Night of the Golden Butterfly Read Free Page A

disdain, he had turned down the offer of a medal and money from the government. Zahid was six years old at the time, but growing up surrounded by sports medals and cups only increased his aversion to hockey. His father had turned equally successfully to business and set up an import-export agency, which, with the help of civil servants in need of a commission, had prospered. Zahid’s reaction had been to join an underground Communist cell, cementing our friendship. But nothing is ever really underground in Fatherland. Everybody knew.
    Reluctantly, Zahid agreed to make the fatal call. A few hours later, as I was carefully tamping the coffee to make myself an espresso, the phone rang. My first instinct was to hang up. It was only the mention of Plato’s name that stopped me. I hadn’t spoken to Zahid for forty-five years—not since his departure from Lahore in the mid-Sixties to read medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, after his marriage.
    To leave the country, he had had to obtain a No Objection Certificate from the Ministry of Interior. In order to do that, we later learned, he had revealed the whereabouts of Comrade Tipu, a Bengali Communist from Chittagong who was at college with us in Lahore. Tipu was much better educated than we in both the Marxist classics and pre-marital sex, and we learned a great deal from him. That cursed spring, he was warned by a friendly bureaucrat that he had just been put on the wanted list for subversive activities against the state. Tipu felt honoured, but also scared. Nobody likes to think of electric rods, icicles or the penises of the secret police being shoved up his arse in a dingy cellar of the Lahore Fort. Someone we all knew had been tortured to death a few years previously and fear was not an irrational response. Tipu decided to go underground. An aunt of mine in a remote and mountainous part of the country was looking for a gardener. I suggested Tipu, who borrowed a few gardening manuals and left for the hills. A few months later he was tracked and arrested. The CID had been tipped off and a senior police chief was heard boasting after a few whiskies in the Gymkhana Club that it was the hockey star’s son who had obliged them. A second cousin present at the occasion made sure that I was informed about it, but only after Zahid had left for Baltimore. The news spread in the city and I broke off all relations with him. Youthful arrogance, now conformist, now rebellious, rarely permits any serious questioning or re-evaluation of actions, events, experiences. We were no different. Zahid was a traitor. I cast him out of my mind, though I could hardly avoid hearing about his success as a surgeon. Since Zahid moved to London we had exchanged curt nods at the odd wedding reception and a funeral or two, including that of an old Fatherland Communist whose son had insisted on prayers in the lavish but ugly Regents Park Mosque. Tipu himself was there. He had led a chequered career as an arms dealer, and I saw the two embrace. By then I had come to know innumerable, deeper, worse betrayals. If Zahid’s was not to be forgiven, it might be qualified. But above all I wanted to hear about Plato. And suddenly, after all these years, I wanted to know about Zahid’s wife. Somewhat impulsively and to my own surprise, I agreed to have dinner with them in Richmond.
    We had not spoken for almost half a century. Old age circumscribes the future, the laws of biology push one to reflect mainly on the past, but if anything, I have tended in the other direction. Why concentrate exclusively on the past? Some friends have become testy and ultra-pessimistic, seeing no value at all in the postmodern world. Biological conservatism or old hopes gone musty, in both cases inducing melancholia, despair-filled days and alcohol-fuelled evenings.
    School friendships are notoriously fickle. Some survive for purely practical reasons, the more privileged schools in every country creating social networks