Love + Hate: Stories and Essays

This Door Is Shut

More or less the last thing Farhana remembered before finding herself on the Boulevard Saint-Germain was her son Yasin waking up his driver and her guard, and ordering them to take her to Karachi airport. As Yasin was too drunk to drive her himself, he instructed the men to put Farhana on the 2 a.m. flight to Istanbul, where she could change for Paris.

Yasin, who had not long before dragged her across the marble floor by her loveliest silk chiffon dupatta, and struck her across the face with the back of his hand, smashing her lip, now bowed before his mother. He said that after her behaviour she should never come back to Pakistan. And since he doubted whether he would live to be old, or that he would go to the West again, it was, as he put it, goodbye, or ‘khuda hafiz’.

‘May Allah protect you, and, never forget this —’ his mother said, wagging her finger at him as she was helped into the car, ‘Allah is always watching you.’

She could hear him laughing as she closed the window.

The following morning, once more wrapped in her favourite trench coat, she was walking around her adopted city. First she’d go to the market; then, perhaps, she’d go to an exhibition, or look again at La Hune, her favourite bookshop, or the other wonderful little places on the Left Bank where she lived, selling hand-made paper and bizarre knick-knacks. In the afternoon she liked to go to the Tuileries or the Luxembourg for a sorbet, watching the children with their au pairs. There was plenty to see. When her first husband had been alive, she’d been a photographer, selling her pictures to Pakistani papers and magazines, and she knew how to look. It wasn’t that Paris looked different now; she had only been in Karachi for a month. But she was full of new words, and would talk about the city differently, when she had the opportunity.

Farhana’s husband, Michel, a retired critic and journalist, was, as always at that time of the morning, reading in his study on what she called his charpoy — his day-bed — supported by oriental tasselled cushions. He hadn’t seen his wife the previous night, and now he didn’t get up to greet or kiss her, as if it would take too much physical effort. He didn’t say he was glad to have her home. But he did wave, lean forward a little, and say, ‘You are back early. What happened to your lip?’

‘I’ll tell you, darling,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you everything.’

He did say he was keen to hear her story. Not that she knew how to tell it. It would have to come out as it came.

In the late 90s, Farhana’s first husband, an army general who had been educated in America, had been publicly beheaded by the Taliban at the behest of his military colleagues, who thought he had become too pro-American. They believed, in fact, that he was betraying the complicity of the army with the Taliban to their mutual enemy, the Americans. For this reason he was captured and driven to the mountains. After she had been sent a photograph of a hand holding up his head, with a large crowd of cheering local villagers in the background, she had fled. Yasin had refused to join her, but remained on the family’s country estate, keeping out of politics.

Farhana went to Paris to stay with a wealthy friend, who advised her never to go home. It would also be a good idea to find a steady man to look after her. Paris was ideal for exiles; once, it had welcomed the stateless. But Farhana would have little money and no status, and the French were notoriously racist, only liking people of colour if they were artists or could play the trumpet. What if they mistook her for an Algerian?

Farhana didn’t seem concerned, and went along with others’ wishes as if she only wanted a quiet life. Now, looking back, she guessed she had been traumatised, and probably still was.

The good friend did a good thing and found the widower Michel, who was ten years older than her. Now in his mid-seventies, he had retired from regular writing in order to read Balzac, study Trollope in English, and become properly familiar with the history of poetry. He had stuck to his word: he was a reader. His chosen destiny made him happy.

At the time he was seen as a tremendous catch, an opportunity not to be missed. He was widowed, well off, cultured, well connected, with numerous books to his name and a lovely flat off the Rue du Bac, on the Left Bank, full of pictures and theatre memorabilia. Farhana, from a distinguished family, was unused to telling anyone who she was. Now she was often informed that she was lucky. Many Parisian women would have wanted this dry old stick. But it was she, a frightened, declining Pakistani woman then in her mid-fifties, who had grabbed the prize. How? She guessed that because she said so little to him, she seemed more demure and mysterious than the others. She certainly had had no idea what she was doing. Perhaps he had pitied her.

It was indeed the case that Michel knew actors, writers and directors. Many of them were distinguished or even world famous in their own world, and they came for dinner once a month and drank a lot. The talk was always of the latest films and books, of what Sarkozy was, or wasn’t, doing. If Farhana wondered what Michel wanted from her, there really was no obscurity. They had never been moved by one another. It was companionship: he liked someone to be there while he talked — an urgent and more or less continuous monologue concerning what was in the newspapers. He liked having someone arrange the film screenings he went to, and the plays he attended, often with her. He liked her to sit with him when he listened to entire symphonies by Brahms or Beethoven, nodding at her instructively during the finer parts. She loved this, as it was an opportunity for her to think about important things.

The friend who arranged the marriage included a warning. ‘Until the age of sixty a woman still needs passion. But I suspect, dear girl, that your man will make love like a critic.’

‘Without asking for it, one day I ran to the airport and found myself dumped in a completely new life, as a middle-aged immigrant,’ said Farhana. ‘How would I know how a critic makes love?’

‘Watch out,’ said her friend. ‘Fastidious.’

Farhana and Michel had sex twice: once before the marriage, and once after, which was more than enough for him. The first time he ejaculated immediately, and the second he suffered cramp and howled awfully, followed by a coughing fit which he thought was a heart attack. Farhana suspected the catastrophe might have been caused by her removing his tie. She had never seen him during the day without a tie, and she only saw him at night, wrapped in a dressing gown, if they both had insomnia. She had bought him a cashmere polo-neck one Christmas, but Michel felt his being was an obscenity without a tie, and he never wore casual clothes.

Farhana thought she was done with her homeland; she had been ripped from the past, and the future was comfortable but null. Then, one afternoon, Yasin’s wife Nasira, who had escaped him at last to London, insisted on coming to Paris to talk. Now working for a travel agent in Cricklewood, North London, Nasira came from a famous family, and had been a Cleopatra, one of the most striking women of Karachi, who wore the most glamorous saris and shimmering shalwar kameez, with solid gold bangles. Many men had been wild about her, which was, Yasin insisted, part of the problem. Now, in jeans and sweater, she was — apart from the Rolex — as diminished and plain as Farhana realised that she herself was. But these two women, both escapees, liked one another, and had much in common.

Farhana put her fingers under Nasira’s chin and raised her face. ‘Why have you come to see me here?’

‘I must warn you,’ Nasira said. Farhana’s wild-tempered son, never the most stable of people, was developing into a madman. Out on his country estate in Sind, where he was a feudal landlord, Yasin was, apparently, playing polo aggressively, drinking whisky, copulating brutally, and shooting his many guns at anything alive. And because of the kidnappings, he was trying to import a brand-new armoured BMW with blacked-out windows into the country. His wife believed that, although this tank was extremely heavy and therefore somewhat slow, the ‘local Mr Toad’, as she called her husband, would smoke a joint, turn up his favourite Punjabi bhangra music, and soon embrace a tree with the vehicle. Although she despised him, she didn’t think another violent death in the family would be good for Farhana.

‘What can I do about it?’ Farhana asked. ‘Are you saying I must go there? I’m too weak now: I can’t face it.’

‘You can only feel you have done your duty,’ her daughter-in-law replied. ‘And then live your life — which is what I am doing at last.’

Haltingly, Farhana asked Michel if he would be interested in accompanying her, but he wondered whether it would be dusty, or inconvenient for his stomach. That was the least of it. Still, she made sure to take her first husband’s gold watch, cufflinks and fountain pens, which she would deliver to Yasin at last.

On her first afternoon in Paris after the trip, her husband asked her to walk with him. That day there was a wind, and he had his waistcoat on. As always, his hands were behind his back. Leaning forward, he barely lifted his feet from the ground, for fear of falling. ‘An old man can come to believe that he could easily be knocked down,’ he said. ‘If he takes a step—’

Farhana interrupted to say, ‘When you return to a country after a terrible shock, and more than a decade away, you will know that the roads will have got wider and the skyscrapers higher. There will be more apartment blocks, more people on the street, new immigrants and tourists coming to see the sights. Michel, I must be ageing because I remember when Karachi was a pleasant post-colonial city.’

‘Tell me!’

‘The men wore suits and the women dresses. People still read Somerset Maugham, drank gin-and-tonics, and listened to “In the Mood”, as if the British had just popped north for the summer. There were flowers in the centre of the road. You could get The Times at your club. This time I saw rubble everywhere, a gun every ten yards, high walls and barbed wire. The women outside were afraid, and covered themselves to avoid harassment. A city in lockdown, a war zone after a war. A state of petrifaction. Decline and decay everywhere.’

Yasin had returned from his estate to welcome his mother. During the brief period he was sober, after he woke up around lunchtime and his servant went in to cut his toenails and shave him, Farhana went to his room. Although he had put on weight, and his body was flabby, his head was also shaven now, making him look thuggish.

Visas to the West were almost impossible to obtain these days; terrorism had rendered Pakistanis pariahs. All the same, Farhana wanted to persuade Yasin, before he destroyed his health, to do his best to escape to the West or even, since times were hard, to Australia or New Zealand, if he could bear it.

He laughed and replied, ‘There is no doubt that we have made a mess of things here. We all love to declare our devotion to the country, but apart from Imran Khan, every single one of us, if offered a visa, would pack hurriedly and rush to the exit tomorrow. But, I am sorry, Mother, I will not be joining the others at the border, humbly begging to be let into the land of plenty and reason. Being “tolerated” is the last thing I want.’

‘Darling, please, give me one good reason for you not to start a new life.’

‘It is here that the reality of the world is lived out.’

The last time he was in France, with his then wife, Yasin said he saw a sign saying ‘Disneyland Paris’ and laughed so much he wished, for the only time, that his father was also around to appreciate it. He had come to dislike the West more as he got older, and had developed a particular animus against the authority of the EU, which he seemed to believe was run by Dominique Strauss-Kahn. He said not only was the EU hypocritical, but Europe was ‘risk-free and easy’. Everything was polite and over-careful in its ‘multiculturalism and love for homosexuals’. The brutality was now exported, and the only victims today were Muslims, whom the West had never given up believing were lesser beings.

He said, ‘Our family sacrificed good lives in India to ruin this new country. As you know, we are a wild and self-destructive people who live carelessly. Life is cheap, only alcohol is expensive. Think how direct we are: all the hotels have been attacked with suicide bombs. When I walk out onto the street I like to know the chances are I will be shot at. What other country in the world would hide Osama Bin Laden in the centre of a city while pocketing vast amounts of American money to finance the search for him? Mother, you must agree it takes perverse genius of the highest order to walk through that looking glass.’

‘It’s not comfortable to be so stressed.’

‘You stress us, with your drone bombings of civilians.’ He asked, ‘How is your husband, the man who replaced my father? Do you like him? I can see from your lack of expression that you really don’t mind, but you did hurry into his arms very quickly.’

‘Forgive me, but I was half-dead and stunned. I’m diabetic, and was diagnosed with extreme anxiety. Day by day I sewed my life back together. Michel gets up in the morning with purpose. You lie there like a teenager.’

‘Even if that man’s work is pointless?’

‘He writes about plays.’

‘But what would Hay Fever mean here?’

‘He respects himself. You say you are religious, but you wallow in cynicism. Didn’t you say, in this country the educated have no religion, and the religious have no education?’

‘I am not religious,’ he said. ‘But I am a Muslim.’

‘Yasin, it is this country which has corrupted your imagination. Your father wasn’t like this. He kept saying that without many voices, including the Christian, devotion to one religion will make us autocrats.’

‘Then the fool was begging to be murdered. He would have handed over the country to Jews, colonialists and those who want to bomb us into fundamentalist capitalism. Who here doesn’t think that Osama taught those arrogant imperialists a good lesson?’ He laughed. ‘But are we really to discuss this, Gertrude, Mother?’

‘You are too old to play Hamlet.’

There were no theatres, bars or new restaurants in Karachi, and people went to one another’s houses. At first she accompanied her son on his nightly round of parties. It was an opportunity for her to see the people she’d grown up with, and for them all to notice how much they had aged.

She kept thinking she had been too long in Paris, for the houses she visited looked dusty, run-down and out-of-date, as if they weren’t worth the expense of renovation. Soon she realised that anyone with money, intelligence, education or talent had left, and that the rest were urging their children to escape. They sold their jewellery and ushered them towards the border, saying, ‘Get out and never return.’ Her friends’ children had joined an international class of wealthy but dispossessed people with American accents who now lived in Beijing, Prague or Toronto, working in hospitals or for law firms or banks. Those left behind were the aged, infirm and hopeless, or those with too many dependants.

At the parties there’d be small talk followed by ferocious drinking. It had been a long time since she’d seen people so shamelessly drunk they were lying under tables. Amongst the drunkest would be Yasin, whom she’d help home at four in the morning. In order to gain entry into the house, he made the servants remain awake until he returned. He would either fall asleep then, or demand a woman, and she found herself fighting with him over the age of the servant girls he took. Fourteen, she said, was too young. Soon she stopped accompanying him, and stayed in the house.

There was nothing to do. She began to sit at the ping-pong table in the living room and write about her life, sometimes by candlelight, since the electricity failed at least twice a day. At least the cook and the servant girl took her seriously, creeping in with big smiles, and kebabs, onion bhajis and mango lassi on a tray, while the sweepress with orange teeth, crouching unnoticed for hours, flicked at the dust across the room. In exchange, Farhana made sure to give them little gifts, shawls, underwear, sandals and loose change.

It was three weeks into the month-long visit that, one afternoon, as she wrote, Yasin came into the room yelling, waving his pistol and saying his father’s legacy of watch, pens and cufflinks had been stolen, and he was having the house searched.

‘I expect you just threw it all in a drawer, Yasin. Look again.’

‘They are happening all the time, these thefts. The people are poorer than you can conceive, Mother. But the cook is particularly naughty. My eye has been on him since I noticed he dyed his beard. He has been filling the fridge with meals no human being has the capacity to eat — I suspect he is feeling guilty. He is our George Clooney — the male kingpin — and the neighbourhood servant girls are in and out of the kitchen, a place I never enter, as you know. Being a kind man, I pay for the abortions on a “three-strikes-and-you’re-out” basis. After that, the girls are sent to their village, where they are reviled, persecuted and sometimes killed for their shame. Since I’m not a hundred per cent certain it is that exact bastard, I will follow the correct procedures …’

‘Good, thank you. Now put the gun away, you’re frightening me.’

She was reassured, in a place where, increasingly, she realised no reassurance was possible. Her closest friend, an English teacher whom she’d been at school with, was kidnapped while driving to meet Farhana. Her car was sandwiched between two other cars until it could only come to a stop; her driver had been dragged out at gunpoint, beaten and thrown into a ditch. The woman was blindfolded and taken to a house which, when she could see, resembled a waiting room. At least twenty other kidnapees sat on the floor, waiting for their families to provide money, while other victims were brought in.

That afternoon, when Farhana walked around Paris with her husband, she said, ‘My friend has always taught English literature, but more recently wanted to add a post-colonial module so the students might glimpse themselves in an artist’s words. But there was a void in the curriculum because she cannot teach Rushdie, or even mention his name. She went into a shop to buy Midnight’s Children, and the owner shouted, “Get out — how dare you mention these hush-hush matters! You can look at pictures of men having sex with camels, or with children or babies. You can call for the death of the apostate. But promote that writer and this place will be ashes — Mullah Omar said this in 2005! Why can’t you read P. G. Wodehouse like everyone else!”’

Farhana’s husband, when he heard this, said, ‘I am reminded that I saw Milan Kundera the other morning, across the street. He walks to his office every day at the same time. I stop and bow respectfully as he passes. Of course, he pretends not to notice me.’

‘He doesn’t notice you,’ she giggled. ‘Why should he notice every old man who stops on the street?’

‘I know he notices me. As I say, he prefers not to look up since he is thinking creatively.’ He went on, ‘At the beginning of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, if I remember correctly, a Czech politician, Clementis, soon to be accused of treason and hanged, is erased from a photograph, leaving only the hat he passed to Gottwald on the day. They are doing the same in your country.’

‘They despair, and cling to the old certainties because they think the writer tears them apart.’

‘Though it is unbearable, they should be grateful, since he has done them the favour of speaking their disloyalty. The artist chews and digests the world for us, and then presents us with evidence of our humanity. What stands between us and barbarism?’

‘Your tie.’

‘Apart from my tie, Farhana, there is the complexity of literature. If they cannot see that, they are lacking in the civilisation you see around you. Anyone here could tell you that extreme religion can only create sacrilege and perversion — like Catholic France producing the Marquis de Sade.’

‘Please, you go too far, Michel.’

‘But how is the boy?’

‘The conditions in which he lives have put a jinn inside him.’

‘What a massive human effort it must have been to make such a wasteland!’

‘And you cannot go onto the street without seeing people carrying rifles and machine guns. When I look around here — at this city — at the people walking peacefully, and the hundreds of years of accumulated achievement, I wonder how it’s done.’

‘Thank God you have seen that, Farhana. I never thought you noticed where you were. What you describe is not achieved by driving out the Jews, Hindus, Catholics, and anyone who adds to the character and creativity of a city, until you have a monotonous monoculturalism — a new puritanism. If you let the pleasure-haters do that, there will be nothing living.’ He stood and looked around at the city as if he had built it himself. ‘The careful preservation of the past is the basis of culture. After the Second World War we learned how destructiveness stalks us, and how fragile civil society is.’

She said, ‘Everywhere around the world the young are rising up, but in Pakistan they are going to the airport. I’ve never before been to a place without hope, nor anywhere without one beautiful thing in it, apart from the orchids in my son’s garden.’

Michel said, ‘This door — to the West — is shut now. In here it is an exclusive spa. Farhana, we are glad to have you, provided you respect our liberality.’

‘I do!’

‘Count yourself lucky to have slipped inside.’

‘Thank you for reminding me, husband.’

‘Now tell me, how is it you made such a boy?’

‘I will think about that — in my writing.’

‘Writing, did you say? Farhana — no!’

Yasin had the house searched several times. ‘It’s gone,’ he said at last. ‘We can’t find any of it. The only things Father left me. I want you to know, Mother, that I let my servants eat meat, which is like caviar to them. I give them food which is not rotten. And of course they steal from me, and only rarely, when I am really wild, do I whip them. They would never be treated so well elsewhere, and this is how they reward me.’

‘It is mislaid, please, believe me,’ she said. ‘I have come here and seen that you are a victim awaiting a murderer. Please look more — behind the sofa, for instance — before you follow the procedures.’

She called it work now, her writing. Hadn’t her life been more interesting than most? An arresting opening had occurred to her: she would begin with her two husbands, and compare Parisian men, their world and methods of love, to that of the men of Pakistan.

She began to get down to it as soon as she woke up, hunched over the ping-pong table, with some rotis on a plate and two standing fans turned full on. It was the only time Farhana felt content and safe in this country, and she had begun this work away from Paris since she knew that, far from encouraging her, Michel would condemn her work as ‘a waste of effort’. It was his job to condemn the bad stuff. ‘Even before it is written?’ she enquired, when discussing the idea with him. ‘That would be confinement — and premature.’

Now she said, ‘I feel as if I have had two men, you and my son, chattering and bullying me in the ear.’

‘Bullying?’

‘Don’t you see you are beginning to operate more like a big fat censor than a critic. I will resist you,’ she said. ‘I will even mention to your friends and perhaps to the concierge that I am writing! How the filthy foreign woman stains the quartier with her amateur words!’

‘Please. Not that.’

‘If you don’t announce it to them next time at dinner, there will be a fuss. Look at my cut lip — there is evidence.’

She saw, when she said this, that he was afraid; she might stand up to him and, in time, gain an advantage.

One evening in Karachi she returned from a visit to her friend to find the gates locked. The guard, who sat on a chair outside with his rifle, didn’t come to her car. Instead her driver had to get out of their vehicle to let her into the house. Inside, it was silent, and it was never silent: there were more staff than family.

She called her son. ‘Where is everyone?’

‘I’ve had enough. I’m following the procedures.’

‘What procedures?’

‘I set a deadline for the return of my possessions but they were not recovered. I ordered the police to take everyone away. You will see how soon, inshallah, my belongings will come back.’

‘How?’

‘It is tragic, Mother, but you and I will have to get our own food tonight. The servants are hanging upside down on meat hooks in the police station. They will be there for a few hours, in their own urine and faeces, until they begin to feel uncomfortable. Meanwhile, I am waiting for the Security Expert to become available.’

‘Security Expert? What is that?’

‘The torturer. This service has now been privatised. We are following your example in the West. He is available by the hour, and I will tip him if the result is positive. What is a fingernail here or there? This is not Downton Abbey. Let’s say it is more like your Guantanamo.’

‘No, Yasin.’

‘Mother, you will see how efficiently we can do things, after your determination to find nothing good in this ravishing country.’

The bell rang. Before she went to her room to think, Farhana saw Yasin and the torturer taking whisky in the living room. She pictured the servants, with whom she’d been friendly — asking for their stories — in the police station.

When she heard the car start in the yard, and the two men got up and went outside, blood and fury rose to her head, and she went to her son before he drove away.

‘I am outraged by this. You must not do it. I forbid it absolutely.’

‘You don’t live here.’

‘I said I forbid it.’

‘Excuse me.’

‘I do not excuse you. He can tear my body instead.’ She turned to the torturer. ‘Open your bag and start on me! Tear out my heart, bastard! It was me who stole the things! Okay? I don’t care if I live or die!’ She began to expose her upper body. ‘Begin here!’

‘You’re making a fool of yourself, Mother. Leave the man alone. I have paid him and can’t afford to waste money.’

‘I attacked Yasin then,’ she said to Michel. ‘I went for his eyes with my nails, I was so outraged by what he had become. Then I ran into my room, took the sheet from the bed, tied one end around my neck and threw the other over the propellers of the fan. I was beginning to die when they came in. They chased me, and Yasin pulled me across the floor. I was screaming so much, it was a nightmare for them. He struck me, but still I insisted he bring the servants back.’

‘And did he?’ asked Michel.

‘Later I saw them come in, a bedraggled bunch, the women weeping and the sweepress with a broken arm and bleeding head, as Yasin got me into the car and sent me away.’

‘You did a good thing, my dear.’

She took his arm. Her husband, walking beside her, looked at the lighted cafes, the churches and the shops, and hummed a song.

She said, ‘I want to believe that people can make good lives and can even be happy, despite what has happened to them and the burdens they have to bear.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It would be a good idea to believe that.’