The first thing that shocked the First Lady about the picture was the amount of flesh oozing out of the white woman’s blouse. She immediately knew that the woman was wearing one of those new bras with wire construction that pushed the breasts up, making them seem bigger. Many of the other generals’ wives wore these bras, but at least they had the decency to wear proper shirts that didn’t show any flesh, only hinted at their enhanced shape. The woman in the picture was wearing a blouse cut so low that half her breasts were out, pushed up and pressed together so closely that the diamond on her necklace was resting on the cusp of her cleavage.
And then, there was her husband, the Man of Truth, the Man of Faith, the man who lectured women on piety on prime-time TV, the man who had fired judges and television newscasters who refused to wear a dupatta on their heads, the man who made sure that two pillows could not be shown together on an empty bed in a television drama, the man who made cinema owners blot out any bare legs or arms of actresses from the film posters; the same man was sitting there staring at these globes of white flesh with such single-mindedness that it seemed as if his own wife had been born without a pair.
The caption said innocuously: The President being interviewed by the famous foreign correspondent Joanne Herring.
Interview my foot, she thought. It seemed that it wasn’t Ms Herring interviewing him, but General Zia interrogating her breasts. She put the paper aside, drank a glass of water, thought of their thirty-four years together, reminded herself of her five grown-up children, of their youngest daughter still to be married. For a moment she doubted what her eyes had just seen and picked up the paper again. There was no mistaking this. It was not the kind of thing where you can write a letter to the editor and demand a correction. General Zia’s eyes, normally crossed, the right one looking in one direction while the left one wandered away to take in something else, were for once focused in the same direction, on the same objects. The angle of his stare was so obvious that if she drew two lines with a pencil, they would connect the iris of his eyes straight to the two white spheres pushed up and pulled together.
She tried to remember what this woman was wearing last time she saw her. She remembered very clearly what her husband had looked like when he saw this woman last time.
The First Lady had started to suspect that her husband was up to something when he asked her to pack his old safari suit for their US visit. Her suspicions deepened when she was told that their first stop would not be Washington DC or New York but Lufkin, Texas, where they were to attend a charity ball. Jeddah, Bejing, Dubai, London, she could understand. These were regular stops for General Zia. But Lufkin? Safari suit? The old man was definitely up to something fishy, the First Lady had thought, checking his beige-coloured, polyester safari suit for any missing buttons.
General Zia had abolished all types of Western dress from his wardrobe except for military uniforms. He always wore a black sherwani for state occasions and, taking their cue from him, the bureaucrats had all started wearing minor variations of the same dress. The more adventurous ones experimented with cuts and colours, and occasionally their headgear, but basically stuck to what General Zia had started calling the National Dress. But like all men of principle, General Zia was always ready to make an exception for a higher cause. And if the cause was a fund-raiser for Afghan jihad, then no principle was sacred enough.
The charity ball in Lufkin was being hosted by Joanne Herring, prime-time news anchor on Lufkin Community Television and Pakistan’s Honorary Ambassador to the United States; an appointment made after her four-hour-long, soul-searching interview with General Zia. Joanne was on a mission to rid the world of evil but she insisted on having fun while doing it.
And God, Lufkin could do with a bit of exotic fun.
Contrary to popular belief, oil millionaires in Lufkin have dull lives. Their political influence is marginal and only very few of them enjoy the wheeler-dealers’ lifestyle that the media outside Lufkin likes to project. Their ten-thousand-dollar donation to their local Congressman gets them a letter signed by an aide in the White House. Those with deeper pockets can splash out one hundred thousand dollars and get invited to the annual prayer breakfast with Ronald Reagan in Washington DC where the President joins them for the prayer from the podium for fifteen minutes and then leaves them to their tepid porridge and coffee. So the arrival of a president — even if this was the President of Pakistan, a country they knew nothing about — and the fact that the man was not only a president but a four-star general, the chief of the largest Muslim army in the world and one of the seven men standing between the Soviet Red Army and the Free World, as their favourite news anchor reminded them every day, meant it was time to dispatch their tuxedos and ball gowns to the dry cleaner’s.
Joanne had started using Pakistan’s flag as the backdrop for her show in the run-up to the ball. The creme de la creme of the East Texan community and would-be supporters of the jihad against the Soviets were sent invitation cards carrying a picture of a dead Afghan child (caption: Better dead than red). Others showed a nameless Afghan mujahid in an old shawl with a rocket launcher on his shoulder (caption: Your ten dollars can help him bring down a Russian Hind helicopter). “Now, don’t that fry your tater? Ain’t that the bargain of the century?” Joanne had followed her invitation with enthusiastic phonecalls, turning the small Texan town into a base camp for the Afghan mujahideen, fighting six thousand miles away.
The Holiday Inn in the city of Lufkin christened its fourth floor the Presidential Floor. Joanne had provided them with a Pakistani flag and an audiotape of Quran recitation that was promptly forwarded to their meat supplier to be played as the slaughter started. The President would get his halal meat. The waiters were taught to say their salaam in Urdu.
Despite these efforts, when General Zia’s convoy pulled into the porch of the Holiday Inn he was disappointed to see only a small office-like structure with a Pakistani flag flying over it. He installed the First Lady in the Presidential Suite. She complained about the size of the bedroom, the complimentary toiletries in the bathroom and really lost her cool when she asked hotel reception to connect her to the Army House and she was put through to the local Salvation Army store.
General Zia, meanwhile, changed into his safari suit with some difficulty. His stomach stuck out like a football and his safari shirt could barely contain it. He mumbled something about meeting an important Texan senator, picked up his briefcase and went to another room on the same floor, bearing a sign that said ‘Presidential Office’. He did feel that the hotel was beneath his status. He himself was a humble man who needed only a cot and a prayer mat, but heads of state needed to stay in proper presidential hotels in order not to lose their sense of purpose. He needed to maintain the honour of his country, but he could hardly bring up this hotel business with Joanne after all she had done for his country and the Afghan cause.
He put his briefcase on the desk, picked up the hotel stationery pad and tried to calm his pounding heart by scribbling on the paper. His host, his comrade in struggle, Joanne, would be here shortly and just thinking about what she might be wearing, what she would smell like, made him nervous. A stream of perspiration ran down his spine. To distract himself, he tried to make notes for his speech at the charity balclass="underline"