Mohammed Hanif’s new novel: Pakistan’s OK Town erupts in protest when a political figure is hanged

Molly Rafique must have planned it this way, although he would insist forever that it was all Allah’s will. When Molly sneaks his young lady friend into the academy, Sir Baghi is finally enjoying an afternoon of solitude. He had sent his students home the moment they heard a newspaper hawker shouting in the street about the hanging. Baghi knows that it will be a very long weekend. He wants to use this unexpected holiday to mark papers, review his syllabus and read the fourth chapter of To the Lighthouse. He also plans a visit to Venus cinema for a matinee in the hope of finding some random afternoon love. It’s not in his nature to be optimistic but he is hoping that the cinema won’t be shut down.

Molly’s lady friend carries a faded sea-green sports bag, with the logo of a panther in the middle of a leap, “Pride of OK Town” inscribed under the panther in fading gold letters. She is wearing baggy tracksuit bottoms, a white dupatta embroidered with white and yellow nargis flowers loosely draped around her neck, a girl old enough to know that she needs a dupatta but young enough not to know what to do with it. She has the air of somebody about to take a leap and start running, somebody who is being chased by their own past or, at least, what they hope is their past.

Molly is sweating, his forehead a network of the entire world’s troubles. A sheen of sweat covers his shaved upper lip, his famous beard quivering. “Can you look after my guest while I do the funeral prayers?”

Funeral prayers? Baghi groans, the veins in his neck bulge because of the unspoken words. He always buttons up his always-black shirt’s collar, less a sartorial choice and more an attempt to hide a crimson hammer and sickle tattoo on his upper chest. Baghi is past his shouting days but he still gets the occasional urge. He knows the mosque is Molly’s business but why does Molly want to have a funeral in absentia for a man hanged two hundred miles away and buried in his village in the dead of the night three days ago? A man who was clearly a feudal despot in the clothes of an awami pseudo socialist, bald and squeaky and certain of his own immortality, the type of man who, from his death cell, writes a threatening pamphlet titled “If I Am Assassinated” … and is assassinated anyway, someone who says you can kill a man but you can’t kill an idea. Baghi wants to tell Molly you can’t have a funeral in absentia for an idea. But the mosque is Molly’s business. On another day he might have said, Molly, surely you don’t want to start a socialist revolution in your mosque? Better not to start it anywhere – look at me.

“What can I do? The bazaar is full of jiyalas and they want a funeral. I know he wasn’t very nice to you but he is gone to Allah now, where we all must go one day, and we must honour the dead,” says Molly, moving towards the door.

Yes, we must honour the dead, Baghi wants to say, even if the dead once had a chilli-powder-laced rod rammed up my ass for writing a letter.

Baghi also wants to say that this is a teaching institution and not a resting place for girls with hurriedly packed sports bags but, before he can say it, Molly is gone, leaving behind the smell of his favourite ittar, a confused mixture of rose and jasmine, and his guest with large, searching eyes, scanning the place for something familiar.

She puts down her bag, moves towards Baghi and holds out her hand. Baghi observes her hand, hesitates before taking it. When was the last time he had shaken hands with a woman? This was not the kind of town where people shook hands with women, not the kind of neighbourhood where people left single women in bachelors’ quarters to be entertained. Her handshake is determined and it forces him to look her in the face.

Ruin, he thinks, she is going to ruin us.

In five years of teaching English to sons and daughters of peasants and shopkeepers, Baghi has developed a revolutionary technique: single words spring up to describe a moment in life. In order to teach these students, you didn’t need proper sentences. Verbs and nouns and adjectives and qualifying adverbs could wait. Usually, a word was enough to describe a given situation, an intention or, in this case, a sense of impending doom.

Baghi rarely gets to say that he was right because it has been proven, often enough, from matters of politics to affairs of the heart, that he was almost always wrong. Later it would turn out that he was right in this moment when he forgets all the flourishes of a successful English tutor and a closet revolutionary, looks at her and comes up with the perfect word: ruin.

Baghi doesn’t much care for the native language tradition which has evolved many ways of describing a face, specially a woman’s face – in fact, most of classical poetry was devoted to capturing a woman’s features. Snakes and wine goblets featured prominently. You looked for wine goblets in the eyes, poisonous vipers in the hair, and the face was always book-like. To Baghi’s enduring irritation, nobody ever said which book, a slim T.S. Eliot volume or a copy of the Original and the Biggest Heer. The English language, Baghi believed, was more accommodating, more precise, yet more expansive. You could do away with wine goblets and coiling, hissing snakes; you could just say her nose was sharp and quivered gently when she breathed, a little dimple on the left cheek, which still had baby fat, set off a mole on the right cheek.

If he was into women, he would say she could probably set anybody’s bed on fire and turn their life to ashes by loving them and then abandoning them to waste away their life writing below-average poetry, invoking as many snakes and broken goblets as they pleased.

Baghi had wanted to do many things in life: bring a violent revolution, make the rich suffer, give all the peasants’ children a world-class education. But right now he was content doing small courtesies; he was going to ask his lady guest to have a seat and politely inquire if they had met in a past life. But before he can say it, she plonks her bag on the floor and takes a seat. He offers her tea, he offers her water. She refuses with a wave of her hand and sits on the chair; she looks towards the ceiling, the bookshelf, the blackboard, then speaks suddenly, and while native poets may have heard a koel cooing, Baghi only hears a dry-throated, husky voice which some men with unresolved sexual urges might find desirable, a voice defeated but refusing to surrender, the voice of someone ready to get up and go looking for a fight again.

“Do you often entertain his friends?” The question sounds like an accusation to Baghi.

“No,” Baghi says. “Not like this.” He fingers his buttoned-up collar, stutters and finds himself defending his friend and landlord Maulvi Rafique’s character, not that his character needs defending: he is a man of God, a rising star of the spiritual marketplace; people offer him mutton qorma and cash in advance to listen to him telling them how to live their lives and how to prepare for the afterlife. She is waiting, still looking at him, as if urging him to explain his life as the entertainer of stray women. “I mean, sometimes we have friends over, common friends, and we talk, but if you are asking if he has brought a woman to my academy, I would have to say no. This is an institution of learning and not a…” She is not listening to him any more. She is the kind of woman who tunes out when a man starts to bullshit. That’s one of the many reasons on Baghi’s list for staying away from women.

Excerpted with permission from Rebel English Academy, Mohammed Hanif, Penguin Random House India.