Night of the Golden Butterfly

THREE

ZAHID HAD TOLD HIM to ring at a decent hour, and when the phone hissed that morning at nine, I knew it must be him.

‘Plato?’

‘You recognized my voice before I spoke.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘Never been so happy in my life. I’m not joking.’

‘Then why did you swear so much when talking to Zahid?’

‘How much time do we have?’

‘The morning’s free.’

‘Then let me start by telling you why I now sometimes use abusive language.’

Slowly, the tale unfolded. Plato was never one for shallow sentimentality and his voice grew harder as he progressed. In brief, Ahmed, a painter friend of his, had abandoned his wife and children for a younger mistress. This was banal and predictable, but he was uneasy and kept returning to the wife and mounting her every Friday afternoon, before having lunch with his boys. One day his wife, Zarina, could take it no longer and lost control. She abused him nonstop: your mother’s cunt, sisterfucker, fuck yourself, sodomite, catamite, dogfucker, daughterfucker… stay with the camel-cunted bitch you’ve found and don’t come to me again. How long this would have lasted is a matter of speculation. Ahmed covered her face with a pillow and smothered her. Then he wept uncontrollably. The older son rang the police, who took him away.

‘I couldn’t understand’, Plato continued, ‘why the use of bad language had led to violence and murder. After all, it was only her way of telling him how angry she was at being abandoned and mistreated. I went to see him a number of times in prison. He was filled with shame and at first did not want to discuss what he had done, but after I pressured him the following explanation emerged. His wife had never used bad language before and had often punished the children when their tongues let slip an obscenity. This is a family that lives in the heart of the old city, where each lane has its own special obscenities. Ahmed told me that the sight of the woman he had chosen to mother his children suddenly transformed by hatred was a blow to his self-esteem, his idea of himself: he had been filled with anger at the thought that he’d married a woman who had turned out to be so vulgar. It was the discovery of this unknown side of her that made him lose control and kill her.’

‘Did they hang him?’

‘What world do you live in? He was released three months later. His lawyer argued it was an “honour killing”, and the judge was paid in advance. Ahmed now lives peacefully with his new wife. The two boys have been sent off to a cadet college and will soon become young army officers. I don’t speak to the dog, but occasionally I indulge in obscene language to express my solidarity with his late wife. Do you believe me?’

‘No.’

‘It’s true. Your old friend Zahid loves being abused anyway. Makes him feel he’s back home. How was the butterfly?’

‘Reserved and dignified as always. More than I can say for you. What do you want of me?’

‘Could you write a long essay about me?’

‘Your paintings?’

‘Yes, but more about my life. She wants it and I can’t deny her anything.’

‘How old is she?’

‘Fifty-two.’

‘Not bad. Only twenty-seven years younger than you. I was hoping she might be one of your younger models. When did her husband die?’

‘Who told you it was dead? It will never die. It’s still alive and present. In fact she keeps it close to her bed.’

‘What?’

‘Prepare yourself for a surprise, Mr Dara. My Zaynab is married to the Koran.’

‘Allah help us.’

‘He never does, as we know.’

‘So she’s the daughter of some Sindhi feudal engaged in sordid calculations about his property.’

Plato was overcome by a fit of bitter laughter. ‘Yes, but in her case it was the brother, not the father, who forced her to marry the Holy Book. He must have made a lot of money selling her share of the land. It’s not that old age has made him generous. He dropped dead a few years ago. The younger brother adores Zaynab. He bought her an apartment in Clifton overlooking the sea. She wanted to buy one of my paintings. I showed her a selection. She bought them all. Then I did an imagined portrait of her on her wedding night. That made her laugh so much that I fell in love. Can you imagine?’

I could, but Plato still wanted to go through it in great detail and I didn’t stop him. I preferred Plato in love to Plato melancholic, filled with whisky-soaked despair and suicidal. He preferred living on the edge and in a way his love for Zaynab fell into that category. For the ignorant she was the equivalent of a Catholic nun, except that she was wed to the Koran, not Jesus. The tradition refused to die out. To become her lover was to defy heaven and become a passionate sinner. I was sure that her marital status was the turn-on. Plato paid no heed to official morality, took great pleasure in defying public opinion and enjoyed startling his conformist contemporaries. His life and his paintings reflected these feelings.

He recounted in some detail how the first meeting had been brief, but profitable. He described her clothes, the colour of her hair underneath the diaphanous dupatta. The way her eyes changed colour and so on. She summoned him a week later to explain the allegorical side of his work. Then he asked her to pose for him. She did so fully clothed, but he painted her lying naked in her bed waiting for her Holy Book — husband. He said the picture was inspired by Magritte, but if it were ever shown in public he would be DD’d (disembowelled and decapitated) by some fanatic. I challenged this assertion. Given that the grotesque practice of Koran-marriage was regularly denounced as un-Islamic by every clerical faction in Fatherland and had even united Shia and Wahhabi, surely it was the men in these families who should be DD’d for misusing the Holy Book to safeguard their property.

I thought my logic was impeccable, but Plato ignored me and continued with his story. Zaynab, he said, was not a virgin. I sighed with relief. The advantage of this type of marriage, she had told him, was that there was no need to dissemble. Every pretty woman Zaynab knew in Fatherland had a husband, and quite a few in addition to a husband had a lover as well and, as an extra, another person to keep her from getting too bored during the day. Talk like this had entranced Plato. He was still gripped by madness, torment and joy, the process clinically described by Stendhal in Love as ‘crystallization’.

‘Plato, are you living in her apartment?’

‘Why not? She pretends I’m her cook-butler-chauffeur, and whenever her friends or relations visit I act the part, as I once did for you and the Golden Butterfly.’

None of his obsessions with women had ever lasted very long, and I enquired gently how long he gave Zaynab.

‘Listen, catamite… sorry, that slipped out by mistake. Zaynab will make sure my body is bathed and enshrouded before the burial. I’m too old to move on anywhere now. Will you tell my story and hers?’

‘Yes to yours, but I don’t know her at all.’

‘She’s coming to your town next month. You’ll meet her.’

‘Are you coming, too?’

‘How can the cook-chauffeur travel abroad with the lady? Her friends aren’t that stupid.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong, Plato. They are stupid. Your photograph has been in Dawn. Your paintings have featured on television, and none of them recognized you?’

‘Servants are invisible.’

‘Till they cut their master’s throat.’

We had been speaking for three hours and now at the risk of offending him I said farewell and noted his phone number. Plato’s submissive, shy, please-ignore-me-I’m-a-nobody exterior had been carefully cultivated over the years and always worked with those who didn’t really know him. It wasn’t totally fake, or else he would have promoted his own work more energetically, but when I pushed him on this he would simply reply that if the work was any good it would last and he was not too interested in money. His attempted blackmail of me was crude and ineffective, since Zahid knew the whole story, but it was undoubtedly a sign of Plato’s desperation, his fear of dying just as he had met a woman he really liked.

Plato entered our lives almost half a century ago. Zahid and I had left our respective high schools and joined the college in Lahore, where we were blessed with a truly enlightened principal. A biologist by training, he was also a gifted Punjabi scholar and had translated some of our epics into Urdu. They were not quite the same thing in Fatherland’s shiny, ornate state language, but he had done them better than anybody else. He had also commissioned a Punjabi translation of Shakespeare. The success of The Tempest, staged the previous year, had been helped by the actor playing Caliban, who bore an unnerving resemblance to the military dictator entrusted by Washington to run Fatherland. We had returned to Lahore from the mountains in time for the Punjabi premiere of Hamlet. Expectations were high: Ophelia was being played by a very pretty Kashmiri boy called Ashraf Lone, and a number of older students who lusted after him had decided they loved the theatre. Hamlet was to be performed in the Open Air Theatre in September, when the heat had abated, the monsoon and accompanying humidity of August had retired for another year and the evenings were pleasant with the scent of jasmine and queen-of-the-night wafted by soft, refreshing breezes across the college lawns to the amphitheatre. The translator was a distinguished Punjabi poet.

A new theatrical production was a big event in the cultural life of the city. The opening night of Hamlet was attended by numerous parents and the intellectual elite of Lahore. Those with sensitive posteriors brought their own cushions to place on the circular rows of redbrick seats overlooking the stage. There was a sense of expectation, an evening away from the vulgar interests of everyday life: what could be loftier than Shakespeare translated into the language of our city by one of Fatherland’s most respected authors? The latter’s arrival at the theatre was greeted with enthusiastic applause.

The play began. All went well till the ghost scene. The actor playing the ghost was a young professor of English, slightly neurotic and very arrogant. He had studied at Edinburgh University and spoke Punjabi with a slight Scottish accent. He had never acted before, but had lobbied forcefully to be part of the play and finally the harassed director had given him the small role of the ghost. When his turn came to speak he was paralyzed with stage fright and forgot his lines. The excessively short senior student playing Hamlet began to panic. The third time he repeated ‘Hai, mayray pio da bhooth’ (‘Oh, my father’s ghost’) without eliciting any response from the ghost, an irritated voice from the audience shouted a loud prompt:

‘Pidke, bacha apni ma di chooth!’ (Runt, save your mother’s cunt!)

To say the effect was electric would be an understatement. The actors collapsed before the audience. Hamlet was a giggling wreck. The ghost passed out with shame. The stage lights were turned off and on for at least ten minutes. The sound of laughter drowned all else: as one wave subsided, another rose. The stage management realized the play was over for the night and announced that the critics were welcome on the next day.

Everyone was looking for the Punjabi Freud whose bon mot had made the evening more memorable by wrecking it. The owner of the voice was in his thirties, bespectacled, dressed in salwar/kurta and chewing paan and had a thick crop of Brylcreemed black hair. He appeared to be on his own. Some members of the audience began to shake his hand and others were pointing appreciatively in his direction, but he seemed determined to get out of the theatre as fast as he could. Zahid and I grabbed him as he was looking for his bicycle in the shed.

‘Disappear, boys. I wish I hadn’t spoken.’

We invited him to join us the next day for drinks in Respected’s juice bar.

‘What sort of juice?’

‘The most delicious fruit juice in the city.’

He laughed without committing himself. We never expected him to show, but in the meantime news of his witticism had travelled far and wide, from the cafés to the kebab stalls of the city. At college the next day it seemed the only subject of conversation. Students asked each other, ‘Were you there?’ Zahid and I were much in demand as witnesses, and every time we repeated Plato’s words there were gales of admiring laughter. Later the same day, when we repaired to the Coffee House, not far from the college, the poets and critics gathered there had also been discussing the cancelled play and there was an overwhelming curiosity as to the author of the prompt. Why had this young man not been heard of before? Such a natural talent deserved his own special table in the café. Literary veterans racked their brains to think of a precedent as startling as his remarkable intervention. I wondered whether the same discussion was taking place in Cheney’s Lunch Home, a five-minute walk away, where aspiring poets mingled with highbrow critics and modernist blank verse was an obsession. At the Coffee House we discussed the poetry of Louis Aragon and Ilya Ehrenburg’s novels. The Lunch Home preferred Baudelaire and Gide and regarded Shakespeare as an antique bore, but even they could not avoid a discussion of the Punjabi Hamlet.

It was in these cafés that I first began to understand the scale of the trauma that had afflicted Lahore during the Partition of 1947 and transformed this cosmopolitan city into a monocultural metropolis. Names of Sikh and Hindu writers and journalists were recalled with sadness and those present who had witnessed the horrors of what is now referred to as ethnic cleansing would shudder as they remembered those times. Few dwelt on 1947 for long. It was just over a decade ago and the wounds were only too visible. There were more pleasant memories. A club, now sadly defunct, called Metro Fatherland, where in the heady years of the early Fifties young Muslim men and women met, ordered drinks and danced. On his way to this paradise, a writer would suddenly glimpse the veil parting on a burqa-clad woman’s face as she bought a piece of fine silk in Anarkali, and describe the vision as celestial light illuminating the Ka’aba. That still happens.

Plato made us wait a whole week before he emerged from his den. We looked carefully for any trace of triumphalism on his face. There was none. Our table was restricted to iconoclasts: a mix of students and young lecturers, the occasional older professor and a few graduates who were now, mainly, young civil servants with much spare time each day. Hangers-on were not tolerated and anyone suspected of being there to ingratiate himself with the teachers was angrily dismissed with a few choice epithets. We greeted Plato warmly. He became a regular fixture, arriving usually at lunchtime. The owner of the juice bar, curly-haired Respected Tufail, whose computer-like brain never forgot what we owed him, refused to charge Plato for a whole month. Respected — everyone called him that ever since he had once complained that students were far too rude and did not appreciate his skills. This was because the common terms of address, affectionately intended, were pimp, catamite, torn-arse, etc., and Tufail had become tired of hearing students half his age shouting, ‘Pimp! A large mixed pomegranate and orange juice.’ He refused to serve any student who hailed him in abusive language. Overnight we gave him his new name. Many customers had no idea what his real one was. Respected was a great wit and raconteur and often sat at our table to join in the banter. Even Babuji, the elderly proprietor of the adjacent café, which plied us with tea, samosas and shami kebabs all day long, would come and sit with us when Plato arrived.

Zahid was more conscientious than I was and often left to attend lectures, but I spent most of my time there, at our table in the corner underneath the big pipal tree, with its eight places permanently reserved for us. Respected and Babuji would never permit anyone else to sit there even if none of us had arrived. It was around this table that we began, slowly, to discover Plato’s past. It took months before he became relaxed enough to share his life story with us.

His name really was Plato. He was born in a village not far from Ludhiana, in East Punjab, now part of India. His precocity as a child and constant questioning had greatly irritated his father, a local schoolteacher, who probably had no answer to some of the boy’s queries. Aflatun, the local version of the philosopher’s name, corrupted from Arabic, was often used pejoratively to describe people who talked too much or repeatedly asked awkward questions or were just too argumentative. And so the three-year-old Mohammed became Mohammed Aflatun, and was registered under that name at the local madrassa and later at the high school in Ludhiana, where a few teachers had actually read Plato. This was a very long time ago. The nickname was meant to ridicule him, but as he grew, Plato took it as a compliment and later immersed himself in the translated editions of the Greek classics. His obsession with Pythagoras led to a lifelong love affair with mathematics, the subject he now taught at an ultra-snobbish Lahore school where entry was based exclusively on class, with preference given to landed families.

‘You teach there? Do you dress any differently?’

‘Why should I? Don’t they need me more than I need them? Once you live to please others, you live in fear of their displeasure, and fear makes one stupid.’

Later we discovered from a colleague of his, who loathed him, that had Plato accepted the offer of a stipend from Cambridge to study higher mathematics he would have prospered in that discipline. The offer was made after he sent a well-known Cambridge don some comments on his work, scribbled on the back of an old sheet of answers to an exam he had marked at school. But Plato disliked specialization, and as he told us on one occasion, ‘I did not want to drown in a pool of mathematics for the rest of my life.’ The prospect was unappealing. But why teach at a school? Why not at the college? Offers had been made there, too, and he had turned them down. School was less demanding, he maintained. Furthermore, he had no university degrees at all, never mind a PhD, and, besides, he could educate some of those private school boys in other disciplines, including that of life, with which they were mostly unacquainted.

The same could not be said of Plato. Life had overeducated him and the marks of its lessons were plain to see. He was light-skinned and thick-lipped, with hollow cheeks that gave him an ageless look, and this attractive ugliness was enhanced by thick black hair that he rarely bothered to groom. His Brylcreemed appearance at Hamlet had been unusual.

One day he told us how he had escaped from the 1947 pogroms in East Punjab and fled to Lahore. He was in his last year of school when news reached Ludhiana that all of the two hundred or so Muslims in his village, including his parents and three younger sisters, as well as aunts and uncles and cousins, had all been taken to the local mosque and set on fire. There wasn’t a single survivor. A kindly Sikh maths teacher who had befriended Plato hugged him and wept. The same man took him to the centre of town where a convoy of buses was being readied to ferry Muslims across to the other side of the partitioned subcontinent. Plato was dazed, unable to register the fact that he had lost everyone. He was put on a bus that contained mainly women and children; his old teacher explained the circumstances and pleaded with a woman to look after his pupil. She did.

‘The two buses in front of us were stopped by Sikhs and I saw the men lined up and killed in the most brutal fashion. Some of them were on their knees pleading for mercy, kissing the feet of those about to massacre them. I thought they would kill us too, saving the women to be raped and slaughtered afterwards. But they were interrupted by a military patrol led by British officers. That in itself was rare, but that’s how we survived.’

He spoke matter-of-factly, with few traces of outward emotion, but the pain was reflected in his eyes. He went on, ‘Then I reached this great city, the Paris of the East, which Punjabis everywhere used to dream of visiting. He who has not seen Lahore has not seen the world and all that sentimental nonsense. And here Muslims were hard at work killing Sikhs and Hindus and looting their property. I was in a refugee camp, and one of my uniformed protectors, after discovering I had no silver or gold or any money on me, wanted some kind of reward and decided to rape me. I was saved by other refugees, who heard my screams and, Allah be praised, dragged the Muslim policeman off my back. My family had been religious. I was taken regularly to the mosque, learned the Koran by rote without understanding a single word, and participated in all the rituals. When I saw what was being done by all sides in the name of religion I turned my back on religion forever.’

The table had fallen silent. Respected quietly placed a tray with tumblers of freshly squeezed orange and pomegranate juice before us. There were tears in his eyes. In the early Sixties, the trauma of Partition still affected many in the city, but few wanted to talk about it. The memories were too recent, and parts of the city still bore the scars. The attempt by the generation before ours to suppress the memory of the killings which they had participated in or witnessed had left a deep emotional scar, made worse by never being discussed and dealt with openly. A madness had seized ordinary people and now they were in denial. When Plato told his story, it was the first time anyone had discussed Partition at our table. Afterwards many of us did, and I heard numerous accounts of what had taken place in the heart of this city during the fateful month of August 1947.

Plato lived in a tiny apartment on the Upper Mall, the main thoroughfare of the city, past the Government House, the old Nedous hotel and the canal, in a block of flats known for some reason as Scotch Corner. During the winter we would often walk up the Mall with him, past the arcades and the old Gymkhana Club, the school where he taught and the Lahore Zoo, which housed the most miserable animals I have ever seen. (It was rumoured that most of the meat rations meant for the lions could be tasted in the café.) The zoo was a halfway point where we paused to sample that day’s gol gappa before parting company close to Scotch Corner. Plato never invited us into his quarters, and despite our burning curiosity, we never asked.

Zahid and I talked about him incessantly. A member of our clandestine Marxist cell angered us one day by referring to Plato as a ‘petty-bourgeois individualist’. When we told Plato about it he laughed and said the description was accurate. He was never interested in Marxism or the Communist Party and treated them as a form of religion. He had read Marx and admired some of his work, but never admitted it to us, ‘because you idiots treat him as if he were a prophet, and if you’re going in for that, you might as well stick to the real ones: Moses, Jesus and our very own.’

Discussions became heated when Hanif Ma, a Lahori Chinese studying physics and destined for great things, was accepted at our table as a regular. He was immediately and unimaginatively given the nickname Confucius, which he accepted with good grace but sometimes found irksome. He pretended to be impressed, however: it was sophisticated of us educated Punjabis not to have simply and affectionately addressed him as ‘China’ as the shopkeepers did in Anarkali bazaar. ‘What can we offer you today, China’, ‘Have some tea, China, while you remember what your mother sent you to buy’, etc.

‘We are simple rustics, Confucius. Here we wear our arse on our sleeve. And you’re a Punjabi just as much as we are, even if you speak a few more languages,’ Zahid told him.

Confucius laughed, and we were to discover his stock of bad words had been gleaned on Beadon Road, where gangs of ruffians ruled supreme. I only went there to the sweet shops, to eat gulab jamuns and rasgullas. Confucius was full of fun, but not unaffected by the great transformation in the country of his forebears, which had also touched many of us. We, too, wanted to make revolution and take the Chinese road. It was difficult to be living in the vicinity and remain unmoved by what was being achieved. Confucius would defend his revolution against all of Plato’s taunts. These exchanges gradually weaned us away from Plato, to his great amusement. ‘Busy making the revolution, boys?’ became one of his more tiresome refrains when Zahid, Confucius and I left the table to attend a cell meeting. Confucius developed a real hatred for him and barely spoke when he was present, even when Plato tried to draw him out on mathematics or physics. Zahid and I could never break with Plato, nor did we want to, even though his cynicism could be extremely corrosive and nerve-racking at times. He had grown so used to being self-reliant that all friendships made him suspicious. It was his intelligence that challenged us all. Even Confucius accepted that this was so.

One year, as the ten-week summer holidays approached, Plato, hearing Zahid and me plotting our exploits, asked casually where we were going. ‘The mountains,’ I told him, ‘Nathiagali for me and Murree for Zahid.’ He smiled.

‘I might see you there.’

‘Wonderful,’ said Zahid after a slight hesitation, unsure whether Plato was being ironic. I knew he didn’t quite mean it. It was an intrusion. Our summers were very precious. We felt completely free, and even though we were twenty miles apart one of us would often walk over to see the other. We had other friends there too, not part of the table, summer friends whom we met only once a year. These friendships often became intense, since there were few restrictions in the mountains and gender segregation was frowned upon.

The thought of Plato being there did strike me as a bit odd. He was part of our grown-up side. The mountain air had a regressive effect on us. We were children again, but children filled with lustful thoughts. Plato, ultrasensitive to any slight, intended or real, looked in my direction. He must have caught the ambiguous note in Zahid’s response.

‘And you, Dara Shikoh. Do you think it’s wonderful news as well?’

‘Not sure, Plato. Depends on how you behave during picnics. Can you play an instrument? Can you sing or act? This will be your real test. I always know you’re slightly tense when you call me Dara Shikoh.’

He immediately relaxed.

‘Don’t worry. I won’t disgrace you boys. And Dara Shikoh is the only Mughal prince I really admire. Akbar was a total fake. Broadminded as far as other faiths were concerned, but a killer of those he regarded as heretics.’

In fact, my nickname was my own fault. I had misinformed many a friend that I was named after Dara Shikoh, a sceptic poet and philosopher who should have succeeded Shah Jehan but was brutally brushed aside by a younger brother, Aurungzab, the devout ruler and ascetic who left us the Badshahi mosque, a ten-minute walk from the college, as his legacy. I was actually named after an old friend of my father’s who had tragically drowned while both of them were swimming from one bank of the Ravi to another in the moonlight. Perhaps he had been named after Dara Shikoh.

Before we left for the mountains, Confucius invited Zahid and me to supper at his house. Neither of us knew where he lived, but he had eaten with us at home many a time and his mother must have insisted he invite us in return.

‘Please remember not to call me Confucius at home. Won’t amuse anyone. They’ll just think indigenous Punjabis are stupid.’

‘What about Mao?’

‘Even worse. My father thinks of him as a bad poet and a philistine.’

All we knew about Confucius’s father was that he owned the best shoe shop on the Mall. The family had obviously been there for a long time, as testified by the photographs on the wall in which young Mr Ma posed proudly with long-departed British colonial officers. My father and I went there each year to have our feet measured for summer sandals and winter shoes. Nothing ever substituted for that in later years.

Confucius had agreed to meet us outside the shop, but we waited a while for another guest. He finally arrived. His bike had suffered a puncture and the usual repair stall was not open. This was Tipu, studying physics, at F.C. (Forman Christian) College, run by US missionaries on the other side of the city. Tipu had a soft, dark face and large brown eyes. Confucius had met him at a seminar, discovered he was a Marxist from Chittagong in East Fatherland, and wanted him invited to our cell meetings. Our rules were strict. A cell could not include more than six students at a time and none of the members was meant to know about the other cells. We did, of course, since there were only two others, but we pretended it was a huge secret. It added to the glamour. There were no existing cells at Tipu’s college. He was contemptuous of his fellow students and his eyes blazed as he informed us that no self-respecting college in East Fatherland was without its Communist cells. I did know of one cell in F.C., but it would have been a terrible breach of confidence to inform him of its existence. I made a mental note to let them know of his.

This conversation was taking place on the Mall, in the middle of a crowd of shoppers. We could have gone on for hours, but were late already. Confucius took us across the road to an old nineteen-twenties apartment block, where he lived and where his mother was patiently waiting to feed us.

‘Salaamaleikum, Dara. How’s your father?’

I didn’t recognize the shoemaker for a minute. Confucius’s father was dressed in a Chinese gown and a finely embroidered skullcap. We were introduced to the rest of his family, and that was the first time Zahid and I saw Jindié, the Golden Butterfly. She stood next to her mother, wearing a traditional but stylish Punjabi salwar/kameez light blue suit, with the kameez just touching her knees. Her silken black hair, covering a head that was an elongated oval, almost touched the floor. The eyebrows formed perfect arches. No makeup disfigured her thin lips. She was a delicate creature, extremely beautiful rather than pretty, but there was not a trace of shyness or affectation as she shook hands, inspecting each of us in turn with a quizzical, semi-humorous look. I never suspected she was a romantic eager for quick results. I found it difficult to concentrate on too much else that evening. What had Confucius said about us? Did she realize I had fallen in love with her? How could she not? It had to be a mandate from heaven.

After greeting Jindié, I bowed politely to Confucius’s mother. Like her husband, Mrs Ma was dressed in an antique Chinese gown. Her hair was pinned up in a bun and her face showed a touch of lipstick and powder, but at the same time conveyed an impression of prudence and good sense.

I was so thunderstruck by Jindié that it took me some time to notice that the living room was lined with books, mainly Chinese editions, some of which were undoubtedly very old. Jindié was talking to Tipu, quite deliberately, I think, to punish me for the way I had looked at her. In fact, she ignored me for the rest of the evening, speaking mainly to Tipu and Zahid but occasionally glancing in my direction to see how I was occupying myself. I moved away to look closely at some beautiful ivory objects on the mantelpiece and then the silks that covered the walls, on which hung a plain white plate with blue Kufic calligraphy. Mr Ma sidled up to explain that it was a ninth-century piece made by potters in Yunnan, who produced such ware exclusively for the merchants in Basra, who brought it to Cordoba and Palermo. None of this meant much to me at the time. I smiled politely and asked about the books. He took one out. It looked exquisite, faded gold Chinese calligraphy on even more faded thick leather.

‘What is it, Mr Ma?’

‘The Han Kitab. You have heard of it?’

‘No. I’m sorry. China is a mystery. All we know about is the revolution.’

That annoyed him and he returned the book to its place. Confucius had observed the scene and came up to reassure me. I wasn’t bothered at all, but was becoming more and more enraged by the way his sister was flirting with Tipu.

The food, when it was served, was almost as divine as Jindié. The local Chinese restaurants were truly awful, catering to imagined local tastes. Pulp-food is always bad. This was the first time I had tasted proper Chinese food, and I complimented Mrs Ma on the quality of her cooking, the virtual opposite of our Punjabi cuisine. She explained that what we were consuming were Yunnanese delicacies, very different from what was served at banquets in Beijing. I asked if she had received any help from her daughter. The reply was an instantaneous no and a glare in Jindié’s direction. In a bid to attract the latter’s attention, I sympathized loudly, hoping to annoy her and failing miserably. She ignored the bait.

I did discover from her mother, however, that Jindié attended a women’s college. This was useful information, since the college in question was packed with seven or eight of my cousins as well as daughters of old family friends. It was presided over by a strict Indian-Christian spinster lady who took her job as principal far too seriously when it came to the social life of her students. To say she kept a watchful eye on her girls would be inaccurate. She had created a spy network of favourites who told her everything. Yes, everything, including the dreams that some of their fellow students recounted over breakfast. The college itself had been set up in 1920 by a prim Scotswoman called Rosamund Nairn and bore her surname. The girls at Nairn were considered to be almost as modern as their counterparts at Primrose in Karachi and Ambleside in Dhaka, and that was saying a great deal at the time.

Apart from my frustration over Jindié, the evening went well. Zahid and I both made sure we called our friend Hanif as often as we could — so often that he began to look annoyed. At this point Jindié addressed us collectively:

‘Is it true that you call him Confucius?’

The whole table erupted in laughter. It was only as we were all leaving and farewells were being said that she walked up to me.

‘It was really nice talking to you.’

‘But you didn’t.’

‘I know.’

Since my house was not too far from F.C. College, Zahid gave both me and Tipu a lift, dropping Tipu off first so the two of us could have a calm post-mortem. We stopped the car on the unfinished road outside my house. It was a wilderness then, with the only the mausoleum of a Sufi venerable lit in the distance with oil lamps.

I had liked Tipu instinctively and was determined that he should join our cell even if it meant biking six miles to where we were. He was obviously bright, and better read than all of us. Zahid disagreed and thought it would be better if Tipu were recruited to his local cell. But I wanted to keep an eye on him, in case Jindié really did want him and not me. I explained this to Zahid, who wasn’t surprised in the least.

‘I noticed your gaze’, said Zahid, ‘and so did she.’

‘Are you sure she did?’

‘How could she not, catamite? You were staring at her quite obviously. Everyone noticed. That’s why she ignored you the whole evening.’

There was little else to discuss, but we did so anyway for almost two hours. Then I went home and searched my father’s study for translations of Chinese literature and history. The shelves were packed with Europe and South Asia. Chinese civilization was represented by political and history books written by Americans and Europeans, and a few translations of Mao Zedong and Liu Shaoxi. There was a Foreign Languages Publishing House translation of Dream of the Red Chamber, but it was unreadable. Deeply frustrated, I went to bed.

Almost everything lost its importance for me except the memory of Jindié. In the two weeks before the colleges shut down I made desperate efforts to catch sight of her. Zahid had his own problems on this front, trying to see Anjum, the general’s daughter, but was as helpful as he could be, waiting with me outside Nairn to discover how Jindié went home. Many young women biked in those days, and I was hoping she was one of them, but we never saw her leave. I pestered one of the cousins I thought I could trust. She told the others and they would come to stare and giggle at Zahid and me, trying to shame us into leaving. But we had no self-esteem in these matters, and so forfeiting our dignity never posed a problem.

After an hour outside Nairn, we would move on to Gulberg, where the object of Zahid’s love went to a ladies’ college modelled on European finishing schools, where ‘home and social sciences’ were so mixed up that cooking counted as a home subject and interior decoration as a social science. Gulberg trained young women to be housewives. Vogue was the sacred magazine of this establishment, devoured eagerly by teacher and pupil. Zahid swore that Anjum was not empty-headed but had been forced to go there by her parents in order to prepare for marriage.

Zahid wanted the general’s daughter and she wanted him. Letters had been exchanged. They met for coffee in a tiny place run by a kindly old German lady and geared for trysts. It worked like this: Anjum and a girlfriend would be dropped off by the chauffeur; they would get a table. Zahid and I would arrive on his Vespa; we’d get another table. If we recognized anybody, we would maintain the pretence that we were there casually, and move off quickly, but this was rare. I had to entertain Anjum’s friend, who was very pretty and very stupid. She would giggle at the slightest provocation, and I got so fed up that I tried to teach her chess so we didn’t have to speak to each other. She was flattered and learned the moves, which enhanced her status at the finishing school: ‘My, my, you’ve become such an intellectual.’

Occasionally, vile scoundrels on a motorbike followed the girls and blackmailed them for petty cash, but this stopped when the German lady informed her husband, who turned out to be a senior police officer and put a cop on guard duty in that street. He was merely protecting his wife’s business interests, but the gesture was greatly appreciated by her customers.

Mercifully, all this came to an end when Anjum gently broke the news that she was to be engaged to an affected English-public-school-educated feudal idiot from Multan. Zahid’s features assumed a deathly pallor as he rose from her table and staggered over to mine. Speech eluded him for a moment and then in a choked voice he said, ‘Let’s go. Now.’

We left. The soul had been torn out of him. Too many hours were wasted discussing the rejection. The day after, he told me quite seriously that he was having great difficulty in resisting the temptation to blow out his brains. A week later, he was calmer and more reflective.

‘She had such a gentle nature, yaar,’ he would repeat time and time again.

Perhaps that was the problem, I suggested. Her ‘gentle nature’ prevented her resisting parental pressures as others, we both knew, had done. His heart was sickened by the ease with which her parents had triumphed. I felt a sense of relief. No more playing chess with an aspiring fashion model. I can’t remember her name, but she was modelling two outfits, ‘Naughty Nymph’ and ‘Hello, Officer’, in the Intercontinental in Rawalpindi when the student insurrection against the military began in 1968. As for my friend, he took to wandering about town, full of emotions but avoiding every location that reminded him of her: It seemed as if the entire city had become a sea of bitterness for him. The memory of Anjum haunted him for a long time. The worst possible passion is the passion for a woman one has never possessed. He recovered slowly.

‘There are other sorrows in the world, Zahid,’ I said comfortingly, paraphrasing the words of a much-loved poet, then in prison for the third time.

‘No, there aren’t.’

This should have alerted me. I should have realized that political commitment of any sort was nothing more than a social obligation for him, but it’s easy to say this with hindsight. At the time we all thought of ourselves and of university students in general as the backbone of the country. Its future depended on us, but in the words of the real Confucius, ‘To lead into battle a people that has not first been instructed is to betray them.’ Zahid insisted that the facts proved otherwise and would counter this with the examples of the French and Russian revolutions. He often inclined to more radical solutions than I did and sometimes mocked my caution. Friendship, too, has its illusions, just as strong as those of love.

Three days before we were due to leave for the mountains, our Confucius dropped by for lunch. My mother liked him because he had a pleasing face, was ultra-polite and always made a point of praising the decor of the house and, even more importantly, admiring her rose garden, which was usually ignored by visitors and by us. My father was impressed by his strong support for the Chinese Revolution, not common then in émigré circles. I felt closer to him for obvious reasons. Nevertheless the conversation seemed excessively stilted till my parents left for their siesta. It was late June. The temperature had reached 108 degrees Fahrenheit and the tar on the roads was beginning to melt. I was racking my brains to find a way of asking after Jindié without appearing too eager, but discretion prevailed. He was her brother, after all, and might be offended by an informal display of interest. Then, just before he left, Confucius, trying to sound as casual as possible, said, ‘By the way, we might see you in Nathiagali. My mother is desperate to avoid the heat this year, and we’ve booked a cottage in Pines Hotel for a month.’

I managed to conceal my joy.

‘With all of us leaving, the city of culture will be empty.’

We laughed at our own arrogance.