The Good Son (18 page)

I went to the mosque on Fridays with the men and learned the prayers, although it was clear to me at an early age that Baba’s Islam was sentimental rather than devout. He didn’t, for example, serve wine at meals, but he had a decanter of whiskey in a locked cabinet, which he shared with select friends in the privacy of his study. At seven I was sent as a day student to Aitchison College. Wazir had preceded me there, and I was amazed to find the wild Pashtun boy transformed into a decorous scholar in blazer and shorts. Being several forms ahead of me, he could not officially recognize my existence at school, but I remember once asking him why he put up with it, and he said, “My father expects it and it is a matter of honor. I would be shamed not to do well before these Punjabis.” I did poorly myself: slow to read, the fat paragraphs of prose impossible to untangle. I was punished often and resented it. The only thing I was good at was memorizing poetry.

The third life was the one I shared with my mother, a secret life. For one thing, although she prayed conventionally enough with the other women, each Sunday she would wake me early and dress me and take me out of the house. We mounted her little 50cc Honda motorbike, me on the pillion behind, hugging her tight, and drove out of Anarkali down the Mall to Hall Road, where we parked in front of the Roman Catholic cathedral and went to mass. I can’t quite recall what I thought of this at the time. I knew my mother was strange and not like the other women of the household. I saw that Laghari Sahib treated her almost like an honorary man, so I guess I assumed she had a special God that was peculiar to her. There were statues of women in the cathedral but none in the mosque, and when I was very small I thought that these were statues of my mom. I didn’t take in much doctrine, but I was happy to have her to myself for a morning and grateful to the Catholic Church for providing it.

I have to say she was not a nurturing kind of mom, no great soft breast to hide in, the last resort of comfort; not at all like the other women I knew in my early life—Wazir’s mother, Nasha, or my old ayah, Faiza. Hugging Sonia was like hugging a boy.

Not that I lacked hugs. From birth I had Faiza, who bathed and
dressed me and kissed away my little hurts and spoke to me in the languages of that country, so that I spoke them like the native I was. The awkward part of this traditional arrangement was that Faiza worked not for my mother but for Noor, my grandmother, called Bibiji by the household. It was apparent to Bibiji that a crazy American woman couldn’t possibly be trusted to raise the heir of the eldest son, so when I was small she took over my rearing entirely.

This was wonderful and terrible at the same time. It was wonderful because I was the little prince among the begums, Bibiji and her perfumed gold-jangling court, the aunties and the friends, all cooing and pinching and hugging and stuffing me with sweetmeats:
barfis
, gulaab jamuns,
jalebis
. Lahore is one of the world centers of sweetmeats, and I would have blown up like a football had my mother’s lanky genes not turned out to be proof against that. It was also horrible, because the hugs were too hard and the pinches too painful and the perfumes often smotheringly dense; the talk, too, mainly knocked my mother and the foolishness of my father for bringing such a one into the Laghari family.

My mother left us for almost two years, starting when I was three and Aisha was one, so I spent those formative years unprotected amid the poisoned candy. I should have become one of those plump and indolent Punjabi men, spoiled in the way that only tyrannized women can spoil their sons, but for some reason it didn’t happen. I remember very well when she returned to Lahore, tough, lean, and burned as black as a Sindi peasant, shocking the pale aunties and me, too; I ran screaming from her embrace. But after some days of thrilling, nervous courtship she lured me back pretty well, with little treats and presents and the gift of her attention, making me her slave until she was ready to tie on her rubber dick and ditch me again.

I suppose you’d have to call our relationship romantic, in that it involved secrets, like our slipping away to church, and a kind of yearning pursuit on my part. I know she hid from me. There was on our roof an assembly of huge ceramic vases that contained a collection of palms and cycads. It served as sort of a backdrop when we had parties up there and shielded part of the roof from neighboring windows. I once found her there, after a frantic search, behind the palms, sitting on a charpoy, writing in a notebook. I recall spying on her in her hideout and then tiptoeing away, coming back again and again when I couldn’t find her elsewhere.

Eventually I must have made some sound because she caught me and invited me into the tiny space. I asked her what she was doing and she said she was making privacy. She said, “Lahore is wonderful and the house is wonderful and the family is too, and don’t think I’m not grateful, but they haven’t invented privacy here yet and I need it.” Then she told me about how when she was in the circus and she wanted to get away from everyone she would crawl into one of the trucks and burrow down into the piles of packing mats and make a little cave for herself where no one could find her.

I liked it when she talked about her time in the circus and I asked her questions about it, only some of which she answered. Later that day I think we played with cards. She always had a deck on her, and she amazed me with card tricks and taught me, when I was old enough, how to rig a deck and deal from the bottom. She could deal from the middle, too, but I was never good enough to do that. Anyway, the next time I went up to the palm cave she wasn’t there. I never found her new hiding place.

That first absence was when she went to Soviet Central Asia and came back and wrote a book about it, which nearly caused a war. In 1974 it was one of the most secret places in the world, studded with nuclear facilities and rocket sites, and somehow this twenty-three-year-old girl disguised as a boy slips across the Afghan border—the Iron Curtain!—seems able to go anywhere she wants, and writes a book about it, actually an amusing, charming book, describing no rocket sites, a book about all the lost people up there and their crazily corrupt society:
Up in the Stans
. It made her famous, they called her “a modern Kim,” as if she had really been a boy and not a mother of two children, and people came to the house to interview her for American and European TV—which she refused.

Naturally, the Soviets said it was all a CIA plot, and I think Pakistani intelligence was a little miffed, but Laghari Sahib cooled everything down and after that, for about five years, we had what I look back on as the most peaceful period of my life. I put all this together a lot later, when I was grown and curious about what had contributed to the disaster of our lives. When you’re a kid, it’s just a succession of days; you’re happy or sad without much context. My mother had been gone, now she was back, and things would once again revolve satisfactorily around the fixed center of the universe, me.

Mom got pregnant after that and later in the year she had another girl, Jamila. I thought we would be a regular family from then on, and we seemed to be, with only the usual discontents. My father could not have been more kind and generous to me, but the fact is I gave him nothing back; I disdained him and ignored him when I could. My sense of what a real man was had been formed by Gul Muhammed Khan and Laghari Sahib, and Farid didn’t measure up.

I think I picked up some of that disdain from Baba himself. Looking back, I can see that the old man was dissatisfied with all his sons, each of whom had inherited only one of his own characteristics. Farid, the eldest, had got the kindness and generosity, but he lacked ambition and the edge necessary to flourish in the tiger pit of Pakistani politics. He’d been handed a job in the foreign ministry, as the basis for a brilliant career in government, but he did not distinguish himself there. His real desire was to be an academic, studying the laws other men had written. Nisar, the middle son, had the brilliance and ambition, as well as the appreciation of art and culture, but he was mean, with a cruel streak. He went into business, which Laghari Sahib considered only one cut up from actual theft—as it sort of is in Pakistan. Seyd, the youngest son, had plenty of edge, and he was generous and loyal to those he considered his friends—among whom my mother and I did not figure—but he was dull. It was all he could do to get through the military academy they sent him to when he bombed out of Aitchison.

Rukhsana, being a girl, did not figure in this algebra, but in the strange way of families, being a girl and the oedipal horseshit being moot, she was closer to Baba than any of her siblings, and he would often ask her to sit by him during the weekly mehfil gatherings, with my mother on the other side.

How do I know all this? Another part of my secret life. My mother used to sit me down, usually in the afternoons after I got back from school, while I ate my tiffin, as they called it, and the girls were out with Faiza, and she would explain my family to me: the tensions, the rivalries, the disappointments, the resentments, all anatomized and poured into my small pink ears. I think now it was cruel to do that to a child, loading me with the kind of insights a kid can’t really absorb, just as bad in its way as Bibiji’s bad-mouthing. I think it warped me, or maybe I was just warped to begin with. She probably did it because she was lonely, despite
Baba’s and Farid’s kindness, and she seized on me as the one who could fix it. Or maybe it was
because
of the kindness. It’s harder to accept charity than to give it, especially if you’re half wild like she was, the way they say a wild animal kept for years and seemingly tame may one day without warning turn on its keeper and chew him up.

That’s one excuse. The other, which she actually told me when I asked her years later why she did it, was that she wanted to protect me from what might happen to me if anything happened to her, that this kind of knowledge, that penetration of motive and hidden interpersonal combat, would help me survive.

These séances were usually interrupted by the return of Faiza and the girls from wherever they’d been, to a public garden or the bazaar, and the change of air was astounding, like sun breaking through a muggy day. Aisha was seven at the time I’m thinking of, to my nine; she would arrive in a whirl of gangly legs and a spate of bright chatter, and instantly all the dark plots were blown into flying ash and dispersed.
There was an elephant and the man let us feed it, but Faiza wouldn’t let us ride. A lady crashed her bicycle into a man and everything spilled and the pigeons escaped, oh, Theo, it was so funny!
They brought halvah home, and news of the halvah-wallah and his tribe, in detail, with opinions and then comments on everyone who’d talked to them, and this was not a short list, because Aisha was the princess of the Urdu Bazaar; she could hardly go ten steps without someone calling her to talk, offering her a sweet. If a family is lucky it has someone like Aisha in it, the clearer of the air, the one for whose sake quarrels are stilled, the lens through which all the family’s love is refined and focused.

She loved me too, the big brother, the strongest, bravest, most handsome of brothers, as she would tell me in Urdu, where you can say things that would be ridiculous in English, and I wanted to cut off a finger every time I hurt her, times more frequent than I can now bear to think about. Farid worshipped the shadow of her passing, and my mother. . . well, there was a distance between them, I felt it at nine, and I suppose it was because even an angel child has to be disciplined and my mother was the one to do it, because Farid would give her anything she wanted.

Then my mother left again: I must have been nine or ten; one morning she was just gone without a word. My father said she had gone on
haj, which I knew was a good thing to do, so I wondered why all the adults in the house were angry. That week in Bibiji’s court it was the only topic of conversation, mainly in nasty whispers so I couldn’t hear, but I heard enough, and when my grandmother said that my mother was no better than a
fahisha
I pulled away from her and stood up and said my mother was not a fahisha and I wouldn’t stand for hearing her called one; the fahishas lived in Tibbi, what Lahoris call the Hira Mandi, where Baba went to see them every Saturday night with his friends. I don’t recall how I knew that Baba visited the famous courtesans of Lahore in their special district; I guess I had picked up the servants’ gossip or maybe Wazir’s, who knew everything.

Whatever, we had a screaming match and I ran out of the perfume fog into fresh air. After that, I was not invited to sit with Bibiji and her friends; I had joined the camp of the enemy. After that, Aisha was the favorite, though a girl.

Because of these events and because my mother was gone, Aisha got indulged more than she would have. Not that she wanted much, a kid surrounded by that much love doesn’t need a lot of stuff, but one thing she wanted got me into the most trouble I was ever in while I was in Lahore and also saved my life. The thing was a Polaroid camera. She’d seen it at a party and she conceived a fierce desire for one and uncharacteristically nagged our father about it, and at her next birthday he gave her one, with a warning to be sparing of the film, hard to get in Lahore at the time, and never to take it out of the house.

Which of course she did, how could she deprive her friends throughout the bazaar of a look at her treasure? Besides, she wanted to give them each a Polaroid portrait of themselves. So she went out with it concealed in a straw market bag that she always carried in imitation of Faiza’s big one, and she was able to slip away from the ayah and down an alley. She met the ice-candy man and did his picture, a crowd gathering to see this wonder, and then, with the camera slung around her neck, she trotted off back up the alley. By that time some big kids were waiting for her, and they roughed her up a little and took the camera.

It was Wazir who told me who did it. Up as he always was on the gossip of the bazaars, he came into my room on the night after it happened—I could still hear Aisha weeping at intervals, being comforted by Faiza to not much avail—and told me it was the Barshawi brothers. These were
a trio of teenage mopes, the sons of a local butcher who was also a ward-heeler type who did low-end political thuggery. The boys were in the habit of grabbing stuff without paying for it, and the father’s po litical connections made it hard for the bazaaris to get any redress. That’s Pakistan.