"And the believers, men and women, are protecting friends of one another; they enjoin the right and forbid the wrong, and they establish worship and pay the poor due, and they obey Allah and his messenger."

Another favourite of my Iranian Shiite friends was:

"Fight them; Allah will torture them by your hands and bring them to disgrace, and assist you against them and heal the hearts of a believing people."

The message of the Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him) expires into the static drone of a megaphone buzzing in early morning. I listen attentively: I can hear the sensitive microphone pick up the Mullah touching his fingers to his tongue, turning pages.

Begum jee's voice returns, layering the Prophet's message. She is turning slowly as if sitting on a slow moving luminous Frisbee thrown out from the wall.

The Farsi influenced verses are like a cool rain on my hot and then cold then hotter again body. She is by my bedside. I wonder if my girlfriend back in Montréal has started her experiments in lesbian sex. I am trapped in a 747 that cannot land in the West, that cannot land in Pakistan. With an incongruous movement, Begum Akhtar turns her back to her younger black and white double in the film. I feel sure that if she looks at her image she'll vanish -- poof, just like that -- so I keep trying to talk to her to prevent her from becoming an empty sari. She turns and blankly looks at me. Does she see or recognize her younger self, I wonder. She comes near me, putting her bluish celluloid hand on my quilted thigh. The rag intensifies into a vortex of sound: the European introduced harmonium, the older tablas and sarangi, a tampura vibrate with codas and smaller instrumental references to her rising and falling voice. Codas within codas pull her back into her flickering, scratchy black and white world. She sings poems of broken friendships, shredded hearts, permanently parted ways. I see in her melodramatic renditions of verse EM Forster rejected by India and Dr. Aziz.

My malaria or something like it has no time to make the English writer a real entity in my returning to Pakistan psychosis except in one scene. He says goodbye to me at a Lahore train station; an epoch slowly puffs down the tracks: Amritsar to Lahore, and for another people, Lahore to Amritsar. Begum jee comes out of the film again. Satyajit Ray's Jalsaghar freezes, just as my uncle used to freeze the brakes before take off on the various transport planes he flew.

Ray's film flutters. A freckled white horse wheezing in pain as the Bengali crabs and a green high tide fill his panicking nostrils and lurching eyes. Begum Akhtar is slowly turning towards the screen, but I manage to pull her into our conversation. I keep her talking. I don't want to suffer the effects of Pakistani antibiotics alone.

"Why do you sing Sufi music?"

She cannot say zamine but says jamine, the Urdu word for ground. She replies in Urdu with what I confuse for a Lucknowesque accent. She cannot make the Arabo Farsi influenced z'ah sound in Urdu. "I don't sing Sufi music, Julian -- that is your name, isn't it? You aren't Moslem, are you? You see, I don't sing music, the music sings me, the poets make me."

An expression that looks like it may become a laugh forms on her face. The next time she chuckles she'll vanish. Her teeth are red from the endless chewing of betel nuts in pan leaves. "I sing love poems. It's not Sufi shoofie music, you know." Her leg is warm and close to my hand. Now my body is suddenly cold, cold as the winters in Montréal, thousands of degrees below zero.

I ask, "Do you know the function of Fluconazole, Begum jee?" Fluconazole, Begum jee, this is an anti fungal drug with no side effects that my friend with AIDS is using. "Begum jee," I say, "you see my friend is suffering from toxoplasmosis and is taking AZT and N acetylcysteine, a hypo allergenic." Begum jee goes blank. She is still in British India, I am in the AIDS era. Night. Rain falls in the military state. The temperature too is falling. Sure to be frost in the morning. The man from the UN with the bullshit theory about coriander and civility sections into the room like Muybridge's Locomotion photographs. Fades. My aunt, in a silk green nightgown, comes in to give me pills. She leaves.

"But, Begum jee, I thought you sang about directly communicating with God?" She moves closer to me, pulls part of the chequered quilt over her knees. She has on a polyester sari, not silk, not cotton; she smells like an airport lounge. The sari rustles in my hand. Formaldehyde breath. Her pupils are dark with thin crimson blood lines zig zagging like railroad tracks on a map. She disappears from view as my sickness fades. She is not the young Begum Akhtar that I remember from Ray's film. There are streaks of grey in her hair. Black dye has been used to give the impression that she is greying only at her temples. Fat chance.

"I can say that there are some singers who -- " Her direction changes. "Julian, you're not Moslem, are you? I didn't think you were, Julian. Sahib, there are those who sing directly to communicate with God because they don't want to talk to representatives of God on earth. And where is God? Don't you trust the representatives?" Her head cranes round to look directly at me. "I sing about love, friendship." Her hand soothingly touches my chest. Her fingers are looking for my nipple. But this can't be true. She is a respected singer. Don't make her do this in your dream, I say to myself. Her hand moves against my body. She mixes up songs with which I am sort of familiar:

She sings a line: "How is one to hide the tears from one's eyes?" Her accompaniment comes to a halt. The musicians are obedient soldiers. "All my songs are a farce; people who like my singing are donkeys, do you hear me? Donkeys." Her hands turn subcontinentally outwards from her breasts. "I don't know why they like my music. Sufism is about a straight line to God without the bearded ones. God matter to you?" Her gritty chuckle grows louder, ends with her coughing and spitting red betel bits on the floor. As she moves back across the room to where her image flickers, her steps are studied, as though she were a member of the Paul Taylor Dance Company.

"Please don't leave me," I beg her.

On the wall, a thin black wind of coal starts writing verses from the Koran from the left to the right. It smells as though someone has just lit up a cigarette. I vomit. Homecoming.

"Please don't go, Mrs. Begum Akhtar. Mrs. Begum Akhtar, are you leaving because I am a Christian?" The pea green puke runs down my front. "I know about your first name, your first name before you became Begum Akhtar -- it was Akhtari Bai Faizabadi, wasn't it? Tell me, Begum jee? Ha! your name was Akhtari Bai Faizabadi, wasn't it? And as soon as people started calling you 'Begum' your singing got worse -- isn't it true? -- and you started drinking -- true, isn't it? You're nothing but a mujra singer -- admit it, for Christ's sake. I'll sing Beatles songs for you. Please don't leave."

I cannot control the dream -- I dream I am splattering back brown watery wisdom to my exile gurus. I can't even insult her into giving a response. All like a bad acid trip, I tell myself. Why am I here? General Zia is here. Pakistan is a military state. I am not used to a military state. Canada is a pleasant liberal democracy. In Lahore, people in prison, torture -- the whole repressive apparatus I've read about. I am a Canadian. I am from Montréal. No, wait a minute. I am a British subject from Warlingham, Surrey. There are too many television sets in this house. I am not a Pakistani, maybe yes maybe no. So what? I've had Jewish girlfriends. I went to Saint Patrick's School in Karachi, where I was given a caning. There was a German kid in my class who never got this treatment. Who is this singer coming into my life?

I have run out of the antibiotics I brought from the West. I'm dependent on this fucking Third World country. I don't need Begum Akhtar, nor her red teeth. I have travellers' cheques. I scream after her: Listen, Mrs. Bobbies Achar, I have American Express Travellers' Cheques. I show her fading body all my American Express TCs. Fuck you, Mrs. Akhtar. "Molluscum contagiosum," I yell after her. The slave labour historian pushed Begum Akhtar on me in the first month of my stay and now she's here in my malaria? The country tries to re own me, but I can't stay. I must go back to where I am clearly a nonentity. There is no unemployment insurance in this country. The state of public medicine is a Thatcherite dream. Just down the street is the church I was baptized in. My grandfather never used to spit near it but he spat everywhere else. Lahore is filled with his asthmatic globs.

It's morning now. A woman servant comes into my room. Tea with ginger is supposed to work as an expectorant. There are red bits in my vomit. My aunt's Siamese cat crosses the floor. I sneeze. I want to reach down the cat's mouth and pull out its lungs. A door is opened. Sunlight in a trapezoidal shape crunches down on the grey tiled floor. The servant leaves. The house is empty. Everyone's at work. This always happens when I visit my friends abroad -- they are at work, I am in their house smoking cigarettes. It is eleven o'clock in the morning. I smell garlic frying in the far off kitchen. Someone is revving up a 100 cc motorbike. The garlic smell mixes with motorbike exhaust. I try to fall asleep. The servant has very nice eyes, her husband is working in the Gulf. The daughters are at school. Will she come in again? The background drone of music pulls me down into an earthy feeling of dust, rustling bones, mud, blood mixing with wine, betrayed love, poison gas in villages, cloven hooves running across a dusty street in the rainy season. Begum Akhtar's teeth in EM Forster's throat, Dr. Aziz on the white horse of modernity lurching upwards.

Her words pull me skyward to my kite filled childhood in this city. I get up yet another time and shit my guts out. Some days later I am better. An oppressive stone lifts itself from my chest. The sky is clear. A crescent moon over Nulakah Church. The cool night air revives me. I feel like Wallace Stevens in Havana, lots of travellers' cheques and all the time in the world.