Tariq Ali - Night of the Golden Butterfly

‘Well, that’s settled. Now should we go and inspect some antique furniture?’

Her living room was especially large, and I suggested that the space above the fireplace might be a home for Plato’s unfinished masterpiece. She screamed.

‘Hai Allah, never. Never. It’s a frightening painting. You haven’t even seen it. Anyway it’s too big for this apartment or any other. It should be in a public space.’

‘Where is it at the moment?’

‘At our Sind home, I hope, carefully covered with muslin sheets to dry it properly. He was worried that local hoodlums might raid his studio when news of his death became known. All the other paintings are in a warehouse. This last one is now at home. We need a museum in Europe or North America to give it a home, and someone like you should write an explanation. It really needs one. Can you think of a title?’

‘Canceristan?’

‘Don’t be silly. Something simple and nonprovocative, like Unfinished…’

‘Last Thoughts in a Dying Country?’

‘No. I visit regularly, and Fatherland’s death has been predicted far too often.’

‘Dying Thoughts in the Last Country.’

‘Shut up. One more try, and then I’ll— ’

‘Artistic Structures of Political Meaning in an Unknown Country. Unfinished, 2009.’

‘Brilliant. That will be the title. In fact, given that you haven’t seen the work, it’s pretty close to the mark and sounds obscure. “Unknown” in the sense of being unknown to its rulers. Yes? Good.’

I received a kiss on the cheek. It turned out that she was the sole executor of Plato’s estate, and she gave me complete authority to negotiate the sale of ASPMUC to a serious modern museum wherever I wished. She would arrange for it to be photographed and have slides posted directly to me.

‘Unless you want to just fly over and see it.’

‘Not this month, but I might do that sometime. Always helps. In any case the curator of whichever museum takes it will certainly want to see it before the purchase, or at least send an expert.’

‘This book you’re writing. It isn’t just about Plato?’

‘No, and it’s not a biography. It’s fiction.’

‘Allah protect you.’

‘No reason for Allah to be upset. I’m just sad that Plato will never read it. He was one of the sixteen people I was writing it for.’

‘Am I included?’

‘Plato and I went back forty-five years. I’ve barely known you a week.’

‘I feel I’ve known you a long time, and the book was my idea. I will be one of the sixteen. Let the figure remain.’

On the train back to London, I thought mainly about Plato, since I had been asked by a daily paper to write his obituary. His life had rarely been untroubled or happy till Zaynab offered him a haven. But nor had he died a physically or mentally broken man, like so many of his wealthy peers whose lives had been led without a trace of generosity or compassion, men who had justified, for petty gain, some indescribable horrors of the modern world. Plato died with his pride and self-respect intact.

One summer evening in Lahore we were discussing the fate of Islam in the West. Plato first mocked the nostalgia and sentimentality that prevailed on the subject — a sure sign of total ignorance, he remarked. Zahid backed him up, and when another friend said that the decision by Muslims in al-Andalus to eat pork in order to survive was a crime, Zahid defended their right to eat cow dung if necessary in order to survive. A strange, sad smile prefaced Plato’s response.

‘It’s one thing to eat pork in order to survive. I would have done the same. But they wanted us to swallow our history, our culture, our language, our entire past, and all that is not so easily digestible.’

ON THE TWENTY-FIFTH DAY after the murder of General Ilyas Rafiq, commanding officer of the Special Services Assault Battalion, I went to have dinner with his mother-in-law. Incapable of stomaching any further hypocrisy, Jindié had refused to stay for the chehlum , the fortieth day after burial that concludes the ritual of official mourning. She left Zahid to console their daughter and returned to London. Her offer to bring the grandchildren back with her to give them and the widowed Neelam a break had been turned down.

The meal she served, unlike the story that accompanied it, was on the skimpy side, a bit too healthy for my tastes, but all I wanted to know that evening was who killed Rafiq and why. No real evidence had emerged so far — though this tiny fact has yet to spoil a good story from circulating in Fatherland. According to Jindié, each of his colleagues suspected different people with varying motives. I rubbed my hands together in delight. It was a classic Fatherland conspiracy. Three versions were floating in cyberspace, she told me, and any of them could be true, but she no longer cared. As far as she was concerned, her son-in-law had been a reprobate and had come to the bad end he deserved. Yet another Rashomon moment for our debased elite, I thought to myself. Assassins are rarely uncovered in Fatherland, which adds to its many charms.

The first and most-believed account linked the death to the machinations of a fellow general, Muhammad Rifaat, who commanded a garrison in a crucial town on the edge of badlands where drone-rockets rained down regularly on the villages and the streams had turned red. Reputedly, the two generals, close friends since their school days, were sharing a mistress, Khalida ‘Naughty’ Lateef, the spirited spouse of a junior officer desperate for promotion. Naughty Lateef’s charms had on one occasion led to fisticuffs between the two men, and all this in the presence of fellow officers. Adultery, especially with the wife of a junior officer, and breach of discipline were both punishable offences.

General Rifaat, who had not provoked the assault, had been officially reprimanded, a black mark that presaged early retirement to a foreign embassy, Kazakhstan or, if he was lucky, Austria.

General Rafiq was reprimanded in private by his chief and told in strong language that such clashes were unseemly. Nothing more. He was an important component in the local ‘war on terror’ and a regular at the US embassy in Fatherland. An angry General Rifaat decided that this state of affairs was unacceptable and planned a private revenge with the help of his old schoolmate, General Baghlol Khan, a weak-kneed Pashtun, in command of the Inter-Services Intelligence but famed neither for his own intelligence nor for anything else, except obeying orders from his superiors. Baghlol loathed Rafiq because of departmental rivalries, but there were a few other reasons as well. The latter, soon after taking command of the Assaulters, as his battalion was known, had uncovered two ISI plants amongst his senior officers. He ordered them to be returned immediately to their base with his compliments. These took the form of some choice insults, including a throwaway reference to the ISI chief as General Camel’s Arse, not an indigenous epithet but one which Rafiq had first encountered as a young officer during his days in Saudi Arabia many moons ago, when Fatherland soldiers defended the kingdom against internal threats. News of the sobriquet had spread, increasing Rafiq’s popularity with the soldiery. Camel’s Arse was what they thought as well.

Given this history, General Baghlol Khan was only too happy to respond to a personal request from his old friend General Rifaat. He called in one of the officers whom Rafiq had insulted and sent back; together they prepared a crude but effective trap. Naughty was brought in to ISI HQ and told that unless she did what she was asked to do, her husband, Major Lateef, would be provided with ISI videos showing her in action with at least three generals. She was shown clips from all three videos, in which she played a starring role. A stunned Naughty fell into line. She rang Rafiq and arranged a rendezvous. Her task was to lure him into making a few unsavoury remarks about the amorous adventures of their boss, the chief of army staff, whom Washington was plotting to remove for reasons unconnected with this sordid affair.