Then turning short on his heels, he strode out of the room with Narses trailing behind him.
After a few moments of silence, I said, looking at Isffy, ‘It’s worse than we imagined . . .’
‘Better,’ Isffy replied and smiled. ‘Much better. This is the moment I’ve been waiting for.’
* * *
A week passed. The blackmailer’s threats, of which there had been only a few until then, as if he himself was uncertain of the value of the video in his possession, became
more frequent and intimate, delivered always via text message or email. The first that Isffy showed me had had a peculiar formality. ‘Having sex video of you and Ms Mehreen, ma’am.
Would be needing cash. Details forthcoming. Yours humbly, Masti ka Raja.’ But as the days passed, the language of communication turned from English to a mixture of Urdu and English, dropping
all vestiges of reserve and formality. Isffy, sitting in his office at QC, forwarded them to me.
I had fallen into an idle regime of whole afternoons spent on the leather beanbag, reading Russian novels and drinking nimbu panis. But every now and then, the flashing of my phone would disturb
some bout of Dostoevskian frenzy.
‘So, Mr Isffy, you like licking the phudi?’ Or: ‘Maroing Ms Mehreen, ma’am, in the bundh?’ And that was the other curious thing about the messages. They seemed,
more than a demand for money, to be an appeal for information, for sexual information. It seemed in some strange way that if only Isffy were to find the man, and sit him down and talk freely to him
about all the things that animated his sexual curiosity, the matter would end there. He would hand back the tapes and go away, on perhaps the condition that Isffy would, from time to time, chat
with him. There was also a note of confusion running through the blackmailer’s messages, as though feelings of inadequacy and frustration in relation to women had been transformed into a kind
of sexual admiration of Isffy – ‘Oh, Mr Isffy, you really know how to give it to her, the doggy style. How big is your lundh?’ It was almost as if, by his association with
Isffy’s, he, too, was hoping to become a man with a modern sex life.
It was clear from some of the information in the messages that the blackmailer was, in the broadest sense, part of the Qasimic Call family. Isffy was sure he was acting under
orders from Narses, and even suspected Mirwaiz, pointing out that he was in and out of the house and could have copied the videos anytime. But I dismissed this possibility out of hand.
‘Why are you so sure it’s not him?’ Isffy asked.
‘It doesn’t sound like him,’ I said uncertainly. What I really meant to say was that the blackmailer seemed too inexperienced, knew too little about life in general, to be
Mirwaiz. And even from that brief acquaintance with him on the train, I felt this was too distasteful a business, too tawdry in its execution, to be conducted by someone like Mirwaiz.
But Isffy was not satisfied with this. To his mind, this was the newest version of an old game. Once again, the man who controlled his father, and foresaw the danger of Isffy producing an heir,
had found a way of not simply disrupting the latest relationship in Isffy’s life, but of discrediting him at the company that would one day form the largest part of his inheritance. He wanted
to create a situation where it would be unacceptable for Isffy to enter a board meeting. And what better way to do that than to expose him as a man who exploits his power in the company for sexual
purposes.
‘You see,’ he said to me, on one of the many balmy evenings we spent on Isffy’s vast terrace, ‘he knows that if I had a wife and children, our father, who wants in his
heart of hearts to heal the rift between us, would be able to do it through them. He’s in his mid-sixties now; he’s slowing down; he wants to express the love he was never able to show
me directly through people of my line. He sees that it is the only way to let me know that he wants it to be OK. But till those people, the linking people, are in place, he will rage, and continue
to do harm to our relationship, because my presence, so long as I seem alone and unhappy, makes him feel guilty. And there’s nothing our father hates more than to feel guilt. It is the one
emotion that is as far away from his nature as is possible.’
‘But this Mehreen girl, is she someone you might settle down with?’
‘Maybe. At this point I don’t need much. And she’s very gentle and understanding. I just need to get her out of this Qasimic environment before Narses ruins my name at the
company. I need to screw him first.’
‘How?’
‘Through this Mirwaiz business.’ Once again I was about to ask him about the circumstances of his first meeting with Mirwaiz, wanting to hear his version of it, but he silenced me:
‘I need a way to let my father know without making it seem that I am doing it to fuck Narses.’
I must have sighed at the dirty dealings of it all, for Isffy said: ‘Don’t get me wrong, bro. It’s not by choice that I’m playing politics. I want out, too. But this guy,
Narses, if I don’t finish him, he’ll finish me.’
‘And you have a way of letting Abba know, without implicating yourself ?’
‘Yes, I think so,’ he said brightly. ‘I really think so.’
‘How?’
‘I’m not sure yet, but a few days ago, I received a message from Mir Anwar. Do you remember him?’
‘The Aylanto manager?’
‘Exactly. He’s an old friend of Abba’s, and though he kisses ass to Narses because he has to, he actually hates the guy. In his heart, he’s an ally of mine, believes
staunchly in the bloodline, the oldest son and all that crap, you know. Anyway, he sent me this message, saying he had some interesting info about Narses, info that he wanted to share with me, but
said he couldn’t do it over the phone. He says he’ll tell me tomorrow in Marrakech at the Gym.’
‘What’s that?’
‘A themed dance, one of the highlights of PbQ nightlife.’ Then looking inexplicably at his watch, Isffy said, ‘There’s a Fifth Column meeting here first.’
‘Fifth . . . ?’
‘The show I’m producing. We’ll go after that. You’ll get a chance to meet some of my friends as well. And Queenie too.’
‘She’s coming?’
‘Yes. And my pal, Momin; he’s one of the great kings, or queens rather, of the Qasimic fashion scene. You’ll love him.’
‘And Anwar . . . ?’
Isffy looked blankly at me. Then leaning back in his chair and staring up at a naked bulb around which insects swarmed, he exclaimed, ‘
Mir
Anwar! He’ll be at the
Gym.’
‘Isffy,’ I asked, ‘how come he’s a friend of Abba’s?’
‘How come? What do you mean? He is.’ Then gauging my meaning, Isffy explained, ‘Don’t be fooled by his appearance. He’s not just the manager of Aylanto; he’s
the owner. It’s just that he’s a hands-on kind of guy. And big politically. He was in jail for a while under Gul. That’s how Abba knows him.’
‘Also a PPP man?’
‘No, he’s part of the Zeban-e-Pak.’
Seeing my vacant expression, Isffy explained, ‘You remember the protest the other day?’
‘The one against English?’
‘Exactly. You saw how they caused all that damage on the rest of the street, but didn’t touch Aylanto? That’s because Mir Anwar is their guy.’
‘What’s the platform?’
‘Linguistic purity. They’re mostly immigrants from India who came here after the Partition, believing they were coming to a linguistic homeland, a place where Urdu
would flower. When it didn’t, when English became the language of the elite, they became disgruntled. They say,
“The country was founded for a purpose; if it’s not going to realize that purpose, then what is the point of the country?” That’s our biggest problem, you know. Everyone has
some high idea or the other about what the country was founded for, but it’s always something completely divorced from the reality of the place, something we have to be and are
not.’
‘Isn’t every place like that?’
‘No. In other places, what you have on the ground becomes the foundation of your aspirations. Here, it’s the other way round. There’s always something abstract that needs to be
imposed on the existing reality. And it fucks up everyone’s moral compass. Because if you’re always setting out to be something you’re not, and are never going to be, if
you’re always chasing some Utopia or the other, then after a while you get fed up and stop bothering even to be what everyone is, which is human; your most basic morality starts to erode.
And, Rehan, you know what they’re about, these unobtainable Utopias?’
‘What?’
‘They’re an excuse for retreat, for more nihilism and futility. Rumi says – though it could just as well be our founder speaking: “That which is not to be found is what I
desire.” So what do I do instead? I build high walls and retreat within them, I occupy myself with futilities. The Z-e-P, for instance, do you know what one of their central demands
is?’
I shook my head.
‘To convert all English books into the Nastaliq script!’
‘To translate them?’
‘No, no,’ Isffy said, laughing now, ‘to leave them in English, but to have all the English words, as they are, in the Urdu script. Now, if you’re bothering to learn
English in the first place, enough to read the damn books; not just this, but enough to be able to guess how English would operate in Nastaliq, to which it is obviously unsuited, then why not just
learn the English script, which you probably already know?’
‘How do they answer that?’
‘They say that a language’s spirit is in its script. And if you turn English into Nastaliq, you can conquer it once and for all.’
‘But why conquer English? Why not just promote your own language?’
‘Because English is power. But because you’re afraid to admit that, you graft your own script over it, and sit happy with the illusion that you have conquered English.’
A little bewildered by all of this, I said, ‘And do they have a large constituency?’
‘Not so large, but energized. They’re willing to die for their crazy ideas. And they’re very powerful in PbQ. You touch one of their people, and you’re a dead
man.’
It could seem sometimes that for every man in Port bin Qasim – and there were fifteen million of them – there were groups and movements. There were green turbans, brown turbans and
red turbans. There were six-inchers and twelve-inchers, depending on which relationship between piety and the length of your beard you believed in. There were purists, semi-purists and
vernacularists, depending on which equation you struck between the purity of the faith and the purity of language. There were Shias and Sunnis, of course, but among them, too, there were
innumerable divisions and sub-divisions. And these groups, each in their highly particular way, despised one another. They planted bombs at each other’s meetings; they rioted at the slightest
provocation; they dug themselves into breeze-block ghettoes that stretched for miles along the periphery of the city. To the outsider, especially if he fell in among the elite, who were irreligious
and English-speaking, it was impossible to make sense of the divisions. It was as if men wished to distinguish themselves in the disorder that prevailed by fine-tuning their shriek every day to a
higher and more particular pitch. And, had so much violence not occurred as a result, had real blood not been spilt, their yearnings might almost have been mistaken for those of individuality.
These voices were to be heard, shrill and primordial, in Port bin Qasim’s media, on its television channels and radio stations, in its newspapers. Every day new stories of exquisite and
inscrutable rage emerged, but their cause never seemed equal to the intensity of their expression. And that perhaps was the point. The author of each episode, as though he were committing a kind of
satirical suicide, seemed to take pleasure in the futility of his death.
There was, for instance, on the front page of the
Herald
, days after my arrival, a black and white picture of a self-immolation. The man appeared almost to be dancing as the white
newsprint fire engulfed his body. It was difficult to know whether his expression was that of someone in pain or in the midst of an extreme euphoria. When I turned to the accompanying story, I
read: ‘Youth sets himself ablaze on discovering his name has Sanskritic origins.’
Or, a few days later, a wedding massacre in Sind. The pictures were awful: images of the young couple contrasted with scenes of butchery and chaos, the red and gold of a wedding lehnga stained
with the deeper red of bridal blood. But once more, the motive for, in this case, fratricide was mystifying: the girl’s brother and friends had turned on the wedding party with axes upon
discovering that not a single member of the groom’s side could convert simple Urdu nouns into their plural forms.
This
, from her brother: ‘My suspicions were first aroused when
I heard one of them say, “baz vakht”. “Vakht?” I thought; strange that he didn’t say “aukaat”. So, out of interest, my friends and I, we began questioning
them. And do you know what? Not one of them, not even the man who was to marry my sister, could tell me what the singular form of “auraak” was. Worse still, when we asked them to form
agent nouns from simple nouns, “intezar” to “muntazir” say, not a man among them could do it. That was when my blood began to boil. I thought what kind of family am I
letting my sister marry into? How would my nieces and nephews be raised? The shame! That was when my fury overcame me, and I took matters into my own hands.’
The makers of
The Fifth Column
expressed little interest in stories of this kind. As their parents had once been concerned with the British, they were now concerned with
the Americans. And behind this concern, though ostensibly they wished to demonstrate the evils of ‘the American hand’, lay a kind of love and admiration, not unlike that of
Isffy’s blackmailer.
As I sat in on their meeting the following evening, I realized that the video Isffy had shown me a week before was not for private consumption at all, but was part of many videos of this kind,
and was intended for broadcast.
‘We have to tell people what the white man is doing in this region,’ Momin said with great feeling, seeming, I thought, to single me out for this statement of intent. He was fat and
effeminate, and dressed in a kaftan with glasswork down the front. His skin was smooth and dark, and his sloping eyes possessed something of the half-open sagacity of the Buddha. Once he had made
this declaration, in as energetic a tone as he could muster, and it was met with thoughtful nods around the room, he lost interest in the subject. He smiled and said slyly, ‘But it’s
quite nice to see how much we’ve been on the front page of the
New York Times
lately, no?’