2008 - A Case of Exploding Mangoes (31 page)

“Can I borrow a shawl?”

“Which one?”

He was hoping she would ask him why he needed it. He was hoping he would be able to tell at least one person before embarking on his mission but all she asked was, which one?

“The older the better,” the General said trying to sound mysterious. She went to the dressing room and brought him an old maroon shawl with a thin embroidered border. She still didn’t ask him why he needed it.

Feeling a bit let down even before the beginning of his adventure, General Zia hugged his daughter again and started to go out.

“Don’t get that shawl dirty,” said the First Lady. “It’s my mother’s.”

General Zia paused for a moment and thought maybe he should confide in her after all, but she picked up her book again and asked without looking at him. “Was it Caliph Omar who used to go out at night disguised as a common man to see if his subjects lived in peace?”

General Zia nodded his head. The First Lady really had a sense of history, he thought. He wouldn’t mind being remembered as Caliph Omar the Second.

“Was he the one who said that even if a dog sleeps hungry on the banks of Euphrates, he’ll never find salvation?”

“Yes,” General Zia said. His moustache did a little dance.

“He should see our Islamic republic now. Randy dogs are running this country.”

General Zia’s heart sank, his moustache drooped but he muttered the verse that had exhorted him to go forth into the world and with renewed determination stormed out of the room.

He asked his gardener if he could borrow his bicycle, and the gardener handed it to him without asking why he needed it. When he stepped out of his living quarters the two commandos posted at the door saluted and started to follow him. He told them to wait for him at their post. “I am going to exercise my legs.”

Then he wrapped the shawl tightly around his head and face, leaving his eyes and forehead uncovered. He climbed onto the bicycle and began to pedal. The bicycle was unsteady for the first few metres, it went left and it went right, but he found his balance and pedalled slowly, keeping to one side of the road.

As his bicycle approached the gate of the Army House, he started to have second thoughts. Maybe I should turn back. Maybe I should inform Brigadier TM and he can send some of his men in civvies who can follow me around. Then Brigadier TM’s flag-draped coffin flashed in front of his eyes and his bicycle wobbled. General Zia was still undecided when his bicycle arrived at the sentry post at the gate of the Army House and the gate opened. He slowed down, looked left and right, hoping someone would recognise him and ask him what the hell he thought he was doing. As his mind raced for an appropriate excuse, a voice shouted from the sentry box.

“Don’t feel like going home, old man? Scared of your woman?” He looked towards the sentry box, but didn’t see anyone. His feet pushed the pedals hard. The gate came down behind him. The thought that his disguise was working reinvigorated him. The doubts cleared, he lifted his bottom from the bicycle seat and pedalled harder, his eyes moistening with the effort and with emotion. He waited at the red light at the crossroads which led to Constitution Avenue, even though there was not a single vehicle in sight. The light stayed red for a long time and showed no sign of turning green. He looked left and right and then left again and turned on to Constitution Avenue.

The avenue was completely deserted, not a soul, not a vehicle.

An eight-lane road, it had not really been designed for traffic, which was thin in this part of town even during the day, but to accommodate the heavy artillery and tanks for the annual National Day Parade. The avenue, still wet from an afternoon shower, glistened yellow under the street lights. The hills surrounding it stood silent and sombre; General Zia rode slowly. His legs, unused to this movement, were beginning to ache. He first rode straight along the side of the road, then moved to the middle and started to zigzag. If someone saw him from the hills they would see an old man wrapped in a shawl, wobbling on his bike. They would have to conclude that the old man was probably very tired after working hard all day at the Army House.

When he had covered about half a mile without seeing a single person, a strange feeling began to set in: what if he was ruling a country without any inhabitants? What if it was a ghost country? What if there was really nobody out there? What if all the statistics from the census that said one hundred and thirty million people lived in the country, fifty-two per cent women, forty-eight per cent men, ninety-eight per cent Muslim, was all simply the work of his overefficient bureaucrats? What if everybody had migrated somewhere else and he was ruling a country where nobody lived except his army, his bureaucrats and his bodyguards? He was breathing hard and feeling quite amused at the bizarre conspiracy theories one can harbour if one is a commoner on a bicycle, when a bush on the roadside moved and a voice shouted at him: “Come here, old man. Riding around without a headlight? Do you think this road belongs to your father? Isn’t there enough lawlessness in this country?”

General Zia put his heels on the road instead of applying the brakes and his bicycle came to a shaky halt. A figure emerged from behind the bush, a man wrapped in an old brown shawl. Under the shawl General Zia could make out his policeman’s beret.

“Get off that bike, uncle. Where do you think you’re going without a headlight?”

The police constable held the handlebars of the General’s bike as if he was about to pedal away. General Zia got off the bike, stumbling because of the shawl wrapped tightly around him. His head was buzzing with excitement at his first encounter with one of his own subjects, without any security cordons separating them, without any guns pointed at the person he was talking to.

Standing on the footpath along Constitution Avenue, under the watchful eyes of a tired old police constable, General Zia realised the true meaning of what the old Dracula had told him. General Zia realised that Ceaucescu’s advice contained a metaphor that he hadn’t understood before this adventure. What is democracy? What is its essence? You draw strength from your people and you become even stronger and that is exactly what General Zia was doing at this moment. Watched over by the silent hills surrounding Islamabad, a very ancient ritual was taking place: a ruler and his subject were face to face without any bureaucrat to complicate their relationship, without any gunmen to pollute their encounter. For a moment the fear of death evaporated into the cold smog and General Zia felt as strong and invincible as the mountains surrounding them.

“Hold your ears,” said the policeman, taking a cigarette from behind his ear and producing a lighter from under his shawl. When he lit the cigarette the air suddenly smelled of kerosene fumes. General Zia tried to balance the bike on the pavement but the policeman gave it a kick and it went hurtling down the footpath and then lay flat.

General Zia took his hands out of the shawl and held his ears. It was a lesson in good governance but it was proving to be fun as well. He was already composing a speech in his head:
All the wisdom I need to run this country I learned from a lone police constable doing his duty on an empty road in the middle of the night in Islamabad…

“Not like that.” The policeman shook his head in disappointment. “Cock. Be a cock. A rooster.”

General Zia thought that the time had come to introduce himself but the constable didn’t give him the opportunity to reveal his face; he held his shawl-covered head with one hand and shoved it down.

“Don’t pretend that you don’t know how to be a cock.”

General Zia knew how to be a cock, but last time he had done it was more than half a century ago in school, and the thought that there were people out here still dishing out that childish punishment bewildered him. His back was refusing to bend but the constable held his head down till it almost touched his knees; General Zia reluctantly put both his hands through his legs and tried to reach for his ears. His back was a block of concrete refusing to bend, his legs shook under the weight of his body and he felt he was going to collapse and roll over. He tried to look up as soon as the constable removed his hand from his head. The constable replaced it with a foot on his neck. General Zia spoke with his head down.

“I am General Zia ul-Haq.”

The smoke hit the constable in his throat and he burst into a coughing fit which turned into laughter.

“Isn’t one General Zia enough for this poor nation? Do we need crazies like you running around in the middle of the night pretending to be him?”

General Zia wriggled his face in the shawl, hoping that the constable would get a glimpse of his face.

“Your Highness,” the constable said, “you must be a very busy man. You must be in a hurry to get back to the Army House to run this country. Tell me a joke and I’ll let you go. Have you ever met such a generous policeman in your life? Come on, tell us a joke about General Zia.”

This was easy, General Zia thought. He had entertained many journalists by telling jokes about himself.

He cleared his throat and started. “Why doesn’t the First Lady let General Zia into her bedroom?”

“Oh shut up,” the constable said. “Everyone knows that one. And it’s not even a joke. It’s probably true. Just say General Zia is a one-eyed faggot thrice and I’ll let you go.”

General Zia had not heard this one before. Indian propaganda, he thought, fluttering his eyelashes just to double-check; his left eye saw the mud-covered canvas shoes of the policeman, his right eye followed a baby frog crossing Constitution Avenue. But his back was killing him, he wanted his spine straight. He whispered in a low voice: “General Zia is a…”

He heard the sound of sirens starting in the distance, the same sirens that the outriders in his presidential convoy used. For a moment he wondered if someone else had occupied the Army House while he was here, talking to this perverted constable?

“I can tell that your heart is not in it. I try it on everyone I stop on this road and I swear that nobody has ever disappointed me. It’s the only punishment they seem to like.”

The constable kicked him on his backside and General Zia went reeling, face forward, his spine snapping back straight and sending waves of pain through his body. The constable dragged him behind the bush.

“The real one-eyed one is on his way. Let me deal with him first. Then we’ll have a long chat,” said the constable, removing his shawl and flinging it over General Zia.

The constable stood at attention on the roadside and saluted as the convoy sped by with its flashing lights and wailing sirens. It was smaller than the normal presidential convoy. One black Mercedes followed by two open-topped jeeps, carrying teams of alert commandos with their guns pointed at the roadside. As the constable returned to start negotiating with General Zia the terms of his release, he heard the convoy reversing at full speed; the sirens sobbed and went quiet like a screaming child suddenly falling to sleep. Before the constable had time to realise what was happening, the commandos were upon him with their Kalashnikovs and searchlights. An old man in a shalwar qameez who was still sitting in the jeep pointed to the bicycle and said in a calm voice, “That is the bicycle he took.”

For the short journey back to the Army House General Zia sat in the back seat of the Mercedes and pretended that General Akhtar wasn’t there. He wound the shawl around himself tightly and sat with his head down like someone who has just woken up from a very bad dream.

But in his heart he knew what he had to do. General Akhtar with all his spies and wiretaps had never told him what one hundred and thirty million people really thought of him. He had not even told him ten per cent of the truth. He didn’t look at General Akhtar but could tell from the smell in the car that he had been knocking down whiskeys at the American Ambassador’s party. What next? Pig meat? His own brother’s flesh?

He spoke for the first time when getting out of the car. “Let that policeman go,” he said, very certain that nobody would believe the constable’s bizarre story. “He was only doing his duty.”

General Zia went straight to his study, sent for his stenographer and dictated two appointment letters. Then he picked up the phone and called a lieutenant general in charge of the military operations. After long apologies for waking him up in the middle of the night, he askrd the Lieutenant General to relieve General Akhtar of his duties.

“I would like you to take charge now. I want you personally to go through all the files on all the suspects. I want you to visit every single interrogation centre General Akhtar is running and I want you to report back directly to me.”

As General Beg set out to take charge from General Akhtar, General Zia made the last telephone call of the night.

“Yes, sir.” General Akhtar was awake and expecting a thank-you call from General Zia.

“Thank you, Akhtar,” General Zia said. “I have no words to show my gratitude. This is not the first time you have saved my life.”

“I was doing my duty, sir.”

“I have decided to promote you. Four stars.”

General Akhtar didn’t believe what he was hearing. Would General Zia relinquish his post as the Chief of the Army? Was General Zia retiring and moving to Mecca? General Akhtar didn’t have to wait long to find out. “I have appointed you the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee. In a way, I have appointed you my boss…”

General Akhtar tried to intervene in a pleading voice. “Sir, my work at the agency is not finished yet. The Americans are talking to the Soviets behind our back…”

A life of glorified bureaucratic tedium flashed in front of his eyes. He would have three adjutants, one each from the air force, navy and army, but no power over any of the three institutions. He would have his own flagged convoy but nowhere to go, except the inauguration of yet another extension to some housing scheme for army officers. He would stand at the head of every reception line ever organised for every second-rate dignitary visiting from every Third World country. Instead of running his intelligence agency he would be sitting at the head of an outfit as ceremonial as the crown of a fighting cock.