A Sultan in Palermo (32 page)

Long before I began the awkward task of composition I would have to research certain aspects of his life, and it was not going to be smooth sailing, either. Plato had kept large tracts of his life hidden from view, or perhaps repressed them. Either way, cataracts lay ahead. How could I write about him unless he let me uncover his dormant past?

Friendships are ridiculously mobile. They flow, change, disappear, go underground mole-like for long spells and are easily forgotten, especially if one friend has shifted continents. During a lifetime we are surrounded by people in clusters, some of whom crystallize into friends of the moment, then melt away, vanish without trace, to be encountered again by accident in the strangest of places. Some political or work friendships endure much longer; a few last forever.

When I agreed to write his story, Plato was thrilled and roared triumphantly. This laughter was so unlike him that I was slightly unnerved. Irritated by my attempt to unearth the reason for this strange request, he added a rider. I would do as he asked, he knew that, but could I do so without employing any of the cunning devices or overblown phrases considered obligatory these days? It must be plain storytelling, without frills or too many digressions. I agreed, but warned him that I couldn’t write a book that was only about him. He was the best person to do that, and could simply dictate a memoir if that was what he wanted. Nor could I simply portray his development in terms of his interactions with other people. The period would have to be evoked, the social milieu excavated, and navel-gazing resisted. I reminded him of Heraclitus: ‘Those who are awake have a world in common, but every sleeper has a world of his own.’

Plato accepted this gracefully, but couldn’t resist sharing a thought in return, I suppose, to encourage me. A setback, he informed me, could be transformed into a victory through a work of art. I disagreed very strongly. Artistic consciousness, even at a high level, could never roll back the realities imposed on a society after a historic defeat. His voice grew louder as he responded by naming painters and poets whose work, in bad times, had lifted the people to unimagined heights. They had done so, I agreed, they had enriched the cultural life of the poor and the defeated by providing them with a useful cultural prop, but that changed nothing. The world of visual art and the realm of literature remained tiny islands. The sharks still controlled the oceans. He became angry. He was working on a triptych that would be a call to arms. He would prove me wrong. His work would set Fatherland on fire. I expressed scepticism.

‘Great Master Plato, your visions will hit Fatherland like thunderbolts from heaven.’

‘Talking to you in this mood is wasting time. Do something useful. Go and start the book. Go now, and where the truth can’t be shown naked, dress it in humour and irony. Can you manage that?’

I will try.

Z
AHID WAS IN LIGHT
sleep mode, dreaming. It was the pissing dream, he told me later, the bladder-full alert dream, the core of which had remained constant throughout his life. Water, forever flowing. Usually, he was having a shower, but sometimes it was a running tap or, on a few rare occasions, a turbulent sea. At school and in the mountains where our families spent the summer, he would describe his affliction in some detail. It was, he explained, a crude, effective internal alarm system. If he delayed too long, his tap began to drip. His mother once provided a more Jungian explanation, but it must have been forgettable, since she could not recall it a week later.

Zahid himself was convinced that he was unique. When he was a baby, his amah had patiently weaned him off the muslin nappies, training him to pee by turning on a tap and whistling the national anthem. It worked—the muslin nappies were permanently discarded when he was only a year old—but it must have left a mark on his psyche. He would often joke that, Allah be praised, it was water that had entered his dreams and not the national anthem, though after a brief discussion, we agreed it might have been better the other way round. At the end of a movie or a radio broadcast he could always find a pissoir. Much better than bed-wetting.

Later, when he was already a distinguished heart surgeon in the United States, treating important people, Zahid discovered that his dream was not as unusual as he had once thought. The revelation came as a disappointment. He used to joke that it was the end of all illusions. It was then that he decided, against the advice of his son, to invest some of his savings in banks and properties in undesirable locations all over the world: Marbella and Miami, Bermuda and Nice as well as—and this very much for old times’ sake—a mountain retreat in the Kaghan valley, sadly destroyed by the earthquake of 2004. All this I discovered later. I had heard, of course, that he had become a Republican and was head of the medical team that operated on Dick Cheney in 1999, saving his life, but had not known that he had moved from DC to London after the explosions of 9/11 or that he was now in semi-retirement in a palatial villa in Richmond, overlooking the Thames. We had lived in different worlds for almost half a century.

When the phone rang, soon after dawn, Zahid automatically groaned and stretched an arm out to grab the clock. Must be an emergency at the hospital, he thought, before realizing he was no longer working. It was ten past five in the morning; must be someone from the east. Early calls upset him. They were invariably from Fatherland and it was usually bad news: another death in the family, a new military coup, an expected assassination, but still they could not be ignored. His wife was still asleep. He rose and lifted the phone, and went over to draw the curtains. Dark clouds. Like him, the city suffered from a weak bladder. He cursed.

The caller heard him swearing, chuckled and hailed him in Punjabi, the mother tongue to beat all other motherfucking mother tongues, or so its partisans boast. No translation can ever do justice to this multilayered language, so rich in puns and double entendres that some scholars have argued that virtually every word of every Punjabi dialect has a dual or hidden meaning. I’m not sure this is the case. That would have created insurmountable problems for the Sikh religion, whose founder, the visionary mystic poet Nanak, a great master of the language, would never ... I mean, he must have known what he was doing when he elevated his native Punjabi into a divine language for the new faith, split off from the caste-ridden Hindus.

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
sunehri titli
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.