Night of the Golden Butterfly (30 page)

A few radio stations played extracts from the tape, and that was the sum total of on-air publicity. Jean-Pierre Bertrand was nowhere to be seen. The celebrities who had clustered around Naughty in Paris and New York did not wish to be associated with her after her death.

Madame Zaynab Shah was referred to in
Marianne
as an oral historian, which was news to everyone except me. The book appeared in English, but the New York friends of Diderot chose to ignore its presence. It did not receive a single review, but, as in Paris, sales were brisk. What surprised us all was that Naughty had made a will before returning to Fatherland. In the case of her death, her sons would inherit her apartment in Paris and everything else. If, for whatever reason, including predeceasing her, this was impossible, her entire estate was bequeathed to Editions Montmorency, with the stipulation that they produce three titles a year that were translations from Punjabi.

I was surprised and pleased to receive a phone call from Neelam. ‘Just got back from Beijing and heard about Mrs Lateef. Then I got a copy of the book. It’s a very good interview. Please congratulate Zaynab
khala
from me. What an awful end to her life. You know it was I who taught her some basic English.’

I told Neelam of my meeting with Naughty and how she had told me the same thing and had sung Neelam’s praises and expressed remorse for having helped to wreck her marriage.

‘Let’s forget that now, Uncle Dara. Allah’s will must be done. The good news is that Mom and I are friends again after almost fifteen years. I told her you stayed at our house and praised the coffee even when I had asked you not to. It pleased her a great deal. When are you visiting Isloo? Soon, I hope.’

Slowly everything was falling into place, some of it in the most gruesome fashion possible and some of it in a way that restored a degree of tranquillity to friends and their children. What would become of Zaynab? I had few doubts that our love and friendship, as pleasant and restorative as it had been, could not last too long. I had books to write. She wanted to build an art museum in Sind where ancient and modern works might be shown together. Mohenjo-Daro on the ground floor, Plato near the top. She had talked about this a great deal, reigniting my old fascination with Mohenjo-Daro and the civilization of which the city had been a part in 3600 BCE. Replicas of its stern-faced priests and exquisitely shaped dancing girls are looking down at me from a bookshelf as I write these words. I’d always thought of writing a novel set in that period in the region, but events had intervened and finally the back burner itself had collapsed. Was it time to revive the project? Perhaps, if only to demonstrate that sanitation and the distribution of food was more advanced then than it is in Fatherland today.

Zaynab knew the state museums were badly funded, run by corrupt bureaucrats, and that as a result many artefacts were already in Western museums or private collections. She was determined to build her own museum. She pressed me repeatedly to become its director, but I could not be part of this project. I could not replace Plato in her life. I told her so and she hugged me tight, but made no attempt to convince me otherwise. We both knew that it was time to move on, and although our friendship was secure for ever, when we would next meet and what we would do were questions that could not be answered. On one issue alone was she intransigent. We had to see Plato’s last painting together. On this there was no dispute.

‘Your initial instincts were correct, Zaynab,’ Henri told her at dinner the evening Naughty’s will was made public. ‘She was not a complete monster. Part victim, part monster. That is what this world does to people. Dara, what should we do to thank her for the bequest? A Yasmine Auratpasand Prize sounds exploitative and false.’

‘Let me think.’

Late that night I did think, and while Zaynab was sleeping peacefully, I thought that a school for girls in the village where she was born, and in her real name, to avoid stupid publicity, might be a possible solution, with scholarships for study abroad guaranteed for the top two students each year. Both Henri and Zaynab agreed. Zaynab would speak to her brother to expedite matters. Henri would talk to a friend on how best to invest the money for such a purpose. Meanwhile a Punjabi list had to be organized for Henri’s publishing house, and I promised to suggest six books for it: three classics and three modern novels.

‘I wish we could simply call it Naughty School for Girls,’ said Zaynab with a gleam in her eyes after Henri had left. ‘But I fear that might be misunderstood by some of our bearded friends.’

D
EAR DARA, I’VE ATTACHED
Jindié’s report, as promised, on her first three months in Beijing and a trip to Yunnan. I’m now quite hopeful that all will be well in the long run. Remember that song you and Jindié would play all the time when you visited our house: Muddy Waters singing ‘Everything’s Gonna Be All Right’? The music of my life is more organized than that, but I’m singing again. The attachment accompanying this e-mail I have been compelled to edit, since it would fill a book on its own, and so I have left out long descriptions of Beijing, a satirical account—whose ferocity both surprised and delighted me—of Jindié’s visit to the Ethnic Culture Theme Park, entered from a detour off the Fourth Ring Road, of which road, too, she has much to say. Jindié’s daily impressions of Beijing and her lyrical description of Dali and Yunnan deserve to be and will, no doubt, be published on their own, though not in the
National Geographic
, since there is not a trace of exoticism in what she writes. Without altering or adorning the simple style of her prose, I have merely shortened the text to concentrate on the development of the characters we already know and the appearance of others necessary to our story.

All best,

Your old friend Confucius.

Dear Dara,

I did not return to Beijing with my brother, but spent a few days in London first preparing for the journey. Zahid knew a number of neurologists and we met two of them together. They pointed out that in memory lapses, it is normally old memories that have been submerged; whether or not they can be brought back to the surface depends on the person concerned: They were impressed by Hanif’s (please accept the use of this name even though you and other friends always think of him as Confucius) total recall of Punjabi, and one of the neurologists said he had not encountered a case of this sort before. He advised us to constantly call Hanif by his name when speaking Punjabi and Chinese. The recall of Punjabi, both of them stressed, was a sign of a submerged memory. It would take time and patience.

Hanif picked us up at Beijing airport and drove us home, pointing at new buildings and naming their architects. He lives in a huge, comfortable apartment built about five or six years ago, close to the financial quarter. His wife, Cheng Yu-chih, is in her late forties, short hair, very well dressed and fluent in English and German. She works as an economist in some government department.

While he showed Zahid the apartment and then took him to the basement to inspect the health centre and swimming pool, I told Yu-chih our story. She was not as surprised as I thought she’d be. Hanif had told her that we were friends he had met in Paris, but that we might be related to him as well. Yu-chih explained that he was slowly trying to build a narrative of his life before his collapse, and since his return from Paris had told a number of people that he had been born in Lahore and had recently met his sister.

She also said he talked in his sleep in strange languages and occasionally used such archaic words in Chinese that she had to consult a dictionary. Now this began to make sense to her. She’d wondered who the old couple were that he had introduced her to once as his parents but who never came here and whom he rarely visited. Yu-chih had thought that he was ashamed of them because they were retired factory workers. This was a common phenomenon in all the big cities, so she had not questioned him too much on the subject. ‘When a country has changed its identity so completely, is it surprising that many of its citizens do the same?’

I like her very much. She is honest and intelligent.

When the two men returned, I said ‘Hanif, I really like your wife.’ The name startled him.

Then Zahid repeated it and he turned on us. ‘Why do you call me by that name? In Paris one of your friends called me Confucius, and now you call me, what did you call me?’

‘Hanif!’

‘It’s not a Chinese name.’

I nodded, but did not push him any further. Later Yu-chih asked me whether our family was Hui. I told her we were Hui from Yunnan, but when we settled in India some of our community took traditional Arab names from our ancestors as well. My parents and I had Chinese names, but they decided to call my brother Hanif. She sat down on the bed with her head in her hands.

‘Dear sister, Jindié, the reason I asked is because your brother is always cursing the Hui in Beijing, sometimes using very bad language. I always reprimand him, but even his body language becomes aggressive. He will never accept he is Hui. That will be the biggest shock for him. I haven’t dared tell him that my family in Shanghai are Hui. We are not religious at all, but my father, a surgeon, is proud of his heritage. Sometimes I take him to Oxen Street because it has the best noodles in town. It’s in the Hui area and he always looks at them strangely. Once he asked offensively for pork and got an offensive reply in return. “Go and fuck a pig,” he said before I drove the car away. I did shout at him afterwards. He talked more rubbish. “The first Hui who came to our country said they would return to theirs. They’re still here twelve centuries later. They should go home.” I asked whether all the minorities should return and reminded him that the Tibetans are desperate to do so but we won’t let them. His reply was very strange. He said: “The others can all stay. Only the Hui. They should go.” He doesn’t mind the Muslims in Xinjiang. They can stay as well. Just the Hui in the south. The intermarriages in the south between Hui and Han were so strong that for centuries the only distinguishing feature was the pork taboo and prayers.

‘Many Han thought Mohammad was just like Confucius for the Hui. Perhaps my dear husband hates hybridity. I just don’t know. None of our friends talks the way he does.’

All this came as a shock and I was very distressed. Slowly, I unpacked my suitcases, thinking all the time of how to unpack Hanif’s mind. I had brought a lovely old photograph of our parents and Younger and Elder Granny posing in front of the Zam Zam gun, which used to hang above the mantelpiece in our Lahore apartment. I now hung it on the wall in the living room. Then I placed a photograph of all of us just after my wedding, with Hanif dressed in an
achkan
, wearing a turban and grinning, in the kitchen. Yu-chih nearly fainted when she saw that one, but said nothing.

Zahid knew some Chinese physicians from international conferences and through them we found an excellent neurologist. I told her everything, including the outbreak of Hui-phobia. Dr Wang agreed to see him, but only after a month. She thought that with proper stimuli his memory could return. If the Punjabi language had been unlocked, then anything was possible. She wanted to know if there had been an accident, and said I should go and meet the couple he thought were his parents. All she would do was put him under a scanner to see if there had been any physical damage. The rest was up to us.

Hanif and Yu-chih would both leave for work early, and Zahid had gone to Isloo to take Neelam and the kids to London for their holidays. I was left on my own and went out to explore the city. Oxen Street was packed with people. I walked to the mosque and looked inside. Nobody cared. I found the best noodle stand in Beijing. It was marked
qing zhen
(halal); another sign said ‘no pork’. They were very good noodles. When I told the owner, who was all of twenty-five years old, that I was a Hui from Fatherland, he was very welcoming. Wanted to know how I had landed up there. His uncle, a Chinese naval engineer, was currently in Gwadur. Had I been there? I shook my head. He told me he was a secular Marxist but also Hui and observed minority holidays to honour his Arab ancestors. He said that since Gulf money has been coming in to help repair the mosques and build a few new ones, he had noticed an increase in mosque attendance. He winked. ‘I think some go for free food and clothes.’

Yu-chih took a day off work and drove me to an old part of the city to meet the couple Hanif thought were his parents. They live in a cluster of small houses near the outskirts of precapitalist Beijing. They must be in their late eighties. They welcomed us warmly and offered some tea and very sweet biscuits. They told their story openly; there was no subterfuge at all.

Hanif had been a very close friend of their son’s, and the boys often stayed with them in the late Sixties. The boys were members of a group of Red Guards that called itself From the Periphery to the Centre Proletarian Group for World Revolution. One day there was a clash, either with another group or with the Lin Biaoists in their own group. They could never get the details, but it ended with their son, Hsuan, being killed. Hanif picked up his friend and carried his body home. His own head was bleeding and he fell unconscious. The old couple began to weep at the memory of Hsuan, and both Yu-chih and I hugged and stroked them till they grew calm again. He had been their only child.

They had called an ambulance and Hanif was taken to the hospital, where he recovered consciousness but had no idea what had happened. He was sent back to their home in an ambulance. After the political turbulence had subsided he entered Beijing University, gaining admittance as the son of a working-class couple. The university authorities themselves were recovering from the chaos of that period. They were aware that Hanif had suffered a severe memory lapse and didn’t press him on details of his prior schooling or anything else. He was given new papers in his Cultural Revolution name, Chiao-fu. He was a brilliant student, always coming home with good reports. Then he went to Shanghai and Hong Kong to work and only recently had he returned to Beijing. Once he started working he had sent his ‘parents’ money every month, often accompanied by clothes and expensive food parcels. He never talked much after Hsuan’s death, but was always dutiful. It was Hanif who had assumed they really were his parents. They never corrected him because in a way he had become their son. Once he saw a photograph of Hsuan and himself with red bands on their heads and asked them, ‘Is that my brother? What happened to him? Why did he die?’