‘You can think what you like. Was it simple mechanics this morning?’
‘I wasn’t referring to us.’
‘Good. Yesterday was a bit sorrowful. I kept hearing a Sindhi lament in my head as I tried to arouse you. Do you have to leave today?’
‘I must. I have to prepare a talk for a conference. I need a few days in the library’
‘That seems excessive. When is your Chinese friend returning from the murder inquiry in Isloo?’
‘How did you know about that?’
‘I made it my business. My brother says they have no idea who killed the general. It wasn’t the usual suspects who are blamed for everything these days.’
‘I never thought it was, but why are you so interested?’
‘Because you are, and I feel linked through you. I thought if I discovered something you could pass it on to your friend. What my brother did say was that General Rafiq had several mistresses.’
‘A crime of passion?’
‘Always possible and not just in beloved Fatherland. And there will be another one if you ever turn your back on me. I like you.’
‘Remain calm. We’re both matrons and must preserve a certain decorum. No reason to regress to our teen years. Sorry, that doesn’t apply to you.’
‘When will you be back?’
‘Within a fortnight.’
‘Should I buy an apartment in Paris or London? Has to be a big city.’
‘Berlin.’
‘So I can leave you in peace to take a Chinese mistress in London. No way. I’m buying an apartment in London. Prices are dropping more and more each day, and Alice has sighted a suitable buy.’
I sat down and shook her.
‘Listen to me carefully. Jindié is a friend from the past who lives with Zahid, another friend, whom I once wronged. She is not my mistress.’
‘She will be soon. Of this I’m sure. Let’s not argue. We’ll both know when it happens. As a matter of fact I prefer Paris. Let’s go and see apartments today.’
‘In the Fauborg St-Germain?’
‘Why not? I want something in the Latin Quarter and wouldn’t it be fun if I found something nice on the rue de Balzac. And which of Stendhal’s novels should I read first?’
‘Difficult. Buy them all and toss a coin. How lucky you are to read them in French. I love them all, but if you put a gun to my head I’d say Lucien Leuwen. That and the two best-known ones need to be reread every two years, and at my age every six months. One always learns something new. I would also strongly recommend his thinly disguised memoir.’
‘By the time you return I’ll have finished them. I read very fast.’
‘Does understanding keep up with your pace?’
‘Does insolence keep up with the charm?’
‘Rewrite.’
She was serious enough about buying a flat, and we spent a few hours in various streets looking at available property. She liked one on the rue de Bièvre, and when I pointed out that Mitterand and a Polish Marxist intellectual had once shared the street, adding that Balzac’s favourite eatery was here, she became agitated. The agent was rung. The apartment was huge for such a small street, but she would have friends to stay over and would be entertaining regularly. There was no haggling. She would pay the asking price. The agent gave me an astonished look as if to ask whether she was serious. I suggested that he close the deal quickly before she saw something on the rue de Balzac.
‘Well, that’s settled. Now should we go and inspect some antique furniture?’
Her living room was especially large, and I suggested that the space above the fireplace might be a home for Plato’s unfinished masterpiece. She screamed.
‘Hai Allah, never. Never. It’s a frightening painting. You haven’t even seen it. Anyway it’s too big for this apartment or any other. It should be in a public space.’
‘Where is it at the moment?’
‘At our Sind home, I hope, carefully covered with muslin sheets to dry it properly. He was worried that local hoodlums might raid his studio when news of his death became known. All the other paintings are in a warehouse. This last one is now at home. We need a museum in Europe or North America to give it a home, and someone like you should write an explanation. It really needs one. Can you think of a title?’
‘Canceristan?’
‘Don’t be silly. Something simple and nonprovocative, like Unfinished…’
‘Last Thoughts in a Dying Country?’
‘No. I visit regularly, and Fatherland’s death has been predicted far too often.’
‘Dying Thoughts in the Last Country.’
‘Shut up. One more try, and then I’ll—’
‘Artistic Structures of Political Meaning in an Unknown Country. Unfinished, 2009.’
‘Brilliant. That will be the title. In fact, given that you haven’t seen the work, it’s pretty close to the mark and sounds obscure. “Unknown” in the sense of being unknown to its rulers. Yes? Good.’
I received a kiss on the cheek. It turned out that she was the sole executor of Plato’s estate, and she gave me complete authority to negotiate the sale of ASPMUC to a serious modern museum wherever I wished. She would arrange for it to be photographed and have slides posted directly to me.
‘Unless you want to just fly over and see it.’
‘Not this month, but I might do that sometime. Always helps. In any case the curator of whichever museum takes it will certainly want to see it before the purchase, or at least send an expert.’
‘This book you’re writing. It isn’t just about Plato?’
‘No, and it’s not a biography. It’s fiction.’
‘Allah protect you.’
‘No reason for Allah to be upset. I’m just sad that Plato will never read it. He was one of the sixteen people I was writing it for.’
‘Am I included?’
‘Plato and I went back forty-five years. I’ve barely known you a week.’
‘I feel I’ve known you a long time, and the book was my idea. I will be one of the sixteen. Let the figure remain.’
On the train back to London, I thought mainly about Plato, since I had been asked by a daily paper to write his obituary. His life had rarely been untroubled or happy till Zaynab offered him a haven. But nor had he died a physically or mentally broken man, like so many of his wealthy peers whose lives had been led without a trace of generosity or compassion, men who had justified, for petty gain, some indescribable horrors of the modern world. Plato died with his pride and self-respect intact.
One summer evening in Lahore we were discussing the fate of Islam in the West. Plato first mocked the nostalgia and sentimentality that prevailed on the subject — a sure sign of total ignorance, he remarked. Zahid backed him up, and when another friend said that the decision by Muslims in al-Andalus to eat pork in order to survive was a crime, Zahid defended their right to eat cow dung if necessary in order to survive. A strange, sad smile prefaced Plato’s response.
‘It’s one thing to eat pork in order to survive. I would have done the same. But they wanted us to swallow our history, our culture, our language, our entire past, and all that is not so easily digestible.’
THIRTEEN
ON THE TWENTY-FIFTH DAY after the murder of General Ilyas Rafiq, commanding officer of the Special Services Assault Battalion, I went to have dinner with his mother-in-law. Incapable of stomaching any further hypocrisy, Jindié had refused to stay for the chehlum, the fortieth day after burial that concludes the ritual of official mourning. She left Zahid to console their daughter and returned to London. Her offer to bring the grandchildren back with her to give them and the widowed Neelam a break had been turned down.
The meal she served, unlike the story that accompanied it, was on the skimpy side, a bit too healthy for my tastes, but all I wanted to know that evening was who killed Rafiq and why. No real evidence had emerged so far — though this tiny fact has yet to spoil a good story from circulating in Fatherland. According to Jindié, each of his colleagues suspected different people with varying motives. I rubbed my hands together in delight. It was a classic Fatherland conspiracy. Three versions were floating in cyberspace, she told me, and any of them could be true, but she no longer cared. As far as she was concerned, her son-in-law had been a reprobate and had come to the bad end he deserved. Yet another Rashomon moment for our debased elite, I thought to myself. Assassins are rarely uncovered in Fatherland, which adds to its many charms.