his weaknesses of being a nationalist at heart yet too weak with the cudgel to tribal demands were exposed soon after he assumed the helm. One day he swore it was Friday because he saw it reflected in the mirror eyes of so many of his comrades when he went to address the Parliament about the latest American offer of building permanent navy bases on the coast of the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Eden, and an air force landing strip in the hinterland plains that he almost. How to say it: recall video replays of the moment of pure fear experienced by the Governor during his mock execution, though he himself had designed the event from start to end. For several months after, Xamid Sultan shuffled from office to office, conducting his affairs like a man with an incubating fever inside and unsure of seeking out a physicianâs counsel; the slightest whispers pulled him closer into his shadow, and when the appropriate Friday actually came around, hewas almost relieved to see the angel of death turn the corner in front of him and address him by his familiar name, which was known only to his mother and brother, and some would later declare he even smiled when the Mauser was raised to his already bleeding skull.
In the next three months, our unnameable currency, which had been nailed to the British pound for as long as anyone could remember, tumbled to near devaluation, and the presidency exchanged hands five times: Samir Gallili, a Chicago Boy inculcated into the black arts of global finance by the tutelage of Milton Friedman/ no stopping the tenebrous palsy of his hands/ at dinner circus legislature mornings/ lend voice to a crumpled shaky paper/ shot by unknown assailants in his sleep/ Samater Adel-Yaqub, a personal friend of Julius Neyere whom he met while attending the University of Edinburgh, but not the same brand of socialist, more the variety Big Baba liked, as he himself would say/ hoven off his hinges by whispers madness machinations/ given: the tapes were discovered later and the small player also/ possible impossible/ slow measured speech of the Manchurian candidate/ thought of as restitution for the death of the previous by opponent party members; two elections in three weeks/ voter turnout sixty-seven and seventythree percent respectively/ names of the candidates wind-skewed into oblivion, no one will recall/ vanished from even the records of the Archives.
Finally, there rose that steely woman who would inspire the whole country with her cruelty and the imaginative ways with which she would interpret the laws prescribed to her from above. Why was the Madam aside from her flatiron hair fixated by gel and hairspray. What were the days of the Madam, which were also endless but conscribed within a more limited infinity than Anwarâs. Who was she to be able to usher an angry God to the unnameable country. Recall that in the Governorâs days, Allah had been present in politics, no ceremony began without a bismillah and none ended without a munazaat, but everyonethought of this as nothing more than the continuation of life, and while people such as Shukriah and Mamun were the exception, they were not ostracized or defeated into submission for living outside matrimonial bounds. Recall, since you may have heard, no woman in my family wore the hijab before 1990, let alone the niqab. No one was stoned barbaric drowned for witchcraft crazy. Remember that the cruelties that followed were different.
It was Maxwell who had wanted it: this much is clear. No one knew when he had arrived and some even claimed that he had disguised himself as a member of Parliament for years, but they surely noticed him one day during a desperate meal when what remained of the original Privy Council was trying to plan what to do now after ek dum fut-a-fut, hosanna, everything down the Thomas Crapper. Then the screeching sound came and they could not help but plug ears with fingers against that offence of metal scraping Pyrex plates: an ox-large