I felt much better after Anis and I had finished our tea and sandwiches on the Shalimar terrace, but a puzzle remained. I asked Anis about the word whose use in that evening’s unpleasant finale had mystified me.
‘Do you think that semen, or tsemen as she hissed it, is an abusive term in Chinese? That would be a unique coincidence; in English it is the seed that produces life.’
‘Or not; as the case may be… you didn’t have a waking wet dream, did you? Just asking. I did wonder about that usage. I noted that she referred to you as semen at least six times in a sentence and a half, and once again later when referring to you in a conversation with Plato. Impressive. It’s a very intimate abuse. She obviously loves you. No doubt about that, but your mother is an effective opponent of all brides-to-be. She’s so judgemental. I’m afraid it’s one of her more repulsive features. My mother’s exactly the same. Surely they can’t have a semen-phobia in the People’s Republic? Never been there. We could ask the Chinese ambassador the next time he comes over for supper.’
He relapsed into deep thought and was lost to the world. I was feeling extremely low as well. Suddenly he came back to life.
‘I was thinking that the only other place where I once heard a pejorative reference to semen was in Venice. The gondoliers, as you know, are extremely competitive and on every level. They often refer to each other as boron or boroni, which is not local slang for “baron”, as assumed by the tourists, but singular and plural for “blob of sperm”, or so they told me.’
Despite my broken heart, I couldn’t help laughing. ‘When were you in Venice?’
‘We went in a school party when I was sixteen. Ten years ago. Very enjoyable trip despite the boroni.’
‘Surely because of it.’
He laughed. I saw him once again in Edinburgh and later twice in London, and then, like so many other Lahoris, he disappeared from my life completely. Occasionally a letter would arrive asking for my opinion on some book or the other that he was thinking of publishing in Urdu, followed by a long silence. Anis never married, despite his mother’s continual pressure, and never left the family house, despite the advice of all his friends. There was no shortage of money or land in the family. He simply couldn’t declare his independence. One day I got a phone call from my mother. Anis had invited some friends for dinner. When they left he had prolonged the farewell and waxed ultrasentimental about friendship, which should have alerted them, since it was out of character, but nobody thought there was anything wrong. Later that night he swallowed a cyanide pill. He had left behind a note explaining why he had committed suicide. When the shaken servants summoned his mother next morning, the old widow remained calm. She looked at his body without a trace of emotion. Then she saw the note and confiscated it before the police arrived. What did you write, Anis? Why didn’t you write to any of us? Or was the letter a complaint addressed to your mother?
Playing the chauffeur all those years ago, when he drove Jindié and me to the Shalimar Gardens and both of us breathed only in sighs, was the big favour Plato did for me in return for which I promised him anything that lay within my power. That is why I am immersed in reconstructing his life. What he may not have fully realized was that in writing about him I would, of necessity, have to resuscitate the lives of others, including my own. Whatever he may think now, he did not and could not have then existed on his own.
It was more than thirty years later when I understood what Jindié had meant when she asked me to read Cao Xueqin’s Dream of the Red Chamber, the great Chinese novel of the late eighteenth century. The author tells his readers that leading a life of poverty and wretchedness has made him realize that the female friends of his youth were morally and intellectually his superiors, and so he wants to record their lives to remind himself of the golden days he carries in his heart. It is a haunting novel of life in an enclosed set of mansions occupied by a wealthy family in the service of the emperor’s court. There are five volumes known; apparently the author could not complete the story in his lifetime. The book reminded me a great deal of Jindié, even though she was probably too young when she first encountered it. Had she modelled herself on Dai-yu, the ultrasensitive beauty whose passions were hidden even from heaven? Reading the novel was an intense experience for me, partly because many of the experiences and emotions of the young people as the author describes them were familiar and made me think not only of Jindié but also of various female cousins I had left behind. The plot is centred on a group of self-absorbed young romantics attempting to ignore the collapsing edifice of the mansion they share with their elders. That, too, was not unfamiliar. Had I read the book sooner, I might have understood Jindié’s preoccupations better, but my enlightenment would always have been too late as far as she was concerned. A second novel I read had not been suggested by her but by her brother, Confucius. It was a tale written a hundred years or so before the Dream. Hugely diverting, it has to be one of the great erotic masterpieces of world literature. In Chin Ping Mei, or The Plum in the Golden Vase, every single major character is viperous and there is virtually nobody in all the three volumes that any reader can sympathize or identify with, a polar opposite to the first novels written in English and the works of Miss Austen and the Brontë sisters. Halfway through the first volume I realized that Jindié must have read some extracts from or even the whole book, and an old mystery was solved. What she had shouted at me on that memorably awful night in the pavilion of the Shalimar Gardens was not semen but Hsi-men, the name of the anti-hero around whose sexual rampaging and avarice the entire novel revolves. I stopped reading for a while when I realized this and laughed. I was slightly shocked as I thought of her yet again. She had been eighteen at the time and must have read the book in secret. Perhaps Dai-yu was not her role model after all. And then memories stirred of some of the things Confucius had said when we were discussing erotic literature. ‘Nothing equals what we had in China,’ he’d told me, so there must have been an old edition of it on her father’s shelves. And, leaving aside Hsi-men himself, this is how one of the minor personages in the novel is described in the list of characters: ‘Wen Pi-ku, Warm-Buttocks Wen, Pedant Wen, Licentiate Wen, a pederast recommended to Hsi-men Ch’ing by his fellow licentiate Ni P’eng to be his social secretary; housed across the street from Hsi-men Ch’ing’s residence… divulges Hsi-men Ch’ing’s private correspondence to Ni P’eng, who shares it with Hsia Yen-Ling; sodomizes Hua-t’ung against his will and is expelled from the Hsi-men household when his indiscretions are exposed.’
Even in retrospect, I was mortified at being compared to the amoral libertine who inserted his plum in every golden vase that he could lay hands on and from every possible position. All I had done was to try and feel the curve of her left breast.
Clearly I had to discuss Chinese literature with Jindié at our next meeting and hopefully in Zahid’s absence. If I was Hsi-men, surely Zahid must be Wen Pi-ku. I e-mailed her to that effect and she replied instantly, suggesting a time, a date and a location. She also wondered whether I had been able to read her letter, essay and diaries. I hadn’t, but I am now about to do so.
SIX
DEAR D: