2008 - A Case of Exploding Mangoes (35 page)

“What is it?” I grab the book from him, go to the first page and read the first sentence.

“So does Nasr really die?”

“I think so.”

“It says so right here in the first sentence. Why keep reading it when you already know that the hero is going to die.”

“To see how he dies. What were his last words. That kind of thing.”

“You are a pervert, comrade.” I throw the book back at him.

“How about a rehearsal?” I shout above the din of the aeroplane.

My squad looks at me with weary eyes, Obaid curses under his breath. They line up sluggishly in the middle of the cabin. I can see their hearts are not in it. The smelly cabin of an aeroplane that has recently been used to transport sick animals, cruising at thirty thousand feet, is not the best setting for our elegant drill routine. But then the pursuit of perfection can’t wait for the ideal environment.

We are in the middle of a rifle salute when the aeroplane hits turbulence. I stand and watch their reactions. Despite a sudden drop in altitude, followed by regular shuddering of the aircraft, my boys manage to hold onto their rifles and their positions. I bring the hilt of my sword to my lips, the tip of the sword is tinged a steel blue with Uncle Starchy’s nectar. I put the sword back in the velvet-lined scabbard and watch them. The aeroplane goes into a thirty-degree turn and I am suddenly skidding towards my squad, trying to maintain my balance. Obaid puts his arm around my waist to steady me. The loadmaster shouts from the back of the plane. “Sit down, please. Sit down. We are coming in for landing.”

The aeroplane starts to descend. My inner cadence tells me that my mission starts now. My poison-tipped sword tells me that it’s ready.

An unmarked white Toyota Corolla started its journey from Rawalpindi with the intention of covering the 530-mile distance to Bahawalpur in five hours and thirty minutes. Those who encountered the car and its maniacal driver along the route were almost certain that the driver would not survive the next ten miles. The car ran over stray dogs and broke up cowherds making their way to the rubbish dumps in the suburbs. It zoomed through crowded city junctions, threatened and overtook the most macho of truck drivers. It didn’t stop for children waiting at zebra crossings, it honked its horn at slow horsecarts, it swerved and dodged public transport buses, it threatened to run through railway crossings, it ran down footpaths when it couldn’t find its way ahead on jammed roads, it was pursued in a futile chase by a road-tax inspector, it was sworn at by labourers repairing the roads, it stopped for refuelling at a petrol station and then took off without paying. The driver of the car was obviously in a hurry. Many of the people who saw the car whizz past were sure that the man driving it was suicidal. They were wrong.

Far from being suicidal, Major Kiyani was on a mission to save lives.

He had personally supervised the last dusting of the VIP pod and inserted the lavender air freshener in the air-conditioning duct. He was there when the pod was lifted by a crane, rolled into the C130’s fuselage through its back ramp and fastened to the floor of the cabin by the air force technicians. He had to leave the VIP area and retreat to his office as General Zia’s entourage started to arrive; in his new job he didn’t have the security clearance to be around the red carpet.

It wasn’t until Pak One had taken off from Rawalpindi’s military airport for Bahawalpur that Major Kiyani put his feet on the table, lit a Dunhill and casually glanced at the passenger list that had been left on his table before Pak One’s take-off. His feet came off the table when he saw General Akhtar’s name just below General Zia’s. Like most veteran intelligence operators he believed that one should know only what one needs to know. Surely General Akhtar knew when to board Pak One and when to get off it; General Akhtar always knew the bigger picture. After eighteen names, starting with senior military ranks, he saw the first civilian name. Mr Arnold Raphel, the US Ambassador. He stood up from his seat. Why was the US Ambassador travelling on Pak One and not on his own Cessna?

Fear was Major Kiyani’s stock-in-trade. He knew how to ration it to others and he knew how to guard against it. But the kind of fear he felt now was different. He sat down again. He lit another cigarette and then realised one was already smouldering in the ashtray. Was there anything that he had not: understood about General Akhtar’s instructions?

It took him another eight minutes and three Dunhills to realise that his options were limited. There were no phone calls he could make without bringing his own name onto the records forever, there were no security alerts he could issue without implicating himself. The only thing he could do was to be there physically before Pak One took off for its return flight. He needed to get there and talk to General Zia before he stepped on that plane again. If General Akhtar was trying to play games with Pak One, it was a matter of internal security. But if General Akhtar was planning to bring down a plane with the US Ambassador on board then, surely, it was a threat to the nation’s very survival and it was his duty to stop it from happening. Major Kiyani felt he was the only man standing between a peaceful August day and the beginning of the Third World War. He looked at the passenger list again and wondered who else was on the plane. Everybody, he thought, or maybe nobody.

The time to make educated guesses was long gone.

A quick look at the commercial flights schedule ruled out the possibility of catching a plane to a nearby city. He thought about making a few calls and getting an air force plane but that would require authorisation from a general and there was no way they would let him land at Bahawalpur. He picked up the keys to his Corolla and was barging towards the door when he looked at his watch. He realised that he would have to wear his uniform. No civilian could do that long a drive without being stopped a dozen times along the way. Then there was the problem of negotiating General Zia’s security cordon. It couldn’t be done without the uniform. He took out a uniform from the stationery cupboard. It was pressed and starched but covered in a thick layer of dust. He couldn’t remember when he had last worn ic. His khaki trousers were too stiff and impossibly tight around his waist. He left the zip button on his trousers open and covered this arrangement with his khaki shirt. He took out the dust-covered oxford shoes from the cupboard but then realised that he was running out of time and nobody was going to see his feet in the car anyway. He decided to stick to his open-toed Peshawari slippers. He didn’t forget to pick up his holster. He had one last look at himself in the mirror and was pleased to notice that despite the awkward fit of the uniform, despite the fact that his hair covered his ears, despite his Peshawari slippers, nobody could mistake him for anyone other than an army major in a hurry.

G
eneral Zia was searching the sand dunes through his binoculars, waiting for the tank demonstration to start, when he saw the shadow of a bird moving across the shimmering expanse of sand. He raised his binoculars and searched for the bird, but the horizon was endlessly blank and blue except for the sun, a blazing silver disc lower than any celestial object should be. General Zia stood under a desert-camouflage tent flanked on one side by US Ambassador Arnold Raphel and on the other by the Vice Chief of the Army Staff, General Beg, with his new three-star general’s epaulettes and tinted sunglasses. General Akhtar was standing a little further away, his binoculars still hanging around his neck, fidgeting with the mahogany baton that he had started to carry since his promotion. Behind them stood a row of two-star generals, Armoured Corps Formation commanders and battery-powered pedestal fans that were causing a mini-sandstorm without providing any relief from the August humidity. At least the tent did protect them against the sun, which bear down on the exercise area marked with red flags, turning it into a glimmering, still sea of sand. Holding to their eyes the leather-encased binoculars provided by the tank manufacturers, the generals saw the khaki barrel of an Mi Abram appear from behind a sand dune. The tank, General Zia noted with interest, had already been painted in the dull green colours of the Pakistan Army. Is it a free sample, he wondered, or has one of my eager generals in Defence Procurement already written the cheque?

The Mi Abram lowered its barrel to salute the General and kept it there as a mark of respect for the recitation from the Quran. The Armoured Corps’ Religious Officer chose the General’s favourite verse for these occasions: “
Hold Fast the Rope of Allah and Keep Your Horses Ready
”.

Lowering his binoculars, General Zia listened to the recitation with his eyes shut and tried to calculate the percentage of kickbacks. As soon as the recitation was over he turned to confer with General Beg about the mode of payment for these tanks. He saw his own distorted face in General Beg’s sunglasses. General Zia couldn’t remember Beg ever wearing these glasses before he appointed him his deputy and practically gave him the operational command of the army. When General Zia had gone to congratulate him
on
his first day in his new office, General Beg received him sporting these sunglasses even though it was a cloudy day in Islamabad; further proof, if proof was needed, that power corrupts. General Zia hated General Beg’s sunglasses but still hadn’t found a way to broach the subject. It was probably a violation of the uniform code. What was worse, it made him look Western and vulgar, more like a Hollywood general than the Commander-in-Chief of the army of an Islamic republic. And General Zia couldn’t look into his eyes.

General Akhtar saw them whispering to each other intensely and his resolve strengthened. As soon as the demonstration was over he would make an excuse and dash back to Islamabad in his own Cessna. General Zia seemed to have forgotten that he had invited his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee. He didn’t seem to remember that he wanted to consult ‘Brother Akhtar’ on the most important decision of his life. If this was a test, he had passed. Now he needed to be close to General Headquarters, close to the National Television Station, close to his black sherwani. He would need to address the nation in less than two hours. This unscheduled trip had added another layer of depth to his plan. Now nobody could say that he had deliberately stayed behind in Islamabad. They would say he was just lucky because he didn’t stay for lunch at the garrison mess. In order to distract himself from the proceedings, he silently started to rehearse his address to the nation.

Listening to General Beg’s long-winded reply about the payment for the tanks, General Zia made a mental note that after the tank trial he would settle this sunglasses business once and for all. General Beg was still going on about the direct link between the proposed tank deal and US military aid—all of it falling within the procurement objectives set in the US-Pakistan defence pact—when the first shot rang out.

General Zia terminated his conversation mid-sentence, put the binoculars to his eyes and searched the horizon. All he could see was a wall of sand. He tried to readjust his binoculars and as the sand began to settle he saw a red banner, the size of a single bed sheet, with a giant hammer and sickle painted on it, fluttering intact over a remote-controlled target-practice vehicle, like a golf cart carrying an advertising banner. The Mi Abram obviously couldn’t see very well. He looked at Arnold Raphel who, with binoculars glued to his eyes, was still searching the horizon optimistically. General Zia wanted to make a joke about the tank being a communist sympathiser but the ambassador didn’t look his way. Other target-practice vehicles started descending the sand dune, bearing other targets: a dummy Indian MiG fighter jet, a gun battery made out of wood and painted a garish pink, a cardboard bunker complete with dummy soldiers.

The Mi Abram’s cannon fired nine more shells and managed to miss every single target. The tank turned towards the observers’ tent, and lowered its barrel again, slowly, as if tired from all the effort. All the generals saluted, the ambassador put his right hand on his heart. The Mi Abram turned back and trundled up the sand dune. The remote-controlled target vehicles, with their dummy targets still intact, started to line up at the base of the sand dune. A gust of desert wind rose from behind the dune, a swirling column of sand danced its way towards the observers’ tent, everybody about-faced and waited for it to pass. As they turned round, shaking the sand off their caps and flicking it off their uniforms, General Zia noticed that the red banner had come loose from its platform on the vehicle and was fluttering away, over the sand dune. Arnold Raphel spoke for the first time. “Well, we got that one. Even if it wasn’t our firepower but this anti-communist desert force.”

There was forced laughter followed by a moment of silence during which everyone heard the faint but unmistakable howling of the desert winds. General Beg took his sunglasses off with an exaggerated gesture. “There is another trial left, sir,” he said, giving a dramatic pause. “Lunch. And then the finest mangoes of the season.” He gestured towards an army truck full of wooden crates. “A gift from All Pakistan Mango Farmers Cooperative. And for today’s lunch, our host is the most respected Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, General Akhtar.”

T
he Martyrs’ boulevard dividing the freshly whitewashed garrison mess and the football-field-size lawns in front of it, is full of screaming sirens and Kalashnikov-carrying commandos jumping in and out of open-topped jeeps. Every general with more than two stars on his shoulders is escorted by his own set of bodyguards and heralded by his personal siren song, as if the occasion were not a lunch in their own dining hall but a gladiatorial parade where the one with the most ferocious bodyguards and the shrillest siren will win. The Garrison Commander’s idea of a warm welcome seems to involve whitewashing everything in sight that doesn’t move. The pebbled footpath on the lawns in front of the mess is whitewashed, the wooden benches are painted white, the electricity and telephone polls are gleaming white, even the trunk of the lone keekar tree under which I have lined up my Silent Drill Squad is covered in a dull rustic white.