It is at this point, taking his first step on the red carpet and chaperoning a dozen confused generals towards Pak One that General Zia feels the first pang of an intense, dry pain in his lower abdomen.
The army of tapeworms, sensing a sudden surge in his blood circulation, begins to wake from their slumber. The tapeworms feel ravenous. A tapeworm’s average age is seven years and it spends its entire life searching for and consuming food. The life cycle of this generation begins on a very lucky note. Climbing up from his rectum, they attack the liver first. They find it healthy and clean, the liver of a man who has not touched a drop of alcohol in twenty years and has quit smoking nine years earlier.
His innards taste like the innards of a man who has had food tasters taste every morsel that he ate for an entire decade. Having worked through his liver, the army starts to make a tunnel in his oesophagus and keeps moving up and up.
Their seven-year life cycle would be cut down to twenty minutes, but while they were alive, they would eat well.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Pak One is a palace compared to the C130 that flew us here. It’s got air conditioning. The floor smells of lemony disinfectants. We are sitting behind the VIP pod, in proper seats with armrests. There is even a waiter in a white turban offering us iced Coca-Cola in plastic glasses. This is the good life, I tell myself. I am poking Obaid in his ribs with my elbow, trying to point towards the cargo lift that’s depositing a stack of crates through the plane’s ramp. Obaid has got his nose buried in the book. He doesn’t even glance towards me. Warrant Officer Fayyaz’s bald head appears from behind the stack of wooden crates. Elaborate messages have been stencilled in blue ink on the crates. “The mangoes that we present you are not just seasonal fruits, they are tokens of our love, a sign of our devotion.” All Pakistan Mango Farmers Cooperative is stencilled in bold letters on all the crates. Secretary General’s fellow travellers are still playing their double game. Warrant Officer Fayyaz secures the crates to the floor of the plane with a plastic belt and gives the belt a forceful shake to see if it is secure. It is.
As the ramp door on the aircraft comes up and creaks shut, the cabin is suddenly full of the overwhelming smell of mangoes. One mango’s smell is nice, the smell of a tonne of them can induce nausea. Fayyaz looks through me as if he had never tried to molest me. Major Kiyani is standing with his back reclined against the VIP pod as if he expects to be invited in at any time. He seems strait jacketed in a uniform a size too small. I give Obaid another nudge in the ribs. “Look at his feet.” Obaid glances at him impatiently. “He is wearing slippers. So? At least he has started wearing a uniform. One thing at a time.” He buries his nose in his book again. Major Kiyani comes towards me and stares at my face as if he has suddenly remembered that he has seen me somewhere but doesn’t quite know what to say to me. I vacate my seat. “Sir, why don’t you sit here?” He almost falls into the seat as if his knees have refused to carry his weight. Warrant Officer Fayyaz shouts from behind the mango crates. “I’ll have to offload you, Under Officer. We are not allowed to carry standing passengers on Pak One.” I have half a mind to squash his head with a mango crate, but two bearded commandos manning the C13O door are already looking at me suspiciously. “Let’s go, Obaid,” I say, moving towards the door without looking at him, feeling as if I have been ejected from my ringside seat at General Zia’s deathbed. From the door I look back and Obaid waves his book towards me and at the same time mouths what to me sounds like: “I am about to finish.”
I give him a scornful look, nod towards Major Kiyani who has slumped in his chair with his eyes closed, tip my peaked cap to the commandos on the door and shout, “Enjoy your VVIP flight.”
“Brother Raphel, you have not had lunch with us,” General Zia says in a complaining voice and takes Arnold Raphel’s hand in both his hands and starts walking towards Pak One. “I know you were taking a siesta with Jesus and Mary.” General Zia puts an arm around his waist and lowers his voice to a whisper. “Now we must put our heads together and suck national security.” Arnold Raphel, still reeling from his spiritual encounter with the Carmelite sisters and their singing orphans, thinks General Zia is cracking a joke.
Arnold Raphel looks towards his Cessna, his mind races through a list of excuses, but by the time he reaches something starting with Nancy, General Zia’s arm is around his waist and he is marching him up the ladder into Pak One.
General Akhtar buries his face in his hands and looks down through his fingers at the fluffy white carpet on the floor of the VIP pod. He notices a thin streak of blood crawling towards him. He traces it to its source and sees that General Zia’s shiny oxfords are oozing blackish red blood. He panics and looks at his own shoes. They are spotless. Suddenly a ray of hope, faint but a ray of hope nonetheless, penetrates the doom engulfing his soul. Maybe the Shigri boy has inflicted an inner wound and Zia is bleeding to death. Maybe the plane will get to Islamabad safely. Maybe he’ll have to rewrite his speech, just changing the lines about an unfortunate accident to President’s sudden demise. Would he be ready to take over the country if the plane makes it to Islamabad? General Akhtar suddenly remembers a long-forgotten prayer from his childhood and starts to mutter it. Then halfway through his prayer, lie changes his mind and lunges towards the VIP pod’s door. “Major Kiyani, tell the crew to keep the air condi-toning off, the President is not feeling too well.”
“By jingo, I am dandy,” General Zia protests, then looks down at the puddle of blood around his shoes on the carpet, but like a junkie in denial, he refuses to make a connection between the grinding pain in his abdomen, the fluid trickling down his pants and the streak of blackish-red blood on the carpet. He decides he needs to change the subject. He wants to take the conversation to a higher level so that nobody would notice the blood on the floor. He knows that the only person he can rely on is Arnold Raphel.
The C130’s doors secured, the pilot move his throttles forward and the four propellers start picking up speed. General Zia looks towards Arnold Raphel and says to him in a pleading voice, “We’ll buy those tanks. What a sensitive machine have you built. But first, tell me how will history remember me.” The voices in the VIP pod are being drowned out by the din of the aeroplane. Arnold Raphel thinks General Zia is asking him about the target sensors on the Abram One tank. Arnold Raphel, Carmelite orphans’ hymns still ringing in his head, loses his cool for a moment and gives the first and the last undiplomatic statement of his life. “No, Mr President, they are as useless as tits on a boar.”
General Zia can’t believe what Arnold Raphel just said: the world would remember him as a bit of a bore.
In a moment of panic General Zia feels that he must rectify this historical misconception. There is no way he was going to go down in the textbooks as the President who ruled this country of one hundred and thirty million people for eleven years, laid the foundations of the first modern Islamic state, brought about the end of communism but was a bit of a bore. He must tell them a joke, he decides. Hundreds of hilarious one-liners that he has tested in his cabinet meetings run through his mind and blur into one endless cosmic joke. He rehearses one in his head. He knows that jokes are all about timing. “What did the seventy houris say when they were told that they would spend the eternity with General Zia in paradise?” He can’t remember the houris’ exact words. There was something about being condemned to hell for eternity but it’s dangerous to tell a joke if you can’t get your punchline right. Then a flash of genius. He must tell a family joke. He wants to be remembered as a witty man. But he also wants to be remembered as a family man.