The Good Son (19 page)

As it happened, Laghari Sahib was in Islamabad for a couple of days on judicial business, and Gul Muhammed with him, so we boys decided that the honor of the family had been damaged and like good Pashtuns we had to make it right. This was Wazir’s idea, naturally, but I took to it without much argument. Somehow, it never occurred to me to go to Farid. Anyway, Wazir was able to sneak off with one of his father’s guns and that evening the pair of us went down to the Urdu Bazaar. As the injured party, I got to carry the thing, a fully loaded .455 Webley Mark VI pistol jammed in my waistband under my long shirt. Arriving at the street of the butchers, we found the oldest Barshawi boy, Amir, in the act of unloading a live sheep from a motorized cart. I pulled out the pistol.

I was nine years old and small and this piece weighed two and a half pounds, a hunk of black steel the size of a leg of lamb. I could hardly aim it at all, and the single-action trigger pull is hard even for a grown man, but in the service of honor I got off my shot.
Boom!
The sheep gave a shrill despairing bleat, Amir let out a similar sound and went down, and the pistol’s mighty recoil snapped my skinny forearm back like a door hinge, sending the hammer into my forehead. I went down too with a face full of blood.

Wazir hauled me to my feet, picked up the pistol, and dragged me out of there bearing my first wound on the field of honor, blinded, deafened—not unusual conditions where honor is concerned—but reasonably satisfied. Fortunately, as it turned out, I’d whacked the sheep and not Amir, so Laghari Sahib was able to smooth things over when he returned the following evening. Then we had an informal judicial hearing in his study.

In my military career I have been chewed out by experts, people who do it for a living at the highest levels of out-chewing, but I have to say that the reaming I got from my grandfather that night was well up there among the top two or three. He had me stand in front of his desk, him erect in his big tufted leather chair, my father sitting at one side, looking pale, as if he were getting some of the back blast himself, while Grandfather
called me a fool, a coward, a moral imbecile, a disgrace to the name of Laghari, a curse on his house, a bazaari guttersnipe. . . and on and on in the same vein. I’d never seen this side of Laghari Sahib before, and for the first time I felt a spark of sympathy for my father.

Then he went on about how day after day he labored to bring law to a lawless, violent land, how the law was the only thing that kept this misbegotten country from falling into murderous anarchy, and now to find it flouted by a child of his own house? Unspeakable! Intolerable! He asked whatever had possessed me to do such a thing and I said I had heard that the Barshawis had beaten up Aisha and stolen her camera and—

And what? My voice choked off. There is a kind of thinking so stupid that little boys and leaders of nations can’t actually bring themselves to articulate it when the jig is finally up, but Laghari Sahib knew very well what it was.

He said, “So on the basis of a bazaar rumor, you proposed to murder a human being? Instead of calling for the police?”

“The police don’t do anything to the Barshawis.”

“Yes, the police are corrupt, but corruption has a limit, even in Lahore. Didn’t it occur to what I suppose I must call your mind that stealing from the granddaughter of a supreme court judge and offering her violence is a different matter from swiping a piece of fruit or a roasted chicken from a bazaari shop table? It is grand larceny with violence, you blockhead! I could have directed the police to arrest those dreadful boys and I would have seen them prosecuted to the full extent of the law. They would be in prison this minute, and for years. Now, instead, I must go hat in hand to the butcher Barshawi and ask him please not to press charges of attempted murder against you and Wazir, and I will be in his debt. Can you even conceive of what it will mean to be in debt to such a man, of what evils I will have to ignore in my official capacity? Oh, stop your sniveling! Farid, give him a handkerchief. Disgusting behavior! I tell you, young fellow, it is a good thing for you that I do not believe in corporal punishment, or you would not have a single bit of skin left on your backside. As it is, your allowance is stopped from this instant. You will be confined to your room except for school and meals. No excursions and no treats until further notice. House arrest, do you understand? And you are very lucky to escape the boys’ prison at Rawalpindi, you and Wazir.”

“It was my idea,” I said. “Wazir just got me the gun. It’s not his fault.”

“No, his fault was greater because he is old enough to know better. And let me tell you, I would not be Wazir to night for a crore of rupees. Farid, get this creature out of my sight!”

My father stood and put his hand on my shoulder, but I shrugged it off and ran out, my eyes streaming. As I came into the courtyard I heard, mixed with the usual sounds of the night—a bulbul twittering, the pump generator, distant music, the rustlings of the peepul tree—an unfamiliar addition: a sharp whistle ending with a snap and then a sharp, stifled cry of pain: Gul Muhammed whipping his son.

I found I didn’t care much, my own misery being too all-consuming, although I recall a perverted envy. Wazir would bear manly marks of suffering, while mine were all in the pride of my heart and unavailable for boasting inspection. Once in my room, I descended into rage, not because of the ridiculous, insulting, infantile punishments, but because I had been injured in my conception of myself as a hero, and by the man whom I wished to impress more than anyone else. I hated Baba in that hour, as only a boy can hate, without the tempering of a lifetime’s experience or the constraints of adult responsibility. I took it out on the furnishings and on my possessions, overturning my bed and dresser, flinging the lamp against the wall, and so on. I had a collection of beautiful British lead soldiers, given to me by Baba for a succession of birthdays, all the regiments of the old Raj, horse and foot, and these I carefully destroyed, one by one, the tears and snot gushing forth.

Then my sister Aisha appeared at the doorway, in her nightgown, clutching her stuffed bunny, her face still bearing the livid marks inflicted in the mugging. She was worried about me. She thought I’d been whipped too and wanted to comfort me.

I snarled at her. I told her it was all her fault, she’d been told not to take her stupid camera to the bazaar. I said I wished they’d killed her. I used English obscenities, which were the only ones I had on hand. Her little face collapsed. She fled. Perfect.

The next day she painted me a picture and slid it under my prison door. She was a wonderful artist, and the picture showed me and Wazir and her and Jamila playing in a green field under deodars. I tore it up and scattered the pieces out the window.

In the next few days I ate breakfast with the family in silence, went to
school, ate again in silence, and stayed in my room. The servants had repaired the damage to my room, of course. One night, later in that awful week, I was awakened from an uneasy sleep by a repetitive clinking sound. I looked out my window—nothing. So I climbed out on the balcony and hitched myself up on an iron trellis full of bougainvillea, and from there I could just make out, through the peepul’s branches, a group of men at the end of our street, where you had to make a sharp turn to get onto Lahore Road, who seemed to be repairing the pavement. I wondered briefly why they were working at night and decided it was so they would not interfere with traffic. I went back to bed.

The next day was March 23, 1980, a date forever burned into memory. This is Pakistan Day and a public holiday. The courts were closed, and on such holidays Laghari Sahib liked to take us children in his Rolls-Royce to Gawal Mandi to stuff ourselves with sweets and then to Shalamar Garden to play and fly kites and later wander among the thousands of candles in the dusk. The Rolls was the old kind with a massive chrome bumper in the back, and the local street kids had learned that when Daud, the driver, slowed to turn the tight corner on the end of our street they could jump up on it and, crouching down, enjoy a ride to wherever we were going. I recall envying them their freedom and wanted to ride that way myself, instead of in the plush interior.

Of course, neither Wazir nor I was going this year. I was therefore able to watch as Baba and the two girls, my sisters, mounted the big Rolls along with Faiza and Daud and set off. I was at my desk, doing my homework, long division as I recall, when the house shook with the blast. I ran out on the balcony and saw the Rolls engulfed in black smoke and flames, right at the place where I’d watched the men the previous night.

I think of that every time I smell the blast stink of high explosive, which is a lot, considering what I do for a living. And that was the end of all those lives—I mean my multiple lives—and of my childhood.

Gloria had listened to all this without asking anything. By the time I was finished, the bottle was nearly empty.

“That’s quite a story,” she said. “And I thought
I
had a hard life.”

“What was your hard life?”

“Oh, you know, the barrio, the agony of poverty and prejudice, yadda yadda. My kid brother became a junkie and got shot in the street. The usual. So what happened next?”

“I’m sorry about your brother.”

Her face closed down. This was delving, apparently. “Yeah, but I got over it. Anyway, the car blew up and your grandfather and your sisters got killed, and. . .?”

“I’ll tell you, but first.”

“Oh, I have to put out to get the story? Like what’s-her-name, Scheherazade?”

“The reverse,” I said. “It’s an Islamic thing. You probably wouldn’t understand.”

We took off each other’s clothes with our mouths locked together, like in the movies, and I found it was harder than it looks on the screen. She seemed to have been aroused by my story, and I felt myself riding on her excitement, drowning the guilt to an extent, which I figured out about then was the reason for the nice meal and this terrific dessert while my mother was tied up in some cellar. My excuse was that—honestly—I thought it might be the very last time.

S
onia awakens to the sound of a heavy truck rolling past the inn and up the narrow village street. The room is perfectly dark; her eyes register nothing but their own energy, little points of shifting false light. She hears Annette’s soft sleep noises, snores, whimpers, the creak of charpoy ropes as her fellow captive turns. From the street comes a shout; other voices join—it’s amazing how sound travels on a still night in a village in the mountains—there is a scraping sound and more voices, rhythmic now, as if a group of men are carrying out some heavy task. A door closes, and then silence, except for the hiss of the night wind blowing sand against the walls.

Some time passes. Sonia wishes she still had her watch but laughs secretly to herself. She has no need anymore to tell time; captivity makes time irrelevant and so is curiously liberating for a denizen of the frenetic West. After an uncertain interval a new sound begins, a deep muffled growl, which she recognizes as a diesel engine, a big one. Sonia rises and walks carefully to the wall under one of the windows. There is an irregularity in the masonry there that enables her to boost herself up to look through the shutter slats. She can see the black bulk of an adjoining building and a thin triangle of sky, specked with small chilly stars. Then, for just a moment, she sees a flash of light from the direction of the diesel sound, unmistakable evidence that someone is generating electricity in the village.

She drops lightly from the wall, landing with a little bounce, the early training still in her nerves and muscles so she can never forget the circus, and lies on the charpoy again, waiting, thinking about the boy’s dream and what she will say to him, if he comes.

And about her own dream, the deformed child, the slaughtered
little creatures. Is the boy Patang, are the creatures the hostages? It’s possible; she has had clairvoyant dreams before this, but at the same time she knows that everything in a dream relates both to her own personal history and also to the deeper history of her species. That’s the great problem with the Jungian approach: everything can mean anything. It requires colossal discernment to tease meaning out of the tangle of archetypes, memory, synchronicity. The psyche knows, but the psyche is not telling; the psyche is subtle and not entirely of this world.

She’d learned that from Joachim Fluss in Zurich, her therapist, teacher, friend, and tormentor, the last in a series of father figures in the skein that began with the horrible Guido and included B. B. Laghari and Ismail Raza Ali but not her poor actual father. Fluss was gone now; he was in late middle age when she met him, one of Jung’s original students, present at the creation of analytic psychology back in the teens and twenties of the last century, a stalwart of the Burghölzli and still serving there on the day she’d arrived, near catatonic with grief, strapped to a bed so she wouldn’t hurt herself. Her head was bandaged; she had tried unsuccessfully to bash her brains out against a curb on the Bahnhofstrasse.