I want to interrupt him and ask him how that is different from when the sweepers are not on strike, but I hear a scraping sound on my dungeon’s door.
I am quite amazed at the speed and accuracy with which I replace the brick in the wall. I am ready to get out of this black hole. I am certain that Major Kiyani’s little game has come to an end. He might be General Akhtar’s personal pet but his leash can’t be this long. I am looking forward to cleaning my teeth, getting into a fresh uniform and above all feeling the sun’s rays piercing my eyes.
The only light I see is a tunnel of brightness that blinds me momentarily as the door opens slightly. The only thing I see is a hand pushing in a stainless-steel plate. Before I can get up, greet the person behind the door, receive or send a message, snatch his gun and take him hostage or beg him for a cigarette, the door is shut again and the room is dark and full of the smell of hot food.
You want freedom and they give you chicken korma.
FOURTEEN
General Zia Ul-Haq picked up the photocopied clipping marked New York Times from the stack of his morning papers and sighed. There she was again: Blind Zainah, her head and face draped in a white dupatta, a cheap pair of plastic sunglasses covering her eyes. He knew it was her before he read the caption under her picture, even before he saw the headline: BLIND JUSTICE IN THE LAND OF THE PURE.
The mornings had become unbearable since the First Lady stopped serving him breakfast. With her at the table, he could at least vent his frustration over the day’s headlines by shouting at her. These days, sitting alone at the twenty-four-seat dining table, he looked like a librarian from hell; he picked a paper, underlined the bad news, made circles around any good bits, jabbed at the pictures of the opposition leaders and flung the paper towards the duty waiter who lurked in a corner desperately hoping that at least some of the news was good.
What was wrong with the Western press? Why were they so obsessed with sex and women? This was the third story in the international press about Blind Zainab. A simple case of unlawful fornication had been turned into an international issue. Why? General Zia wondered. Maybe because the woman was blind, he thought, because she wasn’t much to look at. Trust Americans to devote front-page space to fornicating blind women. Perverts.
General Zia remembered the NYT reporter who had interviewed him: all ballpen-chewing reverence about how he had never met such an erudite leader in the whole Muslim world. General Zia had talked to him for two hours, gifted him a small Persian carpet and walked him out to the porch after the interview. He did remember the reporter asking about the blind woman’s case and he had given his standard reply. “The matter is in the court. Would you ask the President of the United States about a criminal case being heard in a US court?”
He looked at the picture again. He had never quite believed that this woman was blind. Blind people don’t get their photos published on the front pages of American papers. He adjusted his reading glasses, read the story carefully and realised it wasn’t all bad. He was described as a ‘smiling dictator’, “a man with impeccable manners’, “a man who told jokes about himself’, “a man who talked openly and frankly in fluent English but refused to discuss the blind woman’s case”. The relief didn’t last long as he put the article aside and found another clipping from the New York Times” editorial page: a two-paragraph piece, again titled ‘Blind Justice”. He knew that the negative editorials in US papers meant the owners of these papers were out to get you and they were probably doing it at the behest of their government in Washington. He underlined the words barbaric, wily dictator, our government’s fundamentalist friend who is relentlessly marching his country back in time. With every word that he underlined, his blood pressure went up. His left eye twitched. He looked at the top of the editorial page and underlined the name Arthur Sulzberger. He picked up the phone and called his Information Minister, who had set up the interview and thus saved his job after the widows fiasco.
“What kind of name is Sulzberger?” he asked, dropping his customary greeting (How are you and how are the wife and kids?).
The Information Minister was a bit hazy. “Sir, forgive my ignorance but I haven’t heard the name.”
“Did I ask you whether you know this person? All I am asking is this: what kind of name is it? Is it Christian, Jewish, Hindu?”
“I am not sure, sir. It sounds German.”
“I know some newspapers call you Disinformation Minister, but you don’t have to take that title so seriously. Find out and let me know before the evening prayers.” He slammed down the phone.
The Information Minister’s first port of call was his own monitoring desk, which maintained files on all correspondents, editors and publishers. They had never heard the name. He called up a local reporter who had shown him his NYT card many times, but it turned out that this guy worked as a stringer for the NYT’s regional stringer and had never heard the name.
Reluctantly, very reluctantly, the Information Minister passed the request on to the information cell in the Inter Services Intelligence. He knew that it would be fed back to General Zia and he’d be asked why the country needed an Information Minister if the intelligence agencies had to do all his dirty work.
When the ISI told him politely in mid-afternoon that they had nothing on Arthur Sulzberger, his frustration resulted in the cancellation of publishing permits for two local film magazines. Then a flash of brilliance: the New York Times was in New York. He slapped his forehead and called up Pakistan’s press attache in New York, who didn’t have an answer but was confident that he’d find out in half an hour as he had excellent contacts in the NYT newsroom. The press attache called up a friendly Pakistani cab driver who he knew read every word in every paper and always alerted him to any stories about Pakistan.
“Sulzberger,” the cab driver shouted into his cab phone, jumping a Manhattan traffic light. “Sulzberger…that Jew.”
The information travelled from his cab to the Pakistani consulate in New York, reached the Information Ministry in Islamabad over a secure teleprinter and five minutes before his deadline the Information Minister received a note marked ‘Classified’.
The owner of the New York Times was a Jew.
General Zia heard it with a sense of relief. He knew in his guts when he was right. He shouted at the Information Minister: “What are you waiting for? Put out a press release and tell them all this fuss about that blind woman is Jewish propaganda. And next time we go to America invite Sulzberger for lunch. Take a large Persian carpet for him.”
At the end of such a hectic day at the office the Information Minister couldn’t bring himself to tell the General that he had issued the press release about Jewish propaganda first thing in the morning. His office had standard operating procedures when it came to rebutting negative stories about General Zia. These were divided into two categories: Jewish and Hindu propaganda. And since the story had appeared in the New York Times, you couldn’t really put it on the Hindu propaganda pile.
General Zia knew that Arnold Raphel wouldn’t help, but called him up anyway. The ambassador had, of course, seen the interview.
“Some nice quotes,” he said, trying to cheer General Zia up.