Night of the Golden Butterfly

SIXTEEN

I DETECTED A SLIGHT panic when I embraced and kissed Zaynab. It turned out that Naughty, sounding strained and distant after her US tour, had asked to bring her publicist-agent to dinner tonight. The auguries were bad. Zaynab had been firm in her refusal. It was a private occasion, she told her interviewee. After several agitated exchanges, Madame Auratpasand, as we should now have been referring to her but couldn’t, had agreed to come alone as long as the meal was at home. Her publicist did not want her to be seen in a public place unless photographers had been arranged and there was at least one other celebrity present.

Zaynab had asked Eugénie Grandet’s to prepare a meal in advance and deliver it half an hour before her guests arrived. Apart from Naughty, the only other person invited was Henri, who had expressed a desire to see the monster from close up.

It was barely midday, but I was despatched to go and buy some wine. Zaynab was distracted, and the reason for that was obvious, at least to me. She had, not unnaturally, developed a great deal of sympathy for Naughty and had begun to see her exclusively as a victim. My attempts to wean her from this view had been rebuffed. Henri, too, was sceptical, which was why he had been invited to supper.

Naughty was late, as celebs are supposed to be, but it was her attire that surprised all of us. She wore a loose tracksuit made of some indefinable dark green material and a white silk headscarf that she pulled off and threw with abandon on the sofa. We smiled. Then I complimented her on her clothes.

‘Very patriotic of you to dress up in Fatherland colours.’

‘Deliberate, deliberate,’ she said in a funny accent, as if trying to cultivate a nasal twang. ‘My publicist in the States also does makeover jobs on Fatherlandi politicians. He told me I should wear Fatherland colours. Just to show I support our government against terrorism. I wore this on the habshi lady’s show. Copra Freedom. Very popular show. Miss Copra advised me not to wear white brassiere underneath green top.’

‘That was an intelligent suggestion by Mademoiselle Freedom. So you switched to a green brassiere during the advertising break, Madame Auratpasand?’

‘Oui, Monsieur. Copra has bras of every colour just in case the guest is wearing one that can be seen. Many families and children watch Copra Freedom show.’

As we sat down to dinner, Naughty looked uncomfortable, but a few restorative glasses of wine relaxed her a great deal. When Henri praised her interview and her courage, Naughty decided to hurl her first grenade. After a slight pause, she asked politely, ‘Quelle interview, Monsieur?’

Zaynab erupted, ‘Our interview, Naughty!’

‘Oh, that one. I thought that was just informal, Zaynab. By the way, Jean-Pierre Bertrand wants to write my biography for very big New York publisher.’

Before Zaynab could speak again I addressed Naughty in Punjabi. She appeared delighted and replied in a potwari dialect of the language, much sweeter and softer than the Lahori version. I shifted to potwari, the language of my childhood, because I preferred it and still spoke it when visiting northern regions of Fatherland. Naughty grabbed my arm and dragged me from the kitchen into the living room, where the following conversation transpired in dialect.

‘Listen, kind sir. You explain it to the lady. I can’t allow her to publish the interview. I know I agreed, but in America they loved me. Look, dear sir, I’m just a village girl. I only went to school for five years. Captain Lateef was a distant relation. My father gave me to him because he didn’t want a dowry. I just want her, he told my father. Never treated me well. He gets home from the office and drags me to bed. “Open your legs, girl. Hurry up.” Then he mounts me like a dog, and after his business is finished he goes and bathes and says his afternoon prayers. That was life with him for ten years. Two children I gave birth to, and then a kind lady said to me it’s better get your tubes tied. Or this man will just make you a machine to produce sons.’

I asked who the lady was, and Naughty’s hitherto untroubled face became clouded with anxiety. ‘Such a kind lady. She suggested I learn some English and helped me do it. I’m filled with shame. She was General Rafiq’s wife. He first saw me when I was having English lessons with Begum Neelam. One day he sent his car for me. I thought the car would take me to Begum Neelam. It took me to a small hotel in Isloo. General Sahib was waiting for me. He talked a lot, asked many questions and then touched my breasts and said they were nice. So I opened my legs for him. Lateef knew. He said, “Open your legs for the general, you prostitute. It’s good for me.”’

I asked whether her legs had been opened for other generals and if so, how many.

‘Three, including the big chief, but Rafiq, may he be safe in heaven, was the only general who talked to me. Asked afterwards how I felt. What gave me real pleasure. Rafiq was really a very kind man. The other generals made me betray him. Once I betrayed him, my life was finished. What could I do? That’s when I met the Frenchman.’

Once again I interrupted her and asked with as much delicacy as I could muster whether the Frenchman, too, had asked her to open her legs. Her response was accompanied by raucous laughter.

‘No, no, sir. He liked boys. He worked hard on their bums. But he was very kind to me. His name was Gibril, like the angel. Please, sir, please ask the lady and the French monsieur to forget the interview. If it is published, my life will be finished.’

‘Have you told anyone about this interview?’

‘Only my American publicist, Mr Jonathan. He said if the interview was made a book it would be the end of my career. He was very angry. Then I said there was no contract. I had not signed anything. Then he became happy. He wants me to go to Israel, where my book will be published in six months. Sir, is it good idea?’

‘Very bad idea. Listen to me carefully, Naughty. Don’t demand anything of the French publisher now. Tell them you’ll think about it and decide in a few months’ time.’

She agreed. She had sent Lateef a great deal of money for their two sons and had been invited back for a family get-together later in the month, but it was to be a private visit. No publicity at all. Before we rejoined the others I couldn’t resist one last question.

‘I saw a photograph of you in New York. Did anyone in the photograph ask you to open your legs?’

‘The French television guy tried again. I said no. The bald writer pursued me like an animal. I finally agreed but his tablets didn’t work. He made all sorts of promises to get his way. He would review my book in the New York Book Review and New Yorker Book Review and many other things.’

Back in the kitchen, Naughty did as I had suggested and feigned indecision. The rest of the evening passed peacefully, except for the constant ringing of her cell phone. Finally she said her publicist was waiting in a wine bar for her with other people. She left.

Zaynab was now thoroughly disillusioned. ‘Your conversation with her is on tape. Henri suggested we tape everything.’

I was astonished and reprimanded them.

‘I do understand a lot of Punjabi’, Zaynab volunteered, ‘but what language were you speaking? Most of it was incomprehensible.’

Ordinary people measure satisfaction in a variety of ways. A chef who knows he forgot to include some key ingredients in the dish he has just served will not be pleased with the result, regardless of the plaudits received from every customer. A writer may be delighted with her own work, regardless of anything the critics might say. For celebrities there is only one measure. The amount of exposure they receive in any given week in the media, the number of paparazzi skulking in hidden places hoping for an unusual photograph, all this feeds the insatiable desire for publicity that has become, for so many, the transplanted heart of an empty world.

Celebdom is the summit of ambition today and is pursued at whatever cost. It’s a world peopled by actors and sportsmen and a few writers and certain politicians who are devoid of any principle except an insensate obsession with multiplying their wealth and fame. Their marketing and publicity advisers work overtime to ensure that our leaders get enough exposure on celebrity talk shows or in the company of other suitable celebs. The appeal of reality television lies in its insistence that anyone can become A-list overnight. Fellini’s brilliant parody of the jet-setter’s world in La Dolce Vita has been superseded, but in ways that would not have surprised him in the least.

Naughty’s example was a single case in point. Who can blame her for being seduced by the glitter and the cash, when others a hundred times more intelligent and already multimillionaires in their own right were just as desperate to be known to a larger world? This, I suggested to Henri, was the book he should really be commissioning, with the interview as an appendix published in the public interest.

Henri waged guerrilla war against the spirit of the age. He had published stinging essays on the political culture of his own country, some of them written by him. Now he agreed that this was the best way to publish the book, as a combination of polemic and oral history. Both parts should be exactly the same length to emphasize their interdependence, and which came first could be decided later. Zaynab was not convinced. The interview had to be the heart of the book, and the rest an introduction or an epilogue. There was no changing her mind on this structure. She won the argument. It had turned out to be a convivial and productive evening after all.

Once we were alone, Zaynab’s customary curiosity took charge. She wanted every detail of the Richmond conversations. To her annoyance I would provide only a bare summary. But Neelam’s role in the saga of Naughty’s rise surprised both of us, and confirmed my impression of her as a warm-hearted and intelligent person, not unlike her mother.

Zaynab had begun to miss Fatherland. The memory of Plato had become blended with all the other events in her life. She wanted to see how he had left the painting that she had seen in its early stages and disliked. She had found and kept a scrap of Plato’s writing, a diary entry or memo. It was unheard of for Plato to write, so this must have been about something he wanted to paint at some stage.

Weak Smile: A short talk with I. M. Malik, March 2001.

Malik came with paintings because I refused to go to his neat, tidy studio that I’ve always hated. There we used to crowd into the middle of the room, and he would light the place with five huge spotlights and display his paintings. Most of them were examples of bad landscape art: mountain streams with a deer watching from above, pine trees and hills with monkeys, portraits of the famous and the rich and copies of countless other paintings that already existed. I stopped going and when he rang I asked him to bring his new wares to my place. He wanted an honest opinion. Malik was an intelligent critic and I always wondered how someone like him who understood other people’s work extremely well had so few insights into his own art. His admirers, and there were many, claimed that his finest work had been done in pre-Partition Lahore in the 1940s, when the city was known as the Paris of the East and intellectual and artistic life had peaked. What use was all that now?

Before I let him open his case I said, Malik, if they’re money-makers, let’s not waste time. He cursed me and insisted they were good and wanted me to see one in particular. I agreed, looked at it. Really bad. Purely decorative and would probably grace some wall in a vulgar mansion in Defence. He looked at me. I smiled weakly. He said, ‘I know you think it’s ridiculous.’ He waited for my response. I managed another weak smile. ‘You don’t like it?’ Finally I said, ‘No. It’s a very bad painting.’ He got angry. ‘The trouble with you is that you enjoy being out of harmony with the times.’

I replied: ‘An artist should never be in harmony with the times even if they accord with his beliefs. An artist must always look ahead, live on the edge. Otherwise art would become predictable.’

‘You think all my paintings are bad?’

‘No. Some of the earlier ones were good. Very good.’

‘You’ve always spoken the truth. Like a true friend.’ I did not say anything, which was a mistake because it encouraged him.

‘My last painting sold for fifty thousand dollars in Miami. I am a painter in residence in different countries each year. I’ve won six prizes. My new work is not as bad as you think.’

I smiled weakly.

This was the inner core of Plato, and the memory moistened my eyes. I remembered his weak smile well. He hated pretentiousness in any form. Even at our table in the college café in Lahore all those years ago, if anybody started quoting couplets from the poets to emphasize a point, a habit common to many in that city, Plato would smile weakly, wait till they’d finished, and his sarcastic one-liner would follow. Why did he have to die? Zaynab came and sat on my lap. She was missing him too.

‘Don’t go back just yet,’ I pleaded as I stroked her face. ‘Fatherland is at its most dangerous at the moment. Incessant troubles and unparalleled violence, and your brother is a senior government minister.’

She promised to think about it, but I knew she wanted to leave Paris for a while without moving to London. I was beginning to understand her changes of mood and her capriciousness. She was feeling restless. Where did she want to go? She didn’t know, but I could decide. Did she like the sea? Only if it was wild. Not to swim in but just to walk along the beach watching the fury of the waves. I explained gently that this would be torture for me. To be near a sea one cannot enter is like being married to the Koran. She laughed, signalling a change of mood.

‘OK. A sea you can swim in and I can watch.’

‘Zaynab, can you swim?’

Her face disappeared behind her hands.

‘You can learn.’

‘Too late.’

‘We’re going where there’s a teaching pool and the sea. I’ll teach you and it won’t take long. It would be one thing if the Koran fell in the water, but if I got cramps I’d need you to swim.’

A week before we were to leave for Greece, there was an agitated phone call from Henri.

‘Switch on the news. I’m on my way.’

Naughty was dead. Her face was being displayed on every channel. She had disappeared from home two days ago. Her former husband and sons had alerted the police, since her passport and belongings had been left at home. The boys, both in their late teens, beardless and wearing T-shirts and denims, were shown weeping copiously. Their father, in uniform, looked drawn and stressed. Her body had been found that day, hacked to pieces and stored in a sack. The police chief told reporters that the killers were probably surprised at their work, or they would have burned the body.

Tears poured down Zaynab’s cheeks as she watched the news footage. Yet another medieval episode in Fatherland, but this was not a religious murder. That much was obvious to anyone who knew the place. Had it been carried out by a hard-core Islamist network they would have filmed the murder and distributed the video as a warning to others who might be tempted down the same path as poor Naughty. Henri arrived and was clearly agitated. For him the real killers were those who had recruited her to their cause, but before he could expand on this, Zaynab interrupted him. ‘Henri, I know the country well. This is not a political murder carried out by religious fanatics. It feels like something else, I don’t know what, but they will find out. With three generals in the picture as her lovers, military intelligence will want answers.’

Henri was now convinced that Zaynab’s interview with Naughty should be published on its own, with the voice tapes made available to the media. The global networks had been giving the story of her murder massive coverage, strongly hinting that it was a punishment killing by some terrorist group angered by the success of her book in the West. Colonel Lateef, her former husband, had adopted this refrain on every news channel. The boys, unabashed at meeting the gaze of so many curious journalists, told Fatherlandi television that if the police were unable to track the killers, they, as her sons, would avenge their mother’s death. Nobody thought it fitting to inquire what exactly they meant. Meanwhile posters of the martyred Madame Auratpasand appeared on billboards in every European capital, and T-shirts with her image made an appearance in the duty-free shops at Fatherlandi airports. All that was missing was Detectives without Borders to enter the country and nail the killers.

While this tsunami of emotion and hysteria was drowning other stories in the mediasphere, Editions Montmorency, in a sharply worded press release, announced the Auratpasand interview book. This unleashed a new barrage of interest, but Henri was not prepared to sell serialization rights even though the offers came in millions. He was an old-fashioned publisher and wanted the book to be the only point of reference. The market vindicated his decision. Advance orders in France reached the hundred thousand mark.

In the face of all this, the police chief in Isloo maintained a calm dignity, and the immobility of his facial expression became the subject of bitter comment in much of the global media. Given such a fearful tragedy, how come the chief investigator showed no emotion? Were Fatherland’s police indifferent to the crime?

Then, exactly two weeks after the outrage, the unjustly traduced Isloo police called a press conference at 8.30 am that was relayed live on local networks and fed directly to Al Jazeera, CNN and BBC World. There was a stunned silence when the much-maligned policeman, in a calm and still emotionless voice, began to speak.

‘Ladies and gentlemen. Early this morning we made three arrests. Colonel Lateef and his two sons, Ahmed Lateef and Asif Lateef, have been charged with first-degree murder and are in police custody. The Fatherland Army has authorized me to say that Colonel Lateef has been stripped of his rank and cashiered. He is no longer regarded as a serving officer and can be tried as a civilian. I have nothing more to add at this stage.’

Since there was worldwide interest in the affair, the impeccable behaviour of the Isloo police surprised and pleased most people in Fatherland. None of the three accused was tortured. The evidence was circumstantial, but deadly. Naughty had signed three separate cheques for a million dollars each to the three men, but even though her account was in her new name, Yasmine Auratpasand, she had signed them Khalida Lateef. Asif Lateef later admitted that when he questioned his mother regarding the discrepancy, she had sworn on the Koran that this was the only signature the bank would accept. They believed her, but she turned out to be cleverer than all of them. Had she perhaps suspected the foul play they had planned? Their mistake cost them their lives. Asif Lateef told the court the murder had been planned as an honour killing. Their mother had disgraced them with too many men. They had invited her back purely in order to despatch her.

‘In that case’, asked a judge, ‘why were you so interested in the money? You were her only children, so you would have inherited it automatically. Since your guilt is no longer in doubt, it is in your interest to speak the truth.’

But the sons would not implicate their father. His version was that he came home and saw they had killed her, and since they were his sons he felt obliged to help them. Police evidence contradicted that story. Three different knives had been used. All three were found in the sack, and the fingerprints of Colonel Lateef had been identified on one of them. Why had they killed her so brutally? The colonel had rifles and two pistols in the house. A single shot would have sufficed. Once again, it was Asif who provided the explanation. All three had to kill her, and this was the simplest way. A bullet was too quick. They wanted to punish her for the shame she had brought on the family. The judgement was delivered promptly and the sentence was carried out the following week. All three men were hanged.

The saturation coverage given to the murder, of course, contradicted all earlier speculation, but memories are short in the West. Inconvenient truths can be brushed off any fiction. When Editions Montmorency published the interview book with an acerbic introduction by Henri, it was virtually ignored. Despite not being reviewed in the bulk of the media, the first edition of book sold over two hundred thousand copies, and foreign rights were bought like hot gulab jamuns at the Istanbul Book Fair, where Henri had organized an auction.

A few radio stations played extracts from the tape, and that was the sum total of on-air publicity. Jean-Pierre Bertrand was nowhere to be seen. The celebrities who had clustered around Naughty in Paris and New York did not wish to be associated with her after her death.

Madame Zaynab Shah was referred to in Marianne as an oral historian, which was news to everyone except me. The book appeared in English, but the New York friends of Diderot chose to ignore its presence. It did not receive a single review, but, as in Paris, sales were brisk. What surprised us all was that Naughty had made a will before returning to Fatherland. In the case of her death, her sons would inherit her apartment in Paris and everything else. If, for whatever reason, including predeceasing her, this was impossible, her entire estate was bequeathed to Editions Montmorency, with the stipulation that they produce three titles a year that were translations from Punjabi.

I was surprised and pleased to receive a phone call from Neelam. ‘Just got back from Beijing and heard about Mrs Lateef. Then I got a copy of the book. It’s a very good interview. Please congratulate Zaynab khala from me. What an awful end to her life. You know it was I who taught her some basic English.’

I told Neelam of my meeting with Naughty and how she had told me the same thing and had sung Neelam’s praises and expressed remorse for having helped to wreck her marriage.

‘Let’s forget that now, Uncle Dara. Allah’s will must be done. The good news is that Mom and I are friends again after almost fifteen years. I told her you stayed at our house and praised the coffee even when I had asked you not to. It pleased her a great deal. When are you visiting Isloo? Soon, I hope.’

Slowly everything was falling into place, some of it in the most gruesome fashion possible and some of it in a way that restored a degree of tranquillity to friends and their children. What would become of Zaynab? I had few doubts that our love and friendship, as pleasant and restorative as it had been, could not last too long. I had books to write. She wanted to build an art museum in Sind where ancient and modern works might be shown together. Mohenjo-Daro on the ground floor, Plato near the top. She had talked about this a great deal, reigniting my old fascination with Mohenjo-Daro and the civilization of which the city had been a part in 3600 BCE. Replicas of its stern-faced priests and exquisitely shaped dancing girls are looking down at me from a bookshelf as I write these words. I’d always thought of writing a novel set in that period in the region, but events had intervened and finally the back burner itself had collapsed. Was it time to revive the project? Perhaps, if only to demonstrate that sanitation and the distribution of food was more advanced then than it is in Fatherland today.

Zaynab knew the state museums were badly funded, run by corrupt bureaucrats, and that as a result many artefacts were already in Western museums or private collections. She was determined to build her own museum. She pressed me repeatedly to become its director, but I could not be part of this project. I could not replace Plato in her life. I told her so and she hugged me tight, but made no attempt to convince me otherwise. We both knew that it was time to move on, and although our friendship was secure for ever, when we would next meet and what we would do were questions that could not be answered. On one issue alone was she intransigent. We had to see Plato’s last painting together. On this there was no dispute.

‘Your initial instincts were correct, Zaynab,’ Henri told her at dinner the evening Naughty’s will was made public. ‘She was not a complete monster. Part victim, part monster. That is what this world does to people. Dara, what should we do to thank her for the bequest? A Yasmine Auratpasand Prize sounds exploitative and false.’

‘Let me think.’

Late that night I did think, and while Zaynab was sleeping peacefully, I thought that a school for girls in the village where she was born, and in her real name, to avoid stupid publicity, might be a possible solution, with scholarships for study abroad guaranteed for the top two students each year. Both Henri and Zaynab agreed. Zaynab would speak to her brother to expedite matters. Henri would talk to a friend on how best to invest the money for such a purpose. Meanwhile a Punjabi list had to be organized for Henri’s publishing house, and I promised to suggest six books for it: three classics and three modern novels.

‘I wish we could simply call it Naughty School for Girls,’ said Zaynab with a gleam in her eyes after Henri had left. ‘But I fear that might be misunderstood by some of our bearded friends.’