The Good Son

6

T he next day, I was in the kitchen drinking coffee and watching the news on TV when the doorbell rang. It was a reporter from the Washington Post. For the past couple of days we’d had some press interest, reporters wanting to know how we felt that our wife and mother was in the hands of murderous fanatics, but we didn’t talk to any of them. I guess this particular woman was more hard up for a human-interest story than the others. I spoke to her in the doorway, long enough to brush her off, but she gave me her card anyway in case I changed my mind and decided to bask in the glow of public sympathy. I was going to toss it away, but then I had a thought.

I needed some time off and the army wasn’t about to give it to me because our unit was due to start our rotation downrange and there was no leave, so when I looked at the reporter’s card and had that thought I got my Washington Military District directory and looked up Major Lepinski. I typed out a friendly note and clipped the reporter’s card to it and called a courier service and had it sent over to his office. The note said I’d just had a visit from a reporter who was doing a story on the blue-on-blue incident we’d both been involved in out in Waziristan, where we weren’t supposed to be in the first place. I said the reporter didn’t know it had gone down across the Pak border but she had a lot of details. She’d heard that a certain Special Forces captain had called down a big bomb on his own side and one guy had been killed and one ruined and one (me) wounded and would I confirm that such was indeed the case and did I know the captain’s name? She’d heard that this officer had not only not been reprimanded for the blunder but had been promoted to major.

I said I hadn’t told her anything; I’d said I’d call her back, because I wanted to talk to you first, sir. And later that day my phone rang and it was Major Lepinski and we had a nice chat. He explained that the whole mission had been secret, national security at stake, and the army had held a full (secret) investigation and cleared him of all wrongdoing; it was just the fog of war; and I said I understood, sir, and I would keep it tight for the good of the service. And now that I was his very favorite trooper in the whole army, I thought I could impose on him for a little favor, because I didn’t want to go along with my unit on this current rotation; I had a few weeks of urgent personal business I needed leave for and could he help me out? And he could, he would take care of it, he would cut orders for a couple of weeks of temporary duty at the Special Operations Command HQ (that is, a no-show assignment); I could rejoin my unit whenever. I thanked him and assured him, Sir, I would definitely shine my reporter the fuck on. I told him I might be going out of the country for a while starting tomorrow, and he said, Go, he’d be happy to cover for me, and I could hear the relief in his voice.

Gloria had called me when the news of the kidnap broke and she was pretty good about it, being a trauma nurse and used to dealing with people on the edges of catastrophe. She asked if I wanted her to come over, and I said no and told her I was going away for an indefinite time. There was a pause on the line. I could tell she was waiting for some kind of good-bye, and I thought about my mother just taking off on me without a word and found I couldn’t do that, even though we’d agreed to no commitments and all.

So I took her out to dinner at Citronelle on my father’s plastic, using his name to get a reservation. Farid is a pretty modest guy, but he’s still a Punjabi mogul, and he’s known at the nice places around town. I’ve never taken a nickel off him but he wanted to do this and I agreed. He assumed I would be going out with a woman who would expect a luxurious dining experience rather than scarfing takeout from local taquerias in bed, as was the case. There are deep veins of misunderstanding in my family, and lately I have started to find them amusing, although it was not always so.

So we had a nice meal, not my favorite kind of food but she seemed to like it, and she spotted some celebrities eating there, and the celebrities looked at us and wondered who we were to be sitting there at one of the good tables in Citronelle. Then I took her back to Kalorama and showed her around the house.

She ooed a little. “I didn’t know you were rich,” she said.

“I’m not rich. My father’s rich.”

“Same difference.”

“No, it’s not. I live on my E-Seven pay.”

“Why? Is he stingy?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Everything’s a long story with you,” she said. “If I knew you had this kind of money I would’ve hit you for some. You could keep me in style.”

We were in my bedroom at this point and she wandered around looking at things, opening closets, checking out the books and CDs.

“Where’s all your stuff?” she asked.

“This is it. I don’t have a lot of stuff.”

“I mean when you were a kid. I’ve got more shit than this in my room at home, and we were piss poor.”

“I didn’t live here very long. Until I was seventeen I lived in various places in South Asia.”

“Yeah? You said you were born in Pakistan but I figured you were raised here. I mean, you’re an American.”

“Am I? How can you tell?”

“He walks like a duck and talks like a duck, he’s a duck.”

“The duck would like a drink,” I said, and went downstairs and came back with a bottle of Glenlivet and two glasses. She was lying on my bed with her shoes off, paging through a high school yearbook. “You’re not in this,” she observed.

“No, I never graduated. I have a fourth-grade education.” She rolled her eyes the way people do when I say that but declined to comment further.

I poured out a couple of drinks. We drank and smooched a little. I said, “Do you really want this story? I mean, I can go on for quite a while about my sad life.”

“I’ll tell you when I get bored,” she said. “No, honestly, you have no idea how uninteresting most people I know are, especially men. They get poured into a mold in high school and they set up and that’s it for life. It’s TV shows, sports, and gossip, what they’re buying and what they’re planning to buy, and bitching about how everything’s not perfect in their lives. And meanwhile they’re working around dying, smashed up people. It drives me nuts. But you… I spotted something about you the minute I saw you getting worked over. I thought you might have something else going on, which is the real reason why I dragged you into this relationship. So spit it out, Buster! You were born in Pakistan. And then what?”

And then what? I can tell the story, but will she understand what it means? Like all Americans, her whole thing is about privacy, pulling away from the parents to be yourself, whatever that happens to be, and I get it that’s the way things are here in the Great Satan; you reach age thirteen and suddenly your parents don’t know shit and you can’t wait to get out of the house and hang with the kids.

But that’s not the way it is where I come from. There, in Lahore, and later in Pashtunistan, boys still want to grow up to be like their fathers, their grandfathers. To be young is nothing. To be young is not to have a job, a wife, to be broke all the time; if you’re a Pashtun, it’s not having a gun. When I was a kid in Lahore, I thought my grandfather, B. B. Laghari, was God on earth, and I thought Gul Muhammed was, besides Baba, the greatest man in creation. And Farid, my father, and my uncles and my aunt thought the same about their father.

When I got to the States and started going to an American high school, which I did for an extremely short time, I thought everyone around me was insane, the way they talked about their parents. I thought the parents were insane too, they way they handled their kids, like every request they made was a bargain they weren’t sure would be kept. That little whiny tone at the end of every statement: “Be home by ten, okay?”

A traditional society. We say the words but we-I mean Americans-don’t get what it stands for. Here’s an example. My grandfather considered himself a modern man, and in a lot of ways he was. He didn’t boot his son out when that son showed up with a strange American woman he wanted to marry. He installed flush toilets-that was a big deal in Lahore at the time-and he gave his daughter the same education he gave his sons. But he wouldn’t allow TV in the house and he was strict about movies. His wife, Noor, was a traditional Panjabi begum, stayed in the home, didn’t mix with his male guests, and so forth. The main point was that he was in control; he was living the life he thought a traditional Muslim Punjabi of the higher kind was supposed to lead, but he was like Timothy Leary compared to Gul Muhammed.

Grandfather used to have his high-class ghazal evenings, and after the children got sent away, before they sang the more erotic stuff, we would sneak out of bed and go to the servants’ quarters in the back of the yard, and there we would listen to Dost Yacub tell Pashtun stories for Gul Muhammed and his pals. In the winter they met around a fire pit and in hot weather they moved up to the roof of Gul Muhammed’s house, or under the barsati if it was raining.

Dost Yacub was probably over seventy at the time, and one of the last traditional Pashtun storytellers in Lahore. He’d been a warrior in his time and had probably taken shots at people Kipling had known. He told stories about the wars and feuds he’d been in, too, all about zar, zan, zamin-women, gold, and land-and in my child’s mind the stories of his adventures and the stories about princesses and jinns and man-eaters all blended together to make a picture of a different kind of world than my contemporaries in America were having pumped into them through the tube, none of that Sesame Street-Mister Rogers stuff there around the fire or under the hissing lantern. The fairy tales they tell American kids always end with “And they lived happily ever after,” but most Pashtun tales go out with heads rolling “And thus he had his revenge.” I mean, that’s the point of the stories.

So we would sit there and listen to Dost Yacub, me and Wazir, propping up our eyelids as it got late, and later on we’d play out the stories, the way American kids do with cowboys and Indians. We had tin swords and Pashtun clothes and sometimes we could talk or bribe one of the servants’ kids to play a princess or an evil man-eater. Wazir was four years older than I was, which is a lot when you’re a kid, so he was the master of the games. Technically, Gul Muhammed and Wazir were servants, but they weren’t treated as servants, more like members of the family. The story I heard was that Gul Muhammed had rescued Baba during a riot in Srinagar after the partition of India. He’d been cornered with his wife by a gang of Hindus and they were going to rape her and slaughter them both and Gul happened on the scene with a pistol and drove off the gang and so after that they were like brothers, and Baba brought Gul into his home and Gul became his sworn protector, because when you save a life you are responsible for it ever after.

We played that out too, in our games, Wazir haughty and brave as his own father, and my sister Aisha, two years younger than me, was our grandmother, Noor, and I was Laghari Sahib. The marauding mob of Hindus came out of Wazir’s imagination, and he was good, lots of violent threats, screams of rage, twisted face, clutching hands, and I would fight the Hindus with my tin knife while Aisha cowered behind me, until I was borne down by all the fiends Wazir was impersonating, and then switching back to his father again, a fine Pashtun speech here, elaborate threats and boasts, and then he would draw his pistol, an angled piece of pipe that contained as many shots as an Armalite, and slaughter the bestial Hindus. These sessions often left little Aisha in tears, which Wazir considered proof of their authenticity. When we wanted to play again, she always refused, and it was Wazir who had to cajole her to enter the game once again. This always worked: no one could resist Wazir, beautiful, masterful Wazir, the prince of our yard and, when we got older, of the neighborhood beyond.

In the afternoons, when I was eight and he was twelve, we would throw off our school uniforms and put on shalwar kameez and embroidered caps and walk through the Urdu Bazaar. Wazir, who seemed to know everyone, would flatter and joke and insult our way into free candies and hot fried dumplings and sticks of sugarcane, which always tasted sweeter than the ones bought for us. I followed him around like a dog.

That was my Pashtun life but I had another, or maybe it was two other lives. I was the grandson of B. B. Laghari Sahib, and I was being raised as a Punjabi gentleman and a citizen of Pakistan, a Lahori. As soon as I could read well enough, I was required to stand before him and recite Urdu poetry and also Wordsworth and Tennyson, because the heritage of the Raj was not to be despised. And Yeats. The Sahib was a little nuts about Yeats, I have to say; I think he identified with the old lunatic genius, the fact that he mastered the English language better than anyone else of his era yet was not himself English, that he was a statesman as well as a poet, that he had a view of the decline of the ordered world similar to Baba’s own. In any case, I was made to memorize huge chunks of Yeats’s poetry, which I did with a good will because I revered my grandfather and wanted his approval more than anything else in life except maybe the attention of my mother.

I went to the mosque on Fridays with the men and learned the prayers, although it was clear to me at an early age that Baba’s Islam was sentimental rather than devout. He didn’t, for example, serve wine at meals, but he had a decanter of whiskey in a locked cabinet, which he shared with select friends in the privacy of his study. At seven I was sent as a day student to Aitchison College. Wazir had preceded me there, and I was amazed to find the wild Pashtun boy transformed into a decorous scholar in blazer and shorts. Being several forms ahead of me, he could not officially recognize my existence at school, but I remember once asking him why he put up with it, and he said, “My father expects it and it is a matter of honor. I would be shamed not to do well before these Punjabis.” I did poorly myself: slow to read, the fat paragraphs of prose impossible to untangle. I was punished often and resented it. The only thing I was good at was memorizing poetry.

The third life was the one I shared with my mother, a secret life. For one thing, although she prayed conventionally enough with the other women, each Sunday she would wake me early and dress me and take me out of the house. We mounted her little 50cc Honda motorbike, me on the pillion behind, hugging her tight, and drove out of Anarkali down the Mall to Hall Road, where we parked in front of the Roman Catholic cathedral and went to mass. I can’t quite recall what I thought of this at the time. I knew my mother was strange and not like the other women of the household. I saw that Laghari Sahib treated her almost like an honorary man, so I guess I assumed she had a special God that was peculiar to her. There were statues of women in the cathedral but none in the mosque, and when I was very small I thought that these were statues of my mom. I didn’t take in much doctrine, but I was happy to have her to myself for a morning and grateful to the Catholic Church for providing it.

I have to say she was not a nurturing kind of mom, no great soft breast to hide in, the last resort of comfort; not at all like the other women I knew in my early life-Wazir’s mother, Nasha, or my old ayah, Faiza. Hugging Sonia was like hugging a boy.

Not that I lacked hugs. From birth I had Faiza, who bathed and dressed me and kissed away my little hurts and spoke to me in the languages of that country, so that I spoke them like the native I was. The awkward part of this traditional arrangement was that Faiza worked not for my mother but for Noor, my grandmother, called Bibiji by the household. It was apparent to Bibiji that a crazy American woman couldn’t possibly be trusted to raise the heir of the eldest son, so when I was small she took over my rearing entirely.

This was wonderful and terrible at the same time. It was wonderful because I was the little prince among the begums, Bibiji and her perfumed gold-jangling court, the aunties and the friends, all cooing and pinching and hugging and stuffing me with sweetmeats: barfis, gulaab jamuns, jalebis. Lahore is one of the world centers of sweetmeats, and I would have blown up like a football had my mother’s lanky genes not turned out to be proof against that. It was also horrible, because the hugs were too hard and the pinches too painful and the perfumes often smotheringly dense; the talk, too, mainly knocked my mother and the foolishness of my father for bringing such a one into the Laghari family.

My mother left us for almost two years, starting when I was three and Aisha was one, so I spent those formative years unprotected amid the poisoned candy. I should have become one of those plump and indolent Punjabi men, spoiled in the way that only tyrannized women can spoil their sons, but for some reason it didn’t happen. I remember very well when she returned to Lahore, tough, lean, and burned as black as a Sindi peasant, shocking the pale aunties and me, too; I ran screaming from her embrace. But after some days of thrilling, nervous courtship she lured me back pretty well, with little treats and presents and the gift of her attention, making me her slave until she was ready to tie on her rubber dick and ditch me again.

I suppose you’d have to call our relationship romantic, in that it involved secrets, like our slipping away to church, and a kind of yearning pursuit on my part. I know she hid from me. There was on our roof an assembly of huge ceramic vases that contained a collection of palms and cycads. It served as sort of a backdrop when we had parties up there and shielded part of the roof from neighboring windows. I once found her there, after a frantic search, behind the palms, sitting on a charpoy, writing in a notebook. I recall spying on her in her hideout and then tiptoeing away, coming back again and again when I couldn’t find her elsewhere.

Eventually I must have made some sound because she caught me and invited me into the tiny space. I asked her what she was doing and she said she was making privacy. She said, “Lahore is wonderful and the house is wonderful and the family is too, and don’t think I’m not grateful, but they haven’t invented privacy here yet and I need it.” Then she told me about how when she was in the circus and she wanted to get away from everyone she would crawl into one of the trucks and burrow down into the piles of packing mats and make a little cave for herself where no one could find her.

I liked it when she talked about her time in the circus and I asked her questions about it, only some of which she answered. Later that day I think we played with cards. She always had a deck on her, and she amazed me with card tricks and taught me, when I was old enough, how to rig a deck and deal from the bottom. She could deal from the middle, too, but I was never good enough to do that. Anyway, the next time I went up to the palm cave she wasn’t there. I never found her new hiding place.

That first absence was when she went to Soviet Central Asia and came back and wrote a book about it, which nearly caused a war. In 1974 it was one of the most secret places in the world, studded with nuclear facilities and rocket sites, and somehow this twenty-three-year-old girl disguised as a boy slips across the Afghan border-the Iron Curtain!-seems able to go anywhere she wants, and writes a book about it, actually an amusing, charming book, describing no rocket sites, a book about all the lost people up there and their crazily corrupt society: Up in the Stans. It made her famous, they called her “a modern Kim,” as if she had really been a boy and not a mother of two children, and people came to the house to interview her for American and European TV-which she refused.

Naturally, the Soviets said it was all a CIA plot, and I think Pakistani intelligence was a little miffed, but Laghari Sahib cooled everything down and after that, for about five years, we had what I look back on as the most peaceful period of my life. I put all this together a lot later, when I was grown and curious about what had contributed to the disaster of our lives. When you’re a kid, it’s just a succession of days; you’re happy or sad without much context. My mother had been gone, now she was back, and things would once again revolve satisfactorily around the fixed center of the universe, me.

Mom got pregnant after that and later in the year she had another girl, Jamila. I thought we would be a regular family from then on, and we seemed to be, with only the usual discontents. My father could not have been more kind and generous to me, but the fact is I gave him nothing back; I disdained him and ignored him when I could. My sense of what a real man was had been formed by Gul Muhammed Khan and Laghari Sahib, and Farid didn’t measure up.

I think I picked up some of that disdain from Baba himself. Looking back, I can see that the old man was dissatisfied with all his sons, each of whom had inherited only one of his own characteristics. Farid, the eldest, had got the kindness and generosity, but he lacked ambition and the edge necessary to flourish in the tiger pit of Pakistani politics. He’d been handed a job in the foreign ministry, as the basis for a brilliant career in government, but he did not distinguish himself there. His real desire was to be an academic, studying the laws other men had written. Nisar, the middle son, had the brilliance and ambition, as well as the appreciation of art and culture, but he was mean, with a cruel streak. He went into business, which Laghari Sahib considered only one cut up from actual theft-as it sort of is in Pakistan. Seyd, the youngest son, had plenty of edge, and he was generous and loyal to those he considered his friends-among whom my mother and I did not figure-but he was dull. It was all he could do to get through the military academy they sent him to when he bombed out of Aitchison.

Rukhsana, being a girl, did not figure in this algebra, but in the strange way of families, being a girl and the oedipal horseshit being moot, she was closer to Baba than any of her siblings, and he would often ask her to sit by him during the weekly mehfil gatherings, with my mother on the other side.

How do I know all this? Another part of my secret life. My mother used to sit me down, usually in the afternoons after I got back from school, while I ate my tiffin, as they called it, and the girls were out with Faiza, and she would explain my family to me: the tensions, the rivalries, the disappointments, the resentments, all anatomized and poured into my small pink ears. I think now it was cruel to do that to a child, loading me with the kind of insights a kid can’t really absorb, just as bad in its way as Bibiji’s bad-mouthing. I think it warped me, or maybe I was just warped to begin with. She probably did it because she was lonely, despite Baba’s and Farid’s kindness, and she seized on me as the one who could fix it. Or maybe it was because of the kindness. It’s harder to accept charity than to give it, especially if you’re half wild like she was, the way they say a wild animal kept for years and seemingly tame may one day without warning turn on its keeper and chew him up.

That’s one excuse. The other, which she actually told me when I asked her years later why she did it, was that she wanted to protect me from what might happen to me if anything happened to her, that this kind of knowledge, that penetration of motive and hidden interpersonal combat, would help me survive.

These séances were usually interrupted by the return of Faiza and the girls from wherever they’d been, to a public garden or the bazaar, and the change of air was astounding, like sun breaking through a muggy day. Aisha was seven at the time I’m thinking of, to my nine; she would arrive in a whirl of gangly legs and a spate of bright chatter, and instantly all the dark plots were blown into flying ash and dispersed. There was an elephant and the man let us feed it, but Faiza wouldn’t let us ride. A lady crashed her bicycle into a man and everything spilled and the pigeons escaped, oh, Theo, it was so funny! They brought halvah home, and news of the halvah-wallah and his tribe, in detail, with opinions and then comments on everyone who’d talked to them, and this was not a short list, because Aisha was the princess of the Urdu Bazaar; she could hardly go ten steps without someone calling her to talk, offering her a sweet. If a family is lucky it has someone like Aisha in it, the clearer of the air, the one for whose sake quarrels are stilled, the lens through which all the family’s love is refined and focused.

She loved me too, the big brother, the strongest, bravest, most handsome of brothers, as she would tell me in Urdu, where you can say things that would be ridiculous in English, and I wanted to cut off a finger every time I hurt her, times more frequent than I can now bear to think about. Farid worshipped the shadow of her passing, and my mother… well, there was a distance between them, I felt it at nine, and I suppose it was because even an angel child has to be disciplined and my mother was the one to do it, because Farid would give her anything she wanted.

Then my mother left again: I must have been nine or ten; one morning she was just gone without a word. My father said she had gone on haj, which I knew was a good thing to do, so I wondered why all the adults in the house were angry. That week in Bibiji’s court it was the only topic of conversation, mainly in nasty whispers so I couldn’t hear, but I heard enough, and when my grandmother said that my mother was no better than a fahisha I pulled away from her and stood up and said my mother was not a fahisha and I wouldn’t stand for hearing her called one; the fahishas lived in Tibbi, what Lahoris call the Hira Mandi, where Baba went to see them every Saturday night with his friends. I don’t recall how I knew that Baba visited the famous courtesans of Lahore in their special district; I guess I had picked up the servants’ gossip or maybe Wazir’s, who knew everything.

Whatever, we had a screaming match and I ran out of the perfume fog into fresh air. After that, I was not invited to sit with Bibiji and her friends; I had joined the camp of the enemy. After that, Aisha was the favorite, though a girl.

Because of these events and because my mother was gone, Aisha got indulged more than she would have. Not that she wanted much, a kid surrounded by that much love doesn’t need a lot of stuff, but one thing she wanted got me into the most trouble I was ever in while I was in Lahore and also saved my life. The thing was a Polaroid camera. She’d seen it at a party and she conceived a fierce desire for one and uncharacteristically nagged our father about it, and at her next birthday he gave her one, with a warning to be sparing of the film, hard to get in Lahore at the time, and never to take it out of the house.

Which of course she did, how could she deprive her friends throughout the bazaar of a look at her treasure? Besides, she wanted to give them each a Polaroid portrait of themselves. So she went out with it concealed in a straw market bag that she always carried in imitation of Faiza’s big one, and she was able to slip away from the ayah and down an alley. She met the ice-candy man and did his picture, a crowd gathering to see this wonder, and then, with the camera slung around her neck, she trotted off back up the alley. By that time some big kids were waiting for her, and they roughed her up a little and took the camera.

It was Wazir who told me who did it. Up as he always was on the gossip of the bazaars, he came into my room on the night after it happened-I could still hear Aisha weeping at intervals, being comforted by Faiza to not much avail-and told me it was the Barshawi brothers. These were a trio of teenage mopes, the sons of a local butcher who was also a ward-heeler type who did low-end political thuggery. The boys were in the habit of grabbing stuff without paying for it, and the father’s po litical connections made it hard for the bazaaris to get any redress. That’s Pakistan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What was your hard life?”

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

“I’m sorry about your brother.”

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

“I’ll tell you, but first.”

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

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

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