Mohammed Hanif - A Case of Exploding Mangoes

The official reason for our regular visit to Bannon’s room was that we were working out the details of our silent drill display for the President’s inspection. We needed to review the squad’s progress, plot every single manoeuvre and work on our inner cadence.

But we really ended up there every day after the parade because Obaid loved to put his cheeks against the air conditioner’s vent and I wanted to play with Bannon’s Gung Ho Fairburn Sykes knife and listen to his stories of Operation Bloody Rice in Vietnam. He had done two tours of duty, and if he was in the right mood he could transport us to his night patrols and make us feel the movement of every single leaf on the Bloody Rice trail. He embellished his stories with a generous smattering of Cha obo, Chao ong, Chao co , probably the only Vietnamese words he knew. He called his slippers his Ho Chi Minhs. Obaid had his doubts.

“What was a drill instructor doing hunting down commies in a war?”

“Why don’t you ask him?” I would say, and then go on to show off my own knowledge of the subject, culled from two classes on the history of the Vietnam War. “It was war, Baby O, the biggest that America fought. Everyone had to fight. Even the US Army priests and barbers were at the front.”

But today Bannon was in one of his dark, knife-throwing moods. It was difficult to get a word out of him if it wasn’t about the pedigree of his Gung Ho. We lay under the camouflaged canopy. An unlit joint dangled from Bannon’s mouth as he held his Gung Ho from its tip and contemplated its path towards Bruce Lee.

“Give me a target,” he said to no one in particular.

“Third rib from the top,” Obaid said without moving his cheek from the air conditioner’s vents. Bannon held the handle of the knife to his lips for a moment. Then his wrist flicked, the knife circled in the air and ended up between Bruce Lee’s third and fourth rib. “Damn. The air conditioning,” he said. “Gung Ho works best outdoors.” He suggested switching the air conditioning off and having another go. But Obaid wouldn’t have any of that. Obaid went for Bruce Lee’s right nipple and drew a blank, hitting the blue space above his right shoulder.

I removed the knife from the poster and walked backwards, keeping my eyes locked on Bruce Lee’s right eye, my assigned target. When you do short-range targets it’s usually your own eye that fails you, not the way you handle your weapon. The target has to exist in the cross hairs of your eyeballs. If the target doesn’t live in your eye, you can keep your hands as steady as you want and you can hold your breath till you turn blue but there is no guarantee that you’ll get the target. As the knife left my fingertips, I shut my eyes and only opened them when I heard Bannon going, “Oh man, oh man.” I got up from the mattress, walked to the poster, removed the knife from the iris of Bruce Lee’s right eye and threw it over my shoulder towards Bannon. I didn’t have to look back to find out that he had caught it. Obaid shouted: “Don’t be a bloody show-off, Ali. It’s only a circus trick.”

Bannon put the knife back in its leather sheath and lit his joint. “In Danang we captured this gook who had killed nine of my men with a knife. The man was a fucking monkey. He hid in the trees; for all I know he swung from tree to tree like a fucking Chinky Tarzan. Nobody ever saw him. He got ‘em all in the same fashion, during the patrol. Our guys would be out there with their M16 targeted at the bush, ready for an ambush, they would hear a branch move, they would look up and then swishhhh.” Bannon jabbed two fingers at his Adam’s apple. A red rope was tightening in his eyes, his speech was slightly slurred. The air conditioner was refusing to exhale the thick hashish smoke in the room.

“I had some landmines planted around our bunker and put up a sign: “Ho Chi Minh sucks running dogs.” To lure the enemy, you know; we did that all the time. But this gook never showed up.”

The joint was dead. Bannon lit it again and tried to remember where he was.

“So the point is, when we finally caught him, my boys wanted to make hamburger meat out of him. But I said we had to interrogate him, go by the book. It turned out he was a circus guy. You believe that? He’d travelled up to Taiwan throwing his daggers around his mama-pyjama girl. And then his eighty-year-old dad was killed working in his paddy field, just shot down in one of these raids. So this guy gave up his big-titty woman and circus tent. He didn’t join the Viet Cong, which he would have been justified in doing. He just took to the jungles with his circus dagger.” He took a deep puff and exhaled a spiral. “So there, Baby O, that’s the point of my sorry-ass tale. You can throw a knife in a circus and you can have your big-titty women and you are a fucking freak show. You can have the same knife, polish it up with a bit of purpose and you are a man. A real man, not a fucking air-con soldier like you.”

I extended my hand towards Bannon. He mimed a question with his joint. “Are you sure?”

I was very sure. Obaid looked at me with panicked eyes. Bannon handed me the joint and I took a proper puff and held it in my lungs till my eyes watered. It was between exhaling that sweet, acrid smoke and throwing up half an hour later that I got the fucked-up idea that landed me in this shithole.

As he went through the newspapers the morning after broadcasting his special address to the nation, General Zia found himself cheering up. He spread the newspapers on the dining table one by one, till the gleaming mahogany surface was covered with his pictures and his words. He put his red pencil aside, savoured his tea and gave an approving nod to the duty waiter in the corner. The thing General Zia liked about his Information Minister was that although he was a devious bastard with a fake MBA who had made a lot of money ordering useless books that never arrived at the military libraries, he knew how to handle these newspaper editors. General Zia had tried to cultivate these editors himself and found out that they were the kind of intellectuals who prayed with him devoutly then rushed off to get drunk in the hotel rooms that his government provided them, with the booze that the Information Minister bought them. And the following morning their editorials were messy transcriptions of what General Zia had told them between their prayers and the boozing sessions.

This morning, however, was different. The nation’s press had finally shown some spark. The editors had used their imagination while reporting his speech. Every newspaper had it as the banner headline. The message had gone out loud and clear. “ The Battle for Our Ideological Frontiers has begun .” He was particularly pleased with the three-picture strip idea that the Pakistan Times had come up with to illustrate the main points from the extempore part of his speech. First of all I am a Muslim was the caption under a picture of him draped in a white cotton sheet with his head reclining on the black marbled wall of Khana Kaaba in Mecca. Then I am a soldier of Islam appeared under his official portrait, in which he was wearing his four-star General’s uniform. And then, as an elected head of the Muslim state, I am a servant of my people was the caption for the third picture, which showed him in his presidential dress, looking dignified in a black sherwani and his reading glasses, not imposing but authoritative, not a military ruler but a president.

Heads of state, especially the heads of state of developing countries, seldom get the time to sit back and admire their own achievements. This was one of those rare moments when General Zia could recline in his chair with the newspaper in his lap, order another cup of tea and let the collective goodwill of his one hundred and thirty million subjects engulf his body and mind. With his red pencil he jotted a note in the margin of the paper to tell the Information Minister to nominate the editor of the Pakistan Times for a national literary award. He’d also tell the Information Minister that if you speak from your heart people do listen. He decided that from now on all his speeches would include a section starting with: “ My dear countrymen, now I want to say to you something from my heart .” He imagined himself at public rallies flinging his written speech away, into the crowd, the papers flying above the heads of his audience. “ My fellow countrymen, I don’t want to read from a written script, I am not a puppet who would parrot page after page of words written by some Western-educated bureaucrat. I speak from my heart… ” He brought his fist down on the dining table with such force that the teacup rattled, the Pakistan Times slipped off his lap and the red pencil rolled off the table. The duty waiter standing in the corner tensed up at first, then, noticing the ecstatic smile on the General’s face, relaxed and decided not to pick up the paper and pencil from the floor.