Night of the Golden Butterfly

NINETEEN

AT NINE FORTY-FIVE WE moved to the big hall, an unusual structure that stood on its own, at a slight distance from the old house and the new additions. It had originally been built as a covered market so that the horse dealing took place in the shade and the animals could be thoroughly inspected before being bought or sold. Improvements in keeping with its later function had been made in the nineteenth century. Beasts of a different sort assembled here now. Local landlords, usually men of harsh and violent temperament, met here regularly to discuss common preoccupations, mainly brigandage of various sorts that was supposedly plaguing the countryside. For many centuries peasant brigands had constituted the only serious opposition to the vile rule of their masters, who had long forgotten that the origins of their own fortunes, as is the case with great families everywhere, lay in theft and pillage on a grand scale.

When these outlaws were caught and punished, ordinary people felt great sympathy for them; songs and ballads about their deeds remain part of Sindhi folklore. They had defied authority, and for that they were honoured. It was rumoured that this hall had briefly been used as an execution, or rather a strangulation, chamber: those caught stealing were brought here and the life was choked out of them. Not all of them were men.

This was also the hall where the landed gentry of the region had met in the nineteenth century and decided that since the British conquerors had occupied Sind with such superior force, any resistance would amount to collective suicide, and their heirs would be punished by being deprived of their property. Thus, it was unanimously agreed, collaboration was the only way forward. Great-Uncle’s grandfather had been the moving force behind the decision. The landed collaborators had prospered. As the British prepared to leave India, they advised their old friends to transfer their loyalties to the Muslim League and the new Fatherland. They did so and continued to prosper.

Such was the historic location where Plato’s last work was going to be revealed to a handful of his friends. We arrived soon after breakfast and began looking at the old photographs that adorned the walls, including a very fetching one of the then-young great-uncle on horseback and attired in polo gear. We were interrupted by the slow march into the space of a team often brawny peasants, five on each side of the huge painting. They carried it in and placed it against the wall. More retainers rushed in to help uncover it. Plato would have found this both amusing and repulsive, but homilies were redundant, for had he been alive we wouldn’t be here and the work would not have existed in its present form. It was the artistic equivalent of his last will and testament.

Zaynab was becoming impatient. ‘Get the paper and cardboard off and open, open. Hurry up.’

Alice had recovered sufficiently to be present, and in case of an emergency there were six toilets attached to the hall — one for each of the big families who convened here in the old days. Zaynab desperately wanted MoMA in New York to host the first exhibition: hence her determination to bring Alice over to Jam Thanda Gosht and her irritation with me for ‘ragging Alice’.

Yu-chih, no doubt wondering why Confucius had dragged her to this place when she could have been sightseeing elsewhere, was trying not to look bored, and failing. The rest of us were impatiently awaiting Plato’s message to the world. Once the cardboard and brown paper had been removed, we saw that it was not one painting at all, but a huge triptych. Each panel was painted in different colours. I insisted that we should see each in turn, with the other two turned temporarily to face the ancestors on the walls.

The first panel was what Zaynab had seen at an early stage. ‘The horror, the horror’ had been her first reaction, and she had fled to Europe thinking that Plato was on the verge of insanity. The ‘horror’ was undoubtedly present as the core of the painting, but it was much changed since those early drafts. This was the Fatherland panel, the one he had told me might trigger an upheaval in the country. The cancers destroying it were painted as living organisms with tentacle-like attachments that were competing with each other to occupy the whole body. I had never seen anything like this before, from Plato or anyone else. It was certainly original. The colours used to paint the cancers were strange combinations of blood red and pus yellow, but each was given individual features.

Zaynab wanted me to explain each section in turn, though Plato’s message was clear enough. ‘It may be tedious but it’s necessary’, she had insisted the night before, ‘in order for Alice to fully understand the complexity of the painting.’

Ally only knew the young Plato’s work, which was not difficult to understand, not even the folio of 1964 etchings. So, I complied — as I usually did with Zaynab’s demands. The first panel, I said, could simply be titled ‘The Four Cancers of Fatherland’. These were lurid and surreal depictions. No subtleties, no mysteries to explain here. Plato loved leaving clues in his obscurer work, but had not bothered with any in this panel. The malignant cancer that had sprouted three siblings was shaped like an eagle. Stars and stripes in a state of cancerous decay were tattooed on the back of an Uncle Sam, like so many welts. The face of Uncle, watching the eagle with an approving smile, was unmistakable. It was Barack Hussein Obama, the first dark-skinned leader of the Great Society. The newest imperial chieftain was wearing a button: ‘Yes we can… still destroy countries’. Plato’s image was designed to be crude, I thought, but was it accurate? Alice had become nervous and fidgety as she scribbled furiously in her notepad, a clear indication that the arrow had hit the mark.

Was this the first critical entry by the art world? I could hear the sycophants hard at work reassuring liberal opinion that Plato could be safely ignored. He was a marginal painter, not a celebrity with over twenty prizes to his name. I. M. Malik was a much greater and more important artist from that country and was already working on a portrait depicting the president as Saint George fighting an Islamist dragon breathing mushroom clouds. Commissioned by a private collector, it had already been booked into seven museums on the strength of the idea and Malik’s formidable reputation. But which painting would last? This is a question usually avoided by toadies, who can only live in and for the present so as never to be on the wrong side of history. Adept at sniffing power in every sphere, which is part of their trade, they shift effortlessly from one posterior to another. Plato had nothing to fear from their judgement.

The second cancer, painted in blood red and khaki, appeared to be saluting the first. Or was that simply my imagination? I moved back. I was right. He had not wasted much time on Fatherland’s army and had painted the dictators it had given the country in garish colours. They were devouring bits of the dying country as if keeping the chemotherapy at bay. That must have been in Plato’s mind, though not everyone present accepted my interpretation. Zahid thought it was far-fetched, but Alice and Zaynab agreed with me. One of the despots was crumbling and different bits of metastasizing material were floating in the air. The chemo had disintegrated at least one tumour. It was all a bit too much.

The green bomb-shaped blobs with beards were the jihadis, shown in slow separation from the previous two and developing a life of their own. But who were these five bloated figures with linked arms, all of them defecating gold coins, with each figure’s outstretched hand cupped under his neighbour’s buttocks, making sure that the enriched droppings fell on it, until you got to the last figure, who was eating the gold-shit with such vulgar abandon that his face was lathered with it? An odd nose, a typical display of teeth, a populist wave identified this gang as poor Fatherland’s much-despised politicians.

The colours used in this panel matched the intensity of the work. Looked at from a distance it was stunning, but the closer one got to the painting the more horrific it became. What gave this section real depth, however, was not so much the satire, which was obviously strong, but the wall of humanity with which the painter had encircled the canvas. Zaynab had not seen this in the first draft. Plato must have finished it not long before he was taken to the hospital to die. The people on the edge were part-hedge, part-fence, men and women not unlike the ten who had carried the painting into this hall an hour ago and were waiting patiently in the hot sun outside to take it away again.

The people in the painting are also waiting. Why are they waiting? What are they thinking? Portraying them as a wall, Plato is stressing their collective strength. They are many, the cancers are few. What are they waiting for? For the interlinked cancers to reach them? Each face reflects a different form of pain, resignation, anger, despair. I’m reminded of his very first work, the Partition etchings, but this is different, for these people are not simply victims. Their passivity masks their strength. We may be poor, their faces appear seem to be saying, but our dreams are pure. There is no blood on our consciences. Perhaps there should be some. Did Plato feel that too, during his last days, as he fought against time to finish this painting? Some figures have one hand behind their backs. Is the artist implying the existence of concealed weapons? Will the last attempt to save Fatherland come from below and sweep every malignancy away? I don’t know, but that is what I would like to think was in his mind, a last Utopian shout. Was it, Plato?

There are a few smiling faces on the canvas, representing innocence and hope. Infants being suckled by peasant Madonnas, one of them with a tiny mole below her breast, intended to remind us, or perhaps me, of Zaynab. The babies are unaware of what lies ahead, like so many who once thought that Fatherland was the future. This is Plato’s stunning farewell to the land to which he was forced to flee as a refugee more than half a century ago.

We sat in silence for a while, contemplating the work. Alice spoke first. ‘Very brilliant. No doubt about it. His best work. Very brilliant indeed. Some atrophy as they age. He improved with every year. Problems: MoMA won’t take Obama-as-cancer. They would if the picture were by a very famous artist, but Plato has only recently become known in the States.’

‘Don’t tell them,’ said Zaynab. ‘Let them interpret it as they wish.’

‘There is no other interpretation. That’s where the power of the painting lies, Zaynab.’

Yu-chih, who had barely said a word since arriving in this backwater, entered the fray. ‘It’s universal. Any gallery with a curator who knows what constitutes artistic merit will not turn this painting down. The Horse Thief is a very large new gallery in Beijing. They would exhibit this tomorrow. I hope slides are being prepared.’

‘Westward or eastward, Zaynab?’ Tasked in a whisper. She looked at me pleadingly. I turned the Fatherland panel to the wall and displayed the next. This was in classic Plato colours. The entire canvas was covered in waves of blue, turquoise and dark green. We were confronted with a turbulent ocean. Please, I thought, no mermaids. Don’t do it, Plato. In the centre of the painting was a large shell-shaped island with six men surrounding a single woman. Plato had clearly had to restrain himself from painting her as a mermaid. The paint used to cover up the tail was in a slightly different shade, and his death had prevented any further retouching. Five of the figures, surprisingly, were painted almost in Socialist Realist style. Only one, like the sea, was surreal. I moved close to examine the subjects and recognized each one. The others followed suit, and a guessing game began. Everyone knew Kemal Ataturk, though his portrait was the only surreal one. The famous hat, the cryptic smile, the cigarette, the tilted face were all his, but what lay below? He was dressed in tights and his legs were posed in a fantastic pirouette. Rudolf Nureyev or a whirling dervish? The choice was ours. I had no idea that Plato had ever been interested in Ataturk, so this was a surprise — or was he trying to imply something that is often discussed in Istanbul but never written or painted?

The other figures were also from the world of Islam, but of a very different time. Intellectual dissidents, like the man who had painted them, and for that reason heroes who had thrilled his artist’s blood. A blind poet is seated at the feet of the others. On his lap lies a famous work that was, in fact, the only parody ever done of Zaynab’s husband, and that, too, in the twelfth century. How we have progressed. The poet, Abu Ala al-Maari, is conversing with fish and birds. Watching him with kindly, amused and protective expressions are three men in robes and turbans, each clinging to his own best-known work as if someone were threatening to snatch it away from him. These three were old friends I had introduced to Plato thirty years ago, when he was in his most nihilist phase regarding the faith of his forebears: the great scholars of al-Andalus and the Muslim world, Ibn Hazm, Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd. The last man, and I chuckled with delight, was the Sicilian geographer Muhammad Idrisi, showing them all his map of the world. I introduced these figures to the others, with Zaynab nodding a bit too vigorously, as if she already knew — one of her few irritating habits, because she only did it when she was surprised but did not wish to admit to her lack of knowledge.

At first the single woman puzzled me. Whom had Plato intended? Then I noticed that the uplifted arm had a sleeve with an Arabic inscription: Allah, I am fit for greatness and stride with great pride / I allow my lover to reach my cheek, and I grant my kiss to he who craves it. But it was the hand that seemed odd. It had six fingers. Sixer. It was Wallada! A tenth-century poet in Cordoba who maintained a salon, not far from the Great Mosque, that was the site of many heated debates on art and literature and where gossip-carriers reported each day on the latest goings-on in the city. Sixer was the insult she had publicly hurled at her lover, a truly great poet, Ibn Zaydun, whose love poetry is taught to this day in Arab schools and universities. Zaydun had betrayed Wallada’s love by seducing her maid, and subsequently moved on to young men. The poem she recited against him in public lacked literary merit — unlike her epic in defence of gossip, which only survives in fragments — but was repeated endlessly at the time for its shock value, and poor Ibn Zaydun became known in the city, indeed as far afield as Palermo and Baghdad, as the Sixer:

They call you the Sixer,

Your life will leave you before this name does;

Sodomite and buggered you are, let’s add

Adulterer, pimp, cuckold and thief.

There were ruder epithets as well, but ‘Sixer’ remained stuck to the poet till his enshrouded corpse was lowered into the mud. This panel was obviously ‘The Good Muslim’. I had realized my attention had been so concentrated on the main characters that I had missed a few important details. Just below the surface of the sea, death was lurking in the shape of shark-like creations, a few with long beards. But it was Alice who made the discovery of the afternoon. What I had assumed was just a cloud turned out to be a man’s face. Alice swore loudly that it was James Joyce and repeated the name with incredulity. We inspected the cloud from every distance, and seen from where she was standing, just a few feet from the painting, it was obvious she was right. There was also a number, and Zaynab immediately understood.

‘His first and last present to me was a well-worn edition of Ulysses. The Arabic numerals obviously refer to the page number.’

She had to go herself to fetch the book, since the maids could not decipher English titles. All present insisted they had read it, though I knew Zahid and Confucius were definitely lying, unless Confucius had read it during the memory-lapse period. It turned out he had, and Yu-chih informed us that there were two Chinese translations, the older of which was more loyal to the original. Given that some people find Joyce’s later work incomprehensible, I wondered what the Chinese translation might be like. How could JJ possibly be made to work in another language?

An excited Zaynab had found the page and was going through each line. Then she found it and screamed. ‘It’s Stephen Dedalus. He’s just been reflecting on the mathematical discipline of the medieval Arabs, and in particular algebra — al-jabra — and its symbols. He sees them as “wearing quaint caps of squares and cubes”, but listen to this: “… imps of fancy of the Moors. Gone too from the world, Averroes [Ibn Rushd] and Moses Maimonides [Ibn Maymun], dark men in mien and movement, flashing in their mocking mirrors the obscure soul of the world, a darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend.”’

How had I missed that? Was he in Trieste already when the thought occurred? Thinking of the tortured history of his country, his continent and his religion, he had remembered another world. Clever, clever Plato. The panel was unanimously awarded a new title, ‘The Obscure Soul of the World’. JJ’s tribute to an exterminated civilization as recovered by Mohammed Aflatun, deceased. He had never mentioned it to me or to anyone else.

What could the last section of the triptych contain? There was a sense of expectation as we crowded close to examine the work. It was very different from the previous two. This was personal. It consisted of four large and six small panels. Each contained a portrait or a miniature. These were painted short stories. Two small self-portraits of Plato, one showing him as a young man, his face filled with pain, and the other as an old one, with the cancer-ravaged features of the last period. There was the table in the college café in Lahore, around which we were all grouped in the shadows of a pipal tree, with Confucius the most obviously recognizable. Satire had crept in here, with the more reflective types wearing spectacles, the talkative triumvirate with tongues hanging out, and me, licking my spectacles clean. The most straight-laced portrait, and yet funniest for those of us in the know, showed Zaynab covered from head to toe, a pious look on her face, sitting cross-legged on a takhtposh. Lying next to her was the Holy Book. She was holding an unlit candle. The fact that it was unlit was remarked on by everyone. Zaynab and I did not dare look at each other.

‘It must mean something, Dara,’ said Yu-chih. ‘You must have some explanation.’

‘Of course there is,’ I said, racking my brains and trying not to laugh. ‘It’s obvious. Even though Plato was not religious, he was understanding of our faith in his last days. You cannot show a lit candle next to the Honoured Classic. The light emanating from the Book is all you need.’

Zaynab sighed with relief. The rest applauded. There were a few vintage Plato paintings. In one, a dwarf with upraised sword was guarding the pudendum of a crowned lady while a crowned male was happily helping himself to her behind. The Punjabis present roared with delight. Plato was reminding himself and us of the famous impromptu remark that had once reduced an entire theatre to helpless laughter and projected its author onto a larger frame. Alice had not heard the story and — by now fully recovered from her stomach problems — laughed without restraint.

A satirical miniature depicted Jindié and me sporting in Mughal costume in the Shalimar Gardens, below the marble canopy, though I had been given a few Chinese features. I’m lying with my head on Jindié’s lap playing with a flower. Sweet birds fly above. A dropping from one of them is headed straight for my face. A sitar player, who looks suspiciously like Plato, is strumming away below us. One of Jindié’s breasts, something I have yet to see, was delicately displayed, causing a bit of embarrassment to her brother and husband. Then I noticed that it wasn’t simply that. A tiny portion of my anatomy was peeping out in hope. Zaynab gave me a quick glance, pretending she was coughing to cover her giggle, and said, ‘I think this is my favourite one in the last panel.’

‘Oh, no,’ said Yu-chih. ‘It’s too obvious. The unlit candle is the one I really like. It’s so subtle.’

I agreed a bit too loudly.

Plato’s favourite poets were represented, too, and unlike his friends, they had been treated with possibly too much reverence. Here they all were. Faiz, cigarette firmly held in the same hand that is close to his mouth, suppressing the cough that often interrupted his readings. The other hand is resisting the overtures of a society beauty, while in the background Plato’s wall of humanity has been miniaturized from the first painting; their faces, filled with agony, plead for something. A homage to Faiz’s most famous poem, whose first line, ‘Lover, do not ask for that old love again’, is the prologue to verses that explain why he should not. Not because the poet has found another lover, like poor Ibn Zaydun, but because ‘there are other ailments in this world outside the pain of love’. Like the pain of oppression, felt by the poor.

And here is Sahir Ludhianvi, from Plato’s old city in pre-Partitioned India. He was not recognized by any of the others, and I only knew him because we used to recite his poetry all the time as young men. It was easier to grasp than Faiz’s, didactic, and had a Brechtian ring to it though it has survived less well than the work of the great German poet. An explanation is unavoidable. Why is Sahir standing with his trousers at his feet? He is facing us with a mischievous look on his face and a drooping little penis. We can’t see his naked backside because he’s busy showing it to the Taj Mahal, which is being photographed by the tourist hordes. One of Sahir’s sharpest poems is a response to his beloved, who suggests a rendezvous in the moonlight outside the Taj. The poet’s reply is at once moving and brutal, denouncing the monument as the indulgence of an emperor who used his wealth as a crutch ‘to make fun of the love that we, the poor, feel’. How many died building this absurdity, asks the poet of his lover. Ever think of them? Were they never in love? Were their emotions less pure? In Plato’s portrait, the Taj is cracked from side to side, and the cracks, tiny impressionist blobs, are painted in similar colours to the cancers depicted in the first painting. As for the penis, here Plato is suggesting, accurately, that the poet suffered from an ailment like that of the man who painted him. I did not mention this, though Ally and Zaynab exchanged a quick look.

The last three figures are much-loved Punjabi poets from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, presented as tribunes of the people. It is the triumvirate of Waris Shah, Bulleh Shah and Shah Hussain, more holy for many Punjabis than the most devout preachers of any religion. No portraits of them were ever made. Plato paints them as angelic Punjabi peasants: Waris Shah is rescuing Heer from the wedding palanquin; Bulleh Shah is frowning at mosque and temple and reprimanding mullah and Brahmin, done in miniature. And Shah Hussain, who publicly flaunted his male Hindu lover Madho Lai in the streets of Lahore and wrote love songs for him, is shown naked in his arms, but not in bed. They embrace in the streets of Lahore as an admiring public, similar to the faces in the wall of humanity in the previous panel, watches the pair. Plato’s imagination here rested on fact. When Shah Hussain died, the mullahs ordered that his body be left to rot in the sun, since he had breached Koranic injunctions. It is written that tens of thousands of the poet’s admirers defied the mullahs. His body was publicly bathed and shrouded in the red colour he loved and buried with great fanfare and singing.

The title for this panel did not require too much thought: ‘My Life’.

It was over.

Lahore — Pelion — Sardinia—

London,

2006–2009