Of Smokeless Fire by A.A. Jafri (i wanna iguana read aloud TXT) 📕

‘My generation was distorted by the mayhem of Partition. Zakir should have gone through his conversion at that time, but he didn’t. I, however, did . . . especially when I saw the murdered . . .’ Noor did not complete his sentence, but Mansoor knew he was thinking about his father. The scars lay buried in his heart’s alcove. Had Noor lost his faith when he saw his father’s murdered body? Had he been killed by greedy relatives? The evidence was substantial that this was the case, but the story that got sold was that he had been assassinated by fanatic Hindus as part of a broader land dispute called Pakistan. That property would trump kinship was something Noor had never thought of. All property is theft, he had argued, echoing Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, until he migrated to this new country and built his precious Kashana. And as his adopted country became publicly religious, he became privately secular. His conversion was a long-drawn-out process that probably went through several revisions.

But what happened to Zakir? Although he was part of General Dundda’s government in its dying days, he got recruited by Rangeelay Shah because of his foreign service experience. As an intrinsic member of his government, Zakir witnessed the slaughter of people, heard about the raping of girls and saw the looting of property, and yet he remained silent. Why? How could people who shared the same faith slaughter each other so quickly? But to Zakir, it was not the failure of religion; it was the bankruptcy of their inherited beliefs.

One of the members of The Unholy Quartet was now becoming holier than the rest. All these friends—well-read, profoundly intelligent, inversely affected—were now on a path that suddenly diverged, their friendship fissured by fervency.

*

Most bankers remained petrified by the rumours of nationalization, but not Ameer Abbas Alvi. For he was not a typical banker. When life gave him more than his share of tragedies, he accepted them with the stillness of a Stoic philosopher. Ready for a hostile takeover by the government, he sat calmly in his exquisitely decorated penthouse office, his feet crossed on top of the mahogany desk and his head tilted, resting against the black leather chair. The huge bay windows in the office were decked with a variety of plants, some brought by Mehrun. Two large leafy palms in red lacquer pots stood guard at each end of the windows. On the onyx ashtray on the table, a fat brown cigar lay burning, its smell, acrid and overpowering, permeating throughout the room. A picture of Alvi shaking hands with General Dundda hung defiantly on the wall across from his desk. On the adjacent wall, an enlarged photo of J.P. Morgan, the captain of the American banking industry, flaunted rugged capitalism. The fall of General Dundda and the election of a socialist prime minister had not convinced him to replace these precious pictures with the picture of the politician du jour.

Alvi never looked back at his life in India. When the madness of Partition claimed his entire family, fate spared his. Living in Bombay at the time, he worked as a lending officer at the Imperial Mercantile Bank of India. The financial hub of India, Bombay was one of the few lucky cities to have been spared the worst of the rioting. He received the news of his family’s massacre with a resigned calmness. Losing the connection to his biological past made him rupture his relationship with his emotional self. He couldn’t mourn their loss; he never went back to his ancestral home and he never bothered to find out what exactly happened. What was the point? Human beings are bastards, anyway. They will always find a reason to kill each other. Look at East Pakistan.

For another year, he remained in Bombay, worked hard, saved money and created fake short-term loans in fake names. When these loans came due, he converted them into long-term counterfeit investments and transferred the ‘borrowed’ money into foreign banks. Once all the money was in a safe haven, he fled to Turkey and from there to the newly created Pakistan, where he joined the nascent Muslim Trust Bank (MTB) and began his career as an accountant. Changing his identity from Sameer Lukhnavi to Ameer Abbas Alvi, he faked his place of birth from Lucknow to Rawalpindi. In his mind, it was all justifiable felony. To him, the Imperial Mercantile Bank of India was a British bank, and he had no compunction about ‘looting the looters’. And changing his identity was just a tactical manoeuvre against the colonial enemy.

As an officer at MTB, he now put his prior banking knowledge to principled use. And it was his attention to detail, his disciplined work ethic and Atatürk-like self-confidence that thrust him up the hierarchy. Very soon, he rose to become one of the directors at the bank. Political intrigues and disputes with the managing director, however, led to his ouster. But it also provided a perfect opportunity to create a rival bank with the help of his former customers and wealthy acquaintances, all of whom he despised. As the managing director of the High Finance Bank, he made tremendous strides and put the new bank within striking distance of the MTB in terms of total deposits.

Triple-A worked hard and chased opportunities like an addict chasing hashish. He never forgot one lesson that his father taught him early on in his life: Don’t become money’s slave; make money your slave. Determined and ruthless, he expected the same single-minded tenacity from his subordinates, and in turn, rewarded the energetic and the efficient and punished the lazy and the laggard. Mehrun was one of the beneficiaries. She had the brains; and Sadiq Mirza, with his Pygmalion bhoot, had made her sophisticated enough to pass off as a modern begum.

While Alvi guarded his homosexuality ferociously, his enemies gossiped about it openly. He could compete