Night of the Golden Butterfly by Tariq Ali Page B

friends. His mother’s attempts to force him in a heterosexual direction failed regularly. City beauties were paraded before his eyes to try and entice him to marry, but he never showed the slightest interest and they never came back. The courtesans hired by his desperate parents to arouse him from his torpor were paid double by him on the condition they lied to all and sundry about his prowess, which they did with verve, I know because I once overheard our mothers discussing the problem and his mother boasting of how good Anis was in bed with a proper woman. My mother happily joined in the barrage of bitchy attacks on ‘modern girls’. Anis and I laughed a great deal that day. One of the younger courtesans had ended up a friend of ours and would regale us with stories of city venerables—she always named names—who visited the Diamond Market on a weekly basis. A cousin of mine later fell in love with and married her. ‘I know what she was, but so what. That life has made her monogamous and loyal. Rather her than someone from our world.’ He was right, of course. And his three children all studied medicine: the girls work in hospitals in Texas; the boy specialized in orthopaedic surgery and became a skilful surgeon and a born-again Muslim. He was head-hunted by the religious guerrillas in Afghanistan and ended up as their in-house doctor, treating the war wounded at the mobile hospitals of the Taliban. According to his mother, he treated Osama Bin Laden shortly before the latter’s demise.
    I felt much better after Anis and I had finished our tea and sandwiches on the Shalimar terrace, but a puzzle remained. I asked Anis about the word whose use in that evening’s unpleasant finale had mystified me.
    ‘Do you think that semen , or tsemen as she hissed it, is an abusive term in Chinese? That would be a unique coincidence; in English it is the seed that produces life.’
    ‘Or not; as the case may be ... you didn’t have a waking wet dream, did you? Just asking. I did wonder about that usage. I noted that she referred to you as semen at least six times in a sentence and a half, and once again later when referring to you in a conversation with Plato. Impressive. It’s a very intimate abuse. She obviously loves you. No doubt about that, but your mother is an effective opponent of all brides-to-be. She’s so judgemental. I’m afraid it’s one of her more repulsive features. My mother’s exactly the same. Surely they can’t have a semen-phobia in the People’s Republic? Never been there. We could ask the Chinese ambassador the next time he comes over for supper.’
    He relapsed into deep thought and was lost to the world. I was feeling extremely low as well. Suddenly he came back to life.
    ‘I was thinking that the only other place where I once heard a pejorative reference to semen was in Venice. The gondoliers, as you know, are extremely competitive and on every level. They often refer to each other as boron or boroni , which is not local slang for “baron”, as assumed by the tourists, but singular and plural for “blob of sperm”, or so they told me.’
    Despite my broken heart, I couldn’t help laughing. ‘When were you in Venice?’
    ‘We went in a school party when I was sixteen. Ten years ago. Very enjoyable trip despite the boroni.’
    ‘Surely because of it.’
    He laughed. I saw him once again in Edinburgh and later twice in London, and then, like so many other Lahoris, he disappeared from my life completely. Occasionally a letter would arrive asking for my opinion on some book or the other that he was thinking of publishing in Urdu, followed by a long silence. Anis never married, despite his mother’s continual pressure, and never left the family house, despite the advice of all his friends. There was no shortage of money or land in the family. He simply couldn’t declare his independence. One day I got a phone call from my mother. Anis had invited some friends for dinner. When they left he