Mohammed Hanif - A Case of Exploding Mangoes

“Damn, Akhtar,” Bill Casey raised a limp hand to his eyebrow. “I’m dead tired.”

As the outriders switched their sirens on one by one, General Akhtar and Bill Casey got into the fourth limousine, a posse from CIA’s Special Operations Group, wearing suits and carrying no visible arms, and a group of Pakistani commandos with their sleek little Uzis, got into the other limousines and the journey to the Army House started. It was a forty-minute drive for civilians. The VIP convoy, with all traffic and pedestrian crossings blocked, could make it in twelve minutes, but General Akhtar seemed to be in no hurry.

“Would you like a drink before dinner, sir?” he asked, with both his hands in his lap.

“Are we going straight to dinner?” Bill asked wearily.

“Prince Naif is already there, sir.”

“And my friend,” Bill mimed General Zia’s moustache with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, “is he really having these visions?”

General Akhtar smiled a coy smile, puffed out his chest and said in a very concerned tone. “Eleven years is a long time. He’s a bit tired.”

“Tell me about it.” Bill slumped into his seat. “Go ahead. Get me drunk.” General Zia never served alcohol at his dinners, even state dinners, not even for known alcoholics. General Akhtar Abdur Rehman considered it his duty to keep his guests in good humour, either at his office or during the drive Co the Army House. He tapped the driver’s seat, and without looking back, the man passed him a black canvas bag. Akhtar produced two glasses, a silver ice bucket, a bottle of Royal Salute whisky and poured Bill half a glass and himself a glass of water; he asked the driver to slow down and said, “Cheers.”

“Cheers,” said Bill. “Cheers to you, General. Nice country you got here.” He flicked open the curtain on the limousine window and watched the crowd gathered along the roadside, straining against the security police and waiting for this convoy to hurry up and pass so that they could get on with their lives.

“Sad, though, you can’t sit down somewhere and have a goddam drink. Cheers.”

Behind the cordons set up along the road by the police for this VIP procession, people stood and waited and guessed: a teenager anxious to continue his first ride on a Honda 70, a drunk husband ferociously chewing betel nuts to get rid of the smell before he got home, a horse buckling under the weight of too many passengers on the cart, the passengers cursing the cart driver for taking this route, the cart driver feeling the pins and needles in his legs begging for their overdue opium dose, a woman covered in a black burqa — the only body part visible her left breast feeding her infant child — a boy in a car trying to hold a girl’s hand on their first date, a seven-year-old selling dust-covered roasted chickpeas, an old water carrier hawking water out of a goatskin, a heroin addict eyeing his dealer stranded on the other side of the road, a mullah who would be late for the evening prayer, a gypsy woman selling bright pink baby chickens, an air force trainee officer in uniform in a Toyota Corolla being driven by a Dunhill-smoking civilian, a newspaper hawker screaming the day’s headlines, Singapore Airline’s crew in a van cracking jokes in three languages, a pair of home-delivery arms dealers fidgeting with their suitcases nervously, a third-year medical student planning to end his life by throwing himself on the rail tracks in anticipation of the Shalimar Express, a husband and wife on a motorbike returning from a fertility clinic, an illegal Bengali immigrant waiting to sell his kidney so that he could send money back home, a blind woman who had escaped prison in the morning and had spent all day trying to convince people that she was not a beggar, eleven teenagers dressed in white impatient to get to the field for their night cricket match, off-duty policemen waiting for free rides home, a bride in a rickshaw on her way to the beauty salon, an old man thrown out of his son’s home and determined to walk to his daughter’s house fifty miles away, a coolie from the railway station still wearing his red uniform and in a shopping bag carrying a glittering sari he’d change into that night, an abandoned cat sniffing her way back to her owner’s house, a black-turbaned truck driver singing a love song about his lover at the top of his voice, a bus full of trainee Lady Health Visitors headed for their night shift at a government hospital; as the smoke from idling engines mixed with the smog that descends on Islamabad at dusk, as their waiting hearts got to bursting point with anxiety, they all seemed to have one question on their minds: “Which one of our many rulers is this? If his security is so important, why don’t they just lock him up in the Army House?”

Istare through the windscreen with such intensity it’s as if I am the one driving the car. I can only admire how Major Kiyani doesn’t believe in giving anyone the right of way on this narrow, potholed road. He maintains his speed in the face of an oncoming truck, flicks the car headlights to full beam, his fingers tap to the music on the steering wheel and at the last possible moment it’s the truck that swerves and pulls off the road. Major Kiyani’s Corolla seems like an extension of his powers, unblinking, unlimited and needing no justification.

A child bolts out of a golden, harvest-ready wheat-field and Major Kiyani presses the car horn and keeps it pressed for a mile.

The traffic is thin at this time of the evening, mostly trucks and night buses, an occasional tractor with a few tonnes of sugar cane on an overloaded trolley with some urchins following along, trying to pull out a sugar cane or two. We pass a bull cart crawling along the side of the road; the pair of bulls pulling it are blinded by our car’s headlights; the dog walking by the cart yelps just once before ducking to avoid the speeding monster.

Slowly, very slowly, answers begin to emerge in my head, answers to the questions that Major Kiyani will inevitably throw at me. He needs to find out what I know. I need to make sure that every bit I give him widens the gap between what he knows and what he would like to know. The premise for my optimism is a philosophical notion: Major Kiyani would not be taking me away if he knew . I wouldn’t be sitting on a starched white cover of the comfy seat of this Corolla listening to ghazals, if he knew. I would be in the back of a jeep, handcuffed and blindfolded and charge-sheeted and sentenced by now. Or maybe hanging from my own bed sheet in my own dorm.

Where is Major Kiyani from?

Inter Services Intelligence.

What does the agency do?

Investigate.

What do they investigate?

What they don’t know.

Before falling off the edge of the cliff, I am sure, everyone tells himself a story which has a happy ending. This is mine.

The optimism goes straight to my bladder and I want Major Kiyani to get us to our destination, wherever it is. The road signs tell me that we are headed towards Lahore, but there are half a dozen turns in the road leading to various parts of the country and Major Kiyani probably travels in the opposite direction to where he wants to take you. We sit for a long time in a traffic jam caused by roadblocks set up by the police, as a convoy of black limousines crawls past.

“Everything I know about this profession your dad taught me,” he says, looking ahead. “But it seems you never learned anything from him. Americans are trouble. I know your friend Bannon is behind this mad adventure.”

“Then why isn’t he travelling with you instead of me?” I ask.

“You know why,” he says. “He is an American, our guest. He shouldn’t be mixed up with the likes of you. Drill is for the parade square. What he does off the square is my business.”