That last time, when Isffy had been too much in the cold for me to be allowed to meet him, they had reached their deepest impasse. Isffy had found a girl who was truly inappropriate and the
break-up was impossible to obtain. Isffy had left home over it, spending nearly two years away, living under the illusion that his indignation alone would deliver him independence. He had vilified
our father to all who were willing to listen; he was apparently a regular act at the Gymkhana Club bar. But the financial brokerage he tried setting up with a friend, and on to which his hopes of
independence were pinned, sank fast. Those last few months of debt and danger were so severe that even our father, not one to shorten the time those who defied him stewed, was forced to act fast
and bail Isffy out. No sooner had he done it – before he had – than there were new terms. On the one hand, the car, the house, the job to remind Isffy what coming home felt like, on the
other the clean ultimatum: never see the girl again.
I had met Isffy for the first time in La Mirage, the year he accepted the new terms. I remember him having a weary and sensitive face, with still something defiant about it. Surrounded by the
other Tabassums, some his full sisters, others the children of my father’s younger wife, all more malleable than him, all happy under the tyranny of our father, I sensed him holding back. He
sipped his whisky quietly in the corner; he joked and laughed, but he was uneasy. It was as if he also knew a shade of my experience, of feeling diminished in our father’s presence. Because
of our shared trouble with our father and because I knew him the least, Isffy, of all my father’s family, had the largest claim on my imagination. The chance now to see him at his ease, in
his own environment as it were, was one of the main reasons I was looking forward to my time in Port bin Qasim.
Mirwaiz opened a button of his bright printed shirt, and blew down his chest.
‘Hot, no?’ he said. ‘It’s just started, the heat. I can’t take it even slightly, you know?’
We entered a commercial area. The road was lined with shops and restaurants whose blue and green glass frontage reflected with vacant intensity the treeless stretch.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
‘Aylanto,’ Mirwaiz said easily. ‘Have you been there before?’
‘No. It’s my first time in the city.’
‘You’ll love it. It’s new. Mr Narses says that,’ and now he spoke in English, ‘the calamari fritti is out of this world.’ He turned to me and grinned.
‘Have you tried it?’ I asked with astonishment.
‘No,’ Mirwaiz said, ‘I don’t eat seafood. I prefer a place in Defence called . . .’
He was still speaking when, looking up, I saw in the distance, where I had expected to see the glitter of water, a human sea of black and green. Against the haze of the day, it seemed to flicker
and fade, like the black spots that appear before one’s eyes from direct contact with the sun. Carrying over it was a dull and distant roar.
‘What is that?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Mirwaiz replied, seeming to want to shield me from it, ‘a protest of some sort. I’ll find out. This country is crazy, you know, Rehan saab. But
don’t worry. I’ll wait with you till someone arrives. Look, here’s Aylanto.’
It stood on one corner of the shopping street and had, as part of its Spanish colonial theme, a pale yellow facade with crooked rustication and green louvred windows. A group of valets, thin
anxious men with glazed eyes and untidy stubble, lingered outside. They were dressed, despite the great heat, in black trousers, limp black waistcoats and grimy shirts, their bow ties wilting in
the sun.
‘Do you know what’s going on?’ Mirwaiz asked one of them, stepping out of the car and handing him the keys.
‘It seems, sir,’ the man said hurriedly, ‘that there is a protest on.’
‘I can see that, too, genius. What’s it against?’
‘English,’ the man replied, with some confusion.
Mirwaiz gave a derisive chuckle.
‘You see, Rehan saab, how mad the people in this country are? Everything is abstraction. You watch, there’ll be a protest against oxygen next.’
At the glass-fronted shoe shops and boutiques, with their bright signage and billboards, all in English, the protestors rose to frenzy. Like the tail of some reptilian creature, they moved fast
down the street. Where their vandalism opened up bare cement spaces over the shopfronts, they spray-painted sprawling slogans in black.
Mirwaiz read the painted letters on their green satin banners. ‘Jago!’ he muttered. ‘Awake. Fools: if they had any idea that that was a Sanskrit word, they would grow madder
still. Chalo, saab, you’d better go inside.’
A silver Honda screeched out of a side street, its bonnet and windscreen ablaze.
‘Mr Isphandiyar’s car,’ Mirwaiz whispered. Then suddenly intimate, he said: ‘Rehan saab, how well do you actually know these people, the Tabassums . . . ?’
‘Not very well at all,’ I replied.
‘Then just remember this,’ Mirwaiz said with new urgency, ‘your father, Mr Tabassum, is the law. He is the sun in this strange universe. Everyone else exists, be it good or
bad, by his light. Don’t bother looking for an external logic,’ he continued, gesturing inexplicably at the crowd. ‘There is none. Everything,’ he said, pointing at the
closed interior of the restaurant, ‘is to be found within. Mr Isffy, he’s a good guy. He has issues, sure; and our relationship is not what it used to be; but he’ll be your number
one ally, believe me.’
Seeing Isffy emerge from his car, Mirwaiz said hastily: ‘Chal, darling, I’ll hand you over to him and take off. Phir milenge. Soon. And speak to Narses saab about the trip north.
Tell him you want to take Mirwaiz travelling,’ he effused, as if conjuring up a medieval idea of wander, ‘and I’m yours.’
I had turned to leave when I heard him say, ‘Rehan saab, what’s your number?’
‘I don’t have one.’
‘How can that be? Sahil Tabassum’s son and no number? Here take this.’ He reached into the glovebox of the car and took out a plastic CD case containing a yellow and green
booklet, with a pay-as-you-go card. ‘It’s a Qasimic Call card. Your natural right, as the owner’s son. Put the sim into your phone and I’ll maro you a missed call this
evening.’
A few moments later, we sat in the cool of the restaurant, sipping two green non-alcoholic cocktails. Lunching ladies with glossy lips in two shades of brown picked at large
salads.
‘You should have seen what I saw,’ my brother said, speaking of the demonstration, ‘the rage was surreal. I witnessed this one scene in a jewellery shop belonging to an old
man. Some hoodlums had barged in and started doing todh-phodh, tearing down all the things in his shop that were written in English. The old man didn’t say a word. He sat back and let them do
what they wanted. But when they were done, he called over one of the boys and said in a very calm voice, “Could you tell me the time?” The boy was obviously a bit startled by his
reaction. Anyway, he did as he was asked. And just as the guy turns his hand over to look at his watch, you know what this old man does? He tears the watch from his wrist, throws it on the floor
and starts stamping on it till he’s smashed its face. All the while, he’s screaming, spit flying from his mouth, “English! English! English! Even your Time is in English.
You’ve destroyed my shop for nothing; you’ll never be free of English.” ’
I half-listened to my brother. I felt a deep sense of contentment at being in his presence. It was like the comfort of being a child in Delhi when, out with my mother at night, I would fall
asleep on somebody’s sofa to the sound of adult voices.
There was something unreal and marvellous for me about having an elder brother. I had sought this bond with male friends in the past, but it had always felt laboured. Here it was built into the
relationship, a part of its nature, and could even, it seemed – this being the greatest relief of all – be taken for granted.
‘And do you know what the cause of it is?’ Isffy said, focusing my attention.
‘What?’ I asked, aware that our political conversation now was a Tabassum tactic – our father’s really – of overcoming the awkwardness after a long separation.
‘That same vision of purity on which the country was founded. The feeling that if only we were purer we would be better.’
‘More Islam?’
‘Yes and no. What people coming from outside don’t realize is that the rot is secular; it has no religion. The place is full of gangs, kidnappings, parricides, rapes, murders, you
name it. So when someone says Islamic revolution, it brings to mind something terribly organized. But nothing as organized as that can come out of this chaos. Islam hides the real picture; it has
always done that here. Where are you staying, by the way?’ he said, abruptly.
‘I don’t know. Narses suggested I stay at the Qasimic Call guest house . . .’
‘Forget it!’ Isffy said. ‘You’re staying with me. It’s not every day that my long-lost brother comes to town.’
Then I remembered my bags and Mirwaiz. But my brother had anticipated me. ‘I’ve already told the court eunuch’s butt boy,’ he said, ‘to put your bags in my
car.’
The aggression with which he spoke allowed me to speak more intimately.
‘I hope they’re not giving you a rough time?’ I said.
‘No,’ he replied, and feigning, I felt, indifference, added, ‘they’re always trying, of course. But at the moment I’m handling the family’s TV channel, which
is doing well and pulling in tons of advertising. That makes them happy. Plus, I’m producing a news show called
The
Fifth Column
, which has very high TRPs. So things are on an
even keel for now. But that doesn’t mean I’d let my guard down. And now that I’m back in the family, I want to fix that hijra, Narses, once and for all.’
‘Isffy, be careful.’
‘Just wait and see. He’s also vulnerable. Now I’ll show him how it feels.’
‘Vulnerable? Why?’
‘Because,’ Isffy said, holding my gaze over the bubble glass rim of the lime passion, ‘he’s in love, for the first time, with a man other than my father.’
‘Mirwaiz?’
‘Ye-ess.’
‘Isffy, how horrible! He’s hardly older than I am. How did he end up there, anyway? I thought it was you who hired him?’
‘I did. For the office. But Narses took one look at him and snatched him up. Are you shocked? Why? Abba’s no different. When he married Shaista, she was my age.’
‘I suppose.’ Then I recalled how my father would often say to my youngest brother, light-eyed and handsome, ‘I don’t care if you’re a
rapist, a murderer, a serial killer, if you’re a gay I’ll kill you.’ Were he to find out about Mirwaiz, I thought to myself, Narses’s little secret, perhaps the first he had
ever had from our father, was sure to end in tragedy.
‘Is he so bad, Narses?’ I asked.
My brother sighed: ‘No, of course, not. No one is all bad. But he’s played a very destructive role in our family. His willingness to live by the light of my . . . our father has made
it the norm for everyone else. He was like the second man to nod and say, “Yes, the world is flat.” After that, the third, fourth, fifth were easy to find.’ Then, as though
wishing to give me some hard evidence, he said, ‘You know, he’s got me under constant watch at Qasimic Call, looking for anything he can hold against me, reporting every last slip-up to
my father. You can, I suppose, blame Abba for allowing this to happen, but it’s as if Narses feeds his worst instincts. Which are to control and dominate the people near him, as if they were
one of his small businesses.’
Presently a flash of sunlight went through the restaurant. The gloom resettled, but the new arrival delayed his entry. He lingered in an anteroom of sorts, talking on the phone, his figure
partially concealed by a pair of louvred batwing doors. All that was visible was the hem of his cream kurta and a pair of black Peshawari sandals. He had his back to the restaurant, but in the
heaviness of the neck, the thickness of his fingers and the strain in the raised elbow, his great bulk was apparent.
He spoke loudly; he made self-deprecating jokes – ‘But mian saab it was
because
they put me in the back of the plane that it could land at all’ – he alternated
between addressing his interlocutor as mian saab, chief and boss. From the adoration in his voice, the repeated jokes, the booming laughter it was clear to the entire restaurant whom he was
speaking to.
‘Abba,’ Narses wetly mouthed to us as he swung around, resting two heavy arms on the flimsy doors, causing their hinges to whine. His face, almost as if the fat had acted as a
preservative, was youthful. He had a full head of hair, a middle-parting, pinkish cheeks, full lips, and – as with many fat people – put forward the illusion that if only he were thin
he would be good-looking.
Having alerted both father and sons of each other’s presence, he played on our discomfort, knowing that neither of us would cramp our style enough to ask to speak to the other or even to
send a friendly word of greeting. Yet, when the conversation was over, we would all three be left with some resentment that the other had not asked after him.
‘Mian saab, you are too much!’ Narses suddenly exclaimed, bellowing into the darkened room; the lunching ladies and restaurant staff tittered as if they too had been included in the
joke. ‘Now you’ve really shown me. I must tell Isffy and Rehan. Yes, they’re sitting here, looking as if they were joined at birth. They are sure to roar with laughter. OK, chief,
now before you ring off without a word, I’m going to say bye first. Bye now. Bye. Bye.’
Then looking at the phone with dismay, Narses ul-Hijr, with the ease of a man accustomed to making dramatic entries, addressed the whole room: ‘He’s done it again. Twenty-five years
now he’s been my brother-in-law and not once has he ever said hello or bye to me. I know the conversation’s over when there’s no one on the other end. In any event, Mir
Anwar,’ Narses added, looking towards the restaurant manager who now rushed up to him, ‘he sends his warmest regards to you and your family. He never forgets the kindness people showed
him during those dark days of the 1980s when we thought Gul’s tyranny would never end.’