Night of the Golden Butterfly (21 page)

Matho is no more, but his circle of friends still exists, a valiant minority of dissident publishers, intellectuals and workers who regularly and courageously challenge the established order and its mediacracy—men and women who live in a huge bubble, who are unable to account for themselves, and do not regard this in any way as a problem, who rarely question the sociohistorical realities that have produced them, not even when those realities erupt and threaten to bury their future in the lava.

I have maintained contact with many of the dissidents, all good people, but none of them can ever replace Matho. The question ‘Why fight back if nobody else does?’ always remained alien to him. Had he been alive I would have attempted to explain the reasons for this trip and he would have asked why I was going to dine with such an unusual lady from Fatherland and why she was staying at the Crillon, and I can read many other questions as if in your living eyes, Matho, old friend. Your absence has made you even more vivid and I can hear your music and your indignation very clearly.

To my surprise, she was waiting for me at the station, slightly overdressed and a bit tense. I didn’t immediately recognize her. It can’t be the woman I saw in London. She’s transformed. A haute couture trouser suit, makeup, immaculately cut and dressed hair and too much jewellery.

‘Dara!’

‘You should have warned me. Is it a fancy-dress dinner?’

‘Don’t be mean. Why should I spend the rest of my life mourning my past? I have a reasonable income because my only decent brother has a conscience. I’m free here to do as I wish. Don’t I have the right?’

‘That’s not a good question and never will be and you know that perfectly well. You look lovely.’

‘But you’re disappointed.’

‘Paris is always best after it’s rained a bit, the city is cleansed and the sky reverts to blue.’

‘You seemed preoccupied when I rang you. Who were you thinking of?’

‘Stendhal.’

My response triggered a memory and I laughed at myself. She insisted on sharing the joke, and realizing that her sparkling eyes and red lips would give me no rest, I told her. Once in Berlin, researching a novel soon after the Wall fell, I returned to my hotel and picked up a message to call Vera Fuch-Coady, an East Coast academic then in town working on Walter Benjamin’s radio broadcasts for children at the Wissenschaft College. I rang. She was obviously distracted. I asked whether I had disturbed her. I could ring back later. ‘No. Not at all. I’m not doing anything. Should we have dinner tonight?’ I agreed. She rang back a few minutes later.

‘Dara, you know when you rang a minute ago, I said I was doing nothing. This wasn’t exactly accurate. In fact I was thinking of Adorno. See you later.’

I was speechless, muttered something to the effect that I looked forward to seeing her soon and hoped she liked oysters, put the phone down and collapsed into laughter.

Zaynab smiled politely. ‘Who is Adorno?’

Mercifully a taxi became available at that moment. She seemed nervous, inwardly exasperated or scared. When I asked if anything was weighing on her spirits she described an episode that had taken place earlier that day. While walking in the Quarter and savouring the sunshine she was startled by the sight of a gang of policeman, who poured out of a van, surrounded an African, spread-eagled him against a wall, searched him, demanded papers that were not forthcoming and then bundled him into the van and drove away.

‘It happens in Fatherland all the time, but here, too, Dara? I was really shocked. People watched in silence and turned away.’

‘Just like Fatherland,’ I told her. ‘It happens all over Europe. In Italy they love burning gypsies and taunting Muslims. Repression and cowardice in the face of it have become everyday occurrences. Africans from the colonies, kids from the
banlieus
, are often treated like shrivelled leaves. Kicked into the dirt. You’ll get used to it.’

‘Have you?’

I didn’t reply.

Later that evening as our meal was being served I tried to discuss her life and Plato’s, which was after all, the supposed purpose of my trip. She was determined to discuss literature. We compromised. My reference to Stendhal had intrigued her.

‘I must confess I’m still besotted with Balzac. I can match many of his stories with real-life equivalents in Fatherland. Money and power, corruption feeding on corruption, and the origins of every rich family usually uncover a crime.’

The only Stendhal she had ever read was his compendium
Love
.

‘I could never identify with the crystallizing bough in the Salzburg mines. So European. Not his fault, of course. I tried to transfer his method to Sind. Here, I would say, it is the sand that is supreme. The dust storms, the hot winds that sear the skin and the mind, leaving us numb and temporarily paralyzed and distraught. That, too, is like love. Have you never read Ibn Hazm’s treatise on love? He wrote it in Cordoba, eight centuries before Stendhal. Very brilliant. I’ve surprised you. You prefer thinking of me as a martyred provincial from an Asian backwater.’

I had not been sure till then, but now I knew I wanted to spend the night with her. She read my face.

‘Did you know that my lush room with a four-poster was once a torture chamber, or so the maid told me.’

‘Are you still in love with Plato?’

‘No. I was for the first few weeks, but it was pure fantasy. He was very honest with me regarding his condition and we became very close friends. I could discuss anything with him.’

‘He’s always loved martyred provincials. Why the hell did you insist I write a book about him?’

‘Just to see if you could and would, and if you did we had to meet.’

‘I’m flattered, but did it never occur to your provincial mind that we could have met without the book?’

‘Had you been a composer I would have insisted on a Plato sonata. If you had been a painter I would have asked for a portrait, just to see how you saw him. Try to understand, Dara. I was bored.’

‘Hmmm.’

‘He told me you were once in love with a Chinese girl. Where on earth did you meet her?’

‘In Lahore. She was a Chinese Punjabi.’

‘How sweet. Tell me more.’

‘No. Provincials trying to patronize their superiors always make themselves look foolish. She’ll be in the Plato book. It’s all about milieu these days, not just the individual and his ideas.’

‘I need some advice from you.’

‘How could I dare to advise such a strong-minded and singular woman as yourself? You’ve managed pretty well on your own till now.’

‘I’m touched. Does this mean you’ll spend the night in my torture chamber?’

‘Would you like me to?’

‘Yes, but only after we’ve had dessert. It’s too delicious here.’

‘Are you sure it isn’t an ill-considered subterfuge?’

She laughed as she placed the order, and after an espresso each, I suggested some fresh air before retiring. She took my arm and we walked the Paris streets, which were slowly emptying of people as the city went to sleep, discussing its history and the ways of the world. I spoke of the country where I could not live, where people were spewed out and forced to seek refuge abroad, where human dignity had become a wreckage. Her own life was a living-death example of a human being putrefying in the filth that was our Fatherland.

‘You hate it so much?’

‘Not it, but its rulers. Scum of the earth. Blind, uncaring monsters. Fatherland needs a tsunami to drown them and their ill-gotten gains.’

She became quiet.

After we made love, she returned to the question of Jindié and I told her the story.

‘Another strong-minded and singular woman. You seem to specialize in them. How could she bear to walk off with Zahid? You were such close friends.’

‘Perhaps that’s why Plato, unlike Zahid, remains a very good friend.’

‘Don’t worry about him. He knew we were destined for each other. He told me that every woman he really loves but can’t satisfy ends up in bed with you.’

‘Surely there’ve been more than two.’

She laughed without restraint, highlighting another attractive feature of her personality.

The next morning over breakfast she asked whether she should move to London permanently. There was no way she was going back to Fatherland. She was fearful that Karachi was going to explode and there would be a civil war between the North and the South, Pashtuns versus Urdu speakers with Sindhis applauding from the side, hoping each would destroy the other but fearful that the Punjabi army would ride to the rescue.

‘And Plato?’

‘Plato is dying. I didn’t want to tell you last night, Dara, and for purely selfish reasons. I did not want you to think of anything else.’

This came as a complete shock and was deeply unsettling. For some time neither of us spoke. Another old friend was about to die and with him a large part of my own past and shared memories of catamites that we had collectively cursed. I felt a single, salty tear creep down my face and Zaynab brushing it away.

‘I did wonder when I heard his voice on the phone. It was hoarse, but he could sound like that after a bad night. What is it?’

‘Lung cancer that has spread. It was diagnosed a few months ago. I pleaded with him but he refused to come abroad. He refused chemotherapy. He lives on painkillers. All he does is paint. He said you would like his last paintings because they are from inside him, like the very first etchings. Except these are huge canvases. There is a ladder in the studio. Before I left he said, “Look at this one. My last work. This huge cat is me and I’m watching Fatherland. Look, here are Fatherland’s four cancers: America, the military, mullahs and corruption. For the cat there’s just a single one, but the cat will die first. Fatherland is on intensive chemotherapy. All sorts of new drugs are being used, but they might end up producing new cancers.” It’s a horrific painting, Dara. The inner circle of Hell. He wants you to write about it.’

‘I will after I’ve seen it, but why didn’t he tell me?’

‘He didn’t want you or Alice Stepford to know. I have no idea why this is so. And that is the real reason he was so desperate that you write about him. It had nothing to do with any request from me.’

When Plato died, Zahid and I would be virtually the sole survivors of the table around which we had all become friends. Of all of us, Plato had had the most extraordinary qualities, and while some of these were visible in his art, one always felt that he had never allowed himself to reach full bloom. He was at once the most honourable and the most unforgiving of men.

I think he felt that loss when I drove him to Cambridge all those years ago; I observed his concentrated gaze as he looked at the latest books in the field that never became his own. He had smiled in a strange way that I interpreted as regret but was probably not.

‘Do you still understand this stuff, Plato?’

‘A little, but it has moved so far ahead. Way beyond me now. The cold would have killed me. Like poor Ramanujan, incapable of tolerating the cohabitation of extremes.’

‘I thought it was repressed homosexuality that sent him scurrying back to India.’

‘Another way of putting it could be that it was the unrepressed homosexuality of the great mathematician who invited him here that frightened the poor catamite.’

‘Both of us could be right.’

‘Let’s avoid Punjabi melodrama. I think he died of tuberculosis that he contracted here, but I’m not sure.’

It was a crisp November day, but bitterly cold. We had walked for an hour by the river and a friendly poet at Kings gave us lunch. Plato never spoke much in company and when he did there was no artifice. That is why I was puzzled by his failure to tell me he was dying. It would have been in character for him to joke about it and regret that he wasn’t a Believer, otherwise he could have looked forward to at least one
houri
and his ailment instantaneously cured. Ours was a heaven for old men. When we were driving back from Cambridge, he expressed no regrets. All he would say is that one can never completely determine the path that one’s life takes. Other factors always intervene to shape our biographies. I asked if he was thinking of anything specific.

‘If there had been no Partition I might have come here.’

‘But you would never have had time to paint.’

‘I would not have needed to paint.’

Zaynab ordered more coffee.

‘Perhaps you should have left him the poison capsule.’

‘He would be dead by now, and he is desperate to finish the painting.’

‘He never will. He can’t. He knows that and all he’ll do is to carry on enriching the colours.’

‘Listen to me, Dara. I hired two nurses to be with him at all times. There is a doctor on call who has promised me to make his last hours easy. I just could not bear to be there when he died. He knew that, which is why he asked me to leave the country.’

I believed her. Suddenly I had a desperate urge to speak to him one last time. To say a few things I had never said to him. About how important he’d been for all of us. Of how the pleasure he took in defying public opinion had infected us, who were a generation younger, and how his unceasing attacks on time-servers and opportunists during a military dictatorship had given us courage.

‘Zaynab, ring the nurse, please. I want to speak with him.’

She dialled the number. There was no reply.

‘Keep trying, keep trying.’

Finally the nurse answered. She was in an ambulance. Plato had collapsed some hours ago and was unconscious. They were taking him to the hospital. Zaynab and I embraced each other and wept. We spent most of that day in the Louvre, walking in a daze, sitting for a long time in front of a Poussin, thinking of Plato all the time and wondering whether he was already dead. When we returned to her hotel there were dozens of messages. We did not eat, but went straight up. We wept first and then laughed as we sat on the bed and talked about him. We paused to drink some cognac and went to bed, but sleep came fitfully. Images of Plato at different stages of his life kept me half awake, and when I trembled, Zaynab’s soothing hands would massage my head.

Plato had left firm instructions regarding his burial. No protection money was to be paid to secure a place in any graveyard. He was quite happy to be eaten by dogs. Zaynab had suggested that since his painting of the dead hound for her dead brother had enhanced the value of the Shah estates, he should be buried close to where she had first sighted him. Pir Sikandar Shah accordingly arranged for Plato’s body to be transported to his lands and he was Buried in the Shah family graveyard, but without any headstone, as is the custom in that region.