presumably being unwilling to enter the even fouler common latrines. A strong smell of urine escaped from a little toilet that had been built by walling off a corner of the room, the S.P. By contrast, the guest chairs were rickety, the floors bare concrete and slippery with dust. His uniform had been starched to the stiffness of sheet metal, and his numerous badges were matched for brilliance only by his gold pen, which lay on his desk in front of him, pinning down some papers. Behind the desk sat the S.P., a short, plump Punjabi with very thick black hair parted at the side, wearing elaborate golden-framed glasses, with the interlocking Chanel monogram on each side. Sahib.”Ĭhaudrey Zawar Hussein leaned forward and whispered in his ear, “You can just go on in.” In the room, five or six men were sitting in chairs arrayed in a line in front of an enormous desk decorated with a pair of crossed miniature flags of the Punjab police, blue and red. “Mian Sohel Abdalah,” he said to the peon, putting on an air of importance. A peon wearing a dirty white uniform resembling a sailor suit, with brass buttons, guarded the door. Gilded with insignia and sirens and lights, the vehicle defied the general dilapidation. Various additions made the place gaudier and more in keeping with a policeman’s appreciation of his own dignity, including a tin-roofed portico painted with glossy red-and-blue stripes, like a wedding marquee, sheltering the S.P.’s official jeep. The superintendent of police, the senior-most policeman in Cawnapur, had offices in a crumbling whitewashed-brick building near the old city, with deep verandas and archways. So much that belonged to the Abdalahs had through the years been tickled over with a catfishing guile to the munshi’s portion. Sohel left unsaid the corollary, What’s yours is mine. As they drove out, he would say, “But, Mian Sahib, why not take my car? You’ll be more comfortable, and it looks better. Sohel took a grim satisfaction in watching the manager clamber up onto the front bench seat, his dignity ruffled.
His heavy demeanor and black-framed square glasses made him look for all the world like a mid-century European intellectual, with that gravitas and that ponderous air of having threaded a way through complex revolutions.
Chaudrey Zawar Hussein always seemed comically unsuited to the vehicle, a tall man with steel-gray hair, never smiling. Despite the alarming state of the farm’s finances-brought home to him over many afternoons spent sweating through deviously knotted accounts, woven by Munshi Zawar Hussein as a screen to hide his thefts-Sohel had bought himself a used jeep, not a sleek vehicle that would impress the locals, but a boy’s toy, a jacked-up four-by-four with a ragtop. Sohel drove in to Cawnapur with the farm manager, Chaudrey Zawar Hussein, to see the superintendent of police about the matter. Testing Mian Abdalah’s grandson, Sohel, who had returned from college in America six months earlier and moved onto the estate, they had been amusing themselves and bearding him by cutting out lengths of the wire that passed near their village and selling them for copper somewhere across the Indus. The Chandio village sat far from the road at the back end of the estate, buried in an expanse of reeds and derelict land, dunes that had never been cleared. Now, for the second time in a month, the Chandios had stolen a section of the telephone wire, which served for all the area as a symbol of the Dunyapur estate’s preëminence. A single wire ran many forlorn miles from Cawnapur city through the flat tan landscape of South Punjab, there on the edge of the Great Indian Desert, then alongside the packed-dirt farm tracks laid out in geometric lines, and finally entered the grounds of a small, handsome residence built in the style of a British colonial dak bungalow. Even now, thirty years later, there was no other line nearby. They also pushed out a telephone line to his farmhouse, the first phone on any farm in the district. Back in the nineteen-fifties, when old Mian Abdullah Abdalah rose to serve as Pakistan’s Federal Secretary Establishment, a knee-bending district administration metalled the road leading from the Cawnapur railway station to his Dunyapur estate.
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