Mohammed Hanif - A Case of Exploding Mangoes

“The officer corps is not what it used to be,” he said, pouring himself the first whisky of the evening after returning from his umpteenth trip to Afghanistan.

“People who served with me were all from good families. No, I don’t mean wealthy families. I mean respectable people, good people. When you asked them where they were from, you knew their fathers and grandfathers were distinguished people. And now you’ve got shopkeepers’ sons, milkmen’s boys, people who are not good for anything else. I don’t want those half-breeds fucking up my son’s life.”

Daddy, you should see me now.

He knew in his heart that I was not convinced. He called me again when he was pouring his last whisky, his seventh probably. He was a three-whiskies-an-evening man but he felt unusually thirsty when he returned from his Afghan trips. There was bitterness in his voice now that I wasn’t familiar with at that point but which would become permanent.

“I have three war decorations, and wounds to prove them,” he said. “You go to any officers’ mess in the country and you’ll find a few people whose lives I saved. And now? Look at me. They have turned me into a pimp. I am a man who was trained to save lives, now I trade in them.”

He kept twirling his whisky glass in his fingers and kept repeating the word ‘pimp’ over and over again.

I doze off and dream of pissing in the cold clear stream that runs by our house on Shigri Hill. I wake up with my knees trembling and the grime from the floor seeping into my toes. The left side of my trousers is soaking wet. I feel much better.

Stay on your bloody feet. Stay on your bloody feet.

That is the first thing I tell myself before taking stock of my situation. What did they do to the renegade soldiers of the Mughal Army? A swift decapitation or being scrunched under the foot of an elephant would probably be a better fate than this.

The stench has grown fetid and hangs heavy in the air. I close my eyes and try to imagine myself back on Shigri Hill. The mountain air wafts in despite the iron doors and the underground prison and the walls of the Fort. It swirls around me, bringing back the smell of earth dug by goats’ hooves, the aroma of green almonds and the sound of a clear, cold stream gushing past. The silence of the mountains is punctuated by a humming sound, coming from a distance but not very far away. Somebody is singing in a painful voice. Before I can identify the voice a bucket of water is poured over my head and my face is pushed so close to a thousand-watt bulb that my lips burn. I don’t know who is asking the questions. It could be Major Kiyani. It could be one of his brothers without uniform. My answers, when I can muster them, are met with further questions. This is not an interrogation. They are not interested in my answers. The buggers are only interested in sex.

Did Lieutenant Bannon and Obaid have a sexual relationship?

They were very close. But I don’t know. I don’t think so.

Did you and Obaid have a sexual relationship?

Fuck you. No. We were friends.

Did you fuck him?

I can hear you. The answer is no, no, no.

He wasn’t in his bed the night before he disappeared. Do you know where he was?

The only person he could have been with is Bannon. They went on walks sometimes.

Is that why you marked him present in the Fury Squadron roll call?

I assumed he would come straight to the parade square. He did that occasionally.

Did Obaid have any suicidal tendencies? Did he ever talk about taking his own life?

I imagine a two-seater aeroplane going down on all its three axes and the hot white glare of the bulb begins to fade away.

He read poetry. He sang songs about dying but he never actually talked about dying. Not to me. Not in any suicidal way.

The large reception room in the Army House was reserved for receiving visiting foreign dignitaries from the USA and Saudi Arabia, the VVIPs. After winning his air dash from Saudi Arabia to Islamabad, Prince Naif was seated on a velvet sofa, smoking Marlboro Reds and boasting about the sound barrier that his F16 broke on his way to dinner. “Our brother Bill is probably still flying over the Arabian Sea.” Laughing, the Prince raised both arms and mimed the flight of a tired bird.

“Allah’s glory,” said General Zia. “It’s all His blessing. I went on a ride in one of ours and my old bones were aching for days. You, by the grace of Allah, are still a young man.”

General Zia kept looking out of the corner of his eyes at Dr Sarwari, who had accompanied Prince Naif at his request but seemed to have been forgotten in Prince Naif’s victory celebrations. General Zia wanted to have a word with the royal doctor about his condition.

General Zia’s condition, although he himself preferred to call it an itsy-bitsy itch, had been messing up his prayer routine. He had always been very proud of the fact that he was the kind of Muslim who could do his ablutions for his morning prayers and say his late-night prayers with the same ablutions. All the things that break an ablution had been eliminated from his daily routine; garlic, lentils, women who didn’t cover their heads properly. But since he had confined himself to the Army House this itch had started.

He had called his staff surgeon first, had told him about the tiny drops of blood he had found on the seat of his pants, but couldn’t bring himself to talk about the itch.

“Do you get burning, itching in your rectal passage?” the staff surgeon had asked.

“No,” he had said abruptly.

“Sir, internal bleeding can be dangerous but yours seems like a case of worms, tapeworms. If you let me know when you can come to the Combined Military Hospital I’ll arrange for a full check-up.”

General Zia had mumbled something about Code Red and dismissed the doctor. Although the staff surgeon was security cleared Zia didn’t want him to go around sending his tests to other labs or even consulting his doctor colleagues. His own daughter had just graduated from a medical school but he could hardly talk to her about something like this.

Then Prince Naif called and General Zia remembered that Prince Naif always travelled with his personal physician, the only person in his entourage who wore suits and carried a black leather bag, and the only one who stayed silent, neither cracked a joke nor laughed at the Prince’s non-stop comedy act.

“I don’t share my doctor with anyone,” Prince Naif said in mock seriousness when General Zia finally asked his permission to have a private consultation with his physician. “He has seen more of me than any of my wives. But anything for you, my brother, anything. Even my secret weapon.” He gestured towards the doctor, who sat pretending they were talking about someone else.

“It’s just a private little matter. I don’t want my military doctor going around discussing my private things. You know our Pakistani people, they love to gossip.”

“He takes care of all my private things,” Prince Naif chuckled. “And he never talks to anyone.” Then he turned towards the doctor and said, “Take care of my brother’s private things as if they were my own private things.” He rolled with laughter. General Zia forced a smile, got up and moved towards his office. The doctor didn’t join in the joke and followed him sullenly.

After spending eight years looking after Prince Naif’s libido nothing about these rulers surprised Dr Sarwari. They all spent too much time and energy keeping their cocks in shape. If they channelled some of this zeal towards their day jobs, the world would be a much better place, Dr Sarwari had thought in moments of despair. He had ordered the livers of so many houbara bustards to make aphrodisiacs for the Prince, he had rubbed so many ointments made from the Bengal tiger’s testicles on the Prince’s member that he himself had lost all appetite for sex. Even his colleagues in the Saudi medical establishment knew his status as the full-time caretaker of the royal member. After all, the Prince had his own heart specialist, skin specialist and even a plastic surgeon on the royal payroll. But what was dearest to the Prince’s heart was his sexual health and Dr Sarwari was the chosen man for the job. The Royal Dick Doctor, they called him behind his back.