‘Great Master Plato, your visions will hit Fatherland like thunderbolts from heaven.’
‘Talking to you in this mood is wasting time. Do something useful. Go and start the book. Go now, and where the truth can’t be shown naked, dress it in humour and irony. Can you manage that?’
I will try.
TWO
ZAHID WAS IN LIGHT sleep mode, dreaming. It was the pissing dream, he told me later, the bladder-full alert dream, the core of which had remained constant throughout his life. Water, forever flowing. Usually, he was having a shower, but sometimes it was a running tap or, on a few rare occasions, a turbulent sea. At school and in the mountains where our families spent the summer, he would describe his affliction in some detail. It was, he explained, a crude, effective internal alarm system. If he delayed too long, his tap began to drip. His mother once provided a more Jungian explanation, but it must have been forgettable, since she could not recall it a week later.
Zahid himself was convinced that he was unique. When he was a baby, his amah had patiently weaned him off the muslin nappies, training him to pee by turning on a tap and whistling the national anthem. It worked — the muslin nappies were permanently discarded when he was only a year old — but it must have left a mark on his psyche. He would often joke that, Allah be praised, it was water that had entered his dreams and not the national anthem, though after a brief discussion, we agreed it might have been better the other way round. At the end of a movie or a radio broadcast he could always find a pissoir. Much better than bed-wetting.
Later, when he was already a distinguished heart surgeon in the United States, treating important people, Zahid discovered that his dream was not as unusual as he had once thought. The revelation came as a disappointment. He used to joke that it was the end of all illusions. It was then that he decided, against the advice of his son, to invest some of his savings in banks and properties in undesirable locations all over the world: Marbella and Miami, Bermuda and Nice as well as — and this very much for old times’ sake — a mountain retreat in the Kaghan valley, sadly destroyed by the earthquake of 2004. All this I discovered later. I had heard, of course, that he had become a Republican and was head of the medical team that operated on Dick Cheney in 1999, saving his life, but had not known that he had moved from DC to London after the explosions of 9/11 or that he was now in semi-retirement in a palatial villa in Richmond, overlooking the Thames. We had lived in different worlds for almost half a century.
When the phone rang, soon after dawn, Zahid automatically groaned and stretched an arm out to grab the clock. Must be an emergency at the hospital, he thought, before realizing he was no longer working. It was ten past five in the morning; must be someone from the east. Early calls upset him. They were invariably from Fatherland and it was usually bad news: another death in the family, a new military coup, an expected assassination, but still they could not be ignored. His wife was still asleep. He rose and lifted the phone, and went over to draw the curtains. Dark clouds. Like him, the city suffered from a weak bladder. He cursed.
The caller heard him swearing, chuckled and hailed him in Punjabi, the mother tongue to beat all other motherfucking mother tongues, or so its partisans boast. No translation can ever do justice to this multilayered language, so rich in puns and double entendres that some scholars have argued that virtually every word of every Punjabi dialect has a dual or hidden meaning. I’m not sure this is the case. That would have created insurmountable problems for the Sikh religion, whose founder, the visionary mystic poet Nanak, a great master of the language, would never… I mean, he must have known what he was doing when he elevated his native Punjabi into a divine language for the new faith, split off from the caste-ridden Hindus.
Nor are the problems of translation simplified by the profusion of dialects. The voice that addressed Dr Mian Zahid Hussain spoke in the guttural dialect common to Lahore and Amritsar. As the narrator, I will keep the translation literal as far as this first exchange is concerned; but, wishing neither to tax the reader’s patience nor to expose my own limitations, I may be compelled to revert to a less louche mode in the chapters that lie ahead. Or I may not.
‘I say, Zahid Mian. Salaamaleikum.’
The recipient of the greeting cursed again, but inwardly. He did not recognize the voice. Clumsily unbuttoning his pyjamas with one hand while holding the phone in the other, he stumbled into the bathroom and gave much-needed relief to his neurotic bladder, just as a delightful drizzle began to water London’s numerous parks and private gardens. Despite decades of wisdom accumulated at the George Washington Hospital in Washington, DC, he did not know that speaking on the phone directly above the commode creates a slight distortion, an echo easily recognized by an alert person at the other end. And this particular caller relished embarrassing his friends.
‘So frightened by my voice that it makes you piss, catamite?’
‘Forgive me, friend. It’s early here. I don’t recognize your voice.’
‘I won’t forgive you, catamite. The only friend you have is in your hand. Why not put some soap on him and fuck your fist? Then you might recognize my voice, you frogfucker.’
That last was not a common abuse in Lahore but unique to an old circle of friends. Zahid smiled, struggling to identify the now familiar voice and hurriedly getting rid of the after-drops, with only partial success. The traditions of our faith, alas, are divided on this crucially important Islamic ritual. The Shia insist on the Twelver: the penis is shaken vigorously twelve times to get rid of everything lurking inside. The Sunni are more relaxed: six shakes are considered sufficient. In his hurry, Zahid had taken the Sufi path — one strong existentialist tug — and spattered his pyjamas as a result. Simultaneously, he recognized the caller’s voice.
‘Plato! Plato. Of course, it’s you.’
‘Glad you recognized your name, frogfucker.’
Zahid’s loud laugh, slightly tinged with hysteria, was typical of the city where he was born. He responded in kind.
‘For twenty-five sisterfucking years you disappeared yourself, Plato. Did you climb up your own arse? You ring while it’s barely light in this fucked city and complain I don’t recognize your voice. I thought you were dead.’
‘Mean-spirited catamite, why aren’t you? Your mother’s pudendum.’
‘You vanished, Plato. Just like your motherfucked paintings.’
‘Only from your dogfucking Western world. My exhibitions here are always packed.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Lahore, but flying to Karachi later. I have a studio there.’
‘Long live Puristan. Never fucked there, is it? Why are you ringing me at this hour? Are you dying? Been working it hard? Need an arse transplant?’
‘Shut your mouth, catamite. I thought you’d already be up. Aren’t you fasting? Too early to say the morning prayers? Heard you’d gone religious and abased yourself in Makkah.’
Zahid was angered. ‘We’ve all changed, Plato. You, too. Fasting is going a bit far. Better not to than to cheat, like we did when we were kids?’