Mohammed Hanif - A Case of Exploding Mangoes

I think he noticed some interest in my eyes.

“I didn’t kill anyone.” He looked at me and then laughed a slurred laugh. “I mean this time. You know it’s my job,” he shrugged. “The thing about these Afghans is that they are not in it for the killing. They fight but they want to make sure that they are alive after the fighting is over. They are not in the business of killing. They are in the business of fighting. Americans are in it for winning. And us?”

He realised that he was going off on a tangent and mumbled something under his breath which sounded like ‘pimps and prostitutes’.

“How is the fire, young man?” He was suddenly practical. Drunk practical. As if I had taken him for a drunkard and was trying to fool him.

“Let’s go then, young man. Let’s do our duty.”

He picked up his bottle of whisky and poured some into his glass with a tremulous hand. It sloshed, swirled and gurgled in the glass. At the door he turned back and said, “Can you get my suitcase?”

By the time I dragged the suitcase to the living room, he was already sweating. The fire wasn’t such a good idea. The sky was clear and our floating companions, the clouds, had gone back to Siberia or wherever they came from. Even the river down in the valley was silent.

Why do rivers decide to shut up on certain nights?

I dragged the suitcase into the middle of the room and fussed over the fire. The wood was dry, the weather was clear, we didn’t need the bloody fire.

“I have saved a few lives in my time. Or I think I have. This whole bloody Afghan thing. I have done more than five hundred trips. All deniable missions. And now I end up with this.” He looked at the fire appreciatively. I looked at the suitcase.

My cheeks were glowing. The room was oven-hot.

“I took three days dragging this back,” he said, his voice full of remorse.

He stood up with his glass poised in front of his chest. He raised his glass to me and did a 360-degree turn. He seemed to be at a party that had gone on for too long but he was determined to get the last dance in.

“Open the suitcase,” he said.

Out of a very clear night sky a grey cloud, its edges bruised orange like a healing wound, appeared at the window as if Colonel Shigri had called in a witness.

I opened the suitcase. It was full of money. Dollars.

“This was my mission. To retrieve this money from someone who was dead. And I buried my man there and brought this here. Do I look like an accountant? Do I pimp my men for this?”

I looked at him. We held each other’s gaze. I think for a moment he realised that he was talking to his son.

“Into the fire,” he said.

If I hadn’t been so sleepy I might have tried to reason with him. I might have told him that whatever his ethics of war, the money wasn’t his to burn. Instead I obliged. And soon started taking pleasure in watching hundreds of little dead American presidents, White Houses and In God We Trusts crumpling and turning into stashes of ash. I used both my hands and threw wads after wads of dollars into the fireplace. Soon the room was full of green smoke and twenty-five million dollars’ worth of ash. I peeled off a bill from the last pile and slipped it into my pocket. Just to confirm in the morning that it wasn’t a dream.

“Go to sleep, young man. I’ll keep watch. I have asked them to come and collect their pimp money.” I looked at him and laughed. His face was covered with the soot flying around the room. He looked like a badly madeup black slave in a Bollywood film. “Wash your face before you go to sleep,” he said. Those were his last words to me.

The rain rattles the window.

“Has the monsoon started?” Obaid asks, distracted by the sudden lashing of rain on the window.

“Monsoon is for you people in the plains. Here it’s just rain. It comes and goes.”

The first of the monsoon winds caught the crow gorging on mustard flowers in a sea of exploding yellows in eastern Punjab, just on the wrong side of the Pakistani border. The crow had spent a good summer, grown fat and survived a number of ambushes by gangs of Brahminy kites which looked like eagles but behaved like vultures, ruled this area unchallenged in the summer and, despite their exalted name, showed no interest in the abundant vegetation, preying instead on common crows like this visitor from across the border. The crow obviously credited his own cunning for his survival but the curse that he carried was saving him for a purpose, for a death more dramatic than being eaten alive by a bunch of greedy kites with no respect for dietary rules.

One hundred and thirty miles away from the mustard field, in Cell 4 of the Lahore Fort, Blind Zainab folded her prayer that and heard the rustle of a snake. It was a small snake, probably the size of her middle finger, but Zainab’s ears instantly recognised its barely audible scurrying. She stood still for a second, then took off her slipper and waited for the snake to move again. Keeping in mind a childhood superstition, she moved only when she was sure she could target it precisely. She brought the slipper down swiftly and, in three targeted strokes, killed it. Slipper still in hand, she stood still and her nostrils caught a whiff of the pummelled flesh. The dead snake’s blood vapours floated in the dungeon air. Her headache returned with a vengeance, two invisible hammers beating at her temples with excruciating monotony. She reclined against the wall of her cell, threw her slipper away and cursed in a low voice. She cursed the man who had put her in this dark well, where she had nobody to talk to and was forced to kill invisible creatures to survive. “May your blood turn to poison. May the worms eat your innards.” Blind Zainab pressed her temples with the palms of both her hands. Her whispered words travelled through the ancient air vents of the Fort and escaped into the tropical depression that had started over the Arabian Sea and was headed towards the western border.

The monsoon currents induced a certain restlessness in the crow and he took off, flying into the wind. The air was pregnant with moisture. The crow flew one whole day without stopping and didn’t feel thirsty even once. He spent the night at a border checkpoint between India and Pakistan picking at a clay pot full of rice pudding that the soldiers had left outside in the open to cool down. The pot lay in a basket hanging from a washing line; he slept on the washing line with his beak stuck in the pudding. The next day the crow found himself flying over a barren patch, the monsoon wind turned out to be an empty promise. His mouth was parched. He flew slowly, looking for any signs of vegetation. The crow landed near an abandoned, dried-up well where he picked at a dead sparrow’s rotting carcass. His lunch almost killed him. Dying of thirst and stomach pain, he took off on a tangent and followed the direction of the wind until he: saw lights flickering in the distance and columns of smoke rising on the horizon. He tucked his left wing and then his right wing under his body by turns and flew like an injured but determined soldier. In the morning he reached his destination. The lights had disappeared and the sunrise brought with it the wonderful smell of rotting mangoes. He swooped over an orchard, then spotted a skittish little boy rushing out of a small mud hut with a catapult in his hand. Before the crow could take any evasive action, a pebble hit his tail, and he flew up to stay out of the boy’s range. His restlessness was over. His crow instincts and his crow’s fate combined to tell him that he must find a way to stay in this orchard.

The crow’s fate was intertwined with that of one of the two big aluminium birds being put through the last maintenance checks in the hangar of the VIP Movement Squadron of the Pakistan Air Force, five hundred miles away. The engines had been tested, the fatigue profiles had been declared healthy, the backup systems checked for any malfunction. Both the C130 Hercules aircraft were healthy and superfit to fly. According to the standard presidential security procedures, however, the aircraft for General Zia’s journey to attend a tank demonstration in Garrison 5, Bahawalpur, would not be chosen until a few hours before the flight. A fibreglass VIP pod, twelve feet long, was being put through a very strict hygiene regime by Warrant Officer Fayyaz personally. From the; outside the pod looked like one of those shiny capsules that NASA launches into space. From the inside it looked like the compact office of a gangster. Warrant Officer Fayyaz dusted the beige leather sofas with its nova suede headrests and vacuumed the fluffy white carpet. He polished the empty aluminium bar and put a copy of the Quran in the drinks cabinet. It was mandatory for all vehicles and flights carrying the General to have a copy. Not that he recited it during his journeys. He believed that it added another invisible protective layer to his elaborate security cordon. Now all Warrant Officer Fayyaz had to do was to put new air freshener in the air-conditioning duct and the pod would lie ready. For security reasons the pod would not be fitted into one of the two planes till six hours before take-off. Only when this pod had been fitted into one of the two aircraft would it become the presidential plane. At this point it would automatically acquire the call sign Pak One. Warrant Officer Fayyaz had a lot of time on his hands, enough to do a second round of dusting and polishing before he went to pick up the new air freshener from VIP Movement Squadron’s supply officer, Major Kiyani.