Zafar Zulfiqar kills his father

Zafar Zulfikar kills his father, General Zulfikar, after learning that the general was responsible for the humiliating debacle at the Rann of Kutch and had used his military position to profit from smuggling. The killing turns a family reckoning into the lethal aftermath of a border scandal, while official accounts bury the truth beneath patriotic headlines.

Background: the Rann of Kutch

During the Rann of Kutch conflict, six young soldiers at a border post near the seashore mistake smugglers for a ghost army. In the moonlight, they see phantom ships and a band carrying chests and shrouded litters; when the smugglers enter the hut, Zafar collapses at their feet, gibbering. Their terror leaves the soldiers in postures of abject shame.

The supposed ghosts are smugglers moving through the unguarded Rann and on into Pakistan’s cities. Their operation is linked to General Zulfikar: the general’s fortune, already built on the suffering of Hindu families fleeing in 1947, has been augmented by the spring and summer convoys. The border guards have been paid off, making the soldiers’ helplessness part of a larger corruption rather than a simple battlefield defeat.

The killing

In July 1965, Zafar returns on leave to his father’s house in Rawalpindi. He carries not only the memory of the Rann incident but also a history of childhood humiliations and beatings, together with the shame of lifelong enuresis. Knowing that his father was responsible for the events that reduced him to gibbering, he walks toward the general’s bedroom.

He finds General Zulfikar in his bedside bath and slits his throat with a long, curved smuggler’s knife. The weapon links the intimate act of patricide directly to the smuggling operation: the instrument associated with the men who humiliated Zafar becomes the means by which he kills the father whose complicity made that humiliation possible.

Concealment and consequences

Newspaper reports recast the border affair as an Indian invasion repelled by Pakistan’s gallant soldiers, while the payment of the guards is transformed into a story of innocent soldiers massacred by Indian forces. The narrator emphasizes how uncertain the truth becomes once official accounts take hold, and asks who would expose the general’s extensive smuggling when politicians and generals alike possessed goods acquired through his illegal trade.

General Zulfikar dies, and Zafar goes to prison. His imprisonment also spares him from marrying a princess of Kif who has obstinately refused to menstruate in order to avoid marrying him. The narrator connects the Rann incidents to the larger conflict that breaks out in August, presenting the border scandal as tinder for the approaching war and for Saleem’s eventual, unwilling attainment of purity.