The Good Son (6 page)

“Oh, you will hear that from his own lips. I suppose he is as interested in it as in anything else that does not immediately put money into his pocket. Or votes.”

From which they pass to a précis of the current political situation in her nation and the familiar defects of the foreign policy of the United States.

“No wonder you are losing!” Rukhsana says. “Pakistan is stupid enough, but we are all Bismarck compared to you. Why is this, Sonia? People ask me, because I was educated in America, so I am the expert. What can I tell them?”

“You can tell them that not one American in ten thousand can distinguish Iraq from Iran or find Pakistan on a map. We are not a subtle people.”

“Oh, you can say that again! The British were bad enough, but at least they made the effort to understand. They spoke the languages, they knew the history, and still they made terrible errors. But nothing like this. Our country is coming apart, and it all comes from what you are doing. You know how I know this? My brother is moving funds out of Pakistan, so when it collapses we will not be standing in our shirts. This is what we’ve come to.”

She pauses to honk at a motor rickshaw driver who has swerved into her path, a long blast nearly unheard over the continuous honking of the other traffic.

To change the subject, Sonia observes, “The traffic has gotten worse. I wouldn’t have believed it possible.”

“Yes, Lahore is unlivable now, but we still live here. I’m glad I have this Mini. Jafar wants me to use the Mercedes, but can you imagine trying to steer that boat in this mess? Look, there is the High Court. Do remember when you used to drive us children to meet my father there when we had half days at school, and he would take us to the bazaar for ice candy?”

“Oh, yeah, and other sweets. He had a sweet tooth himself, and your mother would always complain that he was ruining our appetites. And he would let himself be berated and give us a sly wink.”

A painful silence after this; then Sonia said, “I’m sorry about your mother. I’m sorry I didn’t come to the funeral.”

“Yes, you should have been there with your husband. She was not very nice to you, but you should have come.”

“I didn’t think I’d be welcome.”

“Oh, what nonsense! Because of something that happened twenty-eight years ago? A book? But
now
you come.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, and is.

“I forgive you,” says Rukhsana, “although others may not.”

“Does that include Nisar?”

“Oh, no, with Nisar everything is negotiable, even forgiveness. Otherwise we would not be here. Move your ass, you stupid monkey!” This is shouted out the window at a van that has stopped in a traffic lane to make a delivery.

“Besides, in the family you know what we say:
Sonia Sonia hai
. You are horrible but we still love you. Here we are.”

She honks at a gate in a whitewashed wall and a servant opens it and they drive into an enclosed yard shaded by two arching
peepul
trees, the paving of the courtyard scattered with blue jacaranda petals.

Sonia climbs from the little car and pauses. “I assume he’s in your father’s library.”

“It’s
his
library now,” says Rukhsana, bitterness touching her voice; Sonia walks slowly down the crushed stone path to the house.

When Sonia comes out of Nisar’s house an hour later, the heat and the ordinary odors of Lahore—spices, jasmine, traffic fumes, sewage, rot—feel welcome, like real life. Nisar has fitted the house with air-conditioning, including a back-up diesel generator, and he keeps his office as cold as his heart. Or so Rukhsana says as Sonia slides into the car.

“It wasn’t too bad,” says Sonia. “He said we can use Leepa House for the conference. He’ll call ahead to the caretakers.”

“In return for what?”

“As you predicted, he wants a meeting with Bill Craig to pitch a scheme for making computer components in one of his Karachi plants. It’s a good deal.”

Rukhsana starts the car, drives out the gate, and turns north, up to the Mall and beyond it to Ravi Road, passing through heavy traffic along the western edge of the old city. They are going to the studios of Ravi TV to record interviews.

Rukhsana asks, “And how did he treat you? Was he nasty?”

“No,” Sonia says wearily, “he was polite and businesslike. He doesn’t seem to dwell in the past.”

“As I do, you mean?”

Sonia sighs. “Honestly, Ruhka, I don’t want to dredge up old family fights or take sides.”

Undeterred, Rukhsana continues. “That’s easy for you to say. You don’t have to live here. Farid is the eldest son, he’s supposed to be the head of the family, but Nisar always gets his way, and—”

“Yes, but as you well know, Farid has no interest in being the head of anything. Look, there’s the cemetery. Can we stop for a little while?”

“We’ll be late.”

“Please.”

Rukhsana twists the wheel violently and cuts across two lanes of traffic, prompting a chorus of horns. She spits out a skein of curses in the street language of Lahore, and turns into the gate of Gau Shala, the old burial ground of the city.

She parks. Sonia asks, “Do you know where they are?”

“Of course,” says Rukhsana stiffly, and leads the way through the thick, dusty, monumented ground, walking ahead like a soldier.

Sonia stands for a while in front of the simple stone slabs that mark the graves of her father-in-law and her two daughters. Jamila would be thirty and Aisha thirty-four, she calculates, but this thought does not summon a sense of loss. Like the markers, that part of her heart is stone now. Grief among traditional Muslim women is operatic, but they are not allowed to attend funerals. They wail at home. She wailed in the streets of Zurich when she heard the news, when someone (it was in fact Rukhsana) remembered to call her. Farid had suffered a complete collapse and was hospitalized for a month after the event. She has long forgiven him, for that lapse and for what happened at about that time to her son. The many catastrophes in her life have marked her, but not by the manufacture of grudges. She recalls a Yeats line Baba often quoted: “Cast a cold eye on life, on death. Horseman, pass by!” She does that, has
done that, for years. The two women walk back to the car, arm in arm. Rukhsana’s cheeks are wet, but she makes no comment.

After they have taped their interviews, they drive to the Avari Hotel on the Mall. Sonia checks in and learns from the desk clerk that the rest of the members of the conference, except for William Craig, have already arrived. The Avari is a perfectly anonymous luxury hotel of the type found in any major city. One might be in Singapore or Toronto, Sonia thinks, upon seeing her room, except for a discreet plate marking the
qibla
, the direction of Mecca for prayers. She has selected this hotel on purpose; there will be culture shock enough for the Western conferees when they get to Kashmir.

Sonia orders tea from room service and sits on the bed with the conference papers spread about her. The conference is called “Conflict Resolution on the Subcontinent: A Therapeutic Approach.” The meeting is actually her idea, although the official sponsor is Amin Yakub Khan, a wealthy Pakistani, once a friend and protégé of B. B. Laghari and now the president of Pakistan’s largest charitable trust. Sonia and he had put together the conference in a flurry of phone calls and e-mails last winter, keeping a low profile because of its controversial nature, designed to discuss the possibility that the kind of ethnic and confessional violence that had characterized the region since the exit of the British Raj was in fact a kind of mass insanity and that the analytical tools that had been used to help many individuals recover from madness might be adapted to the peacemaking process. When Sonia first suggested the project, Amin had laughed and said it might be easier to flood the Indus, the Ganges, and the Brahmaputra with Prozac.

But she wore him down. It would be interesting, she said. It’s always nice to meet people who are not in the tedious mold of one’s everyday acquaintances, it would be a week out of sweltering Lahore in May, and it would be a sort of memorial for Baba, who was always a partisan of East-West cooperation and a lover of peace. They were coming up on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death. They could write a dedication to him when they published the proceedings. So he agreed, in the end, and it only remained to choose the participants and obtain funding.

For the latter, Sonia made contact with William Craig, the famously eccentric telecom billionaire, who owned a vast ranch on the New Mexico border not far from where she lived for part of the year. His foundation
had been supporting a network of mental health clinics in the region for years; she worked at one of these, and they sat together on the organization’s board. They were not exactly friends, but she was able to reach him directly and thus to have her proposal stand out from thousands of others. He immediately agreed to pay for the thing but he wanted to attend, which she had not expected. Perhaps he would cancel at the last moment.

The other invitees were a mixed bag. She had let Amin pick them, insisting only that at least one of them be an Indian national. He’d selected Manjit Nara for that slot, a psychiatrist and ethnographer from Delhi, an expert on Kashmir. Besides him, they invited Father Mark Shea, a Canadian Jesuit who had been prominent in several Latin American peace negotiations; Porter and Annette Cosgrove, American Quakers, who had worked to end the conflict in Angola and written some important books on nonviolent political change; and Karl-Heinz Schildkraut, from Zurich, an old friend of hers and a psychotherapist with a long-standing interest in the history of India and Pakistan.

When the funding came through, Sonia had called her sister-in-law. Rukhsana would be a good choice for the conference rapporteur and could also help Sonia back into the good graces of the Laghari family. Rukhsana had suggested another invitee, Harold Ashton, an Englishman, a former foreign service officer and an expert on the diplomatic history of the subcontinent, who also accepted. Sonia drinks her tea, when it comes, and reads the papers prepared by the attendees until jet lag seizes her and she sleeps.

She awakens three hours later to the sound of the
azan
, the call to Maghrib, the prayer at sunset:

God is great God is great God is great, I attest there is no God
but God, I attest Muhammad is the messenger of God, make
haste to prayer, make haste to welfare, there is no God but God.

The wailing song floats in from a nearby mosque loudspeaker and cuts through the international air-conditioner hum. She has not prayed as a Muslim for a considerable time, but after hearing the azan she finds herself almost reflexively reciting the
du’a
, the supplication before prayer, and then she ties up her hair in her scarf and goes to the bathroom and
performs the ritual ablution, washing her feet and her hands and arms and running her wet hands over her face.

She takes the prayer rug the hotel provides and arranges it to face the qibla. Silently she goes through the proper intention for the Maghrib prayer and then enters the prayer state easily, without friction, the ritual words and the prescribed movements, the hands up next to the face, the hands folded, right over left on the belly, the kneeling, the full prostration, the cycle of one
raka’ah
after another until the three ordained for the sunset prayer are done. Sonia has always been religious in her own fashion. In America, she attends a Catholic church in whatever neighborhood she finds herself, as her mother trained her to do. In Muslim lands she follows her adopted religion. In Europe she presents herself as an adherent of Carl Gustav Jung. Nor is it hypocritical, she thinks, not merely a case of When in Rome. She doesn’t see why her worship should be restricted to one faith, especially as she is devoted to all of them and believes that God understands this peculiarity and approves.

Now it is time to get ready for the reception. She showers, washes and dries her hair, dresses in her best shalwar kameez, a black number shot with silver threads, and arranges a black silk scarf over her short hair. The wall mirror shows her a thin, slight woman with graying black hair atop a deep-tanned face out of which shine dark, bright eyes. She thinks she looks like an American in costume, so she takes a breath and shifts the tension in her muscles, especially the muscles of her face. She looks again and smiles shyly for effect. Now she is a Muslim lady, probably a Pathan, at home in Pakistan. She is very good at this, and it gives her an absurd and infantile pleasure.

The hotel has provided a small room set up with a large round table and a bar. As she enters, Sonia sees Rukhsana speaking to a couple of men. One is a slight elfin figure in a cheap tan suit, his blue eyes bright and cheerful behind rimless glasses, his narrow skull clothed with a thatch of sand-colored hair going gray; the other towers over him, a really huge old man, his face decorated by a noble nose and a white brush mustache. Rukhsana gestures her over and embraces her; Sonia can smell liquor on her breath, although the glass she is holding appears to be fruit juice. Rukhsana introduces the smaller of the two as Father Mark Shea, S.J.