“Tarzan, people are asking about you. You better start talking before their goodwill runs out. It would take me less than a minute to iron the truth out of you but then you would never want to take your clothes off in front of anyone. I am sure even you can’t live with that.”
Then he turns towards another soldier who has followed him into the room.
“Put some clothes on him and take him to the VIP room.”
TWELVE
Clutching the rolled-up newspaper in both hands, the First Lady walked across the lawns of the Army House, ignoring the duty gardener who lifted his head from a rose bush and raised his soiled hand to his forehead to offer her salaam. As she approached the main gate of the Army House, the duty guards stepped out of their cabin, opened the gate and got ready to follow her. She waved the newspaper at the guards without looking up, signalling them to stay at their post. They saluted and returned to their cabin. The standard procedures for Security Code Red that the guards were following didn’t say anything about the First Lady’s movements.
She couldn’t remember the last time she had walked through the gate. She always went out in a mini-convoy of two outriders, her own black Mercedes-Benz followed by an open-top jeep full of armed commandos. The road under her feet looked like an abandoned runway, neat and endless. She had never noticed the ancient trees that lined the road on both sides. With their whitewashed trunks and branches laden with dozing sparrows, they seemed like the backdrop for a ghost story. She was surprised when nobody stopped her at the entrance to the Camp Office adjacent to the Army House, where her husband was busy playing the President.
“Get in the bloody queue,” a voice shouted at her, and she found herself standing at the end of a long queue of women, all middle-aged or old, all covered in white dupattas. She could tell from their faces that they were poor but had made the effort to dress up for the occasion. Their cotton shalwar qameez suits were neat and pressed; some had dusted their cheeks and necks with talcum powder. She noticed at least two shades of red nail polish. The First Lady could see her husband at the other end of the queue; teeth flashing, moustache doing its little dance for the television camera, the middle parting in his oiled hair glinting under the sun.
He was distributing white envelopes and as he handed over the envelopes he patted the women’s heads as if they were not poor women getting some much needed cash but schoolchildren at a morning assembly receiving consolation prizes from their headmaster. The First Lady thought of barging forward and confronting him in front of the television crew. She thought of unfurling the newspaper in front of the camera and giving a speech, telling the world that this Man of Faith, the Man of Truth, this Friend of the Widows was nothing but a tit-ogler.
It was only a passing whim, because she realised not only that her speech would never make it to the nation’s television screens, it would also start some ugly rumours in Islamabad which would circulate to the four corners of the country before the day ended: that the First Lady was a lunatic who felt jealous of the poor widows her husband was trying to help. She thought of opening the newspaper and showing the picture to the other women in the queue, but realised that they would think she was overreacting. “What is wrong with a president talking to white women?” they’d ask. “All presidents do that.”
She looked at the long line of women ahead of her, pulled her dupatta over her forehead tightly and decided to wait patiently in the queue, inching forward as the women in the queue moved towards their benefactor. Her hands kept rolling the newspaper into a tighter and tighter cone. The woman in front of the First Lady had been eyeing her suspiciously since she joined the queue. She looked at the First Lady’s diamond ring, her gold earrings, her mother-of-pearl necklace and hissed. “Did your husband leave you all this jewellery, or did you have to kill him to get it?”
With General Zia refusing to leave the Army House even for state functions because of Code Red, his Information Minister was running out of indoor ideas to keep his boss in the television news headlines. When General Zia ordered him to slot in some prime time for the President’s Rehabilitation Programme for Widows, the Information Minister was reluctant at first. “But we always do that during Ramadan, sir,” the Information Minister had muttered apologetically. He was not sure where to get hold of so many widows at this time of the year.
“Is there a law in this country which prohibits me from helping poor people in the month of June?” General Zia shouted back at him. “Has there been an economic survey that says our widows need help during Ramadan but not tomorrow morning?”
The Information Minister crossed his hands at his crotch and shook his head enthusiastically. “It’s a brilliant idea, sir. It would be a nice change for the news agenda. People are losing interest in all the talk about the Soviets going home and our Afghan mujahideen shooting at each other.”
“And make sure that the hundred-rupee notes are new. Those old women love the smell of fresh currency.”
The orders went out to the Ministry of Social Welfare to produce three hundred properly dressed widows for the ceremony. The cashiers at the State Bank clocked up overtime stuffing new one-hundred rupee notes into three hundred white envelopes. A press release was sent out announcing that the President would distribute alms to the deserving widows. The Information Minister drafted an additional note which would be released to the editors after the ceremony. It said that the President mingled with the widows and their courage brought tears to his eyes.
In the morning, a convoy of buses deposited two hundred and forty-three women at the Army House guardroom. The officials at the Department of Social Affairs, despite their best efforts, had not been able to round up the required number of genuine widows and at the last moment had roped in some of their female staff, their friends and relatives.
A panicked major on guard duty called Brigadier TM and told him that there were hundreds of women waiting to get into the Camp Office. He had no means of body-searching them as there were no women police on duty and according to the Code Red standard operating procedures he couldn’t let them in without a proper body search.
“Hold them there,” Brigadier TM said, abruptly, terminating his morning exercise regime of five hundred push-ups. He jumped into his jeep, buckling on his holster with one hand.
The women milled outside the gate of the Army House. Some of them who had attended these ceremonies before threatened the duty guards and said they would complain to the President. “We are his guests, not some beggars off the road. He invited us.” The guards, getting more jittery by the moment, were relieved when Brigadier TM jumped out of his jeep and ordered the women to line up in three rows.
For Brigadier TM, an all-women gathering was a security nightmare even when he wasn’t implementing Code Red. All those loose shalwar qameez dresses, all the flowing dupattas, the bags, the jewellery that sent the metal detectors wild and then the bloody burqas! How did you know they weren’t carrying a rocket launcher beneath that tent? How did you even know they were women? Brigadier TM put his foot down straight away on the issue of widows in burqas. He sent for the Information Minister, who was supervising the camera crew on the lawns of the Camp Office. “I know these burqas look good on television and I know the President likes them but our security level is red and I can’t allow in any ninjas whose faces I can’t see.”
The Information Minister, always reasonable when it came to dealing with men in uniform, promptly agreed and ordered the women in burqas to board the bus and leave. Their loud protests and at least one offer to take off the burqa were ignored. Then Brigadier TM turned his attention to the remaining women, now subdued after seeing what had happened to their sisters.