Ronny in his story The Couple in the Tonga tries to recreate what is
known as the most spectacular dogfight between Indian and Pakistani fighter
jets in the skies over Lahore during the 1965 war. He lived there for a couple
of years as a child.
The
Couple in the Tonga
I was famished. I hadn’t tasted a morsel of food for a day
and a half, surviving solely on water. The money order my parents had sent from
Dhaka hadn’t yet arrived. “The postal service
is irregular,” the fleshy clerk said apologetically whenever I went to the post
office to inquire, “due to the war with India.” But I had run out of funds
and didn’t know anybody so closely in Lahore to ask for a loan, having arrived
in the city about four months ago, a young college student for whom there
wasn’t even a job available to buy a square meal.
Sitting at the reading table in my one-bedroom apartment,
I cursed myself for deciding to fly over a thousand miles across India for an
adventurous college life in the festive milieu of the renowned city of gardens.
But it was the nineteen-sixties and the whole world was transforming with young
people everywhere, not just in Pakistan,
looking for new adventures in whatever way possible. Hippies, maharishis, pot
abounded. How would I have known I would get caught up in a war, with air raid
sirens bellowing night and day, making me sack out on a thin mattress under the
bed lest I had to jump up from sleep and scurry for shelter? I was expecting
the air raid siren to scream just before noon when all of a sudden, to my
surprise, music came drifting in from the street. I walked up to the window and
looked out. A tonga
was steering down the street, decorated with papier-mâché flowers and
varicolored balloons, drawn by a robust bay horse. A popular Nahid Niazi tune
was wafting in the air. It was a wedding procession with crowds of people
following the tonga,
some dancing to the jingling tune and picking up the coins the couple was
tossing out generously. They were flying up in fistfuls and showering down like
the New Year’s Eve fireworks in Europe.
Immediately I dashed down the two short flights of stairs
and joined the jubilant crowd, picking up coins of all denominations from the
dusty street. Once I had a pocketful of them, I went to the dingy eatery across
from my apartment and ordered three fresh tandoori bread and some chum
chum, when the air raid siren sounded. “Shut the door,” the manager told
the fleet-footed waiter. So I grabbed my food from the waiter’s hand and ran
across the street and up the stairs back into my apartment. Then taking my seat
at the small rickety kitchen table, I began to dig into the bread and the sweets
alternately. God! Food hadn’t tasted so good in my life.
Suddenly I heard the deafening roar of jets above. I
looked out the kitchen window at the two Sabres tearing through the air like
giant birds, pursuing a pair of Hunters to chase them off. They were
crisscrossing the sky, shooting up, swooping down, careening and pirouetting,
with volleys of shots erupting as if hell had broken loose in the heavens. All
at once a Hunter burst into flames and began tumbling down spewing smoke,
followed by a Sabre on fire, while the others were still striving to hit their
marks; but I did not scurry for shelter. My stomach full, I relished the
aftertaste, passing my tongue around in my mouth, reaching out to every nook
and cranny, and praying for the safety of the blessed couple that had
unknowingly delivered me from starvation, providing me with the most delectable
meal of my life.
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Ronny
Noor is a professor of English and world literature at the University of
Texas-Brownsville. His essays, stories, and poems have appeared in numerous
journals around the world. He is also the author of a novel titled
"Snake Dance in
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