Bilquis is lying wide awake in the dark of a cavernous bedroom, her hands crossed upon her breasts. When she sleeps alone her hands habitually find their way into this position, even though her in-laws disapprove. She can't help it, this hugging of herself to herself, as though she were afraid of losing something.

All around her in the darkness are the dim outlines of other beds, old charpoys with thin mattresses, on which other women lie under single white sheets; a grand total of forty females clustered around the majestically tiny form of the matriarch Bariamma, who snores lustily. Bilquis already knows enough about this chamber to be sure that most of the shapes tossing vaguely in the dark are no more asleep than she. Even Bariamma's snores might be a deception. The women are waiting for the men to come.

The turning door-knob rattles like a drum. At once there is a change in the quality of the night. A delicious wickedness is in the air. A cool breeze stirs, as if the entry of the first man has suc- ceeded in dispelling some of the intense treacly heat of the hot season, enabling the ceiling fans to move a little more efficiently through the soupy atmosphere. Forty women, one of them

69

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Bilquis, stir damply under their sheets . . . more men enter. They are tiptoeing along the midnight avenues of the dormitory and the women have become very still, except for Bariamma. The matriarch is snoring more energetically then ever. Her snores are sirens, sounding the all-clear and giving necessary courage to the men.

The girl in the bed next to Bilquis, Rani Humayun, who is unmarried and therefore expects no visit tonight, whispers across the blackness: 'Here come the forty thieves.'

And now there are tiny noises in the dark: charpoy ropes yielding fractionally beneath the extra weight of a second body, the rustle of clothing, the heavier exhalations of the invading hus- bands. Gradually the darkness acquires a kind of rhythm, which accelerates, peaks, subsides. Then there is a multiple padding towards the door, several times the drum-roll of the turning door- knob, and at last silence, because Bariamma, now that it is polite to do so, has quite ceased to snore.

Rani Humayun, who has landed one of the prize catches of the marriage season and will shortly leave this dormitory to wed the fair-skinned, foreign-educated, sensually full-lipped young mil- lionaire Iskander Harappa, and who is, like Bilquis, eighteen years old, has befriended her cousin Raza's new bride. Bilquis enjoys (while pretending to be scandalized) Rani's malicious ruminations on the subject of the household sleeping arrangements. 'Imagine, in that darkness,' Rani giggles while the two of them grind the daily spices, 'who would know if her real husband had come to her? And who could complain? I tell you, Billoo, these married men and ladies are having a pretty good time in this joint family set-up. I swear, maybe uncles with nieces, brothers with their brothers' wives, we'll never know who the children's daddies really are!' Bilquis blushes gracefully and covers Rani's mouth with a coriander-scented hand. 'Stop, darling, what a dirtyfilthy mind!'

But Rani is inexorable. 'No, Bilquis, I tell you, you are new here but I have grown up in this place, and by the hairs of our Bariamma's head I vow that this arrangement which is supposed

The Duellists ? 71

to be made for decency etcetera is just the excuse for the biggest orgy on earth.'

Bilquis does not point out (how rude it would be to do so) that the minuscule, almost dwarfish Bariamma is not only toothless and blind but no longer has a single hair on her ancient head, either. The matriarch wears a wig.

Where are we, and when? � In a large family house in the old quarter of the coastal city which, having no option, I must call Karachi. Raza Hyder, an orphan like his wife, has brought her (immediately after descending from the Dakota of their flight into the west) into the bosom of his maternal relations; Bariamma is his grandmother on his late mother's side. 'You must stay here,' he told Bilquis, 'until things settle down and we can see what is what and what is not.' So these days Hyder is in temporary quarters at the Army base while his bride lies amid sleep-feigning in-laws, knowing that no man will visit her in the night. � And yes, I see that I have brought my tale into a second infinite mansion, which the reader will perhaps already be comparing to a faraway house in the border town of Q.; but what a complete contrast it affords! For this is no sealed-off redoubt; it bursts, positively bursts with family members and related personnel.

'They still live in the old village way,' Raza warned Bilquis before depositing her in that house in which it was believed that the mere fact of being married did not absolve a woman of the shame and dishonour that results from the knowledge that she sleeps regularly with a man; which was why Bariamma had devised, without once discussing it, the idea of the forty thieves. And of course all the women denied that anything of'that nature' ever took place, so that when pregnancies occurred they did so as if by magic, as if all conceptions were immaculate and all births virgin. The idea of parthenogenesis had been accepted in this house in order to keep out certain other, unpleasantly physical notions.

Bilquis, the girl with the dream of queenhood, thought but did not say; 'O God. Ignoramuses from somewhere. Backward types,

Shame ? 72

village idiots, unsophisticated completely, and I am stuck with them.' Aloud, she told Raza meekly: 'Much to be said for the old traditions.' Raza nodded seriously in simple agreement; her heart sank further after that.

In the empire of Bariamma, Bilquis, the newest arrival, the junior member, was of course not treated like a queen.

'See if we don't have sons,' Raza told Bilquis, 'In my mother's family boys grow on trees.'

Lost in the forest of new relatives, wandering in the blood- jungle of the matriarchal home, Bilquis consulted the family Quran in search of these family trees, and found them there, in their traditional place, monkey-puzzle groves of genealogy inscribed in the back of the holy book. She discovered that since the generation of Bariamma, who had two sisters, Raza's maternal great-aunts, both widowed, as well as three brothers � a landlord, a wastrel and a mental-case fool - since that sexually-balanced generation, only two girls had been born in the entire family. One of these was Raza's deceased mother; the other, Rani Humayun, who could not wait to escape from that house which was never left by its sons, who imported their wives to live and breed in bat- tery conditions, like shaver chickens. On his mother's side, Raza had a total of eleven legitimate uncles and, it was believed, at least nine illegitimate ones, the brood of the wastrel, philandering great-uncle. Besides Rani, he could point to a grand total of thirty-two male cousins born in wedlock. (The putative offspring of the bastard uncles did not rate a mention in the Quran.) Of this enormous stock of relatives, a sizeable percentage was in residence under Bariamma's short but omnipotent shadow; wastrel and fool were unmarried, but when the landlord came to stay his wife occupied one of the beds in Bariamma's zenana wing. At the time of which I am speaking, landlord and wife were present; also eight of the eleven legitimate uncles, plus wives; and (Bilquis had diffi- culty with her counting) around twenty-nine male cousins, and Rani Humayun. Twenty-six cousinly wives stuffed the wicked

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bedchamber, and Bilquis herself made forty, once the three sisters of the oldest generation were included.

Bilquis Hyder's head whirled. Trapped in a language which contained a quite specific name for each conceivable relative, so that the bewildered newcomer was unable to hide behind such generic appellations as 'uncle', 'cousin', 'aunt', but was continually caught out in all her insulting ignorance, Bilquis's tongue was silenced by the in-law mob. She virtually never spoke except when alone with Rani or Raza; and thus acquired the triple repu- tation of sweet-innocent-child, doormat and fool. Because Raza was often away for days at a time, depriving her of the protection and flattery the other women got from their husbands on a daily basis, she also attained the status of poor-thing, which her lack of eyebrows (that no amount of pencilled artistry could disguise) did nothing to diminish. Thanks to this she was given slightly more than her fair share of household duties and also slightly more than her fair share of the rough edge of Bariamma's tongue. But she was also admired, grudgingly, because the family had a high opinion of Raza, the women admitted that he was a good man who did not beat his wife. This definition of goodness alarmed Bilquis, to whom it had never occurred that she might be beaten, and she raised the subject with Rani. 'Oh yes,' her cousin-in-law replied, 'how they all hit! Tharaap! Tharaap! Sometimes it does your heart good to watch. But one must also watch out. A good man can go bad, like meat, if you do not keep him cool.'

As the officially designated poor-thing, Bilquis was also obliged to sit each evening at Bariamma's feet while the blind old lady recounted the family tales. These were lurid affairs, featuring divorces, bankruptcies, droughts, cheating friends, child mortality, diseases of the breast, men cut down in their prime, failed hopes, lost beauty, women who grew obscenely fat, smuggling deals, opium-taking poets, pining virgins, curses, typhoid, bandits, homosexuality, sterility, frigidity, rape, the high price of food, gamblers, drunks, murders, suicides and God. Bariamma's mildly droning recital of the catalogue of family horrors had the effect of

Shame ? 74

somehow defusing them, making them safe, embalming them in the mummifying fluid of her own incontrovertible respectability. The telling of the tales proved the family's ability to survive them, to retain, in spite of everything, its grip on its honour and its unswerving moral code. 'To be of the family,' Bariamma told Bilquis, 'you must know our things, and tell us yours.' So Bilquis was forced, one evening (Raza was present but made no attempt to protect her), to recount the end of Mahmoud the Woman and her nudity in the Delhi streets. 'Never mind,' Bariamma pronounced approvingly, when Bilquis was shaking with the shame of her revelations, 'at least you managed to keep your dupatta on.'

After that Bilquis often heard her story being retold, wherever one or two of the family were gathered, in the hot lizardy corners of the courtyard or on the starlit roofs of the summer nights, in the nurseries to frighten the children and even in the boudoir of jewel-heavy, hennaed Rani on the morning of her wedding; because stories, such stories, were the glue that held the clan together, binding the generations in webs of whispered secrets. Her story altered, at first, in the retellings, but finally it settled down, and after that nobody, neither teller nor listener, would tolerate any deviation from the hallowed, sacred text. This was when Bilquis knew that she had become a member of the family; in the sanctification of her tale lay initiation, kinship, blood. 'The recounting of histories,' Raza told his wife, 'is for us a rite of blood.'

But neither Raza nor Bilquis could have known that their story had scarcely begun, that it would be the juiciest and goriest of all the juicygory sagas, and that, in time to come, it would always begin with the following sentence (which, in the family's opinion, contained all the right resonances for the opening of such a narrative):

'It was the day on which the only son of the future President Raza Hyder was going to be reincarnated.'

'Yes, yes,' the audience would cheer, 'tell us that one, that's the best.'

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In that hot season, the two newly-partitioned nations announced the commencement of hostilities on the Kashmiri frontier. You can't beat a northern war in the hot season; officers, foot-soldiers, cooks all rejoiced as they headed for the coolness of the hills. 'Yara, this is luck, na?' 'Shit, sisterfucker, at least this year I won't die in that damn heat.' O backslapping camaraderie of the meteo- rologically fortunate! Jawans went to war with the devil-may-care abandon of holidaymakers. There were, inevitably, deaths; but the organizers of the war had catered for these as well. Those who fell in battle were flown directly, first-class, to the perfumed gardens of Paradise, to be waited on for all eternity by four gorgeous Houris, untouched by man or djinn. 'Which of your Lord's bless- ings,' the Quran inquires, 'would you deny?'

Army morale was high; but Rani Humayun was most put out, because it would have been unpatriotic to hold a �wedding recep- tion in wartime. The function had been postponed, and she stamped her feet. Raza Hyder, however, stepped contentedly into the camouflaged jeep of his flight from the boiling insanity of the summer city, and just then his wife whispered into his ear that she was expecting another sort of happy event. (Taking a leaf out of Bariamma's book, I have turned a blind eye and snored loudly while Raza Hyder visited the dormitory of the forty women and made this miracle possible.)

Raza let fly a yell so swollen by triumph that Bariamma, seated indoors on her takht, became convinced in the confusion of her sweating blindness that her grandson had already received news of some famous victory, so that when such news did in fact come through, weeks later, she replied simply: 'Did you just find that out? I knew it one month back.' (This was in the days before the people learned that their side almost always lost, so that the national leaders, rising brilliantly to the challenge, perfected no fewer than one thousand and one ways of salvaging honour from defeat.)

'He's coming!' Raza deafened his wife, causing earthen pitchers to topple from the heads of womenservants and frightening the

Shame ? 76

geese. 'What did I tell you, Mrs?' He set his cap more jauntily on his head, slapped his wife too firmly on the stomach, joined the palms of his hands together and made diving gestures. 'Whoosh!' he shouted. 'Voom, wife! Here he comes!' And he roared off into the north, promising to win a great victory in honour of his forth- coming son, and leaving behind him a Bilquis who, being washed for the first time by the solipsistic fluids of motherhood, had neglected to notice the tears in her husband's eyes, the tears turning his black eye-pouches into velvet bags, the tears which were among the earliest pointers that the future strong-man of the nation was of the type that cried too easily ... in private with the frustrated Rani Humayun, Bilquis crowed proudly: 'Never mind this war foolishness; the important news is that I am making a boy to marry your unborn daughter.'

An extract from the family's saga of Raza and Bilquis, given in the formulaic words which it would be a gross sacrilege to alter:

'When we heard that our Razzoo had pulled off an attacking coup so daring that there was no option but to call it a triumph, we started off by refusing to believe our ears, � for already in those days even the sharpest ears had developed the fault of becoming wholly unreliable when they were attuned to the radio news bul- letins; � on such occasions everybody heard things that could not possibly have been the case. - But then we nodded our heads, understanding that a man whose wife is about to bear him a son is capable of anything. Yes, it was the unborn boy who was respon- sible for this, the only victory in the history of our armed forces, - which formed the basis of Raza's reputation for invincibility, a reputation which quickly became invincible itself, � so that not even the long humiliating years of his decline proved capable of destroying it. � He returned a hero, having seized for our holy new land a mountain valley so high and inaccessible that even goats had difficulty in breathing up there; so intrepid he was, so tremendous, that all true patriots had to gasp - and you must not believe that propaganda which says that the enemy did not bother

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to defend the place; - the fighting was fierce as ice - and with twenty men only he took the valley! That little band of giants, that daredevil crew, and Old Razor Guts at their head � who could have denied them? Who could have stood in their path?

'For all peoples, there are places that mean too much. "Aansu!" we wept with pride; with true patriotism we sobbed, "Only imagine � he has taken the Aansu-ki-Wadi!" It's true: the capture of that fabled "valley of tears" made us all weep as uncontrollably as, in later years, its conqueror became famous for doing. - But after a while it was clear that nobody knew what to do with that place where your spit froze before it hit the ground; except Iskander Harappa, of course; - who, dry-eyed as ever, went off to the Tribal Agencies Department and purchased more or less the whole caboodle, dirt-cheap, snow-cheap, for cash money on the nail, - and a few years later there were ski-lodges up there, and scheduled air flights, and European goings-on at night that made the local tribals faint for shame. � But did Raz, our great hero, see anything of that foreign exchange?' (Here the teller invariably smites her forehead with the palm of her hand.) 'No, how would he, that great Army dumbo? Isky always got there first. But' (and now the narrator adopts the most cryptic, menacing tone of which she is capable), 'it is being there last that counts.'

At this point I must interrupt the legend. The duel between Raza Hyder (promoted to Major for his Aansu exploit) and Iskander Harappa, which began, but certainly did not end, in Aansu, will have to wait yet awhile; because now that Old Razor Guts is back in town, and it is peacetime again, the wedding is about to be celebrated which will make the mortal adversaries into cousins-in-laws: into family.

Rani Humayun, eyes downcast, watches in a mirror-ring her bridegroom approaching her; borne shoulder-high by a turbaned retinue of friends, he sits on a golden plate. Later, after she had fainted under the weight of her jewellery; been revived by the pregnant Bilquis who then passed out herself; had money thrown

Shame ? 71

in her lap by every member of her family in turn; watched through her veil as her ancient lecherous great-uncle pinched the bottoms of her new husband's female relations, knowing that his grey hairs would prevent them from complaining; and finally lifted the veil beside her while a hand raised her own, and looked long and hard into the face of Iskander Harappa, whose over- powering sexual appeal owed much to the unlined softness of his twenty-five-year-old cheeks - around which curled long hair that was already, and freakishly, the colour of pure silver, and thinning on top to reveal the golden dome of his skull � and between which, also curled, she discovered lips whose patrician cruelty was alleviated by their sensual thickness, the lips, she thought, of a black hubshee, and idea which gave her a peculiarly sinful frisson of delight . . . later, after she had ridden with him to a bedchamber opulent with ancient swords and imported French tapestries and Russian novels, after she had descended full of terror from a white stallion whose sex was quite patently standing to attention, after she had heard the doors of her marriage closing behind her in this other home whose grandeur made Bariamma's place look like a village hovel � then, oiled and naked on a bed before which the man who had just turned her into a grown woman stood staring indolently down upon her beauty, she, Rani Harappa, made her first genuinely wifely remark.

'Who was that fellow,' she asked, 'the fat one, whose horse sat down under him when your procession arrived? I think it must be that bad chap, that doctor or something, that everybody in town is calling such a bad influence on you.'

Iskander Harappa turned his back on her and lit a cigar. 'Get one thing clear,' she heard him say, 'you don't pick and choose my friends.'

But Rani, seized by helpless laughter under the influence of the remembered image of the proud horse that gave up and subsided, legs splayed to the four points of the compass, under the colossal weight of Omar Khayyam Shakil � and also basking in the soft heat of their recent lovemaking � made mollifying sounds: 'I only

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meant, Isky, what a shameless type he must be, to carry all that tummy about and all.'

Omar Khayyam at thirty: five years the senior of Iskander Harappa and more than a decade older than Isky's bride, re-enters our little tale as a character with a high reputation as a doctor and a low reputation as a human being, a degenerate of whom it is often said that he appears to be entirely without shame, 'fellow doesn't know the meaning of the word,' as if some essential part of his education has been overlooked; or perhaps he has deliberately chosen to expunge the word from his vocabulary, lest its explosive presence there amid the memories of his past and present actions shatter him like an old pot. Rani Harappa has correctly identified her enemy, and now remembers, shuddering, and for the hundred and first time since it happened, the moment during her wedding celebrations when a bearer brought Iskander Harappa a telephone message informing him that the Prime Minister had been assassi- nated. When Iskander Harappa stood, called for silence and relayed the message to the appalled guests, an awkward hush per- sisted for fully thirty seconds, and then the voice of Omar Khayyam Shakil, on which everyone could hear the splashing of alcohol, cried out, 'That bastard! If he's dead he's dead. Why does he want to come here and spoil the party?'

Back then everything was smaller than it is today; even Raza Hyder was only a Major. But he was like the city itself, going places, growing fast, but in a stupid way, so that the bigger they both got, the uglier they became. I must tell you what things were like in those early days after the partition: the city's old inhabi- tants, who had become accustomed to living in a land older than time, and were therefore being slowly eroded by the implacably revenant tides of the past, had been given a bad shock by indepen- dence, by being told to think of themselves, as well as the country itself, as new.

Well, their imaginations simply weren't up to the job, you can

I

Shame ? 80

understand that; so it was the ones who really were new, the dis- tant cousins and half-acquaintances and total strangers who poured in from the east to settle in the Land of God, who took over and got things going. The newness of those days felt pretty unstable; it was a dislocated, rootless sort of thing. All over the city (which was, of course, the capital then) builders were cheating on the cement in the foundations of new houses, people - and not only Prime Ministers - got shot from time to time, throats got them- selves slit in gullies, bandits became billionaires, but all this was expected. History was old and rusted, it was a machine nobody had plugged in for thousands of years, and here all of a sudden it was being asked for maximum output. Nobody was surprised that there were accidents . . . well, there were a few voices saying, if this is the country we dedicated to our God, what kind of God is it that permits � but these voices were silenced before they had finished their questions, kicked on the shins under tables, for their own sakes, because there are things that cannot be said. No, it's more than that: there are things that cannot be permitted to be true.

At any rate: Raza Hyder has already shown, in the taking of Aansu, the advantages of the energy-giving influx of immigrants, of novel beings; but energy or no energy, he was unable to pre- vent his first-born son from being strangled to death in the womb.

Once again (in the opinion of his maternal grandmother) he cried too easily. Just when he should have been demonstrating the stiff- ness of his upper lip be began to bawl his eyes out, even in public. Tears were seen sliding off the wax on his bulbous moustache, and his black eye-pouches glistened once more like little pools of oil. His wife, Bilquis, however, did not let fall a single tear.

'Hey, Raz,' she consoled her husband in words iced with the brittle certainty of her desperation, 'Razzoo, chin up. We'll get him back the next time.'

'Old Razor Guts, my toe,' Bariamma scoffed to all and sundry. 'You know he invented that name for himself and forced

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his troops to call him so, by order? Old Leaky Water Reservoir, more like.'

An umbilical cord wound itself around a baby's neck and was transformed into a hangman's noose (in which other nooses are prefigured), into the breath-stopping silken rumal of a Thug; and an infant came into the world handicapped by the irreversible misfortune of being dead before he was born. 'Who knows why God will do such things?' Bariamma, mercilessly, told her grandson. 'But we submit, we must submit. And not take out baby-tears before women.'

However: being stone dead was a handicap which the boy managed, with commendable gallantry, to surmount. Within a matter of months, or was it only weeks, the tragically cadaverous infant had 'topped' in school and at college, had fought bravely in war, had married the wealthiest beauty in town and risen to a high position in the government. He was dashing, popular, handsome, and the fact of his being a corpse now seemed of no more conse- quence than would a slight limp or a minor speech impediment.

Of course I know perfectly well that the boy had in reality per- ished before he even had time to be given a name. His subsequent feats were performed entirely within the distracted imaginations of Raza and Bilquis, where they acquired an air of such solid actu- ality that they began to insist on being provided with a living human being who would carry them out and make them real. Possessed by the fictive triumphs of their stillborn son, Raza and Bilquis went at one another with a will, heaving silently in the blind-eyed dormitory of the family wives, having convinced themselves that a second pregnancy would be an act of replace- ment, that God (for Raza was, as we know, devout) had con- sented to send them a free substitute for the damaged goods they had received in the first delivery, as though He were the manager of a reputable mail-order firm. Bariamma, who found out every- thing, clicked her tongue noisily over this reincarnation nonsense, aware that is was something they had imported, like a germ, from that land of idolaters they had left; but curiously she was never

Shame ? 82

harsh with them, understanding that the mind will find strange means of coping with grief. So she must bear her share of respon- sibility for what followed, she should not have neglected her duty just because it was painful, she should have dished that rebirth notion while she could, but it took root so fast, and then it was too late, not a matter for discussion any more.

Many years later, when Iskander Harappa stood in the dock of the courtroom in which he was on trial for his life, his face as grey as the imported suit he wore, which had been tailored for him when he weighed twice as much, he taunted Raza with the memory of this reincarnation obsession. 'This leader who prays six times a day, and on national television too!' Isky said in a voice whose siren melodies had been untuned by jail. 'I recall when I had to remind him that the idea of avatars was a heresy. Of course he never listened, but then Raza Hyder has made a custom of not listening to friendly advice.' And outside the courtroom, the bolder members of Harappa's disintegrating entourage were heard to mutter that General Hyder had been raised in the enemy state across the border, after all, and there was evidence of a Hindu great-grandmother on his father's side, so those ungodly philoso- phies had long ago infected his blood.

And it is true that Iskander and Rani both tried to argue with the Hyders, but Bilquis's lips just got stretched tight as a drum by her obstinacy. At that time Rani Harappa was expecting, she had managed it like a shot, and Bilquis was already making it a matter of principle not to do what her old dormitory buddy advised, one reason for which may have been that she, Bilquis, in spite of all the nocturnal goings-on, was finding it very difficult to conceive.

When Rani gave birth to a daughter, her failure to produce a male child offered Bilquis a little consolation, but not much, because another dream had bitten the dust, the fantasy of a mar- riage between their firstborn children. Now, of course, the new- born Miss Arjumand Harappa was older than any future male Hyder could ever be, so the match was out of the question. Rani had, in fact, delivered her side of the deal; her efficiency deepened Bilquis's well-like gloom.

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And under Bariamma's roof little sneers and comments began to be aimed at this unnatural female who could produce nothing but dead babies; the family was proud of its fecundity. One night, after Bilquis had retired to bed, having washed the eyebrows off her face and regained her appearance of a startled rabbit, she was staring jealously at the empty bed which had once been occupied by Rani Harappa when, from her other flank, a particularly vicious cousin named Duniyazad Begum hissed night-dark insults: 'The disgrace of your barrenness, Madam, is not yours alone. Don't you know that shame is collective? The shame of any one of us sits on us all and bends our backs. See what you're doing to your husband's people, how you repay the ones who took you in when you came penniless and a fugitive from that godless country over there.'

Bariamma had switched the lights out - the master-switch hung on a cord above her bed � and her snoring dominated the black- ness of the zenana chamber. But Bilquis did not lie still in her bed; she arose and fell upon Duniyazad Begum, who had been awaiting her eagerly, and the two of them, hands entangled in hair, knees driving into yielding fleshy zones, tumbled softly to the floor. The fight was conducted soundlessly, such was the power of the matriarch over the night; but the news spread through the room on ripples of darkness and the women sat up in their beds and watched. When the men came they, too, became mute spec- tators of this mortal combat, during which Duniyazad lost several handfuls of hair from her luxuriant armpits and Bilquis broke a tooth on her adversary's clawing fingers; until Raza Hyder entered the dormitory and pulled them apart. It was at this point that Bariamma ceased to snore and switched on the light, releasing into the illuminated air all the noise, all the cheers and screams, that had been held back by the darkness. As women rushed to prop up the bald, blind matriarch with gaotakia bolsters, Bilquis, trembling in her husband's arms, refused to go on living under that roof of her calumniation. 'Husband, you know it,' she pulled about herself the tattered shreds of her queenly childhood, 'I was raised in a higher fashion than this; and if my children do not

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come it is because I cannot make them here, in this zoo, like they all do, like animals or what.'

'Yes, yes, we know how you think yourself toogood for us,' Bariamma, subsiding into gaotakias with a hissing noise, as of a deflating balloon, had the last word. 'Then you take her away, Raza, boy,' she said in her hornet's whine of a voice. 'You, Billoo Begum, begone. When you leave this house your shame leaves with you, and our dear Duniya, whom you attacked for speaking the truth, will sleep more easily. Come on, mohajirl Immigrant! Pack up double-quick and be off to what gutter you choose.'

I, too, know something of this immigrant business. I am an emi- grant from one country (India) and a newcomer in two (England, where I live, and Pakistan, to which my family moved against my will). And I have a theory that the resentments we mohajirs engender have something to do with our conquest of the force of gravity. We have performed the act of which all men anciently dream, the thing for which they envy the birds; that is to say, we have flown.

I am comparing gravity with belonging. Both phenomena observably exist: my feet stay on the ground, and I have never been angrier than I was on the day my father told me he had sold my childhood home in Bombay. But neither is understood. We know the force of gravity, but not its origins; and to explain why we become attached to our birthplaces we pretend that we are trees and speak of roots. Look under your feet. You will not find gnarled growths sprouting through the soles. Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places.

The anti-myths of gravity and of belonging bear the same name: flight. Migration, n., moving, for instance in flight, from one place to another. To fly and to flee: both are ways of seeking freedom . . . an odd thing about gravity, incidentally, is that while it remains uncomprehended everybody seems to find it easy to comprehend the notion of its theoretical counter-force: anti-gravity. But anti- belonging is not accepted by modern science . . . suppose ICI or

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Ciba-Geigy or Pfizer or Roche or even, I guess, NASA came up with an anti-gravity pill. The world's airlines would go broke overnight, of course. Pill-poppers would come unstuck from the ground and float upwards until they sank into the clouds. It would be necessary to devise special waterproof flying garments. And when the effects of the pill wore off one would simply sink gently down to earth again, but in a different place, because of prevailing windspeeds and planetary rotation. Personalized international travel could be made possible by manufacturing pills of different strengths for different lengths of journey. Some kind of directional booster-engine would have to be constructed, perhaps in back- pack form. Mass production could bring this within the reach of every household. You see the connection between gravity and 'roots': the pill would make migrants of us all. We would float upwards, use our boosters to get ourselves to the right latitude, and let the rotating planet do the rest.

When individuals come unstuck from their native land, they are called migrants. When nations do the same thing (Bangladesh), the act is called secession. What is the best thing about migrant peoples and seceded nations? I think it is their hopefulness. Look into the eyes of such folk in old photographs. Hope blazes undimmed through the fading sepia tints. And what's the worst thing? It is the emptiness of one's luggage. I'm speaking of invisible suitcases, not the physical, perhaps cardboard, variety containing a few meaning-drained mementoes: we have come unstuck from more than land. We have floated upwards from his- tory, from memory, from Time.

I may be such a person. Pakistan may be such a country.

It is well known that the term 'Pakistan', an acronym, was origi- nally thought up in England by a group of Muslim intellectuals. P for the Punjabis, A for the Afghans, K for the Kashmiris, S for Sind and the 'tan', they say, for Baluchistan. (No mention of the East Wing, you notice; Bangladesh never got its name in the title, and so, eventually, it took the hint and seceded from the secessionists. Imagine what such a double secession does to people!) � So it was a word born in exile which then went East,

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was borne-across or trans-lated, and imposed itself on history; a returning migrant, settling down on partitioned land, forming a palimpsest on the past. A palimpsest obscures what lies beneath. To build Pakistan it was necessary to cover up Indian history, to deny that Indian centuries lay just beneath the surface of Pakistani Standard Time. The past was rewritten; there was nothing else to be done.

Who commandeered the job of rewriting history? � The immi- grants, the mohajirs. In what languages? - Urdu and English, both imported tongues, although one travelled less distance than the other. It is possible to see the subsequent history of Pakistan as a duel between two layers of time, the obscured world forcing its way back through what-had-been-imposed. It is the true desire of every artist to impose his or her vision on the world; and Pakistan, the peeling, fragmenting palimpsest, increasingly at war with itself, may be described as a failure of the dreaming mind. Perhaps the pigments used were the wrong ones, impermanent, like Leonardo's; or perhaps the place was just insufficiently imagined, a picture full of irreconcilable elements, midriffbaring immigrant saris versus demure, indigenous Sindhi shalwar-kurtas, Urdu versus Punjabi, now versus then: a miracle that went wrong.

As for me: I, too, like all migrants, am a fantasist. I build imagi- nary countries and try to impose them on the ones that exist. I, too, face the problem of history: what to retain, what to dump, how to hold on to what memory insists on relinquishing, how to deal with change. And to come back to the 'roots' idea, I should say that I haven't managed to shake myself free of it completely. Sometimes I do see myself as a tree, even, rather grandly, as the ash Yggdrasil, the mythical world-tree of Norse legend. The ash Yggdrasil has three roots. One falls into the pool of knowledge by Valhalla, where Odin comes to drink. A second is being slowly consumed in the undying fire of Muspellheim, realm of the flame- god Surtur. The third is gradually being gnawed through by a fearsome beast called the Nidhogg. And when fire and monster have destroyed two of the three, the ash will fall, and darkness will descend. The twilight of the gods: a tree's dream of death.

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My story's palimpsest-country has, I repeat, no name of its own. The exiled Czech writer Kundera once wrote: 'A name means continuity with the past and people without a past are people without a name.' But I am dealing with a past that refuses to be suppressed, that is daily doing battle with the present; so it is perhaps unduly harsh of me to deny my fairyland a title.

There's an apocryphal story that Napier, after a successful cam- paign in what is now the south of Pakistan, sent back to England the guilty, one-word message, 'Peccavi'. / have Sind. I'm tempted to name my looking-glass Pakistan in honour of this bilingual (and fictional, because never really uttered) pun. Let it be Peccavistan.

It was the day on which the only son of the future General Raza Hyder was going to be reincarnated.

Bilquis had moved out of Bariamma's contraceptive presence into a simple residence for married officers and wives in the com- pound of the Army base; and not long after her escape she had conceived, just as prophesied. 'What did I say?' she triumphed, 'Raz, he's coming back, the little angel, just you wait and see.' Bilquis put her new-found fertility down to the fact that she was finally able to make a noise during their lovemaking, 'so that the little angel, waiting to be born, can hear what's going on and respond accordingly,' she told her husband fondly, and the happi- ness of the remark prevented him from replying that it was not only angels who were within earshot of her passionate love-moans and ululations, but also every other married officer on the base, including his immediate superior and also some junior chaps, so that he had been obliged to put up with a fair amount of raillery in the mess.

Bilquis entered labour - the rebirth was imminent - Raza Hyder awaited it, stiffly seated in an anteroom of the military hos- pital's maternity ward. And after eight hours of howling and heaving and bursting blood-vessels in her cheeks and using the filthy language that is permitted to ladies only during parturition, at last, pop! she managed it, the miracle of life. Raza Hyder's daughter was born at two-fifteen in the afternoon, and born,

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what's more, as vivaciously alive and kicking as her big brother had been dead.

When the swaddled child was handed to Bilquis, that lady could not forbear to cry, faintly, 'Is that all, my God? So much huffery and puffery to push out only this mouse?'

The heroine of our story, the wrong miracle, Sufiya Zinobia, was as small a baby as anyone had ever seen. (She remained small when she grew up, taking after her near-midget paternal great- grandmother, whose name, Bariamma, Big Mother, had always been a sort of family joke.)

A surprisingly small bundle was returned by Bilquis to the mid- wife, who bore it out to the anxious father. 'A daughter, Major Sahib, and so beautiful, like the day, dontyouthinkso?' In the delivery room, silence flooded from the pores of the exhausted mother; in the anteroom, Raza was quiet, too. Silence: the ancient language of defeat.

Defeat? But this was Old Razor Guts himself, conqueror of glaciers, vanquisher of frosty meadows and ice-fleeced mountain sheep! Was the future strong-man of the nation so easily crushed? Not a bit of it. Did the midwife's bombshell lead to unconditional surrender? Certainly not. Raza began to argue; and the words came in rushes, inexorable as tanks. The walls of the hospital shook and retreated; horses shied, unseating riders, on the nearby polo fields.

'Mistakes are often made!' Raza shouted. 'Terrible blunders are not unknown! Why, my own fifth cousin by marriage when he was born. . . ! But me no buts, woman, I demand to see the hos- pital supervisor!'

And even louder: 'Babies do not come clean into this world!'

And blasted from his lips like cannonballs: 'Genitalia! Can! Be! Obscured!'

Raza Hyder raging roaring. The midwife stiffened, saluted; this was a military hospital, don't forget, and Raza outranked her, so she admitted yes, what the Major Sahib was saying was possible certainly. And fled. Hope rose in the moist eyes of the father, also in the dilated pupils of Bilquis, who had heard the noise, of

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course. And now it was the baby, its very essence in doubt, who fell silent and began to muse.

The supervisor (a Brigadier) entered the quaking room in which the future President was trying to affect biology by a super- human act of will. His words, weighty, final, outranking Raza's murdered hope. The stillborn son died again, even his ghost snuffed out by the medico's fatal speech: 'No possibility of error. Please to note that the child has been washed. Prior to swaddling procedure. Matter of sex is beyond dispute. Permit me to tender my congratulations.' But what father would allow his son, twice- conceived, to be executed thus, without a fight? Raza tore away swaddling cloth; having penetrated to the baby within, he jabbed at its nether zones: 'There! I ask you, sir, what is that?' - 'We see here the expected configuration, also the not uncommon post- natal swelling, of the female . . .' � 'A bump!' Raza shrieked hope- lessly. 'Is it not, doctor, an absolute and unquestionable bump?'

But the Brigadier had left the room.

'And at this point' � I am quoting from the family legend again � 'when her parents had to admit the immutability of her gender, to submit, as faith demands, to God; at this very instant the extremely new and soporific being in Raza's arms began � it's true! - to blush.'

O rubescent Sufiya Zinobia!

It is possible that the above incident has been a little embell- ished during its many tellings and retellings; but I shall not be the one to question the veracity of oral tradition. They say the baby blushed at birth.

Then, even then, she was too easily shamed.

6

Affairs of Honour

There is a saying that the frog who croaks in the shaft of a well will be frightened by the booming voice of the giant frog who answers him.

When the great gas fields were discovered in Needle Valley in the district of Q., the unpatriotic behaviour of the intemperate local tribals became a matter for national concern. After the team of drilling engineers, surveyors and gas scientists which was sent to Needle to plan the construction of the butane mines had been attacked by the tribals, who raped each member of the team eigh- teen point six times on average (of which thirteen point nine seven assaults were from the rear and only four point six nine in the mouth) before slitting one hundred per cent of the expert gul- lets, the State Chief Minister Aladdin Gichki requested military assistance. The commander of the forces appointed for the protec- tion of the invaluable gas resources was none other than Raza Hyder, hero of the Aansu-ki-Wadi expedition, and already a full Colonel. It was a popular appointment. 'Who better to defend one precious mountain valley,' the nation's premier daily paper War rhetorically inquired, 'than the conqueror of another such

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jewel?' Old Razor Guts himself made the following statement, to a reporter from the same journal, on the steps of the newly air- conditioned mail train to the west: 'These brigands are the frogs in the well, good sir, and, God willing, I intend to be the giant who scares off their pants.'

At that time his daughter Sufiya Zinobia was fifteen months old. She, and his wife Bilquis, accompanied Colonel Hyder on his journey towards the Impossible Mountains. And no sooner had their train pulled out of the station than sounds of 'Godless carousing' (Raza's phrase) began to filter into their compartment. Raza asked the guard for the identities of his neighbours. "Very big persons, sir,' was the reply, 'certain executives and also lady stars of a famous bioscope company.' Raza Hyder shrugged. 'Then we must put up with the racket, because I will not lower myself by disputing with filmi types.' When she heard this Bilquis set her lips in a tight and bloodless smile, and her eyes stared fero- ciously through the mirror on the wall which divided her from the empires of her past.

The carriage was a new model with a corridor running past the compartment doors, and a few hours later Bilquis was returning from the Ladies when a youth with lips as fat as Iskander Harappa's leaned out of the depraved compartment of the cinema people and made kissing noises at her, whispering whiskied endearments: 'I swear, yaar, you can keep your goods from for- eign, the home produce is the best, no question.' Bilquis could feel his eyes squeezing her breasts, but for some unaccountable reason she did not mention this insult to her honour when she returned to her husband's side.

Raza Hyder's honour also received an insulting blow on that trip, or, to be precise, at its conclusion, because when they arrived at the Cantt station in Q. they found a crowd of locust propor- tions awaiting them on the platform, singing hit songs and throwing flowers and waving banners and flags of welcome, and although Bilquis could see Raza twirling his moustache her smiling lips never moved to warn him of the obvious truth, which was that the welcome was not for the Colonel but for the cheap

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riff-raff next door. Hyder descended from the train with arms spread wide and a speech guaranteeing the safety of the crucial gas seams dripping from his lips, and was almost knocked over by the rush of autograph hunters and hem-kissers towards the demure lady actresses. (Off balance, he failed to notice a fat-lipped youth wiggling his fingers in farewell in the direction of Bilquis.) The injury sustained here by his pride explained much of what fol- lowed; in the illogical manner of the humiliated, he began taking it out on his wife, who shared a bioscopic background with his adversaries � whereupon his rage at the botched reincarnation of his only son awoke again, and crossed over the newly-established bridge between his wife and the cinema fans, until Raza began, unconsciously, to hold his progenitorial difficulties against the shallow moviegoers of Q.

Trouble in a marriage is like monsoon water accumulating on a flat roof. You don't realize it's up there, but it gets heavier and heavier, until one day, with a great crash, the whole roof falls in on your head . . . leaving Sindbad Mengal, the kiss-lipped boy who was the youngest son of the president of the bioscope corpo- ration, and who had arrived to take charge of cinematic activity in that region, making promises of weekly programme changes, new picture palaces, and regular personal appearances by top stars and playback singers, the Hyders packed away their own assurances of triumph and pushed their way out of the station through the rejoicing crowd.

At Flashman's Hotel, they were shown into a honeymoon suite which smelled oppressively of naphthalene balls by an enfeebled bearer who was accompanied by the last of the trained monkeys in bellhop uniform, and who could not, in the depths of his despair, resist touching Raza Hyder on the arm and inquiring, 'Please, great sir, do you know, when are the Angrez sahibs coming back?'

And Rani Harappa?

Wherever she looks are peering faces; wherever she listens, voices, using a vocabulary of such multicoloured obscenity that it dyes

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her listening ears in rainbow colours. She wakes up one morning soon after her arrival at her new home to find peasant girls rum- maging through her clothes drawers, taking out and holding up lacy imported lingerie, examining ruby lipsticks. 'What do you think you're doing?' � The two girls, unashamed, turn to stare, still holding garments, cosmetics, combs. 'O, Isky's wife, nothing to worry, Isky's ayah said to look.' 'We polished floors and so she gave permission.' 'Ohe, Isky's wife, look out on those floors we polished! Slipperier than a monkey's bottom, I swear.' - Rani rises to her elbows in bed; her voice fights off sleep. 'Get out! Don't you blush to be here? Go on, flee before I.' The girls fan them- selves as if a fire were blazing in the room. 'O, God, too hot!' 'Hey, Isky's wife, dip your tongue in water!' She shouts, 'Don't be insol. . .', but they interrupt. 'Never mind all that, lady, in this house it's still what Isky's ayah says.' The girls move, wiggling cheeky hips, towards the door. And pause in the doorway for a parting shot: 'Shit, but Isky gives his wife good clothes, the best of everything, no mistake.' 'That is true. But if a peacock dances in the jungle, there is nobody to see its tail.'

'And tell Isky's - tell the ayah I want to see my daughter,' she cries, but the girls have closed the door, and one of them shouts through it, 'Why be so high and mighty? The child will come when she's ready.'

Rani Harappa no longer weeps, no longer tells her mirror This can't be happening or sighs with inaccurate nostalgia for the dormi- tory of the forty thieves. Plus daughter, minus husband, she is stranded in this backyard of the universe: Mohenjo, the Harappa country estate in Sind, stretching from horizon to horizon, afflicted by a chronic water shortage, populated by laughing scornful monsters, 'Frankensteins, absolutely.' She no longer imagines that Iskander does not know how she is treated here. 'He knows,' she says to her mirror. Her beloved husband, her groom on the golden plate. 'A woman becomes looser after having a child,' she confides to the glass, 'and my Isky, he likes things tight.' Then her hand covers her lips and she runs to door and windows to make sure nobody has heard.

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Later, she sits in shalwar and kurta of Italian crepe-de-chine on the coolest porch, embroidering a shawl, watching a little dust cloud on the horizon. No, how can it be Isky, he is in town with his bosom pal Shakil; I knew trouble, knew it the moment I saw him, the fat pigmeat tub. Probably just one of those little whirl- winds that skip across the scrub.

Mohenjo earth is obstinate. It bakes its people hard as rocks in the heat. The horses in the stables are made of iron, the cattle have diamond bones. The birds here beak up clods of earth, spit, build nests out of mud; there are few trees, except in the little haunted wood, where even the iron horses bolt ... an owl, while Rani embroiders, lies sleeping in a burrow in the ground. Only a wingtip can be seen.

'If I was murdered here, the news would never leave the estate.' Rani is uncertain whether or not she has spoken aloud. Her thoughts, loosened by solitude, often burst these days through her unconscious lips; and often contradict one another, because the very next notion to form in her mind as she sits on the heavy- eaved verandah is this: 'I love the house.'

Verandahs run along all four walls; a long covered mosquito- netted walkway joins the house to the kitchen bungalow. It is one of the miracles of the place that chapatis do not cool down on their journey along this wood-floored avenue to the dining hall; nor do souffles ever fall. And oil paintings and chandeliers and high ceilings and a flat tar-macadamed roof upon which, once, before he abandoned her there, she knelt giggling through a morning skylight at her husband still in bed. Iskander Harappa's family home. 'At least I have this piece of him, this soil, his first place. Bilquis, what a shameless person I must be, to settle for such a small part of my man.' And Bilquis, on the telephone from Q.: 'Maybe it's O.K. for you, darling, but I could never put up with it, no sir, anyway my Raza is away at the gas, but spare me your sympathy, dear, when he comes home he may be tired as hell but never so tired, you understand what I mean.'

The dust cloud has reached Mir Village now, so it is a visitor and not a whirlwind. She tries to suppress her excitement. The

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village bears the name of Iskander's father, Sir Mir Harappa, now deceased, once proudly knighted by the Angrez authorities for services rendered. The birdshit is cleaned off his equestrian statue every day. Sir Mir in stone gazes with equal hauteur upon village hospital and brothel, the epitome of an enlightened zamindar . . . 'A visitor.' She claps her hands, rings a bell. Nothing. Until at length Isky's ayah, a heavy-boned woman with soft uncallused hands, brings out a jug of pomegranate water. 'No need to make such noise, Isky's wife, your husband's household knows how to entertain.' Behind the ayah is old Gulbaba, deaf, half-blind, and behind him a trail of spilled pistachio nuts leading to the half- empty dish in his hands. 'O God your servants darling,' Bilquis has offered long-distance views, 'all those fogey types left over from five hundred years ago. I swear you should take them to the doctor and give the painless injections. What you put up with! Queen by name, you must make yourself queen by fame.'

She rocks in her verandah chair, the needle moving unhur- riedly, and feels the youth and gaiety being crushed out of her, drop by drop, by the pressure of the passing moments, and then the horsemen ride into the courtyard and she recognizes Iskander's cousin, Little Mir Harappa from the Daro estate that begins just over the northern horizon. In these parts horizons serve as boundary fences.

'Rani Begum,' Little Mir shouts from horseback, 'no point you blaming me for this. Blame your husband, you should keep him on a tighter rein. Excuse me, but the fellow's a real motherfucker, he's got me all worked up.'

A dozen armed horsemen dismount and begin to loot the house, while Mir wheels and rears his mount and hurls justifica- tions at his cousin's wife, in the throes of a giddy, neighing frenzy that sets his tongue free of all constraints. 'What do you know about that bullock's arsehole, madam? Fuck me in the mouth, but I know. That pizzle of a homosexual pig. Ask the villagers how his great father locked up his wife and spent every night in the brothel, how a whore disappeared when her fat stomach couldn't be explained by what she ate, and then the next thing Lady

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Harappa was holding the baby even though everyone knew she hadn't been screwed in a decade. Like rather, like son, my honest opinion, sorry if you don't like it. Sisterfucking bastard spawn of corpse-eating vultures. Does he think he can insult me in public and get away with it? Who is the elder, me or that sucker of shit from the rectums of diseased donkeys? Who is the bigger landowner, me or him with his six inches of land on which even the lice cannot grow fat? You tell him who is king in these parts. Tell him who can do what he likes round here, and that he should come crawling to kiss my feet like a murdering rapist of his own grandmother and beg for pardon. That nibbler of a crow's left nipple. This day shows him who's the boss.'

Looters cut from gilded frames paintings of the school of Rubens; Sheraton chairs have their legs amputated. Antique silver is placed in worn old saddle-bags. Cut-glass decanters splinter on thousand-knot carpets. She, Rani, goes on with her embroidery in the midst of the punitive riot. The old servants, the ayah, Gul- baba, the polishing girls, syces, villagers from Mir Village stand and watch, squat and listen. Little Mir, a proud equestrian figure, the tall hawkish avatar of the statue in the village, does not fall silent until his men are back upon their horses. 'A man's honour is in his women,' he shouts. 'So when he took that whore from me he took my honour, tell him that, the little jumped-up piss drinker. Tell him about the frog in the well, and how the giant frog replied. Tell him to be afraid and to think himself lucky I am a mild-mannered man. I could have regained my honour by depriving him of his. Lady, I could do to you anything, anything, and who would dare say no? Here it is my law, Mir's law, that runs. Salaam aleikum.' The dust of the departing horsemen settles on the surface of the untouched pomegranate water, then sinks to form a thick sediment at the bottom of the jug. 'I just can't tell him yet,' Rani tells Bilquis on the telephone. 'It makes me feel too ashamed.'

'O, Rani, you got your problems, darling,' Bilquis sympathizes down the Army telephone line. 'What do you mean you don't know? Here 1 am, stuck away just like you, and even in this zero-

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town I know what the whole of Karachi is saying. Darling, who hasn't seen how your Isky and that fat doctor run around, belly- dancer shows, international hotel swimming-pools where the naked white women go, why do you think he puts you where you are? Alcohol, gambling, opium, who knows that. Those women in their waterproof fig leaves. Excuse me darling but somebody has to tell you. Cock-fights, bear-fights, snake-and- mongoose fights, that Shakil fixes everything like a pimp or what. And how many women? O baba. Under banquet tables he grabs their thighs. They say the two of them go to the red-light district with movie cameras. Of course it's clear what that Shakil is up to, that nobody from nowhere is getting the high life on a plate, maybe some of those women are willing to be passed on, crumbs from the rich man's table, you understand my meaning. Anyway the point is darling your Isky pinched his cousin's juiciest little French tart from right under his nose, at some big cultural event, I'm sorry to say it but it was all over town, so funny to see Mir standing there while Isky walked off with the floozy, O God I don't know why you don't just cry and cry. Now what's to get worked up about, honestly you should know who is your friend and who is poisoning your name behind your back. You should hear me on the phone, darling, how I defend you, like a tiger, you've got no idea, sweetie, sitting up there and lording it over your antique Gulbabas and all.'

She encounters the ayah clucking ruefully in the wreckage of the dining hall. 'Went too far,' the ayah says. 'My Isky, such a naughty boy. Always always he got his cousin's goat. Went too far. The little hooligan.'

Wherever she looks are peering faces; wherever she listens, voices. She is watched as, blushing with the humiliation of it, she calls Iskander to give him the news. (It has taken her five days to build up her courage.) Iskander Harappa says just three words.

'Life is long.'

Raza Hyder led his gas soldiers out to Needle Valley after a week in which their activities had so alarmed the town that State Chief

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Minister Gichki had ordered Raza to get moving double- quick before the stock of virgins available to the bachelors of Q. dwindled to a point at which the moral stability of the region would be jeopardized. Accompanying the soldiers were numerous architects, engineers and construction workers, all of whom were in a condition of moist-trousered panic, because for security rea- sons none of them had been informed of the fate of the advance party until they arrived in Q., where they were immediately given magnificently elaborated versions of the tale by every street- corner paan-wallah. The construction personnel sobbed inside locked vans; soldiers, on guard, jeered: 'Cowards! Babies! Women!' Raza in his flagbearing jeep heard none of this. He was unable to turn his thoughts away from the events of the preceding day, when he had visited at the hotel by an obsequious gnome whose loose garments smelled powerfully of motor-scooter exhaust fumes: Maulana Dawood, the ancient divine, around whose chicken-thin neck had once hung a necklace of shoes.

'Sir, great sir, I look upon your hero's brow and am inspired.' The gatta, the bruise of devotion on Raza's forehead, did not go unremarked.

'No, O most wise, it is I who am at once humbled and exalted by your visit.' Raza Hyder would have been prepared to continue in this vein for at least eleven minutes, and felt a little disappointed when the holy man nodded and said briskly, 'So then, to business. You know about this Gichki of course. Not to be trusted.'

'Not?'

'Completely not. Most corrupt individual. But your files will show this.'

'Allow me to benefit from the knowledge of the man on the spot . . .'

'Like all our politicos these days. No fear of God and big smug- gling rackets. This is boring for you; the Army is well up in such matters.'

'Please proceed.'

'Foreign devilments, sir. Nothing less. Devil things from abroad.'

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What Gichki was accused of bringing illicitly into God's pure land: iceboxes, foot-operated sewing machines, American popular music recorded at 78 revolutions per minute, love-story picture books that inflamed the passions of the local virgins, domestic air- conditioning units, coffee percolators, bone china, skirts, German sunglasses, cola concentrates, plastic toys, French cigarettes, con- traceptive devices, untaxed motor vehicles, big ends, Axminster carpets, repeating rifles, sinful fragrances, brassieres, rayon pants, farm machinery, books, eraser-tipped pencils and tubeless bicycle tyres. The customs officer at the border post was mad and his shameless daughter was willing to turn a blind eye in return for regular gratuities. As a result all these items from hell could arrive in broad daylight, on the public highway, and find their way into the gypsy markets, even in the capital itself. 'Army,' Dawood said in a voice that had dropped to a whisper, 'must not stop at stamping out tribal wild men. In God's name, sir.'

'Sir, put your point'

'Sir, it is this. Prayer is the sword of the faith. By the same token, is not the faithful sword, wielded for God, a form of holy prayer?'

Colonel Hyder's eyes became opaque. He turned away to look out of the window towards an enormous silent house. From an upper window of the house a young boy was training field-glasses on the hotel. Raza turned back towards the Maulana. 'Gichki, you say.'

'Here it is Gichki. But everywhere things are the same. Mini- sters!'

'Yes,' Hyder said absently, 'they are ministers, that's true.'

'Then I have said my piece and take my leave, abasing myself before you for the privilege of this encounter. God is great.'

'Be in the hands of God.'

Raza headed for the threatened gas fields with the above con- versation in his mind's ear; and in his mind's eye the picture of a small boy with binoculars, alone at an upstairs window. A boy who was someone's son: a drop appeared on Old Razor Guts's cheek and was blown off by the wind.

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'Gone for three months minimum,' Bilquis sighed into her tele- phone. 'What to do? I am young, I can't sit all day like a water- buffalo in mud. Thank God I can go to the movies.' Every night, leaving her child in the care of a locally hired ayah, Bilquis sat in the brand-new cinema called Mengal Mahal. But Q. was a small town; eyes saw things, even in the dark . . . but I shall return to this theme at a later point, because I can no longer avoid the story of my poor heroine:

Two months after Raza Hyder departed into the wilderness to do battle with the gas-field dacoits, his only child Sufiya Zinobia contracted a case of brain fever that turned her into an idiot. Bilquis, rending hair and sari with equal passion, was heard to utter a mysterious sentence: 'It is a judgment,' she cried beside her daughter's bed. Despairing of military and civilian doctors she turned to a local Hakim who prepared an expensive liquid dis- tilled from cactus roots, ivory dust and parrot feathers, which saved the girl's life but which (as the medicine man had warned) had the effect of slowing her down for the rest of her years, because the unfortunate side-effect of a potion so filled with ele- ments of longevity was to retard the progress of time inside the body of anyone to whom it was given. By the day of Raza's return on furlough Sufiya Zinobia had shaken off the fever, but Bilquis was convinced she could already discern in her not-yet- two-year-old-child the effects of that inner deceleration which could never be reversed. 'And if there is this effect,' she feared, 'who knows what else? Who can say?'

In the clutches of a guilt so extreme that even the affliction of her only child seemed insufficient to explain it, a guilt in which, were I possessed of a scandalously wagging tongue, I would say that something Mengalian, something to do with visits to the cinema and fat-mouthed youths, was also present, Bilquis Hyder spent the night before Raza's return pacing sleeplessly around the honeymoon suite of Flashman's Hotel, and it should perhaps be noted that one of her hands, acting, apparently, of its own voli- tion, continually caressed the region around her navel. At four

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a.m. she obtained a long-distance line to Rani Harappa in Mohenjo and made the following injudicious remarks:

'Rani, a judgment, what else? He wanted a hero of a son; I gave him an idiot female instead. That's the truth, excuse me, I can't help it. Rani, a simpleton, a goof! Nothing upstairs. Straw instead of cabbage between the ears. Empty in the breadbin. To be done? But darling, there is nothing. That birdbrain, that mouse! I must accept it: she is my shame.'

When Raza Hyder returned to Q. the boy was standing at the window of the great solitary house once again. One of the local guides, in answer to the Colonel's inquiry, told Raza that the house was owned by three crazy sinful witches who never came outside but who managed to produce children nevertheless. The boy at the window was their second son: witch-fashion, they claimed to share their offspring. 'But the story is, sir, that in that house is more wealth than in the treasury of Alexander the Great.' Hyder replied with what sounded like contempt: 'So. But if a pea- cock dances in the jungle, who will see its tail?' Still, his eyes never left the boy at the window until the jeep arrived at the hotel, where he found his wife awaiting him with her hair loose and her face washed clean of eyebrows, so that she was the very incarnation of tragedy, and he heard what she had been too ashamed to send word of. The illness of his daughter and the vision of the fieldglass-eyed young boy combined in Hyder's spirits with the bitterness of his ninety days in the desert and sent him storming out of the honeymoon suite bursting with a rage so terrible that for the sake of his personal safety it was necessary to find a release for it as soon as possible. He ordered a staff car to drive him to the residence of Chief Minister Gichki in the Can- tonment, and, without waiting on ceremony, he informed the Minister that although construction work at Needle was well advanced the threat from the tribals could never be eliminated unless he, Hyder, were empowered to take draconian punitive measures. 'With God's help we are defending the site, but now we must stop this pussyfooting. Sir, you must place the law in my

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hands. Carte blanche. At certain moments civil law must bend before military necessity. Violence is the language of these savages; but the law obliges us to speak in the discredited womanly tongue of minimum-force. No good, sir. I cannot guarantee results.' And when Gichki responded that on no account were the laws of the State to be flouted by the armed forces - 'We'll have no bar- barisms in those hills, sir! No tortures, no stringings-up by toes, not while I am Chief Minister here!' � then Raza, in discourte- ously loud tones that escaped through the doors and windows of Gichki's office and terrified the peons outside because they had issued from the lips of one so habitually polite, gave the Chief Minister a warning. 'Army is watching these days, Gichki Sahib. All over the country the eyes of honest soldiers see what they see, and we are not pleased, no sir. The people stir, sir. And if they look away from politicians, where will they turn for purity?'

Raza Hyder in his wrath left Gichki - small, bullet-cropped hair, flat Chinese face � formulating his never-to-be-delivered reply; and found Maulana Dawood awaiting him by the staff car. Soldier and divine rode on the back seat, their words shielded from the driver by a sheet of glass. But it seems probable that behind this screen a name passed from divine tongue into martial ear: a name, carrying with it intimations of scandal. Did Maulana Dawood tell Hyder about the meetings of Bilquis and her Sindbad? I say only that it seems probable. Innocent until proven guilty is an excellent rule.

That night the cinema executive Sindbad Mengal left his office at Mengal Mahal by the back door as usual, emerging into a dark gully behind the cinema screen. He was whistling a sad tune, the melody of a man who cannot meet his beloved even though the moon is full. In spite of the loneliness of the tune he had dressed up to the nines, as was his custom: his bright European garb, bush-shirt and duck pants, was radiant in the gully, and the melan- choly moonlight bounced off the oil in his hair. It is likely that he never even noticed that the shadows in the gully had begun to close in on him; the knife, which the moon would have illumi- nated, was clearly kept sheathed until the last instant. We know

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this because Sindbad Mengal did not stop whistling until the knife entered his guts, whereupon someone else began to whistle the same tune, just in case anybody was passing by and got curious. A hand covered Sindbad's mouth as the knife went to work. In the next few days Mengal's absence from his office inevitably attracted attention, but it was not until several moviegoers had complained about the deterioration in the cinema's stereophonic sound quality that an engineer inspected the loudspeakers behind the screen and discovered segments of Sindbad Mengal's white shirt and duck pants concealed within them, as well as black Oxford shoes. The knife-sliced garments still contained the appropriate pieces of the cinema manager's body. The genitals had been severed and inserted into the rectum. The head was never found, nor was the murderer brought to justice. Life is not always long.

That night Raza made love to Bilquis with a coarseness which she was willing to put down to his months in the wilderness. The name of Mengal was never mentioned between them, not even when the town was buzzing with the murder story, and soon afterwards Raza returned to Needle Valley. Bilquis stopped going to the cinema, and although in this period she retained her queenly composure it seemed as though she were standing on a crumbling outcrop over an abyss, because she became prone to dizzy spells. Once, when she picked up her damaged daughter to play the traditional game of water-carrier, slinging Sufiya Zinobia on her back and pretending she was a water-skin, she collapsed to the floor beneath the delighted child before she had finished pouring her out. Soon afterwards she called Rani Harappa to announce that she was pregnant. While she was imparting this information, the lid of her left eye began, inexplicably, to nictate.

An itchy palm means money in the offing. Shoes crossed on the floor mean a journey; shoes turned upside-down warn of tragedy. Scissors cutting empty air mean a quarrel in the family. And a winking left eye means there will be bad news soon.

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'On my next leave,' Raza wrote to Bilquis, 'I shall be going to Karachi. There are family duties, and also Marshal Aurangzeb is giving a reception. One does not refuse one's Commander-in- Chief s invitation. If your condition, however, you will do better to rest. It would be thoughtless of me to ask you to accompany me on this non-compulsory and arduous trip.'

Politeness can be a trap, and Bilquis was caught in the web of her husband's courtesy. 'As you wish,' she wrote back, and what made her write this was not entirely guilt, but also something untranslatable, a law which obliged her to pretend that Raza's words meant no more than they said. This law is called takallouf. To unlock a society, look at its untranslatable words. Takallouf is a member of that opaque, world-wide sect of concepts which refuse to travel across linguistic frontiers: it refers to a form of tongue- typing formality, a social restraint so extreme as to make it impos- sible for the victim to express what he or she really means, a species of compulsory irony which insists, for the sake of good form, on being taken literally. When takallouf gets between a hus- band and a wife, look out.

Raza travelled alone to the capital. . . and now that an untrans- latable word has brought Hyder and Harappa, unencumbered by spouses, very near to meeting once again, it is time to take stock of the situation, because our two duellists will shortly find them- selves doing battle. Even now, the cause of their first altercation is allowing a servant girl to oil and braid her hair. She, Atiyah Aurangzeb, known to her intimates as "Pinkie', is contemplating, coolly, the soiree which she has decided to arrange in the name of her almost senile husband, the crumbling Marshal Aurangzeb, Joint Chief of Staff. Pinkie Aurangzeb is in her middle thirties, several years older than Raza and Iskander, but this does not diminish her allure; mature women have charms of their own, as is well known. Trapped in a marriage with a dotard, Pinkie finds her pleasures wherever she can.

Meanwhile, two wives are abandoned in their separate exiles, each with a daughter who should have been a son (more needs to be said about young Arjumand Harappa, more will

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certainly be written about poor, idiot Sufiya Zinobia). Two dif- ferent approaches to the matter of revenge have been outlined. And while Iskander Harappa consorts with a fat pigment tub named Omar Khayyam Shakil for purposes of debauchery etc., Raza Hyder would seem to have fallen under the influence of a grey eminence, who whispers austere secrets in the backs of Army limousines. Cinemas, sons of witches, bruises on foreheads, frogs, peacocks have all worked to create an atmosphere in which the stink of honour is all-pervasive.

Yes, it is high time the combatants took the field.

The fact is that Raza Hyder was smitten right between the eyes by Pinkie Aurangzeb. He desired her so badly that it made the bruise on his forehead ache, but he lost her to Iskander Harappa, right there at the Marshall's reception, while the old soldier slept in an armchair, relegated to a corner of the glittering throng, but even in that condition of somnolent cuckolded dotage never spilling a drop from the brimming tumbler of whisky-soda he clutched in his sleeping hand.

On that fateful occasion began a duel which was to continue at least until both protagonists were dead, if not longer. Its initial prize was the body of the Marshal's wife, but after that it moved on to higher things. First things first, however: and Pinkie's body, excitingly on display, in a green sari worn dangerously low upon the hips in the fashion of the women of the East Wing; with silver-and-diamond earrings in the form of crescent-and-star hanging brightly from pierced lobes; and bearing upon irresistibly vulnerable shoulders a light shawl whose miraculous work could only have been the product of the fabled embroiderers of Aansu, because amidst its miniscule arabesques a thousand and one stories had been portrayed in threads of gold, so vividly that it seemed the tiny horsemen were actually galloping along her collarbone, while minute birds appeared to be flying, actually flying, down the graceful meridian of her spine . . . this body is worth linger- ing over.

And lingering over it, when Raza had managed to fight his way

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through the whirlpools and eddies of young bucks and jealous women surrounding Pinkie Aurangzeb, was the half-drunk Iskander Harappa, city playboy number one, at whom the vision of loveliness was smiling with a warmth that froze the thick per- spiration of his arousal on to Raza's waxed moustache, while that notorious degenerate with his filthy tongue that put even his cousin Mir to shame told the goddess dirty jokes.

Raza Hyder stiff, at embarrassed attention, the garment of his lust rendered rigid by the starch of takallouf. . . but Isky hiccuped, 'Look who's here! Our goddamn hero, the tilyar!' Pinkie tittered as Iskander adopted a professional stance, adjusting invisible pince- nez: 'The tilyar, madam, as you are possibly aware, is a skinny little migrating bird good for nothing but shooting out of the sky.' Rip- ples of laughter spread outwards through the eddying bucks. Pinkie, annihilating Raza with a look, murmured, 'Pleased to meet,' and Raza found himself replying with a ruinously awkward and bombastic formality, 'My honour, lady, and may I say that in my opinion and with the grace of God the new blood is going to be the making of our great new nation,' but Pinkie Aurangzeb was pretending to stifle a laugh. 'Fuck me in the mouth, tilyar,' Iskander Harappa shouted gaily, 'this is a party, yaar, no mother- fucking speeches, for God's sake.' The rage buried beneath Hyder's good manners was bubbling higher, but it was impotent against this sophistication that permitted obscenity and blasphemy and could murder a man's desire and his pride with clever laughter. 'Cousin,' he attempted catastrophically, 'I am just a simple soldier,' but now his hostess stopped pretending not to laugh at him, drew the shawl tighter around her shoulders, put a hand on Iskander Harappa's arm and said, 'Take me into the garden, Isky. The air-conditioning is too cold in here, and outside it's nice and warm.'

'Then into the warm, pronto!' Harappa cried gallantly, pressing his glass into Raza's hand for safe-keeping. 'For you, Pinkie, I would enter the furnaces of hell, if you desire protection when you get there. My teetotal relative Raza is no less brave,' he added over his departing shoulder, 'only he goes to hell not for ladies, but for gas.'

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Watching from the sidelines as Iskander Harappa bore his prize away into the close, musky twilight of the garden was the flabby Himalayan figure of our peripheral hero, the doctor, Omar Khayyam Shakil.

Do not form too low an opinion of Atiyah Aurangzeb. She remained faithful to Iskander Harappa even after he turned serious and dispensed with her services, and retired without a word of complaint into the stoic tragedy of her private life, until the day of his death, when after setting fire to an old embroidered shawl she hacked out her own heart with a nine-inch kitchen knife. And Isky, too, was faithful to her in his fashion. From the time that she became his mistress he stopped sleeping with his wife Rani alto- gether, thus ensuring that she would have no more children, and that he would be the last of his line, an idea which, he told Omar Khayyam Shakil, was not without a certain appeal.

(Here I should explain the matter of daughters-who-should- have-been-sons. Sufiya Zinobia was the 'wrong miracle' because her father had wanted a boy; but this was not Arjumand Harappa's problem. Arjumand, the famous 'virgin Ironpants', regretted her female sex for wholly non-parental reasons. 'This woman's body,' she told her father on the day she became a grown woman, 'it brings a person nothing but babies, pinches and shame.')

Iskander reappeared from the garden as Raza was preparing to leave, and attempted to make peace. With a formality the equal of Raza's own, he said: 'Dear fellow, before you go back to Needle you must come up to Mohenjo; Rani would be so happy. Poor girl, I wish she enjoyed this city life . . . and I insist that you call your Billoo there also. Let the ladies have a good chat while we shoot tilyars all day long. What do you say?'

And takallouf obliged Raza Hyder to answer: 'Thank you, yes.'

The day before they passed the sentence of death Iskander Harappa would be permitted to telephone his daughter for one minute exactly. The last words he ever addressed to her in private were acrid with the hopeless nostalgia of those shrunken times:

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'Arjumand, my love, I should have gone out to fight this buffalo- fucker Hyder when he staked himself to the ground. I left that business unfinished; it was my biggest mistake.'

Even in his playboy period Iskander occasionally felt bad about his sequestered wife. At such moments he rounded up a few cronies, bundled them into station-wagons and led a convoy of urban gaiety up to his country estate. Pinkie Aurangzeb was con- spicuous by her absence; and Rani was queen for a day.

When Raza Hyder accepted Isky's invitation to Mohenjo, the two of them drove up together, followed by five other vehicles containing an ample supply of whisky, film starlets, sons of textile magnates, European diplomats, soda siphons and wives. Bilquis, Sufiya Zinobia and the ayah were met at the private railway sta- tion Sir Mir Harappa had constructed on the main line from the capital to Q. And, for one day, nothing bad happened at all.

After the death of Isky Harappa, Rani and Arjumand Harappa were kept locked up in Mohenjo for several years, and to fill the silences the mother told the daughter about the business of the shawl. 'I had begun to embroider it before I heard that I was sharing my husband with Little Mir's woman, but it turned out to be a premonition of another woman entirely.' By that time Arju- mand Harappa had already reached the stage of refusing to hear anything bad about her father. She snapped back: 'Allah, mother, all you can do is bitch about the Chairman. If he did not love you, you must have done something to deserve it.' Rani Harappa shrugged. 'Chairman Iskander Harappa, your father, whom I always loved,' she replied, 'was world champion of shamelessness; he was international rogue and bastard number one. You see, daughter, I remember those days, I remember Raza Hyder when he was not a devil with horns and a tail, and also Isky, before he became a saint.'

The bad thing that happened at Mohenjo when the Hyders were there was started by a fat man who had had too much to drink. It happened on the second evening of that visit, on the very verandah on which Rani Harappa had gone on with her embroi-

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dery while Little Mir's men looted her home - an incursion whose effects could still be seen, in the empty picture-frames with fragments of canvas adhering to the corners, in the sofas whose stuffing stuck out through the ripped leather, in the odd assort- ment of cutlery at the dining table and the obscene slogans in the hall, which could still be made out beneath the coats of white- wash. The partial wreckage of the Mohenjo house gave the guests the feeling of holding a celebration in the midst of a disaster, and made them expect more trouble, so that the bright laughter of the film starlet Zehra acquired an edge of hysteria and the men all drank too fast. And all the time Rani Harappa sat in her rocking- chair and worked on her shawl, leaving the organization of Mohenjo to the ayah who was fawning over Iskander as if he were three years old, or a deity, or both. And finally the trouble did come, and because it was the fate of Omar Khayyam Shakil to affect, from his position on the periphery, the great events whose central figures were other people but which collectively made up his own life, it was he who said with a tongue made too loose by the neurotic drinking of the evening that Mrs Bilquis Hyder was a lucky woman, Iskander had done her a favour by pinching Pinkie Aurangzeb from under Raza's nose. 'If Isky hadn't been there maybe our hero's Begum would have to console herself with chil- dren, because there would be no man to fill her bed.' Shakil had spoken too loud, to gain the attention of the starlet Zehra, who was more interested in the over-bright looks she was getting from a certain Akbar Junejo, a well-known gambler and film producer; when Zehra moved away without bothering to make any excuses, Shakil was faced with the spectacle of a wide-eyed Bilquis, who had just emerged on to the verandah after seeing her daughter into bed, and on whom the pregnancy was showing much too early ... so who knows if that was the reason for Bilquis's stand, if she was just trying to transfer her own guilt on to the shoulders of a husband whose probity was now also the subject of gossip? � Anyway, what happened was this: after it became clear to the guests that Omar Khayyam's words had been heard and understood by the woman who stood blazing on the evening

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verandah, a silence fell, and a stillness which reduced the party to a tableau of fear, and into that stillness Bilquis Hyder shrieked her husband's name.

It must not be forgotten that she was a woman to whom the dupatta of womanly honour had clung even when the rest of her clothing had been torn off her body; not a woman to turn a deaf ear to public slanders. Raza Hyder and Iskander Harappa stared wordlessly at each other while Bilquis pointed a long-nailed index finger at the heart of Omar Khayyam Shakil.

'You hear that man, husband? Hear what shame he is making for me.'

O, the hush, the muteness, like a cloud that obscured the horizon! Even the owls forbore to screech.

Raza Hyder came to attention, because once the afrit of honour has been summoned from its sleep, it will not depart until satisfied. 'Iskander,' Raza said, 'I will not fight inside your house.' Then he did a strange and a wild thing. He marched off the verandah, entered the stables, returned with a wooden stake, a mallet and a length of good stout rope. The stake was driven into the rock-hard earth; and then Colonel Hyder, future President, tethered himself to it by the ankle and hurled the mallet away.

'Here I stand,' he shouted, 'let the one who slanders my honour come out and find me.' And there, all night long, he remained; because Omar Khayyam Shakil rushed indoors, to faint of alcohol and fright.

Hyder like a bull paced in circles, the rope a radius stretching taut from ankle to stake. The night thickened; the guests, embar- rassed, drifted away to bed. But Isky Harappa stayed on the verandah, knowing that although the folly had been the fat man's, the true quarrel stood between the Colonel and himself. The starlet Zehra, on her way to a bed which it would be unforgivably loose-tongued of me to suggest was already occupied � so I shall say nothing at all on the subject � offered her host a warning. 'Don't go getting any stupid ideas, Isky darling, you hear? Don't you dare go out there. He's a soldier, look at him, like a tank, he'll

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kill you for sure. Just let him cool off, O.K.?' But Rani Harappa gave her husband no advice. ('You see, Arjumand,' she told her daughter, years later, 'I recall your daddy when he was too mousey to take his medicine like a man.')

How it ended: badly, as it had to. Just before dawn. You can understand: Raza had been awake all night, stamping in the circle of his pride, his eyes red with rage and fatigue. Red eyes don't see clearly - and the light was poor - and who sees servants coming, anyway? � what I'm trying to say is that old Gulbaba woke early and walked across the yard with a brass lotah jug, on his way to ablute before saying his prayers; and, seeing Colonel Hyder tied to a stake, crept up behind him to ask, sir, what are you doing, will it not be better if you come . . . ? Old servants take liberties. It is the privilege of their years. But Raza, sleep-deafened, heard only steps, a voice; felt a tap on his shoulder; swung round; and with one terrible blow, felled Gulbaba like a twig. The violence loos- ened something inside the old man; let us call it life, because within a month old Gul was dead, with a confused expression on his face, like a man who knows he has mislaid an important pos- session and can't remember what it is.

In the aftermath of that murderous punch Bilquis relented, emerging from the shadow of the house to persuade Raza to unhitch himself from his post. 'The poor girl, Raza, don't make her see this thing.' And when Raza came back to the verandah, Iskander Harappa, himself unslept and unshaven, offered his arms in embrace, and Raza, with considerable grace, hugged Isky, shoulder against shoulder, allowing their necks to meet, as the saying goes.

When Rani Harappa emerged from her boudoir the next day to say goodbye to her husband, Iskander went pale at the sight of the shawl she had wrapped around her shoulders, a completed shawl as delicately worked as anything made by the craftswonien of Aansu, a masterpiece amidst whose minuscule arabesques a thousand and one stories had been portrayed, so artfully that it seemed as though horsemen were galloping along her collarbone,

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while tiny birds flew along the soft meridian of her spine. 'Good-bye, Iskander,' she told him, 'and do not forget that the love of some women is not blind.'

Well, well, friendship is a bad word for the thing between Raza and Iskander, but for a long time after the incident of the stake it was the word they both used. Sometimes the good words can't be found.

She has always wanted to be a queen, but now that Raza Hyder is at last a sort of prince the ambition has gone sour on her lips. A second baby has been born, six weeks early, but Raza has uttered no word of suspicion. Another daughter, but he hasn't com- plained about that either, saying only that it is quite proper that the first should be a boy and the second a girl, so one must not blame the new arrival for her elder sister's mistake. The girl has been named Naveed, that is Good News, and she is a model baby. But the mother has been damaged by this birth. Something has been torn inside, and the medical opinion is that she must have no more children. Raza Hyder will never have a son. He has spoken, just once, of the boy with field-glasses at the window of the witches' house, but this subject, too, has been closed. He is with- drawing from her down the corridors of his mind, closing the doors behind him. Sindbad Mengal, Mohenjo, love: all these doors are closed. She sleeps alone, so that her old fears have her at their mercy, and it is in these days that she begins to be afraid of the hot afternoon wind that flows so fiercely out of her past.

Martial law has been declared. Raza has arrested Chief Minister Gichki and been appointed administrator of the region. He has moved into the Ministerial residence with his wife and children, abandoning to its memories that cracking hotel in which the last trained monkey has taken to wandering listlessly amidst the dying palms of the dining hall while ageing musicians scratch at their rotting riddles for an audience of empty tables. She does not see much of Raza these days. He has work to do. The gas pipeline is progressing well, and now that Gichki is out of the way a pro- gramme of making examples of arrested tribals has been inaugu-

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rated. She fears that the bodies of hanged men will turn the citi- zens of Q. against her husband, but she does not say this to him. He is taking a firm line, and Maulana Dawood gives him all the advice he needs.

The last time I visited Pakistan, I was told this joke. God came down to Pakistan to see how things were going. He asked General Ayub Khan why the place was in such a mess. Ayub replied: 'It's these no-good corrupt civilians, sir. Just get rid of them and leave the rest to me.' So God eliminated the politicos. After a while, He returned; things were even worse than before. This time He asked Yahya Khan for an explanation. Yahya blamed Ayub, his sons and their hangers-on for the troubles. 'Do the needful,' Yahya begged, 'and I'll clean the place up good and proper.' So God's thunder- bolts wiped out Ayub. On His third visit, He found a catastrophe, so He agreed with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto that democracy must return. He turned Yahya into a cockroach and swept him under a carpet; but, a few years later, he noticed the situation was still pretty awful. He went to General Zia and offered him supreme power: on one condition. 'Anything, God,' the General replied, 'You name it.' So God said, 'Answer me one question and I'll flatten Bhutto for you like a chapati.' Zia said: 'Fire away.' So God whispered in his ear: 'Look, I do all these things for this country, but what I don't understand is: why don't people seem to love me any more?'

It seems clear that the President of Pakistan managed to give God a satisfactory answer. I wonder what it was.

III

Shame, Good News and the Virgin

7

Blushing

Not so long ago, in the East End of London, a Pakistani father murdered his only child, a daughter, because by making love to a white boy she had brought such dishonour upon her family that only her blood could wash away the stain. The tragedy was intensified by the father's enormous and obvious love for his butchered child, and by the beleaguered reluctance of his friends and relatives (all 'Asians', to use the confusing term of these trying days) to condemn his actions. Sorrowing, they told radio micro- phones and television cameras that they understood the man's point of view, and went on supporting him even when it turned out that the girl had never actually 'gone all the way' with her boyfriend. The story appalled me when I heard it, appalled me in a fairly obvious way. I had recently become a father myself and was therefore newly capable of estimating how colossal a force would be required to make a man turn a knife-blade against his own flesh and blood. But even more appalling was my realization that, like the interviewed friends etc., I, too, found myself under- standing the killer. The news did not seem alien to me. We who have grown up on a diet of honour and shame can still grasp what must seem unthinkable to peoples living in the aftermath of the

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death of God and of tragedy: that men will sacrifice their dearest love on the implacable altars of their pride. (And not only men. I have since heard of a case in which a woman committed the iden- tical crime for identical reasons.) Between shame and shameless- ness lies the axis upon which we turn; meteorological conditions at both these poles are of the most extreme, ferocious type. Shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence.

My Sufiya Zinobia grew out of the corpse of that murdered girl, although she will not (have no fear) be slaughtered by Raza Hyder. Wanting to write about shame, I was at first haunted by the imagined spectre of that dead body, its throat slit like a halal chicken, lying in a London night across a zebra crossing, slumped across black and white, black and white, while above her a Belisha beacon blinked, orange, not-orange, orange. I thought of the crime as having been committed right there, publicly, ritually, while at the windows eyes. And no mouth opened in protest. And when the police knocked on doors, what hope of assistance had they? Inscrutability of the 'Asian' face under the eyes of the foe. It seems even the insomniacs at their windows closed their eyelids and saw nothing. And the father left with blood-cleansed name and grief.

I even went so far as to give the dead girl a name: Anahita Muhammad, known as Anna. In my imagination she spoke with an East London accent but wore jeans, blue brown pink, out of some atavistic reluctance to show her legs. She would certainly have understood the language her parents spoke at home, but would obstinately have refused to utter a word of it herself. Anna Muhammad: lively, no doubt attractive, a little too danger- ously so at sixteen. Mecca meant ballrooms to her, rotating silver balls, strobe lighting, youth. She danced behind my eyes, her nature changing each time I glimpsed her: now innocent, now whore, then a third and a fourth thing. But finally she eluded me, she became a ghost, and I realized that to write about her, about shame, I would have to go back East, to let the idea breathe its favourite air. Anna, deported, repatriated to a country

'I

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she had never seen, caught brain-fever and turned into a sort of idiot.

Why did I do that to her? � Or maybe the fever was a lie, a fig- ment of Bilquis Hyder's imagination, intended to cover up the damage done by repeated blows to the head: hate can turn a miracle-gone-wrong into a basket case. And that hakimi potion sounds pretty unconvincing. How hard to pin down the truth, especially when one is obliged to see the world in shces; snapshots conceal as much as they make plain.

All stories are haunted by the ghosts of the stories they might have been. Anna Muhammad haunts this book; I'll never write about her now. And other phantoms are here as well, earlier and now ectoplasmic images connecting shame and violence. These ghosts, like Anna, inhabit a country that is entirely unghostly: no spectral 'Peccavistan', but Proper London. I'll mention two: a girl set upon in a late-night underground train by a group of teenage boys is the first. The girl 'Asian' again, the boys predictably white. Afterwards, remembering her beating, she feels not angry but ashamed. She does not want to talk about what happened, she makes no official complaint, she hopes the story won't get out: it is a typical reaction, and the girl is not one girl but many. Looking at smoking cities on my television screen, I see groups of young people running through the streets, the shame burning on their brows and setting fire to shops, police shields, cars. They remind me of my anonymous girl. Humiliate people for long enough and a wildness bursts out of them. Afterwards, surveying the wreckage of their rage, they look bewildered, uncomprehending, young. Did we do such things? Us? But we're just ordinary kids, nice people, we didn't know we could . . . then, slowly, pride dawns on them, pride in their power, in having learned to hit back. And I imagine what would have happened if such a fury could have been released in that girl on her underground train - how she would have thrashed the white kids within an inch of their lives, breaking arms legs noses balls, without knowing whence the vio- lence came, without seeing how she, so slight a figure, could

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command such awesome strength. And they, what would they have done? How to tell the police they were beaten up by a mere girl, just one weak female against the lot of them? How to look their comrades in the face? I feel gleeful about this notion: it's a seductive, silky thing, this violence, yes it is.

I never gave this second girl a name. But she, too, is inside my Sufiya Zinobia now, and you'll recognize her when she pops out.

The last ghost inside my heroine is male, a boy from a news clipping. You may have read about him, or at least his prototype: he was found blazing in a parking lot, his skin on fire. He burned to death, and the experts who examined his body and the scene of the incident were forced to accept what seemed impos- sible: namely that the boy had simply ignited of his own accord, without dousing himself in petrol or applying any external flame. We are energy; we are fire; we are light. Finding the key, stepping through into that truth, a boy began to burn.

Enough. Ten years have slipped by in my story while I've been seeing ghosts. - But one last word on the subject: the first time I sat down to think about Anahita Muhammad, I recalled the last sentence of The Trial by Franz Kafka, the sentence in which Joseph K. is stabbed to death. My Anna, like Kafka's Joseph, died under a knife. Not so Sufiya Zinobia Hyder; but that sentence, the ghost of an epigraph, hangs over her story still:

' "Like a dog!" he said: it was as if he meant the shame of it to outlive him.'

By the year of the Hyders' return from Q. the capital had grown, Karachi had become fat, so that people who had been there from the beginning could no longer recognize the slender girlish town of their youth in this obese harridan of a metropolis. The great fleshy folds of its endless expansion had swallowed up the primeval salt marshes, and all along the sandspit there erupted, like boils, the gaudily painted beach houses of the rich. The streets were full of the darkened faces of young men who had been drawn to the painted lady by her overblown charms, only to find that her price was too high for them to pay; something puritan and violent sat

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on their foreheads and it was frightening to walk amongst their disillusions in the heat. The night held smugglers who rode in scooter-rickshaws to the coast; and the Army, of course, was in power.

Raza Hyder got off the railway train from the west wreathed in rumours. This was the period shortly after the disappearance of the former Chief Minister Aladdin Gichki, who had finally been released from captivity for lack of hard evidence against him; he lived quietly with his wife and dog for several weeks until the day he went out to walk the Alsatian and never returned, even though his last words to Begum Gichki had been, 'Tell the cook to make a dozen extra meatballs for dinner, I'm starving to death today.' Meatballs, one to twelve, steamed expectantly in a dish, but some- thing must have spoiled Gichki's appetite, because he never ate them. Possibly he was unable to resist the pangs of hunger and ate the Alsatian instead, because they never found the dog either, not so much as a hair of its tail. The Gichki mystery kept cropping up in conversations, and Hyder's name often got into these chats, perhaps because the mutual hatred between Gichki and the divine Maulana Dawood was well known, and Dawood's intimacy with Hyder was no secret either. Strange stories filtered back to Karachi from Q. and hung in the air-conditioned urban air.

The official version of Hyder's period of power in the west was that it had been an unmitigated success, and his career was continuing along its upward path. Dacoity had been eliminated, the mosques were full, the organs of state had been purged of Gichkism, of the corruption disease, and separatism was a dead duck. Old Razor Guts was now a Brigadier . . . but, as Iskander Harappa was fond of telling Omar Khayyam Shakil when the pair of them were in their cups, 'Fuck me in the mouth, yaar, every- body knows those tribals are running wild out there because Hyder kept hanging innocent people by the balls.' There were also whispers about marital troubles in the Hyder household. Even Rani Harappa in exile heard the rumours of dissension, of the idiot child whose mother called her 'Shame' and treated her like mud, of the internal injury which made sons impossible and

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which was leading Bilquis down dark corridors towards a crack- up; but she, Rani, did not know how to talk to Bilquis about these things, and the telephone receiver remained untouched on its hook.

Some things did not get talked about. Nobody mentioned a fat-mouthed boy called Sindbad Mengal, or speculated on the parentage of the younger Hyder girl . . . Brigadier Raza Hyder was driven directly from the station to the inner sanctum of the President, Field-Marshal Mohammad A., where according to some reports he was hugged affectionately and had his cheeks pulled in friendship, while others hinted that the blast of angry air issuing from the keyholes of that room was so intensely hot that Raza Hyder, standing to attention before his outraged President, must have been badly singed. What is certain is that he emerged from the Presidential presence as the national minister of educa- tion, information and tourism, while someone else climbed aboard a westbound train to assume the governorship of Q. And Raza Hyder's eyebrows remained intact.

Also intact: the alliance between Raza and Maulana Dawood, who had accompanied the Hyders to Karachi and who, once he was installed in the official residence of the new minister, at once distinguished himself by launching a vociferous public campaign against the consumption of prawns and blue-bellied crabs, which, being scavengers, were as unclean as any pig, and which, although understandably unavailable in far-off Q., were both plentiful and popular in the capital by the sea. The Maulana was deeply affronted to find these armoured monsters of the deep freely avail- able in the fishmarkets, and succeeded in enlisting the support of urban divines who did not know how to object. The city's fisher- men found that the sales of shellfish began to drop alarmingly, and were therefore obliged to rely more than ever on the income they gained from the smuggling of contraband goods. Illicit booze and cigarettes replaced blue crabs in the holds of many dhows. No booze or cigarettes found their way into the Hyder residence, however. Dawood made unheralded raids on the servants' quar- ters to check that God was in charge. 'Even a city of scuttling

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monstrosities,' he assured Raza Hyder, 'can be purified with the help of the Almighty.'

Three years after Raza Hyder's return to Q., it became clear that his star had secretly been in decline, because the rumours from Q. (Mengal, Gichki, ball-hung tribals) never died down entirely; so that when the capital was shifted away from Karachi and taken up north into the clean mountain air and placed in hideous new buildings specially constructed for the purpose, Raza Hyder stayed put on the coast. The ministry of education, infor- mation and tourism went north along with the rest of the admin- istration; but Raza Hyder (to be blunt) was sacked. He was returned to military duty, and given the futureless job of com- manding the Military Training Academy. They permitted him to keep his house, but Maulana Dawood told him: 'So what if you still have the marble walls? They have made you a crab in this marble shell. Na-pak: unclean.'

We have leapt too far ahead: it is time to conclude our remarks about rumours and shellfish. Sufiya Zinobia, the idiot, is blushing.

I did it to her, I think, to make her pure. Couldn't think of another way of creating purity in what is supposed to be the Land of the Pure . . . and idiots are, by definition, innocent. Too romantic a use to make of mental disability? Perhaps; but it's too late for such doubts. Sufiya Zinobia has grown, her mind more slowly than her body, and owing to this slowness she remains, for me, somehow clean (pak) in the midst of a dirty world. See how, growing, she caresses a pebble in her hand, unable to say why goodness seems to lie within this smooth flat stone; how she glows with pleasure when she hears loving words, even though they are almost always meant for someone else . . . Bilquis poured all her affection over her younger daughter, Naveed. 'Good News' � the nickname had stuck, like a pulled face in the wind � was soaked in it, a monsoon of love, while Sufiya Zinobia, her parents' burden, her mother's shame, remained as dry as the desert. Groans, insults, even the wild blows of exasperation rained on her instead; but such rain yields no moisture. Her spirit parched for lack of

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affection, she nevertheless managed, when love was in her vicinity, to glow happily just to be near the precious thing.

She also blushed. You recall she blushed at birth. Ten years later, her parents were still perplexed by these reddenings, these blushes like petrol fires. The fearful incandescence of Sufiya Zinobia had been, it seemed, intensified by the desert years in Q. When the Hyders paid the obligatory courtesy call on Bariamma and her tribe, the ancient lady bent to kiss the girls and was alarmed to find that her lips had been mildly burned by a sudden rush of heat to Sufiya Zinobia's cheek; the burn was bad enough to necessitate twice-daily applications of lip salve for a week. This misbehaviour of the child's thermostatic mechanisms roused in her mother what looked like a practised wrath: 'That moron,' Bliquis shouted beneath the amused gaze of Duniyad Begum and the rest, 'just don't even look at her now! What is this? Anyone puts eyes on her or tells her two words and she goes red, red like a chilli! I swear. What normal child goes so beetroot hot that her clothes can smell of burning? But what to do, she went wrong and that's that, we must just grin and bear.' The disappointment of the Hyders in their elder daughter had also been hardened in the noonday rays of the wilderness into a thing as pitiless as that shadow-frying sun.

The affliction was real enough. Miss Shahbanou, the Parsee ayah whom Bliquis had employed on her return to Karachi, com- plained on her first day that when she gave Sufiya Zinobia a bath the water had scalded her hands, having been brought close to boiling point by a red flame of embarrassment that spread from the roots of the damaged girl's hair to the tips of her curling toes.

To speak plainly: Sufiya Zinobia Hyder blushed uncontrollably whenever her presence in the world was noticed by others. But she also, I believe, blushed for the world.

Let me voice my suspicion: the brain-fever that made Sufiya Zinobia preternaturally receptive to all sorts of things that float around in the ether enabled her to absorb, like a sponge, a host of unfelt feelings.

Where do you imagine they go? - I mean emotions that should

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have been felt, but were not � such as regret for a harsh word, guilt for a crime, embarrassment, propriety, shame? � Imagine shame as a liquid, let's say a sweet fizzy tooth-rotting drink, stored in a vending machine. Push the right button and a cup plops down under a pissing stream of the fluid. How to push the button? Nothing to it. Tell a lie, sleep with a white boy, get born the wrong sex. Out flows the bubbling emotion and you drink your fill . . . but how many human beings refuse to fol- low these simple instructions! Shameful things are done: lies, loose living, disrespect for one's elders, failure to love one's national flag, incorrect voting at elections, over-eating, extra- marital sex, autobiographical novels, cheating at cards, maltreat- ment of womenfolk, examination failures, smuggling, throwing one's wicket away at the crucial point of a Test Match: and they are done shamelessly. Then what happens to all that unfelt shame? What of the unquaffed cups of pop? Think again of the vending machine. The button is pushed; but then in comes the shameless hand and jerks away the cup! The button-pusher does not drink what was ordered; and the fluid of shame spills, spreading in a frothy lake across the floor.

But we are discussing an abstract, an entirely ethereal vending machine; so into the ether goes the unfelt shame of the world. Whence, I submit, it is siphoned off by the misfortunate few, janitors of the unseen, their souls the buckets into which squeegees drip what-was-spilled. We keep such buckets in special cupboards. Nor do we think much of them, although they clean up our dirty waters.

Well then: Sufiya the moron blushed. Her mother said to the assembled relatives, 'She does it to get attention. O, you don't know what it's like, the mess, the anguish, and for what? For no reward. For air. Thank God for my Good News.' But goof or no goof, Sufiya Zinobia - by blushing furiously each time her mother looked sidelong at her father - revealed to watching family eyes that something was piling up between those two. Yes. Idiots can feel such things, that's all.

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<-*�>

Blushing is slow burning. But it is also another thing: it is a psycho- somatic event. I quote: 'A sudden shut-down of the arterio-venous anastomoses of the face floods the capillaries with the blood that produces the characteristically heightened colour. People who do not believe in psychosomatic events and do not believe that the mind can influence the body by direct nervous pathways should reflect upon blushing, which in people of heightened sensibility can be brought on even by the recollection of an embarrassment of which they have been the subject - as clear an example of mind over matter as one could wish for.'

Like the authors of the above words, our hero, Omar Khayyam Shakil, is a practitioner of medicine. He is, furthermore, interested in the action of mind over matter: in behaviour under hypnosis, for example; in the entranced self-mutilations of those fanatical Shias whom Iskander Harappa disparagingly calls 'bedbugs'; in blushing. So it will not be long before Sufiya Zinobia and Omar Khayyam, patient and doctor, future wife and husband, come together. As they must; because what I have to tell is � cannot be described as anything but - a love story.

An account of what happened that year, the fortieth year in the life of Isky Harappa as well as Raza Hyder, probably ought to begin with the moment when Iskander heard that his cousin Little Mir had ingratiated himself with President A., and was about to be elevated to high office. He jumped clean out of bed when he heard the news, but Pinkie Aurangzeb, the owner of the bed and the source of the information, did not budge, even though she knew that a crisis had burst upon her, and that her forty-three- year-old body which Iskander had unveiled by jumping out of bed without letting go of the sheet no longer radiated the kind of light that could get men's minds off whatever was bugging them. 'Shit on my mother's grave,' Iskander Harappa yelled, 'first Hyder becomes a minister and now him. Life gets serious when a man is pushing forty.'

'Things are starting to fade,' Pinkie Aurangzeb thought as she

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lay smoking eleven consecutive cigarettes while Iskander stalked the room wrapped in the bedsheet. She lit her twelfth cigarette as Isky absently let the sheet fall. Then she watched him in the nudity of his prime as he silently broke his ties with his pre- sent, and turned towards the future. Pinkie was a widow; old Marshal Aurangzeb had kicked the bucket at last, and nowadays her soirees were not quite such essential affairs, and the city gossip had begun to reach her late. 'The ancient Greeks,' Iskander said out of the blue, making Pinkie spill the ash off her cigarette-tip, 'kept, in the Olympic games, no records of runners-up.' Then he dressed quickly, but with the meticulous dandyism that she had always loved, and left her for good; that sentence was the only explanation she ever got. But in the years of her isolation she worked it out, she knew that History had been waiting for Iskander Harappa to notice Her, and a man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape. History is natural selection. Mutant versions of the past struggle for dominance; new species of fact arise, and old, saurian truths go to the wall, blindfolded and smoking last cigarettes. Only the mutations of the strong survive. The weak, the anonymous, the defeated leave few marks: field-patterns, axe- heads, folk-tales, broken pitchers, burial mounds, the fading memory of their youthful beauty. History loves only those who dominate her: it is a relationship of mutual enslavement. No room in it for Pinkies; or, in Isky's view, for the likes of Omar Khayyam Shakil.

Reborn Alexanders, would-be Olympic champions must con- form to the most stringent of training routines. So after he left Pinkie Aurangzeb, Isky Harappa also vowed to eschew everything else that could erode his spirit. His daughter Arjumand would always remember that that was when he gave up stud poker, chemin de fer, private roulette evenings, horse-race fixing, French food, opium and sleeping pills; when he broke his habit of seeking out beneath silver-heavy banqueting tables the excited ankles and compliant knees of society beauties, and when he stopped visiting the whores whom he had been fond of photographing with an

Shame ? 12!

I

eight millimetre Paillard Bolex movie camera while they per- formed, singly or in threes, upon his own person or that of Omar Khayyam, their musky languid rites. It was the beginning of that legendary political career which would culminate in his victory over death itself. These first triumphs, being merely victories over himself, were necessarily smaller. He expunged from his public, urban vocabulary his encyclopaedic repertoire of foul green village oaths, imprecations which could detach brim-full cut-glass tum- blers from men's hands and shatter them before they reached the floor. (But when campaigning in the villages he allowed the air to turn green with obscenity once again, understanding the vote- getting powers of the filth.) He stifled for ever the high-pitched giggle of his unreliable playboy self and substituted a rich, full- throated, statesmanlike guffaw. He gave up fooling around with the women servants in his city home.

Did any man ever sacrifice more for his people? He gave up cock-fights, bear-fights, snake-and-mongoose duels; plus disco dancing, and his monthly evenings at the home of the chief film censor, where he had watched special compilations of the juiciest bits excised from incoming foreign films.

He also decided to give up Omar Khayyam Shakil. 'When that degenerate comes to call,' Iskander instructed the gatekeeper, 'just throw the badmash out on his fat bottom and watch him bounce.' Then he retired into the white-and-gilt rococo bedroom at the cool heart of his mansion in 'Defence', an edifice of reinforced cement concrete and stone cladding that resembled a split-level Telefunken radiogram, and sank into meditation.

But, for a long time, surprisingly, Omar Khayyam neither visited nor telephoned his old friend. Forty days passed before the doctor was made aware of the change in his carefree, shame- free world . . .

Who sits at her father's feet while, elsewhere, Pinkie Aurangzeb grows old in an empty house? Arjumand Harappa: thirteen years old and wearing an expression of huge satisfaction, she sits cross- legged on the marble-chip floor of a rococo bedroom, watching

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Isky complete the process of remaking himself; Arjumand, who has not yet acquired the notorious nickname (the 'virgin Iron- pants') that will stick to her for most of her life. She has always known in the precocity of her years that there is a second man inside her father, growing, waiting, and now at last bursting out, while the old Iskander slips rustling and discarded to the floor, a shrivelled snakeskin in a hard diamond of sunlight. So what plea- sure she takes in his transformation, in finally acquiring the father she deserves! 'I did this,' she tells Iskander, 'my wanting it so badly finally made you see.' Harappa smiles at his daughter, pats her hair. 'That happens sometimes.' 'And no more Omar-uncle,' Arjumand adds. 'Good riddance to bad rubbish.'

Arjumand Harappa, the virgin Ironpants, will always be ruled by extremes. Already, at thirteen, she has a gift for loathing; also for adulation. Whom she loathes: Shakil, the fat monkey who has been sitting on her father's shoulders, holding him down in the slime; and also her own mother, Rani in her Mohenjo of bur- rowing owls, the epitome of defeat. Arjumand has persuaded her father to let her live and go to school in the city; and for this father she bears a reverence bordering on idolatry. Now that her wor- ship is at last acquiring an object worthy of itself, Arjumand cannot restrain her joy. 'What things won't you do!' she cries. 'Just wait and see!' Omar Khayyam's absent bulk carries with it the shadows of the past.

Iskander, supine in white-and-gold bed and sunk in frenzied reverie, states with sudden clarity: 'It's a man's world, Arjumand. Rise above your gender as you grow. This is no place to be a woman in.' The rueful nostalgia of these sentences marks the last death-throes of Iskander's love for Pinkie Aurangzeb, but his daughter takes him at his word, and when her breasts begin to swell she will bind them tightly in linen bandages, so fiercely that she blushes with pain. She will come to enjoy the war against her body, the slow provisional victory over the soft, despised flesh . . . but let us leave them there, father and daughter, she already building in her heart that Alexandrine god-myth of Harappa to

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which she will only be able to give free rein after his death, he devising in the councils of his new cleanness the strategies of his future triumph, of his wooing of the age.

Where is Omar Khayyam Shakil? What has become of our peripheral hero? He has aged, too; like Pinkie, he's in his middle forties now. Age has treated him well, silvering his hair and goatee beard. Let us remind ourselves that he was a brilliant student in his day, and that scholarly brightness remains undimmed; lecher and rakehell he may be, but he is also the top man at the city's leading hospital, and an immunologist of no small international renown. In the time since we last knew him well he has travelled to American seminars, published papers on the possibility of psycho- somatic events occurring within the body's immune system, becoming an important chap. He is still fat and ugly, but he dresses now with some distinction; some of Isky's snappy sarto- rial ways have rubbed off on him. Omar Khayyam wears greys: grey suits, hats, ties, grey suede shoes, grey silk underpants, as if he hopes that the muteness of the colour will tone down the garish effect of his physiognomy. He carries a present from his friend Iskander: a silver-headed swordstick from the Aansu valley, twelve inches of polished steel concealed in intricately- carved walnut.

By this time he is sleeping for barely two and a half hours a night, but the dream of falling off the world's end still troubles him from time to time. Sometimes it comes to him when he is awake, because people who sleep too little can find the boundaries between the waking and sleeping worlds get difficult to police. Things skip between the unguarded bollards, avoiding the cus- toms post ... at such times he is assailed by a terrible vertigo, as if he were on top of a crumbling mountain, and then he leans heavily on his sword-concealing cane to prevent himself from falling. It should be said that his professional success, and his friendship with Iskander Harappa, have had the effect of reducing the frequency of these giddy spells, of keeping our hero's feet a little more firmly on the ground. But still the dizziness comes,

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now and then, to remind him how close he is, will always be, to the edge.

But where has he got to? Why does he not telephone, visit, get bounced out on his behind? � I discover him in Q., in the fortress home of his three mothers, and at once I know that a disaster has taken place, because nothing else could have lured Omar Khayyam into the mother country once again. He has not visited 'Nishapur' since the day he left with his feet on a cooling ice- block; bankers' drafts have been sent in his stead. His money has paid for his absence . . . but there are other prices, too. And no escape is final. His willed severance from his past mingles with the chosen insomnia of his nights: their joint effect is to glaze his moral sense, to transform him into a kind of ethical zombie, so that his very act of distancing helps him to obey his mothers' ancient injunction: the fellow feels no shame.

He retains his mesmeric eyes, his level hypnotist's voice. For many years now Iskander Harappa has accompanied those eyes, that voice to the Intercontinental Hotel and allowed them to go to work on his behalf. Omar Khayyam's outsize ugliness, com- bined with eyes-and-voice, makes him attractive to white women of a certain type. They succumb to his flirtatious offers of hyp- nosis, his unspoken promises of the mysteries of the East; he takes them to a rented hotel suite and puts them under. Released from admittedly scanty inhibitions they provide Isky and Omar with some highly charged sex. Shakil defends his behaviour: 'Impos- sible to persuade a subject to do anything she is unwilling to do.' Iskander Harappa, however, has never bothered with excuses . . . this, too, is a part of what Isky - as yet unbeknownst to Omar Khayyam � has forsaken. For History's sake.

Omar Khayyam is in 'Nishapur' because his brother, Babar, is dead. The brother whom he has never seen, dead before his twenty-third birthday, and all that is left of him is a bundle of dirty notebooks, which Omar Khayyam will bring with him when he returns to Karachi after the forty days of mourning. A brother reduced to tattered, scribbled words. Babar has been shot, and the order to fire was given by ... but no, the notebooks first:

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When they brought his body down from the Impossible Moun- tains, smelling of corruption and goats, the notebooks they dis- covered in his pockets were returned to his family with many of their pages missing. Among the tattered remnants of these brutal- ized volumes it was possible to decipher a series of love-poems addressed to a famous playback singer whom he, Babar Shakil, could not possibly have met. And interspersed with the unevenly metrical expressions of this abstract love, in which hymns to the spirituality of her voice mingled uneasily with free verse of a dis- tinctly pornographic sensuality, was to be found an account of his sojourn in an earlier hell, a record of the torment of having been the kid brother of Omar Khayyam.

The shade of his elder sibling had haunted every corner of 'Nishapur'. Their three mothers, who now subsisted on the doctor's remittances and had no more dealings with the pawn- broker, had conspired in their gratitude to make Babar's child- hood a motionless journey through an unchanging shrine whose walls were impregnated by applause for the glorious, departed elder son. And because Omar Khayyam was so much his senior and had long since fled that provincial dustiness in whose streets, nowadays, drunken gas-field workers brawled desultorily with ofF- duty miners of coal, bauxite, onyx, copper and chrome, and over whose rooftops the cracked dome of Flashman's Hotel presided with ever-increasing mournfulness, the younger child, Babar, had the feeling of having been at once oppressed and abandoned by a second father; and in that household of women atrophied by yes- terdays he celebrated his twentieth birthday by carrying examina- tion certificates and gold medals and newspaper cuttings and old schoolbooks and files of letters and cricket bats and, in short, all the souvenirs of his illustrious sibling into the shadowed lightless- ness of the central compound, and setting fire to the whole lot before his three mothers could stop him. Turning his back on the inglorious spectacle of old crones scrabbling amongst hot ashes for the charred corners of snapshots and for medallions which the fire had transmuted from gold into lead, Babar made his way via the

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dumb-waiter into the streets of Q., his anniversary thoughts slow with uncertainties about the future. He was wandering aimlessly, brooding upon the narrowness of his possibilities, when the earth- quake began.

At first he mistook it for a shudder within his own body, but a blow to his cheek, inflicted by a tiny splinter of plunging sharp- ness, cleared the mists of self-absorption from the would-be poet's eyes. 'It's raining glass,' he thought in surprise, blinking rapidly at the lanes of the thieves' bazaar into which his feet had led him without knowing it, lanes of little shanty-stalls among which his supposed inner shudder was making a fine mess: melons burst at his feet, pointy slippers fell from trembling shelves, gemstones and brocades and earthenware and combs tumbled pell-mell into the glass-dusted alleys. He stood stupidly in that vitreous downpour of broken windows, unable to shake off the feeling of having imposed his private turmoils on the world around him, resisting the insane compulsion to seize hold of someone, anyone, in the milling, panicky crowd of pickpockets, salesmen and shoppers, to apologize for the trouble he had caused.

'That earthquake,' Babar Shakil wrote in his notebook, 'shook something loose inside me. A minor tremor, but maybe it also shook something into place.'

When the world was still again he made for a cheap brandy den, picking his way through fragments of glass and past the equally piercing howls of the proprietor; and as he entered (the notebooks stated) he caught sight through the corner of his left eye of a winged and golden-glowing man looking down on him from a rooftop; but when he twisted his head upwards the angel was no longer to be seen. Later, when he was in the moun- tains with the separatist tribal guerrillas, he was told the story of the angels and the earthquakes and the subterranean Paradise; their belief that the golden angels were on their side gave the guerrillas an unshakeable certainty of the justice of their cause, and made it easy for them to die for it. 'Separatism,' Babar wrote, 'is the belief that you are good enough to escape from the clutches of hell.'

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Babar Shakil spent his birthday getting drunk in that den of broken bottles, picking out, more than once, long splinters of glass from his mouth, so that by the evening's end his chin was streaked with blood; but the splashing liquor disinfected the cuts and mini- mized the risk of tetanus. In the brandy shop: tribals, a wall-eyed whore, travelling jokers with drums and horns. The jokes grew louder as the night wore on, and the mixture of humour and booze was a cocktail that gave Babar a hangover of such colossal proportions that he never recovered from it.

What jokes! Hee-hee-what-you-talking-man-someone-will- hear ribaldry: � Listen, yaar, you know when children get cir- cumcised the circumciser speaks holy words? � Yah, man, I know. - Then what did he say when he did the cut on Old Razor Guts? � I don't know, what what? �Just one word only, yaar, one word and he got thrown out of the house! � God, must have been a bad word, man, come on, tell. - This was it, sir: 'Oops.'

Babar Shakil in a dangerous veil of brandy. Comedy enters his bloodstream, effects a permanent mutation. � Hey mister, you know what they say about us tribals, too little patriotism and too much sex-drive, well, it's all true, want to know why? � Yes. � So take patriotism. Number one, government takes our rice for Army troops, we should be proud, na, but we just complain there is none for us. Number two, government mines our minerals and economy gets a boost, but we just beef that nobody here sees the cash. Number three, gas from Needle now provides sixty per cent of national requirement, but still we are not happy, moaning all the time how the gas is not domestically available in these parts. Now how could people be less patriotic, you must agree. But for- tunately our government loves us still, so much that it has made our sex-drive the top national priority. � How's that? � But it is obvious to see: this government is happy to go on screwing us from now till doomsday.

� O, too good, yaar, too good.

The next day Babar left home before dawn to join the guerrillas and his family never saw him alive again. From the bottomless chests of'Nishapur' he took an old rifle and its accompanying car-

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tridge boxes, a few books and one of Omar Khayyam's academic medallions, which had been transmuted into base metal by a fire; no doubt to remind himself of the causes of his own act of sepa- ratism, of the origins of a hatred which had been powerful enough to cause an earthquake. In his hideout in the Impossible Moun- tains Babar grew a beard, studied the complex structure of the hill clans, wrote poetry, rested between raids on military outposts and railway lines and water reservoirs, and eventually, thanks to the exigencies of that dislocated existence, was able to discuss in his notebooks the relative merits of copulation with sheep and with goats. There �were guerrillas who preferred the passivity of sheep; for others the goats' greater friskiness was impossible to resist. Many of Babar's companions went so far as to fall in love with four-legged mistresses, and although they were all wanted men they would risk their lives in the bazaars of Q. in order to pur- chase gifts for their loved ones: combs for fleeces were acquired, also ribbons and bells for darling nannies who never deigned to express their gratitude. Babar's spirit (if not his body) rose above such things; he poured his reservoir of unspent passion over the mental image of a popular singer of whose features he remained ignorant to his dying day, because he had only heard her sing on a crackling transistor radio.

The guerrillas gave Babar a nickname of which he was inordi- nately proud: they called him 'the emperor', in memory of that other Babar whose throne was usurped, who took to the hills with a ragged army and who at last founded that renowned dynasty of monarchs whose family name is still used as an honorific title bestowed on film tycoons. Babar, the Mogul of the Impossible Mountains . . . two days before the departure of Raza Hyder from Q., a sortie led for the last time by the great commander himself was responsible for firing the bullet which knocked Babar down.

But it didn't matter, because he had spent too long with the angels; up in the shifting, treacherous mountains he had watched them, golden-breasted and with gilded wings. Archangels flapped over his head as he sat doing sentry duty on a fierce outcrop of

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rock. Yes, perhaps Jibreel himself had hovered benignly over him like a golden helicopter while he violated a sheep. And shortly before his death the guerrillas noticed that their bearded comrade's skin had begun to give off a yellow light; the little buds of new wings were visible on his shoulders. It was a transformation familiar to the denizens of the Impossible Mountains. 'You won't be here much longer,' they told Babar with traces of envy in their voices, 'Emperor, you're off; no more woolly fucks for you.' The angeling of Babar must have been just about complete by the time of his death, when his guerrilla unit attacked a seemingly broken- down goods train and so fell into Raza Hyder's trap, because although eighteen bullets pierced his body, which made an easy target because it glowed yellow through his clothing in the night, it was easy for him to skip out of his skin and soar lucent and winged into the eternity of the mountains, where a great cloud of seraphs rose up as the world shook and roared, and where to the music of heavenly reed-flutes and celestial seven-stringed sarandas and three-stringed dumbirs he was received into the elysian bosom of the earth. His body, when they brought it down, was said to be as insubstantial and feathery as an abandoned snakeskin, such as cobras and playboys leave behind them when they change; and he was gone, gone for good, the fool.

Of course his death was not described in any notebook; it was enacted within the grieving imaginations of his three mothers, because, as they told Omar while recounting the tale of their son's transformation into an angel, 'We have the right to present him with a good death, a death with which the living can live.' Under the impact of the tragedy, Chhunni, Munnee and Bunny began to crumble inside, becoming mere facades, beings as insubstantial as the sloughed-off corpse of their son. (But they pulled themselves together at the end.)

The body was returned to them some weeks after eighteen bullets had entered it. They also received a letter on official notepaper. 'Only the memory of the former prestige of your family name protects you from the consequences of your son's great infamy. It is our opinion that the families of these gangsters

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have much to answer for.' The letter had been signed, before his departure, by the former governor, Raza Hyder himself; who must therefore have known that he had engineered the death of the boy whom he had seen, years previously, watching him through field-glasses from the upper windows of the sealed man- sion between the Cantt and the bazaar.

Out of pity for Omar Khayyam Shakil � to spare, let us say, his blushes - I shall not describe the scene at the gate of the Harappa town house that took place when the doctor finally turned up in a taxi-cab holding his brother's notebooks in his hand. He has been bounced in enough dirt for the moment; suffice to say that under the cold weight of Iskander's rejection, Omar Khayyam suffered an attack of vertigo so severe that he was sick in the back of the taxi. (Over that, too, I draw a fastidious veil.) Once again others had acted and by so doing had shaped the story of his life: Babar's flight, Hyder's bullets, the exaltation of Mir Harappa and the resulting alteration in Iskander added up, as far as our hero was concerned, to a kick in his personal teeth. Later, in his own home (we have not yet visited the Shakil residence: an unglamorous apartment in one of the city's older housing zones, four rooms notable for the complete absence of all but the most essential items of furniture, as though Shakil in his adulthood were rebelling against the fantasticated clutter of his mothers' home, and choosing, instead, the bare-walled asceticism of his selected father, the vanished, birdcaged schoolteacher Eduardo Rodrigues. A father is both a warning and a lure), which he had been obliged by the outraged taxi-driver to reach stinking and on foot, he retired to bed, heat-drained, his head still spinning; he placed a bundle of tattered notebooks on his bedside table and said as he drifted into sleep: 'Babar, life is long.'

The next day he returned to �work; and the day after that he began to fall in love.

Once upon a time there was a plot of land. It was attractively situ- ated in the heart of the First Phase of the Defense Services Offi-

I

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cers' Co-operative Housing Society; to its right stood the official residence of the national minister for education, information and tourism, an imposing building whose walls were clad in green onyx marble streaked with red, and to its left was the home of the widow of the late Joint Chief of Staff, Marshal Aurangzeb. Despite location and neighbours, however, the plot of land remained empty; no foundations had been dug there, no shuttering raised to build walls of reinforced cement concrete. The plot of land lay, tragically for its owner, in a small hollow; so that when the two days of pouring rain which the city enjoyed each year arrived, the waters flooded into the empty plot and formed a muddy lake. This unusual phenomenon of a lake which came into being for two days a year and which was then boiled away by the sun, leaving behind a thin mulch of water-transported garbage and faeces, was enough to discourage all potential builders, even though the plot was, as stated above, congenially sited: the Aga Khan owned the lodge at the top of the nearby hill, and the eldest son of the President, Field-Marshal Mohammad A., also lived nearby. It was on this hapless patch of earth that Pinkie Aurangzeb decided to raise turkeys.

Deserted by living lover as well as dead husband, the Marshal's widow elected to turn her hand to business. Much taken by the success of the new shaver-chicken scheme which the national air- line had recently begun to operate from batteries on the periphery of the airport, Pinkie decided to go for bigger birds. The officers of the housing society were incapable of resisting Mrs Aurangzeb's allure (it might have been fading, but it was still too much for clerks), and turned blind eyes to the clouds of gobbling fowls which she released into the vacant, walled-in property. The arrival of the turkeys was treated by Mrs Bilquis Hyder as a personal insult. A highly-strung lady, of whom it was said that troubles in her marriage were placing her brain under increasing stress, she took to leaning out of windows and abusing the noisy birds. 'Shoo! Shut up, crazy fellows! Turkeys making God knows what- all racket right next to a minister's house! See if I don't slit your throats!'

Shame, Good News and the Virgin � 139

When Bilquis appealed to her husband to do something about the eternally gobbling birds who were destroying what remained of her peace of mind, Raza Hyder replied calmly, 'She is the widow of our great Marshal, wife. Allowances must be made.' The minister for education, information and tourism was tired at the end of a hard day's work in which he had approved measures which would legalize the piracy by the government of Western scientific text-books, personally supervised the smashing of one of the small portable presses on which anti-state propaganda was illicitly printed and which had been discovered in the basement of an England-returned arts graduate who had been corrupted by foreign ideas, and discussed with the city's leading art dealers the growing problem of pilferage of antiquities from the country's archaeological sites � discussed the issue, one should add, with such sensitivity that the dealers had been moved to present him, in recognition of his attitude, with a small stone head from Taxila, dating from the time of Alexander the Great's expedition into the north. In short, Raza Hyder was in no mood for turkeys.

Bilquis had not forgotten what a fat man had hinted about her husband and Mrs Aurangzeb on the verandah of Mohenjo years ago; she remembered the time when her husband had been willing to stake himself to the ground on her behalf; and she was also, in her thirty-second year, becoming increasingly shrill. That was the year in which the Loo blew more fiercely than ever before, and cases of fever and madness increased by four hundred and twenty per cent . . . Bilquis placed her hands upon her hips and yelled at Raza in the presence of both her daughters: 'O, a fine day for me! Now you humiliate me with birds.' Her elder daughter, the mental case, began to blush, because it was evident that the gobbling turkeys did indeed represent one more victory for Pinkie Aurangzeb over other men's wives, the last such vic- tory, of which the victor was wholly unaware.

And once upon a time there was a retarded daughter, who for twelve years had been given to understand that she embodied her mother's shame. Yes, now I must come to you, Sufiya Zinobia, in your outsize cot with the rubber sheeting, in that ministerial resi-

Shame ? 140

dence of marble walls, in an upstairs bedroom through whose windows turkeys gobbled at you, while at a dressing table of onyx marble your sister screamed at the ayah to pull her hair.

Sufiya Zinobia at the age of twelve had formed the unattractive habit of tearing her hair. When her dark-brown locks were being washed by Shahbanou the Parsee ayah, she would continually kick and scream; the ayah was always forced to give up before the last of the soap had been rinsed out. The constant presence of sandalwood-scented detergent gave Sufiya Zinobia an appalling case of split ends, and she would sit in the enormous cot which her parents had constructed for her (and which they had brought all the way from Q., complete with expanses of rubber undersheets and large-size babies' comforters) and tear each dam- aged hair in two, all the way down to the root. This she did seriously, systematically, as if inflicting ritual injury upon herself like one of Iskander Harappa's bedbugs, the Shia dervishes in the processions of IO Muharram. Her eyes, while she worked, acquired a dull glint, a gleam of distant ice or fire from far below their habitually opaque surface; and the torn cloud of hairs stood out around her face and formed in the sunlight a kind of halo of destruction.

It was the day after the turkey outburst of Bilquis Hyder. Sufiya Zinobia tore her hair in her cot; but Good News, plain-faced as a chapati, was determined to prove that her great thick mane had grown long enough to sit upon. Straining her head backwards she shouted at pale Shahbanou: 'Pull down! Hard as you can! What're you waiting for, stupid? Yank!' � and the ayah, hollow-eyed, frail, tried to tuck hair-tips under Good News's bony rump. Tears of pain stood in the girl's determined eyes: 'A woman's beauty,' Good News gasped, 'grows down from the top of her head. It is well known that men go crazy for shiny hair that you can put under your bums.' Shahbanou in flat tones stated: 'No good, bibi, won't go.' Good News pummelling the ayah turned on her sister in her wrath: 'You. Thing. Look at you. Who would marry you with that hair, even if you had a brain? Turnip. Beetroot. Angrez radish. See how you make trouble for me with your tearing. Elder

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sister should marry first but who will come for her, ayah? I swear, my tragedy, what do you know. Come on now, pull again, this time don't pretend it won't reach - no, never mind that fool now, leave her with her stinky blushes and her wetting. She doesn't understand, what could she understand, zero.' And Shahbanou, shrugging, impervious to Naveed Hyder's blows: 'You shouldn't talk so bad to your sister, bibi, one day your tongue will go black and fall off.'

Two sisters in a room while outside the hot wind begins to blow. Shutters are put up against the wildness of the blast, and over the garden wall turkeys panic in the feverish clutches of the gale. As the Loo increases in fury, the house subsides into sleep. Shahbanou on a mat on the floor beside Sufiya Zinobia's cot; Good News, exhausted by hair-pullery, sprawls on her ten-year- old's bed.

Two sisters asleep: in repose, the younger girl's face revealed its plainness, stripped of its waking determination to be attractive; while the simpleton lost, in sleep, the bland vacuity of her expres- sion, and the severe classicism of her features would have pleased any watching eye. What contrasts in these girls! Sufiya Zinobia, embarrassingly small (no, we shall avoid, at all costs, comparing her to an Oriental miniature), and Good News rangy, elongated. Sufiya and Naveed, shame and good news: the one slow and silent, the other quick with her noise. Good News would stare brazenly at her elders; Sufiya averted her eyes. But Naveed Hyder was her mother's little angel, she got away with everything. 'Imagine,' Omar Khayyam would think in later years, 'if that mar- riage scandal had happened to Sufiya Zinobia! They'd have cut her skin off and sent it to the dhobi.'

Listen: you could have taken the whole quantity of sisterly love inside Good News Hyder, sealed it in an envelope and posted it anywhere in the world for one rupee airmail, that's how much it weighed . . . where was I? Oh, yes, the hot wind blew, its howl a maw of sound that swallowed all other noise, that dry gale bearing disease and madness upon its sand-sharp wings, the worst Loo in living memory, releasing demons into the world, forcing its way

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Shame ? 142

through shutters to plague Bilquis with the insupportable phan- toms of her past, so that although she buried her head under a pillow she still saw before her eyes a golden equestrian figure car- rying a pennant on which there flamed the terrifyingly cryptic word Excelsior. Not even the gobbling of the turkeys could be heard above the gale, as the world took shelter; then the searing fingers of the wind penetrated a bedroom in which two sisters slept, and one of them began to stir.

It's easy to blame trouble on a wind. Maybe that pestilential blast did have something to do with it � maybe, when it touched Sufiya Zinobia, she reddened under its awful hand, she burned, and maybe that's why she got up, eyes blank as milk, and left the room � but I prefer to believe that the wind was no more than a coincidence, an excuse; that what happened happened because twelve years of unloved humiliation take their toll, even on an idiot, and there is always a point at which something breaks, even though the last straw cannot be identified with any certainty: was it Good News's marriage worries? Or Raza's calmness in the face of shrieking Bilquis? Impossible to say.

She must have been sleepwalking, because when they found her she looked rested, as if she'd had a good deep sleep. When the wind died and the household awoke from its turbulent after- noon slumber Shahbanou noticed the empty cot at once and raised the alarm. Afterwards nobody could work out how the girl had escaped, how she managed to sleepwalk through an entire houseful of government furniture and sentries. Shahbanou would always say that it must have been quite a wind, it sent soldiers to sleep at the gate and wrought a somnambulist miracle of such potency that Sufiya Zinobia's passage through the house, into the garden and over the wall acquired the power of infecting anyone she passed, who must have fallen instantly into a wind-sick trance. But it is my opinion that the source of the power, the worker of the miracle, was Sufiya Zinobia herself; there would be other such occasions, when one could not blame the wind . . .

They found her in the aftermath of the Loo, sitting fast asleep under the sun's ferocity in the turkey-yard of the widow Aurang-

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zeb, a little huddled figure snoring gently amidst the corpses of the birds. Yes, they were all dead, every one of the two hundred and eighteen turkeys of Pinkie's loneliness, and people were so shocked that they forgot to clear away the corpses for a whole day, leaving the dead birds to rot in the heat and in the crepuscular gloom of the evening and beneath the ice-hot stars, two hundred and eighteen that would never find their way into ovens or on to dining tables. Sufiya Zinobia had torn off their heads and then reached down into their bodies to draw their guts up through their necks with her tiny and weaponless hands. Shahbanou, who found her first, did not dare to approach her; then Raza and Bilquis arrived, and soon everybody, sister, servants, neighbours, was standing and gaping at the spectacle of the bloodied girl and the decapitated creatures with intestines instead of heads. Pinki Aurangzeb looked hollowly upon the carnage, and was struck by the meaningless hatred in Bilquis's eyes; the two women remained silent, each in the grip of a different horror, so that it was Raza Hyder, his watery black-rimmed eyes riveted upon the face of his daughter with her bloodied lips, who spoke first in a voice echoing with admiration as well as revulsion: 'With her bare hands,' the new government minister trembled, 'what gave the child such strength?'

Now that the iron hoops of the silence had been snapped Shah- banou the ayah began wailing at the top of her voice: 'Ullu-ullu- ullu!', a gibberish lament of such high pitch that it dragged Sufiya Zinobia out of her lethal sleep; she opened those eyes of watered milk and on seeing the devastation around her she fainted, echoing her own mother on that far-off day when Bilquis found herself naked in a crowd and passed out cold for shame.

What forces moved that sleeping three-year-old mind in its twelve-year-old body to order an all-out assault upon feathered turkey-cocks and hens? One can only speculate: was Sufiya Zinobia trying, like a good daughter, to rid her mother of the gobbler plague? Or did the anger, the proud outrage which Raza Hyder ought to have felt, but refused to do so, preferring to make allowances for Pinkie, find its way into his daughter

'1'

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instead? - What seems certain is that Sufiya Zinobia, for so long burdened with being a miracle-gone-wrong, a family's shame made flesh, had discovered in the labyrinths of her unconscious self the hidden path that links sharam to violence; and that, awak- ening, she was as surprised as anyone by the force of what had been unleashed.

The beast inside the beauty. Opposing elements of a fairy-tale combined in a single character . . . Bilquis did not, on this occa- sion, faint. The embarrassment of her daughter's deed, the ice of this latest shame lent a frozen rigidity to her bearing. 'Be quiet,' she ordered the ululating ayah, 'go in and bring out scissors.' Until the ayah had completed her enigmatic errand Bilquis would let nobody touch the girl; she circled her in a manner so forbidding that not even Raza Hyder dared go near. While Shahbanou ran for scissors Bilquis spoke softly, under her breath, so that only a few words wafted as far as the watching husband, widow, younger daughter, servants, anonymous passers-by. '. . . Tear your hair . . . birthright . . . woman's pride ... all fuzzy-wuzzy like a hubshee female . . . cheapness . . . loose . . . crazy,' and then the scissors came, and still nobody dared intervene, as Bilquis grabbed hold of great clumps of her daughter's savaged tresses, and cut, and cut, and cut. At last she stood up, out of breath, and working the scis- sors absently with her fingers she turned away. Sufiya Zinobia's head looked like a cornfield after a fire; sad, black stubble, a cata- strophic desolation wrought by maternal rage. Raza Hyder picked his daughter up with a gentleness born of his infinite puzzlement and carried her indoors, away from the scissors that were still snip- ping at air in Bilquis's uncontrollable hand.

Scissors cutting air mean trouble in the family.

'O, Mummy!' Good News giggled with fear. 'What did you do? She looks like . . .'

'We always wanted a boy,' Bilquis replied, 'but God knows best.'

In spite of being shaken, timidly by Shahbanou and more roughly by Good News, Sufiya Zinobia did not awaken from her faint. By

Shame, Good News and the Virgin � 145

the next evening a fever had mounted in her, a hot flush spread from her scalp to the soles of her feet. The fragile-looking Parsee ayah, whose sunken eyes made her seem forty-three years old but who turned out to be only nineteen, never moved from the side of the great barred cot except to fetch fresh cold compresses for Sufiya's brow. 'You Parsees,' Good News told Shahbanou, 'you've got a soft spot for mental cases, seems to me. Must be all your experience.' Bilquis showed no interest in the application of compresses. She sat in her room with the scissors that seemed to be stuck to her fingers, snipping at empty air. 'Wind fever,' Shah- banou called her charge's nameless affliction, which had made that shorn head blaze; but on the second night it cooled, she opened her eyes, it was thought that she had recovered. The next morning, however, Shahbanou noticed that something frightful had begun to happen to the girl's tiny body. It had started to come out in huge blotchy rashes, red and purple with small hard pimples in the middle; boils were forming between her toes and her back was bubbling up into extraordinary vermilion lumps. Sufiya Zinobia was over-salivating; great jets of spittle flew out through her lips. Appalling black buboes were forming in her armpits. It was as though the dark violence which had been engendered within that small physique had turned inwards, had forsaken turkeys and gone for the girl herself; as if, like her grandfather Mahmoud the Woman who sat in an empty cinema and waited to pay for his double bill, or like a soldier falling on his sword, Sufiya Zinobia had chosen the form of her own end. The plague of shame - in which I insist on including the unfelt shame of those around her, for instance what had not been felt by Raza Hyder when he gunned down Babar Shakil - as well as the unceasing shame of her own existence, and of her hacked-off hair - the plague, I say, spread rapidly through that tragic being whose chief defining characteristic was her excessive sensitivity to the bacilli of humiliation. She was taken to hospital with pus bursting from her sores, dribbling, incontinent, with the rough, cropped proof of her mother's loathing on her head.

Shame ? 146

What is a saint? A saint is a person who suffers in our stead.

On the night when all this happened, Omar Khayyam Shakil had been beset, during his brief sleep, by vivid dreams of the past, in all of which the white-clothed figure of the disgraced teacher Eduardo Rodrigues played a leading role. In the dreams Omar Khayyam was a boy again. He kept trying to follow Eduardo everywhere, to the toilet, into bed, convinced that if he could just catch up with the teacher he would be able to jump inside him and be happy at long last; but Eduardo kept shooing him away with his white fedora, slapping at him and motioning to him to go, get lost, buzz off. This mystified the doctor until many days later, when he realized that the dreams had been prescient warn- ings against the dangers of falling in love with under-age females and then following them to the ends of the earth, where they inevitably cast you aside, the blast of their rejection picks you up and hurls you out into the great starry nothingness beyond gravity and sense. He recalled the end of the dream, in which Eduardo, his white garments now blackened and tattered and singed, seemed to be flying away from him, floating above a bursting cloud of fire, with one hand raised above his head, as if in farewell ... a father is a warning; but he is also a lure, a precedent impos- sible to resist, and so by the time that Omar Khayyam deciphered his dreams it was already far too late to take their advice, because he had fallen for his destiny, Sufiya Zinobia Hyder, a twelve-year- old girl with a three-year-old mind, the daughter of the man who killed his brother.

You can imagine how depressed I am by the behaviour of Omar Khayyam Shakil. I ask for the second time: what kind of hero is this? Last seen slipping into unconsciousness, stinking of vomit and swearing revenge; and now, going crazy for Hyder's daughter. How is one to account for such a character? Is consistency too much to ask? I accuse this so-called hero of giving me the most Godawful headache.

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Certainly (let's take this slowly; no sudden moves, please) he was in a disturbed state of mind. A dead brother, rejection by his best friend. These are extenuating circumstances. We shall take them into account. It is also fair to assume that the vertigo which assailed him in the taxi returned, over the next few days, to knock him even further off balance. So there is some sort of flimsy case for the defence.

Step by step, now. He wakes up, engulfed in the emptiness of his life, alone in the insomnia of the dawn. He washes, dresses, goes to work; and finds that by burying himself in his duties he can manage to keep going; even the vertigo attacks are kept at bay.

What is his area of expertise? We know this: he is an immu- nologist. So he cannot be blamed for the arrival at his hos- pital of Hyder's daughter; suffering an immunological crisis, Sufiya Zinobia is brought to the country's leading expert in the field.

Carefully, now. Avoid loud noises. To an immunologist in search of the calm that comes of challenging, absorbing work, Sufiya Zinobia seems like a godsend. Delegating as many of his responsibilities as possible, Omar Khayyam devotes himself more or less full-time to the case of the simpleton girl whose body's defence mechanisms have declared war against the very life they are supposed to be protecting. His devotion is perfectly genuine (the defence refuses to rest): in the succeeding weeks, he makes himself fully acquainted with her medical background, and after- wards he will set down in his treatise The Case of Miss H. the important new evidence he has unearthed of the power of the mind to affect, 'via direct nervous pathways', the workings of the body. The case becomes famous in medical circles; doctor and patient are forever linked in the history of science. Does this make other, more personal links more palatable? I reserve judgement. Go on one step:

He becomes convinced that Sufiya Zinobia is willing the damage upon herself. This is the significance of her case: it shows that even a broken mind is capable of marshalling macrophages and polymorphs; even a stunted intelligence can lead a palace

Shame ? 148

revolution, a suicidal rebellion of the janissaries of the human body against the castle itself.

'Total breakdown of the immune system,' he notes after his first examination of the patient, 'most terrible uprising I ever saw.'

Now let us put this as kindly as possible for the moment. (I have more accusations, but they will wait.) Afterwards, no matter how furiously he concentrates, trying to summon up every last detail of those days from the poisoned wells of memory, he is unable to pinpoint the moment at which professional excite- ment turned into tragic love. He does not claim that Sufiya Zinobia has given him the least encouragement; that would, in the circumstances, be patently absurd. But at some point, perhaps during his night-long bedside vigils, spend monitoring the effects of his prescribed course of immunosuppressive drugs, vigils in which he is joined by the ayah Shahbanou, who consents to wear sterile cap, coat, gloves and mask, but who absolutely refuses to leave the girl alone with the male doctor � yes, perhaps during those preposterously chaperoned nights, or possibly later, when it is clear that he has triumphed, that the praetorian revolt has been quelled, the mutiny suppressed by pharmaceutical mercenaries, so that the hideous outcrops of Sufiya Zinobia's affliction fade from her body and the colour returns to her cheeks - somewhere along the line, it happens. Omar Khayyam falls stupidly, and irretriev- ably, in love.

'It's not rational,' he reproaches himself, but his emotions, unscientifically, ignore him. He finds himself behaving awkwardly in her presence, and in his dreams he pursues her to the ends of the earth, while the mournful remnant of Eduardo Rodrigues looks down pityingly at his obsession from the sky. He, too, thinks of the extenuating circumstances, tells himself that in his distressed psychological condition he has become the victim of a mental disorder, but he is too ashamed even to think of taking advice . . . no, damn it! Headache or no headache, I will not let him get off as lightly as this. I accuse him of being ugly inside as well as out, a Beast, just as Farah Zoroaster had divined all those years ago. I accuse him of playing God or at least Pygmalion,

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of feeling he had rights of ownership over the innocent whose life he had saved. I accuse that fat pigmeat tub of working out that the only chance he had of getting a beautiful wife was to marry a nitwit, sacrificing wifely brains for the beauty of the flesh.

Omar Khayyam claims his obsession with Sufiya Zinobia has cured his vertigo. Poppycock! Flim-flam! I accuse the villain of attempting a shameless piece of social climbing (he never felt giddy when he did that!) � ditched by one great figure of the period, Omar Khayyam seeks to hitch himself to another star. So unscrupulous is he, so shameless, that he will court an idiot in order to woo her father. Even a father who gave the order which sent eighteen bullets into the body of Babar Shakil.

But we have heard him mumble: 'Babar, life is long.' - O, I'm not fooled by that. You conceive of a revenge plot? � Omar Khayyam, by marrying the unmarriageable child, is enabled to stay close to Hyder for years, before, during and after his Presidency, biding his time, because revenge is patient, it awaits its perfect moment? � Piffle! Wind! Those sick (and no doubt whisky- soaked) words of a fainting whale were no more than a fading, hollow echo of the favourite threat of Mr Iskander Harappa, our hero's erstwhile patron, fellow-debauchee and chum. Of course he never meant them; he is not the avenging type. Did he feel anything at all for that dead brother whom he never knew? I doubt it; his three mothers, as we shall see, doubted it. This is not a possibility one can take seriously. Revenge? Pah! Huh! Phooey! If Omar Khayyam thought about his brother's demise, it is more likely that he thought this: 'Fool, terrorist, gangster. What did he expect?'

I have one last, and most damning, accusation. Men who deny their pasts become incapable of thinking them real. Absorbed into the great whore-city, having left the frontier universe of Q. far behind him once again, Omar Khayyam Shakil's home-town now seems to him like a sort of bad dream, a fantasy, a ghost. The city and the frontier are incompatible worlds; choosing Karachi, Shakil rejects the other. It becomes, for him, a feathery insubstan-

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tial thing, a discarded skin. He is no longer affected by what happens there, by its logic and demands. He is homeless: that is to say, a metropolitan through and through. A city is a camp for refugees.

God damn him! I'm stuck with him; and with his poxy love.

Very well; let's go on. I've lost another seven years of my story while the headache banged and thumped. Seven years, and now there are marriages to attend. How time flies!

I dislike arranged marriages. There are some mistakes for which one should not be able to blame one's poor parents.

8

Beauty and the Beast

' I ust imagine having a fish up your fundament, an eel that spits at J your insides,' Bilquis said, 'and you won't need me to tell you what happens on a woman's wedding night.' Her daughter Good News submitted to this teasing and to the tracing of henna pat- terns upon the ticklish soles of her feet with the demure obstinacy of one who is guarding a terrible secret. She was seventeen years old and it was the eve of her wedding. The womenfolk of Bariamma's family had assembled to prepare her; while Bilquis applied henna, mother and daughter were surrounded by eager relatives bearing oils for the skin, hairbrushes, kohl, silver polish, flatirons. The mummified figure of Bariamma herself supervised everything blindly from her vantage point of a takht over which a Shirazi rug had been spread in her honour; gaotakia bolsters pre- vented her from toppling over on to the floor when she guffawed at the horrifically off-putting descriptions of married life with which the matrons were persecuting Good News. 'Think of a sikh kabab that leaks hot cooking fat,' Duniyazad Begum suggested, old quarrels bright in her eyes. But the virgins offered more opti- mistic images. 'It's like sitting on a rocket that sends you to the moon,' one maiden conjectured, earning a rocket from Bariamma

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