"I have done that myself sometimes."
When TM heard General Zia's voice, he turned round and saluted, this time less aggressively, shifting his feet slightly to cover the frame so that Zia couldn't see the tilt in it.
Without his uniform and presidential paraphernalia, General Zia seemed to have shrunk. His silk gown floated about him. His moustache, always waxed and twirled, drooped over his upper lip.
He was sucking it nervously. His hair, always oiled and parted down the middle, was in a state of disarray, like a parade squad on tea break.
"He was the only true leader we have ever had," General Zia said and stopped as if expecting Brigadier TM to correct him.
Brigadier TM was still in shock. He didn't believe in superstitions. He didn't believe in coincidences. He knew that if your gun was oiled and safety catch unlocked, it would shoot. He knew if your wind-speed calculations were accurate and you knew how to control your descent, your parachute would land you where you wanted to land. He knew if you mentioned a prisoner's daughter's name after keeping him awake for three days, he would talk. Brigadier TM had no experience of monocle-wearing dead men in gilt-edged frames blinking back to his salutes.
"This portrait is not security-cleared, sir. General Akhtar should not have violated Code Red."
"Dear son, I can live with the rumours in the American rags but do I have to be scared of pictures gifted to me by my own intelligence chief? Is General Akhtar under suspicion now? Are you saying I am not safe even in my own drawing room?" General Zia paused for a moment, then added, "Or do you not like the man in the picture?"
"He was a civilian, sir, but he got us this country."
General Zia thrust his hands in the pockets of his gown to hide his irritation; Brigadier TM had no sense of history. "Well, if you compare him to that banya banya Gandhi, or that fornicator Nehru, yes, of course he was a great leader. But since then there have been others who in their own humble way..." General Zia looked at TM's blank face, realised that he wasn't going to get any compliments from him and decided to change the subject. Gandhi, or that fornicator Nehru, yes, of course he was a great leader. But since then there have been others who in their own humble way..." General Zia looked at TM's blank face, realised that he wasn't going to get any compliments from him and decided to change the subject.
"Son, I feel like a prisoner in this house. These ISI people are stupid. They know how to fight the Russians, by jingo they've got their spies spread across half the world, but they can't figure out who is trying to assassinate their own President."
One thing that Brigadier TM never did was snitch on his brothers in uniform, even if they chose not to wear their uniforms. He also tried to change the topic, came up with a proposal and immediately regretted it.
"Why don't you go for an Umra, sir?"
General Zia went to Mecca at least ten times a year and Brigadier TM had to accompany him. He knew General Zia felt very safe there, but he also knew that General Zia behaved like a twelve-year-old having a bad birthday. He threw tantrums, he cried, he smashed his head against the black marble wall of the Khana Kaaba, he sprinted around it as if he was in some kind of competitive run, not on a pilgrimage.
"Do you think Jinnah would go on a pilgrimage under these circumstances?"
Brigadier TM felt the Founder's eye blink at the back of his head. He wanted to point out that Jinnah had never gone on a pilgrimage to Mecca. He wanted to say that even if he had found the time to get away for some spiritual replenishment, the Founder would have probably headed for a pub in west London. TM stood at attention, ignoring Zia's question. He wriggled his toes in his boots; he wasn't sure if his head was getting the blood circulation it needed.
"Did Jinnah ever have to make these decisions?" General Zia made a last desperate attempt to educate Brigadier TM about the vestiges of history. "Did Jinnah ever have to fight the Russians in the morning and convince the Americans in the evening that it is a fight still worth fighting? Was he ever a prisoner in his own Army House?"
"Yes, sir." Brigadier TM shouted and brought his heels together.
"I think I need to be in the country."
Brigadier TM felt relieved. He didn't want to go to Mecca. He didn't want to be in that empty, black marble room again.
Brigadier TM felt alive when there was action or at least the promise of it. You are twenty thousand feet above the ground, free-falling, you adjust your posture, you let your body ride the air currents, you dive, you lose a thousand feet, you do a somersault, you spread your arms and legs, you pull your ripcord and suddenly the world is real, a patch of concrete in front of the presidential dais, or thick bush behind the enemy lines.
He had felt the same sense of anticipation as he walked behind General Zia and entered the Khana Kaaba's compound on his first visit. He was offered a white robe, one like the ones everyone else was wearing, but he took one look at the Saudi policemen escorting them and refused. He was in the House of God but that didn't mean that he should forget his duty. They asked General Zia if they should let his security chief in, dressed in his battle fatigues, but Zia was crying violently and nodding his head constantly. The Saudi police couldn't really tell if he approved or not. General Zia snivelled and buried his head in his white robe and started to pray loudly as they walked towards the black room at the centre of the compound. Brigadier TM looked around for any potential threats. The worshippers were few and scattered and prone; in their various states of worship they looked like logs thrown about randomly. The light was stage bright but cool. Brigadier TM liked well-lit places. The centre of his attention was the black marble, low-ceilinged cubicle draped in black silk. He didn't expect any security risks here. The room had been there for more than fourteen hundred years but he had to take precautions as he knew it was being opened specially for General Zia. The rest of the pilgrims had to make do with touching its outer walls and kissing the gold-embroidered black silk that adorned its walls.
He had ordered a file on the place from the ISI when he did his routine risk assessment and they had sent him a photocopied page from a high-school Islamic Studies book.
It was the exact spot where Abraham had tried to slaughter his son, where Mohammed had smashed idols and declared that all non-Muslims who laid down their arms would be safe.
The only people carrying arms tonight were Saudi security people. Brigadier TM wondered if they even knew how to use them. The place hummed with respect and prayers and he took his hand off his holster. His gaze became that of a tourist, fleeting, slightly curious and not suspicious. He noted with interest that most of the worshippers were black but there were people from other nations. He saw a white woman sitting in a corner reciting the Quran. He couldn't suppress his smile when he saw an old Chinese man holding his rosary with one hand and a walking stick with the other and dragging his feet around the black cubicle.
Brigadier TM thought that maybe after his retirement he would come here as a pilgrim and see if he could feel what others felt.
Their hosts, Saudi princes in gold-bordered silk kaffiyehs, led the way. He had lost count of how many princes there were in this kingdom.
As they approached the black marble cubicle in the centre, Brigadier TM moved in front of the posse, having suddenly realised that, after all, they were entering the unknown. The door opened and nothing happened. There was nobody ambushing them. There was nobody welcoming them either.
The room was empty.
There were no flashes of divine light, no thunder, the walls of the room were black and without a single inscription. And if it hadn't been for General Zia's choked voice seeking forgiveness, it would have been a quiet room full of stale air. Allah's house was a dark, empty room. Brigadier TM shrugged his shoulders, stood at the door and kept an eye on the pilgrims going around the Khana Kaaba.
Brigadier TM felt the Founder's eye blink at the back of his head again. General Zia realised that TM was not in the mood for small talk. He wrapped his nightgown tightly around himself and left the room muttering something, of which Brigadier TM could only make out 'get some sleep'. What General Zia was saying was, "Who can get any sleep on a bitch of a night like this?"
Brigadier TM walked towards the frame, trying to avoid eye contact with the Founder. His hands slipped into both his pockets and came out wrapped in white handkerchiefs. He held the frame by its edges and removed it from the nail from which it hung. He held the frame in front of his chest, carried it to the sofa and placed it carefully with the Founder facing down. He pulled his trouser leg up with his right hand and produced a dagger from a leather sheath clipped above his ankle. He removed the hooks one by one, inserted the tip of the dagger under the cardboard, lifted it and tossed it aside. A thick green velvety cloth covered the back of the portrait. His fingers traced the area where he thought the Founder's face was. Behind the Founder's monocle-covered eye his fingers found a hard round object. He took his dagger again, cut a neat hole around it and picked out a grey metal disc slightly thicker but not bigger than a fifty-paisa coin. He picked it up with his handkerchief-covered hand and held it away from his body as if it was about to explode.
As Brigadier TM was still examining both the sides of the disc, trying to decide whether it was some artistic contraption that the painter of the portrait had used or a lethal device set to blow him away, the metal surface parted from the middle, like the curtains on a miniature theatre, and a concave little lens blinked at him. The metal curtains immediately shut again.
Brigadier TM closed his palm around the spy camera and tried to crush it until his knuckles hurt.
Remote-controlled bombs, reinforced bullets, daggers thrown from a distance, the glint from a marksman's rifle, shoulder-held surface-to-air missiles, bodyguards with grudges and itchy fingers: Brigadier TM could handle it all without his heart beating a beat faster. But this sneaky little camera made him so angry that he forgot his duty for a moment; instead of calling in the forensic experts and trying to track down the camera feed, he walked towards General Zia's bedroom. He hesitated outside the door of his bedroom for a moment, took three deep breaths to compose himself and then knocked.
First Lady opened the door, installed herself in the middle of the frame and looked at him with mocking eyes, as if he was a child who had knocked on his mother's bedroom door after wetting his bed.
"What is it now?" she asked. "Does he have a midnight appointment with a foreign lady correspondent? Or is India about to attack us again?"
Brigadier TM really didn't know how to answer back to a woman.
He opened his palm and showed it to the First Lady.
She gave him a withering look. "Your boss doesn't live here any more." Then she turned and shouted along the corridor. "Look, Zia, your friend has got a present for you."
SEVENTEEN.
"Do you like mangoes?" secretary General's whisper is barely audible. His breathing is heavy. It seems he is in pain. The bastards haven't given him any food either. How much time has passed? Can't be more than three days. I crawl towards the hole in the wall, knocking down little sand pyramids I have been building to mark the days. Not that I know when the day starts or when it ends. There hasn't been a single knock on the door. There hasn't been a single sound from anywhere. "I don't like mangoes," I say. "Not worth the effort. We had apple trees in our backyard on Shigri Hill. I like apples. Pick them, rub them against your pants and eat them. No hassles."
Secretary General is quiet for a long time as if collecting my words from the floor and trying to make a sentence out of them.
"You related?"
"Yes."
"Brother?"
"Worse."
He stays quiet, then his fists hit the wall. Thrice.
"You thought you could do it all by yourself? You have no sense of history. You should have joined hands with your fellow soldiers. Comrades-in-arms."
If only Secretary General knew.
"I was his only son."
As I walked from the parade square towards my dorm I could feel the asphalt surface of the road melting under my boots. In the distance the road evaporated into mirage after vaporous mirage, each of them disappearing as I came closer. Bannon and Obaid were still on the parade square, doing yet another session of extra drill. There was no point going to my dorm. I headed straight for the comfort of Bannon's bunker. The air conditioner was on and my sweat-soaked shirt turned stiff within minutes. I took it off and sat there in my white vest looking around for something to take my mind off the drill commands still reverberating in my head. I lay down on the floor with my head on the mattress and put my boots next to the air-conditioner vent. I rummaged under the mattress and as expected found a brown envelope with the July issue in it. Thai beauty Diana Lang and Yasser Arafat shared the cover: Lang Shots Lang Shots and and Arafat's Guns and Poses Arafat's Guns and Poses, said the cover of Playboy Playboy's World Special issue.
I decided to save Yasser Arafat's interview for later and opened the centrefold. The door opened and Bannon walked in, fanning himself with his peaked cap. "I give up. Your friend isn't going to make it."
He ignored my hand which was struggling simultaneously to stuff the magazine into the envelope and push the envelope under the mattress. Little streams of sweat were running down Bannon's white crocodile face, his hair stuck to his scalp and he was whispering to himself, "Two weeks before the President's inspection and I got people who can't even lockstep."
I brought my feet down from the air-conditioning vents and asked Bannon what he was talking about.
"Baby O ain't going to stay in the Drill Squad. As soon as the parade begins, he starts to sweat like a whore in church. He just hasn't got the aptitude."
"Obaid may not be a natural on the square but he is very keen," I said. "I have never seen anybody as motivated as he is. He stands there in our dorm at night simulating his moves."
"He might have made a good kamikaze but he is just not cut out for going through the whole damn drill."
"He is very emotional about it. Surely you can..."
I let the sentence hang in the chilled air. Surely he would know what I meant. We just couldn't let Obaid down.
"It's for his own good," he muttered. "You tell him to turn right and he goes left. You ask him to throw the rifle and he just stands there. And this is with my verbal commands. Imagine the mayhem when we are in the silent zone. We were doing our rifle spirals today and his every throw came at my head. He'll kill someone or get killed. You try and put some sense into his head. He'll make a fine officer but no way is he rehearsing with us. I have to go and fill out my final report."
Bannon left the room without looking back, without promising anything.
I was still contemplating whether I should find out what Yasser Arafat was doing in a magazine full of oriental girls with heart-shaped pubic hair when the door opened and Obaid walked in, kicked the door shut behind him, leaned against the Bruce Lee poster and stared at me as if I was the sole reason for his lack of hand-eye coordination.
His khaki uniform was marked with patches of sweat, his blue scarf tightly wrapped around his right hand and there was a bruise on his right cheek. His normally serene eyes were swirling pools of anger.
The reasons for his regular thrashing on the square were obvious to me. You could score top marks in war history, you could simulate your drill movements all night long, but when the silent zone kicked in, you couldn't look in your manuals to find out what to do and how to do it. Obaid did all my studying for me. He drew my navigation maps, he took care of my inability to concentrate on any textbook for more than two paragraphs and he prepared notes for me. Despite the lack of an academic bone in my body, or maybe because of it, I was soaring ahead in the drill department, already commanding the squad, whereas he still loitered in the reserve pool. Anyone who could sit down and read a book outside the classroom for ten minutes straight would never make a good officer let alone a coherent pair of military boots on the parade square. And Bannon did have a point: one wrong step, a single wrong note from silent cadence, could wreck the elegant routine we had devised for the President's inspection. It could also destroy the sword manoeuvre that I had prepared for the President.
I thought of distracting Obaid with Yasser Arafat's pictures, but I looked at his contorted face and gave up on the idea. He opened and closed his fists. There was a fury in his eyes that I had never seen before. I moved towards him to put my hand on his shoulder. He recoiled and turned round, put his hands on his face and started to bang his head against the wall.
"It will be all right," I said and felt like one of those doctors who tell you to live life to its fullest after informing you that you have only six weeks to live. He was still for a moment, then he sprang from his position and hurled himself towards Bannon's bed, bringing down the bamboos hoisting the camouflaged canopy over the mattress. All the books he read hadn't taught him the basic military rule: you manage your anger by kicking ass, not by rearranging the furniture in your room. He picked up the pillow and threw it at the wall. Disappointed by the lack of impact, he picked up the ceramic Buddha. I lunged forward and stopped him. "Not the Buddha," I said, taking it from his hands. His fingers were warm on Buddha's air-conditioned ceramic face. He looked around for something else to throw. The air conditioner's cold air had dried up some of the sweat patches on his shirt. As I moved closer to calm him down, I picked up the cardamom on his breath and the musky smell of his drying sweat.
"Let's talk it through," I said. That's what he normally said in such situations.
"You are trying to keep me out."
"Look, Baby O..." I fumbled for words and tried to fill the silence by moving my hand from his shoulder to the back of his neck. His hair bristled under my palm, his neck was still warm despite the chill in the room. I felt angry at my own lack of empathy and it came out.
"Look, it's not a picnic that I am not taking you on. It's for your own good, Baby O."
He ignored my patronising tone. "There is a much simpler way," he said. "What is this place full of? Aeroplanes? What do we need to do? Take a plane and go for the-"
"We are not having that discussion again," I cut him off. For a man in uniform his ideas about soldiering were naive. He considered himself some kind of character from Jonathan Livingstone Seagull Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, the latest addition to the pile of books on his bedside table, and talked about aeroplanes as if they were not million-dollar fighting machines but some kind of vehicle for his spiritual quest.
"The wind was a whisper in his face and the ocean stood still beneath him..." he said with his eyes closed. "I could do it all by myself." He patted my cheek.
"You can hardly land that bloody thing. Forget it."
"Who needs to land?" He produced a navigation map with coordinates drawn and a red circle around the Army House. "Twenty-three minutes, if there is no head- or tailwind."
I snatched the map from him, flung it over my shoulder and stared into his eyes. He stared back unblinking. I thought of telling him about Uncle Starchy's nectar but immediately decided against it.
"Colonel Shigri didn't kill himself and I am not about to," I said. Then put my mouth to his ear and shouted at strength 5: "Is that clear?"
Screw my inner cadence, I thought.
"Is that clear?" I shouted again.
He pressed his ear over my mouth, leaned into me, and put his hand on my waist.
"If you want to do it here, you've got to have me in the squad. You need a back-up."
I removed his hand, took a step back. "Listen, stick to your Rilke or whatever you're reading these days. What are you going to do? Hey, look, this is my sword, here comes the General, look, I am taking a swipe." I did a limp-wristed mime with an imaginary sword. "Oops, sorry, I missed. Can I have another go?"
I think I killed him with those words.
I didn't see his fist coming at my guts, and as I doubled over, his knee hit my ribs and sent me reeling onto Bannon's bed, face down. I found myself sprawled on the heap of bamboos and the camouflaged canopy. The surprise of being hit by Baby O was so overwhelming that I didn't feel any pain. The Bruce Lee poster blurred for a moment. Obaid came and stood over me and looked down as if he had never seen me before. My boot caught him between his shins and he fell beside me.
I rubbed my lower ribcage and sighed. Obaid propped himself up on one elbow and watched me closely. He sat up suddenly as if he had made up his mind about something. Planting both his knees around my hips, he started to pull my vest out of my trousers. He gently rubbed my lower ribcage with both his hands, all the time looking into my eyes. I didn't like him watching my reactions so I closed my eyes, my hips raised themselves involuntarily and my starched khaki trousers suddenly felt very tight. I hoped Bannon would take his time filling out that report.
He moved my vest upwards, the chilled air sent shivers through my chest and my nipples turned shamelessly erect and purple; my belt was unhooked. I sucked my stomach in and held my breath as his hand wandered into my pants. He didn't hold me, just let the back of his hand rest against my cock as if it was a chance encounter. I was scared of the lips that were gently brushing their way towards my chest. I was scared of being kissed.
I breathed in the smell of jasmine oil from his hair and sank back into the mattress; a bamboo crunched under me and I tried to get up in a fit of panic. His hand in my pants pinned me down. His lips travelled along the outline of my jaw, his fingertips made tiny, airy circles on the tip of my cock. I groaned and my hips began to move but he pressed me down with his knee. His lips traced my ribcage and kept travelling downward. I did some hard thinking with my eyes shut. There is a stream near my house on Shigri Hill; I found myself standing in it during the winter, testing my first erection against the ice-cold water. My body leapt up and my cock touched the tip of his nose and he laughed.
There was more surprise for me as he wriggled out of his pants and took my hand to his cock. I found myself tracing a curve, not just a slight curve, but the semicircle of a new moon. His cock was bent like a bow and his erection arched towards his navel. He sighed and lay down beside me. His eyes were shut and a gentle smile was spreading around his lips, a smile so serene, so full yet gentle, that he seemed to have retreated into his world where the wind whispered in his face and the ocean beneath him was still.
I didn't dare speak for a long time. The air conditioner turned off at some point and the only sound in the room was that of two scared boys breathing.
"No. No," he whispered in the end, cupping me in his hands in a futile attempt at not leaving any traces on the bed. "Not on the sheets."
He spoke with his face staring up at the ceiling. "You wouldn't do anything stupid."
"And you will not do anything fucked up," I said.
"I wouldn't," he said.
In the morning he was gone.
EIGHTEEN.