Night of the Golden Butterfly (2 page)

Nor are the problems of translation simplified by the profusion of dialects. The voice that addressed Dr Mian Zahid Hussain spoke in the guttural dialect common to Lahore and Amritsar. As the narrator, I will keep the translation literal as far as this first exchange is concerned; but, wishing neither to tax the reader’s patience nor to expose my own limitations, I may be compelled to revert to a less louche mode in the chapters that lie ahead. Or I may not.

‘I say, Zahid Mian. Salaamaleikum.’

The recipient of the greeting cursed again, but inwardly. He did not recognize the voice. Clumsily unbuttoning his pyjamas with one hand while holding the phone in the other, he stumbled into the bathroom and gave much-needed relief to his neurotic bladder, just as a delightful drizzle began to water London’s numerous parks and private gardens. Despite decades of wisdom accumulated at the George Washington Hospital in Washington, DC, he did not know that speaking on the phone directly above the commode creates a slight distortion, an echo easily recognized by an alert person at the other end. And this particular caller relished embarrassing his friends.

‘So frightened by my voice that it makes you piss, catamite?’

‘Forgive me, friend. It’s early here. I don’t recognize your voice.’

‘I won’t forgive you, catamite. The only friend you have is in your hand. Why not put some soap on him and fuck your fist? Then you might recognize my voice, you frogfucker.’

That last was not a common abuse in Lahore but unique to an old circle of friends. Zahid smiled, struggling to identify the now familiar voice and hurriedly getting rid of the after-drops, with only partial success. The traditions of our faith, alas, are divided on this crucially important Islamic ritual. The Shia insist on the Twelver: the penis is shaken vigorously twelve times to get rid of everything lurking inside. The Sunni are more relaxed: six shakes are considered sufficient. In his hurry, Zahid had taken the Sufi path—one strong existentialist tug—and spattered his pyjamas as a result. Simultaneously, he recognized the caller’s voice.

‘Plato! Plato. Of course, it’s you.’

‘Glad you recognized your name, frogfucker.’

Zahid’s loud laugh, slightly tinged with hysteria, was typical of the city where he was born. He responded in kind.

‘For twenty-five sisterfucking years you disappeared yourself, Plato. Did you climb up your own arse? You ring while it’s barely light in this fucked city and complain I don’t recognize your voice. I thought you were dead.’

‘Mean-spirited catamite, why aren’t you? Your mother’s pudendum.’

‘You vanished, Plato. Just like your motherfucked paintings.’

‘Only from your dogfucking Western world. My exhibitions here are always packed.’

‘Where are you?’

‘Lahore, but flying to Karachi later. I have a studio there.’

‘Long live Puristan. Never fucked there, is it? Why are you ringing me at this hour? Are you dying? Been working it hard? Need an arse transplant?’

‘Shut your mouth, catamite. I thought you’d already be up. Aren’t you fasting? Too early to say the morning prayers? Heard you’d gone religious and abased yourself in Makkah.’

Zahid was angered. ‘We’ve all changed, Plato. You, too. Fasting is going a bit far. Better not to than to cheat, like we did when we were kids?’

‘Many of our old friends are fasting now. Try calling them catamites. They’re ready to kill. Why not you? Listen, Mr Big Surgeon or whatever corrupt business you’re screwing up these days, I rang for something special. My arse is torn, friend. Torn. Badly torn.’

‘Tell me something new.’

‘Love has happened. I need your help. No jokes or cuntish questions about my age. It’s happened.’

Plato was seventy-five, exactly fourteen years older than his country, as he never tired of telling us when we were growing up. He was ten or so years older than us, too, and used his seniority to boast about his sexual exploits, real and imagined, without restraint. About how he disliked docile and gentle middle-class women, obsessed with pimple removers. How he preferred the raw energy and rough hands of peasant wenches. All this we knew. But love? What depths had unleashed this monster? Wondering whether this was real or yet another Plato fantasy, Zahid decided to strike a lighter note.

‘Woman, man or beast?’ Abuse polluted the phone lines, lashing the recipient like hard rain. By the time the monsoon ended, Zahid was laughing so hysterically and stupidly that he woke his wife. From the way he was laughing, Jindié knew the call must be from Lahore, and that it was neither bad news nor his mother. She immediately demanded to know who was ringing up so early. By now it was pouring outside. Plato overheard her melodious voice.

‘Ah, the
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has arisen. My salaams to the great lady. She was created to inflame the imagination of painters. Tell her that after she left, our city never recovered. Why didn’t she dump you and find a better person? Like me, for instance. Catamite, I’m really pleased you haven’t abandoned her for a younger wife. Some young nurse with milkmaid breasts—’

‘Plato, it’s early and I—’

‘I’ll be brief. The woman I love is Zaynab. She’s married. No children, but adores her nieces. She needs help. She asks me for only one thing: my story and hers; collated in one manuscript, with my colour illustrations. Never to be published. Don’t ask why. I don’t know. It’s her only request. How can I refuse? I only rang you because I can’t track down that catamite who once was a friend of ours—Dara. He’ll remember me. We spent enough time together in the kebab shops and the teahouse, especially during Ramadan, when we always broke the fast early and often. Remind him that I once did him a very big favour at some cost to my self-esteem. He promised me one in return whenever and wherever. The time for that is now. I need him, Zahid Mian. I can paint and sign my name. Someone else will have to write the stories. Or has Dara become too grand for Fatherland friends?’

‘Plato, please try and find Dara’s e-mail address. I don’t see him. The motherfucker still treats me like a traitor. The last time I met him was at a Punjabi wedding in New York. I smiled politely in his direction, and he turned away contemptuously. Always an arrogant motherfucker. He might respond better to a direct request from you.’

Plato erupted. ‘Hockey stick up your arse, catamite ... and his. I never use e-mail. That stuff is for catamites and impotents. Just give him the message and my number. Tell him mine is badly torn. I really need that fistfucker’s help. If you’re too shy, ask the Golden Butterfly to ring him. She’ll do it for me.’

The reference to the hockey stick revived memories. Plato was an elephant. Trust him to remember Zahid’s distaste for the sport. Zahid’s father had captained the Punjab university team in the late nineteen-thirties, and some years later scored a goal in the Olympics that won the silver for Fatherland. National acclaim followed, but not from his Communist friends. Moved by their disdain, he had turned down the offer of a medal and money from the government. Zahid was six years old at the time, but growing up surrounded by sports medals and cups only increased his aversion to hockey. His father had turned equally successfully to business and set up an import-export agency, which, with the help of civil servants in need of a commission, had prospered. Zahid’s reaction had been to join an underground Communist cell, cementing our friendship. But nothing is ever really underground in Fatherland. Everybody knew.

Reluctantly, Zahid agreed to make the fatal call. A few hours later, as I was carefully tamping the coffee to make myself an espresso, the phone rang. My first instinct was to hang up. It was only the mention of Plato’s name that stopped me. I hadn’t spoken to Zahid for forty-five years—not since his departure from Lahore in the mid-Sixties to read medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, after his marriage.

To leave the country, he had had to obtain a No Objection Certificate from the Ministry of Interior. In order to do that, we later learned, he had revealed the whereabouts of Comrade Tipu, a Bengali Communist from Chittagong who was at college with us in Lahore. Tipu was much better educated than we in both the Marxist classics and pre-marital sex, and we learned a great deal from him. That cursed spring, he was warned by a friendly bureaucrat that he had just been put on the wanted list for subversive activities against the state. Tipu felt honoured, but also scared. Nobody likes to think of electric rods, icicles or the penises of the secret police being shoved up his arse in a dingy cellar of the Lahore Fort. Someone we all knew had been tortured to death a few years previously and fear was not an irrational response. Tipu decided to go underground. An aunt of mine in a remote and mountainous part of the country was looking for a gardener. I suggested Tipu, who borrowed a few gardening manuals and left for the hills. A few months later he was tracked and arrested. The CID had been tipped off and a senior police chief was heard boasting after a few whiskies in the Gymkhana Club that it was the hockey star’s son who had obliged them. A second cousin present at the occasion made sure that I was informed about it, but only after Zahid had left for Baltimore. The news spread in the city and I broke off all relations with him. Youthful arrogance, now conformist, now rebellious, rarely permits any serious questioning or re-evaluation of actions, events, experiences. We were no different. Zahid was a traitor. I cast him out of my mind, though I could hardly avoid hearing about his success as a surgeon. Since Zahid moved to London we had exchanged curt nods at the odd wedding reception and a funeral or two, including that of an old Fatherland Communist whose son had insisted on prayers in the lavish but ugly Regents Park Mosque. Tipu himself was there. He had led a chequered career as an arms dealer, and I saw the two embrace. By then I had come to know innumerable, deeper, worse betrayals. If Zahid’s was not to be forgiven, it might be qualified. But above all I wanted to hear about Plato. And suddenly, after all these years, I wanted to know about Zahid’s wife. Somewhat impulsively and to my own surprise, I agreed to have dinner with them in Richmond.

We had not spoken for almost half a century. Old age circumscribes the future, the laws of biology push one to reflect mainly on the past, but if anything, I have tended in the other direction. Why concentrate exclusively on the past? Some friends have become testy and ultra-pessimistic, seeing no value at all in the postmodern world. Biological conservatism or old hopes gone musty, in both cases inducing melancholia, despair-filled days and alcohol-fuelled evenings.

School friendships are notoriously fickle. Some survive for purely practical reasons, the more privileged schools in every country creating social networks that make up for the loss or nonexistence of real friendship. Zahid and I had attended different schools, but we met up in the mountains each summer. And yet ours was not just a seasonal friendship. We continued to talk when we returned to Lahore. Later we were at the same college, and our shared politics brought us closer still.

For almost ten years we confided all of our political and sexual fantasies to each other. When Zahid developed an obsessive crush on a general’s daughter, he insisted that I accompany him on his Vespa to the women’s college that she attended. We would wait outside and then follow her car, overtaking it just before it reached her house. She knew. Occasionally she smiled. The memory of a single smile kept him going for weeks. Then she graduated and was soon married off to the scion of some feudal family. Zahid’s offer, transmitted via his mother, had been rudely rejected. Zahid’s political bent and his father’s rejection of honours had made him out of bounds for daughters of army officers and bureaucrats, the two groups that ran Fatherland in those days, presiding over the kind of tyrannies that break a people’s heart and their pride. The boy had no future. How could he expect to marry into privilege?

Zahid recovered, though, and shocked his parents by insisting on marrying Jindié, the daughter of a modest but extremely well off Chinese shoemaker in Lahore. It was a Muslim family, but caste prejudices went deep in Fatherland. A cobbler’s daughter for the only son of a wealthy Punjabi family? Unacceptable. He might as well marry a Negro woman.

Zahid ignored them. ‘What are we?’ he would mock. ‘Peasants descended from low-caste Hindus whose job it was to grow vegetables for the rulers of this city. Our forebears grew turnips and pumpkins; Jindié’s father is a craftsman. Just because he measures your feet for sandals you think he’s lower than you.’ He married Jindié, the
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, as Zahid’s Punjabi friends called her—the Golden Butterfly. Her brother was a member of our political circle. She was a marvel of beauty and intelligence, a rare combination in Lahore. There was an air of gaiety about her as well as majesty. She had thin lips and profoundly expressive eyes. She had read more books than all of us put together, and in three languages. Her knowledge of Punjabi Sufi poetry went deep, and when she sang her voice resembled a flute. And she did sing sometimes, usually when she thought she was alone with our sisters and female cousins, unaware that we were listening. We all loved her. I more than the others, and I think she loved me. She had married Zahid just before his political treachery was exposed, but I thought she must have known of it and that had angered me greatly. It mattered in those days. Consequently, she, too, had been assigned to the deepest circle of my memory.

Now I found myself looking forward to seeing Jindié again. Our relationship had consisted mainly of letters, lengthy phone calls and attempted rendezvous. The last time we had met on our own, forty-five years before, she had been in a state of unspeakable confusion. Covered with shame, she had fled.

The next time I’d seen her had been at a farewell dinner for a retiring professor. She had come with her brother. It was a very proper occasion, not that she was ever capable of relapsing into coquetry. We did not speak and she appeared to be in fragile shape. Her melancholy glances cut me deeply, but there was nothing to be done. Some months later I received a letter informing me of her engagement to Zahid. It was a very long, self-justifying missive of the sort that women are better at writing than men, at least in my limited experience. I was so enraged at the news of her engagement that I never reached the end. In later years I did wonder whether it had contained any words of affection for me. I tore it up into little pieces and flushed it to the depths of the city. It was better confined to the sewers, I thought, where the rats could read bits of it. She should appreciate that, since she was marrying one. Years later, a mutual woman friend told me she had not detected any awkward corners in Jindié’s life. There were two children and they were the centre of her existence. I wondered what had become of them and her life after they left home.