2008 - A Case of Exploding Mangoes (38 page)

Trust these Pakistani generals to get excited about a goddam smelly fruit, he tells his colleagues, clocking off his shift.

M
ajor Kiyani looks down at his slippers and for a moment forgets why he isn’t wearing his military boors. His head feels dizzy as if he has just come off a roller coaster. He sucks in air with the lust of a dying fish. Throughout the entire five-hundred-and-thirty-mile drive he has rehearsed one sentence: “It’s a matter of life and death, sir, it’s a matter of life and death, sir.” He looks around. Arnold Raphel is nowhere in sight. There is not a single American on the tarmac. General Akhtar looks at him with pleading eyes, imploring him to say God knows what. Major Kiyani suddenly feels that he should salute, walk back to his car, drive back to his office, at a reasonable speed this time, and resume his duties. But he can feel the snipers’ guns pointed at the back of his head and two pairs of very curious eyes inspecting his face, waiting for an explanation. A matter of life and death, sir, he says quietly once again to himself, but then between gulping a few more cubic feet of oxygen blurts: “It’s a matter of national security, sir.”

A dark shadow falls across General Akhtar’s tense, yellow face. He wants to shoot Major Kiyani in the head, board his Cessna and fly back to Islamabad. He expects his men to take decisive action, to cover his flanks in battle, to provide him an exit when he needs one, not behave like pansies discussing national security.

He sucks in his thin lips and holds on to his baton tightly. Suddenly Major Kiyani seems to him not the rescuer on horseback waving the irrefutable proof of his innocence, but the Angel of Death himself.

General Zia’s eyes light up, he punches the air with his clinched fist and shouts: “By jingo, let’s suck the national security. We’ve got twenty crates. General Akhtar, here my brother, my comrade, we are going to have a feast on the plane.” He puts one arm around General Akhtar’s waist, the other around Major Kiyani’s and starts walking towards Pak One.

General Zia is feeling safe surrounded by these two professionals but his mind is racing ahead. A jumble of images and words and forgotten tastes are coming back to him. He wishes he could speak as fast as his mind is working but he can’t arrange his words properly. By jingo, he thinks, we will get rid of that bastard with sunglasses; we’ll hang him by the barrel of Abram One and fire the gun. We’ll see how Abram One misses that one. He laughs out loud at that thought. “We’ll buy those tanks. We need those tanks,” he says to Arnold Raphel and then realises that the ambassador isn’t at his side.

“Where is Brother Raphel?” he shouts. General Akhtar sees his opportunity and squirms in General Zia’s grip. “I’ll go and look for him.” General Zia tightens his arm around General Akhtar’s waist, looks into his eyes and says in a spurned lover’s voice. “You don’t want to suck national security with me? You can slice it with a knife and eat it like those city begums. You can have it anyway you want, brother. We have got twenty crates of the finest national security gifted by our own people.”

General Zia approaches the red carpet and a dozen generals line up to salute him. As their hands reach their eyebrows, General Zia winces and instead of returning their salute inspects their faces. General Zia wonders what they are thinking. He wants to ask them about their wives and children, to start a conversation to get an insight into his commanders’ thinking but he ends up issuing an invitation that sounds like an order. “The party is on the plane.” He points his finger at Pak One. “All aboard, gentlemen. All aboard. By jingo, let’s get this party started.”

It is at this point, taking his first step on the red carpet and chaperoning a dozen confused generals towards Pak One that General Zia feels the first pang of an intense, dry pain in his lower abdomen.

The army of tapeworms, sensing a sudden surge in his blood circulation, begins to wake from their slumber. The tapeworms feel ravenous. A tapeworm’s average age is seven years and it spends its entire life searching for and consuming food. The life cycle of this generation begins on a very lucky note. Climbing up from his rectum, they attack the liver first. They find it healthy and clean, the liver of a man who has not touched a drop of alcohol in twenty years and has quit smoking nine years earlier.

His innards taste like the innards of a man who has had food tasters taste every morsel that he ate for an entire decade. Having worked through his liver, the army starts to make a tunnel in his oesophagus and keeps moving up and up.

Their seven-year life cycle would be cut down to twenty minutes, but while they were alive, they would eat well.

P
ak One is a palace compared to the C130 that flew us here. It’s got air conditioning. The floor smells of lemony disinfectants. We are sitting behind the VIP pod, in proper seats with armrests. There is even a waiter in a white turban offering us iced Coca-Cola in plastic glasses. This is the good life, I tell myself. I am poking Obaid in his ribs with my elbow, trying to point towards the cargo lift that’s depositing a stack of crates through the plane’s ramp. Obaid has got his nose buried in the book. He doesn’t even glance towards me. Warrant Officer Fayyaz’s bald head appears from behind the stack of wooden crates. Elaborate messages have been stencilled in blue ink on the crates. “
The mangoes that we present you are not just seasonal fruits, they are tokens of our love, a sign of our devotion
.” All Pakistan Mango Farmers Cooperative is stencilled in bold letters on all the crates. Secretary General’s fellow travellers are still playing their double game. Warrant Officer Fayyaz secures the crates to the floor of the plane with a plastic belt and gives the belt a forceful shake to see if it is secure. It is.

As the ramp door on the aircraft comes up and creaks shut, the cabin is suddenly full of the overwhelming smell of mangoes. One mango’s smell is nice, the smell of a tonne of them can induce nausea. Fayyaz looks through me as if he had never tried to molest me. Major Kiyani is standing with his back reclined against the VIP pod as if he expects to be invited in at any time. He seems strait jacketed in a uniform a size too small. I give Obaid another nudge in the ribs. “Look at his feet.” Obaid glances at him impatiently. “He is wearing slippers. So? At least he has started wearing a uniform. One thing at a time.” He buries his nose in his book again. Major Kiyani comes towards me and stares at my face as if he has suddenly remembered that he has seen me somewhere but doesn’t quite know what to say to me. I vacate my seat. “Sir, why don’t you sit here?” He almost falls into the seat as if his knees have refused to carry his weight. Warrant Officer Fayyaz shouts from behind the mango crates. “I’ll have to offload you, Under Officer. We are not allowed to carry standing passengers on Pak One.” I have half a mind to squash his head with a mango crate, but two bearded commandos manning the C13O door are already looking at me suspiciously. “Let’s go, Obaid,” I say, moving towards the door without looking at him, feeling as if I have been ejected from my ringside seat at General Zia’s deathbed. From the door I look back and Obaid waves his book towards me and at the same time mouths what to me sounds like: “I am about to finish.”

I give him a scornful look, nod towards Major Kiyani who has slumped in his chair with his eyes closed, tip my peaked cap to the commandos on the door and shout, “Enjoy your VVIP flight.”

“Brother Raphel, you have not had lunch with us,” General Zia says in a complaining voice and takes Arnold Raphel’s hand in both his hands and starts walking towards Pak One. “I know you were taking a siesta with Jesus and Mary.” General Zia puts an arm around his waist and lowers his voice to a whisper. “Now we must put our heads together and suck national security.” Arnold Raphel, still reeling from his spiritual encounter with the Carmelite sisters and their singing orphans, thinks General Zia is cracking a joke.

Arnold Raphel looks towards his Cessna, his mind races through a list of excuses, but by the time he reaches something starting with Nancy, General Zia’s arm is around his waist and he is marching him up the ladder into Pak One.

General Akhtar buries his face in his hands and looks down through his fingers at the fluffy white carpet on the floor of the VIP pod. He notices a thin streak of blood crawling towards him. He traces it to its source and sees that General Zia’s shiny oxfords are oozing blackish red blood. He panics and looks at his own shoes. They are spotless. Suddenly a ray of hope, faint but a ray of hope nonetheless, penetrates the doom engulfing his soul. Maybe the Shigri boy has inflicted an inner wound and Zia is bleeding to death. Maybe the plane will get to Islamabad safely. Maybe he’ll have to rewrite his speech, just changing the lines about
an unfortunate accident
to
President’s sudden demise
. Would he be ready to take over the country if the plane makes it to Islamabad? General Akhtar suddenly remembers a long-forgotten prayer from his childhood and starts to mutter it. Then halfway through his prayer, lie changes his mind and lunges towards the VIP pod’s door. “Major Kiyani, tell the crew to keep the air condi-toning off, the President is not feeling too well.”

“By jingo, I am dandy,” General Zia protests, then looks down at the puddle of blood around his shoes on the carpet, but like a junkie in denial, he refuses to make a connection between the grinding pain in his abdomen, the fluid trickling down his pants and the streak of blackish-red blood on the carpet. He decides he needs to change the subject. He wants to take the conversation to a higher level so that nobody would notice the blood on the floor. He knows that the only person he can rely on is Arnold Raphel.

The C130’s doors secured, the pilot move his throttles forward and the four propellers start picking up speed. General Zia looks towards Arnold Raphel and says to him in a pleading voice, “We’ll buy those tanks. What a sensitive machine have you built. But first, tell me how will history remember me.” The voices in the VIP pod are being drowned out by the din of the aeroplane. Arnold Raphel thinks General Zia is asking him about the target sensors on the Abram One tank. Arnold Raphel, Carmelite orphans’ hymns still ringing in his head, loses his cool for a moment and gives the first and the last undiplomatic statement of his life. “No, Mr President, they are as useless as tits on a boar.”

General Zia can’t believe what Arnold Raphel just said: the world would remember him as a bit of a bore.

In a moment of panic General Zia feels that he must rectify this historical misconception. There is no way he was going to go down in the textbooks as the President who ruled this country of one hundred and thirty million people for eleven years, laid the foundations of the first modern Islamic state, brought about the end of communism but was a bit of a bore. He must tell them a joke, he decides. Hundreds of hilarious one-liners that he has tested in his cabinet meetings run through his mind and blur into one endless cosmic joke. He rehearses one in his head. He knows that jokes are all about timing. “What did the seventy houris say when they were told that they would spend the eternity with General Zia in paradise?” He can’t remember the houris’ exact words. There was something about being condemned to hell for eternity but it’s dangerous to tell a joke if you can’t get your punchline right. Then a flash of genius. He must tell a family joke. He wants to be remembered as a witty man. But he also wants to be remembered as a family man.

“Because the First Lady thinks he is too busy screwing the nation,” he says jumping in his seat. It is only when nobody around him laughs that he realises he has blurted out the punchline and now can’t remember the rest of the joke. He yearns for a moment of lucidity, a flash of clarity that would cut through the muddle that is his mind. He looks around at the wretched faces, and realises that he will not remember this joke. Ever.

He turns to General Akhtar in an attempt to preserve his legacy and keep the conversation going. “How do you think, Brother Akhtar, history will remember me?” General Akhtar is pale as death. His thin lips are muttering all the prayers he can remember, his heart has long stopped beating and his underpants are soaked in cold sweat. Most people faced with certain death can probably say a thing or two they have always wanted to say, but not General Akhtar. A lifetime of military discipline and his natural instinct for sucking up to his superiors overcome the fear of death and with shivering hands and quivering lips General Akhtar tells the last lie of his life. “As a good Muslim and a great leader,” he says, then takes out a crisp white handkerchief from his pocket and covers his nose.

As I watch them gather on the red carpet near the ladder up to the C130, I begin to wonder if I should have trusted Uncle Starchy’s folksy pharmacology. General Zia is still standing on his feet with his one arm around General Akhtar’s waist. They look like lovers who don’t want to let go of each other. Maybe I should have thrust the blade in the back of his neck when I had him at the tip of my sword. Too late now. I am already strapped in a seat in General Beg’s plane. He offered me a lift after I was offloaded from Pak One. Our Cessna—his Cessna—waits on the tarmac for Pak One to take off. Protocol demands that Pak One should leave the runway first.

“Good to see you, young man.” He waves his peaked cap at me. He opens a fat book with a fat man on its cover and starts flicking through the pages,
lacocca: An Autobiography
reads the title. “Lots of work to do.” He nods towards the pilot.

What’s with books and soldiers? I wonder. The whole bloody army is turning into pansy intellectuals.

I look out of the window as the American Ambassador walks up to General Zia; double handshakes, hugs as if the General is not meeting the ambassador after two hours but has found his long-lost sibling. General Zia’s grin widens, his teeth flash and his other arm wraps itself around the ambassador’s waist. Bannon is in his suit, standing behind them, puffing nervously on a cigarette. There is an air of important men sharing a joke, spreading goodwill. It’s only when they start climbing the stairs that I realise that General Zia is dragging his feet. He is almost hanging onto the shoulders of the two men flanking him. “The elephant will dance, the elephant will drag his feet, the elephant will drop dead.” Uncle Starchy had given me a step-by-step guide to the effects of his nectar.