Night of the Golden Butterfly by Tariq Ali

Author:Tariq Ali [Ali, Tariq]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781844676545
Publisher: Verso
Published: 2010-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

THE NEWS WAS ON the front page of the International Herald Tribune. A former general and two of his guards had been shot dead in the heart of Isloo, the heavily-policed Fatherland capital. From the tone of the report it was clear that he had been genuinely supportive of the West’s efforts in Afghanistan and the killers were assumed to be al-Qaeda or the Taliban, or both, or an offshoot of either. In other words, there were no clues at all. It had not been a suicide terrorist. On the contrary, the report stressed, it had been a well-planned execution by a killer or killers who had escaped and left no traces. Yet another casualty of the Afghan war, I thought, and turned the page to read the rest of the international news, no longer to be found in most British papers.

Then my cell phone, a little-used object, began to buzz. Jindié was ringing from Isloo. She had to cancel our dinner engagement scheduled for that night. The dead general, she informed me, was her son-in-law. She sounded calm, a bit too calm, I thought, as I offered my condolences. She would ring on her return, which should be within a fortnight. Zahid could stay the forty days if he wished. Not her.

Paris beckoned. Zaynab would be there for three more days. I rang. She was surprised and, I think, pleased. I reserved a room at my favourite dive in the Quarter and booked a seat on an early afternoon train to France.

I had been looking forward to seeing Jindié on her own and discussing the events in Yunnan that had transformed her family’s life. The letter describing the last days of the Dali sultanate affected me more than I had realized. At least they hadn’t decapitated his dead body before the eyes of his women and children. Why bother, they must have thought, when we are going to rape and kill them all. What had happened to the beautiful spy and her child? Did they survive in Cochin China? How delicious if one of the descendants had fought against the Americans in Vietnam. I had recurring thoughts about imperial rulers since ancient times who never paid heed to the rest of humanity.

Jindié, had supplied me with knowledge usually available only to specialist scholars. The Taiping and Boxer rebellions feature in virtually every book on modern Chinese history. Why not Yunnan and Dali? Weighed on any scale, eighteen years of semi-independence defended against repeated Manchu assaults was no mean achievement. I could not fully fathom the reason for disappearing this rebellion from history.

Deprived of Jindié’s company for another two weeks, I had time to read her diary at leisure and began it as the train moved out of London. She had provided me with photocopied extracts. They were handwritten, but in the neat scrawl that she and others had been taught by the nuns at a Jesus and Mary convent school in Fatherland and that never got better, usually worse, when the luckier girls finished their education at Nairn College.

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