Read Night of the Golden Butterfly for Free Online Page A

at the theatre was greeted with enthusiastic applause.
    The play began. All went well till the ghost scene. The actor playing the ghost was a young professor of English, slightly neurotic and very arrogant. He had studied at Edinburgh University and spoke Punjabi with a slight Scottish accent. He had never acted before, but had lobbied forcefully to be part of the play and finally the harassed director had given him the small role of the ghost. When his turn came to speak he was paralyzed with stage fright and forgot his lines. The excessively short senior student playing Hamlet began to panic. The third time he repeated ‘ Hai, mayray pio da bhooth’ ( ‘ Oh, my father’s ghost’) without eliciting any response from the ghost, an irritated voice from the audience shouted a loud prompt:
    ‘Pidke, bacha apni ma di chooth!’ (Runt, save your mother’s cunt!)
    To say the effect was electric would be an understatement. The actors collapsed before the audience. Hamlet was a giggling wreck. The ghost passed out with shame. The stage lights were turned off and on for at least ten minutes. The sound of laughter drowned all else: as one wave subsided, another rose. The stage management realized the play was over for the night and announced that the critics were welcome on the next day.
    Everyone was looking for the Punjabi Freud whose bon mot had made the evening more memorable by wrecking it. The owner of the voice was in his thirties, bespectacled, dressed in salwar/kurta and chewing paan and had a thick crop of Brylcreemed black hair. He appeared to be on his own. Some members of the audience began to shake his hand and others were pointing appreciatively in his direction, but he seemed determined to get out of the theatre as fast as he could. Zahid and I grabbed him as he was looking for his bicycle in the shed.
    ‘Disappear, boys. I wish I hadn’t spoken.’
    We invited him to join us the next day for drinks in Respected’s juice bar.
    ‘What sort of juice?’
    ‘The most delicious fruit juice in the city.’
    He laughed without committing himself. We never expected him to show, but in the meantime news of his witticism had travelled far and wide, from the cafés to the kebab stalls of the city. At college the next day it seemed the only subject of conversation. Students asked each other, ‘Were you there?’ Zahid and I were much in demand as witnesses, and every time we repeated Plato’s words there were gales of admiring laughter. Later the same day, when we repaired to the Coffee House, not far from the college, the poets and critics gathered there had also been discussing the cancelled play and there was an overwhelming curiosity as to the author of the prompt. Why had this young man not been heard of before? Such a natural talent deserved his own special table in the café. Literary veterans racked their brains to think of a precedent as startling as his remarkable intervention. I wondered whether the same discussion was taking place in Cheney’s Lunch Home, a five-minute walk away, where aspiring poets mingled with highbrow critics and modernist blank verse was an obsession. At the Coffee House we discussed the poetry of Louis Aragon and Ilya Ehrenburg’s novels. The Lunch Home preferred Baudelaire and Gide and regarded Shakespeare as an antique bore, but even they could not avoid a discussion of the Punjabi Hamlet .
    It was in these cafés that I first began to understand the scale of the trauma that had afflicted Lahore during the Partition of 1947 and transformed this cosmopolitan city into a monocultural metropolis. Names of Sikh and Hindu writers and journalists were recalled with sadness and those present who had witnessed the horrors of what is now referred to as ethnic cleansing would shudder as they remembered those times. Few dwelt on 1947 for long. It was just over a decade ago and the wounds were only too visible. There were more pleasant memories. A club, now sadly defunct, called Metro