Son of a strange universe: Aatish Taseer's new novel Noon

by Aatish Taseer

Pakistan becomes La Mirage, a shimmering world where violence lurks around the corner but the calamari fritti is heavenly in Aatish Taseer’s new novel Noon. Rehan Tabassum, his narrator is the son of a liaison between an ambitious Indian lawyer and Sahil Tabassum, a prominent politician from La Mirage. Rehan grows up in the lap of luxury with his mother and her new husband, an industrialist in the new India. In this excerpt Rehan travels to La Mirage to meet his father’s family. Mirwaiz, young street smart aide, has just picked him up from the airport. Noon is published in India by Harper Collins.

Mirwaiz opened a button of his bright printed shirt, and blew down his chest.

‘Hot, no?’ he said. ‘It’s just started, the heat. I can’t take it even slightly, you know?’

We entered a commercial area. The road was lined with shops and restaurants whose blue and green glass frontage reflected with vacant intensity the treeless stretch.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

‘Aylanto,’ Mirwaiz said easily. ‘Have you been there before?’

‘No. It’s my first time in the city.’

‘You’ll love it. It’s new. Mr Narses says that,’ and now he spoke in English, ’the calamari fritti is out of this world.’ He turned to me and grinned.

‘Have you tried it?’ I asked with astonishment.

‘No,’ Mirwaiz said, ‘I don’t eat seafood. I prefer a place in Defence called …

He was still speaking when, looking up, I saw in the distance, where I had expected to see the glitter of water, a human sea of black and green. Against the haze of the day, it seemed to flicker and fade, like the black spots that appear before one’s eyes from direct contact with the sun. Carrying over it was a dull and distant roar.

‘What is that?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Mirwaiz replied, seeming to want to shield me from it, ‘a protest of some sort. I’ll find out. This country is crazy, you know, Rehan saab. But don’t worry. I’ll wait with you till someone arrives. Look, here’s Aylanto.’

It stood on one corner of the shopping street and had, as part of its Spanish colonial theme, a pale yellow facade with crooked rustication and green louvred windows. A group of valets, thin anxious men with glazed eyes and untidy stubble, lingered outside. They were dressed, despite the great heat, in black trousers, limp black waistcoats and grimy shirts, their bow ties wilting in the sun.

‘Do you know what’s going on?’ Mirwaiz asked one of them, stepping out of the car and handing him the keys.

‘It seems, sir,’ the man said hurriedly, ’that there is a protest on.’

‘I can see that, too, genius. What’s it against?’

‘English,’ the man replied, with some confusion.

Mirwaiz gave a derisive chuckle.

‘You see, Rehan saab, how mad the people in this country are? Everything is abstraction. You watch, there’ll be a protest against oxygen next.’

At the glass-fronted shoe shops and boutiques, with their bright signage and billboards, all in English, the protestors rose to frenzy. Like the tail of some reptilian creature, they moved fast down the street. Where their vandalism opened up bare cement spaces over the shop-fronts, they spray-painted sprawling slogans in black.

Mirwaiz read the painted letters on their green satin banners. ‘Jago!’ he muttered. ‘Awake. Fools: if they had any idea that that was a Hindi word, they would grow madder still. Chalo, saab, you’d better go inside.’

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A silver Honda screeched out of a side street, its bonnet and windscreen ablaze.

‘Mr Isphandiyar’s car,’ Mirwaiz whispered. Then suddenly intimate, he said: ‘Rehan saab, how well do you actually know these people, the Tabassums…?’

‘Not very well at all,’ I replied.

‘Then just remember this,’ Mirwaiz said with new urgency, ‘your father, Mr Tabassum, is the law. He is the sun in this strange universe. Everyone else exists, be it good or bad, by his light. Don’t bother looking for an external logic,’ he continued, gesturing inexplicably at the crowd. ‘There is none. Everything,’ he said, pointing at the closed interior of the restaurant, ‘is to be found within. Mr Isffy, he’s a good guy. He has issues, sure; and our relationship is not what it used to be; but he’ll be your number one ally, believe me.’

Seeing Isffy emerge from his car, Mirwaiz said hastily: ‘Chal, darling, I’ll hand you over to him and take off. Phir milenge. Soon. And speak to Narses saab about the trip north. Tell him you want to take Mirwaiz travelling,’ he effused, as if conjuring up a medieval idea of wander, ‘and I’m yours.’

I had turned to leave when I heard him say, ‘Rehan saab, what’s your number?’

‘I don’t have one.’

‘How can that be? Sahil Tabassum’s son and no number? Here take this.’ He reached into the glovebox of the car and took out a plastic CD case containing a yellow and green booklet, with a pay-as-you-go card. ‘It’s a Qasimic Call card. Your natural right, as the owner’s son. Put the sim into your phone and I’ll maro you a missed call this evening.

A few moments later, we sat in the cool of the restaurant, sipping two green non-alcoholic cocktails. Lunching ladies with glossy lips in two shades of brown picked at large salads.

‘You should have seen what I saw,’ my brother said, speaking of the demonstration, ’the rage was surreal. I witnessed this one scene in a jewellery shop belonging to an old man. Some hoodlums had barged in and started doing todh-phodh, tearing down all the things in his shop that were written in English. The old man didn’t say a word. He sat back and let them do what they wanted. But when they were done, he called over one of the boys and said in a very calm voice, “Could you tell me the time?” The boy was obviously a bit startled by his reaction. Anyway, he did as he was asked. And just as the guy turns his hand over to look at his watch, you know what this old man does? He tears the watch from his wrist, throws it on the floor and starts stamping on it till he’s smashed its face. All the while, he’s screaming, spit flying from his mouth, “English! English! English! Even your Time is in English. You’ve destroyed my shop for nothing; you’ll never be free of English.”’

I half-listened to my brother. I felt a deep sense of contentment at being in his presence. It was like the comfort of being a child in Delhi when, out with my mother at night, I would fall asleep on somebody’s sofa to the sound of adult voices.

There was something unreal and marvellous for me about having an elder brother. I had sought this bond with male friends in the past, but it had always felt laboured. Here it was built into the relationship, a part of its nature, and could even, it seemed — this being the greatest relief of all – be taken for granted.

‘And do you know what the cause of it is?’ Isffy said, focusing my attention.

‘What?’ I asked, aware that our political conversation now was a Tabassum tactic – our father’s really – of overcoming the awkwardness after a long separation.

‘That same vision of purity on which the country was founded. The feeling that if only we were purer we would be better.’

‘More Islam?’

‘Yes and no. What people coming from outside don’t realise is that the rot is secular; it has no religion. The place is full of gangs, kidnappings, parricides, rapes, murders, you name it. So when someone says Islamic revolution, it brings to mind something terribly organised. But nothing as organised as that can come out of this chaos. Islam hides the real picture; it has always done that here. Where are you staying, by the way?’ he said, abruptly.

‘I don’t know. Narses suggested I stay at the Qasimic Call guest house…’

‘Forget it!’ Isffy said. ‘You’re staying with me. It’s not every day that my long-lost brother comes to town.’