“Hopefully not in London, the shopping’s gone to hell. But the Americans.”
“We’re thinking the same thought, Prime Minister. The Special Relationship.”
“Is nowhere near as reciprocal as the Brits like to think. I’ll tell you one thing gives me joy out of this whole mess, Khan. We stuck it up that chuutya Jivanjee. He thought he was so clever, leaking those photographs of his Holy Shopping Trolley; well, now he’s the one running back home with his balls in his mouth.”
“Still, Prime Minister, he hasn’t gone away, you know. I think we shall be hearing from Mr. Jivanjee if we get our peace conference.”
“When, Khan.”
Shaheen Badoor Khan dips his head in acquiescence. But he knows that there is no science in this thing. He, his government, and his nation have been lucky thus far. Sajida Rana picks a badly sewn seam in her combat pants, slouches down in her seat, and asks, “Anything about me yet?” Shaheen Badoor Khan flips on his palmer and scans the news channels and agency services. Phantom pages appear before his field of vision. News breaks around him in soft, colourful detonations.
“CNN, BBC, and News International are running it as breaking news. Reuters is just copying to the US Press.”
“What’s the Great Satan’s general tenor?”
Shaheen Badoor Khan flicks through leader articles from Boston to San Diego.
“Mild scepticism to outright rejection. The conservatives are calling for our withdrawal, then maybe negotiations.”
Sajida Rana tugs gently at her bottom lip, a private gesture known only to intimates, like her fabulously dirty mouth.
“At least they aren’t sending the marines. But then it’s only water, not oil. Still, it’s not Washington we’re at war with. Anything from Delhi?”
“Nothing on the online channels.”
Prime Minister Rana drags the lip a little lower.
“I don’t like that. They’ve got other headlines written.”
“Our satellite data show Awadhi forces still holding position.”
Sajida Rana lets go her lip, sits up in her seat.
“Fuck them. This is a great day! We should rejoice! Shaheen.” The first name. “In confidence: Chowdhury, what do you think of him?”
“Minister Chowdhury is a very able constituency member.”
“Minister Chowdhury is a hijra. Shaheen, there’s an idea I’ve been pushing around the back of my head. Deedarganj will be up for by-election some time in the next year, Ahuja’s putting a brave face on it but that tumour’s eating him from the inside out, poor bastard. It’s a good staunch seat; hell, they’d elect James F. McAuley if he waved a bit of incense at Ganesha.”
“With respect Prime Minister, President McAuley is not a Muslim.”
“Well fuck it, Khan, you’re hardly Bin Laden. What are you, Sufi, something like that?”
“I come from a Sufi background, that’s correct.”
“Well, that’s my point exactly. Look, truth of it is, you’ve played a good chukka on this one and I need your abilities out in the open. You’d have to serve out your apprenticeship on the backbenches, but I’d certainly be fast-tracking you for a ministerial portfolio.”
“Prime Minister, I don’t know what to say.”
“Well, you could start with thank you, you fucking parsimonious Sufi. Strictest, of course.”
“Of course, Prime Minister.”
Deprecating, bowing, acquiescing; a mere civil servant; but Shaheen Badoor Khan’s heart leaps. There was a time at Harvard after the freshman results when the tension burst and the summer opened free and wide and he forgot both business school virtues and the disciplines of his school of Islam. Under the lengthy guidance of a liquor store owner he had bought himself a bottle of imported Speyside single malt whisky and, in the shafts of dusty light through his room window, toasted his success. Between the creak of the cork in the bottle-neck and the dry retching in the purple twilight there had been a distinct period when he felt embedded in joy and radiance and confidence and that the world was his without limit or bar. He had gone to his window, bottle in hand, and roared at the planet. The hangover, the spiritual guilt, had been worth it for that one, charged burn of epiphany. Now strapped in beside his Prime Minister in an army tilt-jet, he knows it again. Cabinet Minister. Him. He tries to look at himself, imagine a different seat at the table in the beautiful, luminous council room; imagine himself rising to his feet under the dome of the Sabha. The Honourable Member for Deedarganj. And it will be right. It is his just reward, not for his diligent, unstinting service, but for his ability. He deserves this. Deserves it, will have it.
“How long have we worked together?” Sajida Rana asks.
“Seven years,” Shaheen Badoor Khan replies. He thinks, and three months twenty-two days. Sajida Rana nods. Then she does the thing with the lip again.
“Shaheen.”
“Yes, Prime Minister?”
“Is everything all right?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean, Prime Minister.”
“It’s just, well, you’ve seemed distracted recently. I’ve heard a rumour.”
Shaheen Badoor Khan feels his heart stop, his breath freeze, his brain crystallise. Dead. He is dead. No. She would not have offered him everything she has in this high, private place only to rip it away from him for a trifle of madness. But it is not madness, Shaheen Badoor Khan. It is how you are. Thinking you can deny it, hide it, is the madness. He moistens his lips with his tongue. There must be no faltering, no dryness or failure in these words he has to say.
“Government is the province of rumours, Prime Minister.”
“I’d just heard you’d left some do in the Cantonment early.”
“I was tired, Prime Minister. That was the day.” He is not safe yet.
“Of the briefing, yes, I remember. What I heard, and doubtless it’s gross slander, is that there was a bit of. tension between you and Begum Bilquis. I know it’s bloody cheek, Shaheen, but is everything all right at home?”
Tell her, Shaheen Badoor screams at himself. Better she finds out now than from some party tout, or, God preserve us, N. K. Jivanjee. If she does not know already, if this is not some test of honesty and loyalty. Tell her where you went, who you met, what you almost did with him. Yt. Tell her. Hand it over to the mother of the nation, let her manage it and spin it and massage it for the cameras, all those things he has done so long, so loyally, for Sajida Rana.
He cannot. His enemies within and without the party hate him enough as a Muslim. As a pervert, a wife-abandoner, a lover of things most of them cannot even regard as human, his career would be over. The Rana government could not survive. Before everything, Shaheen Badoor Khan is a civil servant. The administration must stand.
“May I be frank, Prime Minister?”
Sajida Rana leans across the narrow aisle.
“That’s twice in one conversation, Shaheen.”
“My wife. Bilquis. well, recently, we’ve been going through a cold period. When the boys left for university, well, we’d never had that much apart from them to talk about. We live independent lives now—Bilquis has her column and women’s forum. But you can be assured that we won’t let that get in the way of our public duties. We won’t embarrass you that way again.”
“No embarrassment,” Sajida Rana murmurs, then the military pilot makes a terse announcement about landing at Nabha Sparasham Air Force Base in ten minutes and Shaheen Badoor Khan uses the distraction to look out of the window at the great brown stain of Varanasi’s monstrous bastis. He allows himself a small twitch of a smile. Safe. She doesn’t know. He has spun it. But there are tasks he has to do now. And there, along the very southern edge of the horizon, is that a dark line of cloud?