Major Zulfikar

Major Zulfikar, also called Zulfy, is a Pakistani army officer and aide to Brigadier Dodson whose investigation of Mian Abdullah’s murder draws him into the hidden life of Aadam Aziz’s household. He is described as short, bow-legged, flat-headed, and short-sighted, with a thin voice and a carefully pressed uniform; the contrast between this unassuming appearance and his ambition gives his pursuit of Nadir Khan both comic force and political unease.

Position and Introduction

Major Zulfikar appears in the aftermath of Mian Abdullah’s killing, when Brigadier Dodson’s staff car passes through a street where old men are competing at hitting a brass spittoon with streams of betel juice. The vehicle knocks the spittoon aside, scattering children and disrupting their game. The image of red liquid spreading in the dust, like an accusing hand directed at retreating British power, places the officer in a scene where colonial authority is present but already exposed to ridicule and judgment.

His introduction makes his physical limitations part of his social persona. Short sight obliges him to take life one step at a time, earning him a reputation for thoroughness and dullness, qualities that please his superiors because he seems useful without seeming threatening. His stiff, immaculate uniform carries the air of official rectitude, while the narrator calls him a man with a future. This portrait presents military respectability not as proof of insight, but as a surface under which ambition and uncertainty coexist.

Investigation and the Hidden Household

After Abdullah’s assassination, the killers remain unidentified and their paymasters unnamed. A story circulating among the old men claims that dogs overwhelmed the assassins and allowed Nadir Khan to escape, but the narrator pointedly challenges that account and asks readers to look into Abdullah and his political gatherings. The gap between the rumor and the narrator’s challenge establishes the limits of what can be known about the murder; Major Zulfikar is assigned to pursue the matter without being given a reliable resolution.

He visits Aadam Aziz’s home to tie up loose ends concerning both Abdullah’s murder and Nadir’s disappearance. He mistakes the house’s silence for mourning, unaware that Nadir is hidden in the cellar. Seated with the children in the drawing room, beside a radiogram and surrounded by life-size family portraits, Zulfikar notices the mature, watchful gaze of young Emerald. He reads her look as an understanding of his future and decides that he will marry her after a suitable interval. The visit thus joins official investigation to private desire: while searching for a missing man, Zulfikar encounters the woman he intends to make his wife.

Pursuit and Defeat

Emerald later breaks her silence and goes to the cantonment to tell Zulfikar that Nadir is concealed beneath her family’s house. He responds with immediate excitement, setting aside his anger at the disclosure, and returns to the home with fifteen soldiers. The search turns the secret hiding place into a public matter: the soldiers roll back the drawing-room carpet and open the trapdoor, but Nadir has already escaped through an outside door leading toward the gully by the cornfield.

Nadir’s flight leaves Zulfikar with suspicion but no captive and no clear proof. In the street, Zulfikar runs after him, passing the paan-shop and the old men’s spittoon contest. He lacks the street children’s practiced ability to dodge the streams of betel juice. A jet strikes his uniform, and a second follows; in anger he kicks over the spittoon and stamps on it before limping back toward the car. The episode reduces his pursuit to a public mishap: his authority can mobilize soldiers and open a hidden door, but it cannot secure the fugitive, and the ordinary street game briefly turns the officer into its target.

Marriage and Narrative Significance

The novel does not give Zulfikar a definitive answer to the murder he investigates. The assassins and those who may have commissioned them remain unnamed, while Nadir’s escape prevents the household search from becoming a conclusive reckoning. The narrator’s insistence that Abdullah’s story has been swept under the carpet connects the officer’s unfinished inquiry to a broader problem: political history is not simply recorded or forgotten but shaped by rumor, concealment, and the uneven survival of evidence.

Zulfikar’s decision to marry Emerald grows out of the same visit in which he mistakes a hidden fugitive’s household for a scene of mourning. His marriage intention links his official role to the family’s changing domestic history, though the evidence here does not describe the marriage itself. Across his scenes, the polished uniform, the opened trapdoor, and the knocked-over spittoon mark the distance between institutional confidence and what the officer can actually establish. Major Zulfikar is neither the answer to Abdullah’s murder nor merely a comic interruption: he embodies the novel’s uncertainty about how power investigates, what it fails to uncover, and whose version of events endures.