Shame

Also by Salman Rushdie

FICTION

Grimus

Midnight's Children

The Satanic Verses

Haroun and the Sea of Stories

East, West

The Moor's Last Sigh The Ground Beneath Her Feet

NONFICTION

The Jaguar Smile

Imaginary Homelands

The Wizard of Oz

SCREENPLAY

Midnight's Children

ANTHOLOGY Mirrorwork (co-editor)

SALMAN RUSHDIE

Shame

A NOVEL

Picador USA

Henry Holt and Company New York

SHAME: A NOVEL. Copyright � 1983 by Salman Rushdie. All rights

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Design by Kathryn Parise

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rushdie, Salman.

Shame: a novel / Salman Rushdie.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-312-27093-3 I. Title.

PR6068.U757S5

823'.914�dc21 97-5633

CIP

First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd.

First published in the United States by Knopf

First Picador USA Edition: December 2000

10 987654321

For Sameen

CONTENTS

I Escapes from the Mother Country 1

Chapter One The Dumb-Waiter 3

Chapter Two A Necklace of Shoes 19

Chapter Three Melting Ice 39

II The Duellists 53 Chapter Four Behind the Screen 55 Chapter Five The Wrong Miracle 69 Chapter Six Affairs of Honour 90

III Shame, Good News and the Virgin 115

Chapter Seven Blushing 117

Chapter Eight Beauty and the Beast 151

IV In the Fifteenth Century 183

Chapter Nine Alexander the Great 185

Chapter Ten The Woman in the Veil 207

Chapter Eleven Monologue of a Hanged Man 233

Chapter Twelve Stability 254

V Judgment Day 281 Acknowledgments 307

I

Escapes from the Mother Country

Hafeezullah Shakil

Old Mr Shakil

Chhunni, Munnee, and Bunny Shakil (the "three mothers")

Rumi Shakil

Bariamma 2 sisters

I 3 brothers--------

I

11 legitimate sons

(many illegitimate offspring)

1 daughter

32 boys

Mahmoud "the Woman'

I

Sir Mir Harappa

brother

Kaza Hyder =

Bilquis Rani Humayun = Iskander Harappa Little Mir

Harappa

Babar Shakil Omar Khayyam Shakil

Sufiya Zinobia Naveed = Talvar Arjumand Harappa

Hyder Hyder Ulhaq (the "virgin Ironpants") Haroun

("Good News") Harappa

27 children

1

The Dumb-Waiter

In the remote border town of Q., which when seen from the air resembles nothing so much as an ill-proportioned dumb-bell, there once lived three lovely, and loving, sisters. Their names . . . but their real names were never used, like the best household china, which was locked away after the night of their joint tragedy in a cupboard whose location was eventually forgotten, so that the great thousand-piece service from the Gardner potteries in Tsarist Russia became a family myth in whose factuality they almost ceased to believe . . . the three sisters, I should state without further delay, bore the family name of Shakil, and were universally known (in descending order of age) as Chhunni, Munnee and Bunny.

And one day their father died.

Old Mr Shakil, at the time of his death a widower for eighteen years, had developed the habit of referring to the town in which he lived as 'a hell hole'. During his last delirium he embarked on a ceaseless and largely incomprehensible monologue amidst whose turbid peregrinations the household servants could make out long passages of obscenity, oaths and curses of a ferocity that made the air boil violently around his bed. In this peroration the embittered

3

Shame ? 4

old recluse rehearsed his lifelong hatred for his home town, now calling down demons to destroy the clutter of low, dun-coloured, 'higgling and piggling' edifices around the bazaar, now annihi- lating with his death-encrusted words the cool whitewashed smugness of the Cantonment district. These were the two orbs of the town's dumb-bell shape: old town and Cantt, the former inhabited by the indigenous, colonized population and the latter by the alien colonizers, the Angrez, or British, sahibs. Old Shakil loathed both worlds and had for many years remained immured in his high, fortress-like, gigantic residence which faced inwards to a well-like and lightless compound yard. The house was positioned beside an open maidan, and it was equidistant from the bazaar and the Cantt. Through one of the building's few outward-facing windows Mr Shakil on his death-bed was able to stare out at the dome of a large Palladian hotel, which rose out of the intolerable Cantonment streets like a mirage, and inside which were to be found golden cuspidors and tame spider-monkeys in brass- buttoned uniforms and bellhop hats and a full-sized orchestra playing every evening in a stuccoed ballroom amidst an energetic riot of fantastic plants, yellow roses and white magnolias and roof- high emerald-green palms � the Hotel Flashman, in short, whose great golden dome was cracked even then but shone nevertheless with the tedious pride of its brief doomed glory; that dome under which the suited-and-booted Angrez officers and white-tied civil- ians and ringleted ladies with hungry eyes would congregate nightly, assembling here from their bungalows to dance and to share the illusion of being colourful - whereas in fact they were merely white, or actually grey, owing to the deleterious effect of that stony heat upon their frail cloud-nurtured skins, and also to their habit of drinking dark Burgundies in the noonday insanity of the sun, with a fine disregard for their livers. The old man heard the music of the imperialists issuing from the golden hotel, heavy with the gaiety of despair, and he cursed the hotel of dreams in a loud, clear voice.

'Shut that window,' he shouted, 'so that I don't have to die lis- tening to that racket,' and when the old womanservant Hashmat

Escapes from the Mother Country ? 5

Bibi had fastened the shutters he relaxed slightly and, summoning up the last reserves of his energy, altered the course of his fatal, delirious flow.

'Come quickly,' Hashmat Bibi ran from the room yelling for the old man's daughters, 'your fatherji is sending himself to the devil.' Mr Shakil, having dismissed the outside world, had turned the rage of his dying monologue against himself, calling eternal damnation down upon his soul. 'God knows what got his goat,' Hashmat despaired, 'but he is going in an incorrect way.'

The widower had raised his children with the help of Parsee wet-nurses, Christian ayahs and an iron morality that was mostly Muslim, although Chhunni used to say that he had been made harder by the sun. The three girls had been kept inside that labyrinthine mansion until his dying day; virtually uneducated, they were imprisoned in the zenana wing where they amused each other by inventing private languages and fantasizing about what a man might look like when undressed, imagining, during their pre-pubertal years, bizarre genitalia such as holes in the chest into which their own nipples might snugly fit, 'because for all we knew in those days,' they would remind each other amazedly in later life, 'fertilization might have been supposed to happen through the breast.' This interminable captivity forged between the three sisters a bond of intimacy that would never completely be broken. They spent their evenings seated at a window behind a lattice-work screen, looking towards the golden dome of the great hotel and swaying to the strains of the enigmatic dance music . . . and there are rumours that they would indolently explore each other's bodies during the languorous drowsiness of the afternoons, and, at night, would weave occult spells to hasten the moment of their father's demise. But evil tongues will say anything, especially about beautiful women who live far away from the denuding eyes of men. What is almost certainly true is that it was during these years, long before the baby scandal, that the three of them, all of whom longed for children with the abstract passion of their vir- ginity, made their secret compact to remain triune, forever bound by the intimacies of their youth, even after the children came: that

Shame ? 6

is to say, they resolved to share the babies. I cannot prove or dis- prove the foul story that this treaty was written down and signed in the commingled menstrual blood of the isolated trinity, and then burned to ashes, being preserved only in the cloisters of their memories.

But for twenty years, they would have only one child. His name would be Omar Khayyam.

All this happened in the fourteenth century. I'm using the Hegiran calendar, naturally: don't imagine that stories of this type always take place longlong ago. Time cannot be homogenized as easily as milk, and in those parts, until quite recently, the thirteen- hundreds were still in full swing.

When Hashmat Bibi told them that their father had arrived at his final moments, the sisters went to visit him, dressed in their brightest clothes. They found him in the grip of an asphyxiating fist of shame, demanding of God, in gasps of imperious gloomi- ness, that he be consigned for all eternity to some desert outpost of Jahannum, some borderland of hell. Then he fell silent, and Chhunni, the eldest daughter, quickly asked him the only ques- tion of any interest to the three young women: 'Father, we are going to be very rich now, is that not so?'

'Whores,' the dying man cursed them, 'don't count on it.' The bottomless sea of wealth on which everyone had supposed the Shakil family fortunes to be sailing proved, on the morning after his foulmouthed death, to be an arid crater. The fierce sun of his financial incompetence (which he had successfully concealed for decades behind his imposing patriarchal facade, his filthy temper and the overweening hauteur which was his most poi- sonous legacy to his daughters) had dried out all the oceans of cash, so that Chhunni, Munnee and bunny spent the entire period of mourning settling the debts for which his creditors had never dared to press the old man while he lived, but for payment of which (plus compound interest) they now absolutely refused to wait one moment longer. The girls emerged from their lifelong

Escapes from the Mother Country ? 7

sequestration wearing expressions of well-bred disgust for these vultures swooping down to feast upon the carcass of their parent's great improvidence; and because they had been raised to think of money as one of the two subjects that it is forbidden to discuss with strangers, they signed away their fortune without even trou- bling to read the documents which the money-lenders presented. At the end of it all the vast estates around Q., which comprised approximately eighty-five per cent of the only good orchards and rich agricultural lands in that largely infertile region, had been lost in their entirety; the three sisters were left with nothing but the unmanageably infinite mansion stuffed from floor to ceiling with possessions and haunted by the few servants who refused to leave, less out of loyalty than from that terror of the life-prisoner for the outside world. And - as is perhaps the universal custom of aristo- cratically bred persons - they reacted to the news of their ruin by resolving to throw a party.

In later years, they told each other the story of that notorious gala night with a simple glee that restored to them the illusion of being young. 'I had invitations printed in the Cantt,' Chhunni Shakil would begin, seated beside her sisters on an old wooden swing-seat. Giggling happily about the old adventure, she con- tinued, 'And what invitations! Embossed, with gold lettering, on cards stiff as wood. They were like spits in the eye of fate.'

'Also in the closed eyes of our dead father,' Munnee added. 'To him it would have seemed like a completely shameless going-on, an abhorrence, the proof of his failure to impose his will on us.'

'Just as,' Bunny continued, 'our ruin proved his failure in another sphere.'

At first it seemed to them that the dying shame of their father had been born of his knowledge of the coming bankruptcy. Later, however, they began to consider less prosaic possibilities. 'Maybe,' Chhunni hypothesized, 'he saw on his death-bed a vision of the future.'

'Good,' her sisters said, 'then he will have died as miserably as he made us live.'

The news of the emergence into society of the Shakil sisters

Shame � 8

spread rapidly through the town. And on the much-anticipated evening, the old house was invaded by an army of musical geniuses, whose three-stringed dumbirs, seven-stringed sarandas, reed flutes and drums filled that puritanical mansion with celebra- tory music for the first time in two decades; regiments of bakers and confectioners and snack-wallahs marched in with arsenals of eats, denuding the shop-counters of the town and filling up the interior of the huge multicoloured shamiana tent that had been erected in the central compound, its mirrorworked fabric reflecting the glory of the arrangements. It became clear, how- ever, that the snobbishness which their father had bred into the sisters' bone-marrow had fatally infected the guest list. Most of the burghers of Q. had already been mortally insulted to find them- selves deemed unworthy of the company of the three lustrous ladies, whose gilt-edged invitations were the talk of the town. Now the crimes of omission were compounded by those of com- mission, because it was seen that the sisters had committed the ultimate solecism: invitations, scorning the doormats of the indigenous worthies, had found their way into the Angrez Can- tonment, and into the ballroom of the dancing sahibs. The long- forbidden household remained barred to all but a few locals; but after the cocktail hour at Flashman's, the sisters were visited by a uniformed and ball-gowned crowd of foreigners. The imperial- ists! � the grey-skinned sahibs and their gloved begums! � raucous-voiced and glittering with condescension, they entered the mirrorworked marquee.

'Alcohol was served.' Old mother Chhunni, reminiscing, clapped her hands delightedly at the horror of the memory. But that was the point at which the reminiscing always ceased, and all three ladies became curiously vague; so that I am unable to clear away the improbabilities which have mushroomed around that party during the dark passage of the years.

Can it really have been the case that the few non-white guests � local zamindars and their wives, whose wealth had once been trifling in comparison with the Shakil crores � stood together in a tight clump of rage, gazing balefully at the cavorting sahibs?

Escapes from the Mother Country ? 9

That all these persons left simultaneously after a very few mo- ments, without having broken bread or eaten salt, abandoning the sisters to the colonial authorities? How likely is it that the three sisters, their eyes shining with antimony and arousal, moved in grave silence from officer to officer, as though they were sizing them up, as if mustachioes were being checked for glossiness and jaws evaluated by the angles of their jutting? � And then (the legend goes) that they, the Shakil girls, clapped their hands in unison and ordered the musicians to start playing Western-style dance music, minuets, waltzes, fox-trots, polkas, gavottes, music that acquired a fatally demonic quality when forced out of the vir- tuosi's outraged instruments?

All night, they say, the dancing continued. The scandal of such an event would have placed the newly orphaned girls beyond the pale in any case, but there was worse to come. Shortly after the party ended, after the infuriated geniuses has departed and the mountains of uneaten food had been thrown to the pie-dogs � for the sisters in their grandeur would not permit food intended for their peers to be distributed among the poor - it began to be bruited about the bazaars of Q. that one of the three nose-in-air girls had been put, on that wild night, into the family way.

O shame, shame, poppy-shame!

But if the sisters Shakil were overwhelmed by any feelings of dishonour, they gave no sign of it. Instead, they dispatched Hashmat Bibi, one of the servants who had refused to leave, into Q., where she commissioned the services of the town's finest handyman, a certain Mistri Yakoob Balloch, and also purchased the largest imported padlock to be found in the God-Willing Ironmongery Store. This padlock was so large and heavy that Hashmat Bibi was obliged to have it carried home on the back of a rented mule, whose owner inquired of the servant woman: 'For what your begums want this lock-shock now? Invasion has already occurred.' Hashmat replied, crossing her eyes for emphasis: 'May your grandsons urinate upon your pauper's grave.'

The hired handyman, Mistri Yakoob, was so impressed by the ferocious calm of the antediluvian crone that he worked willingly

Shame ? 10

under her supervision without daring to pass a comment. She had him construct a strange external elevator, or dumb-waiter, large enough to hold three grown adults, by means of which items could be winched by a system of motorized pulleys from the street into the upper storeys of the house, or vice versa. Hashmat Bibi stressed the importance of constructing the whole contraption in such a way that it could be operated without requiring the man- sion's inhabitants to show themselves an any window � not so much as a little finger must be capable of being glimpsed. Then she listed the unusual security features which she wished him to install in the bizarre mechanism. 'Put here,' she ordered him, 'a spring release which can be worked from inside the house. When triggered, it should make the whole bottom of the lift fall offjust- likethat. Put there, and there, and there, some secret panels which can shoot out eighteen-inch stiletto blades, sharp sharp. My ladies must be defended against intruders.'

The dumb-waiter contained, then, many terrible secrets. The Mistri completed his work without once laying eyes on any of the three sisters Shakil, but when he died a few weeks later, clutching his stomach and rolling about in a gully, spitting blood on to the dirt, it got about that those shameless women had had him poi- soned to ensure his silence on the subject of his last and most mys- terious commission. It is only fair to state, however, that the medical evidence in the case runs strongly against this version of events. Yakoob Balloch, who had been suffering for some time from sporadic pains in the region of the appendix, almost certainly died of natural causes, his death-throes caused not by the spectral poisons of the putatively murderous sisters, but by the genuinely fatal banality of peritonitis. Or some such thing.

The day came when the three remaining male employees of the Shakil sisters were seen pushing shut the enormous front doors of solid teak and brass. Just before those gates of solitude closed upon the sisters, to remain unopened for more than half a century, the little crowd of curious townsfolk outside caught sight of a wheel- barrow on which there gleamed, dully, the outsize lock of their withdrawal. And when the doors were shut, the sounds of the

Escapes from the Mother Country ? 11

great lock being hauled into place, and of the key being turned, heralded the beginning of the strange confinement of the scan- dalous ladies and their servants too.

It turned out that on her last trip into town Hashmat Bibi had left a number of sealed envelopes containing detailed instructions at the establishments of the community's leading suppliers of goods and services; so that afterwards, on the appointed days and at the hours specified, the chosen washerwoman, the tailor, the cobbler, as well as the selected vendors of meats, fruits, haberdashery, flowers, stationery, vegetables, pulses, books, flat drinks, fizzy drinks, foreign magazines, newspapers, unguents, perfumes, antimony, strips of eucalyptus bark for tooth-cleaning, spices, starch, soaps, kitchen utensils, picture frames, playing cards and strings for musical instruments, would present themselves at the foot of Mistri Yakoob's last construction. They would emit coded whistles, and the dumb-waiter would descend, humming, to street level bearing written instructions. In this way the Shakil ladies managed to recede entirely and for all time from the world, returning of their own volition into that anchoritic existence whose end they had been so briefly able to celebrate after their father's death; and such was the hauteur of their arrangements that their withdrawal seemed like an act not of contrition but of pride.

There arises a delicate question: how did they pay for it all?

With some embarrassment on their behalf, and purely to show that the present author, who has already been obliged to leave many questions in a state of unanswered ambiguity, is capable of giving clear replies when absolutely necessary, I reveal that Hashmat Bibi had delivered a last sealed envelope to the door of the town's least savoury establishment, wherein the Quranic stric- tures against usury counted for nothing, whose shelves and storage chests groaned under the weight of the accumulated debris of innumerable decayed histories. . . damn and blast it. To be frank � she went to the pawnshop. And he, the pawnbroker, the ageless, pencil-thin, innocently wide-eyed Chalaak Sahib, would also pre- sent himself thereafter at the dumb-waiter (under cover of night, as instructed), to assess the worth of the items he found therein,

Shame ? 12

and to send up into the heart of the silent house cash monies on the nail to a total of eighteen point five per cent approx. of the market value of the irredeemably pawned treasures. The three mothers of the imminent Omar Khayyam Shakil were using the past, their only remaining capital, as a means of purchasing the future.

But who was pregnant?

Chhunni, the eldest, or Munnee-in-the-middle, or 'little' Bunny, the baby of the three? � Nobody ever discovered, not even the child that was born. Their closing of ranks was absolute, and effected with the most meticulous attention to detail. Just imagine: they made the servants swear loyalty oaths on the Book. The servants joined them in their self-imposed captivity, and only left the house feet first, wrapped in white sheets, and via, of course, the route constructed by Yakoob Balloch. During the entire term of that pregnancy, no doctor was summoned to the house. And as it proceeded, the sisters, understanding that unkept secrets always manage to escape, under a door, through a keyhole or an open window, until everyone knows everything and nobody knows how . . . the sisters, I repeat, displayed the uniquely passionate solidarity that was their most remarkable char- acteristic by feigning � in the case of two of them � the entire range of symptoms that the third was obliged to display.

Although some five years separated Chhunni from Bunny, it was at this time that the sisters, by virtue of dressing identically and through the incomprehensible effects of their unusual, chosen life, began to resemble each other so closely that even the servants made mistakes. I have described them as beauties; but they were not the moon-faced almond-eyed types so beloved of poets in that neck of the woods, but rather strong-chinned, powerfully built, purposefully striding women of an almost oppressively charismatic force. Now the three of them began, simultaneously, to thicken at the waist and in the breast; when one was sick in the morning, the other two began to puke in such perfectly synchronized sympathy that it was impossible to tell which stomach had heaved first. Identically, their wombs ballooned towards the pregnancy's full

Escapes from the Mother Country ? 13

term. It is naturally possible that all this was achieved with the help of physical contrivances, cushions and padding and even faint- inducing vapours; but it is my unshakeable opinion that such an analysis grossly demeans the love that existed between the sisters. In spite of biological improbability, I am prepared to swear that so wholeheartedly did they wish to share the motherhood of their sibling � to transform the public shame of unwedlocked concep- tion into the private triumph of the longed-for group baby � that, in short, twin phantom pregnancies accompanied the real one; while the simultaneity of their behavior suggests the operation of some form of communal mind.

They slept in the same room. They endured the same crav- ings - marzipan, jasmine-petals, pine-kernels, mud - at the same times; their metabolic rates altered in parallel. They began to weigh the same, to feel exhausted at the same moment, and to awake together, each morning, as if somebody had rung a bell. They felt identical pains; in three wombs, a single baby and its two ghostly mirror-images kicked and turned with the precision of a well-drilled dance troupe . . . suffering identically, the three of them - I will go so far as to say - fully earned the right to be con- sidered joint mothers of the forthcoming child. And when one � I will not even guess at the name � came to her time, nobody else saw whose waters broke; nor whose hand locked a bedroom door from the inside. No outside eyes witnessed the passage of the three labours, two phantom one genuine; or the moment when empty balloons subsided, while between a third pair of thighs, as if in an alleyway, there appeared the illegitimate child; or when hands lifted Omar Khayyam Shakil by the ankles, held him upside-down, and thumped him on the back.

Our hero, Omar Khayyam, first drew breath in that improbable mansion which was too large for its rooms to be counted; opened his eyes; and saw, upside-down through an open window, the macabre peaks of the Impossible Mountains on the horizon. One � but which? � of his three mothers had picked him up by the ankles, had pummelled the first breath into his lungs . . . until, still staring at the inverted summits, the baby began to scream.

Shame ? 14

When Hashmat Bibi heard a key turning in the door and came timidly into the room with food and drink and fresh sheets and sponges and soap and towels, she found the three sisters sitting up together in the capacious bed, the same bed in which their father had died, a huge mahogany four-poster around whose columns carved serpents coiled upwards to the brocade Eden of the canopy. They were all wearing the flushed expression of dilated joy that is the mother's true prerogative; and the baby was passed from breast to breast, and none of the six was dry.

Young Omar Khayyam was gradually made aware that certain irregularities had both preceded and succeeded his birth. We have dealt with the pre-; and as for the sue-:

'I refused completely,' his eldest mother Chhunni told him on his seventh birthday, 'to whisper the name of God into your ear.'

On his eighth birthday, middle-Munnee confided: 'There was no question of shaving your head. Such beautiful black-black hair you came with, nobody was cutting it off under my nose, no sir!'

Exactly one year later, his youngest mother adopted a stern expression. 'Under no circs,' Bunny announced, 'would I have permitted the foreskin to be removed. What is this idea? It is not like banana peel.'

Omar Khayyam Shakil entered life without benefit of mutila- tion, barbery or divine approval. There are many who would con- sider this a handicap.

Born in a death-bed, about which there hung (as well as curtains and mosquito-netting) the ghost-image of a grandfather who, dying, had consigned himself to the peripheries of hell; his first sight the spectacle of a range of topsy-turvy mountains . . . Omar Khayyam Shakil was afflicted, from his earliest days, by a sense of inversion, of a world turned upside-down. And by something worse: the fear that he was living at the edge of the world, so close that he might fall off at any moment. Through an old telescope, from the upper-storey windows of the house, the child Omar Khayyam surveyed the emptiness of the landscape around Q.,

Escapes from the Mother Country � 15

which convinced him that he must be near the very Rim of Things, and that beyond the Impossible Mountains on the hori- zon must lie the great nothing into which, in his nightmares, he had begun to tumble with monotonous regularity. The most alarming aspect of these dreams was the sleep-sense that his plunges into the void were somehow appropriate, that he deserved no better ... he awoke amidst mosquito-netting, sweating freely and even shrieking at the realization that his dreams were informing him of his worthlessness. He did not relish the news.

So it was in those half-formed years that Omar Khayyam took the never-to-be-reversed decision to cut down on his sleeping time, a lifelong endeavour which had brought him, by the end, by the time his wife went up in smoke � but no, ends must not be permitted to precede beginnings and middles, even if recent scien- tific experiments have shown us that within certain types of closed system, under intense pressure, time can be persuaded to run backwards, so that effects precede their causes. This is precisely the sort of unhelpful advance of which storytellers must take no notice whatsoever; that way madness lies! - to the point at which a mere forty minutes a night, the famous forty winks, sufficed to refresh him. How young he was when he made the surprisingly adult resolution to escape from the unpalatable reality of dreams into the slightly more acceptable illusions of his everyday, waking life! 'Little bat,' his three mothers called him tolerantly when they learned of his nocturnal flittings through the inexhaustible cham- bers of their home, a dark-grey chadar flapping around his shoul- ders, providing protection against the cold of the winter nights; but as to whether he grew up into caped crusader or cloaked bloodsucker, into Batman or Dracula, I leave it to the reader to decide.

(His wife, the elder daughter of General Raza Hyder, was an insomniac too; but Omar Khayyam's sleeplessness is not to be compared with hers, for while his was willed, she, foolish Sufiya Zinobia, would lie in bed squeezing her eyelids shut between her thumbs and forefingers, as if she could extrude consciousness through her eyelashes, like motes of dust, or tears. And she

Shame ? 16

burned, she fried, in that very room of her husband's birth and his grandfather's death, beside that bed of snakes and Paradise ... a plague on this disobedient Time! I command this death scene back into the wings at once: shazam!)

By the age of ten young Omar had already begun to feel grateful for the enclosing, protective presence of the mountains on the western and southern skyline. The Impossible Mountains: you will not find that name in your atlases, no matter how large-scale. Geographers have their limitations, however; the young Omar Khayyam, who fell in love with a miraculously shiny brass tele- scope which he unearthed from the wild abundance of things that clogged his home, was always aware that any silicon creatures or gas monsters inhabiting the stars of the Milky Way which flowed overhead each night would never have recognized their homes by the names in his much-thumbed star charts. 'We had our reasons,' he said throughout his life, 'for the name we gave to our personal mountain range.'

The thin-eyed, rock-hard tribals who dwelt in those moun- tains and who were occasionally to be seen in the streets of Q. (whose softer inhabitants crossed streets to avoid the tribals' mountainous stench and barging, unceremonious shoulders) also called the range 'the roof of Paradise'. The mountains, in fact the whole region, even Q. itself, suffered from periodic earthquakes; it was a zone of instability, and the tribals believed that the tremors were caused by the emergence of angels through fissures in the rocks. Long before his own brother saw a winged and golden- glowing man watching him from a rooftop, Omar Khayyam Shakil had become aware of the plausible theory that Paradise was located not in the sky but beneath his very feet, so that the earth movements were proof of the angels' interest in scru- tinizing world affairs. The shape of the mountain range altered constantly under this angelic pressure. From its crumpled ochre slopes rose an infinite number of stratified pillar-like formations whose geological strata were so sharply defined that the titanic columns seemed to have been erected by colossi skilled in stone-

Escapes from the Mother Country ? 17

masonry . . . these divine dream-temples, too, rose and fell as the angels came and went.

Hell above, Paradise below; I have lingered on this account of Omar Khayyam's original, unstable wilderness to underline the propositions that he grew up between twin eternities, whose con- ventional order was, in his experience, precisely inverted; that such headstandings have effects harder to measure than earth- quakes, for what inventor has patented a seismograph of the soul?; and that, for Omar Khayyam, uncircumcised, unwhispered- to, unshaven, their presence heightened his feeling of being a person apart.

But I have been out of doors for quite long enough now, and must get my narrative out of the sun before it is afflicted by mirages or heat-stroke. � Afterwards, at the other end of his life (it seems that the future cannot be restrained, and insists on seeping back into the past), when he got his name into all the papers over the scandal of the headless murders, the customs official's daughter Farah Rodrigues unlocked her lips and released from her custody the story of the day on which the adolescent Omar Khayyam, even then a fat fellow with a missing shirt-button at navel height, had accompanied her to her father's post at the land border forty miles to the west of Q. She sat in an illicit brandy den and spoke to the room in general, in the cackle of splintered glass to which time and the wilderness air had reduced her formerly crystal laugh: 'Incredible, I swear,' she reminisced, 'we just reached there in the jeep and at once a cloud came down and sat on the ground, right along the frontier, like it couldn't get across without a visa, and that Shakil was so scared he passed out, he got vertigo and fainted, even though both his feet had been on solid ground.'

Even in the days of his greatest distinction, even when he married Hyder's daughter, even after Raza Hyder became Presi- dent, Omar Khayyam Shakil was sometimes plagued by that improbable vertigo, by the sense of being a creature of the edge: a peripheral man. Once, during the time of his drinking and carousing friendship with Iskander Harappa, millionaire playboy,

Shame ? 18

radical thinker, Prime Minister and finally miracle-working corpse, Omar Khayyam in his cups described himself to Isky. 'You see before you,' he confided, 'a fellow who is not even the hero of his own life; a man born and raised in the condition of being out of things. Heredity counts, dontyouthinkso?'

'That is an oppressive notion,' Iskander Harappa replied.

Omar Khayyam Shakil �was raised by no fewer than three mothers, with not a solitary father in sight, a mystery which was later deep- ened by the birth, when Omar was already twenty years old, of a younger brother who was likewise claimed by all three female parents and whose conception seemed to have been no less immaculate. Equally disturbing, for the growing youth, was his first experience of falling in love, of pursuing with waddling and heated resolution the voluptuously unattainable figure of a certain Farah the Parsee (nee Zoroaster), an occupation known to all the local lads, with the solitary exception of his congenitally isolated self, as: 'courting Disaster'.

Dizzy, peripheral, inverted, infatuated, insomniac, stargazing, fat: what manner of hero is this?

2

A Necklace of Shoes

A few weeks after Russian troops entered Afghanistan, I returned home, to visit my parents and sisters and to show off my firstborn son. My family lives in 'Defence', the Pakistan Defence Services Officers' Co-Operative Housing Society, although it is not a military family. 'Defence' is a fashionable part of Karachi; few of the soldiers who were permitted to buy land there at rock-bottom prices could afford to build on it.

But they weren't allowed to sell the empty plots, either. To buy an officer's piece of'Defence', you had to draw up a complex contract. Under the terms of this contract the land remained the property of the vendor, even though you had paid him the full market price and were now spending a small fortune building your own house on it to your own specifications. In theory you were just being a nice guy, a benefactor who had chosen to give the poor officer a home out of your boundless charity. But the contract also obliged the vendor to name a third party who would have plenipotentiary authority over the property once the house was finished. This third party was your nominee, and when the construction workers went home he simply handed the property over to you. Thus two separate acts of goodwill were necessary to

19

Shame ? 20

the process. 'Defence' was almost entirely developed on this nice- guy basis. This spirit of comradeship, of working selflessly together towards a common goal, is worthy of remark.

It was an elegant procedure. The vendor got rich, the interme- diary got his fee, you got your house, and nobody broke any laws. So naturally nobody ever questioned how it came about that the city's most highly desirable development zone had been allotted to the defence services in this way. This attitude, too, remains a part of the foundations of 'Defence': the air there is full of unasked questions. But their smell is faint, and the flowers in the many maturing gardens, the trees lining the avenues, the perfumes worn by the beautiful soignee ladies of the neighbourhood quite over- power this other, too-abstract odour. Diplomats, international businessmen, the sons of former dictators, singing stars, textile moguls, Test cricketers come and go. There are many new Datsun and Toyota motor cars. And the name 'Defence Society', which might sound to some ears like a symbol (representing the mutually advantageous relationship between the country's establishment and its armed forces), holds no such resonance in the city. It is only a name.

One evening, soon after my arrival, I visited an old friend, a poet. I had been looking forward to one of our long conversa- tions, to hearing his views about recent events in Pakistan, and about Afghanistan, of course. His house was full of visitors as usual; nobody seemed interested in talking about anything except the cricket series between Pakistan and India. I sat down at a table with my friend and began an idle game of chess. But I really wanted to get the low-down on things, and at length I brought up the stuff that was on my mind, beginning with a question about the execution of Zulfikar AH Bhutto. But only half the question got past my lips; the other half joined the ranks of the area's many unasked queries, because I felt an extremely painful kick land on my shins and, without crying out, switched in mid-sentence back to sporting topics. We also discussed the incipient video boom.

People entered, excited, circled, laughed. After about forty minutes my friend said, 'It's O.K. now.' I asked, 'Who was it?' He

Escapes from the Mother Country ? 21

gave me the name of the informer who had infiltrated this par- ticular group. They treated him civilly, without hinting that they knew why he was there, because otherwise he would vanish, and the next time they might not know who the informer was. Later, I met the spy. He was a nice guy, pleasantly spoken, honest- faced, and no doubt happy that he was hearing nothing worth reporting. A kind of equilibrium had been achieved. Once again, I was struck by how many nice guys there were in Pakistan, by the civility growing in those gardens, perfuming the air.

Since my last visit to Karachi, my friend the poet had spent many months in jail, for social reasons. That is to say, he knew somebody who knew somebody who was the wife of the second cousin by marriage of the step-uncle of somebody who might or might not have shared a flat with someone who was running guns to the guerrillas in Baluchistan. You can get anywhere in Pakistan if you know people, even into jail. My friend still refuses to talk about what happened to him during those months; but other people told me that he was in bad shape for a long time after he got out. They said he had been hung upside-down by the ankles and beaten, as if he were a new-born baby whose lungs had to be coerced into action so that he could squeal. I never asked him if he screamed, or if there were upside-down mountain peaks visible through a window.

Wherever I turn, there is something of which to be ashamed. But shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture. In 'Defence', you can find shame in every house, burning in an ashtray, hanging framed upon a wall, covering a bed. But nobody notices it any more. And everyone is civilized.

Maybe my friend should be telling this story, or another one, his own; but he doesn't write poetry any more. So here I am instead, inventing what never happened to me, and you will note that my hero has already been ankle-hung, and that his name is the name of a famous poet; but no quatrains ever issued or will issue from his pen.

Outsider! Trespasser! You have no right to this subject! ... I know:

Shame ? 22

nobody ever arrested me. Nor are they ever likely to. Poacher! Pirate! We reject your authority. We know you, with your foreign lan- guage wrapped around you like a flag: speaking about us in your forked tongue, what can you tell but lies? I reply with more questions: is his- tory to be considered the property of the participants solely? In what courts are such claims staked, what boundary commissions map out the territories?

Can only the dead speak?

I tell myself this will be a novel of leavetaking, my last words on the East from which, many years ago, I began to come loose. I do not always believe myself when I say this. It is a part of the world to which, whether I like it or not, I am still joined, if only by elastic bands.

As to Afghanistan: after returning to London, I met a senior British diplomat at a dinner, a career specialist in 'my' part of the world. He said it was quite proper, 'post-Afghanistan', for the West to support the dictatorship of President Zia ul-Haq. I should not have lost my temper, but I did. It wasn't any use. Then, as we left the table, his wife, a quiet civil lady who had been making pacifying noises, said to me, 'Tell me, why don't people in Paki- stan get rid of Zia in, you know, the usual way?'

Shame, dear reader, is not the exclusive property of the East.

The country in this story is not Pakistan, or not quite. There are two countries, real and fictional, occupying the same space, or almost the same space. My story, my fictional country exist, like myself, at a slight angle to reality. I have found this ofF-centring to be necessary; but its value is, of course, open to debate. My view is that I am not writing only about Pakistan.

I have not given the country a name. And Q. is not really Quetta at all. But I don't want to be precious about this: when I arrive at the big city, I shall call it Karachi. And it will contain a 'Defence'.

Omar Khayyam's position as a poet is curious. He was never very popular in his native Persia; and he exists in the West in a transla-

Escapes from the Mother Country ? 23

tion that is really a complete reworking of his verses, in many cases very different from the spirit (to say nothing of the content) of the original. I, too, am a translated man. I have been borne across. It is generally believed that something is always lost in translation; I cling to the notion - and use, in evidence, the success of Fitzgerald-Khayyam � that something can also be gained.

'The sight of you through my beloved telescope,' Omar Khayyam Shakil told Farah Zoroaster the day he declared his love, 'gave me the strength to break my mothers' power.'

'Voyeur,' she replied, 'I shit on your words. Your balls dropped too soon and you got the hots, no more to it than that. Don't load your family problems on to me.' She was two years his senior, but Omar Khayyam was nevertheless forced to concede that his dar- ling had a dirty mouth . . .

... As well as the name of a great poet, the child had been given his mothers' family name. And as if to underline what they meant by calling him after the immortal Khayyam the three sisters gave a name, too, to that underlit corridory edifice that was now all the country they possessed: the house was named 'Nishapur'. Thus a second Omar grew up in a second place of that name, and every so often, as he grew, would catch a strange look in his three mothers' six eyes, a look that seemed to say Hurry up, we are waiting for your poems. But (I repeat) no rubaiyat ever issued from his pen.

His childhood had been exceptional by any standards, because what applied to mothers and servants wentwithoutsaying for our peripheral hero as well. Omar Khayyam passed twelve long years, the most crucial years of his development, trapped inside that reclusive mansion, that third world that was neither material nor spiritual, but a sort of concentrated decrepitude made up of the decomposing remnants of those two more familiar types of cosmos, a world in which he would constantly run into � as well as the mothballed, spider-webbed, dust-shrouded profusion of crumbling objects - the lingering, fading miasmas of discarded ideas and forgotten dreams. The finely-calculated gesture with

Shame ? 24

which his three mothers had sealed themselves off from the world had created a sweltering, entropical zone in which, despite all the rotting-down of the past, nothing new seemed capable of growth, and from which it became Omar Khayyam's most cherished youthful ambition quickly to escape. Unaware, in that hideously indeterminate frontier universe, of the curvature of space and time, thanks to which he who runs longest and hardest inevitably ends up, gaspingpanting, with wrenched and screaming tendons, at the starting line, he dreamed of exits, feeling that in the claus- trophobis of 'Nishapur' his very life was at stake. He was, after all, something new in that infertile and time-eroded labyrinth.

Have you heard of those wolf-children, suckled � we must sup- pose - on the feral multiple breasts of a hairy moon-howling dam? Rescued from the Pack, they bit their saviours vilely in the arm; netted and caged, they are brought stinking of raw meat and faecal matter into the emancipated light of the world, their brains too imperfectly formed to be capable of acquiring more than the most fundamental rudiments of civilization . . . Omar Khayyam, too, fed at too-many mammary glands; and he wandered for some four thousand days in the thing-infested jungle that was 'Nishapur', his walled-in wild place, his mother-country; until he succeeded in getting the frontiers opened by making a birthday wish that could not be satisfied by anything lifted up in the machine of Mistri Balloch.

'Drop this jungle-boy business,' Farah sneered when Omar tried it on her, 'you're no fucking ape-man, sonny jim.' And, educationally speaking, she was right; but she had also denied the wildness, the evil within him; and he proved upon her own body that she was wrong.

First things first: for twelve years, he had the run of the house. Little (except freedom) was denied him. A spoiled and vulpine brat; when he howled, his mothers caressed him . . . and after the nightmares began and he started giving up sleep, he plunged deeper and deeper into the seemingly bottomless depths of that decaying realm. Believe me when I tell you that he stumbled down corridors so long untrodden that his sandalled feet sank into

Escapes from the Mother Country ? 25

the dust right up to his ankles; that he discovered ruined staircases made impassable by longago earthquakes which had caused them to heave up into tooth-sharp mountains and also to fall away to reveal dark abysses of fear ... in the silence of the night and the first sounds of dawn he explored beyond history into what seemed the positively archaeological antiquity of 'Nishapur', discovering in almirahs the wood of whose doors disintegrated beneath his tentative fingers the impossible forms of painted neolithic pottery in the Kotdiji style; or in kitchen quarters whose existence was no longer even suspected he would gaze ignorantly upon bronze implements of utterly fabulous age; or in regions of that colossal palace which had been abandoned long ago because of the col- lapse of their plumbing he would delve into the quake-exposed intricacies of brick drainage systems that had been out of date for centuries.

On one occasion he lost his way completely and ran wildly about like a time-traveller who has lost his magic capsule and fears he will never emerge from the disintegrating history of his race - and came to a dead stop, staring in horror at a room whose outer wall had been partly demolished by great, thick, water-seeking tree-roots. He was perhaps ten years old when he had this first glimpse of the unfettered outside world. He had only to walk through the shattered wall � but the gift had been sprung upon him without sufficient warning, and, taken unawares by the shocking promise of the dawn light streaming through the hole, he turned tail and fled, his terror leading him blindly back to his own comforting, comfortable room. Afterwards, when he had had time to consider things, he tried to retrace his steps, armed with a purloined ball of string; but try as he might, he never again found his way to that place in the maze of his childhood where the minotaur of forbidden sunlight lived.

'Sometimes I found skeletons,' he swore to disbelieving Farah, 'human as well as animal.' And even where bones were absent, the house's long-dead occupants dogged his steps. Not in the way you think! � No howls, no clanking chains! � But disembodied feel- ings, the choking fumes of ancient hopes, fears, loves; and finally,

Shame ? 26

made wild by the ancestor-heavy, phantom oppressions of these far recesses of the run-down building, Omar Khayyam took his revenge (not long after the episode of the broken wall) on his unnatural surroundings. I wince as I record his vandalism: armed with broomstick and misappropriated hatchet, he rampaged through dusty passages and maggoty bedrooms, smashing glass cabinets, felling oblivion-sprinkled divans, pulverizing wormy libraries; crystal, paintings, rusty helmets, the paper-thin remnants of priceless silken carpets were destroyed beyond all possibility of repair. 'Take that,' he screeched amidst the corpses of his useless, massacred history, 'take that, old stuff!' - and then burst (dropping guilty hatchet and clean-sweeping broom) into illogical tears.

It must be stated that even in those days nobody believed the boy's stories about the far-flung infinities of the house. 'Only child,' Hashmat Bibi creaked, 'always always they live in their poor head.' And the three male servants laughed too: 'Listening to you, baba, we are thinking this house has grown so huge huge, there mustn't be room for anywhere else in the world!' And three mothers, sitting tolerantly in their favourite swingseat, stretched out patting hands and sealed the matter: 'At least he has a vivid imagination,' said Munnee-in-the-middle, and Mother Bunny concurred: 'Comes from his poetic name.' Worried that he might be sleep-walking, Chhunni-ma detailed a servant to place his sleeping-mat outside Omar Khayyam's room; but by then he had placed the more fantasricated zones of 'Nishapur' off-limits for ever. After he descended upon the cohorts of history like a wolf (or wolf-child) on the fold, Omar Khayyam Shakil confined himself to the well-trodden, swept and dusted, used regions of the house.

Something - conceivably remorse - led him to his grandfather's dark-panelled study, a book-lined room which the three sisters had never entered since the old man's death. Here he discovered that Mr Shakil's air of great learning had been a sham, just like his supposed business acumen; because the books all bore the ex libris plates of a certain Colonel Arthur Greenfield, and many of their pages were uncut. It was a gentleman's library, bought in toto from

Escapes from the Mother Country ? 27

the unknown Colonel, and it had remained unused throughout its residence in the Shakil household. Now Omar Khayyam fell upon it with a will.

Here I must praise his autodidactic gifts. For by the time he left 'Nishapur' he had learned classical Arabic and Persian; also Latin, French and German; all with the aid of leather-bound dictionaries and the unused texts of his grandfather's deceptive vanity. In what books the young fellow immersed himself! Illuminated manu- scripts of the poetry of Ghalib; volumes of letters written by Mughal emperors to their sons; the Burton translation of the Alf laylah wa laylah, and the Travels of Ibn Battuta, and the Qissa or tales of the legendary adventurer Hatim Tai . . . yes, yes, I see that I must withdraw (as Farah instructed Omar to withdraw) the mis- leading image of the mowgli, the junglee boy.

The continual passage of items from living quarters via dumb- waiter to pawnshop brought concealed matter to light at regular intervals. Those outsize chambers stuffed brim-full with the mate- rial legacy of generations of rapaciously acquisitive forebears were being slowly emptied, so that by the time Omar Khayyam was ten and a half there was enough space to move around without bumping into the furniture at every step. And one day the three mothers sent a servant into the study to remove from their lives an exquisitely carved walnut screen on which was portrayed the mythical circular mountain of Qaf, complete with the thirty birds playing God thereupon. The flight of the bird-parliament revealed to Omar Khayyam a little bookcase stuffed with volumes on the theory and practice of hypnosis: Sanskrit mantras, compendiums of the lore of the Persian Magi, a leathern copy of the Kalevala of the Finns, an account of the hypno-exorcisms of Father Gassner of Klosters and a study of the 'animal magnetism' theory of Franz Mesmer himself; also (and most usefully) a number of cheaply printed do-it-yourself manuals. Greedily, Omar Khayyam began to devour these books, which alone in the library did not bear the name of the literary Colonel; they were his grandfather's true legacy, and they led him into his lifelong involvement with that arcane science which has so awesome a power for good or ill.

Shame ? 28

The household servants were as under-occupied as he; his mothers had gradually become very lax about such matters as cleanliness and cuisine. The trio of menservants became, there- fore, Omar Khayyam's first, willing subjects. Practising with the aid of a shiny four-anna coin he put them under, discovering with some pride his talent for the art: effortlessly keeping his voice on a flat, monotonous plane, he lulled them into trances, learning, among other things, that the sexual drives which his mothers appeared to have lost completely since his birth had not been simi- larly stilled in these men. Entranced, they happily confessed the secrets of their mutual caresses, and blessed the maternal trinity for having so altered the circumstances of their lives that their true desires could be revealed to them. The contented three-way love of the male servants provided a curious balance for the equal, but wholly platonic, love of the three sisters for one another. (But Omar Khayyam continued to grow bitter, despite being sur- rounded by so many intimacies and affections.)

Hashmat Bibi also agreed to 'go under'. Omar made her imagine she was floating on a soft pink cloud. 'You are sinking deeper,' he intoned as she lay upon her mat, 'and deeper into the cloud. It is good to be in the cloud; you want to sink lower and lower.' These experiments had a tragic side-effect. Soon after his twelfth birthday, his mothers were informed by the three loving menservants, who stared accusingly at the young master as they spoke, that Hashmat had apparently willed herself into death; at the very end she had been heard muttering, '. . . deeper and deeper into the heart of the rosy cloud.' The old lady, having been given glimpses of non-being through the mediating powers of the young hypnotist's voice, had finally relaxed the iron will with which she had clung to life for what she had claimed was more than one hundred and twenty years. The three mothers stopped swinging in their seat and ordered Omar Khayyam to abandon mesmerism. But by then the world had changed. I must go back a little way to describe the alteration.

What was also found in the slowly emptying rooms: a previ- ously mentioned telescope. With which Omar Khayyam spied out

Escapes from the Mother Country ? 29

of upper-storey windows (those on the ground floor being perma- nently shuttered and barred): the world seen as a bright disc, a moon for his delight. He watched kite-fights between colourful, tailed patangs whose strings were black and dipped in glass to make them razor sharp; he heard the victors' cries - 'Boi-oi-oi! Boi-oi!' - come towards him on the gritty breeze; once a green and white kite, its string severed, dropped in through his open window. And when, shortly before his twelfth birthday, there strolled on to this ocular moon the incomprehensibly appealing figure of Farah Zoroaster, at that time no more than fourteen but already pos- sessed of a body that moved with the physical wisdom of a woman, then, in that exact moment, he felt his voice break in his throat, while below his belt other things slid downwards too, to take their appointed places, somewhat ahead of schedule, in hitherto-empty sacs. His longing for the outside was immediately transformed into a dull ache in the groin, a tearing in his loins; what followed was perhaps inevitable.

He was not free. His roving freedom-of-the-house was only the pseudo-liberty of a zoo animal; and his mothers were his loving, caring keepers. His three mothers: who else implanted in his heart the conviction of being a sidelined personality, a watcher from the wings of his own life? He watched them for a dozen years, and, yes, it must be said, he hated them for their closeness, for the way they sat with arms entwined on their swinging, creaking seat, for their tendency to lapse giggling into the private languages of their girlhood, for their way of hugging each other, of putting their three heads together and whispering about whoknowswhat, of finishing one another's sentences. Omar Khayyam, walled up in 'Nishapur' had been excluded from human society by his mothers' strange resolve; and this, his mothers' three-in-oneness, redoubled that sense of exclusion, of being, in the midst of objects, out of things.

Twelve years take their toll. At first the high pride which had driven Chhunni, Munnee and Bunny to reject God, their father's memory and their place in society had enabled them to maintain

Shame ? 30

the standards of behaviour which were just about their father's only legacy to them. They would rise, each morning, within sec- onds of one another, brush their teeth up, down and sideways fifty times each with eucalyptus sticks, and then, identically attired, would oil and comb each other's hair and twine white flowers into the coiled black buns they made of their locks. They addressed the servants, and also each other, by the polite form of the second-person pronoun. The rigidity of their bearing and the precision of their household instructions gave a legitimizing sheen to all their actions, including (which was no doubt the point) the production of an illegitimate child. But slowly, slowly, they slipped.

On the day of Omar Khayyam's departure for the big city, his eldest mother told him a secret that put a date to the beginning of their decline. 'We never wanted to stop breast-feeding you,' she confessed. 'By now you know that it is not usual for a six-year-old boy to be still on the nipple; but you drank from half a dozen, one for each year. On your sixth birthday we renounced this greatest of pleasures, and after that nothing was the same, we began to forget the point of things.'

During the next six years, as breasts dried and shrank, the three sisters lost that firmness and erectness of body which had accounted for a good deal of their beauty. They became soft, there were knots in their hair, they lost interest in the kitchen, the ser- vants got away with murder. But still they declined at the same rate and in identical fashion; the bonds of their identity remained unbroken.

Remember this: the Shakil sisters had never received a proper education, except in manners; while their son, by the time his voice broke, was already something of a self-taught prodigy. He attempted to interest his mothers in his learning; but when he set out the most elegant proofs of Euclidian theorems or expatiated eloquently on the Platonic image of the Cave, they rejected the unfamiliar notions out of hand. 'Angrez double-dutch,' said Chhunni-ma, and the three mothers shrugged as one. 'Who is to understand the brains of those crazy types?' asked Munnee-in-

Escapes from the Mother Country ? 31

the-middle, in tones of final dismissal. 'They read books from left to right.'

The philistinism of his mothers accentuated Omar Khayyam's feelings, inchoate and half-articulated, of being extraneous, both because he was a gifted child whose gifts were being returned-to- sender by his parents, and because, for all his learning, he guessed that his mothers' point of view was holding him back. He suffered the sensation of being lost inside a cloud, whose curtains parted occasionally to offer tantalizing glimpses of the sky ... in spite of what he murmured to Hashmat Bibi, cloudiness was not attractive to the boy.

Now then. Omar Khayyam Shakil is almost twelve. He is over- weight, and his generative organ, newly potent, also possesses a fold of skin that should have been removed. His mothers are growing vague about the reasons for their life; while he, in con- trast, has overnight become capable of levels of aggression previ- ously foreign to his complaisant fat-boy nature. I offer (have already hinted at) three causes: one, his sighting of fourteen-year- old Farah on the moon of his telescopic lens; two, his awkward- ness about his altered speech, which swings out of control between croaks and squeaks while an ugly lump bobs in his throat like a cork; and one must not forget three, namely the time- honoured (or dishonoured) mutations wrought by pubertal bio- chemistry upon the adolescent male personality . . . ignorant of this conjunction of diabolic forces within their son, the three mothers make the mistake of asking Omar Khayyam what he wants for his birthday.

He surprises them by being sullen: 'You'll never give it, what's the point?' Horrified maternal gasps. Six hands fly to three heads and take up hear-no-see-no-speak-no-evil positions. Mother Chhunni (hands over ears): 'How can he say this? The boy, what's he talking?' And middling-Munnee, peeping tragically through her fingers: 'Somebody has upset our angel, plain to see.' And Baby Bunny removes hands from lips to speaknoevil: 'Ask! Ask only! What can we refuse? What's so big that we won't do?'

Shame ? 32

It bursts out of him then: howling, 'To let me out of this horrible house,' and then, much more quietly, into the aching silence that his words have brought into being, 'and to tell my father's name.'

'Cheek! Cheek of the chappie!' � this from Munnee his middle mother; then her sisters draw her into an inward-facing huddle, arms round waists in that pose of obscene unity which the watching boy finds so hard to stomach.

'Didn't I tell?' - in grunts and falsettos of anguish - 'Then why get it out of me in the first place?'

But now it is possible to observe a change. Quarrelsome syl- lables fly out of the maternal huddle, because the boy's requests have divided the sisters for the first time in more than a decade. They are arguing, and the argument is a rusty, difficult business, a dispute between women who are trying to remember the people they once were.

When they emerge from the rubble of their exploded identity they make heroic attempts to pretend to Omar, and to themselves, that nothing serious has happened; but although all three of them stick by the collective decision that has been made, the boy can see that this unanimity is a mask which is being held in place with considerable difficulty.

'These are reasonable requests,' Baby Bunny speaks first, 'and one, at least, should be granted.'

His triumph terrifies him; the cork in his throat jumps, almost as far as his tongue. 'Whichwhichwhich?' Fearfully, he asks.

Munnee takes over. 'A new satchel will be ordered and will come in the Mistri's machine,' she states gravely, 'and you will go to school. You need not be too happy,' she adds, 'because when you leave this house you will be wounded by many sharp names, which people will throw at you, like knives, in the street.' Munnee, the fiercest opponent of his freedom, has had her own tongue sharpened on the steel of her defeat.

Finally, his eldest mother says her piece. 'Come home without hitting anyone,' she instructs, 'or we will know that they have

Escapes from the Mother Country ? 33

lowered your pride and made you feel the forbidden emotion of shame.'

'That would be a completely debased effect,' middle-Mun- nee says.

This word: shame. No, I must write it in its original form, not in this peculiar language tainted by wrong concepts and the accumu- lated detritus of its owners' unrepented past, this Angrezi in which I am forced to write, and so for ever alter what is written . . .

Sharam, that's the word. For which this paltry 'shame' is a wholly inadequate translation. Three letters, shin re mim (written, naturally, from right to left); plus zabar accents indicating the short vowel sounds. A short word, but one containing encyclopaedias of nuance. It was not only shame that his mothers forbade Omar Khayyam to feel, but also embarrassment, discomfiture, decency, modesty, shyness, the sense of having an ordained place in the world, and other dialects of emotion for which English has no counterparts. No matter how determinedly one flees a country, one is obliged to take along some hand-luggage; and can it be doubted that Omar Khayyam (to concentrate on him), having been barred from feeling shame (vb. int.: sharmhna) at an early age, continued to be affected by that remarkable ban throughout his later years, yes, long after his escape from his mothers' zone of influence?

Reader: it cannot.

What's the opposite of shame? What's left when sharam is sub- tracted? That's obvious: shamelessness.

Owing to the pride of his parents and the singular circumstances of his life, Omar Khayyam Shakil, at the age of twelve, was wholly unfamiliar with the emotion in which he was now being forbidden to indulge.

'What does it feel like?' he asked � and his mothers, seeing his bewilderment, essayed explanations. 'Your face gets hot,' said Bunny-the-youngest, 'but your heart starts shivering.'

Shame ? 34

'It makes women feel like to cry and die,' said Chhunni-ma, 'but men, it makes them go wild.'

'Except sometimes,' his middle mother muttered with prophetic spite, 'it happens the other way around.'

The division of the three mothers into separate beings became, in the following years, more and more plaintosee. They squabbled over the most alarming trifles, such as who should write the notes that were placed in the dumb-waiter, or whether to take their mid-morning mint tea and biskuts in the drawing room or on the landing. It was as if by sending their son out into the sunlit arenas of the town they had exposed themselves to the very thing they denied him the freedom to experience; as if on the day when the world laid eyes for the first time on their Omar Khayyam the three sisters were finally pierced by the forbidden arrows of sharam. Their quarrels died down when he made his second escape; but they were never properly reunited until they decided to repeat the act of motherhood . . .

And there is an even stranger matter to report. It is this: when they were divided by Omar Khayyam's birthday wishes, they had been indistinguishable too long to retain any exact sense of their former selves � and, well, to come right out with it, the result was that they divided up in the wrong way, they got all mixed up, so that Bunny, the youngest, sprouted the premature grey hairs and took on the queenly airs that ought to have been the prerogative of the senior sibling; while big Chhunni seemed to become a torn, uncertain soul, a sister of middles and vacillations; and Munnee developed the histrionic gadfly petulance that is the traditional characteristic of the baby in any generation, and which never ceases to be that baby's right, no matter how old she gets. In the chaos of their regeneration the wrong heads ended up on the wrong bodies; they became psychological centaurs, fish-women, hybrids; and of course this confused separation of personalities car- ried with it the implication that they were still not genuinely dis- crete, because they could only be comprehended if you took them as a whole.

Who would not have wanted to escape from such mothers? �

Escapes from the Mother Country ? 35

In later years, Omar Khayyam would remember his childhood as a lover, abandoned, remembers his beloved: changeless, incapable of ageing, a memory kept prisoner in a circle of heart's fire. Only he remembered with hatred instead of love; not with flames, but icily, icily. The other Omar wrote great things out of love; our hero's story is poorer, no doubt because it was marinated in bile.

� And it would be easy to argue that he developed pronounced misogynist tendencies at an early age. � That all his subsequent dealings with women were acts of revenge against the memory of his mothers. - But I say in Omar Khayyam's defence: all his life, whatever he did, whoever he became, he did his filial duty and paid their bills. The pawnbroker Chalaak Sahib ceased to pay visits to the dumb-waiter; which indicates the existence of love, love of some sort. . . but he is not grown-up yet. Just now the satchel has arrived via the Mistri's machine; now it hangs over the shoulder of the twelve-year-old escapologist; now he enters the dumb-waiter and the satchel begins its descent back to earth. Omar Khayyam's twelfth birthday brought him freedom instead of cake; also, inside the satchel, blue-lined copybooks, a slate, a washable wooden board and some quill pens with which to practise the sinuous script of his mother tongue, chalks, pencils, a wooden ruler and a box of geometry instruments, protractor, dividers, compass. Plus a small aluminum etherizing box in which to murder frogs. With the weapons of learning hanging over his shoulder, Omar Khayyam left his mothers, who wordlessly (and still in unison) waved goodbye.

Omar Khayyam Shakil never forgot the moment of his emergence from the dumb-waiter into the dust of the no-man's-land around the high mansion of his childhood which stood like a pariah between the Cantonment and the town; or the first sight of the reception committee, one of whose members was carrying a most unexpected sort of garland.

When the wife of Q.'s finest leather-goods merchant received the sisters' order for a school satchel from the peon whom she dis- patched to the dumb-waiter once a fortnight in accordance with

Shame � 36

the Shakils' standing orders, she, Zeenat Kabuli, at once ran round to the house of her best friend, the widow Farida Balloch, who lived with her brother Bilal. The three of them, who had never ceased to believe that Yakoob Balloch's street-death was the direct result of his getting mixed up with the anchoritic sisters, agreed that the flesh-and-blood product of the longago scandal must be about to emerge into plain daylight. They stationed themselves outside the Shakil household to await this event, but not before Zeenat Kabuli had pulled out from the back of her shop a gunny sack filled with old rotting shoes and sandals and slippers of no conceivable value to anyone, annihilated footwear that had been awaiting just such an occasion, and which was now strung together to form the worst of all insults, that is, a necklace of shoes. 'The shoe garland,' the widow Balloch swore to Zeenat Kabuli, 'just see if I don't hang it on that child's neck, personal.'

The week-long vigil of Farida, Zeenat and Bilal inevitably attracted attention, so that by the time Omar Khayyam jumped out of the dumb-waiter they had been joined by divers other gawpers and taunters, raggedy urchins and unemployed clerks and washerwomen on their way to the ghats. Also present was the town postman, Muhammad Ibadalla, who bore upon his forehead the gatta or permanent bruise which revealed him to be a religious fanatic who pressed brow to prayer-mat on at least five occasions per diem, and probably at the sixth, optional time as well. This Ibadalla had found his job through the malign influence of the beardy serpent who stood beside him in the heat, the local divine, the notorious Maulana Dawood who rode around town on a motor-scooter donated by the Angrez shabis, threatening the citi- zens with damnation. It turned out that this Ibadalla had been incensed by the Shakil ladies' decision not to send their letter to the headmaster of the Cantt school via the postal services. It had been included, instead, in the envelope they had sent down in the dumb-waiter to the flower-girl Azra, along with a small extra fee. Ibadalla had been wooing this Azra for some time, but she laughed at him, 'I don't care for a type who spends so much time with his backside higher than his head.' So the sisters' decision to place

Escapes from the Mother Country ? 37

their letter in her care struck the postman as a personal insult, a way of undermining his status, and also as further proof of their Godlessness, for had they not allied themselves by this infamous act of correspondence with a slut who cracked jokes about prayer? 'Behold,' Ibadalla yelled energetically as Omar Khayyam touched the ground, 'there stands the Devil's seed.'

There now occurred an unfortunate incident. Ibadalla, incensed by the Azra business, had spoken up first, thus incurring the dis- pleasure of his patron Maulana Dawood, a loss of divine support which ruined the postman's chance of future promotion and intensified his hatred of all Shakils; because of course the Maulana thought it his right to begin the assault on the poor, fat, prema- turely-pubescent symbol of incarnate sin. In an attempt to regain the initiative Dawood flung himself to his knees in the dust at Omar's feet; he ground his forehead ecstatically into the dirt by Omar's toes, and called out: 'O God! O scourging Lord! Bring down upon this human abomination Thy sizzling fountain of fire!' Etcetera. This grotesque display greatly irritated the three who had kept the original vigil. 'Whose husband died for a dumb-waiter?' Farida Balloch hissed to her friend. 'That shouting oldie's? Then who should be speaking now?' Her brother Bilal did not stop for speech; rope of shoes in hand, he strode forward, bellowing in that stentorian voice that was almost the equal of the fabled voice of his namesake, that first, black Bilal, the Prophet's muezzin: 'Boy! Flesh of infamy! Think yourself lucky I do no more than this! You think I couldn't squash you flat like one mosquito?' � And in the background, like raucous echoes, urchins washerwomen clerks were chanting: 'Devil's seed! - Fountain of fire! - Whose husband died? - Like one mosquito!' - They were all closing in, Ibadalla and Maulana and three vengeful vigilantes, while Omar stood like a cobra-hypnotized mongoose, but all around him things were unfreezing, the twelve-year-old, suspended prejudices of the town were springing back to life . . . and Bilal could wait no longer, he rushed up to the boy as Dawood prostrated himself for the seventeenth time; the garland of shoes was hurled in Omar's direction; and just then the Maulana straightened up to

Shame ? 38

howl at God, interposing scrawny gizzard between insulting footwear and its target, and there, next thing anyone knew, was the fateful necklace, hanging around the divine's accidental neck.

Omar Khayyam began to giggle: such can be the effects of fear. And urchins giggled with him; even the widow Balloch had to fight back the laughter until it came out as water from her eyes. In those days, people were not so keen on the servants of God as we are told they have become at present . . . Maulana Dawood rose up with murder in his face. Being no fool, however, he quickly turned this face away from the giant Bilal and reached out his claws for Omar Khayyam - who was saved by the blessed figure, shouldering its way through the mob, of Mr Eduardo Rodrigues, schoolmaster, who had arrived as arranged to fetch the new pupil to class. And with Rodrigues was a vision of such joy that moon- struck Khayyam at once forgot the danger that had come so close. 'This is Farah,' Rodrigues told him, 'she is two standards senior to you.' The vision looked at Omar; then at the shoe-necked Maulana, who in his rage had neglected to remove the garland; then put back its head and roared.

'God, yaar,' she said to Omar, her first word a casual blas- phemy, 'why you didn't sit on at home? This town was already full of fools.'

3

Melting Ice

Cool, white as a refrigerator, it stood amidst offensively green lawns: the Cantonment School. In its gardens trees also flourished, because the Angrez sahibs had diverted large quantities of the region's sparse water supplies into the hoses with which the Cantt gardeners strolled around all day. It was clear that those curious grey beings from a wet northern world could not sur- vive unless grass and bougainvillaea and tamarind and jackfruit thrived as well. As for the human saplings nurtured in the School: white (grey) as well as brown, they ranged from age-three to age- nineteen. But after the age of eight, the numbers of Angrez chil- dren fell away sharply, and the children in the upper standards were almost uniformly brown. What happened to the fair-skinned children after their eighth birthdays? Death, vanishment, a sudden surge of melanin production in their skins?-No, no. For the real answer it would be necessary to conduct extensive research into the old ledgers of steamship companies and the diaries of long- extinct ladies in what the Angrez colonialists always called the mother country, but what was in fact a land of maiden aunts and other, more distant female relatives, on whom children could be billeted to save them from the perils of an Oriental upbringing . . .

39

Shame ? 40

but such research is beyond the resources of the author, who must avert his eyes from such side-issues without further delay.

School is school; everyone knows what goes on there. Omar Khayyam was a fat boy, so he got what fat boys get, taunts, ink- pellets in the back of the neck, nicknames, a few beatings, nothing special. When his schoolfellows found that he had no intention of rising to any gibes about his unusual origins they simply left him alone, contenting themselves with the occasional schoolyard rhyme. This suited him excellently. Unashamed, accustomed to solitude, he began to enjoy his near-invisibility. From his position at the edge of the school's life, he took vicarious pleasure in the activities of those around him, silently celebrating the rise or fall of this or that playground emperor, or the examination failures of particularly unappetizing classfellows: the delights of the spectator.

Once, by chance, he stood in a shadowed corner of the tree- heavy grounds and observed two seniors canoodling energetically behind a flame-of-the-forest. Watching their fondlings, he felt a strangely warm satisfaction, and decided to look for other oppor- tunities of indulging in this new pastime. As he grew older, and was permitted to stay out later, he became skilled in his chosen pursuit; the town yielded up its secrets to his omnipresent eyes. Through inefficient chick-blinds he spied on the couplings of the postman Ibadalla with the widow Balloch, and also, in another place, with her best friend Zeenat Kabuli, so that the notorious occasion on which the postman, the leather-goods merchant and the loud-mouthed Bilal went at one another with knives in a gully and ended up stone dead, all three of them, was no mystery to him; but he was too young to understand why Zeenat and Farida, who should by rights have hated each other like poison once it all came out, shacked up together instead and lived, after that triple killing, in unbreakable friendship and celibacy for the rest of their days.

To be frank: what a telescope began at long distance, Omar Khayyam continued in close-up. Let us not be afraid to mention the word 'voyeur', remembering that it has already been men- tioned (in telescopic context) by Farah Zoroaster. But now that

Escapes from the Mother Country ? 41

we have named him peeping-tom, we should also say that he was never caught, unlike that bold fellow in Agra who, they say, looked over a high wall to spy on the building of the Taj Mahal. He had his eyes put out, or so the story goes; whereas Omar Khayyam's peepers were opened wide by his voyeurism, which revealed to him both the infinitely rich and cryptic texture of human life and also the bitter-sweet delights of living through other human beings.

He had one total failure. Needless to say, what mothers had hidden from him for twelve years, schoolboys unveiled in twelve minutes: that is, the story of the legendary party at which musta- chioed officers had been eyed, sized up, and afterwards . . . Omar Khayyam Shakil, obeying maternal orders, engaged in no fisticuffs when taunted with this saga. He existed in a kind of Eden of the morals, and shrugged the insults off; but after that he began watching the Angrez gentlemen for signs, examining them for facial resemblances to himself, waiting to pounce on some casual or inadvertent expression or gesture that might reveal the identity of his unknown male progenitor. He had no success. Perhaps the father was long gone, and living, if still alive, in some seaside bun- galow lapped by tides of nostalgia for the horizons of his departed glory, fingering the few miserable artifacts - ivory hunting horns, kukri knives, a photograph of himself at a Maharaja's tiger hunt � which preserved, on the mantels of his declining years, the dying echoes of the past, like seashells that sing of distant seas . . . but these are fruitless speculations. Unable to locate a father, the boy^ selected one for himself out of available personnel, bestowing the accolade without any reservations upon Mr Eduardo Rodrigues the schoolmaster, who was himself a recent arrival in Q., having alighted jauntily from a bus one day some years previously, dressed in whites, with a white fedora on his head and an empty birdcage in his hand.

And one last word about Omar Khayyam's peepings: because of course his three mothers had begun to live vicariously too, they couldn't help themselves, in those days of their weakening resolve they quizzed him eagerly upon his return from Outside about

Shame ? 42

ladies' fashions and all the minutiae of town life, and had he heard anything about them; from time to time they covered their faces with their shawls, so that it was evident that they could no longer seal themselves off from the emotion they had anathematized . . . spying on the world through the unreliable eyes of their son (and naturally he did not tell them everything), their own voyeurism- by-proxy had the effect that such things are classically supposed to have: that is, it weakened their moral fibre. Perhaps this is why they were able to contemplate a repetition of their crime.

Mr Eduardo Rodrigues was as slim and sharp as his enormous col- lection of pencils, and nobody knew his age. According to the angle at which the light caught his face he could take on the bright-eyed insolent appearance of a teenager or the doleful aspect of a man drowning in half-spent yesterdays. An unexplained southerner, he cut a mysterious figure in the town, having gone directly from the bus depot of his arrival to the Cantonment School, where he had succeeded in talking his way into a teaching post before night fell. 'It is necessary to be unusual,' was all the explanation he would give, 'if one wants to spread the Word.'

He lived in a puritanical room as the paying guest of one of the less fortunate Angrez sahibs. On his walls he hung a crucifix, and also glued up a number of cheap pictures, excised from calendars, of a balmy coastal land in which palm trees swayed against impos- sibly orange sunsets and a Baroque cathedral stood, partially over- grown by creepers, on an ocean inlet crowded with flame-sailed dhows. Omar Khayyam Shakil and Farah Zoroaster, the only stu- dents who ever entered this sanctum, saw no signs of anything more personal; it seemed as if Eduardo were hiding his past from the fierce rays of the desert sun, to prevent it from fading. Such was the blinding emptiness of the teacher's quarters that Omar Khayyam did not notice until his third visit the cheap birdcage sit- ting on top of the room's one cupboard, a cage from which the gold paint had long ago begun to peel, and which was just as empty as it had been on the day of his arrival at the bus depot, 'As

Escapes from the Mother Country ? 43

if,' Farah whispered scornfully, 'he came up here to catch a bird, and couldn't, the stupid type.'

Eduardo and Omar, each in his separate way an outsider in Q., may have been drawn to each other by the half-conscious percep- tion of their likeness; but there were also other forces at work. These forces may all be conveniently collected under a single heading, and this phrase, too, has been mentioned before: it is 'courting Disaster'.

It had not escaped the notice of the town gossips that Eduardo had arrived, birdcage in hand, fedora on head, a mere two months after the customs officer Zoroaster had been sent up to these parts, minus wife, plus eight-year-old daughter. So it wasn't long before mule-wallahs and ironmongers and scootered divines had worked out that this Zoroaster's previous posting had been in the same zone of creepery cathedrals and coconut beaches whose memory could be smelled on Rodrigues's white suit and in his Portuguese name. Tongues began to wag: 'So where is that customs-wallah's wife? Divorced, sent back to her mother, murdered in a rage of the passions? Look at that Farah, she doesn't look like her daddy, not one bit!' But these tongues were also obliged to admit that Farah Zoroaster did not look one bit like the teacher either, so that avenue was reluctantly closed off, especially when it became plain that Rodrigues and Zoroaster were on extremely cordial terms. 'So why does a customs officer get shunted out here to this end-of-the-earth job?' Farah had a simple answer. 'My stupid father is a type who goes on dreaming after he has woken up. He thinks one day we will return to where we have never been, that damn land of Ahuramazda, and this no-good Irani frontier is the closest we could get. Can you imagine?' she howled, 'He volunteered.'

Gossip is like water. It probes surfaces for their weak places, until it finds the breakthrough point; so it was only a matter of time before the good people of Q. hit upon the most shameful, scandalous explanation of all. 'O God, a grown man in love with

Shame ? 44

a little child. Eduardo and Farah - what do you mean it can't happen, happens every day, only a few years back there was that other � yes, that must be it, these Christians are big perverts, God preserve us, he follows his little floozy up here to the backyard of the universe, and who knows what encouragement she gives, because a woman knows how to tell a man if he is wanted or not wanted, of course, even at eight years old, these things are in the blood.'

Neither Eduardo nor Farah gave, in their behaviour, the slightest indication that the rumours were rooted in fact. It is true that Eduardo did not marry during the years of Farah's growing towards womanhood; but it is also true that Farah, known as 'Disas- ter', was also called 'the ice block' on account of her sub-zero coldness towards her many admirers, a frigidity which extended also to her relations with Eduardo Rodrigues. 'But of course they put up a good front, what do you think?' - the gossips were able to point out, triumphantly, that they had been justified by events in the end.

Omar Khayyam Shakil, for all his love of watching-and- listening, pretended to turn a deaf ear to all these stories; such are the effects of love. But they got inside him anyway, they got under his skin and into his blood and worked their way, like little splinters, to his heart; until he, too, proved himself guilty of the alleged Christian perversions of the schoolteacher Rodrigues. Choose yourself a father and you also choose your inheritance. (But Sufiya Zinobia must wait for a few pages yet.)

I have idled away too many paragraphs in the company of gossips; let's get back on to solid ground: Eduardo Rodrigues, accompanied gossip-feedingly by Farah, collecting Omar Khayyam on his first schoolday, a fact which bore witness to the residual influence of the Shakil name in the town. In the following months, Eduardo discovered the boy's exceptional aptitude for learning, and wrote to his mothers offering his services as a private tutor who could help realize their child's potential. It is a matter of record that this mothers agreed to the schoolteacher's suggestion; also that Eduardo's only other private pupil was Farah Zoroaster,

Escapes from the Mother Country ? 45

whose father was excused from paying any fee, because Eduardo was a genuinely dedicated teacher; and thirdly, that as the years passed the threesome of Omar, Eduardo and Farah became a common sight in the town.

It was Rodrigues, who had the ability of speaking in capital let- ters, who steered Omar towards a medical career, 'To Succeed in Life,' he told the boy amid beach-postcards and empty birdcage, 'one must be Of the Essence. Yes, make yourself Essential, that's the Ticket . . . and who is most Indispensable? Why, the fellow who does the Dispensing! I mean of Advice, Diagnosis, Restricted Drugs. Be a Doctor; it is what I have Seen in You.'

What Eduardo saw in Omar (in my opinion): the possibilities of his true, peripheral nature. What's a doctor, after all? � A legiti- mized voyeur, a stranger whom we permit to poke fingers and even hands into places where we would not permit most people to insert so much as a finger-tip, who gazes on what we take most trouble to hide; a sitter-at-bedsides, an outsider admitted to our most intimate moments (birthdeathetc), anonymous, a minor character, yet also, paradoxically, central, especially at the crisis. . . yes, yes. Eduardo was a far-sighted teacher, and no mistake. And Omar Khayyam, who had picked Rodrigues for a father, never once considered going against his tutor's wishes. This is how lives are made.

But not only in this way; also by dog-eared books discovered accidentally at home, and by long-suppressed first loves . . . when Omar Khayyam Shakil was sixteen years old, he was flung into a great vortex of fearful joy, because Farah the Parsee, Disaster Zoroaster, invited him one day to come out and see her father's customs post.

'. . . and fainted, though both his feet had been on solid ground.' We have already been told something of what transpired at the frontier: how a cloud descended, and Omar Khayyam, mistaking it for his childhood nightmare of the void at the end of the earth, passed out. It is possible that this fainting fit gave him the idea for what he did later that day.

Shame ? 46

Details first: what was the tone of Farah's invitation? - Grace- less, curt, I-don't-care-if-you-don't. Its motivation, whence? � From Eduardo, who had urged her privately: 'That is one lonely boy, be nice. You bright ones should stick together.' (Omar Khayyam was the brighter of the pair; although two years still stood between them, he had caught up Farah in other ways, and was now in the self-same standard.) How rapidly did Omar Khayyam accept? - Ek dum. Fut-a-fut. At once, or even quicker.

On weekdays, during term, Farah lodged in Q. at the home of a Parsee mechanic and his wife, with whom her father had culti- vated a friendship for this very purpose. This mechanic, an unim- portant Jamshed who does not even merit a description, drove them out to the frontier on the selected holiday in a jeep he was repairing. And as they neared the border, Farah's spirits rose while Omar's fell . . .

1. 1. 1. His fear of the Edge mounted, irrationally, as they drove, as he sat behind her in the roofless vehicle while her open, wind- whipped hair flickered in front of him like black fire. Whereas her mood was lightened by the drive, around a spur of the mountains, through a pass in which they were watched by the invisible eyes of suspicious tribals. The emptiness of the frontier pleased Farah, no matter how openly she sneered at her father for having taken this dead-end job. She even began to sing; revealing that she had a melodious voice.

At the frontier: clouds, fainting fit, water sprinkled on face, reawakening, whereaml. Omar Khayyam comes round to find that the cloud has lifted, so that it is possible to see that the frontier is an unimpressive place: no wall, no police, no barbed wire or floodlights, no red-and-white striped barriers, nothing but a row of concrete bollards at hundred-foot intervals, bollards driven into the hard and barren ground. There is a small customs house, and a railhead that has turned brown with rust; on the rails stands a single forgotten goods van, also browned by oblivion. 'The trains don't come any more,' Farah says, 'the international situation does not permit it.'

Escapes from the Mother Country ? 47

A customs officer depends, for a decent income, on traffic. Goods pass through, he not unreasonably impounds them, their owners see reason, an accommodation is reached, the customs man's family gets new clothes. Nobody minds this arrangement; everyone knows how little public officials are paid. Negotiations are honourably conducted on both sides.

But very little in the way of dutiable items passes through the small brick building that is Mr Zoroaster's power centre. Under cover of night, tribals stroll back and forth between the countries through bollards and rocks. Who knows what they carry forth and back? This is Zoroaster's tragedy; and, in spite of her scholarship, he has trouble financing his daughter's fine education. How he consoles himself: 'Soon, soon the railway line will open . . .' But the rust is accumulating on this belief as well; he gazes across bol- lards to the ancestral land of Zarathustra and tries to gain solace from its proximity, but there is, these days, a strain in his expres- sion . . . Farah Zoroaster claps her hands and runs in and out between the interminable bollards. 'Fun, na?' she yells, 'Teep- taap!' Omar Khayyam, for the sake of maintaining her affable mood, agrees that the place is quite tip-top. Zoroaster shrugs without bitterness and retreats into his office with the jeep-driver, warning the young people not to stay out too long in the sun.

Perhaps they stayed out too long, and that was what gave Omar Khayyam the courage to declare his love: 'The sight of you through my telescope,' etc., but there is no need to repeat his speech, or Farah's coarse reply. Rejected, Omar Khayyam unleashes piteous questions: 'Why? Why not? Because I'm fat?' And Farah replies, 'Fat would be all right; but there is something ugly about you, you know that?' - 'Ugly?' - 'Don't ask me what, I dunno. Something. Must be in your personality or somewhere.'

Silence between them until late afternoon. Omar meandering in Farah's wake between bollards. He notices that broken pieces of mirrors have been tied to many of the posts with pieces of string; as Farah approaches each fragment she sees shards of herself reflected in the glass, and smiles her private smile. Omar Khayyam Shakil understands that his beloved is a being too self-contained to

Shame ? 48

succumb to any conventional assault; she and her mirrors are twins and need no outsiders to make them feel complete . . . and then, in the late afternoon, inspired by too-much-sun or fainting fit, he has his idea. 'Have you ever,' he asks Farah Zoroaster, 'been hyp- notized?' - And for the first time in history, she looks at him with interest.

Afterwards, when her womb began to swell; when an outraged headmaster called her into his office and expelled her for calling down shame upon the school; when she was thrown out by her father, who had suddenly found that his empty customs house was too full to accommodate a daughter whose belly revealed her adherence to other, unacceptable customs; when Eduardo Rodrigues had taken her, pulling and fighting against his inexorable, gripping hand, to the Cantt padre and married her by force; Eduardo, having thus declared himself the guilty party for all to see, was dismissed from his job for conduct unbecoming; when Farah and Eduardo had left for the railway station in a tonga notable for the almost total absence of luggage (although a bird- cage, still empty, was present, and malicious tongues said that Eduardo Rodrigues had finally caught two birds instead of one); when they had gone and the town had settled back into ashen nothingness, after the brief blaze of the wicked drama that had been played out in its streets . . . then Omar Khayyam tried, futilely, to find consolation in the fact that, as every hypnotist knows, one of the first reassurances in the hypnotic process, a for- mula which is repeated many times, runs as follows:

'You will do anything that I ask you to do, but I will ask you to do nothing that you will be unwilling to do.'

'She was willing,' he told himself. 'Then where's the blame? She must have been willing, and everybody knows the risk.'

But in spite of nothing-that-you-will-be-unwilling-to-do; in spite, too, of the actions of Eduardo Rodrigues, which had been at once so resolute and so resigned that Omar Khayyam had almost been convinced that the teacher really was the father-why not, after all? A woman who is willing with one will be willing

Escapes from the Mother Country ? 49

with two! - in spite of everything, I say, Omar Khayyam Shakil was possessed by a demon which made him shake in the middle of breakfast and go hot in the night and cold in the day and some- times cry out for no reason in the street or while ascending in the dumb-waiter. Its fingers reached outwards from his stomach to clutch, without warning, various interior parts of himself, from adam's-apple to large (and also small) intestine, so that he suffered from moments of near-strangulation and spent long unproductive hours on the pot. It made his limbs mysteriously heavy in the mornings so that sometimes he was unable to get out of bed. It made his tongue dry and his knees knock. It led his teenage feet into cheap brandy shops. Tottering drunkenly home to the rage of his three mothers, he would be heard telling a swaying group of fellow-sufferers: 'The only thing about this business is that it has made me understand my mothers at last. This must be what they locked themselves up to avoid, and baba, who would not?' Vom- iting out the thin yellow fluid of his shame while the dumb-waiter descended, he swore to his companions, who were falling asleep in the dirt: 'Me, too, man. I've got to escape this also.'

On the evening when Omar Khayyam, eighteen years old and already fatter than fifty melons, came home to inform Chhunni, Munnee and Bunny that he had won a scholarship at the best medical college in Karachi, the three sisters were only able to hide their grief at his imminent departure by erecting around it a great barrier of objects, the most valuable jewels and paintings in the house, which they scurried to collect from room to room until a pile of ancient beauty stood in front of their old, favourite swing- seat. 'Scholarship is all very well,' his youngest mother told him, 'but we also can give money to our boy when he goes into the world.' 'What do these doctors think?' Chhunni demanded in a king of fury. 'We are too poor to pay for your education? Let them take charity to the devil, your family has money in abun- dance.' 'Old money,' Munnee concurred. Unable to persuade them that the award was an honour he did not wish to refuse, Omar Khayyam was obliged to leave for the railway station with

ll

Shame � 50

his pockets bulging with the pawnbroker's banknotes. Around his neck was a garland whose one-hundred and one fresh-cut flowers gave off an aroma which quite obliterated the memory-stink of the necklace of shoes which had once so narrowly missed his neck. The perfume of this garland was so intense that he forgot to tell his mothers a last bit of gossip, which was that Zoroaster the customs officer had fallen sick under the spell of the bribeless desert and had taken to standing stark naked on top of concrete bollards while mirror-fragments ripped his feet. Arms outstretched and daughterless, Zoroaster addressed the sun, begging it to come down to earth and engulf the planet in its brilliant cleansing fire. The tribals who bore this tale into the bazaar of Q. were of the opinion that the customs-wallah's fervour was so great that he would undoubtedly succeed, so that it was worth making prepara- tions for the end of the word.

The last person to whom Omar Khayyam spoke before making his escape from the town of shame was a certain Chand Moham- mad who said afterwards, 'That fat guy didn't look so hot when I started talking to him and he looked twice as sick when I fin- ished.' This Chand Mohammad was a vendor of ice. As Omar Khayyam, still unable to shake off the terribly debility which had gripped him ever since the incident at the frontier, hauled his obe- sity into a first-class carriage, Chand ran up and said, 'Hot day, sahib. Ice is needed.' At first, Shakil, out of breath and gloomy, told him, 'Be off and sell other fools your frozen water.' But Chand persisted: 'Sahib, in the afternoon the Loo wind will blow, and if you do not have my ice at your feet the heat will melt the marrow out of your bones.'

Persuaded by this convincing argument, Omar Khayyam pur- chased a long tin tub, four feet long, eighteen inches wide, one foot deep, in which there lay a solid slab of ice, sprinkled with sawdust and sand to prolong its life. Grunting as he heaved it into the carriage, the ice vendor made a joke. 'Such is life,' he said, 'one ice block returns to town and another sets off in the opposite direction.'

Escapes from the Mother Country ? 51

Omar Khayyam unbuckled his sandals and placed his bare feet on the ice, feeling the healing solace of its coldness. Peeling off too many rupees for Chand Mohammad as he cheered up, he asked idly, 'What rubbish are you talking? How can a block of ice return unmelted after the journey? The tin tub, empty, or full of melted water, you must be meaning that.'

'O, no, sahib, great lord,' the ice-vendor grinned as he pock- eted the cash, 'this is one ice block that goes everywhere without melting at all.'

Colour drained from fat cheeks. Plump feet jumped off ice. Omar Khayyam, looking around fearfully as if he thought she might materialize at any moment, spoke in tones so altered by fury that the ice-vendor backed off, frightened. 'Her? When? You are trying to insult . . . ?' He caught the ice-man by his ragged shirt, and the poor wretch had no option but to tell it all, to reveal that on this very train, a few hours back, Mrs Farah Rodrigues (nee Zoroaster) had returned shamelessly to the scene of her infamy and headed straight out to her father's frontier post, 'even though he threw her in the street like a bucket of dirty water, sahib, just think.'

When Farah came back, she brought neither husband nor child. Nobody ever found out what had become of Eduardo and the baby for which he had sacrificed everything, so of course the sto- ries could circulate without fear of disproof: a miscarriage, an abortion in spite of Rodrigues's Catholic faith, the baby exposed on a rock after birth, the baby stifled in its crib, the baby given to the orphanage or left in the street, while Farah and Eduardo like wild lovers copulated on the postcard beaches or in the aisle of the vegetation-covered house of the Christian God, until they tired of each other, she gave him the boot, he (tired of her lascivious flirt- ings) gave her the boot, they gave each other simultaneous boots, who cares who it was, she is back so lock up your sons.

Farah Rodrigues in her pride spoke to no one in Q. except to order food and supplies in the shops; until, in her old age, she began to frequent the covert liquor joints, which was where she

Shame ? 52

would reminisce, years later, about Omar Khayyam, after his name got into the papers. On her rare visits to the bazaar she made her purchases without looking anyone in the eye, pausing only to gaze at herself in every available mirror with a frank affection which proved to the town that she regretted nothing. So even when it got about that she had come back to look after her crazy father and to run the customs post, to prevent his dismissal by his Angrez bosses, even then the town's attitude did not soften; who knows what they get up to out there, people said, naked father and whore-child, best place for them is out there in the desert where nobody has to look except God and the Devil, and they know it all already.

And on his train, his feet once more resting on a block of melting ice, Omar Khayyam Shakil was borne away into the future, convinced that he had finally managed to escape, and the cool pleasure of that notion and also of the ice brought a smile to his lips, even while the hot wind blew.

Two years later, his mothers wrote to tell him that he had a brother, whom they had named Babar after the first Emperor of the Mughals who had marched over the Impossible Mountains and conquered wherever he went. After that the three sisters, uni- fied once again by motherhood, were happy and indistinguishable for many years within the walls of'Nishapur'.

When Omar Khayyam read the letter, his first reaction was to whistle softly with something very like admiration.

'The old witches,' he said aloud, 'they managed to do it again.'

II

The Duellists

4

Behind the Screen

This is a novel about Sufiya Zinobia, elder daughter of General Raza Hyder and his wife Bilquis, about what happened between her father and Chairman Iskander Harappa, formerly Prime Minister, now defunct, and about her surprising marriage to a certain Omar Khayyam Shakil, physician, fat man, and for a time the intimate crony of that same Isky Harappa, whose neck had the miraculous power of remaining unbruised, even by a hangman's rope. Or perhaps it would be more accurate, if also more opaque, to say that Sufiya Zinobia is about this novel.

At any rate, it is not possible even to begin to know a person without first gaining some knowledge of her family background; so I must proceed in this way, by explaining how it was that Bilquis grew frightened of the hot afternoon wind called the Loo:

On the last morning of his life, her father Mahmoud Kemal, known as Mahmoud the Woman, dressed as usual in a shiny blue two-piece suit shot with brilliant streaks of red, looked approv- ingly at himself in the ornate mirror which he had removed from the foyer of his theatre on account of its irresistible frame of naked cherubs shooting arrows and blowing golden horns, hugged his eighteen-year-old daughter, and announced: 'So you see, girl,

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Shame ? 56

your father dresses finely, as befits the chief administrative officer of a glorious Empire.' And at breakfast, when she began dutifully to spoon khichri on to his plate, he roared in good-natured fury, 'Why do you lift your hand, daughter? A princess does not serve.' Bilquis bowed her head and stared out of the bottom left-hand corner of her eyes, whereupon her father applauded loudly. 'O, too good, Billoo! What elite acting, I swear!'

It's a fact, strange-but-true, that the city of idolaters in which this scene took place - call it Indraprastha, Puranaqila, even Delhi - had often been ruled by men who believed (like Mahmoud) in Al-Lah, The God. Their artifacts litter the city to this day, ancient observatories and victory towers and of course that great red fortress, Al-Hambra, the red one, which will play an important part in our story. And, what is more, many of these godly rulers had come up from the humblest of origins; every schoolchild knows about the Slave Kings . . . but anyway, the point is that this whole business of ruling-an-Empire was just a family joke, because of course Mahmoud's domain was only the Empire Talkies, a fleapit of a picture theatre in the old quarter of the town.

'The greatness of a picture house,' Mahmoud liked to say, 'can be deduced from the noisiness of its customers. Go to those deelux palaces in the new city, see their velvet thrones of seats and the mirror tiling all over the vestibules, feel the air-conditioning and you'll understand why the audiences sit as quiet as hell. They are tamed by the splendour of the surroundings, also by the price of the seats. But in the Empire of Mahmoud the paying customers make the very devil of a din, except during the hit song numbers. We are not absolute monarchs, child, don't forget it; especially in these days when the police are turning against us and refuse to come and eject even the biggest badmashes, who make whistlings that split your ears. Never mind. It is a question of freedom of individuals, after all.'

Yes: it was a fifth-rate Empire. But to Mahmoud it was quite something, a Slave King's estate, for had he not begun his career out on the suppurating streets as one of those no-account types

The Duellists ? 57

who push the movie adverts around town on wheelbarrows, shouting, 'It is now-showing!' and also 'Plans filling up fast!' � and did he not now sit in a manager's office, complete with cashbox and keys? You see: even family jokes run the risk of being taken seriously, and there lurked in the natures of both father and daughter a literalism, a humourlessness owing to which Bilquis grew up with an unspoken fantasy of queenhood simmering in the corners of her downcast eyes. 'I tell you,' she would apostrophize the angelic mirror after her father had left for work, 'with me it would be absolute control or zero! These badmashes would not get away with their whistling shistling if it was my affair!' Thus Bilquis invented a secret self far more imperious than her father the emperor. And in the darkness of his Empire, night after night, she studied the giant, shimmering illusions of princesses who danced before the rackety audience beneath the gold-painted equestrian figure of an armoured medieval knight who bore a pennant on which was inscribed the meaningless word Excelsior. Illusions fed illusions, and Bilquis began to carry herself with the grandeur befitting a dream-empress, taking as compliments the taunts of the street-urchins in the gullies around her home: 'Tan- tara!' they greeted her as she sailed by, 'Have mercy, O gracious lady, O Rani of Khansi!' Khansi-ki-Rani, they named her: queen of coughs, that is to say of expelled air, of sickness and hot wind.

'Be careful,' her father warned her, 'things are changing in this city; even the most affectionate nicknames are acquiring new and so-dark meanings.'

This was the time immediately before the famous moth-eaten partition that chopped up the old country and handed Al-Lah a few insect-nibbled slices of it, some dusty western acres and jungly eastern swamps that the ungodly were happy to do without. (Al- Lah's new country: two chunks of land a thousand miles apart. A country so improbable that it could almost exist.) But let's be unemotional and state merely that feelings were running so high that even going to the pictures had become a political act. The one-godly went to these cinemas and the washers of stone gods to those; movie-fans had been partitioned already, in advance of the

Shame ? 58

tired old land. The stone-godly ran the movie business, that goes without saying, and being vegetarians they made a very famous film: Gai-Wallah. Perhaps you've heard of it? An unusual fantasy about a lone, masked hero who roamed the Indo-Gangetic plain liberating herds of beef-cattle from their keepers, saving the sacred, horned, uddered beasts from the slaughterhouse. The stone-gang packed out the cinemas where this movie was shown; the one-godly riposted by rushing to see imported, non- vegetarian Westerns in which cows got massacred and the good guys feasted on steaks. And mobs of irate film buffs attacked the cinemas of their enemies . . . well, it was a time for all types of craziness, that's all.

Mahmoud the Woman lost his Empire because of a single error, which arose out of his fatal personality flaw, namely toler- ance. 'Time to rise above all this partition foolishness,' he informed his mirror one morning, and that same day he booked a double bill into his Talkies: Randolph Scott and Gai-Wallah would succeed one another on his screen.

On the opening day of the double bill of his destruction the meaning of his nickname changed for ever. He had been named The Woman by the street urchins because, being a widower, he had been obliged to act as a mother to Bilquis ever since his wife died when the girl was barely two. But now this affectionate title came to mean something more dangerous, and when children spoke of Mahmoud the Woman they meant Mahmoud the Weakling, the Shameful, the Fool. 'Woman,' he sighed resignedly to his daughter, 'what a term! Is there no end to the burdens this word is capable of bearing? Was there ever such a broad-backed and also such a dirty word?'

How the double bill was settled: both sides, veg and non-veg, boycotted the Empire. For five, six, seven days films played to an empty house in which peeling plaster and slowly rotating ceiling fans and the intermission gram-vendors gazed down upon rows of undoubtedly rickety and equally certainly unoccupied seats; three- thirty, six-thirty and nine-thirty shows were all the same, not even

The Duellists ? 59

the special Sunday-morning show could tempt anyone through the swing doors. 'Give it up,' Bilquis urged her father. 'What do you want? You miss your wheelbarrow or what?'

But now an unfamiliar stubbornness entered Mahmoud the Woman, and he announced that the double bill would be held over for a Second Sensational Week. His own barrow-boys deserted him; nobody was willing to cry these ambiguous wares through the electric gullies; no voice dared announce, 'Plans now open!' or, 'Don't wait or it's too late!'

Mahmoud and Bilquis lived in a high thin house behind the Empire, 'straight through the screen,' as he said; and on that after- noon when the world ended and began again the emperor's daughter, who was alone with the servant at home, was suddenly choked by the certainty that her father had chosen, with the mad logic of his romanticism, to persist with his crazy scheme until it killed him. Terrified by a sound like the beating wings of an angel, a sound for which she could afterwards find no good explanation but which pounded in her ears until her head ached, she ran out of her house, pausing only to wrap around her shoulders the green dupatta of modesty; which was how she came to be standing, catching her breath, in front of the heavy doors of the cinema behind which her father sat grimly amidst vacant seats watching the show, when the hot firewind of apocalypse began to blow.

The walls of her father's Empire puffed outwards like a hot puri while that wind like the cough of a sick giant burned away her eyebrows (which never grew again), and tore the clothes off her body until she stood infant-naked in the street; but she failed to notice her nudity because the universe was ending, and in the echoing alienness of the deadly wind her burning eyes saw every- thing come flying out, seats, ticket books, fans, and then pieces of her father's shattered corpse and the charred shards of the future. 'Suicide!' she cursed Mahmoud the Woman at the top of a voice made shrieky by the bomb. 'You chose this!' - and turning and running homewards she saw that the back wall of the cinema had been blown away, and embedded in the topmost storey of her

Shame ? 60

high thin house was the figure of a golden knight on whose pennant she did not need to read the comically unknown word Excelsior.

Don't ask who planted the bomb; in those days there were many such planters, many gardeners of violence. Perhaps it was even a one-godly bomb, seeded in the Empire by one of Mah- moud's more fanatical co-religionists, because it seems that the timer reached zero during a particularly suggestive love scene, and we know what the godly think of love, or the illusion of it, espe- cially when admission money must be paid to see it ... they are Against. They cut it out. Love corrupts.

O Bilquis. Naked and eyebrowless beneath the golden knight, wrapped in the delirium of the firewind, she saw her youth flying past her, borne away on the wings of the explosion which were still beating in her ears. All migrants leave their pasts behind, although some try to pack it into bundles and boxes � but on the journey something seeps out of the treasured mementoes and old photographs, until even their owners fail to recognize them, because it is the fate of migrants to be stripped of history, to stand naked amidst the scorn of strangers upon whom they see the rich clothing, the brocades of continuity and the eyebrows of belonging � at any rate, my point is that Bilquis's past left her even before she left that city; she stood in a gully, denuded by the sui- cide of her father, and watched it go. In later years it would visit her sometimes, the way a forgotten relative comes to call, but for a long time she was suspicious of history, she was the wife of a hero with a great future, so naturally she pushed the past away, as one rebufls those poor cousins when they come to borrow money.

She must have walked, or run, unless a miracle occurred and she was lifted by some divine power out of that wind of her deso- lation. Returning to her senses, she felt the pressure of red stone against her skin; it was night, and the stone was cool upon her back in the dark dry heat. People were surging past her in great herds, a crowd so large and urgent that her first thought was that it was being propelled by some unimaginable explosion: 'Another bomb, my God, all these persons blown away by its power!' But it

The Duellists ? 61

was not a bomb. She understood that she was leaning against the endless wall of the red fortress that dominated the old city, while soldiers shepherded the crowd through its yawning gates; her feet began to move, faster than her brain, and led her into the throng. An instant later she was crushed by the reborn awareness of her nudity, and began to cry out: 'Give me a cloth!', until she saw that nobody was listening, nobody even glanced at the body of the singed, but still beautiful, naked girl. Yet she clutched at herself for shame, holding on to herself in that rushing sea as if she were a straw; and felt around her neck the remnants of a length of muslin. The dupatta of modesty had stuck to her body, fixed there by the congealed blood of the many cuts and scratches of whose very existence she had been unaware. Holding the blackened remnants of the garment of womanly honour over her secret places, she entered the dull redness of the fort, and heard the boom of its closing doors.

In Delhi, in the days before partition, the authorities rounded up any Muslims, for their own safety, it was said, and locked them up in the red fortress, away from the wrath of the stonewashers. Whole families were sealed up there, grandmothers, young chil- dren, wicked uncles . . . including members of my own family. It's easy to imagine that as my relatives moved through the Red Fort in the parallel universe of history, they might have felt some hint of the fictional presence of Bilquis Kemal, rushing cut and naked past them like a ghost ... or vice versa. Yes. Or vice versa.

The tide of human beings carried Bilquis along as far as the large, low, ornately rectangular pavilion that had once been an emperor's hall of public audience; and in that echoing diwan, overwhelmed by the humiliation of her undress, she passed out. In that generation many women, ordinary decent respectable ladies of the type to whom nothing ever happens, to whom nothing is supposed to happen except marriage children death, had this sort of strange story to tell. It was a rich time for stories, if you lived to tell your tale.

Shortly before the scandalous marriage of her younger daugh- ter, Good News Hyder, Bilquis told the girl the story of her meet-

Shame ? 6 2

ing with her husband. 'When I woke up,' she said, 'it was daytime and I was wrapped in an officer's coat. But whose do you think, goof, of course his, your own father Raza's; what to tell you, he saw me lying there, with all my goods on display in the window, you know, and I suppose the bold fellow just liked what there was to see.' Good News went haal and tch tchl, feigning shock at her mother's sauciness, and Bilquis said shyly: 'Such encounters were not uncommon then.' Good News dutifully replied, 'Well, Amma, as for his being impressed, I'm not one bit surprised.'

Raza arriving in the hall of public audience came to attention before Bilquis, who was decently coated; he clicked his heels, saluted, grinned. 'It is normal during a courtship,' he told his future wife, 'for clothes to be worn. It is the privilege of a husband eventually to remove . . . but in our case, the reverse procedure will be true. I must dress you, top to toe, as befits a blushing bride.' (Good News, full of marriage juices, sighed when she heard this. 'His first words! My God, too romantic!')

How he seemed to military-coated Bilquis: 'So tall! So fair- skinned! So proud, like a king!' No photographs were taken of their meeting, but allowances must be made for her state of mind. Raza Hyder was five foot eight: no giant, you'll agree. And as for his skin - it was certainly darker than Bilquis's adoring eyes were willing to concede. But proud, like a king? That is likely. He was only a Captain then; but it is, nevertheless, a plausible description.

What may also be said fairly of Raza Hyder: that he possessed enough energy to light up a street; that his manners were always impeccable � even when he became President, he met people with such an air of humility (which is not irreconcilable with pride) that very few were willing to speak ill of him afterwards, and those that did so would feel, as they spoke, as if they were betraying a friend; and that he bore, upon his forehead, the light but permanent bruise which we have previously noted on the devout forehead of Ibadalla, the postman of Q.: the gatta marked Raza for a religious man.

One last detail. It was said of Captain Hyder that he did not sleep for four hundred and twenty hours after the Muslims were

The Duellists ? 63

X'

gathered in the red fortress, which would explain the black pouches under his eyes. These pouches would grow blacker and baggier as his power increased, until he no longer needed to wear sunglasses the way the other top brass did, because he looked like he had a pair on anyway, all the time, even in bed. The future General Hyder: Razzoo, Raz-Matazz, Old Razor Guts himself] How could Bilquis have resisted such a one? She was conquered in double-quick time.

During their days in the fort, the pouch-eyed Captain visited Bilquis regularly, always bringing with him some item of clothing or beautification: blouses, saris, sandals, eyebrow pencils with which to replace the lost hairs, brassieres, lipsticks were showered on her. Saturation bombing techniques are designed to force an early surrender . . . when her wardrobe had grown large enough to permit the removal of the military overcoat, she paraded for him in the hall. 'Come to think of it,' Bilquis told Good News, 'maybe that was when he made that dressing-up remark.' Because she remembered how she had replied: lowering her eyes in the elite actressy manner which her father had once praised, she said sadly, 'But what husband could I, -without hope of dowry, ever find? Certainly not such a generous Captain who outfits strange ladies like queens.'

Raza and Bilquis were betrothed beneath the bitter eyes of the dispossessed multitudes; and afterwards the gifts continued, sweet- meats as well as bangles, soft drinks and square meals as well as henna and rings. Raza established his fiancee behind a screen of stone lattice-work, and set a young foot-soldier on guard to defend her territory. Isolated behind this screen from the dull, debilitated anger of the mob, Bilquis dreamed of her wedding day, defended against guilt by that old dream of queenliness which she had invented long ago. 'Teh tch,' she reproached the glowering refugees, 'but this envy is a too terrible thing.'

Barbs were flung through the stone lattice: 'Ohe, madam! Where do you think he gets your grand-grand clothes? From handicraft emporia? Watch the mud-flats of the river beneath the fortress walls, count the looted naked bodies flung there every

Shame ? 6 4

night!' Dangerous words, penetrating lattice-work: scavenger, harlot, whore. But Bilquis set her jaw against such coarseness and told herself: 'How bad-mannered it would be to ask a man from where he brought his gifts! Such cheapness, I will never do it, no.' This sentiment, her reply to the gibes of her fellow refugees, never actually passed her lips, but it filled up her mouth, making it puff up into a pout.

I do not judge her. In those days, people survived any way they could.

The Army was partitioned like everything else, and Captain Hyder went west to the new, moth-nibbled land of God. There was a marriage ceremony, and then Bilquis Hyder sat beside her new husband in a troop transport, a new woman, newly-wed, flying to a bright new world.

'What things won't you do there, Raz!' she cried. 'What great- ness, no? What fame!' Raza's ears went red under the eyes (hot with amusement) of his companions in that bumping, rackety Dakota; but he looked pleased all the same. And Bilquis's prophecy came true, after all. She, whose life had blown up, emp- tying her of history and leaving in its place only that dark dream of majesty, that illusion so powerful that it demanded to enter the sphere of what-was-real - she, rootless Bilquis, who now longed for stability, for no-more-explosions, had discerned in Raza a boulder-like quality on which she would build her life. He was a man rooted solidly in an indeflectible sense of himself, and that made him seem invincible, 'A giant absolutely,' she flattered him, whispering in his ear so as not to set off the giggles of the other officers in the cabin, 'shining, like the actors on the screen.'

I am wondering how best to describe Bilquis. As a woman who was unclothed by change, but who wrapped herself in certainties; or as a girl who became a queen, but lost the ability possessed by every beggar-woman, that is, the power of bearing sons; or as that lady whose father was a Woman and whose son turned out to be girl as well; and whose man of men, her Razzoo or Raz-Matazz,

The Duellists ? 65

was himself obliged, in the end, to put on the humiliating black shroud of womanhood; or perhaps as a being in the secret grip of fate�for did not the umbilical noose that stifled her son find its echo, or twin, in another and more terrible rope? . . . But I find that I must, after all, return to my starting point, because to me she is, and will always be, the Bilquis who was afraid of the wind.

I'll be fair: nobody likes the Loo, that hot afternoon breath- that-chokes. We pull down our shutters, hang damp cloths over the windows, try to sleep. But as she grew older the wind awak- ened strange terrors in Bilquis. Her husband and children noticed how nervous and snappish she became in the afternoons; how she took to pacing about, slamming and locking doors, until Raza Hyder protested against living in a house where you had to ask your wife for a key before you could go to the pot. From her slender wrist there hung, jingling, the ten-ton key-ring of her neurosis. She developed a horror of movement, and placed an embargo on the relocation of even the most trivial of household items. Chairs, ashtrays, flowerpots took root, rendered immobile by the force of her fearful will. 'My Hyder likes everything in its place,' she would say, but the disease of fixity was hers. And there were days when she had to be kept indoors as a virtual prisoner, because it would have been a shame and a scandal if any outsider had seen her in that state; when the Loo blew she would screech like a hoosh or an afrit or some such demon, she would shout for the household servants to come and hold down the furniture in case the wind blew it away like the contents of a long-lost Empire, and scream at her daughters (when they were present) to cling tight to something heavy, something fixed, lest the firewind bear them off into the sky.

The Loo is an evil wind.

If this were a realistic novel about Pakistan, I would not be writing about Bilquis and the wind; I would be talking about my youngest sister. Who is twenty-two, and studying engineering in Karachi; who can't sit on her hair any more, and who (unlike me)

Shame ? 66

is a Pakistani citizen. On my good days, I think of her as Pakistan, and then I feel very fond of the place, and find it easy to forgive its (her) love of Coca-Cola and imported motor cars.

Although I have known Pakistan for a long time, I have never lived there for longer than six months at a stretch. Once I went for just two weeks. Between these sixmonthses and fortnights there have been gaps of varying duration. I have learned Pakistan in slices, the same way as I have learned my growing sister. I first saw her at the age of zero (I, at fourteen, bent over her crib as she screamed into my face); then at three, four, six, seven, ten, fourteen, eighteen and twenty-one. So there have been nine youngest-sisters for me to get to know. I have felt closer to each successive incarnation than to the one before. (This goes for the country, too.)

I think what I'm confessing is that, however I choose to write about over-there, I am forced to reflect that world in fragments of broken mirrors, the way Farah Zoroaster saw her face at the bol- larded frontier. I must reconcile myself to the inevitability of the missing bits.

But suppose this were a realistic novel! Just think what else I might have to put in. The business, for instance, of the illegal installation, by the richest inhabitants of'Defence', of covert, sub- terranean water pumps that steal water from their neighbours' mains � so that you can always tell the people with the most pull by the greenness of their lawns (such clues are not confined to the Cantonment of Q.). - And would I also have to describe the Sind Club in Karachi, where there is still a sign reading 'Woman and Dogs Not Allowed Beyond This Point'? Or to analyse the subtle logic of an industrial programme that builds nuclear reactors but cannot develop a refrigerator? O dear � and the school text-books which say, 'England is not an agricultural country', and the teacher who once docked two marks from my youngest sister's geography essay because it differed at two points from the exact wording of this same text-book . . . how awkward, dear reader, all this could turn out to be.

The Duellists ? 67

How much real-life material might become compulsory! � About, for example, the longago Deputy Speaker who was killed in the National Assembly when the furniture was flung at him by elected representatives; or about the film censor who took his red pencil to each frame of the scene in the film Night of the Generals in which General Peter O'Toole visits an art gallery, and scratched out all the paintings of naked ladies hanging on the walls, so that audiences were dazzled by the surreal spectacle of General Peter strolling through a gallery of dancing red blobs; or about the TV chief who once told me solemnly that pork was a four-letter word; or about the issue of Time magazine (or was it Newsweek?) which never got into the country because it carried an article about President Ayub Khan's alleged Swiss bank account; or about the bandits on the trunk roads who are condemned for doing, as private enterprise, what the government does as public policy; or about genocide in Baluchistan; or about the recent preferential awards of State scholarships, to pay for postgraduate studies abroad, to members of the fanatical Jamaat party; or about the attempt to declare the sari an obscene garment; or about the extra hangings � the first for twenty years � that were ordered purely to legitimize the execution of Mr Zulfikar Ali Bhutto; or about why Bhutto's hangman has vanished into thin air, just like the many street-urchins who are being stolen every day in broad daylight; or about anti-Semitism, an interesting phenomenon, under whose influence people who have never met a Jew vilify all Jews for the sake of maintaining solidarity with the Arab states which offer Pakistan workers, these days, employment and much-needed for- eign exchange; or about smuggling, the boom in heroin exports, military dictators, venal civilians, corrupt civil servants, bought judges, newspapers of whose stories the only thing that can confi- dently be said is that they are lies; or about the apportioning of the national budget, with special reference to the percentages set aside for defence (huge) and for education (not huge). Imagine my difficulties!

By now, if I had been writing a book of this nature, it would have done me no good to protest that I was writing universally,

Shame ? 68

not only about Pakistan. The book would have been banned, dumped in the rubbish bin, burned. All that effort for nothing! Realism can break a writer's heart.

Fortunately, however, I am only telling a sort of modern fairy- tale, so that's all right; nobody need get upset, or take anything I say too seriously. No drastic action need be taken, either.

What a relief]

And now I must stop saying what I am not writing about, because there's nothing so special about that; every story one chooses to tell is a kind of censorship, it prevents the telling of other tales ... I must get back to my fairy-story, because things have been happening while I've been talking too much.

On my way back to the story, I pass Omar Khayyam Shakil, my sidelined hero, who is waiting patiently for me to get to the point at which his future bride, poor Sufiya Zinobia, can enter the narrative, head first down the birth canal. He won't have to wait long; she's almost on her way.

I shall pause only to note (because it is not inappropriate to mention this here) that during his married life Omar Khayyam was forced to accept without argument Sufiya Zinobia's childlike fondness for moving the furniture around. Intensely aroused by these forbidden deeds, she rearranged tables, chairs, lamps, when- ever nobody was watching, like a favourite secret game, which she played with a frightening stubborn gravity. Omar Khayyam found protests rising to his lips, but he bit them back, knowing that to say anything would be useless: 'Honestly, wife,' he wanted to exclaim, 'God knows what you'll change with all this shifting shifting.'

5

The Wrong Miracle