There is a pause. Then Amin chuckles and says, “Well, you are certainly outspoken, sir. But the actual situation is not so easily dismissed.”
Ah, thinks Sonia, they have already stumbled on the K-word.
“No, the plight of the Muslim majority of Kashmir is not so easily dismissed,” Amin continues, and then smiles down at the Indian. “But perhaps Dr. N and the rest of us can solve it where so many have failed.”
“Stranger things have happened,” says Nara, with his own shy smile. “Although I cannot help but agree with what Mr. Cosgrove says. My thought is that until we recognize violent nationalism as another sort of mental disease we will get nowhere.”
“Yes, but where is the cure?” says Amin. “Who has ever cured it?”
“Well, as to that I have some theories,” the Indian replies, “which I daresay you will hear enough about during the coming week to make you quite ill with the sound of my voice. And while I am not such a fool as to credit the inevitablity of progress, I think that if one hundred years ago you had predicted that Western Europe, the greatest hotbed of nationalism of that era, the very source of the contagion, if you will, would be converted less than a century later into what amounts to a single great country, with a tiny armaments budget and utter peace among all its parts-well, people would have thought you a lunatic. But it occurred. And it can occur in South Asia as well.”
“Yes!” says Amin, “I will drink to that,” and he lifts his glass of soda water.
Sonia appreciates the way Nara has defused the topic and she turns to him and draws him out on his practice of psychotherapy. While she chats, her glance falls frequently across the table, where Rukhsana is sitting next to Ashton and directing nearly all of her energetic attention to him, the two heads leaning at each other like flowers in a bed.
Nara seems to pick up on her thoughts. Quietly he says, “Mrs. Qasir seems to have made a conquest.”
“Yes, or the other way around. Of course, they are old acquaintances.”
“Yes, Harold knows everyone. I myself know him reasonably well.”
“I don’t. What’s he like? I know his books, of course.”
“Yes, a great expert on the subcontinent is Mr. Ashton. As he should be. He is almost the last of his breed, you know; he descends from nabobs, from the white Mughals. I believe his family came to India in the eighteenth century, and they waxed great; his ancestors doubtless ruled mine with an iron hand, though in the famous velvet glove. Very fair, but stern. When we kicked them out in ’forty-seven, some few could not quite give us up, and so we have the Harold Ashtons of the world. Speaks all the languages, of course, chats in the bazaars and the chancelleries with equal aplomb, and informs the world of our mysterious Eastern ways.”
“You sound like you don’t care for him.”
A delicate shrug. “Nothing personal, I assure you, and at least he is not an ignoramus in his chosen field. It’s only that… have you ever noticed that when an English person of a certain type-I mean the type represented by Ashton-enters a shop kept by an Indian or a Pakistani, here or abroad, something happens to the shopkeeper or clerk? As soon as that pukka accent emerges the air changes, the clerk stands straighter, he becomes more attentive, perhaps a bit fawning, and other customers are ignored. The clerk is in a sense hypnotized by what we must call racial memory. Colonialism still inhabits our unconscious, even now, fifty years on.”
“And yours too?”
He smiled and sniffed a laugh. “Oh, yes, mine too. I find I start sounding like an old babu, and my English becomes a little tangled. It is humiliating.”
“How do you know him?”
“I am one of his informants. He considers me an expert on the psyche of the various subcontinental races. Which is, I suppose, why I am here.”
He abandons this uncomfortable subject and addresses Amin. “This really is an excellent curry, properly spiced. I always find, don’t you, Amin, that when Westerners are at a dinner they always make the curry tastelessly bland.”
“Yes, indeed!” says Amin. “But not here. All the Westerners must be vetted for proper curry, or they can’t come. Mr. Cosgrove, for example, is passing the test. I see you are enjoying your dish, Mr. Cosgrove.”
Cosgrove swallows his mouthful of incandescent mutton and says, “Yes, delicious. We both like spicy food, don’t we, dear?”
And without waiting for his wife to reply he launches into a presentation of his thermophiliac bona fides. They have been in Haiti and Angola, in Mozambique and Guatemala, all zones where people have learned to mask the taste of slightly off meat with chilies. He actually quotes this theory, unconscious of the pained expressions growing on the faces of the Pakistani and the Indian at the table. “We eat anything,” he asserts with a smile.
A man who enjoys the sound of his own voice, observes Sonia, as Cosgrove reels out a series of amusing and gently self-deprecating anecdotes about culinary disasters in the world’s hellholes. His wife listens with the sort of gelid expression often seen on the faces of loyal wives with older loquacious husbands, even though much of the deprecation involves her: skinning and cooking the capybara, mistaking ipecac for baking soda, and so on.
Sonia has not had much to do with Quakers before now and had imagined them to be severe, taciturn, and dreamy. Apparently not, if the current example is typical. Annette, however, is a little dreamy. Perhaps, she muses, Cosgrove is a Quaker by marriage and Annette is the real thing. Cosgrove has the bland, unobtrusive, forgettable face one sees often in white America, the fruits of genetic homogenization. Annette is from the same stock, but hers is unforgettable; she does nothing with it, but nothing is required: the cheekbones and the clear, lightly tanned skin are marvels. She has a wide mouth, unreddened by lipstick, but red enough without, and an endearing little overbite that enhances her smile. They are both blue-eyed, with fine corn-silk hair, Cosgrove’s neatly trimmed in a ten-dollar haircut and Annette’s kept long but bound up in a crown of braiding. She is slim; he is not, perhaps from eating everything. Sonia wonders what their intimate life is like, whether they have a family or if, instead, they have devoted their all to the peace of the world.
After Cosgrove runs down, the conversation becomes general. They speak of Lahore and the problems of Pakistan; then the issue of America, the great bull of the planet, and how it can be made to tread more lightly upon our common earth. The curry is cleared away and a deep-fried rohu follows, a local fish much prized by the Lahoris, bland and emollient with greases, a rest stop for flaming pharynges, and then a chicken tikka that proves even hotter than the curry. Sonia sees that Annette has become flushed and sweaty but continues to eat manfully, like her husband, soaking up the fiery stuff with handfuls of naan, wisely abstaining from ice water.
The chicken is cleared and dessert arrives: gulaab jamun, pyramids of deep-fried dough balls soaked in rose-flavored syrup. Sonia tastes it and smiles at Amin.
“You remembered,” she says.
“Yes, you reminded me when we were setting this up how Baba used to serve it to his guests, and I thought it would be fitting. Ah, I see they are wheeling in my cross, so to speak.”
Hotel staff have rolled away the bar and set up a podium. When the dessert is finished and the coffee poured out into tiny cups, Amin rises. He is a good speaker, strong-voiced, and the style of his subcontinental English reminds Sonia powerfully of Laghari Sahib, which, together with the taste of roses in her mouth from the gulaab, brings a stab to her throat and a pressure of tears to her eyes. He speaks, in fact, of that gentleman, describing him to those in the assembly who did not know him, his charity, his integrity, his devotion to peace and lawful ways.