Tariq Ali: Night of the Golden Butterfly

‘Did they hang him?’

‘What world do you live in? He was released three months later. His lawyer argued it was an “honour killing”, and the judge was paid in advance. Ahmed now lives peacefully with his new wife. The two boys have been sent off to a cadet college and will soon become young army officers. I don’t speak to the dog, but occasionally I indulge in obscene language to express my solidarity with his late wife. Do you believe me?’

‘No.’

‘It’s true. Your old friend Zahid loves being abused anyway. Makes him feel he’s back home. How was the butterfly?’

‘Reserved and dignified as always. More than I can say for you. What do you want of me?’

‘Could you write a long essay about me?’

‘Your paintings?’

‘Yes, but more about my life. She wants it and I can’t deny her anything.’

‘How old is she?’

‘Fifty-two.’

‘Not bad. Only twenty-seven years younger than you. I was hoping she might be one of your younger models. When did her husband die?’

‘Who told you it was dead? It will never die. It’s still alive and present. In fact she keeps it close to her bed.’

‘What?’

‘Prepare yourself for a surprise, Mr Dara. My Zaynab is married to the Koran.’

‘Allah help us.’

‘He never does, as we know.’

‘So she’s the daughter of some Sindhi feudal engaged in sordid calculations about his property.’

Plato was overcome by a fit of bitter laughter. ‘Yes, but in her case it was the brother, not the father, who forced her to marry the Holy Book. He must have made a lot of money selling her share of the land. It’s not that old age has made him generous. He dropped dead a few years ago. The younger brother adores Zaynab. He bought her an apartment in Clifton overlooking the sea. She wanted to buy one of my paintings. I showed her a selection. She bought them all. Then I did an imagined portrait of her on her wedding night. That made her laugh so much that I fell in love. Can you imagine?’

I could, but Plato still wanted to go through it in great detail and I didn’t stop him. I preferred Plato in love to Plato melancholic, filled with whisky-soaked despair and suicidal. He preferred living on the edge and in a way his love for Zaynab fell into that category. For the ignorant she was the equivalent of a Catholic nun, except that she was wed to the Koran, not Jesus. The tradition refused to die out. To become her lover was to defy heaven and become a passionate sinner. I was sure that her marital status was the turn-on. Plato paid no heed to official morality, took great pleasure in defying public opinion and enjoyed startling his conformist contemporaries. His life and his paintings reflected these feelings.

He recounted in some detail how the first meeting had been brief, but profitable. He described her clothes, the colour of her hair underneath the diaphanous dupatta . The way her eyes changed colour and so on. She summoned him a week later to explain the allegorical side of his work. Then he asked her to pose for him. She did so fully clothed, but he painted her lying naked in her bed waiting for her Holy Book — husband. He said the picture was inspired by Magritte, but if it were ever shown in public he would be DD’d (disembowelled and decapitated) by some fanatic. I challenged this assertion. Given that the grotesque practice of Koran-marriage was regularly denounced as un-Islamic by every clerical faction in Fatherland and had even united Shia and Wahhabi, surely it was the men in these families who should be DD’d for misusing the Holy Book to safeguard their property.

I thought my logic was impeccable, but Plato ignored me and continued with his story. Zaynab, he said, was not a virgin. I sighed with relief. The advantage of this type of marriage, she had told him, was that there was no need to dissemble. Every pretty woman Zaynab knew in Fatherland had a husband, and quite a few in addition to a husband had a lover as well and, as an extra, another person to keep her from getting too bored during the day. Talk like this had entranced Plato. He was still gripped by madness, torment and joy, the process clinically described by Stendhal in Love as ‘crystallization’.

‘Plato, are you living in her apartment?’

‘Why not? She pretends I’m her cook-butler-chauffeur, and whenever her friends or relations visit I act the part, as I once did for you and the Golden Butterfly.’

None of his obsessions with women had ever lasted very long, and I enquired gently how long he gave Zaynab.

‘Listen, catamite… sorry, that slipped out by mistake. Zaynab will make sure my body is bathed and enshrouded before the burial. I’m too old to move on anywhere now. Will you tell my story and hers?’

‘Yes to yours, but I don’t know her at all.’

‘She’s coming to your town next month. You’ll meet her.’

‘Are you coming, too?’

‘How can the cook-chauffeur travel abroad with the lady? Her friends aren’t that stupid.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong, Plato. They are stupid. Your photograph has been in Dawn . Your paintings have featured on television, and none of them recognized you?’

‘Servants are invisible.’

‘Till they cut their master’s throat.’

We had been speaking for three hours and now at the risk of offending him I said farewell and noted his phone number. Plato’s submissive, shy, please-ignore-me-I’m-a-nobody exterior had been carefully cultivated over the years and always worked with those who didn’t really know him. It wasn’t totally fake, or else he would have promoted his own work more energetically, but when I pushed him on this he would simply reply that if the work was any good it would last and he was not too interested in money. His attempted blackmail of me was crude and ineffective, since Zahid knew the whole story, but it was undoubtedly a sign of Plato’s desperation, his fear of dying just as he had met a woman he really liked.

Plato entered our lives almost half a century ago. Zahid and I had left our respective high schools and joined the college in Lahore, where we were blessed with a truly enlightened principal. A biologist by training, he was also a gifted Punjabi scholar and had translated some of our epics into Urdu. They were not quite the same thing in Fatherland’s shiny, ornate state language, but he had done them better than anybody else. He had also commissioned a Punjabi translation of Shakespeare. The success of The Tempest , staged the previous year, had been helped by the actor playing Caliban, who bore an unnerving resemblance to the military dictator entrusted by Washington to run Fatherland. We had returned to Lahore from the mountains in time for the Punjabi premiere of Hamlet . Expectations were high: Ophelia was being played by a very pretty Kashmiri boy called Ashraf Lone, and a number of older students who lusted after him had decided they loved the theatre. Hamlet was to be performed in the Open Air Theatre in September, when the heat had abated, the monsoon and accompanying humidity of August had retired for another year and the evenings were pleasant with the scent of jasmine and queen-of-the-night wafted by soft, refreshing breezes across the college lawns to the amphitheatre. The translator was a distinguished Punjabi poet.

A new theatrical production was a big event in the cultural life of the city. The opening night of Hamlet was attended by numerous parents and the intellectual elite of Lahore. Those with sensitive posteriors brought their own cushions to place on the circular rows of redbrick seats overlooking the stage. There was a sense of expectation, an evening away from the vulgar interests of everyday life: what could be loftier than Shakespeare translated into the language of our city by one of Fatherland’s most respected authors? The latter’s arrival at the theatre was greeted with enthusiastic applause.