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Fatherland had a husband, and quite a few in addition to a husband had a lover as well and, as an extra, another person to keep her from getting too bored during the day. Talk like this had entranced Plato. He was still gripped by madness, torment and joy, the process clinically described by Stendhal in Love as ‘crystallization’.
    ‘Plato, are you living in her apartment?’
    ‘Why not? She pretends I’m her cook-butler-chauffeur, and whenever her friends or relations visit I act the part, as I once did for you and the Golden Butterfly.’
    None of his obsessions with women had ever lasted very long, and I enquired gently how long he gave Zaynab.
    ‘Listen, catamite ... sorry, that slipped out by mistake. Zaynab will make sure my body is bathed and enshrouded before the burial. I’m too old to move on anywhere now. Will you tell my story and hers?’
    ‘Yes to yours, but I don’t know her at all.’
    ‘She’s coming to your town next month. You’ll meet her.’
    ‘Are you coming, too?’
    ‘How can the cook-chauffeur travel abroad with the lady? Her friends aren’t that stupid.’
    ‘That’s where you’re wrong, Plato. They are stupid. Your photograph has been in Dawn . Your paintings have featured on television, and none of them recognized you?’
    ‘Servants are invisible.’
    ‘Till they cut their master’s throat.’
    We had been speaking for three hours and now at the risk of offending him I said farewell and noted his phone number. Plato’s submissive, shy, please-ignore-me-I’m-a-nobody exterior had been carefully cultivated over the years and always worked with those who didn’t really know him. It wasn’t totally fake, or else he would have promoted his own work more energetically, but when I pushed him on this he would simply reply that if the work was any good it would last and he was not too interested in money. His attempted blackmail of me was crude and ineffective, since Zahid knew the whole story, but it was undoubtedly a sign of Plato’s desperation, his fear of dying just as he had met a woman he really liked.
    Plato entered our lives almost half a century ago. Zahid and I had left our respective high schools and joined the college in Lahore, where we were blessed with a truly enlightened principal. A biologist by training, he was also a gifted Punjabi scholar and had translated some of our epics into Urdu. They were not quite the same thing in Fatherland’s shiny, ornate state language, but he had done them better than anybody else. He had also commissioned a Punjabi translation of Shakespeare. The success of The Tempest , staged the previous year, had been helped by the actor playing Caliban, who bore an unnerving resemblance to the military dictator entrusted by Washington to run Fatherland. We had returned to Lahore from the mountains in time for the Punjabi premiere of Hamlet . Expectations were high: Ophelia was being played by a very pretty Kashmiri boy called Ashraf Lone, and a number of older students who lusted after him had decided they loved the theatre. Hamlet was to be performed in the Open Air Theatre in September, when the heat had abated, the monsoon and accompanying humidity of August had retired for another year and the evenings were pleasant with the scent of jasmine and queen-of-the-night wafted by soft, refreshing breezes across the college lawns to the amphitheatre. The translator was a distinguished Punjabi poet.
    A new theatrical production was a big event in the cultural life of the city. The opening night of Hamlet was attended by numerous parents and the intellectual elite of Lahore. Those with sensitive posteriors brought their own cushions to place on the circular rows of redbrick seats overlooking the stage. There was a sense of expectation, an evening away from the vulgar interests of everyday life: what could be loftier than Shakespeare translated into the language of our city by one of Fatherland’s most respected authors? The latter’s arrival