Stranger to History (31 page)

My own fatigue deepened just as the Mango King had a second wind. He ordered wine and asked if I’d like some dinner. The wine was unusual in the sub-continent, whisky and soda would have been more standard, but this, like the cigars and brandy that came afterwards, and the guide to being a gentleman, seemed like a recent feudal affectation.

I laughed at the suggestion of dinner, as it was already dawn; he stared at me.

‘No, thank you,’ I replied, more soberly.

‘Yum-yum,’ he said, looking at the feast that was now being laid out before us. There were several kinds of meat, rice, lentils, bread and more wine.

The Mango King rolled up his sleeves to eat and I saw that there were cigarette burns branded into his arm. The cutlery was Christofle, scattered stylishly among the ovenproof crockery and dinner trays.

Two minutes later he asked again. I declined once more and said that I’d like to go to bed. He gestured to a man to show me to my room, and just as I was leaving, he enquired one last time if I wouldn’t have any dinner.

When I awoke a few hours later, I was lying under a wooden fan, with an inbuilt light, and a small chandelier. Next to my bed there was a copy of
Time
magazine and a guide to nightlife in Thailand. The little room, despite the air-conditioning, was suffocating. From the edges of tightly drawn curtains, a white blaze broke through. It was about ten o’clock and the house was quiet. I stepped into the drawing room and felt a wave of compressed heat. The room could not have been more badly designed for the fierce temperature beyond its darkened, sliding doors. It was low, like a garage, heavy with carpeting and velvety sofas, and without ventilation. I stepped out on to a white tiled courtyard and soon retreated. It was dangerous heat, the worst I’d ever experienced, sharp, unshaded, asphyxiating. It could make you sick if you went unprotected into it. Yet to be back in the room, in the bad, stale air, was hardly better. Outside, buffaloes lay in the shade of trees; little villages of straw, with brambly fences, dotted the Mango King’s lands; and slim, black women, in bright colours, with white bangles all the way up their arms, walked along the edges of mud paths.

After tea, breakfast and a shower, I came into the main room of the house to find that the Mango King was up and inspecting weapons. ‘You can’t get this on licence,’ he said cheerfully, as the man brought out an Uzi. The Mango King was freshly bathed, his eyes alert, his manner sprightly in a way I wouldn’t have thought possible the night before. The deadened glaze had gone from his eyes and his mind made connections easily. He seemed to read my face and sense that I might be a little surprised at the gun parade before lunch. ‘A lot of people in Karachi don’t like farmers,’ he said. ‘They say they’re feudal, but my feeling is that there are good and bad people in every field.’ Still fixing magazines, looking through sights, handing back guns, he said, ‘Can you imagine? Even I was kidnapped.’

I thought he was being deliberately provocative now and, concealing my surprise, I asked casually, ‘How old were you?’

‘I was twelve and when I came back I was thirteen. It was from 1984 to 1985, for six months. I was chained for the last two. My father wouldn’t pay the ransom. When they called he started abusing them so they only called once. After that, they dealt with my uncle.’ The kidnappers had picked him up outside his school in Hyderabad.

The Mango King did not alter his short, offhand style. His point was not to emphasise the violence in his life but to make clear that he had paid his dues.

It was difficult to take anything away from the story. The Mango King drank heavily; he had suspicious cigarette burns on his arms; he played with guns; his father, who knew the right answer to everything, sounded as if he had been difficult; and yet what might have seemed like cause for alarm was presented instead as emblematic of the feudal life. The violence he had experienced, and perhaps inflicted, became like a rite of passage.

‘Was it traumatic?’

‘Yes,’ the Mango King replied, ‘but you get used to anything.’

His reply reminded me of a story my father once told me of being in prison in Pakistan. His jailers had put him in a metal cage in heat similar to the kind outside. Then they threw a leather blanket over the top and sprinkled it with water so that the humidity made the air even less breathable. They wanted my father to sign an admission of guilt, which they didn’t bring him until several hours into the process of breaking him down. When finally they did bring it, he wouldn’t sign. His explanation was that they tortured him for too long: if they’d brought it sooner, he might have signed, but once he realised he could bear the unbearable, new resolve hardened in him.

Like the Mango King’s, it was difficult to draw a message of courage from my father’s story. At most, and this in part was why my father told it, it could give an idea of what was needed to enter politics in Pakistan. But that kind of mettle could not be asked of everyone. It couldn’t be made a requirement of office, like promising to tell the truth. Most people would bend and enter a state of corruption, which wasn’t really corruption given the duress. In the end, the story could only be seen in its context, a vignette in Pakistan’s Hobbesian political life. The extreme shows of defiance – not signing the admission or not paying the ransom – could also come to seem like bravado rather than courage when the people who endured them saw them as training rather than injustice.

That evening the Mango King suggested I go with him to Mirpur Khas, a nearby town, to meet a lawyer who was working on a case he was fighting. The sun at last was loosening its grip on the day and the land, stunned and silent for many hours, came to life with the screeching of birds and the movement of animals. The evening brought with it colour that, after the white blaze, made it seem as if the sun was sinking behind a mountain of prisms.

Driving out of the Mango King’s gate, I noticed something I hadn’t seen earlier: under the name of the estate, it said, ‘Veni Vidi Vici’.

‘We used to send mangoes to the Queen of England,’ the Mango King said proudly.

‘You should start again.’

‘No,’ he smiled, ‘but we send them to Musharraf.’

In the car, the Mango King and his tall, thin lieutenant discussed feudal revenge. The lieutenant was a
muhajjir
or immigrant from India. His family came to Pakistan after Partition from Jodhpur in Rajasthan. The feudal life needed men like the lieutenant. He was dark and bald, with the aspect of a grand vizier, and after the Mango King’s father died, he served the son as a loyal adviser. They talked about how another feudal had killed the Mango King’s friend in an argument over 350 acres. The Mango King said that the other landlords still teased the dead man’s son for having been unable to exact revenge. ‘What can he do?’ The Mango King laughed. ‘His father’s killer is hardly in the country, and when he is, he’s guarded heavily.

There’s a Sindi saying: “Love and revenge never get old.”’ ‘Don’t the police ever get involved?’

‘Not in these things. The people come to me with their problems and family matters. If you’re the landlord, you’re politician and policeman too. The landowner’s word is law.’ Then, thinking about it for a moment, he said, ‘In the end, it’s not even about land. It’s about who gets to be head honcho.’ I thought he put it well: land at last was stabilising; this was about arbitrary power and the Mango King was also vulnerable.

The Mango King’s lieutenant had been back to Jodhpur just once, in 1990, and from the moment he heard I was Indian, he could speak of nothing else. He craned his long neck forward and asked if I saw much difference between India and Pakistan.

‘Not much,’ I said, meaning to be polite. ‘There’s more feudalism here.’

‘But between human beings, on a human level?’

‘No, not really.’

‘But there is!’ He smiled.

‘What?’

‘In Pakistan, the clothes people wear are much better. There’s far less poverty. India makes its own things, its own cars, but then you don’t get Land Cruisers. In India, you get Indian needles. In Pakistan, we get Japanese needles!’

In India you now got Japanese needles too. The lieutenant had visited before economic liberalisation, but that was not the point. What struck me was how this man, who would never come close to owning a Land Cruiser, could talk of such things as core human differences. The poverty around him was as bad as anything I had ever seen, yet he spoke of expensive cars. It was as if the mere fact of difference was what he needed. It hardly mattered what the differences meant: that was taken care of by the inbuilt rejection of India. In the confusion about what Pakistan was meant to be, whether it was a secular state for Indian Muslims, a religious state, a military dictatorship, a fiefdom, that rejection of India could become more powerful an idea than the assertion of Pakistan.

‘What other differences did you see?’ he asked.

‘It’s hard to say as there’s so much change within India. There are more differences between the north and the south than there are between north India and Pakistan.’

The lieutenant was not to be put down. He wanted to get something off his chest. ‘The other difference,’ he began, ‘was that while men here wear flat colours, the men there are fond of floral prints, ladies’ clothes.’ Hindus weaker, more feminine, and Muslims stronger, manlier: this was the dull little heart of what the lieutenant wanted to say and a great satisfaction came over his face as he spoke. This was the way he reconnected with the glories of the Islamic past, of the time when the ‘Civilisation of Faith’ remained and the martial Muslims ruled the ‘devious Hindu’.

The heat that seemed inescapable earlier had lifted magically and the din of insects made its way into the car. The land around us was completely dark, but for the occasional tube-light over a small structure somewhere in the fields.

‘Were you scared when they kidnapped you?’ I asked the Mango King, hoping to hear the rest of the story.

‘The first fifteen minutes were scary, but then it was all right.’

After many minutes of silence, the Mango King began again, with a new softness in his voice, ‘They said, “Now, OK, say your last prayers,” but fortunately,’ he chuckled, ‘they did not kill me.’ After four months he had tried to steal a kidnapper’s gun and use it on two of them, but just as he picked it up, the third returned and wrested it from his hands. That was when they chained him as punishment. It was painful to think of the Mango King, so hard now, in so vulnerable a position.

I thought he wanted to say more, but his lieutenant interrupted: ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘why do you wear a
kara
?’ He was referring to the steel bangle on my wrist.

‘Because my grandmother is a Sikh and wanted me to wear it.’

‘Your mother’s Sikh and you’re Muslim.’

‘No,’ I said, wishing to annoy him, ‘my mother’s Sikh and my father’s Muslim.’

‘Yes, yes, so you’re Muslim.’

‘I’m nothing.’

The lieutenant seemed to ask the question in the most basic sense. He could tell I wasn’t a practising Muslim, but he wanted to know if I was Muslim somehow, in the way that my father was Muslim. My experience with my father had shown that this vague sense contained passions I didn’t share so I thought it better to dissent early rather than have to explain myself later.

‘Come on, you’re Muslim. If you’re father’s Pakistani, you’re Muslim.’

‘If you say so, but don’t you have to believe certain things to be a Muslim? If I don’t believe, can I still be Muslim?’

He looked at me with fatigue. It was almost as if he wanted to say yes. It was as though, once acquired, this identity based on a testament of faith could not be peeled away, like caste in India. And really, I felt that if I could know the sanctity of his feeling of difference in relation to non-Muslim India, and the symbolic history that went with it, I would be as Muslim as he was.

‘It’s his decision,’ the Mango King laughed.

The lieutenant fell into a moody silence. ‘It’s hotter in India than it is in Pakistan, isn’t it?’ he started again.

The Mango King groaned with irritation.

‘No, it’s the same!’ I said. ‘You see too many differences.’

Perhaps sensing that he had created bad feeling with a guest, he said, ‘Sikhs have a very sweet way of speaking.’

‘Their way of speaking is the same as ours!’ the Mango King snapped, and the lieutenant retreated with a sad, stung expression.

Pakistan’s economic advantage, the manliness of Muslim men, Land Cruisers and Japanese needles, even an imagined better climate: these were the small, daily manifestations that nourished a greater rejection of India, making the idea of Pakistan robust and the lieutenant’s migration worthwhile. The Mango King didn’t need the lieutenant’s sense of the other. He was where his family had always been, sure of himself and, if anything, he felt the lack of the Hindu middle class that once completed his society. It reminded me of a story of a Pakistani aunt of mine: as a child, she had seen the waves of Muslim migration from India and said, ‘Oh, look, the Pakistanis are coming!’ The Mango King, unlike his lieutenant, hadn’t migrated in search of a great Muslim homeland and found himself, still after six decades, an immigrant.