Mohammed Hanif - A Case of Exploding Mangoes

ISI also does drugs but we have never done drugs. OK, we smoked hash once, but in the mountains I come from, hashish is like a spice in the kitchen, for headaches and stuff. Obaid got some from our washerman Uncle Starchy and we smoked one moonlit night in the middle of the parade square. Obaid had a singing fit and I practically had to gag him before bringing him back to our dorm.

I need to get an SOS to Bannon.

Shit on a shingle. Shit on a shingle.

Before morning prayers on 15 June 1988, General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq’s index finger hesitated on verse 21:87 while reading the Quran, and he spent the rest of his short life dreaming about the innards of a whale. The verse also triggered a security alert that confined General Zia to his official residence, the Army House. Two months and two days later, he left the Army House for the first time and was killed in an aeroplane crash. The nation rejoiced and never found out that General Zia’s journey towards death had started with the slight confusion he experienced over the translation of a verse on that fateful day.

In Marmaduke Pickthall’s English translation of the Quran, verse 21:87 reads like this: And remember Zunnus, when he departed in wrath: he imagined that We had no power over him! But he cried through the depths of darkness, “There is no god but thou: glory to thee: I was indeed wrong! ”

When General Zia’s finger reached the words I was indeed wrong , it stopped. He retraced the line with his finger, going over the same words again and again with the hope of teasing out its true implication. This was not what he remembered from his earlier readings of the verse.

In Arabic it says:

Which should translate as:

And I am one of those who oppressed their own souls .

But in this version it said:

I was wrong .

The General knew the story of Jonah well. The fact that Jonah was Zun-nus here did not confuse him. He knew Jonah and Zun-nus were one and the same, a frustrated prophet who walked out on his clan, ended up in a whale’s belly, then chanted this verse over and over again till the whale spat him back out, alive and well.

General Zia had taken to reading the English translation of the Quran before his morning prayers because it helped him prepare for his acceptance speech at the Nobel Prize presentation ceremony. For the first time in the history of the prize, he would insist on a recitation from the Quran before his acceptance speech. The prize hadn’t been announced yet, but he was hopeful and he was looking for a suitable passage to quote.

Jonah’s prayer was not going to be in the speech, but the discrepancy between what General Zia remembered and what he had before him now on the page still bothered him. Absentmindedly, he shifted his weight and scratched his left buttock on the prayer mat, his index finger still going back and forth over the troublesome verse. The prayer that was a four feet by two antique carpet from Bukhara, embellished with gold thread, and adorned, on the right-hand corner, with a solid gold compass which permanently pointed towards Khana Kaaba in Mecca.

Presenting it to the General, the second Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Prince Naif, had joked, “This will point you towards Mecca even if you are in space.”

And General Zia had replied with humour characteristic of their relationship, “And if wishes were Aladdin’s carpets, sinners like me would always be flying to Mecca.”

General Zia thought maybe he should deliver his speech in Urdu or polish up his Arabic and surprise his Saudi friends. On his visits to the UN he had met these highly paid women in suits, who translated into all these languages as you spoke. Surely the Swedes could afford them. Then he thought of his good friend Ronald Reagan fidgeting with his headphones, getting restless, and decided to stick to English. Better to look at another translation, he told himself. He got up from the prayer mat, wrapping his Chinese silk nightgown around the bulge of his belly. “The only civilian part of my body and hence out of control,” he was fond of saying.

Before he moved here, the marble-floored room with mahogany-panelled walls contained books on military history and his predecessors’ portraits. He had all the books and pictures removed to the guest-room annexe and changed it into a prayer room. Army House, which now also served as the Chief Martial Law Administrator’s office, was a colonial bungalow, with fourteen bedrooms, eighteen acres of lawns and a small mosque. It reminded him of old black-and-white films, of benevolent rulers who were close to their people. The new President House was ready. He entertained foreign dignitaries and local mullahs there a couple of days a week but was reluctant to move in. He felt lost in the President House’s palatial corridors and had instructed his Chief Staff Officer to tell the First Lady that it was still a work in progress.

“The bathrooms are not finished yet and there are some security concerns,” he said whenever she pestered him about the house move. The new President House reminded him of Prince Naif’s palace, and although he loved and respected Prince Naif like a brother, what was good for the Crown Prince of the oil-rich desert kingdom was not necessarily suitable for the humble ruler of this poor nation of one hundred and thirty million people.

He was not sure about that number, but it was a neat figure and he would stick to it till he could get around to ordering a new census.

He wrapped the Pickthall translation in a green velvet cover and put it back on the shelf with other copies, commentaries and interpretations of the holy book. He wondered whether he should change into his uniform before going for his morning prayers. Inter Services Intelligence Chief was due to see him at 0630, the prayers would finish at 0615 and he wanted to spend some time talking to the imam of the Army House mosque.

Between making a decision and implementing it, General Zia sometimes liked to seek divine opinion. And although changing into uniform before or after morning prayers wasn’t likely to affect the destiny of his one hundred and thirty million subjects, he picked up another volume of the Quran from the shelf anyway, closed his eyes, opened the book at random and moved his finger on the pages in front of him with his eyes shut. He wished himself and his country a safe day, opened his eyes and found his finger pointing at:

The pre-dawn routine that gave Army House a head start over its subjects had already begun outside his study. The commandos on the night shift were flicking back the safety catches on their Kalashnikovs and stretching their limbs; a team of gardeners was being body-searched at the main guardroom; General Zia’s personal batman was pinning seven identical sets of medals to seven different uniforms; the first of the hundreds of house sparrows hiding behind floodlights and ack-ack guns that provided the Army House with security cover was chirping away in an attempt to start the morning conversation.

General Zia sighed, pressed the Quran against both his eyes, kissed its spine and replaced it on the shelf. He hugged himself to control the shivers running through his body. The same verse from two different volumes, so early in the morning. That had never happened before.

Starting with the night of the coup, he had always consulted the book for guidance and always found the answers he was looking for. Eleven years ago, moments before ordering his troops to carry out Operation Fairplay that removed Prime Minister Bhutto and installed him as the head of the country, he had opened the Quran and found He it is who hath made you regents in the earth .