The Good Son by Michael Gruber Read Free Book Online Page A

women is operatic, but they are not allowed to attend funerals. They wail at home. She wailed in the streets of Zurich when she heard the news, when someone (it was in fact Rukhsana) remembered to call her. Farid had suffered a complete collapse and was hospitalized for a month after the event. She has long forgiven him, for that lapse and for what happened at about that time to her son. The many catastrophes in her life have marked her, but not by the manufacture of grudges. She recalls a Yeats line Baba often quoted: “Cast a cold eye on life, on death. Horseman, pass by!” She does that, hasdone that, for years. The two women walk back to the car, arm in arm. Rukhsana’s cheeks are wet, but she makes no comment.
    After they have taped their interviews, they drive to the Avari Hotel on the Mall. Sonia checks in and learns from the desk clerk that the rest of the members of the conference, except for William Craig, have already arrived. The Avari is a perfectly anonymous luxury hotel of the type found in any major city. One might be in Singapore or Toronto, Sonia thinks, upon seeing her room, except for a discreet plate marking the
qibla
, the direction of Mecca for prayers. She has selected this hotel on purpose; there will be culture shock enough for the Western conferees when they get to Kashmir.
    Sonia orders tea from room service and sits on the bed with the conference papers spread about her. The conference is called “Conflict Resolution on the Subcontinent: A Therapeutic Approach.” The meeting is actually her idea, although the official sponsor is Amin Yakub Khan, a wealthy Pakistani, once a friend and protégé of B. B. Laghari and now the president of Pakistan’s largest charitable trust. Sonia and he had put together the conference in a flurry of phone calls and e-mails last winter, keeping a low profile because of its controversial nature, designed to discuss the possibility that the kind of ethnic and confessional violence that had characterized the region since the exit of the British Raj was in fact a kind of mass insanity and that the analytical tools that had been used to help many individuals recover from madness might be adapted to the peacemaking process. When Sonia first suggested the project, Amin had laughed and said it might be easier to flood the Indus, the Ganges, and the Brahmaputra with Prozac.
    But she wore him down. It would be interesting, she said. It’s always nice to meet people who are not in the tedious mold of one’s everyday acquaintances, it would be a week out of sweltering Lahore in May, and it would be a sort of memorial for Baba, who was always a partisan of East-West cooperation and a lover of peace. They were coming up on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death. They could write a dedication to him when they published the proceedings. So he agreed, in the end, and it only remained to choose the participants and obtain funding.
    For the latter, Sonia made contact with William Craig, the famously eccentric telecom billionaire, who owned a vast ranch on the New Mexico border not far from where she lived for part of the year. His foundationhad been supporting a network of mental health clinics in the region for years; she worked at one of these, and they sat together on the organization’s board. They were not exactly friends, but she was able to reach him directly and thus to have her proposal stand out from thousands of others. He immediately agreed to pay for the thing but he wanted to attend, which she had not expected. Perhaps he would cancel at the last moment.
    The other invitees were a mixed bag. She had let Amin pick them, insisting only that at least one of them be an Indian national. He’d selected Manjit Nara for that slot, a psychiatrist and ethnographer from Delhi, an expert on Kashmir. Besides him, they invited Father Mark Shea, a Canadian Jesuit who had been prominent in several Latin American peace negotiations; Porter and Annette Cosgrove, American