Tariq Ali - Night of the Golden Butterfly

‘In that case’, asked a judge, ‘why were you so interested in the money? You were her only children, so you would have inherited it automatically. Since your guilt is no longer in doubt, it is in your interest to speak the truth.’

But the sons would not implicate their father. His version was that he came home and saw they had killed her, and since they were his sons he felt obliged to help them. Police evidence contradicted that story. Three different knives had been used. All three were found in the sack, and the fingerprints of Colonel Lateef had been identified on one of them. Why had they killed her so brutally? The colonel had rifles and two pistols in the house. A single shot would have sufficed. Once again, it was Asif who provided the explanation. All three had to kill her, and this was the simplest way. A bullet was too quick. They wanted to punish her for the shame she had brought on the family. The judgement was delivered promptly and the sentence was carried out the following week. All three men were hanged.

The saturation coverage given to the murder, of course, contradicted all earlier speculation, but memories are short in the West. Inconvenient truths can be brushed off any fiction. When Editions Montmorency published the interview book with an acerbic introduction by Henri, it was virtually ignored. Despite not being reviewed in the bulk of the media, the first edition of book sold over two hundred thousand copies, and foreign rights were bought like hot gulab jamuns at the Istanbul Book Fair, where Henri had organized an auction.

A few radio stations played extracts from the tape, and that was the sum total of on-air publicity. Jean-Pierre Bertrand was nowhere to be seen. The celebrities who had clustered around Naughty in Paris and New York did not wish to be associated with her after her death.

Madame Zaynab Shah was referred to in Marianne as an oral historian, which was news to everyone except me. The book appeared in English, but the New York friends of Diderot chose to ignore its presence. It did not receive a single review, but, as in Paris, sales were brisk. What surprised us all was that Naughty had made a will before returning to Fatherland. In the case of her death, her sons would inherit her apartment in Paris and everything else. If, for whatever reason, including predeceasing her, this was impossible, her entire estate was bequeathed to Editions Montmorency, with the stipulation that they produce three titles a year that were translations from Punjabi.

I was surprised and pleased to receive a phone call from Neelam. ‘Just got back from Beijing and heard about Mrs Lateef. Then I got a copy of the book. It’s a very good interview. Please congratulate Zaynab khala from me. What an awful end to her life. You know it was I who taught her some basic English.’

I told Neelam of my meeting with Naughty and how she had told me the same thing and had sung Neelam’s praises and expressed remorse for having helped to wreck her marriage.

‘Let’s forget that now, Uncle Dara. Allah’s will must be done. The good news is that Mom and I are friends again after almost fifteen years. I told her you stayed at our house and praised the coffee even when I had asked you not to. It pleased her a great deal. When are you visiting Isloo? Soon, I hope.’

Slowly everything was falling into place, some of it in the most gruesome fashion possible and some of it in a way that restored a degree of tranquillity to friends and their children. What would become of Zaynab? I had few doubts that our love and friendship, as pleasant and restorative as it had been, could not last too long. I had books to write. She wanted to build an art museum in Sind where ancient and modern works might be shown together. Mohenjo-Daro on the ground floor, Plato near the top. She had talked about this a great deal, reigniting my old fascination with Mohenjo-Daro and the civilization of which the city had been a part in 3600 BCE. Replicas of its stern-faced priests and exquisitely shaped dancing girls are looking down at me from a bookshelf as I write these words. I’d always thought of writing a novel set in that period in the region, but events had intervened and finally the back burner itself had collapsed. Was it time to revive the project? Perhaps, if only to demonstrate that sanitation and the distribution of food was more advanced then than it is in Fatherland today.

Zaynab knew the state museums were badly funded, run by corrupt bureaucrats, and that as a result many artefacts were already in Western museums or private collections. She was determined to build her own museum. She pressed me repeatedly to become its director, but I could not be part of this project. I could not replace Plato in her life. I told her so and she hugged me tight, but made no attempt to convince me otherwise. We both knew that it was time to move on, and although our friendship was secure for ever, when we would next meet and what we would do were questions that could not be answered. On one issue alone was she intransigent. We had to see Plato’s last painting together. On this there was no dispute.

‘Your initial instincts were correct, Zaynab,’ Henri told her at dinner the evening Naughty’s will was made public. ‘She was not a complete monster. Part victim, part monster. That is what this world does to people. Dara, what should we do to thank her for the bequest? A Yasmine Auratpasand Prize sounds exploitative and false.’

‘Let me think.’

Late that night I did think, and while Zaynab was sleeping peacefully, I thought that a school for girls in the village where she was born, and in her real name, to avoid stupid publicity, might be a possible solution, with scholarships for study abroad guaranteed for the top two students each year. Both Henri and Zaynab agreed. Zaynab would speak to her brother to expedite matters. Henri would talk to a friend on how best to invest the money for such a purpose. Meanwhile a Punjabi list had to be organized for Henri’s publishing house, and I promised to suggest six books for it: three classics and three modern novels.

‘I wish we could simply call it Naughty School for Girls,’ said Zaynab with a gleam in her eyes after Henri had left. ‘But I fear that might be misunderstood by some of our bearded friends.’

DEAR DARA, I’VE ATTACHED Jindié’s report, as promised, on her first three months in Beijing and a trip to Yunnan. I’m now quite hopeful that all will be well in the long run. Remember that song you and Jindié would play all the time when you visited our house: Muddy Waters singing ‘Everything’s Gonna Be All Right’? The music of my life is more organized than that, but I’m singing again. The attachment accompanying this e-mail I have been compelled to edit, since it would fill a book on its own, and so I have left out long descriptions of Beijing, a satirical account — whose ferocity both surprised and delighted me — of Jindié’s visit to the Ethnic Culture Theme Park, entered from a detour off the Fourth Ring Road, of which road, too, she has much to say. Jindié’s daily impressions of Beijing and her lyrical description of Dali and Yunnan deserve to be and will, no doubt, be published on their own, though not in the National Geographic , since there is not a trace of exoticism in what she writes. Without altering or adorning the simple style of her prose, I have merely shortened the text to concentrate on the development of the characters we already know and the appearance of others necessary to our story.

All best,

Your old friend Confucius.

Dear Dara,

I did not return to Beijing with my brother, but spent a few days in London first preparing for the journey. Zahid knew a number of neurologists and we met two of them together. They pointed out that in memory lapses, it is normally old memories that have been submerged; whether or not they can be brought back to the surface depends on the person concerned: They were impressed by Hanif’s (please accept the use of this name even though you and other friends always think of him as Confucius) total recall of Punjabi, and one of the neurologists said he had not encountered a case of this sort before. He advised us to constantly call Hanif by his name when speaking Punjabi and Chinese. The recall of Punjabi, both of them stressed, was a sign of a submerged memory. It would take time and patience.