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for her blasphemy, because the faith clearly stated that lunar expeditions were impossible. The women sang songs insulting Good News's fiance, young Haroun, the eldest son of Little Mir Harappa: 'Face like a potato! Skin like a tomato! Walks like an elephant! Tiny plantain in his pant.' But when Good News spoke up for the first and last time that evening, nobody could think of a single word to say.

'Mummy dear,' Naveed said firmly into the scandalized silence, 'I won't marry that stupid potato, you just see if I do.'

Haroun Harappa at twenty-six was already accustomed to noto- riety, because during the one year he had spent at an Angrez uni- versity he had published an article in the student paper in which he had described the private dungeons at the vast Daro estate into which his father would fling people for years on end. He had also written about the punitive expedition which Mir Harappa once led against the household of his cousin Iskander, and of the foreign bank account (he gave the number) into which his father was transferring large quantities of public money. The article was reprinted in Newsweek, so that the authorities back home had to intercept the entire shipment of that subversive issue and rip out the offending pages from every copy; but still the contents became common knowledge. When Haroun Harappa was expelled from his college at the end of that year, on the grounds that after three terms studying economics he had failed to master the concepts of supply and demand, it was generally supposed that he had written his article out of a genuine and innocent stupidity, hoping, no doubt, to impress the foreigners with his family's acumen and power. It was known that he had spent his university career almost exclusively in the gaming clubs and whorehouses of London, and the story went that when he entered the examina- tion hall that summer he had glanced at the question paper without sitting down, shrugged, announced cheerfully, 'No, there's nothing here for me,' and strolled out to his Mercedes- Benz coupe without more ado. 'The boy's a dope, I'm afraid,'

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Little Mir told President A., 'no need to take steps against him, I hope. He'll come home and settle down.'

Little Mir made one attempt to persuade Haroun's college to keep him on. A large filigree-silver cigar box was presented to the Senior Common Room. The fellows of the college refused, how- ever, to believe that a man as distinguished as Mir Harappa would try to bribe them, so they accepted the gift and chucked his son out on his ear. Haroun Harappa came home with numerous squash rackets, addresses of Arab princes, whisky decanters, bespoke suits, silk shirts and erotic photographs, but without a for- eign degree.

But the seditious Newsweek article had not been the product of Haroun's stupidity. It had been born of the profound and undying hatred the son felt for his father, a hatred which would even sur- vive Mir Harappa's terrible death. Little Mir had been a sternly authoritarian parent, but that in itself was not unusual and might even have engendered love and respect if it had not been for the matter of the dog. On Haroun's tenth birthday, at Daro, his father had presented him with a large parcel, done up in green ribbon, from which a muffled barking could clearly be heard. Haroun was an inward and only child who had grown fond of solitude; he did not really want the long-haired collie puppy who emerged from the package^ and thanked his father with a perfunctory surliness that irritated Little Mir intensely. In the next few days it became obvious that Haroun intended to leave the dog to be cared for by the servants; whereupon Mir with the foolhardy stubbornness of his irritation issued orders that nobody was to lay a finger on the animal. 'The damn hound is yours,' Mir told the boy, 'so you look after it.' But Haroun was as obstinate as his father, and did not so much as give the puppy a name, so that in the bitter heat of the Daro sunshine the puppy had to forage for its own food and drink, contracted mange, distemper and curious green spots on the tongue, was driven mad by its long hair and finally died in front of the main door to the house, emitting piteous yelps and leaking a thick yellow porridge from its behind. 'Bury it,' Mir told

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Haroun, but the boy set his jaw and walked away, and the slowly decomposing corpse of the unnamed pooch mirrored the growth of the boy's loathing for his father, who was thereafter forever associated in his mind with the stench of the rotting dog.

After that Mir Harappa understood his mistake and went to great lengths to regain his son's affection. He was a widower (Haroun's mother had died in childbirth) and the boy was gen- uinely important to him. Haroun was outrageously spoiled, because although he refused to ask his father for so much as a new vest Mir was always trying to guess what was in the boy's heart, so that Haroun was showered with gifts, including a complete set of cricket equipment comprising six stumps, four bails, twelve sets of pads, twenty-two white flannel shirts and trousers, eleven bats of varying weight and enough red balls to last a lifetime. There were even umpires' white coats and score-books, but Haroun was uninterested in cricket and the lavish present lan- guished, unused, in a forgotten corner of Daro, along with the polo gear, the tent pegs, the imported gramophones and the home-movie camera, projector and screen. When he was twelve the boy learned to ride and after that was to be found gazing long- ingly at the horizon beyond which lay the Mohenjo estate of his uncle Iskander. Whenever he heard that Isky was visiting his ancestral home Haroun would ride without stopping to sit at the feet of the man who ought by rights, he believed, to have been his father. Mir Harappa did not protest when Haroun expressed a wish to move to Karachi; and as he grew up in that mushrooming city Haroun's infatuation with his uncle mushroomed too, so that he began to affect the same dandyism and bad language and admi- ration for European culture that were Isky's trademarks before his great conversion. This was why the young man insisted on being sent to study abroad, and why he passed his time in London engaged in whoring and gambling. After his return he went on in the same way; it had become a habit by then and he was unable to give it up even when his idolized uncle renounced such unstates- manlike activities, so that the gossip in the town was that a little Isky had taken over where the big one left off. Mir Harappa con-

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tinued to foot the bill for his son's outrageous behaviour, still hoping to win back the love of his only progeny; to no avail. Haroun in his habitually intoxicated state began to talk too much, and in loose-mouthed company. He spouted, drunkenly, the revo- lutionary political notions that had been current among European students during his year abroad. He castigated Army rule and the power of oligarchies with all the enthusiastic garrulity of one who despises every word he is saying, but hopes that it will wound his even more detested parent. When he went so far as to mention the possibility of mass-producing Molotov cocktails, none of his cronies took him seriously, because he said it at a beach party while astride the shell of a weeping Galapagos turtle which was dragging itself up to the sand to lay its infertile eggs; but the state informant in the gathering made his or her report, and President A., whose administration had become somewhat rocky, flew into a rage so terrible that Little Mir had to prostrate himself on the floor and beg for mercy for his wayward son. This incident would have forced Mir into a confrontation with Haroun, which he greatly feared, but he was spared the trouble by his cousin Iskander, who had also heard about Haroun's latest outrage. Haroun, summoned to Isky's split-level radiogram of a house, shifted from foot to foot under the brilliantly scornful eyes of Arjumand Harappa while her father spoke in gentle, implacable tones. Iskander Harappa had taken to dressing in green outfits styled by Pierre Cardin to resemble the uniforms of the Chinese Red Guards, because as the Foreign Minister in the government of President A. he had become famous as the architect of a friend- ship treaty with Chairman Mao. A photograph of Isky embracing the great Zedong hung on the wall of the room in which the uncle informed his nephew: 'Your activities are becoming an embarrassment to me. Time you settled down. Take a wife.' Arju- mand Harappa stared furiously at Haroun and obliged him to do as Iskander asked. 'But who?' he inquired lamely, and Isky waved a dismissive hand. 'Some decent girl,' he said, 'plenty to choose from.'

Haroun, realizing that the interview was at an end, turned to

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go. Iskander Harappa called after him: 'And if you're interested in politics you better stop riding sea-turtles and start working for me.'

The transformation of Iskander Harappa into the most pow- erful new force on the political scene was by this time complete. He had set about engineering his rise with all the calculated bril- liance of which Arjumand had always known him to be capable. Concentrating on the high-profile world of international affairs, he had written a series of articles analysing his country's require- ments from the great powers, the Islamic world and the rest of Asia, following these up with an arduous programme of speeches whose arguments proved impossible to resist. When his notion of 'Islamic socialism' and of a close alliance with China had gained such wide public support that he was effectively running the nation's foreign policy without even being a member of the cabinet, President A. had had no option but to invite him into the government. His enormous personal charm, his way of making the plain, bolster-chested wives of visiting world leaders feel like Greta Garbo and his oratorical genius made him an instant hit. 'The thing that satisfies me most,' he told his daughter, 'is that now we've given the go-ahead to the Karakoram road to China, I can have fun kicking around the minister for public works.' The works minister was Little Mir Harappa, his old friendship with the President having failed to outweigh Iskander's public appeal. 'That bastard,' Iskander said to Arjumand with glee, 'is finally under my thumb.'

When the A. regime started losing popularity, Iskander Har- appa resigned and formed the Popular Front, the political party which he funded out of his bottomless wealth and whose first Chairman he became. 'For an ex-foreign minister,' Little Mir told the President sourly, 'your protege seems to be concentrating pretty heavily on the home front.' The President shrugged. 'He knows what he's doing,' said Field-Marshal A., 'unfortunately.'

Rumours of the government's corruption provided the fuel; but Isky's campaign for a return to democracy was perhaps unstoppable anyway. He toured the villages and promised every

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peasant one acre of land and a new water-well. He was put in jail; huge demonstrations secured his release. He screamed in regional dialects about the rape of the country by fat cats and tilyars, and such was the power of his tongue, or perhaps of the sartorial tal- ents of Monsieur Cardin, that nobody seemed to recall Isky's own status as a landlord of a distinctly obese chunk of Sind . . . Iskander Harappa offered Haroun political work in his home district. 'You have anti-corruption credentials,' he told the youth. 'Tell them about the Newsweek article.' Haroun Harappa, offered the golden opportunity of running down his father on their home turf, took the job at once.

'Well, Abba,' he thought happily, 'life is long.'

Two days after Haroun lectured an egg-laying turtle about revolu- tion, Rani Harappa at Mohenjo was telephoned by a male voice so muted, so crippled by apologies and embarrassment that it was a few moments before she recognized it as belonging to Little Mir, with whom she had had no contact since his looting of her home, although his son Haroun had been a regular visitor. 'God damn it, Rani,' Little Mir finally admitted through the spittle- heavy clouds of his humiliation, 'I need a favour.'

Rani Harappa at forty had defeated Iskander's formidable ayah by the simple method of outliving her. The days of irreverently giggling village girls rummaging through her underwear were long past; she had become the true mistress of Mohenjo by dint of the unassailable calm with which she embroidered shawl after shawl on the verandah of the house, persuading the villagers that she was composing the tapestry of their fate, and that if she wished to she could foul up their lives by choosing to sew a bad future into the magical shawls. Having earned respect, Rani was strangely content with her life, and maintained cordial relations with her husband in spite of his long absences from her side and his permanent absence from her bed. She knew all about the end of the Pinkie affair and knew in the secret chambers of her heart that a man embarking on a political career must sooner or later ask his wife to stand beside him on the podium; secure in a future

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which would bring her Isky without her having to do a thing, she discovered without surprise that her love for him had refused to die, but had become, instead, a thing of quietness and strength. This was a great difference between her and Bilquis Hyder: both women had husbands who retreated from them into the enigmatic palaces of their destinies, but while Bilquis sank into eccentricity, not to say craziness, Rani had subsided into a sanity which made her a powerful, and later on a dangerous, human being.

When Little Mir rang, Rani had been looking towards the vil- lage where the white concubines were playing badminton in the twilight. In those days many of the villagers had gone West to work for a while, and those who returned had brought with them white women for whom the prospect of life in a village as a number-two wife seemed to hold an inexhaustibly erotic appeal. The number-one wives treated these white girls as dolls or pets and those husbands who failed to bring home a guddi, a white doll, were soundly berated by their women. The village of the white dolls had become famous in the region. Villagers came from miles around to watch the girls in their neat, clean whites giggling and squealing as they leapt for shuttlecocks and displayed their frilly panties. The number-one wives cheered for their number- twos, taking pride in their victories as in the successes of children, and offering them consolation in defeat. Rani Harappa was deriving such gentle pleasure from observing the dolls at play that she forgot to listen to what Mir was saying. 'Fuck me in the mouth, Rani,' he shouted at last with the fury of his suppressed pride, 'forget our differences. This business is too important. I need a wife, most urgently.'

'I see.'

'Ya Allah. Rani, don't be difficult, for God's sake. Not for me, what do you think, would I ask? For Haroun. It's the only way.'

The desperation with which Little Mir stammered out the need for a good woman to stabilize his wayward son overcame any ini- tial reluctance Rani might have felt, and she said at once, 'Good News.' 'Already?' Little Mir asked, misunderstanding her. 'You women don't waste any time!'

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How a marriage is made: Rani suggested Naveed Hyder, thinking that a wedding in the family would do Bilquis good. By that time the telephone link between the two women was no longer a means by which Rani found out what was going on in the city, no longer an excuse for Bilquis to gossip and condescend while Rani humbly snatched from her friend's conversation what- ever crumbs of life it offered. Now it was Rani who was strong, and Bilquis, her old regal dreams in ruins since Raza's sacking from the government, who needed support, and who found in the unchanging solidity of Rani Harappa the strength to sustain her through her increasingly bewildered days. 'Just what she needs,' Rani thought with satisfaction, 'trousseau, marquees, sweetmeats, too much to think about. And that daughter of hers can't wait to get hitched.'

Little Mir consulted the President before agreeing to the match. The Hyder family had become accident-prone of late: the old rumours from Q. still circulated, and it had not been easy to keep the incident of the dead turkeys out of the papers. But now, in the mountainous coolness of the new northern capital, the President had begun to feel the chilly winds of his unpopularity, and agreed to the marriage, because, he decided, it was time to draw the hero of Aansu close to him again, like a warm blanket or shawl. 'No problem,' A. told Little Mir, 'my congrats to the happy pair.'

Mir Harappa visited Rani at Mohenjo to discuss the details. He rode up stiff with embarrassment and behaved with bad-tempered humility throughout. 'What a father will do for a son!' he burst out at Rani as she sat on the verandah working on the inter- minable shawl of her solitude. 'When my boy is a daddy himself he will know how a daddy feels. I hope this Good News of yours is a fertile girl.'

'Proper sowing ensures a good harvest,' Rani replied serenely. 'Please take some tea.'

Raza Hyder did not object to the betrothal. In those years when his only responsibility was to oversee the intake and training of raw recruits, when the fact of his decline stared him in the face every day, multiplied, replicated in the gawky figures of youths

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who didn't know which end of a bayonet meant business, he had been observing the rise of Iskander Harappa with barely sup- pressed envy. 'The time will come,' he prophesied to himself, 'when I'll have to go begging that guy for an extra pip.' In the turbulent climate of the government's instability Raza Hyder had been wondering which way to jump, whether to come out in support of the Popular Front's demand for elections, or to put what remained of his reputation behind the government in the hope of preferment. The offer of Haroun Harappa for a son-in- law gave him the chance of having it both ways. The match would please the President: that much had been made clear. But Raza also knew of Haroun's hatred for his father, which had placed the boy firmly in Isky Harappa's pocket. 'A foot in both camps,' Raza thought, 'that's the ticket.'

And it is possible that Raza was delighted to be able to get rid of Good News, because she had developed, as she grew, some- thing of the full-mouthed insouciance of the late Sindbad Mengal. Haroun's mouth was also thick and wide, a part of his family inheritance. 'Two fat-lip types,' Raza Hyder told his wife in tones more jovial than he normally used when addressing her, 'made for each other, na? The babies will look like fishes.' Bilquis said, 'Never mind.'

How a marriage is made: I see that I have somehow omitted to mention the views of the young persons concerned. Photographs were exchanged. Haroun Harappa took his brown envelope to his uncle's house and opened it in the presence of Iskander and Arju- mand: there are times when young men turn to their families for support. The monochrome photograph had been artistically retouched to give Good News skin as pink as blotting-paper and eyes as green as ink.

'You can see how he's made her pigtail longer,' Arjumand pointed out.

'Let the boy make up his own mind,' Iskander reproved her, but Arjumand at twenty had conceived a strange dislike of the picture. 'Plain as a plate,' she announced, 'and not so fair-skinned as all that.'

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'It's got to be somebody,' Haroun stated, 'and there's nothing wrong with her.' Arjumand cried, 'How can you just say that? Got eyes in your head or ping-pong balls?' At this point Iskander ordered his daughter to be quiet and told the bearer to bring sweetmeats and celebratory glasses of lime juice. Haroun went on staring at that photograph of Naveed Hyder, and because nothing, not even the paintbrush of a zealous photographer, could mask Good News's unquenchable determination to be beautiful, her fiance was quickly overpowered by the iron will of her celluloid eyes, and began to think her the loveliest bride on earth. This illu- sion, which was entirely the product of Good News's imagina- tion, entirely the result of the action of mind over matter, would survive everything, even the wedding scandal; but it would not survive Iskander Harappa's death.

'What a girl,' said Haroun Harappa, driving Arjumand from the room in disgust.

As for Good News: 'I don't need to look at any stupid photo- graph,' she told Bilquis, 'he's famous, he's rich, he's a husband, let's catch him quick.' 'His reputation is bad,' Bilquis said, as a mother should, offering her daughter the chance to withdraw, 'and he is bad to his daddy.'

'I'll fix him,' Good News replied.

Later, alone with Shahbanou as the ayah brushed her hair, Good News added some further thoughts. 'Hey, you with the eyes at the bottom of a well,' she said, 'you know what marriage is for a woman?'

'I am a virgin,' Shahbanou replied.

'Marriage is power,' Naveed Hyder said. 'It is freedom. You stop being someone's daughter and become someone's mother instead, ek dum, fut-a-fut, pronto. Then who can tell you what to do? � What do you mean,' a terrible notion occurred to her, 'do you think I'm not a virgin also? You shut your dirtyfilthy mouth, with one word I could put you on the street.'

'What are you talking, bibi, I only said.'

'I tell you, how great to be away from this house. Haroun Harappa, I swear. Too good, yaar. Too good.'

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'We are modern people,' Bilquis told her daughter. 'Now that you have accepted you must get to know the boy. It will be a love match.'

Miss Arjumand Harappa, the 'virgin Ironpants', had rejected so many suitors that although she was barely twenty years old the city's matchmakers had already begun to think of her as being on the shelf. The flood of proposals was not entirely, or even pri- marily, the result of her extreme eligibility as the only child of Chairman Iskander Harappa; it had its true source in that extraor- dinary, defiant beauty with which, or so it seemed to her, her body taunted her mind. I must say that of all the beautiful women in that country packed full of improbable lovelies, there is no doubt who took the prize. In spite of bound and still-apple-sized breasts, Arjumand carried off the palm.

Loathing her sex, Arjumand went to great lengths to disguise her looks. She cut her hair short, �wore no cosmetics or perfume, dressed in her father's old shirts and the baggiest trousers she could find, developed a stooped and slouching walk. But the harder she tried, the more insistently her blossoming body outshone her dis- guises. The short hair was luminous, the unadorned face learned expressions of infinite sensuality which she could do nothing to control, and the more she stooped, the taller and more desirable she grew. By the age of sixteen she had been obliged to become expert in the arts of self-defence. Iskander Harappa had never tried to keep her away from men. She accompanied him on his diplo- matic rounds, and at many embassy receptions elderly ambassadors were found clutching their groins and throwing up in the toilet after their groping hands had been answered by a well-aimed knee. By her eighteenth birthday the throng of the city's most coveted bachelors outside the gate of the Harappa house had become so swollen as to constitute an impediment to traffic, and at her own request she was sent away to Lahore to a Christian boarding college for ladies, whose anti-male rules were so severe that even her father could see her only by appointment in a tat-

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tered garden of dying roses and balding lawns. But she found no respite in that prison populated exclusively by females, all of whom she scorned for their gender; the girls fell for her just as hard as the men, and final-year students would clutch at her behind when she passed. One lovelorn nineteen-year-old, despairing of catching Ironpants's eye, pretended to sleepwalk into the empty swimming pool and was removed to hospital with mul- tiple fractures of the skull. Another, crazed by love, climbed out of the college compound and went to sit at a cafe in the famous red- light district of Heeramandi, having decided to become a whore if she could not have Arjumand's heart. This distressed girl was abducted from the cafe by the local pimps, who forced her father, a textile magnate, to pay a ransom of one lakh of rupees for her safe return. She never married, because although the pimps insisted that they had their honour, too, nobody believed she had not been touched, and after a medical inspection the college's devoutly Catholic headmistress absolutely refused to concede that the wretch might have been deflowered upon her antiseptic premises. Arjumand Harappa wrote to her father and asked him to take her away from the college. 'It's no relief,' the letter said. 'I should have known girls would be worse than boys.'

The return from London of Haroun Harappa unleashed a civil war inside the virgin Ironpants. His remarkable physical resem- blance to photographs of her father at twenty-six unnerved Arju- mand, and his fondness for whoring, gambling and other forms of debauchery convinced her that reincarnation was not simply a crazy notion imported by the Hyders from the country of the idolaters. She attempted to suppress the idea that beneath Haroun's dissolute exterior a second great man, almost the equal of her father, lay concealed, and that, with her help, he could dis- cover his true nature, just as the Chairman had . . . refusing even to whisper such things to herself in the privacy of her room, she cultivated in Haroun's presence that attitude of scornful conde- scension which quickly persuaded him that there was no point in his trying where so many others had failed. He was not insensible

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to her fatal beauty, but the reputation of the virgin Ironpants, when combined with that terrible and uninterruptedly disgusted gaze, was enough to send him elsewhere; and then the photo- graph of Naveed Hyder bewitched him, and it was too late for Arjumand to change her approach. Haroun Harappa was the only man, other than her father, whom Arjumand ever loved, and her rage in the days after his betrothal was awful to behold. But Iskander was preoccupied in those days, and failed to pay any attention to the war inside his child.

'God damn,' Arjumand said to her mirror, unconsciously reflecting the former habit of her mother alone in Mohenjo, 'life is shit.'

It was once explained to me by one of the world's Greatest Living Poets � we mere prose scribblers must turn to poets for wisdom, which is why this book is littered with them; there was my friend who hung upside-down and had the poetry shaken out of him, and Babar Shakil, who wanted to be a poet, and I suppose Omar Khayyam, who was named for one but never was � that the classic fable Beauty and the Beast is simply the story of an arranged marriage.

'A merchant is down on his luck, so he promises his daughter to a wealthy but reclusive landowner, Beast Sahib, and receives a lavish dowry in exchange � a great chest, I believe, of broad pieces of gold. Beauty Bibi dutifully marries the zamindar, thus restoring her father's fortunes, and naturally at first her husband, a total stranger, seems horrible to her, monstrous even. But eventually, under the benign influence of her obedient love, he turns into a Prince.'

'Do you mean,' I ventured, 'that he inherits a title?' The Great Living Poet looked tolerant and tossed back his silvery shoulder- length hair.

'That is a bourgeois remark,' he chided me. 'No, of course the transformation would have taken place neither in his social status nor in his actual, corporeal self, but in her perception of him. Pic-

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ture them as they grow closer to each other, as they move inwards over the years from the opposed poles of Beautyness and Beastdom, and become at last, and happily, just plain Mr Husband and Mrs Wife.'

The Great Living Poet was well-known for his radical ideas and for the chaotic complexity of his extramarital love life, so I thought I would please him by commenting slyly: 'Why is it that fairy-tales always treat marriage as an ending? And always such a perfectly happy one?'

But instead of the man-to-man wink or guffaw for which I'd been hoping (I was very young), the Great Living Poet adopted a grave expression. 'That is a masculine question,' he replied, 'no woman would be so puzzled. The proposition of the fable is clear. Woman must make the best of her fate; for if she does not love Man, why then he dies, the Beast perishes, and Woman is left a widow, that is to say less than a daughter, less than a wife, worth- less.' Mildly, he sipped his Scotch.

'Whatif, whatif,' I stammered, 'I mean, uncle, whatif the girl really couldn't bear the husband chosen for her?' The Poet, who had begun to hum Persian verses under his breath, frowned in dis- tant disappointment.

'You have become too Westernized,' he said. 'You should spend some time, maybe seven years or so, not too long, with our village people. Then you will understand that this is a completely Eastern story, and stop this whatif foolishness.'

The Great Poet is unfortunately no longer living, so I cannot ask him whatif the story of Good News Hyder were true; nor can I hope for the benefit of his advice on an even more ticklish sub- ject: whatif, whatif a Beastji somehow lurked inside Beauty Bibi? Whatif the beauty were herself the beast? But I think he might have said I was confusing matters: 'As Mr Stevenson has shown in his Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, such saint-and-monster conjunctions are conceivable in the case of men; alas! such is our nature. But the whole essence of Woman denies such a possibility.'

The reader may have divined from my last whatifs that I have

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two marriages to describe; and the second, waiting in the periph- eries of the first, is of course the long-hinted-at Nikah of Sufiya Zinobia Hyder and Omar Khayyam Shakil.

Omar Khayyam finally screwed up the courage to ask for Sufiya Zinobia's hand when he heard about the betrothal of her youn- ger sister. When he arrived, grey respectable fifty, at her marble home and made his extraordinary request, the impossibly old and decrepit divine Maulana Dawood let out a scream that made Raza Hyder look around for demons. 'Spawn of obscene hags,' Dawood addressed Shakil, 'from the day you descended to earth in the machine of your mothers' iniquity I knew you. Such filthy suggestions you come to make in this house of lovers of God! May your time in hell be longer than a thousand lifetimes.' The rage of Maulana Dawood created, in Bilquis, a mood of perverse obsti- nacy. In those days she was still prone to lock doors furiously, to defend herself against the incursions of the afternoon wind; the light in her eyes was a little too bright. But the engagement of Good News had given her a new purpose, just as Rani had hoped; so it was with a fair approximation of her old arrogance that she spoke to Omar Khayyam: 'We understand that you have been obliged to bring your own proposal because of the absence of your family members from Town. The irregularity is forgiven, but we must now consider in private. Our decision will be communi- cated to you in due course.' Raza Hyder, struck dumb by this reappearance of the old Bilquis, was unable to disagree until Shakil had left; Omar Khayyam, arising, placing grey hat on grey hair, was betrayed by a sudden reddening beneath the pallor of his skin. 'Blushing,' Maulana Dawood screeched, extending a sharp-nailed finger, 'that is only a trick. Such persons have no shame.'

After Sufiya Zinobia recovered from the immunological catastrophe that followed the turkey massacre, Raza Hyder had discovered that he could no longer see her through the veil of his disappointment in her sex. The memory of the tenderness with which he had lifted her out of the scene of her somnambulist vio- lence refused to leave him, as did the realization that while she was

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ill he had been beset by emotions that could only be described as arising out of fatherly love. In short, Hyder had changed his opinion of his retarded child, and had begun to play with her, to take pride in her tiny advances. Together with the ayah Shahbanou the great war hero would play at being a train or steamroller or crane, and would lift the girl and throw her in the air as if she really were still the small child whose brain she had been forced to retain. This new pattern of behaviour had per- plexed Bilquis, whose affections remained concentrated on the younger girl ... at any rate, Sufiya Zinobia's condition had improved. She had grown two and a half inches, put on a little weight, and her mental age had risen to about six and a half. She was nineteen years old, and had conceived for her newly loving father a child's version of that same devotion which Arjumand Harappa felt for her father the Chairman.

'Men,' Bilquis told Rani on the telephone, 'you can't depend on them.'

As for Omar Khayyam: the complexity of his motives has already been discussed. He had spent seven years failing to cure himself of that obsession which relieved him of vertigo attacks, but during those years of struggle he had also arranged to examine Sufiya Zinobia at regular intervals, and had ingratiated himself with her father, building on the gratitude Raza felt towards him for having saved his daughter's life. But a proposal of marriage was something else again, and once he was safely out of the house Raza Hyder began to voice his doubts.

'The man is fat,' Raza reasoned. 'Ugly also. And we must not forget his debauched past.'

'A debauched life led by the child of debauched persons,' Dawood added, 'and a brother shot for politics.'

But Bilquis did not mention her memory of Shakil drunk at Mohenjo. Instead she said, 'Where are we going to find the girl a better match?'

Now Raza understood that his wife was as anxious to be rid of this troublesome child as he was to see the back of her beloved Good News. The realization that there was a kind of symmetry

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here, a sort of fair exchange, weakened his resolve, so that Bilquis detected the uncertainty in his voice when he asked, 'But a dam- aged child: should we look for husbands at all? Should we not accept the responsibility, wife? What is this marriage business where such a girl is concerned?'

'She is not so stupid now,' Bilquis argued, 'she can dress herself, go to the pot, and she does not wet her bed.'

'For God's sake,' Raza shouted, 'does that qualify her to be a wife?'

'That frogspawn slime,' Dawood exclaimed, 'that messenger of Shaitan. He has come here with his proposal to divide this holy house.'

'Her vocabulary is improving,' Bilquis added, 'she sits with Shahbanou and tells the dhobi what to wash. She can count the garments and handle money.'

'But she is a child,' Raza said hopelessly.

Bilquis grew stronger as he weakened. 'In a woman's body,' she replied, 'the child is nowhere to be seen. A woman does not have to be a brainbox. In many opinions brains are a positive dis- advantage to a �woman in marriage. She likes to go to the kitchen and help the khansama with his work. At the bazaar she can tell good vegetables from bad. You yourself have praised her chutneys. She can tell when the servants have not polished the furniture properly. She wears a brassiere and in other ways also her body has become that of an adult woman. And she even does not blush.'

This was true. The alarming reddenings of Sufiya Zinobia were, it seemed, things of the past; nor had the turkey- assassinating violence recurred. It was as if the girl had been cleansed by her single, all-consuming explosion of shame.

'Maybe,' Raza Hyder slowly said, 'I am worrying too much.'

'Besides,' Bilquis said with finality, 'he is her doctor, this man. He saved her life. Into whose hands could we more safely place her? Into nobody's, I say. This proposal has come to us from God.'

'Catch your ears,' Dawood shrieked, 'tobah, tobah! But your

Shame, Good News and the Virgin � 169

God is great, great in his greatness, and so he may forgive such blasphemy.'

Raza Hyder looked old and sad. 'We must send Shahbanou with her,' he insisted. 'And a quiet wedding. Too much hulla- baloo would frighten her.'

'Just let me finish with Good News,' Bilquis said in delight, 'and we will have a wedding so quiet that only the birds will sing.'

Maulana Dawood withdrew from the scene of his defeat. 'Girls married in the wrong order,' he said as he departed. 'What began with a necklace of shoes cannot end well.'

On the day of the polo match between the Army and Police teams Bilquis shook Good News awake early. The match was not scheduled to begin until five o'clock in the afternoon, but Bilquis said, 'Eleven hours dolling yourself up to meet your future hus- band is like money in the bank.' By the time mother and daughter arrived at the polo ground Good News was in such tip-top condi- tion that people thought a bride had abandoned her wedding feast to come and watch the game. Haroun Harappa met them by the little table at which the match commentator sat surrounded by microphones and led them to the chairs he had saved for them; the spectacle of Good News's get-up was so overpowering that he came away with a clearer impression of the design of her nose- jewellery than of the fortunes of the game. Every so often during that afternoon he ran off and returned bearing paper plates heaped with samosas or jalebis, with cups of fizzing cola balanced along his forearms. During his absences Bilquis watched her daughter like a hawk, to make sure she tried no funny business like catching the eyes of other boys; but when Haroun returned Bilquis became unaccountably absorbed in the game. The great star of the Police team was a certain Captain Talvar Ulhaq, and in that time of the Army's unpopularity his annihilation of their polo squad that afternoon turned him into something of a national hero, especially as he conformed to all the usual heroic requirements, being tall, dashing, mustachioed, with a tiny scar on his neck that looked exactly like a love-bite. This Captain Talvar was to be the cause of

Shame ? 17 0

the wedding scandal out of which, it could be argued with some plausibility, the whole of the future grew.

From the stammering and awkward conversation she had with Haroun that day Good News discovered to her consternation that her future husband had no ambitions and a tiny appetite. Nor was he in any hurry to have children. The confidence with which Naveed Hyder had stated, 'I'll fix him,' ebbed out of her in the physical presence of this pudding of a young man, so it was per- haps inevitable that her eyes should become glued to the upright, capering, mythological figure of Talvar Ulhaq on his whirling horse. And maybe it was also inevitable that her excessive dressi- ness should attract the interest of the young police captain who was famous for being the most successful stud in the city - so maybe the whole thing was Bilquis's fault for dressing up her daughter � at any rate, Bilquis for all her vigilance missed the moment when their eyes met. Good News and Talvar stared at each other through the dust and hooves and polo-sticks, and at that moment the girl felt a pain shoot up her insides. She managed to turn the shuddering moan which escaped her lips into a violent sneeze and cough before anyone noticed, and was assisted in her subterfuge by the commotion on the polo field, where Cap- tain Talvar's horse had inexplicably reared and thrown him down into the perils of the flying hooves and sticks. 'I just went stiff all over,' Talvar told Naveed later, 'and the horse lost its temper with me.'

The game ended shortly afterwards, and Good News went home with Bilquis, knowing that she would never marry Haroun Harappa, no, not in a million years. That night she heard pebbles rattling on her bedroom window, tied her bedsheets together and climbed down into the arms of the polo star, who drove her in a police car to his beach hut at Fisherman's Cove. When they had finished making love she asked the most modest question of her life: 'I'm not so great looking,' she said, 'why me?' Talvar Ulhaq sat up in bed and looked as serious as a schoolboy. 'On account of the hunger of your womb,' he told her. 'You are appetite and I am food.' Now she perceived that Talvar had a pretty high

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opinion of himself and began to wonder whether she might have bitten off more than she could chew.

It turned out that Talvar Ulhaq had had the gift of clairvoyancy from childhood, a talent which assisted him greatly in his police work, because he could divine where crimes were going to be committed before the thieves had worked it out themselves, so that his record of arrests was unbeatable. He had foreseen in Naveed Hyder the children who had always been his greatest dream, the profusion of children who would make him puff up with pride while she disintegrated under the awesome chaos of their numbers. This vision had made him willing to undertake the extremely dangerous course of action to which he was now com- mitted, because he knew that Raza Hyder's daughter was engaged to be married to the favourite nephew of Chairman Iskander Harappa, that the invitations to the wedding had already gone out, and that by any normal standards his situation was hopeless. 'Nothing is impossible,' he told Naveed, got dressed, and went outside into the salty night to find a sea-turtle to ride. Naveed emerged a little later to find him whooping with joy as he stood on a turtle's back, and while she was enjoying his simple pleasure the fishermen came and grinned at them. Afterwards Naveed Hyder was never sure whether this had been a part of Talvar's plan, whether he had signalled to the fishermen from the back of the weeping turtle, or if he had visited the Cove in advance to plan the whole thing, because after all it was well-known that the fishermen and the police force were great allies, being regularly in cahoots for smuggling purposes . . . Talvar, however, never admitted any responsibility for what happened.

What happened was that the fisherman's leader, a patriarch with an honest and open face in which an unblemished set of white teeth gleamed improbably in the moonlight, informed the couple pleasantly that he and his fellows intended to blackmail them. 'Such ungodly goings-on,' the old fisherman said sadly, 'it is bad for our peace of mind. Some compensation, some comfort must be given.'

Talvar Ulhaq paid up without arguing and drove Good News

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home. With his help, she managed to climb up the rope of bed- sheets without being discovered. 'I won't see you again,' he said at their parting, 'until you break your engagement and allow what must be to be.'

His second sight informed him that she would do as he had asked, so he went home to prepare for marriage and for the storm which would surely break.

Good News (let us remind ourselves) was her mother's favourite daughter. Her fear of forfeiting this position fought inside her with the equal and opposite fear that the fishermen would continue their blackmail; the insane love she had conceived for Talvar Ulhaq wrestled with the duty she owed to the boy her parents had selected; the loss of her virginity drove her wild with worry. But until the last evening before her wedding she remained silent. Talvar Ulhaq told her afterwards that her inaction had brought him close to the point of insanity, and that he had resolved to turn up at the wedding and shoot Haroun Harappa, whatever the consequences, if she had decided to go through with the match. But at the eleventh hour Good News told her mother, 'I won't marry that stupid potato,' and all hell broke loose, because love was the last thing anyone had been expecting to foul up the arrangements.

O glee of female relatives in the face of unconcealable scandal! O crocodile tears and insincere pummelling of breasts! O delighted crowing of Duniyazad Begum as she dances upon the corpse of Bilquis's honour! And the forktongued offers of hope: Who knows, talk to her, many girls panic on their wedding eve, yes, she'll see sense, just try only, time to be firm, time to be gentle, beat her up a little, give her a loving hug, O God, but how ter- rible, how can you cancel the guests?

And when it is clear that the girl cannot be moved, when the delicious horror of it all is out in the open, when Good News admits that there is Someone Else - then Bariamma stirs on her bolsters and the room falls silent to hear her judgment.

'This is your failure as a mother,' Bariamma wheezes, 'so now

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the father must be called. Go now and bring him, my Raza, run and fetch.'

Two tableaux. In the bridal chamber Naveed Hyder sits immov- able and mulish while all around her are women frozen by their delight into living statues, women holding combs, brushes, silver- polish, antimony, staring at Naveed, disaster's source, with petri- fied joy. Bariamma's lips are the only moving features in the scene. Time-honoured words are dripping out of them: floozy, hussy, whore. And in Raza's bedroom Bilquis is clinging to her husband's legs as he struggles into his pants.

Raza Hyder awoke to catastrophe from a dream in which he saw himself standing on the parade-ground of his failure before a phalanx of recruits all of whom were exact replicas of himself, except that they were incompetent, they could not march in step or dress to the left or polish their belt buckles properly. He had been screaming his despair at these shades of his own ineptitude, and the rage of the dream infected his waking mood. His first reaction to the news which Bilquis forced past lips that did not want to let it through was that he had no option but to kill the girl. 'Such shame,' he said, 'such havoc wrought to the plans of parents.' He decided to shoot her in the head in front of his family members. Bilquis clung to his thighs, slipped down as he began to move, and was dragged from the bedroom, her nails digging into his ankles. The cold sweat of her fear made her pencilled eye- brows run down her face. The ghost of Sindbad Mengal was not mentioned, but O, he was there all right. Army pistol in hand, Raza Hyder entered Good News's room; the screams of women greeted him as he came.

But this is not the story of my discarded Anna M.; Raza, raising his gun, found himself unable to use it. 'Throw her into the street,' he said, and left the room.

Now the night is full of negotiations. Raza in his quarters stares at an unused pistol. Deputations are sent; he remains unbending. Then the ayah Shahbanou, rubbing sleep from black-rimmed

Shame � 174

eyes, so like Hyder's own, is dispatched by Bilquis to plead Good News's cause. 'He likes you because you are good with Sufiya Zinobia. He'll listen maybe to you when he won't to me.' Bilquis is crumbling visibly, has been reduced to pleading with servants. Shahbanou holds Good News's future in her hands � Good News, who has kicked, abused, hit � 'I'll go, Begum Sahib,' Shahbanou says. Ayah and father confer behind closed doors; 'Forgive my saying, sir, but don't pile shame on shame.'

At three a.m. Raza Hyder relents. There must be a wedding, the girl must be handed over to a husband, any husband. That will get rid of her and cause less of a stir than kicking her out. 'A whore with a home,' Raza summons Bilquis to announce, 'is better than a whore in the gutter.' Naveed tells her mother the name: not without pride, she says clearly to one and all: 'It must be Captain Talvar Ulhaq. Nobody else will do.'

Telephone calls. Mir Harappa awoken to be informed of the change of plan. 'Your bastard family. Fuck me in the mouth if I don't get even.' Iskander Harappa receives the news calmly, relays it to Arjumand who is in her nightgown beside the telephone. Something flickers in her eyes.

It is Iskander who tells Haroun.

And one more call, to a police captain who has not slept a wink, who like Raza has spent part of the night fingering a pistol. 'I will not tell you what I think of you,' Raza Hyder roars into the mouthpiece, 'but get your hide here tomorrow and take this no- good female off my hands. Not one paisa of dowry and keep out of my sight for ever after.'

'Ji, I shall be honoured to marry your daughter,' Talvar politely replies. And in the Hyder household, women who can scarcely believe their luck begin once again to make preparations for the great day. Naveed Hyder goes to bed and falls sound asleep with an innocent expression on her face. Dark henna on her soles turns orange while she rests.

'Shame and scandal in the family,' Shahbanou tells Sufiya Zinobia in the morning. 'Bibi, you don't know what you missed.'

Shame, Good News and the Virgin ? 175

Something else was happening that night. On university, cam- puses, in the bazaars of the cities, under cover of darkness, the people were assembling. By the time the sun rose it was clear that the government was going to fall. That morning the people took to the streets and set fire to motor cars, school buses, Army trucks and the libraries of the British Council and United States Informa- tion Service to express their displeasure. Field-Marshal A. ordered troops into the streets to restore peace. At eleven-fifteen he was visited by a General known to everyone by the nickname 'Shaggy Dog', an alleged associate of Chairman Iskander Harappa. General Shaggy Dog informed the distraught President that the armed forces were absolutely refusing to fire on civilians, and soldiers would shoot their officers rather than their fellow-countrymen. This statement convinced President A. that his time was up, and by lunchtime he had been replaced by General Shaggy, who placed A. under house arrest and appeared on the brand-new tele- vision service to announce that his sole purpose in assuming power was to lead the nation back towards democracy; elections would take place within eighteen months. The afternoon was spent by the people in joyful celebration; Datsuns, taxi-cabs, the Alliance Francaise building and the Goethe Institute provided the fuel for their incandescent happiness.

Mir Harappa heard about the bloodless coup of President Dog within eight minutes of Marshal A.'s resignation. This second major blow to his prestige drained all the fight out of Little Mir. Leaving a letter of resignation on his desk he fled to his Daro estate without bothering to await developments, and immured himself there in a mood of such desolation that the servants could hear him muttering under his breath that his days were numbered. 'Two things have happened,' he would say, 'but the third is yet to come.'

Iskander and Arjumand spent the day with Haroun in Karachi. Iskander on the telephone all day, Arjumand so aroused by the news that she forgot to sympathize with Haroun about his can-

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r

celled wedding. 'Stop looking so fish-faced,' she told him, 'the future has begun.' Rani Harappa arrived by train from Mohenjo, thinking she was about to spend a carefree day at Good News's Nikah celebrations, but Isky's chauffeur Jokio told her at the sta- tion that the world had changed. He drove her to the town house, where Iskander embraced her warmly and said, 'Good you came. Now we must stand together before the people; our moment has come.' At once Rani forgot all about weddings and began to look, at forty, as young as her only daughter. 'I knew it,' she exulted inwardly. 'Good old Shaggy Dog.'

So great was the excitement of that day that the news of the events in the Hyder household was blotted out completely, whereas on any other day the scandal would have been impossible to cover up. Captain Talvar Ulhaq came alone to the wedding, having chosen to involve neither friends nor family members in the shameful circumstances of his nuptials. He had to struggle through streets that were hot with burning cars in a police jeep that mercifully escaped the ministrations of the crowds, and was received by Raza Hyder with glacial formality and scorn. 'It is my earnest intention,' Talvar told Raza, 'to be the finest son-in-law that you could wish for, so that in time you may reconsider your decision to cut your daughter out of your life.' Raza gave the briefest of replies to this courageous speech. 'I don't care for polo players,' he said.

Those guests who had managed to reach the Hyder residence through the unstable euphoria of the streets had taken the precau- tion of dressing in their oldest, most tattered clothes; nor did they wear any jewellery. They had put on these unfestive rags to avoid attracting the attention of the people, who usually put up with rich folk but might just have elected in their elation to add the city's elite to their collection of burning symbols. The dilapidated condition of the guests was one of the strangest features of that day of strangenesses; Good News Hyder, oiled hennaed bejewelled, looked in that gathering of frightened celebrants even more out of place than she had appeared at the polo match of her inescapable destiny. 'It's like being married in a palace full of beggars,' she

Shame, Good News and the Virgin ? 177

whispered to Talvar, who sat flower-garlanded beside her on a little podium beneath the glittering, mirrorworked marquee. The sweetmeats and delicacies of Bilquis's motherly pride languished uneaten on long whiteclothed tables in the bizarre atmosphere of that horrified and dislocated time.

Why the guests refused to eat: already unbalanced by the dan- gers of the streets, they had been almost completely deranged by the information, which was conveyed to them on little hand- written erratum slips which Bilquis had been writing out for hours, that while the bride was indeed the expected Good News Hyder there had been a last-minute change of groom. 'Owing to circumstances beyond our control,' read the little white chitties of humiliation, 'the part of husband will be taken by Police Capt. Talvar Ulhaq.' Bilquis had had to write this line five hundred and fifty-five times over, and each successive inscription drove the nails of her shame deeper into her heart, so that by the time the guests arrived and the servants handed out the erratum slips she was as stiff with dishonour as if she had been impaled on a tree. As the shock of the coup was replaced on the guests' faces by the awareness of the size of the catastrophe that had befallen the Hyders, Raza, too, became numb all over, anaesthetized by his public disgrace. The presence of the Himalayas of uneaten food struck the chill of shame into the soul of Shahbanou the ayah, who was standing by Sufiya Zinobia in a condition of such extreme despondency that she forgot to greet Omar Khayyam Shakil. The doctor had lumbered into that gathering of million- aires disguised as gardeners; his thoughts were so full of the ambi- guities of his own engagement to the halfwit of his obsessions that he utterly failed to notice that he had walked into a mirage from the past, a ghost-image of the legendary party given by the three Shakil sisters in their old house in Q. The erratum slip rested unread in his plump tight fist until, belatedly, the meaning of the uneaten food dawned on him.

It was not an exact replica of that longago party. No food was eaten, but still a wedding took place. Can there ever have been a Nikah at which nobody flirted with anybody else, at which the

Shame ? 17 8

hired musicians were so overwhelmed by the occasion that they neglected to play a single note? Certainly there could not have been many nuptial feasts at which the last-minute groom was all but murdered on his podium by his newly-acquired sister-in-law.

O dear, yes. I regret to have to inform you that (setting the seal, as it were, on that perfect disaster of a day) the somnolent demon of shame that had possessed Sufiya Zinobia on the day she slew the turkeys emerged once more beneath the mirror-shiny shamiana of disgrace.

A glazing-over of her eyes, which acquired the milky opacity of somnambulism. A pouring-in to her too-sensitive spirit of the great abundance of shame in that tormented tent. A fire beneath the skin, so that she began to flame all over, a golden blaze that dimmed the rouge on her cheeks and the paint on her fingers and toes . . . Omar Khayyam Shakil spotted what was going on, but too late, so that by the time he shouted 'Look out!' across that catatonic gathering the demon had already hurled Sufiya Zinobia across the party, and before anyone moved she had grabbed Cap- tain Talvar Ulhaq by the head and begun to twist, to twist so hard that he screamed at the top of his voice, because his neck was on the point of snapping like a straw.

Good News Hyder grabbed her sister by the hair and pulled with all her might, feeling the burning heat of that supernatural passion scorch her fingers; then Omar Khayyam and Shahbanou and Raza Hyder and even Bilquis joined in, as the guests sank fur- ther into their speechless stupor, aghast at this last expression of the impossible fantasy of the day. The combined efforts of the five desperate people succeeded in detaching Sufiya Zinobia's hands before Talvar Ulhaq's head was ripped off like a turkey's; but then she buried her teeth in his neck, giving him a second scar to bal- ance that famous love-bite, and sending his blood spurting long distances across the gathering, so that all her family and many of the camouflaged guests began to resemble workers in a halal slaughterhouse. Talvar was squealing like a pig, and when they finally dragged Sufiya Zinobia off him she had a morsel of his skin and flesh in her teeth. Afterwards, when he recovered, he was

Shame, Good News and the Virgin ? 179

never able to move his head to the left. Sufiya Zinobia Hyder, the incarnation of her family's shame and also, once again, its chief cause, fell limply into her fiance's arms, and Omar Khayyam had assailant and victim taken immediately to hospital, where Talvar Ulhaq remained on the critical list for one hundred and one hours, while Sufiya Zinobia had to be brought out of her self- induced trance by the exercise of more hypnotic skill than Omar had ever been required to display. Good News Hyder spent her wedding night weeping inconsolably on her mother's shoulder in a hospital waiting-room. 'That monster,' she sobbed bitterly, 'you should have had her drowned at birth.'

A short inventory of the effects of the wedding scandal: the stiff neck of Talvar Ulhaq, which terminated his career as a polo star; the birth of a spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation within Raza Hyder, who found it hard to ostracize a man whom his daughter had almost killed, so that Talvar and Good News were not, after all, cast out of the bosom of that accursed family; also the acceler- ated disintegration of Bilquis Hyder, whose breakdown could no longer be concealed, even though she became, in the following years, little more than a whisper or rumour, because Raza Hyder kept her away from society, under a kind of unofficial house arrest.

What else? - When it became clear that Iskander Harappa's Popular Front would do extremely well in the elections, Raza paid a call on Isky. Bilquis stayed at home with her hair hanging loose, railing at the heavens because her husband, her Raza, had gone to abase himself before that blubber-lips who always got everything he wanted. Hyder tried to force himself to apologize for the wedding fiasco, but Iskander said merrily, 'For God's sake, Raza, Haroun can take care of himself, and as for your Talvar Ulhaq, I'm pretty impressed by the coup that fellow engineered. I tell you, he's the man for me!' Not long after this meeting, once the insanity of the elections had passed and President Shaggy Dog had retired into private life, Prime Minister Iskander Harappa made Talvar Ulhaq the youngest police chief in the country's his-

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tory, and also promoted Raza Hyder to the rank of General and placed him in command of the Army. Hyders and Harappas moved north to the new capital in the hills; Isky told Rani, 'From now on Raza has no option but to be my man. With the amount of scandal sitting on his head, he knows he'd have been lucky to keep his commission if I hadn't come along.'

Haroun Harappa, his heart broken by Good News, flung him- self into the party work given him by Iskander, becoming an important figure in the Popular Front; and when, one day, Arju- mand declared her love, he told her bluntly, 'Nothing I can do. I have decided never to marry.' The rejection of the virgin Iron- pants by Good News's jilted fiance engendered in that formidable young woman a hatred of all Hyders which she would never lose; she took the love she had intended to give Haroun and poured it like a votive offering over her father instead. Chairman and daughter, Iskander and Arjumand: 'There are times,' Rani thought, 'when she seems more like his wife than 1 do.' And another unspoken tension in the Harappa camp was that between Haroun Harappa and Talvar Ulhaq, who were obliged to work together, which they did for many years without ever finding it necessary to exchange a single spoken word.

The quiet marriage of Omar Khayyam Shakil and Sufiya Zinobia went off, by the way, without further incident. But what of Sufiya Zinobia? � Let me just say for the moment that what had reawoken in her did not go back to sleep for good. Her transfor- mation from Miss Hyder into Mrs Shakil will not be (as we shall see) the last permanent change . . .

And along with Iskander, Rani, Arjumand, Haroun, Raza, Bilquis, Dawood, Naveed, Talvar, Shahbanou, Sufiya Zinobia and Omar Khayyam, our story now moves north, to the new capital and the ancient mountains of its climactic phase.

Once upon a time there were two families, their destinies insepa- rable even by death. I had thought, before I began, that what I had on my hands was an almost excessively masculine tale, a saga of sexual rivalry, ambition, power, patronage, betrayal, death,

Shame, Good News and the Virgin ? 181

revenge. But the women seem to have taken over; they marched in from the peripheries of the story to demand the inclusion of their own tragedies, histories and comedies, obliging me to couch my narrative in all manner of sinuous complexities, to see my 'male' plot refracted, so to speak, through the prisms of its reverse and 'female' side. It occurs to me that the women knew precisely what they were up to � that their stories explain, and even subsume, the men's. Repression is a seamless garment; a society which is authoritarian in its social and sexual codes, which crushes its women beneath the intolerable burdens of honour and propriety, breeds repressions of other kinds as well. Contrari- wise: dictators are always � or at least in public, on other people's behalf� puritanical. So it turns out that my 'male' and 'female' plots are the same story, after all.

I hope that it goes without saying that not all women are crushed by any system, no matter how oppressive. It is commonly and, I believe, accurately said of Pakistan that her women are much more impressive than her men . . . their chains, neverthe- less, are no fictions. They exist. And they are getting heavier.

If you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining.

In the end, though, it all blows up in your face.

IV

In the Fifteenth Century

9

Alexander the Great

Iskander Harappa stands in the foreground, finger pointing towards the future, silhouetted against the dawn. Above his patrician profile the message curls; from right to left the flowing golden shapes. A NEW man for a new century. The fifteenth century (Hegiran calendar) peeps over the horizon, extending long fingers of radiance into the early sky. The sun rises rapidly in the tropics. And glinting on Isky's finger is a ring of power, echoing the sun . . . the poster is omnipresent, stamping itself on the walls of mosques, graveyards, whorehouses, staining the mind: Isky the sorcerer, conjuring the sun from the black depths of the sea.

What is being bom?--A legend. Isky Harappa rising, falling; Isky condemned to death, the world horrified, his executioner drowned in telegrams, but rising above them, shrugging them off, a compassionless hangman, desperate, afraid. Then Isky dead and buried; blind men regain their sight beside his martyr's grave. And in the desert a thousand flowers bloom. Six years in power, two in jail, an eternity underground . . . the sun sets quickly, too. You can stand on the coastal sandspits and watch it dive into the sea.

Chairman Iskander Harappa, dead, stripped of Pierre Cardin

1 8 5

Shame ? 186

and of history, continues to cast his shadow. His voice murmurs in his enemies' secret ears, a melodious, relentless monologue gnawing their brains like a worm. A ring finger points across the grave, glinting its accusations. Iskander haunts the living; the beautiful voice, golden, a voice holding rays of dawn, whispers on, unsilenced, unstoppable. Arjumand is sure of this. Afterwards, when the posters have been torn down, in the aftermath of the noose which, winding round him like a baby's umbilical cord, maintained such respect for his person that it left no mark upon his neck; when she, Arjumand, has been shut away in once-more- looted Mohenjo, along with a mother who looks like a grand- mother and who will not accept her dead husband's divinity; then the daughter remembers, concentrating on details, telling herself the time will come for Iskander to be restored to history. His legend is in her care. Arjumand stalks the brutalized passages of the house, reads cheap love-fiction, eats like a bird and takes laxatives, empties herself of everything to make room for the memories. They fill her up, her bowels, her lungs, her nostrils; she is her father's epitaph, and she knows.

From the beginning, then. The elections which brought Iskander Harappa to power were not (it must be said) as straight- forward as I have made them sound. As how could they be, in that country divided into two Wings a thousand miles apart, that fan- tastic bird of a place, two Wings without a body, sundered by the land-mass of its greatest foe, joined by nothing but God . . . she remembers that first day, the thunderous crowds around the polling stations. O confusion of people who have lived too long under military rule, who have forgotten the simplest things about democracy! Large numbers of men and women were swept away by the oceans of bewilderment, unable to locate ballot- boxes or even ballots, and failed to cast their votes. Others, stronger swimmers in those seas, succeeded in expressing their preferences twelve or thirteen times. Popular Front workers, dis- tressed by the general lack of electoral decorum, made heroic attempts to save the day. Those few urban constituencies making returns incompatible with the West-Wing-wide polling pattern

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were visited at night by groups of enthusiastic party members, who helped the returning officers to make a recount. Matters were much clarified in this way. Outside the errant polling sta- tions large numbers of democrats assembled, many holding burning brands above their heads in the hope of shedding new light on the count. Dawn light flamed in the streets, while the crowds chanted loudly, rhythmically, spurring on the returning officers in their labours. And by morning the people's will had been expressed, and Chairman Isky had won a huge and absolute majority of the West Wing's seats in the new National Assembly. Rough justice, Arjumand remembers, but justice all the same.

The real trouble, however, started over in the East Wing, that festering swamp. Populated by whom?�O, savages, breeding end- lessly, jungle-bunnies good for nothing but growing jute and rice, knifing each other, cultivating traitors in their paddies. Perfidy of the East: proved by the Popular Front's failure to win a single seat there, while the riff-raff of the People's League, a regional party of bourgeois malcontents led by the well-known incompetent Sheikh Bismillah, gained so overwhelming a victory that they ended up with more Assembly seats than Harappa had won in the West. Give people democracy and look what they do with it. The West in a state of shock, the sound of one Wing flapping, beset by the appalling notion of surrendering the government to a party of swamp aborigines, little dark men with their unpronounceable language of distorted vowels and slurred consonants; perhaps not foreigners exactly, but aliens without a doubt. President Shaggy Dog, sorrowing, dispatched an enormous Army to restore a sense of proportion in the East.

Her thoughts, Arjumand's, do not dwell on the war that fol- lowed, except to note that of course the idolatrous nation posi- tioned between the Wings backed the Eastern bastards to the hilt, for obvious, divide-and-rule reasons. A fearful war. In the West, oil-refineries, airports, the homes of God-fearing civilians bom- barded by heathen explosives. The final defeat of the Western forces, which led to the reconstitution of the East Wing as an autonomous {that's a laugh) nation and international basket case,

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was obviously engineered by outsiders: stonewashers and damn- yankees, yes. The Chairman visited the United Nations and bawled those eunuchs out: 'You won't destroy us while I'm alive.' He stormed out of the General Assembly, handsome, intemperate, great: 'My country hearkens for me! Why should I stay in this harem of transvestite whores?'�and returned home to take up the reins of government in what was left of the land of God. Sheikh Bismillah, the architect of division, became chief of the junglees. Later, inevitably, they swarmed into his palace and shot him and his family full of holes. Sort of behaviour one expects from types like that.

The catastrophe: throughout the war, hourly radio bulletins described the glorious triumphs of the Western regiments in the East. On that last day, at eleven a.m., the radio announced the last and most spectacular of these feats of arms; at noon, it curtly informed its audience of the impossible: unconditional surrender, humiliation, defeat. The traffic stood still in city streets. The nation's lunch remained uncooked. In the villages, the cattle went unfed and the crops unwatered despite the heat. Chairman Iskander Harappa, on becoming Prime Minister, correctly identi- fied the national reaction to the astounding capitulation as one of just rage, fuelled by shame. What calamity could have befallen an Army so rapidly? What reversal could have been so sudden and so total as to turn victory into disaster in a mere sixty minutes? 'Responsibility for that fatal hour,' Iskander pronounced, 'lies, as it must, at the top.' Policemen, also dogs, surrounded the home of ex-President Shaggy within fifteen minutes of this decree. He was taken to jail, to be tried for war crimes; but then the Chairman, reflecting, once again, the mood of a people sickened by defeat and yearning for reconciliation, for an end to analyses of shame, offered Shaggy a pardon in return for his acceptance of house arrest. 'You are our dirty laundry,' Iskander told the incompetent old man, 'but, lucky for you, the people don't want to see you beaten clean upon a stone.'

There were cynical people who sneered at this pardon; that is needless-to-say, since all nations have their nihilists. These ele-

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ments pointed out that Iskander Harappa had been the principal beneficiary of the civil war that ripped his country in half; they spread rumours of his complicity in the whole sad affair. 'Shaggy Dog,' they muttered in their shabby dens, 'was always Harappa's pet; ate out of Isky's hand.' Such negativistic elements are an ugly fact of life. The Chairman treated them with contempt. At a rally attended by two million people, Iskander Harappa unbuttoned his shirt. 'What have I to hide?' he shouted. 'They say I have bene- fited; but I have lost fully half my beloved country. Then tell me, is this gain? Is this advantage? Is this luck? My people, your hearts are scarred by grief; behold, my heart bears the same wounds as yours.' Iskander Harappa tore off his shirt and ripped it in half; he bared his hairless breast to the cheering, weeping crowd. (The young Richard Burton once did the same thing, in the film Alexander the Great. The soldiers loved Alexander because he showed them his battle scars.)

Some men are so great that they can be unmade only by them- selves. The defeated Army needed new leadership; Isky packed off the discredited old guard into early retirement, and put Raza Hyder in control. 'He will be my man. And with such a compro- mised leader the Army can't get too strong.' This single error proved to be the undoing of the ablest statesman who ever ruled that country which had been so tragically misfortunate, so accursed, in its heads of state.

They could never forgive him for his power of inspiring love. Arjumand at Mohenjo, replete with memories, allows her remembering mind to transmute the preserved fragments of the past into the gold of myth. During the election campaign it had been common for women to come up to him, in full view of his wife and daughter, and declare their love. Grandmothers in villages perched on trees and called down as he passed: 'O, you, if I were thirty years younger!' Men felt no shame when they kissed his feet. Why did they love him? 'I am hope,' Iskander told his daughter . . . and love is an emotion that recognizes itself in others. People could see it in Isky, he was plainly full of the stuff, up to the brim, it

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spilled out of him and washed them clean. - Where did it come from? - Arjumand knows; so does her mother. It was a diverted torrent. He had built a dam between the river and its destination. Between himself and Pinkie Aurangzeb.

In the beginning Arjumand had hired photographers to snap Pinkie secretly, Pinkie in the bazaar with a plucked chicken, Pinkie in the garden leaning on a stick, Pinkie naked in the shower like a long dried date. She left these pictures for the Chairman to see. 'Look, Allah, she's fifty years old, looks a hun- dred, or seventy anyway, what is kept in her?' In the photographs the face was puffy, the legs vein-scarred, the hair careless, thin, white. 'Stop showing me these pictures,' Iskander shouted at his daughter (she remembers because he almost never lost his temper with her), 'don't you think I know what I did to her?'

If a great man touches you, you age too quickly, you live too much and are used up. Iskander Harappa possessed the power of accelerating the ageing processes of the women in his life. Pinkie at fifty was beyond turkeys, beyond even the memory of her beauty. And Rani had suffered, too, not so badly because she had seen less of him. She had been hoping, of course; but when it became clear that he only wanted her to stand on election platforms, that her time was past and would not return, then she went back to Mohenjo without any argument, becoming once more the mis- tress of peacocks and game-birds and badminton-playing concu- bines and empty beds, not so much a person as an aspect of the estate, the benign familiar spirit of the place, cracked and cob- webby just like the ageing house. And Arjumand herself has always been accelerated, mature too young, precocious, quick as needles. 'Your love is too much for us,' she told the Chairman, 'we'll all be dead before you. You feed on us.'

But they all outlived him, as it turned out. His diverted love (because he never saw Pinkie again, never lifted a telephone or wrote a letter, her name never passed his lips; he saw the photo- graphs and after that nothing) splashed over the people, until one day Hyder choked off the spring.

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It splashed, too, over Arjumand; for whom it was more than enough. She moved in with him to the Prime Minister's residence in the new northern capital, and for a while Rani kept writing to her, suggesting boys, even sending photographs; but Arjumand would return the letters and the photographs to her mother after ripping them to shreds. After several years of tearing potential hus- bands in half the virgin Ironpants finally defeated Rani's hopes, and was allowed to continue down her chosen road. She was twenty-three when Isky became Prime Minister, she looked older, and although she was still far too beautiful for her own good the passage of time eroded her prospects, and at last she ran out of suitors. Between Arjumand and Haroun nothing more was said. He tore me in half long ago.

Arjumand Harappa qualified in the law, became active in the green revolution, threw zamindars out of their palaces, opened dungeons, led raids on the homes of film stars and slit open their mattresses with a long two-edged knife, laughed as the black money poured out from between the pocketed springs. In court she prosecuted the enemies of the state with a scrupulous ferocity that gave her nickname a new and less ribald meaning; once she arrived at her chambers to find that some joker had broken in during the night and had left, standing in the centre of the room, a mocking gift: the lower half of an antique and rusty suit of armour, a pair of satirical metal legs placed at attention, heels together, on the rug. And laid neatly across the hollow waist, a padlocked metal belt. Arjumand Harappa, the virgin Ironpants.

That night she cried, sitting on the floor of her father's study, her head resting on his knee. 'They hate me.' Iskander grabbed her and shook her until the astonishment dried the tears. 'Who hates you?' he demanded, 'just ask that. It is my enemies who are yours, and our enemies are the enemies of the people. Where's the shame in being hated by those bastards?' She understood then how love engenders hate. 'I am making this country,' Iskander told her quietly, 'making it as a man would build a marriage. With strength as well as caring. No time for tears if you're going to

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help.' She wiped her eyes and grinned. 'Polygamist,' she punched his leg, 'what an old-fashioned backward type at heart! It's just marriages and concubines you want. Modern man, my foot.'

'Mr. Harappa,' the Angrez television interviewer is asking, 'many commentators would say, there is a widely-held view, some sec- tors of opinion maintain, your opponents allege, what would you say to the suggestion, that by some standards, from certain points of view, in a way, your style of government might be described as being perhaps, to some extent..."

'I see they are sending children to interview me now,' Isky interposes. The interviewer has begun to sweat. Off-camera, but Arjumand remembers.

'. . . patrician,' he finishes, 'autocratic, intolerant, repressive?'

Iskander Harappa smiles, sits back in his Louis Quinze chair, sips roohafza from a cut-glass tumbler. 'You could say,' he replies, 'that I do not suffer fools gladly. But, as you see, I suffer them.'

Arjumand at Mohenjo replays her father's videotapes. Played in the room where it was made, this conversation overwhelms her, this electronic resurrection by remote control. Yes, he suffered them. His name was etched on history in letters of burning gold; why should he go for brassy types? Here they are on the tape, trust a Western journalist to go digging in the cess-tank and come up holding handfuls of scum. He tortured me, they whine, he fired me, he put me in jail, I ran for my life. Good television: make our leaders look like primitives, wild men, even when they have for- eign educations and fancy suits. Yes, always the malcontents, that's all they care about.

He never liked arguments. Do as he ordered and do it now, fut-a-fut, or out on your ear you go. This was as it should be. Look what he had to work with � even his ministers. Turn- coats, nest-featherers, quislings, timeservers, the lot of them. He trusted none of these characters, so he set up the Federal Security Force with Talvar Ulhaq at its head. 'Information is light,' Chair- man Iskander Harappa said.

The clairvoyancy of Talvar Ulhaq enabled him to compile

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exhaustive dossiers on who-was-bribing-whom, on conspiracies, tax evasion, dangerous talk at dinner parties, student sects, homo- sexuality, the roots of treason. Clairvoyancy made it possible for him to arrest a future traitor before he committed his act of treason, and thus save the fellow's life. The negativist elements attacked the FSF, they would have put out that great cleansing light, so off to jail they went, best place for malcontents. No time for such types during a period of national regeneration. 'As a nation we have a positive genius for self-destruction,' Iskander told Arjumand once, 'we nibble away at ourselves, we eat our children, we pull down anyone who climbs up. But I insist that we shall survive.'

'Nobody can topple me,' Isky's ghost tells the electronic shade of the Angrez journalist, 'not the fat cats, not the Americans, not even you. Who am I? I am the incarnation of the people's love.'

Masses versus classes, the age-old opposition. Who loved him? 'The people', who are no mere romantic abstractions: who are sensible, and smart enough to know what serves them best. Who loved him? Pinkie Aurangzeb, Rani Harappa, Arjumand, Talvar, Haroun. What dissensions among this quintet! - Between wife and mistress, mother and daughter, jilted Arjumand and jilting Haroun, jilted Haroun and usurping Talvar . . . perhaps, Arju- mand muses, his fall was our fault. Through our divided ranks they drove the regiments of his defeat.

They. Fat cats, smugglers, priests. City socialites who remem- bered his carefree youth and could not tolerate the thought that a great man had sprung out of that debauched cocoon. Factory bosses who had never paid as much attention to the maintenance of their workers as they lavished on the servicing of their imported looms, and whom he, the Chairman, forced to accept the unthinkable, that is, unionization. Usurers, swindlers, banks. The American Ambassador.

Ambassadors: he got through nine of them in his six years. Also five English and three Russian heads of mission. Arjumand and

I1

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Iskander would place bets on how long each new arrival would survive; then, happy as a boy with a new stick and hoop, he would set about giving them hell. He made them wait weeks for audiences, interrupted their sentences, denied them hunting licences. He invited them to banquets at which the Russian Ambassador was served birds'-nest soup and Peking Duck, while the American got borshch and blinis. He refused to flirt with their wives. With the British Ambassador he would pretend to be a hick just down from the villages, and speak only in an obscure regional dialect; in the case of the United States, however, he took the opposite tack and addressed their legate in incomprehensibly florid French. Embassies would constantly be subjected to power cuts. Isky would open their diplomatic bags and personally add outrageous remarks to the Ambassadors' reports, so that one Rus- sian was summoned home to explain certain unusual theories of his about the parentage of various leading Politburo chiefs; he never returned. The Jack Anderson column in America carried a leaked document in which the U.S. delegate to Iskander's court had apparently confessed that he had long felt a strong sexual attraction towards Secretary Kissinger. That was the end of that Ambassador. 'It took time to get into my stride,' Iskander admitted to Arjumand, 'but once I got the hang of it, those guys never got any sleep.'

He had two-way bugs placed in their telephones and after that the Soviet Ambassador was plagued by interminable recordings of Hail to the Chief whenever he picked up his receiver, while the American got the complete thoughts of Chairman Mao. He smuggled a series of beautiful young boys into the British Ambas- sador's bed, much to the consternation, not to say delight, of his wife, who developed thereafter the habit of retiring to her room very early, just in case. He expelled cultural attaches and agricul- tural attaches. He summoned the Ambassadors to his office at three in the morning and screamed at them until dawn, accusing them of conspiring with religious fanatics and disaffected textile tycoons. He blocked their drains and censored their incoming mail, depriving the English of their subscription copies of horse-

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racing journals, the Russians of Playboy and the Americans of everything else. The last of the nine Americans lasted only eight weeks, dying of a heart attack two days before the coup which dethroned Isky and ended the game. 'If I last long enough,' the Chairman mused, 'maybe I can destroy the whole international diplomatic network. They'll run out of Ambassadors before I run out of steam.'

In the fifteenth century a great man came to power. Yes, he seemed omnipotent, he could trifle with the emissaries of the might, look at me, he was saying, you can't catch me. Immortal, invul- nerable Harappa. He gave people pride . . . the tenth American Ambassador arrived after Iskander's arrest, and expression of blessed relief on his face. When he presented his credentials to Raza Hyder he murmured quietly, 'Forgive me, sir, but I hope you lack your predecessor's sense of humour.'

'The question of national stability,' Hyder replied, 'is no joke.'

Once, when Arjumand visited her father in his hell-hole of a jail, Iskander, bruised, wasted, sick with dysentery, forced a grin to his lips. 'This tenth bastard sounds like a real shit,' he said pain- fully. 'I wish I could have made it into double figures.'

In the fifteenth century . . . but the century did not, despite posters, turn in the year of his accession. That happened later. But such was the impact of his coming that the actual change, thirteen hundred into fourteen hundred, felt like an anticlimax when it finally occurred. His greatness overpowered Time itself. A NEW MAN FOR A NEW century . . . yes, he ushered it in, ahead of Time. But it did the dirty on him. Time's revenge: it hung him out to dry.

They hanged him in the middle of the night, cut him down, wrapped him up and gave him to Talvar Ulhaq, who put him into a plane and flew him to Mohenjo, where two women waited, under guard. When the body had been unloaded the pilot and crew of the Fokker Friendship refused to leave the aircraft. The plane waited for Talvar at the top of Mohenjo's runway, giving off a nervous haze, as if it could not bear to stay in that place an

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instant longer than necessary. Rani and Arjumand were driven by staff car to Sikandra, that outlying zone of Mohenjo where Harappas had always been buried. And saw amid the marble umbrellas of the tombs a fresh, deep hole. Talvar Ulhaq at atten- tion beside the white-swathed body. Rani Harappa, white-haired now, like the phantom of Pinkie Aurangzeb, refused to cry. 'So it's him,' she said. Talvar bowed, stiff-necked, from the waist. 'Prove it,' said Rani Harappa. 'Show me my husband's face.'

'You should spare yourself,' Talvar replied. 'He was hanged.'

'Be quiet,' Rani said. 'Pull back the sheet.'

'I greatly regret,' Talvar Ulhaq bowed again, 'but I have orders.'

'What orders?' Rani did not raise her voice. 'Who can deny me such a thing?' But Talvar said again, 'Sincerely. I regret,' and low- ered his traitor's eyes. Talvar and Raza, policeman and soldier: Isky's men.

'Then something is the matter with the body,' Rani said, at which Talvar stiffened. 'Your husband is dead,' he snapped, 'what can be the matter with him now?'

'Then let me kiss him through the sheet,' Rani whispered, and bent down to the swaddled shape. Talvar did not attempt to stop her, until he realized what she was up to, and by then her nails had clawed a great hole in the cloth, and there, staring up at her with open eyes, was Iskander's ash-grey face.

'You didn't even close them,' Arjumand spoke for the first time. But her mother fell silent, staring intently at fleshy lips, at silver hair, until they pulled her away . . . 'Go on,' Rani said, 'bury the evidence of your shame. I have seen it now.' The sun leapt over the horizon as they laid Iskander down.

'When you hang a man,' Rani Harappa said distantly in the returning car, 'the eyes bulge. The face turns blue. The tongue sticks out.'

'Amma, for God's sake.'

'The bowels open, but they could have cleaned that up. I smelled some disinfectant.'

'I won't listen to this.'

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'Maybe even the face, they have people to fix such things, to cut off the tongue so that the lips will shut. Maybe make-up artists were employed.'

Arjumand Harappa covered her ears.

'But one thing remains. On a hanged man's neck the rope leaves its mark. Iskander's neck was clean.'

'This is disgusting,' Arjumand said, 'I'll be sick.'

'Don't you understand?' Rani Harappa shouted at her. 'If the rope did not mark him, it must be because he was already dead. Are you to stupid to see? They hanged a corpse.'

Arjumand's hands fell to her lap. 'O God.' The mark-free neck: absence of death's visiting card. Seized by a sudden unreason, Arjumand cried, 'Why are you talking so big, Amma? What do you know about hangings and all?'

'You have forgotten,' Rani said mildly, 'I saw Little Mir.'

That day Rani Harappa tried, for the last time, to call her old friend Bilquis Hyder on the telephone.

'I'm sorry,' a voice said, 'Begum Hyder cannot come to talk.' 'Then it's true,' Rani thought, 'poor Bilquis. He has her shut away as well.'

Rani and Arjumand were kept under house arrest for six years exactly, two before the execution of Iskander Harappa, four after it. During that time they completely failed to draw closer to each other, owing to the incompatibility of their memories. But the one thing they did have in common was that neither of them ever wept over Iskander's death. The presence at Mohenjo of a small canvas mountain-range of Army tents, which had been thrown up as if by an earthquake in that same courtyard in which Raza Hyder had once staked himself to the ground, kept their eyes dry. That is to say, they were living on usurped soil, in occupied terri- tory, and they were determined not to let the invaders see their tears. Their chief warder, a certain Captain Ijazz, a young barrel of a fellow with toothbrush hair and a persistent fuzz on his upper lip which obstinately refused to thicken into a moustache, at first attempted to goad them into it. 'God knows what you women

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are,' he shrugged. 'You rich bitches. Your man is dead but you will not wet his grave.' Rani Harappa refused to be provoked. 'You are right,' she replied, 'God knows. And He also knows about young men in uniforms. Brass buttons cannot hide a thing from Him.'

During those years spent beneath the suspicious eyes of soldiers and in the cold breezes of her daughter's solitude Rani Harappa continued to embroider woollen shawls. 'House arrest changes very little,' she admitted to Captain Ijazz at the very beginning, 'speaking for myself. It just means there are new faces around to say a few words to now and then.'

'Don't start imagining I'm your friend,' Ijazz shouted, the sweat glistening on his fuzzy mouth. 'Once we've killed that bastard we'll confiscate this house. All this gold, silver, all those dirty for- eign paintings of naked women and of men who are half horse. It must go.'

'Start with the pictures in my bedroom,' Rani advised him. 'They are worth the most money. And let me know if you need help to sort out the real silver from the plate.'

Captain Ijazz was less than nineteen years old when he came to Mohenjo, and in the confusion of his youth he swung violently between the braggadocio born of his embarrassment at being sent to guard such illustrious ladies, and the incompetent awkward shyness of his years. When Rani Harappa offered to assist him with the looting of Mohenjo the flint of his shame ignited the tinder of his pride and he ordered his men to make a pile of valu- ables in front of the verandah where she sat, her face neutral and composed, and worked upon a shawl. Babar Shakil in his brief youth had burned one heap of relics; Captain Ijazz, who had never heard of the boy who became an angel, reignited that bon- fire at Mohenjo, the bonfire in which men burn what oppresses them about the past. And throughout that day of flame Rani Harappa guided the vandalizing soldiers, making sure the choicest pieces of furniture and the finest works of art found their way into the blaze.

Two days later Ijazz came up to Rani, who was in her rocking-

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chair as usual, and apologized gracelessly for his intemperate deed. 'No, it was a good idea,' she replied, 'I didn't like that old stuff anyway, but Isky would have gone wild if I'd tried to throw it out.' After the fire-looting of Mohenjo, Ijazz started treating Rani Harappa with respect, and by the end of the six years he had begun to think of her as a parent, because he had grown up in front of her eyes. Deprived of a normal life and of the cama- raderie of the barracks, Ijazz took to pouring his heart out to Rani, all his half-formed dreams of women and of a small farm in the north.

'It's my fate,' Rani thought, 'to get mistaken for people's mothers.' She remembered that even Iskander had started making that mistake by the end. The last time he visited Mohenjo he bent down and kissed her feet.

The two women each took their revenge on their captor. Rani made him love her, with the result that he hated himself; but Arjumand began to do what she had never done in her life, that is, she dressed to kill. The virgin Ironpants swung her hips and wiggled her behind and flashed her eyes at all the soldiers, but most of all at the peach-faced Captain Ijazz. The effect of her behaviour was dramatic. Fights broke out in the little canvas Himalayas, teeth were broken, soldiers inflicted knife-wounds on their comrades. Ijazz himself was screaming inwardly, in the grip of a lust so fierce that he thought he would explode, like a balloon full of coloured water. He cornered Arjumand one afternoon while her mother was asleep. 'Don't think I don't know what you're up to,' he warned her, 'you millionaire whores. Think you can do anything. In my village a girl would have been stoned for acting like you do, such cheapness, you know what I mean.'

'Then have me stoned,' Arjumand retorted, 'I dare you.'

One month later Ijazz spoke to her again. 'The men want to rape you,' he yelled helplessly, 'I can see it in their faces. Why should I stop them? I should permit it; you are bringing this shame on your own head.'

'Let them come, by all means,' Arjumand replied, 'but you must be the first.'

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'Harlot,' he cursed her in his impotence, 'don't you know you're in our power? Nobody cares one paisa what happens to you.'

'I know,' she said.

By the end of the period of house arrest, when Arjumand had Captain Ijazz imprisoned and tortured slowly to death, he was twenty-four years old; but his hair, like that of the late Iskander Harappa, had gone permanently white as snow. When they took him to the torture chambers he said just three words before he started screaming". 'So, what's new?'

Rani Harappa, rocking on her verandah, completed in six years of embroidery a total of eighteen shawls, the most exquisite pieces she ever created; but instead of showing off her work to daughter or soldiers, she placed each shawl, on completion, in a black metal trunk full of naphthalene balls and fastened the lock. The key to this trunk was the only one she had been permitted to keep. Captain Ijazz kept all the rest on a large ring hanging from his belt, which reminded Rani of Bilquis Hyder, the Bilquis who locked doors compulsively under the influence of the afternoon wind. Poor Bilquis. She, Rani, missed their telephone conversa- tions. The deeds of men had severed that link between the women, that nourishing cord which had, at different times, car- ried messages of support first one way, then the other, along its unseen pulses.

Can't be helped. Rani, phlegmatically, worked on her perfect shawls. At first Captain Ijazz had tried to deny her needles and thread, but she shamed him out of that quickly enough. 'Don't think I'm going to stab myself on account of you, boy,' she told him. 'Or what do you suppose? Will I hang myself, perhaps, by a noose of embroidery wool?' The serenity of Iskander's wife (this was before he died) won the day. Ijazz even agreed to requi- sition balls of wool in the colours and weights she specified from the military quartermaster-stores; and then once again she began to work, to weave the shawls, those soft fields, and

In the Fifteenth Century � 20 1

then to raise upon them the vivid and magical crops of her sorceress's art.

Eighteen shawls locked in a truck: Rani, too, was perpetuating memories. Harappa the martyr, the demigod, lived on in his daughter's thoughts; but no two sets of memories ever match, even when their subject is the same . . . Rani never showed her work to anyone until, years later, she sent the trunk to Arjumand as a gift. Nobody ever looked over her shoulder as she worked. Neither soldiers nor daughter were interested in what Mrs Harappa did to while away her life.

An epitaph of wool. The eighteen shawls of memory. Every artist has the right to name her creation, and Rani would put a piece of paper inside the trunk before she sent it off to her newly powerful daughter. On this piece of paper she would write her chosen title: 'The Shamelessness of Iskander the Great.' And she would add a surprising signature: Rani Humayun. Her own name, retrieved from the mothballs of the past.

What did eighteen shawls depict?

Locked in their trunk, they said unspeakable things which nobody wanted to hear: the badminton shawl, on which, against a lime- green background and within a delicate border of overlapping rac- quets and shuttlecocks and frilly underpants, the great man lay unclothed, while all about him the pink-skinned concubines cavorted, their sporting outfits falling lightly from their bodies; how brilliantly the folds of breeze-caught garments were por- trayed, how subtle the felicities of light and shade! � the female figures seemed unable to bear the confinements of white shirts, brassieres, gymshoes, they flung them off, while Isky lounging on his left flank, propped up on an elbow, received their ministra- tions, yes, I know, you have made a saint of him, my daughter, you swallowed everything he dished out, his abstinence, his celibacy of an Ori- ental Pope, but he could not do without for long, that man of pleasure masquerading as a servant of Duty, that aristocrat who insisted on his seigneurial rights, no man better at hiding his sins, but I knew him, he

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hid nothing from me, I saw the white girls in the village swell and pop, I knew about the small but regular donations he sent them, Harappa children must not starve, and after he fell they came to me; and the slapping shawl, Iskander a thousand times over raising his hand, lifting it against ministers, ambassadors, argumentative holy men, mill-owners, servants, friends, it seemed as if every slap he ever delivered was here, and how many times he did it, Arjumand, not to you, to you he would not have, so you will not believe, but see upon the cheeks of his contemporaries the indelible blushes engendered by his palm; and the kicking shawl, Iskander booting bottoms and provoking in their owners other feelings than love; and the hissing shawl, Iskander seated in the office of his glory, its details accurate in the most minute degree, so that one could almost smell that awesome chamber, that place of pointed concrete arches with his own Thoughts framed upon the wall, and the Mont Blanc pens like black alps in their holders on his desk, even their white stars picked out by her scrupulous needle; that room of shadows and of power, in which no shadow was empty, eyes glinted in every area of shade, red tongues flicked, silver-threaded whispers susurrated across the cloth: Iskander and his spies, the head spider at the heart of that web of listeners and whisperers, she has sewn the silvery threads of the web, they radiated out from his face, in silver thread she revealed the arachnid terrors of the days, when men lied to their sons and angry women had only to murmur to the breeze to bring a fearsome revenge down upon their lovers, you never felt the fear, Arjumand, of wondering what he knew; and the torture shawl, on which she embroidered the foetid violence of his jails, blindfolded prisoners tied to chairs while jailers hurled buckets of water, now boiling hot (the thread-steam rose), now freezing cold, until the bodies of the victims grew confused and cold water raised hot burns upon their skins: weals of red embroidery rose scarlike on the shawl; and the white shawl, embroidered white on white, so that it revealed its secrets only to the most meticulous and squinting eyes: it showed policemen, because he had given them new uniforms, white from head to toe, white helmets with silver spikes, white leather holsters, white jackboots up to the knee,

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policemen running discotheques in which the booze flowed freely, white bottles with white labels, white powders sniffed from the white backs of gloves, he turned a blind eye, understand, he wanted the police strong and the Army weak, he was dazzled, daughter, by whiteness; and the swearing shawl, Iskander's mouth as wide as the Abyss, the oaths represented by foul creatures crawling from his lips, vermilion cockroaches, magenta lizards, turquoise leeches, ochre scorpions, indigo spiders, albino rats, because he never stopped that either, how selective, Arjumand, your ears; and the shawls of inter- national shame, Isky grovelling at primrose Chinese feet, Isky conspiring with Pahlevi, embracing Dada Amin; eschatological Iskander, riding an atomic bomb; Harappa and Shaggy Dog like cruel boys slitting the throat of an emerald chicken and plucking the feathers from its east wing, one by one; and the election shawls, one for the day of suffrage that began his reign, one for the day that led to his downfall, shawls swarming with figures, each one a breathtakingly lifelike portrait of a member of the Front, figures breaking seals, stuffing ballot-boxes, smashing heads, fig- ures swaggering into polling booths to watch the peasants vote, stick-waving rifle-toting figures, fire-raisers, mobs, and on the shawl of the second election there were three times as many fig- ures as on the first, but despite the crowded field of her art not a single face was anonymous, every tiny being had a name, it was an act of accusation on the grandest conceivable scale, and of course he'd have won anyway, daughter, no question, a respectable victory, but he wanted more, only annihilation was good enough for his opponents, he wanted them squashed like cockroaches under his boot, yes, obliteration, and in the end it came to him instead, don't think he wasn't surprised, he had forgotten he was only a man; and the allegorical shawl, Iskander and the Death of Democracy, his hands around her throat, squeezing Democracy's gullet, while her eyes bulged, her face turned blue, her tongue protruded, she shat in her pajamas, her hands became hooks trying to grab the wind, and Iskander with his eyes shut squeezed and squeezed, while in the background the Generals watched, the murder reflected by a miracle of the needlewoman's skill in the mirrored glasses they all wore, all

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except one, with deep black circles around his eyes and easy tears on his cheeks, and behind the Generals other figures, peeping over uniformed shoulders, through epaulettes, under armpits, crew-cut Americans and Russians in baggy suits and even the great Zedong himself, they all watched, they didn't have to lift a finger, no need to look beyond your father, Arjumand, no need to hunt conspirators, he did their work for them, they didn't even have to break wind, I am hope, he used to say, and so he was, but he took off that cloak and turned into something else, Iskander the assassin of possibility, immortalized on a cloth, on which she, the artist, had depicted his victim as a young girl, small, physically frail, internally damaged: she had taken for her model her memory of an idiot, and conse- quently innocent, child, Sufiya Zinobia Hyder (now Shakil), gasping and empurpled in Iskander's unyielding fist; and the auto- biographical shawl, the portrait of the artist as an old crone, that self-portrait in which Rani had depicted herself as being com- posed of the same materials as the house, wood, brick, tin, her body merging into the fabric of Mohenjo, she was earth and cracks and spiders, and a fine mist of oblivion clouded the scene; that was the fourteenth shawl, and the fifteenth was the shawl of the fifteenth century, the famous poster recreated in thread, Iskander pointing at the future, only there was nothing on the horizon, no dawn-fingers, just the endless waves of night; and then Pinkie's shawl, on which she committed suicide; and the last two were the worst: the shawl of hell, which, as Omar Khayyam Shakil had discovered as a child, lay in the west of the country in the vicinity of Q., where the separatist movement had grown out of all recognition in the wake of the secession of the East, prolif- eration of sheep-fuckers, but Iskander had done for them, there it all was in scarlet, scarlet and nothing but scarlet, what he did for the sake of no-more-secessions, in the name of never-another- East-Wing, the bodies sprawled across the shawl, the men without genitals, the sundered legs, the intestines in place of faces, the alien legion of the dead blotting out the memory of Raza Hyder's governorship, or even giving that period, in retrospect, a kindly, tolerant glow, because there was no comparison, daughter, your man of

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the people, your master of the common touch, I have lost count of the corpses on my shawl, twenty, fifty, a hundred thousand dead, who knows, and not enough scarlet thread on earth to show the blood, the people hanging upside down with dogs at their open guts, the people grinning lifelessly with bullet-holes for second mouths, the people united in the worm-feast of that shawl of flesh and death; and Little Mir Harappa on the last of all the shawls, Little Mir buried at the bottom of a trunk, but of course he rose to clasp his cousin in his own phantasmal grip, to drag Iskander Harappa down to hell . . . her eighteenth shawl and her supreme master- piece, a panoramic landscape, the hard earth of her exile stretched across the cloth, from Mohenjo as far as Daro, villagers balancing buckets on shoulder-poles, horses running free, women tilling the soil, the dawn light kindled in miracles of rose and blue embroi- dery: Daro was coming awake, and from its great verandah, by the steps, something long and heavy was swinging in the breeze, a single death after the carnage of the seventeenth shawl, Little Mir Harappa dangling by the neck under the eaves of his family home, dead in the first months of the Chairman's reign, his sightless eyes staring down at the very spot where, once upon a time, the cadaver of an unloved dog had been permitted to decay, yes, she had delineated his body with an accuracy that stopped the heart, leaving out nothing, not the disembowelling, not the tear in the armpit through which Mir's own heart had been removed, not the torn-out tongue, nothing, and there was a villager standing beside the corpse, with his bewildered remark sewn in black above his head, 'It looks as if,' the fellow said, 'his body has been looted, like a house.'

It was, of course, for his alleged complicity in the murder of Little Mir Harappa that Iskander was put on trial for his life. Also indicted, for the actual performance of the crime, was the dead man's son Haroun. He, however, was tried in absentia, having fled the country, it was thought, although it was possible that he had simply vanished, gone to ground.

No murderers were depicted on Rani's eighteenth shawl . . .

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but now that all eighteen have been spread out and admired, it is time to turn away from Harappas, from Rani and Arjumand sequestered in that house whose decay had reached the point at which the water trickled blood-red from rust-corroded taps. Time to turn back the clock, so that Iskander rises from the grave, but recedes, as well, into the background of the tale. Other people have been living lives while Harappas rose and fell.

10

The Woman in the Veil

There was once a young woman, Sufiya Zinobia, also known as 'Shame'. She �was of slight build, had a weakness for pine- kernels, and her arms and legs were imperfectly co-ordinated when she walked. Despite this ambulatory awkwardness, how- ever, she would not have struck a stranger as being particularly abnormal, having acquired in the first twenty-one years of life the usual complement of physical attributes, including a small severe face that made her seem unusually mature, disguising the fact that she had only managed to get hold of around seven years' worth of brains. She even had a husband, Omar Khayyam Shakil, and never complained that her parents had chosen for her a man fully thirty-one years her senior, that is to say, older than her own father. Appearances notwithstanding, however, this Sufiya Zino- bia turned out to be, in reality, one of those supernatural beings, those exterminating or avenging angels, or werewolves, or vam- pires, about whom we are happy to read in stories, sighing thank- fully or even a little smugly while they scare the pants off us that it's just as well they are no more than abstractions or figments; because we know (but do not say) that the mere likelihood of

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their existence would utterly subvert the laws by which we live, the processes by which we understand the world.

Lurking inside Sufiya Zinobia Shakil there was a Beast. We have already seen something of the growth of this unspeakable monster; we have seen how, feeding on certain emotions, it took possession of the girl from time to time. On two occasions she fell grievously ill and almost died; and perhaps both illnesses, brain- fever and immunological collapse, were attempts by her ordinary self, by the Sufiya-Zinobia-ness of her, to defeat the Beast, even at the cost of her own life. But the Beast was not destroyed. And maybe somebody should have guessed, after the attack on her brother-in-law, that whatever other-than-Beastly part of her remained was gradually losing its ability to resist the blood- creature within. But when Omar Khayyam's whispering voice finally found the way to unlock her trance, she woke up fresh and relaxed and seemingly unaware of having terminated Talvar's polo-playing career. The Beast had nodded off again, but the bars of its cage had been broken. Still, there was general relief. 'Poor girl got so upset she went wild, that's all,' Shahbanou the ayah told Omar Khayyam, 'but she's O.K. now, thank God.'

Raza Hyder summoned Shakil to a conference and honourably offered him the opportunity of withdrawing from the proposed marriage. On hearing this the antique divine Maulana Dawood, who was also present, refused to remain silent. His original oppo- sition to the nuptials lost in the foggy labyrinths of his great age, the old man whined like a malicious bullet. 'That she-devil and this child of she-devils,' he cried, 'let them make their hell together, in some other place.' Omar Khayyam replied with dig- nity, 'Sir, I am a man of science; to the devil with this talk of devils. I will not cast off a loved one because she fell ill; it is, rather, my duty to make her well. And this is being done.'

I am no less disappointed in my hero than I was; not being the obsessive type, I find it difficult to comprehend his obsession. - But I must admit that his love for the damaged girl is beginning to seem as if it might be genuine . . . which does not invalidate my criticisms of the fellow. Human beings have a remarkable talent

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for persuading themselves of the authenticity and nobility of aspects of themselves which are in fact expedient, spurious, base. - At any rate: Omar Khayyam insisted on going ahead with the match.

Bilquis Hyder, her senses distracted by the events of Good News's wedding day, proved incapable of entering into the spirit of a second marriage. When Sufiya Zinobia left hospital her mother refused to speak to her; but on the eve of the wedding she came to where Shahbanou was oiling the girl and twining her hair, and spoke so ponderously that it was plain that each word was a heavy weight which she was hauling up from the fathomless well of her duty. 'You must think of yourself as the ocean,' she told Sufiya Zinobia. 'Yes, and he, the man, imagine him a sea creature, because that is what men are like, to live they must drown in you, in the tides of your secret flesh.' Her eyes roamed loosely around her face. Sufiya Zinobia pulled a face at these incomprehensible maternal abstractions and replied obstinately in her voice of a seven-year-old girl, which was also the eerily dis- guised voice of the latent monster: 'I hate fish.'

What is the most powerful impulse of human beings in the face of night, of danger, of the unknown? - It is to run away; to avert the eyes and flee; to pretend the menace is not loping towards them in seven-league boots. It is the will to ignorance, the iron folly with which we exercise from consciousness whatever consciousness cannot bear. No need to invoke the ostrich to give this impulse symbolic form; humanity is more wilfully blind than any flight- less bird.

At Sufiya Zinobia's wedding (a private affair; no guests, no marquees; the three mothers of Q. stayed away, Dawood absented himself also, leaving only Hyders and lawyers and Shakil) Raza Hyder forced Omar Khayyam to agree to the insertion in the Nikah contract of a clause forbidding him, Omar, to remove his bride from her parents' home without their prior permission. 'A father,' Raza explained, 'cannot do without the precious pieces of his heart,' from which it can be seen that his new love for Sufiya

Shame ? 2 10

�was burning more brightly than ever, and blinded by the glare of that flame he refused to see the truth of her. In the following years he persuaded himself that by locking up his wife, by veiling her in walls and shuttered windows, he could save his family from the malign legacy of her blood, from its passions and its torments (for if Sufiya Zinobia's soul was in agony, she was also the child of a frenzied woman, and that, too, may be an explanation of a kind).

Omar Khayyam also refused to see. Blinded by science, he married Hyder's daughter. Sufiya Zinobia smiled and ate a plate of laddoos decorated with silver paper. Shahbanou the ayah fussed round her like a mother.

I repeat: there is no place for monsters in civilized society. If such creatures roam the earth, they do so out on its uttermost rim, consigned to peripheries by conventions of disbelief. . . but once in a blue moon something goes wrong. A Beast is born, a 'wrong miracle', within the citadels of propriety and decorum. This was the danger of Sufiya Zinobia: that she came to pass, not in any wilderness of basilisks and fiends, but in the heart of the respectable world. And as a result that world made a huge effort of the will to ignore the reality of her, to avoid bringing matters to the point at which she, disorder's avatar, would have to be dealt with, expelled - because her expulsion would have laid bare what-must-on-no-account-be-known, namely the impossible verity that barbarism could grow in cultured soil, that savagery could lie concealed beneath decency's well-pressed shirt. That she was, as her mother had said, the incarnation of their shame. To comprehend Sufiya Zinobia would be to shatter, as if it were a crystal, these people's sense of themselves; and so of course they would not do it, they did not, not for years. The more powerful the Beast became, the greater grew the efforts to deny its very being . . . Sufiya Zinobia outlived most members of her family. There were those who died for her.

No more dreams of failure, no more square-bashing with green recruits; Raza Hyder got his promotion from Iskander Harappa, and Omar Khayyam Shakil agreed to move north with everyone

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else. His high medical reputation and Hyder's renewed influence secured for Omar the post of senior consultant at the Mount Hira hospital in the new capital, and then they were off, bedrolls and ayahs and all, and soon they were airborne over the wide northern plateau that lay between two great rivers, the Potwar plateau, the stage on which great scenes were to be played out, seventeen hun- dred feet above sea-level.

Thin soil over porous pudding-stone . . . but in spite of the soil's thinness the plateau produced improbable quantities of rain- nourished crops; it was a terrain of such unlikely fertility that it had managed to raise a whole new city like a blister on the hip of an old town. Islamabad (you might say) out of Rawalpindi's rib.

Maulana Dawood, looking down from the skies and seeing the Potwar plateau with its cities gleaming in the distance, banged on the cabin window in dribbling, half-senile delight. 'Arafat,' he shouted at the top of his voice, alarming a stewardess, 'we are come to Arafat,' and nobody, not Raza his friend, not Bilquis his enemy, had the heart to set him right, because if the old man had chosen to believe that they were about to land on the holy ground of the Arafat plain outside Mecca Sharif, well, that, too, was a kind of blindness, a fantasy forgivable in the old.

General Raza Hyder inherited from his predecessor a lugubrious seven-foot ADC named Major Shuja, and also an Army so unnerved by its defeat in the former East Wing that it could no longer win so much as a football game. Understanding the inti- mate relationship between sport and war, the new Commander- in-Chief took it upon himself to attend every possible athletic contest involving his boys, hoping to inspire the teams by his pres- ence. So it was that during the first months of his chieftancy Raza Hyder was present at the most remarkable series of humiliations in the annals of Army sport, beginning with the legendary inter- services cricket game in which the Army XI lost all ten first- innings wickets without scoring a single run off the bat. Their Air Force opponents piled up a formidable reply, because the war had largely been an Army disaster, and so the airmen remained, for the

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most part, unaffected by the disgrace. The Army cricketers finally lost the game by an innings and 420 runs; it would have been 419 except that one of the Army's second-innings runs was never completed, because the player in question appeared to lose heart in mid-sprint, stopped, scratched his head, stared about distract- edly, and failed even to notice when he was run out . . . Hyder witnessed, too, the hockey match in which the Navy boys scored forty times in eighty minutes while the soldiers stared glumly at their curved sticks as if they were rifles, such as the ones surren- dered on the day of reckoning in the East; and at the new National Swimming Baths he saw with his own eyes a double tragedy, one Army diver never surfacing after botching a dive so completely that he preferred to drown rather than emerge from the waters of his shame, while another got himself in an even worse tangle, taking off from the high board and landing on his belly with a noise like a gunshot, bursting open like a paint- balloon and forcing the authorities to drain the pool so that they could tidy away his guts. After this the mournful figure of Major Shuja presented itself to the General in his office and suggested that perhaps it would be better, begging for pardon, sir, if the C-in-C Sahib would stay away from such events, as his presence was intensifying the jawans' shame and making matters worse than ever.

'Son of a gun,' Raza cried, 'how come the entire Army turned into a bunch of blushing women overnight?'

'The war, sir,' replied Shuja, speaking from the well of a desolation so profound that he no longer cared about his career prospects, 'and, beg for pardon, General, but you weren't involved in that scrap.'

Now Raza understood that his troops were joined in the ter- rible solidarity of their shared humiliation, and guessed at last why it was that not one of his fellow officers had ever offered him a fizzy drink in the officers' mess. 'I thought it was jealousy,' he rebuked himself, and said to Shuja, who was waiting glumly at attention for the demotion his insolence deserved: 'O.K., Major; what's your solution?'

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The unexpectedness of the question startled Shuja into honesty. 'Permission to speak frankly, sir?' Hyder nodded: 'Man to man. You, me and the gatepost.'

'Then, beg for pardon, sir, but a return to Army rule. Takeover, sir.'

Hyder was amazed. 'Do people always talk treason in this town?'

The gloom surrounding the ADC thickened further. 'The General Sahib asked, sir, and I only said. Young officers are rest- less, sir, this is an Army town, the Army is used to power, and sir, everyone knows what these politicos are like, no good, sir, not suitable, the officers remember when they had respect, but now they feel so depressed, sir, seems like anyone can kick the Army around these days. Beg for pardon, sir.'

'The devil with your coup,' Hyder told him fiercely, 'the way things are right now half a dozen of Isky Harappa's ex-mistresses could take the whole Army apart.'

'Yes, sir,' Shuja said, and burst, astoundingly, into tears. Gen- eral Hyder reminded himself that the young giant wasn't much over eighteen; and then his own notoriously over-active tear- ducts began to smart in sympathy, so he said quickly, 'For God's sake, man. Nobody's going to court-martial you. Just get your priorities right. Let's win a few polo matches before thinking of taking over the country.'

'Very good, sir,' Shuja controlled himself, 'I shall convey the General's view to the polo squad, sir.'

'What a life,' Raza Hyder said aloud when he was alone. 'The higher you climb, the thicker the blasted mud.' It was lucky for the country, he mused, that Old Razor Guts was accustomed to standing on his own two feet.

The restoration of the Army's morale, it would be fair to say, was the crowning glory of Raza Hyder's career � it was a tougher job, in my opinion, than anything he undertook when President. How did he do it? - He lost wrestling matches.

The morning after his conversation with Major Shuja he instructed the ADC to select opponents for him, mostly from the

Shame ? 2 14

common soldiers, but also from a cross-section of the officers. 'I am keen on wrestling,' he lied, 'and it's time I saw what stuff our Army phaelwans are made of.'

General Raza Hyder fought with one hundred and eleven sol- diers and was thrashed by them all. He made no attempt to win, concentrating, instead, on the far more difficult business of losing against opponents who had forgotten that it was possible to win; of losing, moreover, while giving the impression of struggling for victory with all his might. 'You can see what good it's doing,' he told Omar Khayyam Shakil, who acted as the General's personal physician before and after each bout, and who was alarmed by the phenomenal battering being given to that forty-nine-year-old body. 'Yes,' Omar Khayyam replied, ministering to aching bones and rainbow bruises, 'any fool can see that.' Raza Hyder wept freely as he lay beneath Shakil's probing fingers, but he called them tears of joy.

The wrestling strategy of Raza Hyder gained him a double vic- tory. It helped the Army to accept his leadership, because now he was united with his men in that macabre fellowship of shame. As Old Razor Guts was drop-kicked in the jaw, dumped on canvas with his ankles knotted round his neck, throttled by an infantryman's arm; as his ribs snapped and his arms left their sockets, the old popularity of the hero of Aansu was reborn; cleansed of the dust and anonymity of his Staff College years, it shone once again, like new. Yes, Razor Guts was back, bigger than ever . . . but Raza had been after more than that, and his second purpose was also achieved, because as the soldiers in camp after camp participated in, or witnessed from roaring ringsides, the pulverization of the one genuine war hero left in the Army, they began to regain faith in themselves, they began to believe that if they were good enough to dump the General in the dirt they couldn't be such pathetic fighting men as they had come to imagine. After one year of wrestling Raza Hyder called a halt. He had lost both upper central incisors and sustained countless other injuries. 'I don't have to take this any more,' he told Shuja, whose air of permanent dejection (although somewhat reduced) now

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stood revealed as a personality flaw and not simply the product of the lost, and now almost forgotten, war.

'Tell those bastards,' Raza instructed him, 'that I expect all per- sonnel to win every competition they enter from now on, or else.' There followed an electrifying improvement in Army sporting results.

I have lingered on this business of Army morale to indicate why it was that during his years as Commander-in-Chief Raza Hyder did not have the time or the mental energy to pay proper attention to what his daughter Sufiya Zinobia was getting up to in the nights.

The politicos and diplomats were in charge of the new city but the Army dominated the old town. The new capital was com- posed of numerous concrete edifices which exuded an air of philistine transience. The geodesic dome of the Friday Mosque had already begun to crack, and all around it the new official buildings preened themselves as they, too, fell apart. The air- conditioning broke down, the electric circuits shorted, flush water kept bubbling up into washbasins to the consternation of the plumbers . . . O vilest of cities! Those buildings represented the final triumph of a modernism that was really a kind of pre-stressed nostalgia, form without function, the effigy of Islamic architecture without its heart, buildings containing more Mughal arches than the Mughals could ever have imagined, arches reduced by pre- stressed concrete to mere pointy holes in walls. The new capital was in reality the biggest collection of airport terminals on earth, a garbage dump for unwanted transit lounges and customs halls, and maybe that was appropriate, because democracy had never been more than a bird of passage in those parts, after all ... the old town possessed, by contrast, the confident provinciality of its years. Old, wide, tree-lined streets, chaotic bazaars, slums, the solidly outsized mansions of the departed Angrez rulers. The C-in-C's official residence was a neo-classical palace of stone por- ticoes with massive fluted pillars supporting mock-Grecian, friezed pediments, and there were little piles of cannonballs lining

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the grand steps up to the front door; a wheeled gun apocryphally named 'Little Zamzama' guarded the bright-green lawn. The place was spacious that the whole family moved in without any arguments, so that Good News and Talvar Ulhaq, Omar Khayyam and Sufiya Zinobia, Dawood and Shahbanou the ayah, as well as Raza and Bilquis, pursued their several destinies beneath that ample roof, while the alien gods of Greece and Rome, posing stonily against the high blue sky, looked down on them with supercilious expressions on their faces.

Things did not go well.

'As if this crazy Army isn't bad enough,' Raza told himself in those first northern days, 'here's my own house filling up with mad persons,' and it seemed as though the occupants of that anachronistic palace set about turning his angry exaggeration into the literal truth.

When Maulana Dawood appeared one morning wearing the tra- ditional garb of a pilgrim on the Hajj, in two white cloths, one wound around his loins and the other hooped negligently across his chest, General Raza Hyder was forced to entertain the possi- bility that the fossilized divine had finally succumbed to the tide of senility which had begun washing over him during their flight into the north. At first he tried to deal kindly with his old ally. 'Maulanaji,' he said, 'if you want to perform the pilgrimage you just have to say the word, I'll fix everything, plane tickets to Arabia and all,' but Dawood only replied, 'Why do I need aircraft when I am already walking upon this sacred ground?' After that the Maulana took to tottering around town with his hands opened before him like a book, intoning verses from the Quran in an Arabic which the loss of his reason led him to adulterate with other, coarser dialects; and in the grip of that senility which made him imagine that he saw the peaks of faraway Abu Qubais, Thabir and Hira behind the town, and which led him to mistake a bicycle factory for the cemetery in which the Prophet's wife lay buried, he began to abuse the townspeople for their irreligious blas- phemies, because of course the men were improperly attired and

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the women were a disgrace, they laughed in his face when he called them whores. He was a mad old man asking the way to the Kaaba, a beardy fool in his second childhood who prostrated him- self outside fish-shops as if they were the holy places of Mecca and yelled 'Ya Allah!' In the end his body was brought back to the Hyder residence on a donkey-cart, whose puzzled owner said that the old fellow had expired with the words, 'There it is! � And they are covering it with shit.' He had wandered to the edge of the old town to the place where the new water purification tanks had recently been filled with activated sludge, and Raza Hyder tried hard to pretend that this was the obvious, banal reason for the Maulana's last words; but in reality he was profoundly dis- turbed, because being a religious man he had never found himself capable of dismissing Maulana Dawood's antics as mere senilities; the gatta bruise on Raza's forehead ached and suggested to him that perhaps the old Maulana really had seen a vision of Mecca, a revelation of holiness in the midst of this unholy town, so that his dying words might contain an awful, cryptic warning. 'The Kaaba,' Raza's own voice whispered tremulously in his ear, 'it must have been, he must have seen it at last, and they were pouring excrement on it.' Later, when he was President, he would be unable to get this vision out of his mind.

At the end of the first year of civilian rule, General Raza Hyder became a grandfather. Good News gave birth to fine, healthy twin sons, and the General was so delighted that he forgot all about Sindbad Mengal. Exactly one year later Good News became a mother again; this time she produced triplets. Raza Hyder was a little alarmed and joked nervously to Talvar Ulhaq: 'You said you would be the perfect son-in-law, but, baba, five grandsons is enough, maybe you are overdoing your duty.' Precisely twelve months later Good News brought forth a beautiful quartet of baby girls, whom Hyder loved so much that he decided not to express his concern about the growing numbers of cradles and comforters and washing-lines and rattles clogging up the house. Five more granddaughters turned up one year later to the day, and now

Shame ? 21

n,A-

Hyder had to say something. 'Fourteen kids with the same birthday,' he told the couple as sternly as he could manage, 'what do you think you're up to? Haven't you heard of the population problem? You should take, perhaps, certain steps, but at that Talvar Ulhaq drew himself up until his whole body was as stiff as his neck and replied, 'Sir, I never thought to hear you say such a thing. You are a devout man, I thought. Maulana Dawood's ghost would blush if it heard General Hyder recommend such Godless procedures.' So Hyder felt ashamed and shut his mouth, and in the fifth year Good News's womb released six more new lives, three male, three female, because Talvar Ulhaq in the pride of his manhood had chosen to ignore Hyder's remark about too-many- grandsons; and in the year of Iskander Harappa's fall the number rose to twenty-seven children in all, and by that time everyone had lost count of how-many-boys-how-many-girls.

Begum Naveed Talvar, the former Good News Hyder, proved utterly incapable of coping with the endless stream of humanity flowing out between her thighs. But her husband was relentless, insatiable, his dream of children had expanded to fill up the place in his life previously occupied by polo, and owing to his clair- voyant talents he always knew which nights were best for concep- tion. He came to her once a year and ordered her to get ready, because it was time to plant the seed, until she felt like a vegetable patch whose naturally fertile soil was being worn out by an over- zealous gardener, and understood that there was no hope for women in the world, because whether you were respectable or not the men got you anyway, no matter how hard you tried to be the most proper of ladies the men would come and stuff you full of alien unwanted life. Her old personality was getting squashed by the presence of the children who were so numerous that she forgot their names, she hired an army of ayahs and abandoned her offspring to their fate, and then she gave up trying. No more attempts to sit on her hair: the absolute determination to be beau- tiful which had entranced first Haroun Harappa and then Cap- tain Talvar faded from her features, and she stood revealed as the plain, unremarkable matron she had always really been. Arjumand

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Harappa, �whose hatred of Good News had not been diminished by the years, kept herself informed of her enemy's decline. A pho- tographer who had once taken pictures of Pinkie Aurangzeb was employed to snatch images of Good News; Arjumand showed these slides to Haroun Harappa, carelessly, as if they didn't matter. 'Poor old bachelor boy,' she taunted him, 'to think you could have spent your whole life with this gorgeous floozy if she hadn't found somebody better.'

The Loo does not blow in the north, but still, on some afternoons, Bilquis would hold the furniture down to stop it blowing away. She roamed the corridors of her new, palatial home mumbling inaudibly under her breath, until one day she raised her voice loud enough for Raza Hyder to hear. 'How does a rocket rise to the stars?' she asked vaguely, because she was really still talking to her- self. 'It is never easy to leave the earth. As the machine rises up, it loses parts of itself, they drop off and fall back, until finally the nose, only the nose gets free of the pull of the land.' Raza Hyder frowned and said, 'God knows what you're rambling on about, woman,' but in spite of this remark, and his subsequent suggestion to Omar Khayyam that Bilquis's mind had begun to wander like her feet, he knew what she had meant, which was that although he had risen, just as she had prophesied, to the very peak of his profession, people had been falling away from him as he rose; other human beings were the burned-out stages of his flight towards shoulder-stars. Dawood, Good News, Bilquis herself: 'Why should I feel ashamed?' he asked himself. 'I did nothing to them.'

Things had been chipping away at Bilquis for years, firewinds and pennant-waving knights and murdered cinema managers and not having sons and losing her husband's love and brain-fever and turkeys and erratum slips, but the worst thing of all was to be there, in that palace, that queenly residence of which she had always dreamed, and to discover that that wasn't any good either, that nothing worked out, everything turned to ashes. Ruined by the hollowness of her glory, she was finally broken by the decline

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of her favourite Good News, who lay suffocating beneath the soft avalanche of her children and would not be comforted . . . one morning they all saw Bilquis putting on a black burqa, taking the veil or purdah, even though she was indoors and only family members and servants were present. Raza Hyder asked her what she thought she was doing, but she just shrugged and replied, 'It was getting too hot, so I wanted to draw the curtains,' because by now she was scarcely capable of speaking except in metaphors. Her mumbles were full of curtains and oceans and rockets, and soon everybody got used to it, and to that veil of her solipsism, because everyone had their own problems. Bilquis Hyder became, in those years, almost invisible, a shadow hunting the corridors for something it had lost, the body, perhaps, from which it had come unstuck. Raza Hyder made >sure she stayed indoors . . . and the house ran itself, there were servants for everything, and the mis- tress of the C-in-C's residence became less than a character, a mirage, almost, a mumble in the corners of the palace, a rumour in a veil.

Rani Harappa telephoned occasionally. Bilquis would some- times come to the phone, sometimes not; when she did she spoke so quietly and in such slurred accents that Rani found it hard to understand what was being said, discerning only a deep bitterness, as if Bilquis had begun to resent her friend, as if Hyder's almost discarded wife still had enough pride to dislike the way Iskander had picked up her husband and made him great. 'Your husband, Rani,' she once said, loud and clear, 'he'll never be happy until Raza lies down and licks his boots.'

General Hyder would remember to his dying day the time he had visited Iskander Harappa to discuss the defence budget and been slapped across the face for his pains. 'Expenditure is falling below acceptable levels, Isky,' he informed the Prime Minister, and to his astonishment Harappa banged on his desk so fiercely that the Mont Blanc pens jumped in their holders and the shadows in the corners hissed with alarm. 'Acceptable to whom?' Iskander Harappa shouted. 'The Army does not say what goes, mister. No

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longer. Get that out of your head. If we allot you fifty paisa a year, then that is what you must make do with. Get that straight and get out.'

'Iskander,' Raza said without raising his voice, 'don't forget your friends.'

'A man in my position has no friends,' Harappa replied. 'There are only temporary alliances based on mutual self-interest.'

'Then you have ceased to be a human being,' Raza told him, and added thoughtfully: 'A man who believes in God must also believe in men.' Iskander Harappa flew into an even more terri- fying rage. 'Look out, General,' he shrieked, 'because I can put you back in that dustbin where I found you.' He had rushed out from behind his desk and was screaming right into Raza's face, depositing spittle on the General's cheeks. 'God forgive you, Isky,' Raza murmured, 'you have forgotten that we are not your ser- vants.' It was at this point that Iskander Harappa struck him on a spittle-moistened cheek. He did not strike back, but remarked softly, 'The blushes caused by such blows do not easily fade.' Years later, Rani Harappa would prove his point, by immortal- izing such blushes on a shawl.

And in those later years, when Iskander Harappa was safely under the ground and his tough-as-nails daughter was locked away with her mother, Raza Hyder would find himself dreaming about that slap, and about all those years in which Isky Harappa had treated him like dirt. And Arjumand had been even worse, she had stared at him with such open hatred that he believed her capable of anything. Once Isky sent her, in his place, to the annual Army parade, just to humiliate the soldiers by making them salute a woman, and a woman, what was more, who had no official status in the government; and Raza had made the mistake of men- tioning his worries to the virgin Ironpants. 'Maybe history has come between our houses,' he said, 'and things have gone wrong, but remember we aren't strangers, Arjumand, we go back along way.'

'I know,' she said witheringly, 'my mother is your cousin, I believe.'

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I

And Sufiya Zinobia?

She was his wife but she was not his wife. In Karachi on his wed- ding night Omar Khayyam had been prevented by a contractual clause from taking his bride away; instead, he was shown to a room containing a single bed and no Sufiya Zinobia anywhere. Shahbanou the ayah ushered him in and then stood obstinately in the doorway, her muscles tense. 'Doctor Sahib,' she said finally, 'you must tell me what are your intentions.' The fierce solicitude for Sufiya Zinobia which had driven Shahbanou to commit so outrageous a breach of social law, of the master-servant relation- ship, also prevented Omar Khayyam from becoming angry. 'Don't worry,' he soothed the ayah, 'I know the girl is simple. I have no desire to impose my, to force myself upon, to demand my marital,' whereupon Shahbanou nodded and said, 'That's O.K. for now, Sahib, but how long will you wait? Men are only men.'

'I will wait until my wife is agreeable,' Omar Khayyam replied angrily, 'I am no junglee man.' (But once - we remember - he had called himself a wolf-child.)

Shahbanou turned to go. 'Remember, if you get impatient,' she told him in a matter-of-fact voice, 'that I am waiting to kill you if you try.'

By the time of the move north, it was clear that Omar Khayyam had changed his ways. Like Iskander Harappa, but for different reasons, he gave up his old debauches: Raza Hyder would have settled for nothing less. The new, northern version of Omar Khayyam Shakil lived simply and worked hard: fourteen hours a day at the Mount Hira Hospital, except on those occasions when he stood in the General's corner during wrestling bouts. He returned to the C-in-C's residence only to eat and to sleep, but in spite of all the evidence of reformation, abstinence and dedication, Shahbanou continued to watch him like a hawk, not least because his already ample figure grew ever more corpulent in these days, so that when he joked with the ayah, 'Well, Banou, am I being a good boy or not?', she replied seriously, 'Omar Sahib, I can see

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you filling up with God knows what, and you are eating so little that it can't be food, so as far as I can tell it's only a matter of time before you lose control or burst. How difficult to be a man,' she said with a grave sympathy in her eyes.

That night he recognized Shahbanou's knock on his bedroom door. He hauled himself out of bed and arrived at the door puffing and patting his heart; to discover the ayah outside, holding a candle, her hair loose, her bony body of a tilyar bird half-visible through her cotton shift. 'What are you thinking of?' Omar Khayyam demanded in surprise, but she pushed her way past him and sat down solemnly on the bed.

'I don't want to kill anybody,' she explained in neutral tones, 'so I thought, better I do this instead.'

'How much you must love her,' Omar Khayyam marvelled. 'More than you,' she answered without criticism and quickly removed her shift.

'I'm an old man,' he told her later, 'so three times is at least two too many. Maybe you want to kill me anyway, and this is a sim- pler method.'

'It is not simple, Omar Sahib,' she replied, 'and you're not such a wreck as you say.'

After that she came to him every night, except during her times of the month and the days of fertility, and on those seven or eight nights he lay in the grip of his voluntary insomnia imagining her body like a wire beside him in the bed, and wondering about the strange destiny which had led him to marry one wife and to acquire quite a different one. After a while he realized that he had started to lose weight. The pounds were beginning to drop off him, and by the time of Harappa's fall he had become not exactly slim, because he would never be that, but he had shrunk out of all his suits (so it will be seen that his life and Isky's were still linked, because Isky, too, lost weight . . . but again, for different reasons. For different reasons); under the spell of the Parsee ayah he had diminished to remarkably normal dimensions. 'I may be no movie star,' he told his mirror, 'but I have also ceased to be a cartoon.' Omar Khayyam and Shahbanou: our peripheral hero has acquired

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a shadow bride, and his own shadow has been enabled, as a result, to grow less.

And Sufiya Zinobia?

1. 1. 1. lies in bed squeezing her eyelids shut with her fingers hoping for the sleep she knows may never come. Feels on the skin of her eyelids the prickle of Shahbanou's stare. The ayah on the mat, watching waiting. Then she, Sufiya Zinobia, decides sleep is impossible, relaxes completely, drops her hands, pretends. She has found that this mimicry, this simulacrum of sleep, makes other people happy. She does it automatically now, has had plenty of practice, her breathing settles into a certain rhythm, there is a cer- tain way of shifting the body at certain intuited intervals, a certain pattern to the behaviour of the eyeballs beneath the lids. After some time she hears Shahbanou rise from her mat, slip out of the room, go a few steps down the passage, knock. Insomnia sharpens the ears. She hears bedsprings, his exhalations, her bony cries. There is a thing that people do at night. Her mother told her oceans and fish. Behind her eyes she sees the Parsee ayah meta- morphosing, becoming liquid, flowing outwards until she fills the room. Melted Shahbanou, salty, immense, and a transmogrifying Omar growing scales, fins, gills and swimming in that sea. She wonders what it's like afterwards, when they change back, how they tidy up the mess, how everything gets dry. (One morning she slipped into her husband's bedroom after he left for the hospital and Shahbanou went to count dirty garments with the dhobi. She felt the sheets with her hands, found damp patches. But an ocean should leave its mark: she scanned the floor for starfish, seaweed, shells. And found none: a mystery.)

She likes it now that she is sometimes left alone and the things can happen in her head, the favourite things she keeps in there, locked up; when people are present she never dares to take the things out and play with them in case they get taken away or broken by mistake. Big clumsy people all around, they don't mean to break things but they do. Inside her head the precious fragile

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toys. One of the best inside-things is when her father picks her up. Hugs, smiles at, cries over her. Says things she doesn't really understand but the sounds are nice. She takes him out of her head and makes him do it over and over, all of it, like having a bedtime story told six times running. You can't do that with the things outside your head. Sometimes they only happen once and you have to be quick and grab them and stuff them away in your secret place. Sometimes they never happen at all. There is a thing she has inside that has never happened anywhere else: her mother skips with her. Bilquis holds the skipping rope and the two of them jump together, fasterfaster, until they are going so fast you can't see who is who any more, they could be one person held within the circle of the rope. It tires her out to play with this toy, not because of the skipping but because of the difficulty of doing things inside that you haven't brought there from the outside. Why are these inside-only things so much harder to do? And almost impossible to repeat overandover.

A special teacher comes most days and she likes that. She, the teacher, brings new things and Sufiya Zinobia puts some of these inside her head as well. There is a thing called the world that makes a hollow noise when you knock your knuckles on it or sometimes it's flat and divided up in books. She knows it is really a picture of a much bigger place called everywhere but it isn't a good picture because she can't see herself in it, even with a mag- nifying glass. She puts a much better world into her head, she can see everyone she wants to there. Omar Shahbanou Bilquis Raza tiny on the tin. She waves down, the little ant family waves back up. Also writing, she can do that, too. In her secret place her favourite letters, the bumpy sin, hockeystick lam, mim with its chest puffed out like a turkey, write themselves over and over.

She packs her head full of good things so that there won't be room for the other things, the things she hates.

A picture of herself with dead birds. Who put that in there? And another one: she is biting somebody, hard. Sometimes these badnesses start repeating themselves like stuck records and it isn't easy to push them away and pick up her father's smile or the

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skipping rope instead. She knows she used to be ill and maybe these bad toys got left over from them.

And there are other things that don't seem to be from any- where. They come most often during the sleepless nights, shapes that make her feel like crying, or places with people hanging upside-down from the roof. She feels the things that get inside her must be her own fault. If she were good the bad things would go elsewhere, so that means she is not good. Why is she so bad? What makes her rotten, evil? She tosses in her bed. And pouring out from inside the fearsome alien shapes.

Often she thinks about husband. She knows what a husband is. Her father is a husband, also Talvar Ulhaq, and now she has one, too. What does that mean, to have a husband} What are they for? She can do most things for herself and Shahbanou helps with the rest. But she has a husband. It is another mystery.

Before the marriage she asked Shahbanou about this and put Shahbanou-answering into her head. She takes the ayah out and hears her say, overandover. 'They are for money and babies. But don't worry, bibi, money is no problem and babies aren't for you.' She can't understand this, no matter how often the picture plays. If money is no problem you shouldn't need husbands for it. And babies aren't foryou. Why? 'Just, I say so.' But why? 'O shoo. Why why why away you fly.' It always ends like that, without explaining anything. But this husband business is important. She has one. Everyone else must know but she doesn't. Again her own stupid fault.

The best thing that has happened recently is the babies, her sister's babies. She, Sufiya, plays with them as often as she can. She likes watching them crawl, fall over, make funny noises, likes knowing more than them. She skips for them: O the wonder in their eyes. She puts them in her head and brings them out when the sleep won't come. Good News never plays with the babies. Why? No point asking. 'Why why pudding and pie.' In her head the babies laugh.

Then the bad shapes again, because if she has a husband, and a husband is for babies, but babies-aren't-for-you, then something

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must be wrong. This gives her a feeling. Just like a blush, all over, hot hot. But although her skin tingles and her cheeks burn it is only happening on the inside; nobody notices these new internal blushes. That is strange also. It makes the feeling worse. Some- times she thinks, 'I am changing into something,' but when those words come into her head she doesn't know what they mean. How do you change into a something? The bad, wrong words and the feeling sharper and more painful. Go away go away go away. Go away.

There is a thing that women do at night with husbands. She does not do it, Shahbanou does it for her. / hate fish. Her hus- band does not come to her at night. Here are two things she does not like: that he does not come, that's one, and the thing itself makes two, it sounds horrible, it must be, the shrieks the moans the wet and smelly sheets. Chhi chhi. Disgusting. But she is a wife. She has a husband. She can't work this out. The horrible thing and the horrible not-doing-the-thing. She squeezes her eyelids shut with her fingers and makes the babies play. There is no ocean but there is a feeling of sinking. It makes her sick.

There is an ocean. She feels its tide. And, somewhere in its depths, a Beast, stirring.

The business of the disappearing children had been going on in the country's shanty-towns and slums for many years. There were various theories about these disappearances. It was suggested that the children were being abducted to the Gulf to provide cheap labour or to be exploited by Arab princelings in worse, unnamable ways. Some people maintained that the parents were the culprits, that they were doing away with the unwanted members of their outsize families. The mystery had never been solved. No arrests made, no slave-trade conspiracies unearthed. It became a fact of life: children simply vanished, in broad daylight, into thin air. Poof!

Then they found the headless bodies.

It was the year of the general election. After six years in power, Iskander Harappa and the Popular Front were campaigning hard.

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Opposition was fierce, however: Isky's rivals had united to give him a tough fight. Economic criticisms were made; but also sug- gestions-of-Godlessness, vilification-of-arrogance, insinuations-of- corruption. It was widely supposed that the Front would lose every frontier constituency, both in the northwest and around Q. Also many seats in the towns. In short, people had plenty on their minds without worrying about a few dead paupers.

The four bodies were all adolescent, male, pungent. The heads had been wrenched off their necks by some colossal force: literally torn from their shoulders. Traces of semen were detected on their tattered pants. They were found in a rubbish dump near a slum. It seemed that the four of them had died more or less simultane- ously. The heads were never found.

The election campaign was at fever-pitch. The murders barely made the newspapers; they were not reported on the radio. There were rumours, some gossip, but people were quickly bored. All kinds of God knows what-all could happen in those slums.

This is what happened.

The woman in the veil: a horror story.

Talvar Ulhaq was flying back to the capital from Q. when he had the vision. In those days the chief of the Federal Security Force was a busy man, hardly sleeping, racing around the country. It was election time, and Talvar was a member of Iskander Harappa's trusted inner circle, his act of betrayal was still in the future. So he was fully occupied, because Isky relied on the FSF to keep him one jump ahead of his opponents, to discover their plans, to infiltrate fifth-columnists into their headquarters and sub- vert their arrangements, to find grounds for arresting their leaders. He was busy with such matters in that aeroplane, so that when the damaged ligaments in his neck began to play up like the very devil, he gritted his teeth and ignored them, because he was run- ning his eyes carefully over certain photographs of separatist Fron- tier politicos in bed with attractive young men who were, in fact, loyal employees of the FSF, working courageously and selflessly for their country. But then the vision came, and Talvar had to