Mohammed Hanif - A Case of Exploding Mangoes

Between us on the floor are nine mountain lambs in various stages of misery, shivering under their tight little woolly curls. Their hind legs are tied with rope so that they can’t move. Some are sprawled on the floor of the cabin, others are on their knees. One of them has thrown up and is struggling to breathe with his face on the floor, others are huddling together. Under their meshed muzzles, their faces are perplexed question marks.

Since when did the Pakistan Air Force start dealing in livestock? I want to ask Fayyaz, but he is only a fat horny loadmaster.

“Where are they going?” I ask.

“Same place we art going,” he says with a coy smile.

“Which is where?”

“I am not allowed to tell you,” he says, looking at the lambs as if they might hear the destination and not like it.

“Have you ever been to the Lahore Fort?” I ask him casually.

“No. But I have seen it on TV.” He is puzzled.

“No, Loadmaster Fayyaz.” I chew his name before spitting it out. “There is another fort under that fort they show on the television. It’s for the collaborators, the likes of you.” I start looking at the lambs again.

“They are going for the party,” he says with his hands folded in his lap. It seems he has got a handle on his runaway lust. “They can get the finest goat meat in Islamabad, but they want Afghani lambs. I doubt whether these will survive till the fourth of July.”

“The Americans are having a party?”

“It’s their Independence Day. We have been bringing food from all over the country for the past week. It must be a big party.”

I close my eyes and wonder whether Bannon is going.

The lambs have just begun to get used to the din of the aircraft and the fluctuating cabin pressure when the aircraft starts to descend steeply. They retch and bleat under their muzzles. The one with his face on the floor gets up and raises his front legs in an attempted capriole but stumbles and falls into his own piss.

“I need to put your blindfold back on,” the loadmaster says, in a voice full of expectations. I beckon him towards me with my cuffed hands and give him a murderous look. He is a man of the world. He gets the message and puts my blindfold back without touching a single hair on my body.

The back door opens as soon as the aircraft comes to a standstill. I can hear the lambs sliding down the ramp, their first and last flight probably already a nightmare in the past. Another hand on my shoulder and I am led down a ladder. The air outside smells of hot concrete, burning landing gear and evaporating air fuel.

It’s heavenly compared to the smell inside the cabin. A short walk, then a wait under the sun. The jeep I am thrown into smells of rose air freshener and Dunhills. I don’t think I have been brought here for the party.

General Akhtar’s devotion to his boss General Zia was not the ordinary devotion that a three-star general shows towards a four-star general. Their mutual dependence wasn’t that of two soldiers who can rely on each other to get a piggyback to the base if injured in the battle. Theirs was a bond between two dogs stranded on a glacier, each sizing up the other, trying to decide if he should wait for his comrade to die before eating him or do away with the niceties and try to make a meal out of him immediately.

But there was a difference between the two: General Zia with his five titles, addresses to the UN and Nobel Prize hopes was satiated. General Akhtar, always playing second fiddle to his boss, was starving, and when he looked around the frozen landscape, all he saw was General Zia — fattened, chubby-cheeked and marinating in his own paranoia. Publicly, General Akhtar denied any ambition; he encouraged journalists to describe him as a silent soldier, happy to command his ghost armies in secret wars. But when he stood in front of the mirror in his office day after day and counted the three stars on his shoulder, he couldn’t deny to himself that he had become a shadow of General Zia. His own career had followed General Zia’s ambitions like a faithful puppy.

If General Zia wanted to become an elected president, General Akhtar not only had to ensure that ballot boxes were stuffed in time but was also expected to orchestrate spontaneous celebrations all over the country after the votes were counted. If General Zia announced a National Cleanliness Week, General Akhtar had to make sure that the gutters were disinfected and security-checked before the President could show up to get his picture taken. On good days General Akhtar felt like a royal executioner during the day, and a court food-taster in the evening. On bad days he just felt like a long-suffering housewife always clearing up after her messy husband. He had started to get impatient. The title of ‘second most powerful man in the land’, which he had enjoyed in the beginning, had started to sound like an insult. How could you be second most powerful when your boss was all -powerful?

The puppy had grown up and felt constantly starved.

General Akhtar had learned to put the puppy on a leash and take him for short walks, because he knew he couldn’t let him run wild. Not yet.

It was on one of these puppy-on-the-leash walks that he was walking along the corridor of his headquarters, minutes after his camera feed from the Army House abruptly disappeared. He ran his operations from a four-storey, nondescript office block. There was no signboard outside the building to identify it, no postal address for this enterprise; even the white Corollas entering and leaving the car park had no number plates. But still every cab driver in town somehow knew about the occupants of this building and the nature of their business. General Akhtar was walking on a frayed grey carpet, his ears taking in the familiar night-shift sounds; most of the staff had already left for the day but he could hear the muffled voices from behind the closed doors. His night-shift handlers were talking to his operators in distant, unsuspecting countries; Ethiopia, Nepal, Colombia. There was one consolation for General Akhtar: he might be the second most powerful man in a Third World country but the intelligence agency he ran was worthy of a superpower.

Since no women worked in the office block, the toilets were marked ‘Officers and Men’. General Akhtar passed the toilets and entered an unmarked room at the end of the corridor. More than a dozen telephone operators watched wall-mounted audiotapes connected to telephone monitors; the tapes started to roll as soon as the subject under surveillance picked up the phone. It wasn’t just the usual set of politicians, diplomats and journalists whose phones were tapped; many of General Akhtar’s closest colleagues would have been surprised to find out that their every phone call, their every verbal indiscretion was recorded here.

The operators working in the monitoring room had strict orders to continue their normal functions regardless of the rank of their visitor. A dozen heads wearing headphones nodded silently as General Akhtar entered the room.

He tapped the shoulder of the first operator in the row, who seemed completely absorbed in the task at hand. The operator removed his headphones and looked at General Akhtar with a mixture of respect and excitement. During his eleven months at the agency, he had ntver been addressed by General Akhtar. The operator felt his life was about to change.

General Akhtar took the headphones from his hands and put them on his own ears. He heard the moans of a man obviously in the middle of pleasuring himself as a woman on the other end urged him on in a motherly voice. General Akhtar gave the operator a disgusted look; the operator avoided eye contact with him and said, “The Minister of Information, sir.” The operator felt apologetic, even though he was only doing his duty.