Night of the Golden Butterfly by Tariq Ali Read Free Book Online

scribbled on the back of an old sheet of answers to an exam he had marked at school. But Plato disliked specialization, and as he told us on one occasion, ‘I did not want to drown in a pool of mathematics for the rest of my life.’ The prospect was unappealing. But why teach at a school? Why not at the college? Offers had been made there, too, and he had turned them down. School was less demanding, he maintained. Furthermore, he had no university degrees at all, never mind a PhD, and, besides, he could educate some of those private school boys in other disciplines, including that of life, with which they were mostly unacquainted.
    The same could not be said of Plato. Life had overeducated him and the marks of its lessons were plain to see. He was light-skinned and thick-lipped, with hollow cheeks that gave him an ageless look, and this attractive ugliness was enhanced by thick black hair that he rarely bothered to groom. His Brylcreemed appearance at Hamlet had been unusual.
    One day he told us how he had escaped from the 1947 pogroms in East Punjab and fled to Lahore. He was in his last year of school when news reached Ludhiana that all of the two hundred or so Muslims in his village, including his parents and three younger sisters, as well as aunts and uncles and cousins, had all been taken to the local mosque and set on fire. There wasn’t a single survivor. A kindly Sikh maths teacher who had befriended Plato hugged him and wept. The same man took him to the centre of town where a convoy of buses was being readied to ferry Muslims across to the other side of the partitioned subcontinent. Plato was dazed, unable to register the fact that he had lost everyone. He was put on a bus that contained mainly women and children; his old teacher explained the circumstances and pleaded with a woman to look after his pupil. She did.
    ‘The two buses in front of us were stopped by Sikhs and I saw the men lined up and killed in the most brutal fashion. Some of them were on their knees pleading for mercy, kissing the feet of those about to massacre them. I thought they would kill us too, saving the women to be raped and slaughtered afterwards. But they were interrupted by a military patrol led by British officers. That in itself was rare, but that’s how we survived.’
    He spoke matter-of-factly, with few traces of outward emotion, but the pain was reflected in his eyes. He went on, ‘Then I reached this great city, the Paris of the East, which Punjabis everywhere used to dream of visiting. He who has not seen Lahore has not seen the world and all that sentimental nonsense. And here Muslims were hard at work killing Sikhs and Hindus and looting their property. I was in a refugee camp, and one of my uniformed protectors, after discovering I had no silver or gold or any money on me, wanted some kind of reward and decided to rape me. I was saved by other refugees, who heard my screams and, Allah be praised, dragged the Muslim policeman off my back. My family had been religious. I was taken regularly to the mosque, learned the Koran by rote without understanding a single word, and participated in all the rituals. When I saw what was being done by all sides in the name of religion I turned my back on religion forever.’
    The table had fallen silent. Respected quietly placed a tray with tumblers of freshly squeezed orange and pomegranate juice before us. There were tears in his eyes. In the early Sixties, the trauma of Partition still affected many in the city, but few wanted to talk about it. The memories were too recent, and parts of the city still bore the scars. The attempt by the generation before ours to suppress the memory of the killings which they had participated in or witnessed had left a deep emotional scar, made worse by never being discussed and dealt with openly. A madness had seized ordinary people and now they were in denial. When Plato told his story, it was the first time anyone had discussed Partition at our table.