Tariq Ali - Night of the Golden Butterfly

‘A universal disease as far as rulers are concerned, then and now. I’m still not too convinced by any of this… I wonder how my old friend Confucius-your-brother would have interpreted the novel.’

‘It’s obvious. A degenerate work reflecting a degenerate age. That was the Maoist line on everything classical during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.’

I wondered which of the men who’d led the Chinese revolution to victory had read the novel. Mao would certainly have enjoyed it, and some of his later life gave the impression of being modelled on that of Hsi-men, though the fictional character never had to contend with a tough-minded wife like Chiang Ching. I never liked her, but I couldn’t help admiring her poise and arrogance as she confronted her prosecutors in court before being sentenced to a life in prison after the collapse of the Gang of Four. It contrasted well with the demeanour of broken Bolshevik intellectuals in the Stalinist show-trials of the Thirties, confessing to ‘crimes’ they had never committed. What had our Lahori Confucius made of it all? His testimony would really be something. I willed him to be alive. Did Jindié think he was? She shook her head.

‘I think he must have died under a false identity.’

‘I feel he’s still alive and keeping an eye on us from afar. Just a feeling. Pure irrationality. Is your son Suleiman still in Yunnan?’

‘Yes, I’m going to see him next month. I’ve never been, you know. Time to go and bid farewell to the ancestors. Want to come? Zahid would be very happy.’

It was a tempting offer and I promised to think about it.

‘China is going through a remarkable cycle in its history. How will it end?’

‘Don’t know. Sometimes a nation grows more in a decade than in a century, but there have been so many decades and centuries in the Chinese past that prophecy is impossible. If I can I will accompany you to China. There is nobody else I would rather be with in Yunnan.’

‘I will accept that as a compliment.’

I graciously declined her offer of the guest room, though grace is not generally regarded as one of my virtues and is frowned upon as an affectation in most of the Punjab.

‘It was a really nice evening, Jindié. I’m really happy we finally spent a night together without quarrelling.’

She kissed my forehead. ‘Why did you decide not to stay? Frightened of being raped by me disguised as Hsi-men?’

‘I just don’t like waking up in a house where there is no coffee.’

She pushed me gently out the doorway.

I drove back to North London just as dawn was breaking. Whatever the time of year, this has to be the nicest time of day to be awake in London, just before the big city wakes up. I crossed the river at Kew, stopping for a few minutes to see if a house I’d shared with friends after leaving university was still there. It wasn’t, and, slightly disappointed, I drove on and was home within fifteen minutes. There are advantages to living in an early Victorian square within ten minutes of St Pancras station. Novelists and bachelors share this in common: both are permanently at the mercy of capricious impulses. I espressoed myself two coffees, shaved and showered, left a message for Zaynab on her machine asking her to get some croissants, rush-packed a bag, adding a few books, earphones and my iPod, and walked to the station. At six-fifteen in the morning I was on the train to the Continent.

THE CROISSANTS WERE COLD by the time we finished making love, but dipping the cold edge of one in a bowl of milky hot coffee can sometimes be an equally sensuous experience. Zaynab Koran, nee Shah, having lived in Paris for over a month on her own, provided me with an emotional account of her social life.

‘I’m not sure I made the right decision, D. I love this city and I love French culture, but something’s happened. Have you heard of a Fatherland woman called Naughty Lateef? That’s what she calls herself.’

She was flabbergasted when I described Naughty’s recent adventures in Fatherland. She repeatedly shook her head in disbelief.

‘She’s writing her memoirs, and they’ve started promoting her already. Let me show you the magazine.’

Naughty had made the cover of Feminisme Aujourd’hui , a journal that had not crossed my path before and was largely full of ads for perfume, lingerie and related goods. Naughty, herself an Isloo Hui, was the cover story. Prior to this, I’d had no idea what she looked like, but the image on the cover did not come as a surprise. The modesty implied by the Armani scarf covering her head was immediately negated by her two friends below, proudly jutting forward as if to say, ‘Look, look, we have them in Fatherland too.’ Her looks were typical of Fatherlandi starlets who disgrace an already abysmal cinematic tradition: a fair skin, brown eyes with a tinge of green or blue eyes with a ring of brown, a toothpaste-ad smile, wavy hair, big breasts and a saucy expression.

This was what undiscerning males from the high command of Fatherland’s armed forces required for rest and relaxation; and all in all it was best their needs were fulfilled by indigenous commodities. It avoided the trouble of importing Eastern European call girls, whom the fall of Communism had made available in very large numbers to the rest of the world and who now cluttered the hundred or so brothels in Kabul and numerous five-star monstrosities in the Gulf.

The pretty wives of the more obedient junior and not-so-junior officers were regarded as fair prey, occasionally to be had with the full agreement of husbands eying a rapid promotion or a sinecure in the military-industrial enterprises and pleasantly surprised that their wives had turned out to be such lucrative investments. This was the world so well described in the anonymous Chin Ping Mei. The Fatherland high command was littered with Hsi-men types, who their juniors were only too happy to mimic.

The interview with Naughty spanned six glossy pages. She was masquerading as a wronged Muslim woman, describing her oppression in lavish detail. The number of times she had been forced by different men, totally against her will, the tears that followed each experience and how when she had complained about this to a religious scholar, he had looked at her with anger and said, ‘Women like you should be stoned to death.’ Fiction, thinly disguised as fact for the European market, especially France and Holland, where the premiums on this sort of material were high. She informed the reader that she was working on a book for a giant German conglomerate and its North American, French, British and Spanish subsidiaries.

It was not that wronged and oppressed women were in short supply in Fatherland — though their sufferings were not exclusively the outcome of religious oppression — but Naughty was not one of them. I couldn’t wait for her book. The fiction was so blatant that it was bound to generate a response. I couldn’t help chuckling at market fashions. Fake anti-communism and Holocaust memoirs had become popular a few decades ago, with publishers justifying these faux biographies as an attempt to grapple with a unique experience of horror, rather than seeing them for what they were, tawdry attempts to exploit a historical tragedy in order to appease one’s bank manager.

Now it was open season on Islam. Any piece of rubbish was fine as long as it targeted the followers of the Prophet, preferably rubbish from women with pleasing exteriors, who would be easier to market in the West. I could see why Zaynab, forcibly married to the Koran, was seriously upset by Naughty’s dramatic entrance on the European stage. Zaynab had a real tale to tell, a story that had the Holy Book at its centre and the uses made of it by cruel and rapacious landlords to oppress their sisters and daughters. She had never spoken about any of that in public when she was in Europe. She told me she had no desire to fan the flames of prejudice.