As I am dialling the last two digits my nose catches the faint smell of Dunhill. My first thought is that some cheeky bugger is smoking in the sickbay. My morale gets a boost with the thought that I can probably get a cigarette off him after I finish the phone call.
The phone is answered on the second ring. The operator, used to receiving too many calls, replies in a neutral tone; he will only decide what to do with me after he can identify my rank, and can establish my status in the scheme of things.
“Asslam u alaikum, Army House,” the operator says, and the shock of being connected to that place is mixed with relief that the operator seems to be a civilian. It’s usually easy to impress them.
“Khan sahib,” I start. “I’m a relative of General Zia. I know you can’t put me through to him, but can you take an urgent message?”
“Your name, sir?”
“Under Officer Ali Shigri. Son of Colonel Quli Shigri. The late Colonel Shigri.” I always find this the hard part, but the name works and I suddenly feel I am being listened to. Not that he actually believes that I am related to the General, but he has obviously heard of Colonel Shigri. Who in the Army House doesn’t know the late Colonel Shigri?
“Do you have a pen and paper?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Write: Colonel Quli Shigri’s son called. He gives his respects. He gives his salaam. Did you get that? Salaam.”
“Yes, sir.”
“He says that he wants to pass on some very important, very urgent information about the missing plane. It’s a matter…did you get that?”
He replies in the affirmative and I think hard about an attention-grabbing end to my message: My only friend in the world is in danger. If you guys have him, be nice to him. I have some top CIA info that I can’t trust anyone with. Save my ass.
“It’s a matter of national security,” I say. “He must get this directly from you.”
I smell the Dunhill smoke in the room before I hear the voice. I would recognise it from my coffin.
“Under Officer Ali?”
The fact that the voice has used my first name makes me put the phone down abruptly.
Major Kiyani of the Inter Services Intelligence is standing in the doorway, one hand leaning on the frame, the other holding the cigarette in front of his chest. He is in civvies. He is always in civvies. A cream-coloured silk shalwar qameez, neatly pressed, his gelled hair glistening under the bulb’s light, a curl carefully arranged in the middle of his forehead where his burly eyebrows meet.
I have never seen him in uniform. I am not even sure whether he has one or knows how to wear one. I saw him for the first time at Dad’s funeral; his cheeks were slightly sunken and his eyes seemed sincere. But then there were so many people there and I had assumed he was just another one of Dad’s disciples swarming around our house, fixing things, taking care of his papers.
“I realise that it’s very painful for you, but the Colonel would have wanted this done quickly,” he had said, dabbing his eyes with a white hankie, after we deposited Dad’s flag-draped coffin under his favourite apple tree on Shigri Hill.
In ten minutes he had drafted a statement on my behalf and made me sign it. The statement said that as the only male member of the family, I didn’t want an autopsy, I didn’t suspect foul play and I had found no suicide note.
“Call me if you ever need anything,” he had said and left without giving me a phone number. I never needed anything. Not from him.
“I see you are all dressed up and ready to go,” he says.
With people like Major Kiyani there are no identification cards, no arrest warrants, no pretence at doing something legal or for your own good. There is a cruel stillness about him. The stillness of a man who lights up in a hospital room and doesn’t even look around for something to use as an ashtray.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“Somewhere we can talk.” His cigarette makes a directionless wave in the air. “This place is full of sick people.”
“Am I under arrest?”
“Don’t be so dramatic.”
A Toyota Corolla without a number plate is parked outside, a white, early-1988 model. It is still not available on the market. The car is gleaming and spotless white, with matching starched cotton seat covers. As he starts the car I realise we are headed out, out of here, somewhere not very close, somewhere not very pleasant.
I am already missing my dorm, my Silent Drill Squad, even 2nd OIC’s sad, tired jibes.
The car is very empty. Major Kiyani doesn’t carry a briefcase or a file or a weapon. I look hungrily at his packet of cigarettes and gold lighter lying on the dashboard in front of him. He sits back, his hands resting lightly on the steering wheel, ignoring me. I study his pink, manicured fingers, the fingers of a man who has never had to do any real work. One look at his skin and you can tell he has been fed on a steady diet of bootleg Scotch whisky, chicken korma and an endless supply of his agency’s safe-house whores. Look into his sunken cobalt-blue eyes and you can tell he is the kind of man who picks up a phone, makes a long-distance call and a bomb goes off in a crowded bazaar. He probably waits outside a house at midnight in his Corolla with its headlights switched off while his men climb the wall and rearrange the lives of some hapless civilians. Or, as I know from personal experience, he appears quietly at funerals after accidental deaths and unexplained suicides and wraps things up with a neat little statement, takes care of any loose ends, saves you the agony of autopsies and the foreign press speculating about decorated colonels swinging from ceiling fans. He is a man who runs the world with a packet of Dunhills, a gold lighter and an unregistered car.
He reaches into his glove compartment and starts rummaging for a tape.
“Asha or Lata?” he asks.
I see a palm-sized holster and the ivory handle of a grey metal pistol and suddenly feel at ease. The presence of a gun in the glove compartment justifies this journey. He can take me wherever he wants to take me.
To tell you the truth I really can’t tell the difference between Lata and Asha. They are old, fat, ugly Indian sisters who both sing like they were teenage sex kittens. One probably sounds sexier than the other, I can never tell. But across the country battle lines are drawn between those who like Asha and those who like Lata. Tea or coffee? Coke or Pepsi? Maoist or Leninist? Shia or Sunni?
Obaid used to say it’s all very simple. It all depends on how you are feeling and how you would rather feel. That was the most fucked-up thing I ever heard.
“Lata,” I say.
He says I have got my dad’s good taste and inserts a tape into the player. It’s a male folk singer singing a ghazal, something about erecting a wall in the desert so that no one can bother the wandering lovers.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “We know you are from a good family.”
SIX
One person in Islamabad hoping to improve the quality of his life after General Zia’s disappearance from public life was a newly married, balding, forty-five-year-old diplomat, a man who would not live to celebrate his forty-third birthday.
Arnold Raphel was washing a bunch of arugula in his kitchen, a part of the house he was not very familiar with. Like any US ambassador’s kitchen, it was designed for a team of chefs, waiters and their helpers, not for the brightest star in the State Department trying to prepare a supper for two. Arnold Raphel wanted to surprise his wife Nancy, referred to as Cupcake in moments of intimacy, by giving her a Foggy Bottom evening in Islamabad. He had asked the domestic staff to take the evening off, ordered his communication room to reroute all important calls to the First Secretary’s residence and shut the doors to his vast drawing rooms, dining halls and guest suites. On her return from her weekly tennis game, Nancy would find that there were just the two of them, in their own living area, no servants milling about waiting for dinner instructions. For one evening they would live the life of a newly married couple; an early supper just like they used to have in their two-bedroom condo in Washington and then spontaneous love-making after watching the Redskins triumph over the Green Bay Packers in a crucial NFL play-off.