Night of the Golden Butterfly (11 page)

Despite my broken heart, I couldn’t help laughing. ‘When were you in Venice?’

‘We went in a school party when I was sixteen. Ten years ago. Very enjoyable trip despite the boroni.’

‘Surely because of it.’

He laughed. I saw him once again in Edinburgh and later twice in London, and then, like so many other Lahoris, he disappeared from my life completely. Occasionally a letter would arrive asking for my opinion on some book or the other that he was thinking of publishing in Urdu, followed by a long silence. Anis never married, despite his mother’s continual pressure, and never left the family house, despite the advice of all his friends. There was no shortage of money or land in the family. He simply couldn’t declare his independence. One day I got a phone call from my mother. Anis had invited some friends for dinner. When they left he had prolonged the farewell and waxed ultrasentimental about friendship, which should have alerted them, since it was out of character, but nobody thought there was anything wrong. Later that night he swallowed a cyanide pill. He had left behind a note explaining why he had committed suicide. When the shaken servants summoned his mother next morning, the old widow remained calm. She looked at his body without a trace of emotion. Then she saw the note and confiscated it before the police arrived. What did you write, Anis? Why didn’t you write to any of us? Or was the letter a complaint addressed to your mother?

Playing the chauffeur all those years ago, when he drove Jindié and me to the Shalimar Gardens and both of us breathed only in sighs, was the big favour Plato did for me in return for which I promised him anything that lay within my power. That is why I am immersed in reconstructing his life. What he may not have fully realized was that in writing about him I would, of necessity, have to resuscitate the lives of others, including my own. Whatever he may think now, he did not and could not have then existed on his own.

It was more than thirty years later when I understood what Jindié had meant when she asked me to read Cao Xueqin’s
Dream of the Red Chamber
, the great Chinese novel of the late eighteenth century. The author tells his readers that leading a life of poverty and wretchedness has made him realize that the female friends of his youth were morally and intellectually his superiors, and so he wants to record their lives to remind himself of the golden days he carries in his heart. It is a haunting novel of life in an enclosed set of mansions occupied by a wealthy family in the service of the emperor’s court. There are five volumes known; apparently the author could not complete the story in his lifetime. The book reminded me a great deal of Jindié, even though she was probably too young when she first encountered it. Had she modelled herself on Dai-yu, the ultrasensitive beauty whose passions were hidden even from heaven? Reading the novel was an intense experience for me, partly because many of the experiences and emotions of the young people as the author describes them were familiar and made me think not only of Jindié but also of various female cousins I had left behind. The plot is centred on a group of self-absorbed young romantics attempting to ignore the collapsing edifice of the mansion they share with their elders. That, too, was not unfamiliar. Had I read the book sooner, I might have understood Jindié’s preoccupations better, but my enlightenment would always have been too late as far as she was concerned. A second novel I read had not been suggested by her but by her brother, Confucius. It was a tale written a hundred years or so before the
Dream
. Hugely diverting, it has to be one of the great erotic masterpieces of world literature. In
Chin Ping Mei
, or
The Plum in the Golden Vase
, every single major character is viperous and there is virtually nobody in all the three volumes that any reader can sympathize or identify with, a polar opposite to the first novels written in English and the works of Miss Austen and the Brontë sisters. Halfway through the first volume I realized that Jindié must have read some extracts from or even the whole book, and an old mystery was solved. What she had shouted at me on that memorably awful night in the pavilion of the Shalimar Gardens was not
semen
but
Hsi-men
, the name of the anti-hero around whose sexual rampaging and avarice the entire novel revolves. I stopped reading for a while when I realized this and laughed. I was slightly shocked as I thought of her yet again. She had been eighteen at the time and must have read the book in secret. Perhaps Dai-yu was not her role model after all. And then memories stirred of some of the things Confucius had said when we were discussing erotic literature. ‘Nothing equals what we had in China,’ he’d told me, so there must have been an old edition of it on her father’s shelves. And, leaving aside Hsi-men himself, this is how one of the minor personages in the novel is described in the list of characters: ‘Wen Pi-ku, Warm-Buttocks Wen, Pedant Wen, Licentiate Wen, a pederast recommended to Hsi-men Ch’ing by his fellow licentiate Ni P’eng to be his social secretary; housed across the street from Hsi-men Ch’ing’s residence ... divulges Hsi-men Ch’ing’s private correspondence to Ni P’eng, who shares it with Hsia Yen-Ling; sodomizes Hua-t’ung against his will and is expelled from the Hsi-men household when his indiscretions are exposed.’

Even in retrospect, I was mortified at being compared to the amoral libertine who inserted his plum in every golden vase that he could lay hands on and from every possible position. All I had done was to try and feel the curve of her left breast.

Clearly I had to discuss Chinese literature with Jindié at our next meeting and hopefully in Zahid’s absence. If I was Hsi-men, surely Zahid must be Wen Pi-ku. I e-mailed her to that effect and she replied instantly, suggesting a time, a date and a location. She also wondered whether I had been able to read her letter, essay and diaries. I hadn’t, but I am now about to do so.

DEAR D:

You asked far too many questions before you left Lahore. One that irritated me the most was whether I saw myself as a Punjabi or as a Chinese girl. Instead of replying that I was a Chinese Punjabi, which I think is what you wanted to hear, I remained silent because it is more complicated. Did you ever notice how often I remained silent when you questioned me? Did you? It would have been impolite to tell you that they were usually stupid questions that irritated me greatly. You always asked about my family history. In this case the reason I did not reply was not because your query was foolish, but somehow I felt the timing was wrong, and, to be truthful, I didn’t want the information passed on to your mother, which you would have done and with a look of triumph.

The enclosed manuscript is really for you. Perhaps it’s too lengthy and dull. If you feel that, don’t even try and be diplomatic. That was never your style. It was such a sad and difficult subject that I was often inclined to stop. But it became a habit and was my way of conducting a one-sided conversation with you, in which you just had to listen and not question me every few sentences. The early section is typewritten! I had a great deal of spare time at Georgetown before the children arrived, while Zahid was saving lives. He’s good at his job but sometimes goes too far. A few years back he saved a life that the entire family, except for him, felt did not deserve to be saved.

I did not much care for the company of other medical wives and was never into shopping as a habit, let alone acquiring jewellery; these objects slip by me unperceived. So I spent many hours in the university library reading Chinese history, something that was impossible to do at dear old Nairn College, where the history we were taught was too, too farcical. So what you have is in three parts. Tales that my paternal great-grandmother told us when we were very small and that were regularly repeated by her grandson and his mother. It is oral history of the kind familiar to most families, though if I remember well your family stories always had alternative versions that were probably closer to what must have happened. The bulk of what I have sent you is oral history, but where I can I have confirmed it during my labours at the library. I have added a map to help you situate Yunnan. Punjabis are genetically provincial and need all the help they can get.

There are my incomplete diaries about what happened to me after your attempted rape failed (I’m teasing; I never thought that for a moment) and you left Lahore never to return. I think I know why. Zahid did return for a while and we began to see each other, first to talk about you and then ourselves, and when he suggested marriage, neither of us pretended it was love or passion. It was friendship and convenience. And, just so that you know, he is a very sweet and kind man and my life has not been unhappy at all. Of course he has become very wealthy now, but this has not made him miserly or disagreeable. In many ways, though not politically, he remains the same. I can’t pretend that all is well. My life has lacked something, but then whose life is perfect? Yours?

One question I will answer now. I always thought of myself as a Lahori Punjabi. If pushed further, I would have said I was a Yunnanese Punjabi. Never a Chinese Fatherlandi. Those two identities were not mine. At the time you would not have understood this, because, like my brother, you were infected with the revolution, and talk of Han domination would have been brushed aside by all of you with contempt as it still is by Zahid. Perhaps the reason for this is that the Punjabis have become the Han equivalents of Fatherland, crushing other nationalities at will, but that’s your story. Better write it before the Baluch and the Pashtuns and the Sindhis produce their own.

Sometimes I wondered whether you ever took me seriously. I suppose I should have written ages ago and told you that Zahid had had nothing to do with Tipu’s arrest, but knowing you I also knew what would happen. You would have established contact with Zahid, apologised, made friends and, being Punjabis, wallowed in a lot of emotion, male camaraderie and self-pity. Had that happened, with you coming in and out of our house on whatever continent, it would have been unbearable for me, since in the shadow of that brotherhood I would have become a cipher. So it was pure selfishness that stopped me from telling you. I prevented him from doing so as well, by employing underhanded arguments. When the children arrived and became the centre of my life, then I could have told you, but we inhabited such different worlds that I thought you’d probably forgotten our very existence. Nothing in your novels that I have read indicated otherwise. Enough. I hope the manuscript answers all the questions you asked when you still loved me, and if there are others I’ll answer them as well, since we’re in the same city again after forty-five years.

—
Jindié.

PS: You asked me about the Chinese equivalents for Arab names; here are some of them:

* Ma for Muhammad

* Ha for Hassan

* Hu for Hussain

* Sai for Said

* Sha for Shah

* Zheng for Shams

* Koay for Kamaruddin

* Chuah for Osman

M
Y GREAT-GRANDMOTHER QIN-SHI
, whom we knew as Elder Granny, was a niece of Dù Wénxiù. The name will not mean anything to you or to most people, but it’s inscribed in the annals of the Han as a byword for rebellion, Islam and ‘petty-bourgeois nationalist deviations’. Elder Granny would talk about the rebellions in Yunnan as if they had happened in the previous week. Hui, or sometimes Hui Hui, was the Chinese name for Muslims or people of Muslim origin, but I suppose you know that by now. Or was China only Mao and Lin Biao for you as well? Nothing else mattered. I can’t help these asides because I can still get very angry with you sometimes.

Every evening just before we went to bed, Father would send us to Elder Granny’s tiny little room near the kitchen. She must have been in her nineties at the time, and we all knew she would die soon. My father worshipped her. She was his last link with Yunnan except for Old Liu, a cobbler from Dali who really was an antique—one hundred years old in 1954. He had taught Grandfather and Father the art of measuring feet and cutting leather to make shoes. Father would tell us that Old Liu always made a shoe from just one piece of leather. That was the test. If you used more than a single piece you would never be a master shoemaker. Sandals were different, of course, but Liu never took them seriously.

Elder Granny had no teeth at all and could eat only soup and barley rice. Her toothlessness made us laugh, because we were children and even though veneration of our elders had been instilled into us at every opportunity, a Punjabi cynicism had crept into our lives as well, infecting us with the Lahori sense of humour. Often stupid, sometimes surprisingly subtle, but usually very funny.

At story-time we would sit at her feet, not looking at her when she talked, so as not to giggle when she became really excited and a shower of spit descended on us and it became really hard to keep a straight face. Despite all this we understood every word. She spoke Mandarin with a strong Yunnanese accent. When she used strange words, Hanif would shout, ‘We don’t know what that means, Elder Granny,’ even though it was considered rude to interrupt elders and he always pretended that he didn’t really care about our past. She didn’t mind at all. She would stop in mid-sentence and patiently explain what each word meant. Hanif wasn’t really interested in the stories, but he loved her presence, so mostly he sat quietly, thinking about cricket and his school friends. Elder Granny would begin each story the same way, so that her introduction became embedded in our heads. I used to tell the same stories to my children, but in Punjabi because they never learnt Mandarin, to their great regret. ‘Please start now, Elder Granny,’ I would say, and she would begin:

‘And there was once a city, a beautiful city, much more beautiful than Beijing, and it was called Dali. It was built on the edge of a lake, surrounded by mountains, and in the spring when the blossoms were out we could be forgiven for thinking that this was a replica of heaven. Kunming may have been the capital, but Dali was the heart of Yunnan, which, as you know, is itself the most beautiful country in China. In this beautiful city, there lived a family. Our family. We had been here for such a long time that nobody remembered how long, and in China that can only mean a very, very, long time ago. Some of us lived on the land, but most of us were traders, including Dù Wénxiù’s father. He was a salt merchant, but that did not satisfy him because it was not aesthetically pleasing, and so he set up a shop with the finest textiles and pottery.