I always know you’re slightly tense when you call me Dara Shikoh.’

He immediately relaxed.

‘Don’t worry. I won’t disgrace you boys. And Dara Shikoh is the only Mughal prince I really admire. Akbar was a total fake. Broadminded as far as other faiths were concerned, but a killer of those he regarded as heretics.’

In fact, my nickname was my own fault. I had misinformed many a friend that I was named after Dara Shikoh, a sceptic poet and philosopher who should have succeeded Shah Jehan but was brutally brushed aside by a younger brother, Aurungzab, the devout ruler and ascetic who left us the Badshahi mosque, a ten-minute walk from the college, as his legacy. I was actually named after an old friend of my father’s who had tragically drowned while both of them were swimming from one bank of the Ravi to another in the moonlight. Perhaps he had been named after Dara Shikoh.

Before we left for the mountains, Confucius invited Zahid and me to supper at his house. Neither of us knew where he lived, but he had eaten with us at home many a time and his mother must have insisted he invite us in return.

‘Please remember not to call me Confucius at home. Won’t amuse anyone. They’ll just think indigenous Punjabis are stupid.’

‘What about Mao?’

‘Even worse. My father thinks of him as a bad poet and a philistine.’

All we knew about Confucius’s father was that he owned the best shoe shop on the Mall. The family had obviously been there for a long time, as testified by the photographs on the wall in which young Mr Ma posed proudly with long-departed British colonial officers. My father and I went there each year to have our feet measured for summer sandals and winter shoes. Nothing ever substituted for that in later years.

Confucius had agreed to meet us outside the shop, but we waited a while for another guest. He finally arrived. His bike had suffered a puncture and the usual repair stall was not open. This was Tipu, studying physics, at F.C. (Forman Christian) College, run by US missionaries on the other side of the city. Tipu had a soft, dark face and large brown eyes. Confucius had met him at a seminar, discovered he was a Marxist from Chittagong in East Fatherland, and wanted him invited to our cell meetings. Our rules were strict. A cell could not include more than six students at a time and none of the members was meant to know about the other cells. We did, of course, since there were only two others, but we pretended it was a huge secret. It added to the glamour. There were no existing cells at Tipu’s college. He was contemptuous of his fellow students and his eyes blazed as he informed us that no self-respecting college in East Fatherland was without its Communist cells. I did know of one cell in F.C., but it would have been a terrible breach of confidence to inform him of its existence. I made a mental note to let them know of his.

This conversation was taking place on the Mall, in the middle of a crowd of shoppers. We could have gone on for hours, but were late already. Confucius took us across the road to an old nineteen-twenties apartment block, where he lived and where his mother was patiently waiting to feed us.

‘Salaamaleikum, Dara. How’s your father?’

I didn’t recognize the shoemaker for a minute. Confucius’s father was dressed in a Chinese gown and a finely embroidered skullcap. We were introduced to the rest of his family, and that was the first time Zahid and I saw Jindié, the Golden Butterfly. She stood next to her mother, wearing a traditional but stylish Punjabi
salwar/kameez
light blue suit, with the
kameez
just touching her knees. Her silken black hair, covering a head that was an elongated oval, almost touched the floor. The eyebrows formed perfect arches. No makeup disfigured her thin lips. She was a delicate creature, extremely beautiful rather than pretty, but there was not a trace of shyness or affectation as she shook hands, inspecting each of us in turn with a quizzical, semi-humorous look. I never suspected she was a romantic eager for quick results. I found it difficult to concentrate on too much else that evening. What had Confucius said about us? Did she realize I had fallen in love with her? How could she not? It had to be a mandate from heaven.

After greeting Jindié, I bowed politely to Confucius’s mother. Like her husband, Mrs Ma was dressed in an antique Chinese gown. Her hair was pinned up in a bun and her face showed a touch of lipstick and powder, but at the same time conveyed an impression of prudence and good sense.

I was so thunderstruck by Jindié that it took me some time to notice that the living room was lined with books, mainly Chinese editions, some of which were undoubtedly very old. Jindié was talking to Tipu, quite deliberately, I think, to punish me for the way I had looked at her. In fact, she ignored me for the rest of the evening, speaking mainly to Tipu and Zahid but occasionally glancing in my direction to see how I was occupying myself. I moved away to look closely at some beautiful ivory objects on the mantelpiece and then the silks that covered the walls, on which hung a plain white plate with blue Kufic calligraphy. Mr Ma sidled up to explain that it was a ninth-century piece made by potters in Yunnan, who produced such ware exclusively for the merchants in Basra, who brought it to Cordoba and Palermo. None of this meant much to me at the time. I smiled politely and asked about the books. He took one out. It looked exquisite, faded gold Chinese calligraphy on even more faded thick leather.

‘What is it, Mr Ma?’

‘The Han Kitab. You have heard of it?’

‘No. I’m sorry. China is a mystery. All we know about is the revolution.’

That annoyed him and he returned the book to its place. Confucius had observed the scene and came up to reassure me. I wasn’t bothered at all, but was becoming more and more enraged by the way his sister was flirting with Tipu.

The food, when it was served, was almost as divine as Jindié. The local Chinese restaurants were truly awful, catering to imagined local tastes. Pulp-food is always bad. This was the first time I had tasted proper Chinese food, and I complimented Mrs Ma on the quality of her cooking, the virtual opposite of our Punjabi cuisine. She explained that what we were consuming were Yunnanese delicacies, very different from what was served at banquets in Beijing. I asked if she had received any help from her daughter. The reply was an instantaneous
no
and a glare in Jindié’s direction. In a bid to attract the latter’s attention, I sympathized loudly, hoping to annoy her and failing miserably. She ignored the bait.

I did discover from her mother, however, that Jindié attended a women’s college. This was useful information, since the college in question was packed with seven or eight of my cousins as well as daughters of old family friends. It was presided over by a strict Indian-Christian spinster lady who took her job as principal far too seriously when it came to the social life of her students. To say she kept a watchful eye on her girls would be inaccurate. She had created a spy network of favourites who told her everything. Yes, everything, including the dreams that some of their fellow students recounted over breakfast. The college itself had been set up in 1920 by a prim Scotswoman called Rosamund Nairn and bore her surname. The girls at Nairn were considered to be almost as modern as their counterparts at Primrose in Karachi and Ambleside in Dhaka, and that was saying a great deal at the time.

Apart from my frustration over Jindié, the evening went well. Zahid and I both made sure we called our friend Hanif as often as we could—so often that he began to look annoyed. At this point Jindié addressed us collectively:

‘Is it true that you call him Confucius?’

The whole table erupted in laughter. It was only as we were all leaving and farewells were being said that she walked up to me.

‘It was really nice talking to you.’

‘But you didn’t.’

‘I know.’

Since my house was not too far from F.C. College, Zahid gave both me and Tipu a lift, dropping Tipu off first so the two of us could have a calm post-mortem. We stopped the car on the unfinished road outside my house. It was a wilderness then, with the only the mausoleum of a Sufi venerable lit in the distance with oil lamps.

I had liked Tipu instinctively and was determined that he should join our cell even if it meant biking six miles to where we were. He was obviously bright, and better read than all of us. Zahid disagreed and thought it would be better if Tipu were recruited to his local cell. But I wanted to keep an eye on him, in case Jindié really did want him and not me. I explained this to Zahid, who wasn’t surprised in the least.

‘I noticed your gaze’, said Zahid, ‘and so did she.’

‘Are you sure she did?’

‘How could she not, catamite? You were staring at her quite obviously. Everyone noticed. That’s why she ignored you the whole evening.’

There was little else to discuss, but we did so anyway for almost two hours. Then I went home and searched my father’s study for translations of Chinese literature and history. The shelves were packed with Europe and South Asia. Chinese civilization was represented by political and history books written by Americans and Europeans, and a few translations of Mao Zedong and Liu Shaoxi. There was a Foreign Languages Publishing House translation of
Dream of the Red Chamber
, but it was unreadable. Deeply frustrated, I went to bed.

Almost everything lost its importance for me except the memory of Jindié. In the two weeks before the colleges shut down I made desperate efforts to catch sight of her. Zahid had his own problems on this front, trying to see Anjum, the general’s daughter, but was as helpful as he could be, waiting with me outside Nairn to discover how Jindié went home. Many young women biked in those days, and I was hoping she was one of them, but we never saw her leave. I pestered one of the cousins I thought I could trust. She told the others and they would come to stare and giggle at Zahid and me, trying to shame us into leaving. But we had no self-esteem in these matters, and so forfeiting our dignity never posed a problem.

After an hour outside Nairn, we would move on to Gulberg, where the object of Zahid’s love went to a ladies’ college modelled on European finishing schools, where ‘home and social sciences’ were so mixed up that cooking counted as a home subject and interior decoration as a social science. Gulberg trained young women to be housewives.
Vogue
was the sacred magazine of this establishment, devoured eagerly by teacher and pupil. Zahid swore that Anjum was not empty-headed but had been forced to go there by her parents in order to prepare for marriage.

Zahid wanted the general’s daughter and she wanted him. Letters had been exchanged. They met for coffee in a tiny place run by a kindly old German lady and geared for trysts. It worked like this: Anjum and a girlfriend would be dropped off by the chauffeur; they would get a table. Zahid and I would arrive on his Vespa; we’d get another table. If we recognized anybody, we would maintain the pretence that we were there casually, and move off quickly, but this was rare. I had to entertain Anjum’s friend, who was very pretty and very stupid. She would giggle at the slightest provocation, and I got so fed up that I tried to teach her chess so we didn’t have to speak to each other. She was flattered and learned the moves, which enhanced her status at the finishing school: ‘My, my, you’ve become such an intellectual.’

Occasionally, vile scoundrels on a motorbike followed the girls and blackmailed them for petty cash, but this stopped when the German lady informed her husband, who turned out to be a senior police officer and put a cop on guard duty in that street. He was merely protecting his wife’s business interests, but the gesture was greatly appreciated by her customers.

Mercifully, all this came to an end when Anjum gently broke the news that she was to be engaged to an affected English-public-school-educated feudal idiot from Multan. Zahid’s features assumed a deathly pallor as he rose from her table and staggered over to mine. Speech eluded him for a moment and then in a choked voice he said, ‘Let’s go. Now.’

We left. The soul had been torn out of him. Too many hours were wasted discussing the rejection. The day after, he told me quite seriously that he was having great difficulty in resisting the temptation to blow out his brains. A week later, he was calmer and more reflective.

‘She had such a gentle nature,
yaar
,’ he would repeat time and time again.

Perhaps that was the problem, I suggested. Her ‘gentle nature’ prevented her resisting parental pressures as others, we both knew, had done. His heart was sickened by the ease with which her parents had triumphed. I felt a sense of relief. No more playing chess with an aspiring fashion model. I can’t remember her name, but she was modelling two outfits, ‘Naughty Nymph’ and ‘Hello, Officer’, in the Intercontinental in Rawalpindi when the student insurrection against the military began in 1968. As for my friend, he took to wandering about town, full of emotions but avoiding every location that reminded him of her: It seemed as if the entire city had become a sea of bitterness for him. The memory of Anjum haunted him for a long time. The worst possible passion is the passion for a woman one has never possessed. He recovered slowly.

‘There are other sorrows in the world, Zahid,’ I said comfortingly, paraphrasing the words of a much-loved poet, then in prison for the third time.

‘No, there aren’t.’

This should have alerted me. I should have realized that political commitment of any sort was nothing more than a social obligation for him, but it’s easy to say this with hindsight. At the time we all thought of ourselves and of university students in general as the backbone of the country. Its future depended on us, but in the words of the real Confucius, ‘To lead into battle a people that has not first been instructed is to betray them.’ Zahid insisted that the facts proved otherwise and would counter this with the examples of the French and Russian revolutions. He often inclined to more radical solutions than I did and sometimes mocked my caution. Friendship, too, has its illusions, just as strong as those of love.