Stranger to History (30 page)

A moment later a servant showed me into his library. It was a room with floor-to-ceiling books and windows overlooking a swimming-pool. On a slim, marble table there were family pictures in polished silver frames. The physical resemblance of the people in them to me was another reminder of my absence. It was as if a kink in time and space had air-brushed me out. I didn’t feel emotional or even nervous; I was overwhelmed by the unreality of the moment. Tea and sandwiches laid out on a tray seemed to mock me.

My father walked in a few minutes later with his young wife. Her hair was blow-dried and she had diamonds in her ears. He was in blue, wearing soft boots with tan insides. I noticed them because my mother would tell me he had weak ankles and bought expensive boots. Though I couldn’t have known it at the time, I must have sought to bridge the time when she and I had known him with the time now. It was why I asked his wife if she would leave us alone. It was perhaps also why the pictures and the portrait had unsettled me.

My father’s physical appearance riveted me. The man who walked in was a fatter, balder version of the man from my browning silver frame. I had seen him last when I was not even eighteen months old and had no image of him except from those old pictures. I noticed the light, greenish-amber eyes that my mother had described to me, the lines around the mouth that were like mine, and the way he dropped into his chair, uncaring of where his hands and legs fell. I would have liked to know what he smelt of.

I must have been in some state of shock because I can hardly remember a word that was said. I know that I wanted very quickly to provide him with good reasons for why he hadn’t been in my life and offered his political career, which he took up readily. I also made a point of saying that now that he was no longer in politics, perhaps it would be easier for us to meet, even if we couldn’t have a conventional father–son relationship. This, too, he accepted. And then we spoke of generalities: my journey, the differences between India and Pakistan, how similar the two countries were. I felt the conversation was stilted, but I didn’t realise how much more open it would seem when compared with our later conversations. My father asked after my mother and said he had no hard feelings towards her. It was almost the only time in our relationship that he acknowledged I had known him in the past. It helped me to ground myself in the present situation.

Then, as we got up, he asked if I had any questions for him. I had many, but felt that since the meeting had gone well and he seemed open to seeing me again, there would be time later. But when his life in Lahore, the life I had not been part of, closed around him again, he was less willing.

The Mango King

‘I
feel I’ve made a mistake in my attitude to Pakistan,’ I said to the publisher. ‘I arrived treating it as just another country. I was still thinking of Turkey, Syria and Iran when I got here. But I feel now that I’m more invested in Pakistan than I thought. I need to see more of it.’

He frowned and his eyebrows collected tightly above his eyes. He was a heavy man in a white
salwar kameez
, with short greying hair and moustache. His face was large and pinkish and his eyes intense. He published a major Pakistani newspaper. My mother had put us in touch, and though he wasn’t sure what I was writing about, he seemed to understand my urgency. He did for me what I would have liked my father to have done: he insisted on my connection to Pakistan, the land, deeper than the border that divided India and Pakistan. He made no outward attempt to do this, but by arousing my interest in the cultural bonds that still existed between the two countries, in speaking to me of my paternal grandfather, an Urdu poet, in the pre-Partition years, and, most importantly, by communicating his own feeling for my situation, the publisher gave me the other side of the romance of an undivided India on which my maternal grandfather and my mother had raised me. Here was Pakistan, a whole country of unexplored connections. But where to begin?

Karachi, though it was the closest thing to a representative Pakistani city, was not like Istanbul was to Turkey or Tehran to Iran, not a city where a fifth or a sixth of the population lived. No one knew the exact figure, but a rough estimate put it at 16 million in a country of about 160 million. Pakistan, unlike any other country I had been in so far, was largely rural. People had said to me, ‘You don’t know the soul of Pakistan till you know feudal Pakistan.’ And charged by the desire to see this feudal life, I asked the publisher if he could help.

We sat in his grand old Karachi house. He lay on a very high bed, smoking, dictating itineraries and making phone calls to people who might help me. The most famous twentieth-century Indian and Pakistani artists covered the high walls of his room; boxes and precarious stacks of books lay on the floor. The house had long dark corridors and whole wings seemed to be closed off. After a few hours of messages left, phone calls returned, lists made, lectures on safety and extreme heat, the publisher looked up at me, scribbling as he spoke. ‘Can you leave tonight?’

‘Tonight?’

His fierce, pinkish face, the face of a man used to getting things done, fixed on mine; something twitched. He seemed to show disappointment and anger that I had wasted his time and betrayed his romantic vision of travelling in the country of the Indus, of Mohenjodaro, of Sufi shrines and the oldest Indian civilisation.

‘Yes,’ I stammered. ‘I can leave tonight.’

‘Good.’

It was early evening when I went back to my brother’s to pack my bags. I was to leave late that night with the Mango King for his lands in interior Sind.

I had dozed off on my brother’s beanbag when the Mango King called to say he was outside. I looked at my watch and saw it was well past midnight. I picked up my bag and went downstairs. A warm breeze was blowing and the street, lit with flickering tube light, was quiet. A white car, with heavily tinted windows, stood outside. As I approached, one of its back doors opened, but no one stepped out. Instead, cold, air-conditioned air infused with a faint smell of cigarettes drifted out. I put my head into the car and saw a young man in the back seat, with a black moustache, fair skin and a handsome, slightly puffy, face. He peered at me through a dense haze of smoke and gestured to me to get in.

The chauffeur drove off as soon as I shut the door. I turned now to the Mango King, who lit another cigarette. The air was so smoky, so cold and unbreathable, and the black windows wound up so deliberately, that my first exchanges with him were a series of polite half-smiles, confused looks, gentle prodding, anything to steer the conversation in the direction of why we were driving in these conditions. The Mango King, if he registered my objections, showed no sign of it. He smoked continuously, slowly and deeply, looking out at the deserted streets. I could tell from his eyes and the thickness in his voice that he had been drinking.

‘In the city I am a different person,’ he said abruptly, ‘and, you’ll see, in the village I am a different person. One has to adjust. It gets pretty nasty,’ he added suddenly. ‘People steal water. Typical
vadhera
.’ A
vadhera
, or landlord, was what the Mango King had become after his father died; his family were among the largest producers of mangoes in the country. ‘But things won’t change.’

‘Why?’

‘Not for another fifty years. There will still be feudalism.’ I nodded and saw that he was drinking from a hip flask.

‘Do you know why Sindi society is a failure?’ the Mango King asked, in his abrupt way.

‘No.’

‘There’s no middle class. There’s us and there’s them. We had a middle class, but they took off when what happened?’ I thought it was a rhetorical question and didn’t answer, but the Mango King’s gaze held me, expecting a reply.

‘Partition,’ I answered obediently.

‘Exactly. But, you know, life goes on, one day to the next. My father trained me to be a farmer.’ The Mango King spoke in broken sentences, disconnected in thought and language. After a long silence, he said, ‘Do you know why religion was invented?’

‘Why?’ I asked, wondering if some vague précis of my purpose had been passed on to him.

‘A man can deal with everything but death.’

The Mango King lit up again, but this time my eyes focused on a new discomfort: an AK-47 was placed between him and me, and the ribs of its magazine, its short barrel, and bulbous sight shone in the yellow streetlight. The Mango King was silent now, still drinking and smoking. The car’s cold, fetid air made me feel ill. The gun’s silhouette came in and out of shadow as we left Karachi. I kept catching it in the corner of my eye, and as there was a lull in the conversation, I thought I’d ask why the AK-47, particularly, was so popular.

‘Three things you have to be able to trust,’ the Mango King answered. ‘Your lads, your woman and your weapon. It’ll never jam on you. Anyone can fire it and it’ll never jam.’

I don’t know when I fell asleep, but I woke up once to see the Mango King still smoking. The next time, he was asleep, his head bobbing from side to side, the gun still visible at his feet, matt black with occasional yellow lustre.

I fell into a deeper sleep and woke next when I felt a touch on my hand. It was dawn, and we drove down a deserted country road, amid acres and acres of flat, empty fields.

‘The estate begins here,’ he said. The car swung left. ‘This, on both sides, is my estate.’ I looked around and saw that there were only shrubs and small trees on the land, thirsty even in the half-light. ‘This is the land I don’t grow.’

‘Why?’

‘No water.’

‘How big is it?’

‘Six thousand acres.’ By the sub-continent’s standards, this was a large holding.

Then after some silence, he straightened his posture and, with pregnant solemnity, said, ‘This is my territory.’

We passed several acres of dense, low crop, then just before the house, like some last battalion of a great regiment or a vanishing tribe of horses, seeming almost to smile at their own dignity in the desolate fields around them, were the mango trees. The Mango King stared in dull-eyed wonder at the dark green, almost black canopies, heavy with fruit and dropping low in a curtsy against an immense saffron sky.

As we came closer, the trees that seemed to have a single, pointed canopy, concealing their short trunks, were in fact distinct clusters of long, curled leaves, as though warped by the heat. Their contours contained a bewitching interplay of pigment and shadow. The fruit was small and mostly unripe, but the end of each was yellow as though some tropical poison gathered its reserves before overwhelming the whole.

When we got out of the car, I saw that the Mango King was tall and well-built. His cream
salwar kameez
partially concealed a new paunch, and like the puffiness of his face, it was unattractive on a man of his looks.

A few men were stooped in greeting. The Mango King waved at them, then stumbled through a doorway. We entered a walled garden of palms, droopy
ashoka
trees and buoyant rubber plants. A cement walkway, like a Pac-man trail, led to the house. The Mango King’s fluttering cream figure reeled, tottered, straightened, and lurched down the narrow path, as his servants and I followed. The walkway finished in front of a low white bungalow. Darkness and a musty stench from thick, beige carpeting hit us as we entered. I couldn’t make out much of the house in the dim morning light. At the far end, there was a square arrangement of low sofas.

The Mango King collapsed into one, and stared vacantly at me, as if only now seeing me. I wondered what he thought I wanted with him. Among pictures of the family, and one of the Mango King in a yellow tie, there were many books: a pictorial biography of Hitler,
National Geographic
s, Frederick Forsyth,
Jane’s Aircraft Almanacs
,
Animals in Camera
and dozens on travel. I felt from the books, and from the framed posters of impressionist paintings, a longing for other places; it was like a longing for clemency, in colour, temperature and degree.

‘Did your father read a lot?’ I asked, scanning the shelves.

‘Yes,’ the Mango King replied. ‘He was the sort of man you could talk to about anything and he would always have the right answer.’ The description suggested a nightmare person, but the Mango King hadn’t intended it to sound that way. ‘I used to read,’ he added, ‘but I don’t get the chance any more.’ He showed me a book he’d recently bought. It was a guide to being a gentleman. ‘It says that a gentleman never adjusts his crotch in public.’ The Mango King chuckled and then we fell into silence. He sat there, looking neither at me nor at his men, but ahead, into the gloom, like a man who had just lost all his money. A servant brought him some water and a new AK-47, this time with a drum magazine. He leant it against the leg of his chair and, turning to me, said that this one was Chinese; more than a hundred countries produced them now. He asked me if I’d like to fire one.

‘Yes,’ I said, surprising myself.

‘She wreaks havoc when she opens her mouth,’ he smiled mirthlessly. He was prone to theatrical utterances and to clichés like ‘Different strokes for different folks’ or ‘You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy,’ which he said as if they’d never been said before. The idea of firing the gun was forgotten for now.