A Sultan in Palermo (35 page)

He recounted in some detail how the first meeting had been brief, but profitable. He described her clothes, the colour of her hair underneath the diaphanous
dupatta
. The way her eyes changed colour and so on. She summoned him a week later to explain the allegorical side of his work. Then he asked her to pose for him. She did so fully clothed, but he painted her lying naked in her bed waiting for her Holy Book—husband. He said the picture was inspired by Magritte, but if it were ever shown in public he would be DD’d (disembowelled and decapitated) by some fanatic. I challenged this assertion. Given that the grotesque practice of Koran-marriage was regularly denounced as un-Islamic by every clerical faction in Fatherland and had even united Shia and Wahhabi, surely it was the men in these families who should be DD’d for misusing the Holy Book to safeguard their property.

I thought my logic was impeccable, but Plato ignored me and continued with his story. Zaynab, he said, was not a virgin. I sighed with relief. The advantage of this type of marriage, she had told him, was that there was no need to dissemble. Every pretty woman Zaynab knew in Fatherland had a husband, and quite a few in addition to a husband had a lover as well and, as an extra, another person to keep her from getting too bored during the day. Talk like this had entranced Plato. He was still gripped by madness, torment and joy, the process clinically described by Stendhal in
Love
as ‘crystallization’.

‘Plato, are you living in her apartment?’

‘Why not? She pretends I’m her cook-butler-chauffeur, and whenever her friends or relations visit I act the part, as I once did for you and the Golden Butterfly.’

None of his obsessions with women had ever lasted very long, and I enquired gently how long he gave Zaynab.

‘Listen, catamite ... sorry, that slipped out by mistake. Zaynab will make sure my body is bathed and enshrouded before the burial. I’m too old to move on anywhere now. Will you tell my story and hers?’

‘Yes to yours, but I don’t know her at all.’

‘She’s coming to your town next month. You’ll meet her.’

‘Are you coming, too?’

‘How can the cook-chauffeur travel abroad with the lady? Her friends aren’t that stupid.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong, Plato. They are stupid. Your photograph has been in
Dawn
. Your paintings have featured on television, and none of them recognized you?’

‘Servants are invisible.’

‘Till they cut their master’s throat.’

We had been speaking for three hours and now at the risk of offending him I said farewell and noted his phone number. Plato’s submissive, shy, please-ignore-me-I’m-a-nobody exterior had been carefully cultivated over the years and always worked with those who didn’t really know him. It wasn’t totally fake, or else he would have promoted his own work more energetically, but when I pushed him on this he would simply reply that if the work was any good it would last and he was not too interested in money. His attempted blackmail of me was crude and ineffective, since Zahid knew the whole story, but it was undoubtedly a sign of Plato’s desperation, his fear of dying just as he had met a woman he really liked.

Plato entered our lives almost half a century ago. Zahid and I had left our respective high schools and joined the college in Lahore, where we were blessed with a truly enlightened principal. A biologist by training, he was also a gifted Punjabi scholar and had translated some of our epics into Urdu. They were not quite the same thing in Fatherland’s shiny, ornate state language, but he had done them better than anybody else. He had also commissioned a Punjabi translation of Shakespeare. The success of
The Tempest
, staged the previous year, had been helped by the actor playing Caliban, who bore an unnerving resemblance to the military dictator entrusted by Washington to run Fatherland. We had returned to Lahore from the mountains in time for the Punjabi premiere of
Hamlet
. Expectations were high: Ophelia was being played by a very pretty Kashmiri boy called Ashraf Lone, and a number of older students who lusted after him had decided they loved the theatre.
Hamlet
was to be performed in the Open Air Theatre in September, when the heat had abated, the monsoon and accompanying humidity of August had retired for another year and the evenings were pleasant with the scent of jasmine and queen-of-the-night wafted by soft, refreshing breezes across the college lawns to the amphitheatre. The translator was a distinguished Punjabi poet.

A new theatrical production was a big event in the cultural life of the city. The opening night of
Hamlet
was attended by numerous parents and the intellectual elite of Lahore. Those with sensitive posteriors brought their own cushions to place on the circular rows of redbrick seats overlooking the stage. There was a sense of expectation, an evening away from the vulgar interests of everyday life: what could be loftier than Shakespeare translated into the language of our city by one of Fatherland’s most respected authors? The latter’s arrival at the theatre was greeted with enthusiastic applause.

The play began. All went well till the ghost scene. The actor playing the ghost was a young professor of English, slightly neurotic and very arrogant. He had studied at Edinburgh University and spoke Punjabi with a slight Scottish accent. He had never acted before, but had lobbied forcefully to be part of the play and finally the harassed director had given him the small role of the ghost. When his turn came to speak he was paralyzed with stage fright and forgot his lines. The excessively short senior student playing Hamlet began to panic. The third time he repeated ‘
Hai, mayray pio da bhooth’
(
‘
Oh, my father’s ghost’) without eliciting any response from the ghost, an irritated voice from the audience shouted a loud prompt:

‘Pidke, bacha apni ma di chooth!’
(Runt, save your mother’s cunt!)

To say the effect was electric would be an understatement. The actors collapsed before the audience. Hamlet was a giggling wreck. The ghost passed out with shame. The stage lights were turned off and on for at least ten minutes. The sound of laughter drowned all else: as one wave subsided, another rose. The stage management realized the play was over for the night and announced that the critics were welcome on the next day.

Everyone was looking for the Punjabi Freud whose bon mot had made the evening more memorable by wrecking it. The owner of the voice was in his thirties, bespectacled, dressed in
salwar/kurta
and chewing
paan
and had a thick crop of Brylcreemed black hair. He appeared to be on his own. Some members of the audience began to shake his hand and others were pointing appreciatively in his direction, but he seemed determined to get out of the theatre as fast as he could. Zahid and I grabbed him as he was looking for his bicycle in the shed.

‘Disappear, boys. I wish I hadn’t spoken.’

We invited him to join us the next day for drinks in Respected’s juice bar.

‘What sort of juice?’

‘The most delicious fruit juice in the city.’

He laughed without committing himself. We never expected him to show, but in the meantime news of his witticism had travelled far and wide, from the cafés to the kebab stalls of the city. At college the next day it seemed the only subject of conversation. Students asked each other, ‘Were you there?’ Zahid and I were much in demand as witnesses, and every time we repeated Plato’s words there were gales of admiring laughter. Later the same day, when we repaired to the Coffee House, not far from the college, the poets and critics gathered there had also been discussing the cancelled play and there was an overwhelming curiosity as to the author of the prompt. Why had this young man not been heard of before? Such a natural talent deserved his own special table in the café. Literary veterans racked their brains to think of a precedent as startling as his remarkable intervention. I wondered whether the same discussion was taking place in Cheney’s Lunch Home, a five-minute walk away, where aspiring poets mingled with highbrow critics and modernist blank verse was an obsession. At the Coffee House we discussed the poetry of Louis Aragon and Ilya Ehrenburg’s novels. The Lunch Home preferred Baudelaire and Gide and regarded Shakespeare as an antique bore, but even they could not avoid a discussion of the Punjabi
Hamlet
.

It was in these cafés that I first began to understand the scale of the trauma that had afflicted Lahore during the Partition of 1947 and transformed this cosmopolitan city into a monocultural metropolis. Names of Sikh and Hindu writers and journalists were recalled with sadness and those present who had witnessed the horrors of what is now referred to as ethnic cleansing would shudder as they remembered those times. Few dwelt on 1947 for long. It was just over a decade ago and the wounds were only too visible. There were more pleasant memories. A club, now sadly defunct, called Metro Fatherland, where in the heady years of the early Fifties young Muslim men and women met, ordered drinks and danced. On his way to this paradise, a writer would suddenly glimpse the veil parting on a burqa-clad woman’s face as she bought a piece of fine silk in Anarkali, and describe the vision as celestial light illuminating the Ka’aba. That still happens.

Plato made us wait a whole week before he emerged from his den. We looked carefully for any trace of triumphalism on his face. There was none. Our table was restricted to iconoclasts: a mix of students and young lecturers, the occasional older professor and a few graduates who were now, mainly, young civil servants with much spare time each day. Hangers-on were not tolerated and anyone suspected of being there to ingratiate himself with the teachers was angrily dismissed with a few choice epithets. We greeted Plato warmly. He became a regular fixture, arriving usually at lunchtime. The owner of the juice bar, curly-haired Respected Tufail, whose computer-like brain never forgot what we owed him, refused to charge Plato for a whole month. Respected—everyone called him that ever since he had once complained that students were far too rude and did not appreciate his skills. This was because the common terms of address, affectionately intended, were pimp, catamite, torn-arse, etc., and Tufail had become tired of hearing students half his age shouting, ‘Pimp! A large mixed pomegranate and orange juice.’ He refused to serve any student who hailed him in abusive language. Overnight we gave him his new name. Many customers had no idea what his real one was. Respected was a great wit and raconteur and often sat at our table to join in the banter. Even Babuji, the elderly proprietor of the adjacent café, which plied us with tea, samosas and
shami
kebabs all day long, would come and sit with us when Plato arrived.

Zahid was more conscientious than I was and often left to attend lectures, but I spent most of my time there, at our table in the corner underneath the big pipal tree, with its eight places permanently reserved for us. Respected and Babuji would never permit anyone else to sit there even if none of us had arrived. It was around this table that we began, slowly, to discover Plato’s past. It took months before he became relaxed enough to share his life story with us.

His name really was Plato. He was born in a village not far from Ludhiana, in East Punjab, now part of India. His precocity as a child and constant questioning had greatly irritated his father, a local schoolteacher, who probably had no answer to some of the boy’s queries. Aflatun, the local version of the philosopher’s name, corrupted from Arabic, was often used pejoratively to describe people who talked too much or repeatedly asked awkward questions or were just too argumentative. And so the three-year-old Mohammed became Mohammed Aflatun, and was registered under that name at the local madrassa and later at the high school in Ludhiana, where a few teachers had actually read Plato. This was a very long time ago. The nickname was meant to ridicule him, but as he grew, Plato took it as a compliment and later immersed himself in the translated editions of the Greek classics. His obsession with Pythagoras led to a lifelong love affair with mathematics, the subject he now taught at an ultra-snobbish Lahore school where entry was based exclusively on class, with preference given to landed families.

‘You teach there? Do you dress any differently?’

‘Why should I? Don’t they need me more than I need them? Once you live to please others, you live in fear of their displeasure, and fear makes one stupid.’

Later we discovered from a colleague of his, who loathed him, that had Plato accepted the offer of a stipend from Cambridge to study higher mathematics he would have prospered in that discipline. The offer was made after he sent a well-known Cambridge don some comments on his work, scribbled on the back of an old sheet of answers to an exam he had marked at school. But Plato disliked specialization, and as he told us on one occasion, ‘I did not want to drown in a pool of mathematics for the rest of my life.’ The prospect was unappealing. But why teach at a school? Why not at the college? Offers had been made there, too, and he had turned them down. School was less demanding, he maintained. Furthermore, he had no university degrees at all, never mind a PhD, and, besides, he could educate some of those private school boys in other disciplines, including that of life, with which they were mostly unacquainted.

The same could not be said of Plato. Life had overeducated him and the marks of its lessons were plain to see. He was light-skinned and thick-lipped, with hollow cheeks that gave him an ageless look, and this attractive ugliness was enhanced by thick black hair that he rarely bothered to groom. His Brylcreemed appearance at
Hamlet
had been unusual.

One day he told us how he had escaped from the 1947 pogroms in East Punjab and fled to Lahore. He was in his last year of school when news reached Ludhiana that all of the two hundred or so Muslims in his village, including his parents and three younger sisters, as well as aunts and uncles and cousins, had all been taken to the local mosque and set on fire. There wasn’t a single survivor. A kindly Sikh maths teacher who had befriended Plato hugged him and wept. The same man took him to the centre of town where a convoy of buses was being readied to ferry Muslims across to the other side of the partitioned subcontinent. Plato was dazed, unable to register the fact that he had lost everyone. He was put on a bus that contained mainly women and children; his old teacher explained the circumstances and pleaded with a woman to look after his pupil. She did.