“I had some landmines planted around our bunker and put up a sign: “Ho Chi Minh sucks running dogs.” To lure the enemy, you know; we did that all the time. But this gook never showed up.”
The joint was dead. Bannon lit it again and tried to remember where he was.
“So the point is, when we finally caught him, my boys wanted to make hamburger meat out of him. But I said we had to interrogate him, go by the book. It turned out he was a circus guy. You believe that? He’d travelled up to Taiwan throwing his daggers around his mama-pyjama girl. And then his eighty-year-old dad was killed working in his paddy field, just shot down in one of these raids. So this guy gave up his big-titty woman and circus tent. He didn’t join the Viet Cong, which he would have been justified in doing. He just took to the jungles with his circus dagger.” He took a deep puff and exhaled a spiral. “So there, Baby O, that’s the point of my sorry-ass tale. You can throw a knife in a circus and you can have your big-titty women and you are a fucking freak show. You can have the same knife, polish it up with a bit of purpose and you are a man. A real man, not a fucking air-con soldier like you.”
I extended my hand towards Bannon. He mimed a question with his joint. “Are you sure?”
I was very sure. Obaid looked at me with panicked eyes. Bannon handed me the joint and I took a proper puff and held it in my lungs till my eyes watered. It was between exhaling that sweet, acrid smoke and throwing up half an hour later that I got the fucked-up idea that landed me in this shithole.
TEN
As he went through the newspapers the morning after broadcasting his special address to the nation, General Zia found himself cheering up. He spread the newspapers on the dining table one by one, till the gleaming mahogany surface was covered with his pictures and his words. He put his red pencil aside, savoured his tea and gave an approving nod to the duty waiter in the corner. The thing General Zia liked about his Information Minister was that although he was a devious bastard with a fake MBA who had made a lot of money ordering useless books that never arrived at the military libraries, he knew how to handle these newspaper editors. General Zia had tried to cultivate these editors himself and found out that they were the kind of intellectuals who prayed with him devoutly then rushed off to get drunk in the hotel rooms that his government provided them, with the booze that the Information Minister bought them. And the following morning their editorials were messy transcriptions of what General Zia had told them between their prayers and the boozing sessions.
This morning, however, was different. The nation’s press had finally shown some spark. The editors had used their imagination while reporting his speech. Every newspaper had it as the banner headline. The message had gone out loud and clear. “The Battle for Our Ideological Frontiers has begun.” He was particularly pleased with the three-picture strip idea that the Pakistan Times had come up with to illustrate the main points from the extempore part of his speech. First of all I am a Muslim was the caption under a picture of him draped in a white cotton sheet with his head reclining on the black marbled wall of Khana Kaaba in Mecca. Then I am a soldier of Islam appeared under his official portrait, in which he was wearing his four-star General’s uniform. And then, as an elected head of the Muslim state, I am a servant of my people was the caption for the third picture, which showed him in his presidential dress, looking dignified in a black sherwani and his reading glasses, not imposing but authoritative, not a military ruler but a president.
Heads of state, especially the heads of state of developing countries, seldom get the time to sit back and admire their own achievements. This was one of those rare moments when General Zia could recline in his chair with the newspaper in his lap, order another cup of tea and let the collective goodwill of his one hundred and thirty million subjects engulf his body and mind. With his red pencil he jotted a note in the margin of the paper to tell the Information Minister to nominate the editor of the Pakistan Times for a national literary award. He’d also tell the Information Minister that if you speak from your heart people do listen. He decided that from now on all his speeches would include a section starting with: “My dear countrymen, now I want to say to you something from my heart.” He imagined himself at public rallies flinging his written speech away, into the crowd, the papers flying above the heads of his audience. “My fellow countrymen, I don’t want to read from a written script, I am not a puppet who would parrot page after page of words written by some Western-educated bureaucrat. I speak from my heart…” He brought his fist down on the dining table with such force that the teacup rattled, the Pakistan Times slipped off his lap and the red pencil rolled off the table. The duty waiter standing in the corner tensed up at first, then, noticing the ecstatic smile on the General’s face, relaxed and decided not to pick up the paper and pencil from the floor.
On any other day, General Zia would have read the editorials, looked for negative comments, scanned the adverts for female models not properly covered, but he was so content over the coverage of his speech, his heart was so full of tenderness for the newspapers and journalists, that he didn’t see the back page of the Pakistan Times. He missed the picture which showed him in full military regalia, golden-braided peaked cap on his head and a couple of dozen medals dangling from his chest. A silk sash with the emblems of all the armed forces crossed his torso diagonally, his hands entangled over his crotch as if trying to restrain one another, drool forming in the corner of his mouth, his eyes wide open and staring, like the eyes of a child who has wandered into a sweet shop to find its owner fast asleep.
The First Lady stayed away from newspapers. There were too many words she couldn’t make sense of and too many pictures of her husband. She herself rarely appeared in the papers and if she did she was usually attending a children’s festival or the Quran recitation competitions for women General Zia dispatched her to so she could represent the government and hand out prizes. The Information Minister sent her the clippings of these pictures and she usually hid them from General Zia because he always found fault with her appearance. If she wore make — up, he accused her of aping high-society Westernised women. If she wore no makeup, he said she looked like death, very unlike a first lady. He constantly lectured her that as the First Lady of an Islamic state, she should be a role model for other women. “Look at what Mrs Ceausescu has done for her country.”
The First Lady had never met Mrs Ceausescu and her husband never bothered to explain who she was or what she did. She did take other visiting first ladies shopping, but it was no fun because the shopkeepers either refused to take money from her or quoted her prices so low that she couldn’t even haggle. The bazaars were cleared of shoppers before her arrival and she felt as if she was on the set of a television soap opera. General Zia did encourage her from time to time to read newspapers to keep abreast of the political and social changes he was bringing about in the country, but she never bothered. “These newspapers are full of what you said and what you did and who you met. And you are always here, lounging around the house. Don’t I see enough of you that I shouldn’t have to see you staring at me from every page of every single rag?”
With such indifference to the national press it couldn’t be a coincidence that the First Lady found a copy of the Pakistan Times on her bedside table, carefully folded to reveal the picture on the back page, the picture that would destroy her faith in all men forever and result in the unceremonious sacking of the editor of the Pakistan Times.