PACING up and down on the verandah, I had smoked my last cigarette an hour ago, grinding the short end into the dust under the heel of my shoe as I had seen Bogart do many a time when he was similarly at his wit’s end.
My next step would have been to loosen the tie, muss up my oily hair and put glass and bottle together, except that Rooh Afza does not have the same calming effect as Bogart’s preferred concoction for soothing the nerves and putting the worries of the world into their proper perspective.
Would those after the Axis of Evil get to me before the fearful sight of the combined might of the Sindh and Punjab police at my doorstep? Whose approaching sounds would I hear first? Would it be the shuffle and scrape of wornout shoes accompanied by the kebab-and-onion-flavoured burping? Would that awful aroma trigger off the sequence of events leading to me being hustled off in chains, suffocating under a smelly chador grabbed from the chowkidar at the gate?
I imagined the rest of the country already in jail, as joint chief suspects in the heinous crime-watch, the PTV news team in the crowded thana and seeing me being tossed onto the dusty floorboards of a police van amidst a crowd of dishevelled policemen pushing and shoving each other to get nearer to the cameras. I prayed that my parents and children, arrested as key suspects shortly before the kidnapping, would not be witness to my ignominy and shame. Perhaps, they would be away from the TV sets, in court or most likely in the toilets, for, I comforted myself, we have genetically weak stomachs and thana food and unfiltered water just does not suit us.
Alternatively, would the first sounds be that whistle and whine of the parting of Pakistani airwaves, bowing and scraping, in front of a western designer bomb that would break rudely through the iron and steel and masonry of the front window? The damn window had not held back Billa Dakoo, darling of the local thana. What resistance could it possibly offer to an intelligent American intruder, given our centuries-old tradition of hospitality?
I wondered if I would have the time to weave or bob or duck as the smart bomb halted before my face and compared, in accordance with the Human Rights Act, the shape, hue and moisture content of my left eyeball against the image obtained from Nadra’s database, before, on receiving an affirmative answer from the in-built microprocessor, blowing me into smithereens. One of those smithereens, neatly gathered up in a hermetically-sealed plastic bag, I reflected, would later be used by forensic experts in Langley to establish the evil content in my DNA, justifying the cost of the bomb to the taxpayer in America and mightily relieving the public conscience there, as well as being of great consolation to my own spirit.
My only hope, I realized, lay in Nadra’s homemade ethnic “cumpooter” system that only rarely manages to retain any given photograph with its associated personal data, let alone the same set of eyeballs. That database, handed over as another part of the contribution to the war against terror, could yet, I wished fervently, be the saving of Pakistanis, giving the lie to the old adage “haste makes waste.”
That Axis of Evil, the formation of which we had set in motion when we got married, and to which we had given final shape when my wife gave birth to that necessary third point, our only child, had been the undoing of us all, finally. The family elders had warned us against marriage, and then pleaded with us not to add a third member that would give us the shape of an axis, easily recognized by American spy satellites.
For years, I had blamed the bangs and sparks over our house to the faulty Wapda transformer. I now regretted the many times that I had mistakenly let the lower staff in the local Wapda office hear the sound of grammatically correct and fluent English, when I should have been on the blower with Nasa and telling them what to do with their satellite hovering overhead, in short crisp sentences of no more than three words each (including the word Evil), in Texan twang and abnormally-limited vocabulary.
Would those determined to eradicate the Axis of Evil, unwittingly formed in the early 80s by the baratis of Defence, the dulhanwalas from distant Karachi and, a prudent number of months later, by the staff of the labour room at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, be the first to reach me? Or, would I finally have to cast the Pearl before the group of unmentionable animals as they swarmed in to arrest me ahead of the Home Departments of all the provinces of the country, and the Federal Interior Minister, together with their respective moustaches and travelling press conferences? I tried to determine which would be the better way to go.
I was alone against the Axis and I was alone against the chaotic police. One way or the other, as the last man not in some kind of uniform or ensconced in a Grade 17 or above post in government, yet to be arrested for the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl, I knew the end was nigh. I poured myself a stiff Rooh Afza and wondered wryly, probably for the last time, why it had to be that ghastly colour. I considered the momentary glory that would be mine were I to be promoted to sole chief suspect in the Pearl case, and compared it to the brief lonely end that would be my fate were I to let the Allies blow me to bits in my front room. Then I decided that the smart bomb through the window and into my face was an infinitely better end than the smelly chador that the police would wrap around my head. At least, I had the reassurance that the bomb had made a fair comparison of me against Nadra’s database and passed scrutiny in Geneva for use against evil people of darker shade, whereas the chador was an evil weapon of mass destruction that had first been used nefariously against women in Iran and Afghanistan, and now against more than one hundred million joint chief suspects, key suspects and major leads in the Pearl case.
I opened the window and waited for the bomb, wondering if my light-blue contact lenses would fool it. Bogart never smiled, so I resisted the temptation, too. What’s more, I didn’t really feel like smiling.
PACING up and down on the verandah, I had smoked my last cigarette an hour ago, grinding the short end into the dust under the heel of my shoe as I had seen Bogart do many a time when he was similarly at his wit’s end.
