Tariq Ali - Night of the Golden Butterfly

Alice disagreed with my assessment. She thought it was perfectly possible that Plato had gone into a decline because of the state of global culture. ‘It’s the same everywhere. As a music critic I sit through countless operas and concerts here and at the Met in New York. Tickets are so overpriced that not many music lovers can afford seats. It’s corporate entertainment now and the audiences are very philistine. Directors know this and play to their weaknesses. They laugh at some stupid slapstick in a Mozart opera, they applaud a badly sung aria simply because the star stops and waits for the applause, etc. It is depressing. The ability to discriminate is disappearing fast in Western culture. People like what they’re told to like, and since they’ve paid a high price for it they convince themselves that what they’ve seen and heard was good. The theatre’s no different. Any serious criticism is regarded as disloyal. After a week at work I often feel suicidal.’

I knew Plato better than either of them did and knew that his depression had little to do with lack of appreciation. That had never bothered him at all. I feared it was his past, and his impotence and his love and desire for Zaynab that he could only partially fulfil. He had refused to see an analyst. Might a chemical do the trick? It seemed cruel, but I wondered whether Zaynab had tried Viagra or one of its equivalents.

‘He’d be horrified. He’s always making vicious jokes about the sixty-somethings who cruise nonstop in the Viagra triangle in Clifton. The thought of him…’

‘I wasn’t suggesting you hand him a tablet. But you poisoned the hound, didn’t you? Give it to Plato mixed with what the Bangladeshis refer to as shag gosht . Who knows, both of you may get lucky.’

Alice backed up this suggestion. ‘No harm in trying it once. If it works and the depression disappears, do it regularly. If it doesn’t, you lose nothing. Why did you never suggest it to me, Dara?’

‘We were much younger then and you were still Ally.’

Zaynab was worried. What if it gave him a heart attack? She’d read that a former president of Nigeria had died of an overdose while on the job. We advised caution the first time. Perhaps just half the recommended dose. She promised she would try when she returned. Before that she planned a trip to Paris. It was her first time and she wanted to see with her own eyes the Latin Quarter where Balzac had lived, worked and staved off his creditors. French novelists had kept her company during the early years of her marriage to the Honoured Classic, and she still returned to them from time to time. Her life had become a never-ending rush. She could never stay in one place for too long. Even when at home she travelled a great deal, seeing parts of the country that were new to her.

Her sister-in-law belonged to the old ruling family in Swat, and she would often go and stay there in the summer, using it as a base to visit Gilgit. She told me this as I was dropping her off at her hotel.

‘Have you ever been to Swat? Strange to think that there’s a war going on now, a war in which Plato and I find it difficult to support either side. One of Plato’s paintings shows both sides as one. A hydra-headed beast.’

‘No mermaids on the landscape?’

‘None. You haven’t answered my question.’

I described a trip I’d taken to Swat over forty years before, with a small group of students travelling by a GTS bus from Mardan, where I had been staying with close family friends. Our bus wound its way along tiny roads where one had to pull to the side and stop when a car or lorry approached from the opposite direction. Suddenly an old Rolls Royce pulled up behind us, its driver honking aggressively and gesturing that he wanted the bus to move out of the way. Overtaking was not permitted, and our driver, correctly, refused. Ten miles on there was a broader stretch of the road. The car passed us then and screeched to a halt in front of us. We stopped. The owner of the Rolls was the Wali of Swat, a traditional tribal chief, ennobled and placed in power by the British and mercilessly lampooned by Edward Lear. He walked out of the car. The Swatis sitting in the bus cowered. Men and women covered their heads and tried to hide. The Pashtun driver, now trembling with fear, was asked to step outside. He pleaded for forgiveness. He’d had no idea it was the Wall’s car. His pleas were ignored. The Wali took a rifle from one of his bodyguards and shot our driver dead. Then he drove away. We were stranded for three hours before another driver arrived.

‘Allah save us,’ said Zaynab. ‘That was my sister-in-law’s grandfather.’

I let her out of the car.

‘Perhaps we can continue this conversation in Paris? I’ll be staying at the Crillon for two weeks.’

‘Enjoy, it was the SS headquarters during the war.’

‘Does that mean no?’

‘No. But it doesn’t mean yes either.’

‘Why? I have much more to tell you, things I didn’t want to mention in front of Alice Stepford.’

‘And it has to be in Paris?’

‘You must admit it would be more congenial. Where else can I practice that French that Mile Verbizier-taught me in my youth? Vous comprenez?’

I made neither comment nor commitment, but waved a friendly farewell as she let herself out of the car.

THE NEWS WAS ON the front page of the International Herald Tribune . A former general and two of his guards had been shot dead in the heart of Isloo, the heavily-policed Fatherland capital. From the tone of the report it was clear that he had been genuinely supportive of the West’s efforts in Afghanistan and the killers were assumed to be al-Qaeda or the Taliban, or both, or an offshoot of either. In other words, there were no clues at all. It had not been a suicide terrorist. On the contrary, the report stressed, it had been a well-planned execution by a killer or killers who had escaped and left no traces. Yet another casualty of the Afghan war, I thought, and turned the page to read the rest of the international news, no longer to be found in most British papers.

Then my cell phone, a little-used object, began to buzz. Jindié was ringing from Isloo. She had to cancel our dinner engagement scheduled for that night. The dead general, she informed me, was her son-in-law. She sounded calm, a bit too calm, I thought, as I offered my condolences. She would ring on her return, which should be within a fortnight. Zahid could stay the forty days if he wished. Not her.

Paris beckoned. Zaynab would be there for three more days. I rang. She was surprised and, I think, pleased. I reserved a room at my favourite dive in the Quarter and booked a seat on an early afternoon train to France.

I had been looking forward to seeing Jindié on her own and discussing the events in Yunnan that had transformed her family’s life. The letter describing the last days of the Dali sultanate affected me more than I had realized. At least they hadn’t decapitated his dead body before the eyes of his women and children. Why bother, they must have thought, when we are going to rape and kill them all. What had happened to the beautiful spy and her child? Did they survive in Cochin China? How delicious if one of the descendants had fought against the Americans in Vietnam. I had recurring thoughts about imperial rulers since ancient times who never paid heed to the rest of humanity.

Jindié, had supplied me with knowledge usually available only to specialist scholars. The Taiping and Boxer rebellions feature in virtually every book on modern Chinese history. Why not Yunnan and Dali? Weighed on any scale, eighteen years of semi-independence defended against repeated Manchu assaults was no mean achievement. I could not fully fathom the reason for disappearing this rebellion from history.