Mohammed Hanif - A Case of Exploding Mangoes

A hand gripped her arm firmly. “Where do you think you are going, old woman? We are taking you to the Fort. The press won’t be able to bother you there.”

Iwake up to my neighbour’s desperate whispers echoing in my cell. “Comrade. Comrade.” My fists are clenched and sand sticks to my sweaty palms. “Comrade.”

It takes me a moment to orient myself, another to recognise the source of these whispers. By the time I rub my palms against the back of my trousers and move towards the hole in the wall I am thinking that it seems I have been accepted back into the struggle.

“Yes, comrade,” I say with the flourish of a veteran communist.

His voice is raspy and full of excitement.

“Can you smell a woman?” he says.

“I can smell them from a mile away, Comrade Secretary General. Specially if they smell nice.”

“No,” he whispers agitatedly. “Can you smell a woman here?”

I take a deep breath and smell the stench of my own teeth, which haven’t been brushed for I don’t know how many days.

“Did you smell it? She is close, very close.”

“As close as your revolution?”

“This is not the time to make jokes. We need to stick together. I think it might be the cell next to yours.”

“This is the Fort. What could a woman possibly do to end up here?”

“You don’t know these people. They are capable of anything. She is definitely in the cell next to you. Talk to her.”

“I am in no mood for female company, Secretary General. I don’t like women on an empty stomach. You talk to her.”

“The bourgeoisie protect their own even in prison. Why couldn’t they have put her in the cell beside mine? You get chicken to eat and a woman as a neighbour and what do I get? An army deserter as a neighbour and stinking food.”

“I am not a deserter,” I explain. “I am still in uniform.” There is the silence of two hungry men in the dark.

“You know what you could do, comrade…” His whisper is suddenly full of genuine longing and his breathing is heavy.

“I am with you, comrade,” I say.

“You can find the brick in the wall with her cell. You can talk to her. You can ask her to put her tit in the hole and then you can touch it.”

“And what makes you think she’ll do it?”

“Tell her you are in the army.”

I hear steps in the corridor; they stop in front of my dungeon. I put the brick in the hole and sit down with my back against the wall.

There is a knock on the door. Who knocks on a prisoner’s door? They probably want to see whether I am dead or alive. I try to stand up without making any sound- My knees tremble, I put a hand on the wall for support, try to moisten my chapped lips with my tongue and say in a faint but firm voice: “Yes.”

The door opens with a creak, the light is dull and faded and the sharp smell of home-made jasmine perfume overwhelms me. The man wielding a pair of handcuffs is not wearing a uniform but I can tell from his civilian hairstyle that he is one of Major Kiyani’s men. No point asking him what his orders are. After starving me in this black hole for eternity they have decided to formally arrest me. Life is not about to get better. I wish Secretary General could see me in handcuffs. He would be proud. The soldier takes his time with my blindfold, adjusting it over my eyebrows and nose, blocking out any stray rays of light, making sure I can breathe. Even from behind my blindfold I feel a surge of bright white sunlight as I am led up the stairs and into the cloister between the Court for the Commons and the Palace of Mirrors. The air in the Fort smells of grass, freshly cut and watered. I wish I could scratch the back of my neck.

The jeep goes through a crowded bazaar. I smell cakes and cow dung and raw mangoes. I hear the hawkers hawking and traffic police constables whistling at buses and buses honking back, a duet that is melody to my ears after days and nights of the dungeon’s silence. The jeep comes out on a leafy avenue, the air is full of floating pollen, the traffic is orderly, the cars sound new and stop at traffic signals. The trees along the road smell like sunburnt eucalyptus. The jeep stops at a place smelling of metal polish and army boots. A gate opens and the jeep moves forward slowly. In the distance I can hear the rumble of an aircraft preparing to take off. And then the very familiar smell of aircraft fuel, and the sound of idling propellers.

They want to fly me back to the Academy with honour because they have found no evidence against me.

Or they want to throw me out of the plane because they have found no evidence and don’t need it.

I read in Reader’s Digest that in some Latin American country that is what the army was doing: taking prisoners up in a plane and then throwing them from an altitude of twenty thousand feet, over the sea. Handcuffed.

I flex my arms as a hand grips my shoulder and leads me up a ladder. Anyone trying to throw me off this plane would come with me. I am not going alone.

I can tell as soon as I step off the ladder and into the plane that I am in a Hercules C13O. Why do they need a whole C13O to transport a single person? A C13O is like a huge flying truck, it can take twenty thousand kilograms, the combined weight of an armoured jeep and a tank, and still have space left for their crews. Its backdoor ramp is like the gate of a town house, a vehicle can pass through it, dozens of paratroopers can jump. Or somebody can be thrown out. The man holding my shoulder asks me to sit in a webbed seat, fastens my nylon seat belt, asks me if I’d prefer my hands behind me or in front. In front, of course, you moron. My hands are free for a moment. No time for heroics.

I smell the animals before I hear their muffled bleating and the sound of their tiny, nervous feet on the metal floor of the cabin. They smell like freshly bathed goats but their bleating sounds oddly strangled. I wriggle in my seat and want to announce that I am on the wrong flight. The back gate creaks shut, the propellers pick up speed and suddenly the cabin is full of the pungent smell of animal piss. As the aircraft’s nose lifts off the runway, the smell becomes even stronger. The animals are obviously not used to flying.

Distracted by the din of the aircraft and stench of the animals, I jump from my seat when a hand tousles my hair and a rasping voice says, “You shouldn’t have done it, sir.”

“What?” I say, genuinely baffled.

“Whatever you did. They wouldn’t put handcuffs on you if you hadn’t done anything.”

Fuck off, I want to say. I stay silent.

“Do you want me to remove your blindfold?”

“Are you sure?” I say, suddenly very courteous.

“They didn’t say anything about you. And we are airborne, what can you possibly see?”

He tries to move the blindfold above my eyes and his fat fingers linger on my cheeks more than they push the cloth. I bend my head offering him the knot at the back of my head. His attempts to untie the knot are exaggerated. His fingers are straying onto my neck, my shoulders. Then he puts his teeth on the knot and I can feel his slobbering lips at the back of my neck, inches below where he should be directing his efforts. He comes closer and I can feel his cock poking my shoulder. For a moment I think of bringing my handcuffed hands up and strangling his cock with the chain between my handcuffs.

You might be going to your death, but there is always someone else there pursuing their own agenda.

I am adjusting my hands for the right angle of attack when his teeth get into the knot in the right place; one hard jab of his cock in my armpit and my blindfold is off.

He is sweating after all the hard work. His loadmaster’s overalls are olive green and oil-stained and they rise like a little tent over his crotch. Fayyaz , his nameplate shamelessly announces. I stare at his face without blinking as if remembering his pathetic features. He shuffles back to his seat across the cabin.