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look up from his work, because it seemed to him that the cabin shimmered and dissolved, and then he was standing like a shadow on the wall of the Hyder residence, at night, watching the figure of Bilquis Hyder, veiled as usual in a head-to-toe black burqa, moving towards him down a darkened corridor. As she passed him without glancing in his direction he was appalled to see that her burqa was sodden and dripping with something too thick to be water. The blood, black in the unlit corridor, left a trail down the passage behind her.

The vision faded. When Talvar got home he checked things out and discovered that nothing seemed amiss at the Hyder house, Bilquis had not left the premises and everyone was fine, so he put the matter out of his mind and got on with his job. Later he con- fessed to General Raza Hyder, 'It's my mistake. I should have seen at once what was going on; but my thoughts were on other things.'

The day after his return from Q. Talvar Ulhaq heard about the four headless bodies, by the purest chance: two of his men were joking about the murders in the FSF canteen, wondering if they could pin the killings on well-known homosexual opposition bosses. Talvar went cold and cursed himself. 'You idiot,' he thought, 'no wonder your neck was hurting.'

He drove immediately to the Army GHQ, and asked Raza to accompany him into the gardens, to make sure they were not overheard. Hyder, in some confusion, did as his son-in-law requested.

Once they were outside in the heat of the afternoon Talvar recounted his vision, and admitted shamefacedly that he should have known that the figure he had seen had been too physically small to have been Bilquis Hyder. It seemed to him, to, that on reflection there had been something a little loose and uncoordi- nated about its walk . . . 'Forgive me,' he said, 'but I think that Sufiya Zinobia has been sleepwalking again.' Such was the respect for his clairvoyant powers that Raza Hyder listened giddily, but without interruption, as Talvar continued, expressing the opinion that were Sufiya Zinobia to be subjected to a medical examination

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she would be found not to be virgo intacta, which would be highly indicative, because they all knew that her husband did not share her bed. 'Pardon my bluntness, sir, but I believe she had intercourse with the four young goondas before tearing off their heads.'

The image of his deranged daughter surrendering to that mul- tiple deflowering, and then rising in her vengeance to rip her lovers to shreds, made Raza Hyder feel physically ill ... 'Please understand, sir,' Talvar was saying respectfully, 'that I do not wish to proceed in this matter, except in accordance with your precise instructions. This is a family business.'

'How was I to know?' Raza Hyder, his voice arriving almost inaudibly from a great distance. 'Some birds, a bad temper at a wedding, then nothing for years. Kept thinking, what problem? Would go away, had gone. Fooled ourselves. Fools,' and then he was silent for several minutes. 'Could be the finish for me,' he added eventually, 'funtoosh, kaput, good night.'

'Can't be allowed, sir,' Talvar objected. 'The Army needs you, sir.'

'Good fellow, Talvar,' Raza mumbled, and then drifted off again until his son-in-law coughed and asked, 'So, how to pro- ceed, sir?'

General Hyder snapped out of it. 'What do you mean?' he inquired. 'What is this proceed? What evidence is here? Only theory and mysticism. I will have none of it. How dare you make allegations on such a basis? To hell with this tomfoolery, mister. Don't waste my time.'

'No, sir.' Talvar Ulhaq came to attention. Tears were in the General's eyes as he put his arm around the younger man's braced shoulders.

'Got the message, hey, Talvar, boy? Chup: mum's the word.'

In the depths of the ocean the sea-Beast stirs. Swelling slowly, feeding on inadequacy, guilt, shame, bloating towards the surface. The Beast has eyes like beacons, it can seize insomniacs and turn them into sleepwalkers. Sleeplessness into somnambulism, girl into

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fiend. Time moves differently for the Beast. The years fly past like birds. And as the girl grows, as her understanding increases, the Beast has more to eat ... Sufiya Zinobia at twenty-eight had advanced to a mental age of approximately nine and a half, so that when Shahbanou the ayah became pregnant that year and was dis- missed from service on the grounds of her immorality, Sufiya knew what had happened, she had heard the night-time noises, his grunts, her birdlike cries. In spite of her precautions the ayah had conceived a child, because it's easy to miscalculate dates, and she left without a word, without attempting to apportion blame. Omar Khayyam kept in touch with her, he paid for the abortion and made sure she did not starve afterwards, but that solved nothing; the damage had been done.

Sufiya Zinobia stiff as a board in bed. Trying to bring the good things out of her head, babies, her father's smile. But instead there is only the thing inside Shahbanou, the thing that husbands make, because he did not give me the baby she took it inside her instead. She, Sufiya, possessed by fault and shame. That woman who loved me. And my husband, who can blame him, he never had a wife. Overandover in her empty room; she is a tide rising towards flood, she feels something coming, roaring, feels it take her, the thing, the flood or perhaps the thing in the flood, the Beast bursting forth to wreak its havoc on the world, and after that she knows nothing, will remember nothing, because it, the thing, is free.

Insomnia into somnambulism. The monster rises from the bed, shame's avatar, it leaves that ayah-empty room. The burqa comes from somewhere, anywhere, it has never been a difficult garment to find in that sad house, and then the walk. In a replay of the turkey disaster she bewitches the nocturnal guards, the eyes of the Beast blaze out of hers and turn the sentries to stone, who knows how, but later, when they awake, they are unaware of having slept.

Shame walks the streets of night. In the slums four youths are transfixed by those appalling eyes, whose deadly yellow fire blows like a wind through the lattice-work of the veil. They follow her

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to the rubbish-dump of doom, rats to her piper, automata dancing in the all-consuming light from the black-veiled eyes. Down she lies; and what Shahbanou took upon herself is finally done to Sufiya. Four husbands come and go. Four of them in and out, and then her hands reach for the first boy's neck. The others stand still and wait their turn. And heads hurled high, sinking into the scat- tered clouds; nobody saw them fall. She rises, goes home. And sleeps; the Beast subsides.

General Raza Hyder searched his daughter's room himself. When he found the burqa it was crackly, starched by the dried-on-blood. He wrapped it in newspaper and burned it to ashes. Then he threw the ashes out of the window of a moving car. It was election day, and there were many fires.

11

Monologue of a Hanged Man

Chairman Iskander Harappa developed a toothache thirty sec- onds before the jeeps surrounded his home in the capital of unwanted airport terminals. His daughter Arjumand had just said something that tempted fate, and whenever anybody did that it made all of Iskander's betel-blackened teeth howl with supersti- tious anguish, especially after midnight, when such things are even more dangerous than they seem in the daylight. 'The steam has gone out of the opposition,' Arjumand had suggested, much to her father's alarm. He had been musing in a contented after- dinner fashion about the rumoured escape of an albino panther in the wooded hills of Bagheeragali some forty miles away; forcing his thoughts out of those haunted woods he scolded his daughter, 'God knows how to wash off this optimism of yours; I'll have to dunk you in the reservoir behind the Barrage Dam.' Then his teeth began giving him hell, worse than ever before, and he said aloud in his surprise what he had suddenly thought: 'I am smoking the last but one cigar of my life.' No sooner had the prophecy left his lips than they were joined by an uninvited guest, an Army officer with the saddest face in the world, Colonel Shuja, for six

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years ADC to General Raza Hyder. The Colonel saluted and informed the Prime Minister of the coup. 'Beg for pardon, sir, but you must accompany me at once to the Bagheeragali rest house.' Iskander Harappa realized that he had failed to grasp the meaning of his reverie, and smiled at his own stupidity. 'You see, Arju- mand,' he said, 'they want to feed me to the panther, isn't it so?' Then he turned to Shuja and asked who had given such orders. 'Chief Martial Law Administrator, sir,' the Colonel replied. 'Gen- eral Hyder, sir, beg for pardon.'

'Look at my back,' Iskander told his daughter, 'and you will see a coward's knife.'

Thirty minutes later General Salman Tughlak, the Joint Chief of Staff, was hauled out of a noisy nightmare, in which the debacle of the East Wing war was being replayed in slow motion, by the insistence of his telephone bell. General Tughlak was the only member of President Shaggy Dog's high command to have escaped the Harappa overhaul of the upper echelons of the Defence establishment, and for a moment the bad dream refused to leave him, so that he yelled distractedly into the telephone, 'What's up? Have we surrendered?'

'We've done it,' the voice of Raza Hyder said in some confu- sion.

General Tughlak was equally puzzled: 'Done what, for God's sake?'

'Ya Allah,' Raza Hyder panicked, 'didn't anybody tell you?' Then he began to stammer, because of course the Joint Chief was his superior officer, and if the boss refused to bring the Navy and Air Force out in support of the Army's initiative things could get pretty nasty. Thanks to the indecipherable stammer of his fear and the lingering mist of sleep enveloping General Tughlak, it took Raza Hyder over five minutes to make the Joint Chief understand what had happened that night.

'So?' Tughlak said at last. 'What now?'

Hyder's stammer improved; but he remained cautious: 'Excuse me, General,' he used delaying tactics, 'how do you mean, sir?'

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'Damn it, man,' Tughlak exploded, 'what orders are you going to give?'

There was a silence during which Raza Hyder understood that it was going to be all right; then he said meekly, 'Tughlakji, you know, with your previous martial law experience and all. . .'

'Spit it out,' Tughlak commanded.

'. . . frankly, sir, we were hoping you could help us with that.'

'Bastard amateurs,' old Tughlak muttered happily, 'take over a government and you don't know your pricks from your sticks.' The opposition had never accepted the election results. Mobs in the cities cried corruption; there were fires, riots, strikes. The Army was sent to fire on civilians. Jawans and young officers mur- mured mutinous syllables, which were drowned at first by rifle- shots. And Arjumand Harappa tempted fate.

It is said that General Hyder was at first reluctant to move, doing so only when his colleagues gave him the choice of deposing Harappa or falling with him. But President Hyder denied this: 'I'm the type,' he said, 'who sees a mess and can't help cleaning it up.'

On the morning after the coup Raza Hyder appeared on national television. He was kneeling on a prayer-mat, holding his ears and reciting Quranic verses; then he rose from his devotions to address the nation. This was the speech in which the famous term 'Operation Umpire' was first heard by the people. 'Under- stand,' Raza said briskly, 'the Army seeks to be no more than an honest ref or ump.'

Where was Raza's right hand while he spoke? On what, while he promised fresh-elections-within-ninety-days, did his fingers rest? What, leatherbound and wrapped in silk, lent credibility to his oath that all political parties, including the Popular Front of 'that pluckiest fighter and great politician' Iskander Harappa, would be allowed to contest the rerun poll? 'I am a simple soldier,' Raza Hyder declared, 'but scandal is scandal, and unscandalling must be accomplished.' The television camera trav- elled down from his gatta-btuised face, down along his right

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arm, until the nation saw where his right hand rested: on the Holy Book.

Raza Hyder, Harappa's protege, became his executioner; but he also broke his sacred oath, and he was a religious man. What he did later may well have been the result of his desire to cleanse his sullied name in the eyes of God.

That was how it began. Arjumand Harappa was packed off to Rani at Mohenjo; but Haroun Harappa was not caught. He had fled the country or gone underground . . . whichever it was, it seemed, in those first days, like a considerable over-reaction. Raza Hyder joked to General Tughlak: 'That is one heck of a stupid boy. Does he think I'm going to cut off his thing just because he wasn't good enough to marry my daughter?'

Chairman Iskander Harappa was detained in some comfort at the government rest house in Bagheeragali, where of course he was not eaten by a panther. He even retained the use of a tele- phone, for incoming calls only; the Western newspapers found out the number and Iskander gave long, eloquent interviews to many overseas journalists. In these interviews he made detailed accusations, casting numerous doubts on Raza Hyder's good faith, moral fibre, sexual potency and legitimacy of birth. Still Raza remained tolerant. 'That Isky,' he confided to Colonel Shuja, 'highly-strung bloke. Always was. And the chap is naturally upset; I'd be the same in his shoes. Also one must not believe everything one reads in the Christian press.'

'Suppose you hold elections and he wins, sir,' Colonel Shuja ventured as his face acquired the most dolorous expression Raza had ever seen on that unhappy countenance, 'beg for pardon, sir, but what'U he do to you?'

Raza Hyder looked surprised. 'What is this doV he cried. 'To me? His old comrade, his family member by marriage? Have I tor- tured him? Have I thrown him in the public lock-up? Then what is there for him to do?'

'Family of gangsters, sir,' Shuja said, 'those Harappas, everyone knows. Revenge crimes and what-all, it's in their blood, beg for pardon, General.'

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From that moment Raza Hyder's bruised forehead acquired deep furrows of thought, and two days later he announced to his ADC, 'We're going to see that fellow pronto and just sort every- thing out.'

Afterwards Colonel Shuja would swear that until the meeting between Raza and Iskander the General had never thought of assuming the Presidency. 'That stupid man,' he always stated when asked, 'brought his fate on his own head.' Shuja drove with General Hyder to Bagheeragali, and as the staff car climbed the hill roads their nostrils were assailed by the sweet scents of pine-cones and beauty, those aromas which had the power of lifting the heaviest hearts and making one think that nothing was insoluble. And at the Bagheeragali bungalow the ADC waited in an antechamber while the fateful conference took place.

Iskander Harappa's premonition about the cigars had come true, because in spite of all the air-conditioning units and cut-glass gob- lets and Shirazi rugs and other creature comforts at the rest house he had been unable to locate a single ashtray; and when he asked the guards to have a box of his favourite Havanas sent from his home they had politely told him it was impossible. The smoking ban possessed Isky's thoughts, wiping out his appreciation of his comfortable bed and good meals, because it �was plain that some- body had ordered the guards to deny him his smokes, so he was being told something � watch out � and he didn't like it, no sir. The absence of cigar-smoke left a rancid taste in his mouth. He began to chew betel-nut non-stop, deliberately spitting the juice out on the priceless rugs, because his rage had begun to overcome the fas- tidious elegance of his true nature. The paans made his teeth hurt even more, so what with everything that had gone wrong inside his mouth it wasn't surprising his words turned bad as well . . . Raza Hyder could not have been expecting the reception he got, because he went into Iskander's room with a conciliatory smile on his face; but the moment he shut the door the cursing began, and Colonel Shuja swore that he saw wisps of blue smoke emerging from the keyhole, as if there were a fire inside, or four hundred and twenty Havana cigars all smoking away at the same time.

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Seducer of your grandmother's pet mongrel bitch, seller of your daughters at low prices to the bastard offspring of pimps, diarrhoeic infidel who shits on the Quran � Isky Harappa cursed Raza for an hour and a half without permitting any interruption. Betel-juice and the absence of tobacco added to his already enor- mous vocabulary of imprecations a deadlier rancour than it had ever possessed in the days of his rakehell youth. By the time he finished the walls of that room were spattered from top to bottom with betel-juice, the curtains were ruined, it looked as if a herd of animals had been slaughtered in there, as if turkeys or goats had been struggling wildly in their death-throes, rushing around the room with the blood spewing from the red smiles on their throats. Raza Hyder came out with paan-juice dripping off his clothes, his moustache was full of it and his hands shook as the red fluid dribbled off his fingertips, as if his hands had been washed in a bowl of Iskander's lifeblood. His face was paper-white.

General Hyder did not speak until the staff car pulled up out- side the C-in-C's residence. Then he said casually to Colonel Shuja: 'I have been hearing some terrible things about Mr Harappa's period in office. That man does not deserve to be set loose. He is a menace to the country.'

Two days later Talvar Ulhaq made the statement in which, under oath, he accused Iskander Harappa of arranging for the murder of his cousin, Little Mir. When Colonel Shuja read this document he thought, wonderingly: 'Just l��k where bad lan- guage will get you.'

In those days the Chief Martial Law Administrator's home had begun to resemble an orphanage more than a seat of government, owing to Good New's inability to stem the annual flood of chil- dren issuing from her loins. Twenty-seven children aged between one and six puked, dribbled, crawled, drew with crayons on the walls, played with bricks, screamed, spilled juice, fell asleep, tumbled down stairs, broke vases, ululated, giggled, sang, danced, skipped, wet themselves, demanded attention, experimented with bad language, kicked their ayahs, refused to clean their teeth,

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pulled the beard of the religious teacher engaged to teach them handwriting and the Quran, tore down curtains, stained sofas, got lost, cut themselves, fought against vaccination needles and tetanus jabs, begged for and then lost interest in pets, stole radios, and burst into top-level meetings in that demented house. Meanwhile Good News had expanded yet again, and she was so big she looked as if she'd swallowed a whale. Everyone knew with a ter- rible certainty that the progression was continuing, that this time no fewer than eight babies would be produced, and that next year there would be nine, and after that ten, and so on, so that by her thirtieth birthday she would have given birth to no fewer than seventy-seven children; the worst was still to come. It is possible that if Raza and Talvar had not been thinking of other things they might have guessed what she would do; but maybe nobody would have stopped her anyway, because the oppression of the children had started to unhinge everyone who lived amid the uproar of their numbers.

O, this Talvar Ulhaq: what uneasinesses, what ambiguities hung around the stiff-necked chief of the Federal Security Force! Hyder's son-in-law, Harappa's right-hand man . . . after the fall of Iskander Harappa, Raza Hyder came under considerable pressure to do something about his daughter's husband. The FSF was not a popular organization; Raza had no option but to disband it. But still there were cries for Talvar's head. So it was just as well that the former polo star chose this moment to prove that he had meant every syllable of his loyal vow to be the perfect son-in-law. He handed Raza Hyder his secret, detailed dossier on the Mir Harappa killing, from which it was obvious that Haroun Harappa had committed the murder, out of his ancient hatred for his father; and that the evil genius behind the unsavoury affair had been none other than the Chairman of the Popular Front, who had once murmured, patiently: 'Life is long.'

'There is evidence that he misused public money developing the tourist trade, for his own benefit, in Aansu,' Raza Hyder briefed General Tughlak, 'but this is much better. This will finish him completely.'

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The act of loyal treason committed by Talvar Ulhaq changed everything. The Popular Front was banned from the elections; then the elections were postponed; then postponed again; then shelved; then cancelled. It was in this period that the initials CMLA, standing for Chief Martial Law Administrator, acquired a new meaning. People began to say what they really stood for was Cancel My Last Announcement.

And the memory of a right hand on a Book refused to fade.

Chairman Iskander Harappa was taken from Bagheeragali rest house to the Kot Lakhpat jail in Lahore. He was kept there in soli- tary confinement. He suffered from malaria and from infections of the colon. There were bouts of severe influenza. His teeth began to fall out; and he lost weight in other ways as well. (We have mentioned that Omar Khayyam Shakil, his old companion in dev- ilry, was also slimming down in this period, under the benign influence of a Parsee ayah.)

The trial took place in the High Court at Lahore, before five Punjabi judges. Harappa, it will be recalled, hailed from the Mohenjo estate in Sind. The testimony of ex-FSF Chief Talvar Ulhaq was central to the prosecution's case. Iskander Harappa gave evidence in his own defence, accusing Talvar of fabricating evidence to save his own skin. At one point Iskander used the phrase, 'Damn it,' and was reprimanded for the use of bad lan- guage in court. He apologized: 'My state of mind is not good.' The Chief Justice replied: 'We don't care.' This made Iskander lose his temper. 'I've had enough,' he cried, 'of insults and humiliations.' The Chief Justice ordered police officers: 'Take that man away until he regains his senses.' Another judge added the following remark: 'We cannot tolerate this. He thinks he is the former Prime Minister, but we do not care for him.' All this is on the record.

At the end of the six-month trial, Iskander Harappa and also the absent Mr Haroun Harappa were sentenced to hang by the neck until dead. Iskander was immediately moved into the death-

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cell at Kot Lakhpat jail. He was given just seven days, instead of the usual thirty, to lodge an appeal.

Iskander announced: 'Where there is no justice, there is no point in seeking it. I shall not appeal.'

That night Begum Talvar Ulhaq, the former Good News Hyder, was found in her bedroom at the Hyder residence, hanged by the neck, dead. On the floor beneath her dangling feet lay the broken rope of her first attempt, snapped by the enormous weight of her pregnancy. But she had not been deterred. There was jas- mine in her hair and she had filled the room with the fragrance of Joy by Jean Patou, the most expensive perfume in the world, imported from France to cover up the smell of her bowels opening in death. A suicide note had been attached to the obscene globularity of her midriff by a baby's safety-pin. It referred to her terror of the arithmetical progression of babies marching out of her womb. It did not mention what she thought of her husband, Talvar Ulhaq, who would never be brought to trial on any charge.

At the funeral of Naveed Talvar, Raza Hyder kept staring at the cryptic and estranged figure of his wife Bilquis in her black burqa; he remembered all at once how he had first come upon her in that distant fortress full of refugees, how she had been as naked then as she was clothed now; he saw her history as a slow retreat from that early nudity into the secrecy of the veil.

'Ai, Bilquis,' he murmured, 'what happened to our lives?'

'You want to feel bad?' she answered, much too loudly. 'Then feel bad for the life that has been lost. I blame you for this. Shame, shame, poppy-shame.'

He understood that she was no longer the luminous girl with whom he had fallen in love in a different universe, her reason had gone, and so he made Colonel Shuja escort her home before the funeral rites were completed. Sometimes he thinks the walls are throbbing, as if the water-stained concrete has developed a tic, and then he allows himself to close his eyelids which are as heavy as iron shields, so that he can tell himself who he is. In the armour of

Shame ? 242

this blindness he recites: I, Iskander Harappa, Prime Minister, Chairman of the Popular Front, husband of Rani, father to Arju- mand, formerly devoted lover of. He has forgotten her name and forces his eyelids open, he has to use his fingers to push them up, and the walls are still pulsating. Cockroaches dislodged by the movement fall down upon his head; they are three inches long and when he brushes them to the floor he has to crush them with his bare heels; they crackle like pine-kernel shells on the cement. There is a drumming in his ears.

What is the shape of death? Death's cell is ten feet long, seven wide, eight high, twenty point seven four cubic yards of finality beyond which there awaits a certain courtyard, a last cigar, silence. / will insist on Romeo y Juliettas. That story also ends in death . . . They call this solitary confinement but he is not alone, there are flies fornicating on his toenails and mosquitoes drinking from the pools of his wrists, putting the blood to some use before it all goes to waste. Four guards in the corridor, too: in short, plenty of com- pany. And sometimes they let his lawyers pay a call.

Through the door of the iron bars comes the stink of the latrine. In the winter he shivers but the low temperature takes the edge off that brown and foetid smell. In the hot season they switch off the ceiling fan and the odour bubbles and swells, stuffing its putrid fingers up his nose, making his eyes bulge even though his tear ducts are dry. He goes on hunger strike and when he is almost too weak to move they hang a blanket over the latrine door and switch on the fan. But when he asks for drinking water they bring it boiling hot and he has to wait many hours for it to cool.

Pains in the chest. He vomits blood. There are nosebleeds, too.

Two years from fall to hanging, and almost the whole time spent in the enclosed space of death. First in Kot Lakhpat, then in the District Jail from which, if he had a window, he could see the palace of his former glory. When they moved him from the first death-cell to the second he formed the giddy conviction that no move had taken place, that although he had experienced the sack over the head, the shovings, the sensations of travel, of flight, they had simply done it to disorient him, and brought him back to his

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starting-place. Or finishing-place. The two cells were so alike that he would not believe he had been moved to the capital until they let his lawyers in to tell him so.

They keep him chained around the clock. When he turns too suddenly in his sleep the metal cuffs bite into his ankles. For one hour a day they remove the chains; he shits, walks. And is shackled once again. 'My morale is high,' he tells his lawyers, 'because I am not made of the wood whick burns easily.'

The death-cell, its proportions, its contents. He focuses his mind on what is concrete, tangible, there. These flies and mosqui- toes and cockroaches, they are his friends, he counts them, they can be touched or crushed or borne. These iron bars enclosing him, one to six. This flea-bag mattress, provided after he made a fuss daily for five months, it is a victory, perhaps his last. These chains, that lotah pot full of water too hot to touch. Something is meant here, something intended. The death-cell holds the key to the mystery of dying. But nobody scratched a code on any wall.

If it is a dream, and sometimes in the fever of his days he thinks it is, then (he also knows) the dreamer is someone else. He is inside the dream, or he would not be able to touch dream-insects; dream-water would not burn him . . . someone is dreaming him. God, then? No, not God. He struggles to remember Raza Hyder's face.

Comprehension comes before the end. He, Harappa, brought the General from the wilderness into the world. The General of whom this cell is one small aspect, who is general, omnipresent, omnivorous: it is a cell inside his head. Death and the General: Iskander sees no difference between the terms. From darkness into light, from nothingness into somethingness. I made him, I was his father, he is my seed. And now I am less than he. They accuse Haroun of killing his father because that is what Hyder is doing to me.

Then another step, which takes him beyond such aching sim- plicities. The father should be superior and the son, inferior. But now I am low and he, high. An inversion: the parent become the child. He is turning me into his son.

His son. Who emerged dead from the womb with a noose

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about his neck. That noose seals my fate. Because now he under- stands the cell, the throbbing walls, the smell of excrement, the drumbeat of a foul invisible heart: death's belly, an inverse womb, dark mirror of a birthplace, its purpose is to suck him in, to draw him back and down through time, until he hangs foetal in his own waters, with an umbilical cord hung fatally round his neck. He will leave this place only when its mechanisms have done their work, death's baby, travelling down the death canal, and the noose will tighten its grip.

A man will wait a lifetime for revenge. The killing of Iskander Harappa avenges the still-born child. Yes: I am being unmade.

Iskander Harappa was persuaded by his lawyers to lodge an appeal against the High Court's sentence of death. The appeal was heard by a bench of seven judges sitting in the Supreme Court in the new capital. By the time the Supreme Court hearings ended he had been in captivity for a year and a half; and a further six months were to pass before the body of the former Prime Minister arrived at Mohenjo in the care of Talvar Ulhaq, who had, by then, been returned to active police duty.

Elections were not held. Raza Hyder became President. All this is well know.

And Sufiya Zinobia?

Back goes the clock once again. It was election day and there were many fires. Raza Hyder pouring ashes from the window of a moving car. Isky Harappa unaware of the death-cells of the future. And Omar Khayyam Shakil in a blue funk.

After the dismissal of Shahbanou the Parsee ayah, Omar Khayyam grew afraid, because he saw the shapes of his early life rising up to haunt his adulthood. Once again a Parsee girl had been made pregnant; once again, there was a mother with a fatherless child. The idea that there could be no escape wrapped itself round his head like a hot towel and made it hard for him to breathe; and on top of that he was extremely nervous of what

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General Hyder might do now that the ayah had been dismissed for the crime of pregnancy and it was no longer possible to keep the secret of whom Shahbanou had been visiting every night. What was out in the open: the most grievous of faults, the infidelity of a husband beneath his wife's father's roof. A betrayal of salt.

But Raza Hyder was just as agitated as Omar Khayyam, and was not thinking about salt. After the burning of the blood- encrusted veil he had been assailed by the thought that perhaps Talvar Ulhaq was just a little too good to be true with his pose of ideal son-in-lawship. Whose neck got bitten? Whose polo career was vampirically terminated? Who might, very plausibly, have bided his time and waited for revenge? 'Fool that I am,' Raza cursed himself, 'I should have had the blood analysed. Maybe it was only a goat's; but now it's all up in smoke.'

O reluctance of a father to accept his daughter's Beastliness! Up in smoke: certainty, obligation, responsibility. Raza Hyder con- sidered the option of forgetting the whole thing . . . that night, however, he was visited by a dream of Maulana Dawood, and the dead divine yelled at him that it was about time he started believing that a devil had got inside his daughter, because the whole business was a test of his faith devised by God, and he had better choose what he really cared about, his daughter's life or the eternal love of the Deity. Maulana Dawood, who had apparently gone on ageing after death and was more decrepit-looking than ever, added unkindly that if it was any help he could assure Hyder that Sufiya Zinobia's antics would get worse rather than better, and in the end they would certainly terminate Raza's career. Raza Hyder woke up and burst into tears, because the dream had shown him his true nature, which was that of a man who was pre- pared to sacrifice everything, even his child, to God. 'Remember Abraham,' he told himself as he mopped his eyes.

So Hyder and Shakil were both distressed, that morning, by the sense of being out of control of their lives - by the stifling pres- ence of Fate . . . Raza realized that he had no option but to talk to Sufiya Zinobia's husband. Never mind that foolishness with the ayah; this was serious, and the fellow had a right to know.

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When the General's ADC presented himself to Omar Khayyam Shakil and said sadly and in some puzzlement that the C-in-C required the doctor's presence on a little fishing expedition, Omar began to quake in his boots. What could be so important as to make Hyder spend the day with him while the city was exploding with post-electoral fireworks? 'This is it,' he thought, 'that ayah has done for me.' On the drive into the Bagheeragali hills he was too afraid to open his mouth.

Raza Hyder told him that they were going to a stream that was famous both for the beauty of the surrounding wooded slopes and for the legend that its waters were haunted by a fish-hating ghost of such ferocity that the many plump mahaseer trout who passed that way preferred to leap on to the hooks of any anglers who fished there, no matter how incompetent they were. That day, however, neither Raza nor Omar Khayyam would succeed in landing a single fish.

Rejection by mahaseer trout: why did the fish not bite? What made the two distinguished gentlemen less appealing than the ghostfish? Being unable to enter into the imagination of a trout, I offer my own (fishy enough) explanation. A fish seeks, in a fishook, a kind of confidence, the hook communicating its inevitability to fishlips. Angling is a battle of wits; the thoughts of the fishermen pass down rods and lines, and are divined by finny creatures. Who, on this occasion, found haunted waters easier to stomach than the ugly descending thoughts . . . well, accept don't accept, but facts are facts. A day in wading boots and empty bas- kets at the end of it. The fish delivered their verdict on the men.

Two men in water discussed impossible things. While all around them koels, pine-trees, butterflies added a fantastic improbability to their words . . . Raza Hyder, unable to get revenge-plots out of his mind, found himself thinking that he was placing his fate in the hands of a man whose brother he had exter- minated. O suspect sons-in-law! Doubt and gloom hung over Hyder's head and scared away the fish.

But � even though Iskander Harappa in his death-cell believed

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that men would wait a lifetime for revenge - even though I am going to have to reopen this blasted possibility, because Hyder has got it into his head - I simply cannot bring myself to see our hero as a brooding, biding-his-time menace out of a revenge tragedy. I have conceded that his obsession with Sufiya Zinobia might have been genuine; beyond that, or even because of that, I stick to my guns. Too much time has passed without any hint from Omar Khayyam that some terrible deed of retribution was in the off- ing; it seems to me that he has made his choice, choosing Hyders, rejecting family; that Omar-the-husband, Omar-the-son- in-law, has long since disposed of the shade of Omar-the-brother, mourning for the sibling he never knew, darkest of horses, waiting for his chance. - It is tiresome when one's characters see less clearly than oneself; but I have his three mothers on my side. - And Raza can't have taken his own worries too seriously, because he ended up telling Omar Khayyam everything, the headless boys, the semen traces, the veil. - And if he didn't, well, then, nor shall we.

Two men in a fast-flowing stream, and over their heads thunderclouds, invisible to human eyes but alarming to fishy ones. Omar Khayyam's bladder had begun to ache with fear, the fear of Sufiya Zinobia replacing his fear of Raza Hyder, now that he had realized that Raza was turning a blind eye to the Shahbanou affair; and a third fear, too, the fear of what Raza Hyder was proposing.

The sacrifice of Abraham was mentioned. The painless, fatal injection. Tears streamed from Hyder's eyes, plopped into water, their saltiness further discouraging the already scornful fish. 'You are a doctor,' Hyder said, 'and a husband. I leave it up to you.'

The action of mind over matter. In a hypnotic trance the sub- ject can acquire what seems like superhuman strength. Pain is not felt, arms become as strong as iron bars, feet run like the wind. Extraordinary things. Sufiya Zinobia could enter such a state, it seemed, without external help. Perhaps, under hypnosis, a cure could be effected? The wellsprings of the rage located, burned away, drained . . . the source of her anger discovered, and made still. Let us recall that Omar Khayyam Shakil was an illus-

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trious medical man, and the professional excitement had led him to Sufiya Zinobia years ago. That old challenge had been renewed. Raza and Omar Khayyam: both men felt themselves being tested, the one by God, the other by his science. And it is common for males of the species to be incapable of resisting the idea of a test ... 'I shall watch her closely,' Omar Khayyam said. 'There is a possible treatment.'

Nobody does anything for just one reason. It is not possible that Omar Khayyam, for so long shameless, was made brave by a twinge of shame? That his guilt over the Shahbanou business made him say, 'There is a treatment,' and so face the worst danger of his life? - But what is undeniable, what I do not attempt to deny, is that courage was shown. And courage is a rarer thing than evil, after all. Credit where it's due.

But what confusion swept over Raza Hyder! A man who has decided to do away with his daughter for religious reasons does not relish being told he has been too hasty.

'You're a fool,' General Hyder told his son-in-law. 'If the devil comes out again she will tear off your stupid head.'

To come to the point: for some days Omar Khayyam watched Sufiya at home, playing with the numberless children, skipping for them and shelling pine-kernels, and he could see that she was get- ting worse, because this was the first time that the violence bursting from her had left no after-effects, no immune-disorder, no comatose trance; she was becoming habituated to it, he thought in fright, it could happen again at any time, the children. Yes, he saw the danger, now that he was looking for it he caught the flickers in her eyes, the coming and going of little pricks of yellow light. He was watching her carefully so he saw what casual eyes would have missed, which was that the edges of Sufiya Zinobia were beginning to become uncertain, as if there were two beings occupying that air-space, competing for it, two entities of identical shape but of tragically opposed natures. From the flickering points of light he began to learn that science was not

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enough, that even though he rejected possession-by-devils as a way of denying human responsibility for human actions, even though God had never meant much to him, still his reason could not erase the evidence of those eyes, could not blind him to that unearthly glow, the smouldering fire of the Beast. And around Sufiya Zinobia her nephews and nieces played.

'It's now or never,' he thought, and spoke to her in the fashion of an old-fashioned husband: 'Wife, kindly accompany me to my quarters.' She rose and followed him without a word, because the Beast was not in charge; but once they were there he made the mistake of commanding her to lie down on the bed, without explaining that he had no intention of forcing her to, of demanding his marital, so of course she misunderstood his purpose and at once the thing began, the yellow fire burning from her eyes, and she leapt from the bed and came at him with her hands stuck out like hooks.

He opened his mouth to scream but the sight of her sucked the breath from his lungs; he stared into those eyes of Hell with his mouth open like asphyxiating fishlips. Then she fell to the floor and began to �writhe and to gag, and purple bubbles formed on her protruding tongue. It was impossible not to believe that a struggle was taking place, Sufiya Zinobia against the Beast, that what was left of that poor girl had hurled itself against the creature, that the wife was protecting her husband against herself. This was how it came about that Omar Khayyam Shakil looked into the eyes of the Beast of shame and survived, because although he had been paralysed by that basilisk flame she had snuffed it out long enough to break the spell, and he managed to shake himself free of its power. She was flinging herself around the floor so violently that she splintered the frame of his bed when she collided with it, and while she thrashed about he managed to reach his medicine bag, his fingers managed to reach the hypodermic and the sedative, and in the very last instant of Sufiya Zinobia's struggle, when for a fraction of a second she acquired the serene air of a slumbrous infant, just before the final assault of the Beast, which would have

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destroyed Sufiya Zinobia Shakil for ever, Omar Khayyam stuck the needle, without benefit of local anaesthetic, deep into her rump and pushed the plunger, and she subsided into unconscious- ness with a sigh.

There was an attic room. (It was a house designed by Angrez architects.) At night, when the servants were asleep, Raza Hyder and Omar Khayyam carried the drugged form of Sufiya Zinobia up attic stairs. It is even possible (difficult to see in the dark) that they wrapped her in a carpet.

Omar Khayyam had refused to administer the final, painless injection. I will not kill her. Because she saved my life. And because, once, I saved hers. But he no longer believed treatment was pos- sible; he had seen the golden eyes of the most powerful mesmerist on earth. Neither kill nor cure . . . Hyder and Shakil agreed that Sufiya Zinobia was to be kept unconscious until further notice. She was to enter a state of suspended animation; Hyder brought long chains and they padlocked her to the attic beams; in the nights that followed they bricked up the attic window and fas- tened huge bolts to the door; and twice in every twenty-four hours, Omar Khayyam would go unobserved into that darkened room, that echo of other death-cells, to inject into the tiny body lying on its thin carpet the fluids of nourishment and of uncon- sciousness, to administer the drugs that turned her from one fairy-tale into another, into sleeping-beauty instead of beauty- and-beast. 'What else to do?' Hyder said helplessly. 'Because I cannot kill her either, don't you see.'

The family had to be told; nobody's hands were clean. They were all accomplices in the matter of Sufiya Zinobia; and the secret was kept. The 'wrong miracle' . . . she disappeared from sight. Poof! Like so.

When it was announced that the Supreme Court had upheld the death sentence by a split decision, four to three, Iskander Harappa's lawyers told him that a pardon was assured. 'Impossible to hang a man on such a split,' they said. 'Relax.' One of the

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judges who had voted for acquittal had said, 'All's well that ends well.' Legal precedent, Iskander was told, obliged the Head of State to exercise clemency after a vote of this type. Iskander Harappa told his lawyers: 'We shall see.' Six months later he was still in the death-cell when he was visited by the unchangingly glum-faced Colonel Shuja. 'I have brought you a cigar,' the ADC said, 'Romeo y Juliettas, your favourite, I think.' Iskander Harappa guessed as he lit up that he was going to die, and began to say his prayers in beautiful Arabic; but Shuja interrupted, 'Some mistake, beg for pardon, sir.' He insisted that he had come for quite a different reason, that Harappa was required to sign a full confession, and after that the question of clemency would receive favourable consideration. On hearing this Isky Harappa sum- moned the last of his strength and began to swear at the mournful Pathan officer. It was a kind of suicide. His words had never been sharper. The obscenity of his language inflicted stinging blows, Shuja felt them piercing his skin, and understood what Raza Hyder had suffered in Bagheeragali two years earlier; he felt the rage rising within him, he was unable to undergo such humilia- tion without giving way to the anger, and when Iskander yelled, 'Fuck me in the mouth, pimp, go suck your grandson's cock,' that was it, it didn't matter that Shuja was not old enough to have a grandchild, he stood up very slowly and then shot the former Prime Minister through the heart.

The Beast has many faces. Some are always sad.

A hanging in the courtyard of the District Jail at dead of night. Prisoners howling, banging cups, sang Isky's requiem. And the hangman was never seen again. Don't ask me what became of him; I can't be expected to know everything. He vanished: poof! - And after the body was cut down, the flight to Mohenjo, Rani tearing the death-sheet from the face. But she never saw the chest. And then blind men seeing, the lame walking, lepers cured when they touched the martyr's tomb. It was also said that this tomb- touching was a particularly efficacious remedy for disorders of the teeth.

1'

ll'!

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And Pinkie's suicide; no need to go into all that again. She stayed dead; she never haunted anybody.

President Raza Hyder in a prison courtyard with a dangling corpse remembered what Bilquis had said. 'They are falling away,' he thought, 'like rocket stages.' Dawood gone to Mecca, Bilquis and Sufiya lost behind different veils, Good News and now Isky twirling on their ropes. Distrusting his sons-in-law, but bound to them by necessity, Raza felt around him the enclosing emptiness of the void. It was at this moment, when Harappa hung from a noose with a bag over his head, that Raza Hyder heard Iskander's voice. 'Never fear, old boy, it's pretty difficult to get rid of me. I can be an obstinate bastard when I choose.'

The golden voice, clear as a bell. And Raza Hyder in shock shouted, 'The motherfucker isn't dead!' The obscenity from his lips astonished the still-unvanished hangman, and at once in his ear the laughing Isky-voice: 'Don't be silly, yaar. You know what's going on here.'

O unceasing monologue of a hanged man! Because it never left him, from the day of Iskander's death to the morning of his own, that voice, sardonic lilting dry, now advising him not to fire his ADC because that would let the truth out for sure, now teasing him, President sahib, you've got a lot to learn about running the show; words dripping on his ear-drum like Chinese tortures, even in his sleep; sometimes anecdotal, reminding him of tilyars and tied-to-a-stake, at other times taunting, how long do you think you'll last, Raz, one year, two?

Nor was Iskander's the only voice. We have already seen the first appearance of the spectre of Maulana Dawood; it returned to perch, invisibly, on the President's right shoulder, to whisper in his ear. God on his right shoulder, the devil on his left; this was the unseen truth about the Presidency of Old Razor Guts, these two conflicting soliloquies inside his skull, marching leftright left- right leftright down the years.

From The Suicide, a play by the Russian writer Nikolai Erdman: 'Only the dead can say what the living are thinking.'

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Reappearances of the dead must be offset by disappearances of the living. A hangman: poof! And Pinkie Aurangzeb. And I've saved the worst for last: on the night of the Harappa hanging, Omar Khayyam Shakil discovered that Sufiya Zinobia, his wife, Hyder's daughter, had escaped.

An empty attic. Broken chains, cracked beams. There was a hole in the bricked-up window. It had a head, arms, legs.

'God help us,' said Omar Khayyam, in spite of his uncircum- cised, unshaven, unwhispered-to beginnings. It was as though he had divined that it was time for the Almighty to step forward and take charge of events.

12

Stability

The great French revolutionary hero Danton, who will lose his head during the 'Terror', is making a rueful remark. '. . . But Robespierre and the people', he observes, 'are virtuous.' Danton is on a London stage, not really Danton at all but an actor speaking the lines of Georg Biichner in English translation; and the time is not then, but now. I don't know if the thought originated in French, German or English, but I do know that it seems astonish- ingly bleak - because what it means, obviously, is that the people are like Robespierre. Danton may be a hero of the revolution, but he also likes wine, fine clothes, whores; weaknesses which (the audi- ence instantly sees) will enable Robespierre, a good actor in a green coat, to cut him down. When Danton is sent to visit the widow, old Madame Guillotine with her basket of heads, we know it isn't really on account of any real or trumped-up political crimes. He gets the chop (miraculously staged) because he is too fond of pleasure. Epicureanism is subversive. The people are like Robespierre. They distrust fun.

This opposition � the epicure against the puritan � is, the play tells us, the true dialectic of history. Forget left-right, capitalism- socialism, black-white. Virtue versus vice, ascetic versus bawd,

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God against the Devil: that's the game. Messieurs, mesdames: faites vosjeux.

I watched the play in a large theatre that was two-thirds empty. Politics empties theatres in old London town. Afterwards, the departing audience made disapproving remarks. The trouble with the play, apparently, was that there was too much of ranting Danton and not enough of sinister Robespierre. The customers bemoaned the imbalance. 'I liked the nasty one,' someone said. Her companions agreed.

I was with three visitors from Pakistan. They all loved the play. 'How lucky you are,' they envied me, 'to live where such things can be put on.' They told me the story of a recent attempt to stage Julius Caesar at the University of P. It seems that the authorities became very agitated when they heard that the script called for the assassination of a Head of State. What was more, the production was to be in modern dress: General Caesar would be in full dress uniform when the knives got to work. Extreme pressure was brought to bear on the University to scrap the production. The academics, honourably, resisted, defending an ancient writer with a rather martial name against this assault-of-the-Generals. At one point the military censors suggested a compromise: would the University not agree to mount the whole production, just as scripted, with the single exception of that unpalatable killing? Surely that scene was not absolutely necessary?

Finally, the producer came up with a brilliant, a positively Solomonic solution. He invited a prominent British diplomat to play Caesar, dressed in (British) Imperial regalia. The Army relaxed; the play opened; and when the first-night curtain fell, the house lights went up to reveal a front row full of Generals, all applauding wildly to signify their enjoyment of this patriotic work depict- ing the overthrow of imperialism by the freedom movement of Rome.

I insist: I have not made this up ... and I am reminded of a British diplomat's wife whom I mentioned earlier. 'Why don't people in Rome,' she might well have inquired, 'get rid of Gen- eral Caesar in, you know, the usual way?'

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But I was talking about Biichner. My friends and I had liked Danton's Death; in the age of Khomeini, etc., it seemed most apposite. But Danton's (Biichner's?) view of'the people' bothered us. If the people were like Robespierre, how did Danton ever get to be a hero? Why was he cheered in court?

'The point is,' one of my friends argued, 'that this opposition exists all right; but it is an internal dialectic' That made sense. The people are not only like Robespierre. They, we, are Danton, too. We are Robeston and Danpierre. The inconsistency doesn't matter; I myself manage to hold large numbers of wholly irrecon- cilable views simultaneously, without the least difficulty. I do not think others are less versatile.

Iskander Harappa was not just Danton; Raza Hyder wasn't Robespierre pure-and-simple. Isky certainly lived it up, perhaps he was something of an epicure, but he also believed that he was always, unarguably, right. And eighteen shawls have shown us that he wasn't averse to Terror, either. What befell him in his death- cell befell others because of him. That is important. (But if we mind about the others, we must also, unfortunately, mind about Iskander.) And Raza Hyder? It is possible to believe that he took no pleasure in what he did, that the pleasure principle was not in operation, even though he claimed to act in the name of God? I don't think so.

Isky and Raza. They, too, were Danpierre and Robeston. Which may be an explanation; but it cannot, of course, be an

excuse.

When Omar Khayyam Shakil saw the Sufiya-Zinobia-shaped hole in a bricked-up window, the idea came to him that his wife was dead. Which is not to say that he expected to find her lifeless body on the lawn below the window, but that he guessed that the crea- ture inside her, the hot thing, the yellow fire, had by now con- sumed her utterly, like a house-gutting blaze, so that the girl whose fate had prevented her from becoming complete had finally diminished to the vanishing point. What had escaped, what now roamed free in the unsuspecting air, was not Sufiya Zinobia Shakil

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at all, but something more like a principle, the embodiment of violence, the pure malevolent strength of the Beast.

'Damn it,' he told himself, 'the world is going mad.'

There was once a wife, whose husband injected her with knock-out drugs twice daily. For two years she lay on a carpet, like a girl in a fantasy who can only be awoken by the blue- blooded kiss of a prince; but kisses were not her destiny. She appeared to be spellbound by the sorceries of the drug, but the monster inside her never slept, the violence which had been born of shame, but which by now lived its own life beneath her skin; it fought the narcoleptic fluids, it took its time, spreading slowly through her body until it had occupied every cell, until she had become the violence, which no longer needed anything to set it off, because once a carnivore has tasted blood you can't fool it with vegetables any more. And in the end it defeated the drug, it lifted its body up and broke the restraining chains.

Pandora, possessed by the unleashed contents of her box.

Yellow fire behind her closed eyelids, fire under her fingernails and beneath the roots of her hair. Yes, she was dead all right, I'm sure of it, no more Sufiya-Zinobia-ness, everything burned up in that Hell. Throw a body on a funeral pyre and it will jerk, genu- flect, sit up, dance, smile; the fire pulls the nerve-strings of the corpse, which becomes the fire's puppet, conveying a ghastly illu- sion of life amidst the flames . . .

There was once a Beast. When it was sure of its strength, it chose its moment, and sprang through a wall of brick.

During the next four years, that is to say the period of the Presi- dency of Raza Hyder, Omar Khayyam Shakil grew old. Nobody noticed at first, because he had been grey for years; but once he had turned sixty his feet, which had been obliged for most of their lives to bear the impossible burden of his obesity, staged a revolt, because in the aftermath of the departure of Shahbanou the ayah, when he had been deprived of the mint teas and nocturnal nour- ishments of her loyalty, he began to put on weight again. Buttons popped off trouser waistbands, and his feet went on strike. Omar

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Khayyam's steps became agonies, even when he leaned on the sword-concealing cane which he had carried down all the years, ever since the time of his lecherous alliance with Iskander Harappa. He took to spending hours on end seated in a cane chair in what had once been Sufiya Zinobia's prison cell, staring out through the window which held, in fantastic outline, the red brick after- image of his departed wife.

He retired from Mount Hira Hospital and sent most of his pen- sion money to an old house in Q. inhabited by three old women who refused to die, unlike Bariamma, who had long since done the decent thing and expired, propped up by bolsters, so that it was almost a full day before anyone saw what had happened . . . more money was sent to a Parsee ayah, and Omar Khayyam lived quietly under Raza Hyder's roof, shelling pine-kernels while his eyes, roving outwards through the attic window, seemed to be following someone, although there was nobody there.

Because he was familiar with the theory that susceptibility to hypnosis was the sign of a highly developed imaginative faculty - that the hypnotic trance is a form of inward creativity, during which the subject remakes herself and her world as she chooses � he sometimes thought that Sufiya Zinobia's metamorphosis must have been willed, because even an autohypnotist cannot ask her- self to do what she would be unwilling to do. So then she had chosen, she had created the Beast ... in which event, he rumi- nated in a cane chair with a mouth full of pine-kernels, her case is an object lesson. It demonstrates the danger of permitting the imagination too free a rein. The rampages of Sufiya Zinobia were the results of a fancy that ran wild.

'Shame should come to me,' he informed the koel perching on the window, 'here I sit doing what I'm criticizing, thinking God knows what, living too much in my head.'

Raza Hyder also thought: 'Shame should come to me.' Now that she was gone his thoughts were plagued by her. That something- too-loose in her muscles, that something-half-coordinated in her gait had stopped him loving her for a time. She had to almost die

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before I. And of course it wasn't enough. His head was bursting with voices: Isky Dawood Isky Dawood. Hard to think straight. . . and now she would take her revenge. Somehow, some time, she would drag him down. Unless he found her first. But who to send, who to brief? 'My daughter, the idiot with brain-fever, has become a human guillotine and started ripping off men's heads. This is her photo, wanted dead or alive, handsome reward.' Impossible. No can do.

O impotence of power. The President persuading himself not to be stupid, she won't survive, she hasn't, nothing heard for some time now, no news is good news. Or she'll turn up somewhere and then we'll hush it up. But still there cropped up in his thoughts the picture of a tiny girl with a face of classical severity; it was an accusation . . . throbbing at his temples, Isky and Dawood whispered and argued, rightleftright. But one can be haunted by the living as well as the dead. A wild look appeared in his eyes.

Like Omar Khayyam Shakil, President Raza Hyder began to shell and eat large quantities of pine-kernels, Sufiya Zinobia's favourite treat, which she had spent long and happy hours releasing from their shells, with crazy dedication, because the shelling of pine-kernels is a form of lunacy, you spend more energy getting the damn things out than they give you when you eat.

'General Hyder,' the Angrez television interviewer asks Raza, 'informed sources opine, close observers claim, many of our viewers in the West would say, how would you refute the argu- ment, have you a point of view about the allegation that your institution of such Islamic punishments as flogging and cutting-off of hands might be seen in certain quarters as being, arguably, according to certain definitions, so to speak, barbaric?'

Raza Hyder smiles at the camera, a courteous smile, the smile of a man of true good manners and no little decorum. 'It is not barbaric,' he replies. 'Why? For three reasons.' He raises a finger for each reason and counts them off. 'Number one,' he explains, 'is that, kindly understand, a law in itself is neither barbaric nor

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not barbaric. What matters is the man who is applying the law. And in this case it is I, Raza Hyder, who am doing it, so of course it will not be barbaric.

'Number two, let me say, sir, that we are not some savages down from the trees, you see? We will not simply order people to stick out their hands, like this, and go fataakh! with a butcher's knife. No, sir. All will be done under the most hygienic condi- tions, with proper medical supervision, use of anaesthetic etcetera.

'But the third reason is that these are not laws, my dear fellow, which we have plucked out of the wind. These are the holy words of God, as revealed in sacred texts. Now if they are holy words of God, they cannot also be barbaric. It is not possible. They must be some other thing.'

He had chosen not to move into the President's House in the new capital, feeling more comfortable in the Commander-in-Chief's residence, in spite of the noisy hordes of motherless children bul- lying ayahs in the corridors. At first he had been willing to spend some of his nights under the Presidential roof, for instance at the time of the Pan-Islamic conference when Heads of State arrived from all over the globe, and they all brought their mothers along, so that all hell broke loose, because the mothers in the zenana wing embarked at once on a tooth-and-nail struggle for seniority, and they kept sending urgent messages to their sons, interrupting the conference's plenipotentiary sessions to complain about mortal insults received and honour besmirched, which brought the world leaders close to starting fist-fights or even wars. Raza Hyder did not have a mother to land him in hot water, but he had worries of his own, because he had discovered on the first night of the con- ference that while he was in this airport of a palace the voice of Iskander Harappa became so loud in his ears that he could hardly hear anything else. The monologue of the hanged man buzzed in his skull, and it seemed that Isky had decided to give his successor some useful tips, because the disembodied voice had started quoting liberally and in an irritatingly sing-song accent from what it took Raza a long time to work out were the writings of the

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notorious infidel and foreigner Niccolo Machiavelli. Raza lay awake all that night with the spectral buzzing in his head. 'In taking a state,' Iskander was saying, 'the conqueror must arrange to commit all his cruelties at once, for injuries should be done all together, so that being less tasted, they will give less offence.' Raza Hyder had been unable to prevent an exclamation � 'Ya Allah, shut up, shut up!' � from getting past the Presidential lips, and at once guards came running into his bedroom, fearing the worst, namely an invasion by the endlessly complaining mothers of the world leaders; Raza was obliged to say with shame, 'Nothing, nothing. A nightmare, a bad dream, nothing to worry about.'

'Sorry, Raza,' Iskander whispered, 'only trying to help.'

The moment the conference was over and the mothers had been pulled apart Raza rushed back to his other home, where he could relax, because there Maulana Dawood's voice in his right ear was louder than Isky's in his left. He learned to concentrate all his attention on his right side, and as a result it became possible to live with the ghost of Iskander Harappa, even though Isky kept trying to make his points.

In the fifteenth century General Raza Hyder became President of his country, and everything began to change. The effect of the ceaseless monologue of Iskander Harappa was to drive Raza into the ectoplasmic arms of his old crony Maulana Dawood. Around whose neck had once been placed, by mistake, a certain necklace of shoes. Raza Hyder with his gatta bruise was, you recall, the type of mohajir who had arrived with God in every pocket, and the more Iskander whispered the more Raza felt that God was his only hope. So when Dawood whined, 'Here in holy Mecca much evil can be seen; the sacred places must be cleansed, that is your first and only duty,' Hyder paid attention, even though it was clear that death had not managed to disabuse the divine of the notion that they had come to the holy heart of the faith, Mecca Sharif, the city of the great Black Stone.

What Raza did: he banned booze. He closed down the famous old beer brewery at Bagheera so that Panther Lager became a fond memory instead of a refreshing drink. He altered the television

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schedules so drastically that people began summoning repair men to fix their sets, because they could not understand why the TVs �were suddenly refusing to show them anything except theological lectures, and they wondered how these mullahs had got stuck inside the screen. On the Prophet's birthday Raza arranged for every mosque in the country to sound a siren at nine a.m. and anybody who forgot to stop and pray when he heard the howling was instantly carted off to jail. The beggars of the capital and also of all the other cities remembered that the Quran obliged the faithful to give alms, so they took advantage of the arrival of God in the Presidential office to stage a series of enormous marches demanding the establishment by law of a minimum donation of five rupees. They had underestimated God, however; in the first year of his rule Raza Hyder incarcerated one hundred thous- and beggars and, while he was at it, a further twenty-five hun- dred members of the now-illegal Popular Front, who were not much better than mendicants, after all. He announced that God and socialism were incompatible, so that the doctrine of Islamic Socialism on which the Popular Front had based its appeal was the worst kind of blasphemy imaginable. 'Iskander Harappa never believed in God,' he declared publicly, 'so he was destroying the country while pretending to hold it together.' The incompati- bility doctrine made Raza very popular with the Americans, who were of the same opinion, even though the God concerned was different.

' "Of those who have attained the position of prince by vil- lainy," ' Iskander's voice whispered in his ear, 'II Principe, chapter eight. You ought to read it; it's very short,' but by this time Raza had worked out how to ignore his sinister or left-sided dead angel. He blotted out Isky's mischief-making, and instead of noting the historical precedents offered by the histories of Agathocles the Sicilian and Oliverotto da Fermo he listened to Maulana Dawood. Iskander refused to give up, claiming that his motives were selfless, trying to remind Raza of the difference between well and badly committed cruelties, and of the need for cruelties to diminish with time, and for benefits to be granted little by little, so that they

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might be better enjoyed. But by now Dawood's ghost was in its stride; it had gained in confidence, on account of its preferential treatment by the President, and ordered Raza to ban movies, or at least imported ones for a start; it objected to unveiled women walking the streets; it demanded firm measures and an iron hand. It is a matter of record that in those days religious students started carrying guns and occasionally taking pot-shots at insufficiently devout professors; that men would spit at women in the street if they went about their business with their midriffs showing; and that a person could be strangled for smoking a cigarette during the month of fasting. The legal system was dismantled, because the lawyers had demonstrated the fundamentally profane nature of their profession by objecting to divers activities of the state; it was replaced by religious courts presided over by divines whom Raza appointed on the sentimental grounds that their beards reminded him of his deceased adviser. God was in charge, and just in case anybody doubted it He gave little demonstrations of His power: he made various anti-faith elements vanish like slum children. Yes, the bastards were just rubbed out by the Almighty, they van- ished, poof, like so.

Raza Hyder was a busy man in those years, with little time for what remained of his family life. He ignored his twenty-seven grandchildren, leaving them to their father and ayahs; but his devotion to the concept of family was well-known, he made much of it, and that was why he saw Bilquis regularly, once a week. He had her brought to the television studios in time for his broadcast to the nation. This always began with a prayer session, during which Raza knelt in the foreground renewing his bruise, while behind him Bilquis prayed too, like a good wife, in soft focus and veiled from head to foot. He would sit with her for a few moments before they went on air, and he noticed that she always brought some sewing along. Bilquis was not Rani; she embroidered no shawls. Her activities were both simpler and more mysterious, consisting of sewing large expanses of black cloth into shapes that were impossible to decipher. For a long time the awkwardness between them prevented Raza from asking her

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what the hell she was up to, but in the end his curiosity got the better of him, and when he was sure nobody else was within earshot the President asked his wife: 'So what is all this stitching? What are you making in such a hurry that you can't wait till you get back home?'

'Shrouds,' she answered seriously, and he felt a chill on his spine.

Two years after the death of Iskander Harappa the women of the country began marching against God. These processions were tricky things, Raza decided, they needed careful handling. So he trod cautiously, even though Maulana Dawood screamed in his ear that he was a weakling, he should strip the whores naked and hang them from all available trees. But Raza was circumspect; he told the police to avoid hitting the ladies on the breasts when they broke up the demonstrations. And finally God rewarded his vir- tuous restraint. His investigators learned that the marches were being organized by a certain Noor Begum, who was going into the tenements and villages and whipping up anti-religious feelings. Still Raza was reluctant to ask God to make the bitch disappear, because you can't ask the Almighty to do everything, after all; so he felt profoundly justified when he was given evidence that his Noor Begum was a notorious character with a history of exporting women and children to the harems of Arab princes. Only now did he send his men off to seize her, because nobody could object to such an arrest, and even Iskander Harappa compli- mented him: 'You're a quick learner, Raza, maybe we all under- estimated your skills.'

This was Raza Hyder's motto: 'Stability, in the name of God.' And after the Noor Begum business he added a second maxim to the first: 'God helps those who help themselves.' To achieve stability-in-God's-name he placed Army officers on the board of every major industrial enterprise in the country; he put Generals everywhere, so that the Army got its fingers deeper into things than it had ever done before. Raza knew his policy had succeeded when Generals Raddi, Bekar and Phisaddi, the youngest and ablest members of his general staff, came to him with hard and fast

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evidence that General Salman Tughlak, in cahoots with Police Chief Talvar Ulhaq, Raza Hyder's son-in-law, and Colonel Shuja, his long-time ADC, was planning a coup. 'Stupid fools,' Raza Hyder murmured, regretfully. 'Whisky addicts, you see? They want their chota pegs and so they are ready to unmake everything we have achieved.' He put on a lachrymose expression as tragic as any of Shuja's; but he was secretly delighted, because he had always been embarrassed by the memory of his inept nocturnal telephone call to General Tughlak; and he had been trying to find a reason for disposing of his ADC ever since the business in the death-cell at the District Jail; and Talvar Ulhaq had ceased to be trustworthy years ago. 'A man who will turn against one boss,' Raza said to young Raddi, Bekar and Phisaddi, 'will turn against two,' but what he really meant was that the clairvoyancy of Talvar scared him stiff, and anyway the fellow knew all about Sufiya Zinobia, and that meant he knew too much . . . Raza clapped the young Generals on their backs and said, 'Well, well, now it is all in the lap of God,' and by the next morning the three conspirators had vanished without even leaving behind the tiniest little puffs of smoke. The twenty-seven orphans of Talvar Ulhaq filled the C-in-C's residence with a curious harmonized scream, all of them shrieking at exactly the same pitch and pausing for breath at the same time, so that everyone had to wear ear-plugs for forty days; then they realized that their father wasn't going to return, and shut up completely, so that their grandfather never noticed them again until the last night of his reign.

The loyalty of his junior Generals showed Raza Hyder that the Army was having too good a time to wish to rock the boat. 'A stable situation,' he congratulated himself, 'everything tickety-boo.'

It was at this point that his daughter Sufiya Zinobia re-entered his life.

May I interpose a few words here on the subject of the Islamic revival? It won't take long.

Pakistan is not Iran. This may sound like a strange thing to say

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about the country which was, until Khomeini, one of the only two theocracies on earth (Israel being the other one), but it's my opinion that Pakistan has never been a mullah-dominated society. The religious extremists of the Jamaat party have their supporters among college students and so forth, but relatively few people have ever voted Jamaat in an election. Jinnah himself, the Founder or Quaid-i-Azam, doesn't strike me as a particularly God-bothered type. Islam and the Muslim State were, for him, political and cultural ideas; the theology was not the point.

What I am saying will probably be anathematized by the present regime in that hapless country. Too bad. My point is that Islam might well have proved an effective unifying force in post- Bangladesh Pakistan, if people hadn't tried to make it into such an almighty big deal. Maybe Sindhis, Baluchis, Punjabis and Pathans, not to mention the immigrants, would have sunk their differences for the sake of their common faith.

Few mythologies survive close examination, however. And they can become very unpopular indeed if they're rammed down people's throats.

What happens if one is force-fed such outsize, indigestible meals? - One gets sick. One rejects their nourishment. Reader: one pukes.

So-called Islamic 'fundamentalism' does not spring, in Pakistan, from the people. It is imposed on them from above. Autocratic regimes find it useful to espouse the rhetoric of faith, because people respect that language, are reluctant to oppose it. This is how religions shore up dictators; by encircling them with words of power, words which the people are reluctant to see discredited, disenfranchised, mocked.

But the ramming-down-the-throat point stands. In the end you get sick of it, you lose faith in the faith, if not qua faith then cer- tainly as the basis for a state. And then the dictator falls, and it is discovered that he has brought God down with him, that the jus- tifying myth of the nation has been unmade. This leaves only two options: disintegration, or a new dictatorship . . . no, there is a third, and I shall not be so pessimistic as to deny its possibility.

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The third option is the substitution of a new myth for the old one. Here are three such myths, all available from stock at short notice: liberty; equality; fraternity. I recommend them highly.

Afterwards, during his terror-stricken flight from the capital, Raza Hyder would remember the story of the white panther that had been in circulation at the time of Iskander Harappa's arrest, and would shudder with recognition and fear. The rumour had died down quickly enough, because nobody ever reported an actual sighting of the fabulous animal, except for one rather unreliable village boy named Ghaffar, and his description had been so cock- eyed that people had decided that the panther had sprung from inside GhafFar's notoriously untruthful head. The improbable beast of the boy's imagination had been, he said, 'not white all over, it had a black head and no hair anywhere else, like it had gone bald; also, it walked funnily.' The newspapers had reported this statement jokily, knowing that their readers had a tolerant fondness for monster stories; but General Hyder, recalling the affair, was seized by the fearful notion that the white panther of Bagheeragali had been a proleptic miracle, a minatory prophecy, Time's ghost, the future stalking the forests of the past. 'He saw her all right,' Raza bitterly thought, 'and nobody believed.'

She reappeared in this way:

One morning Omar Khayyam Shakil was sitting looking out of the attic window as usual when Asgari the sweeperwoman, who had been driven wild by this habit of his, which obliged her to come up and sweep the floors of that forgotten room, and also by his absent-minded way of dropping pine-kernel shells on the floor while she worked, muttered under her toothless old woman's breath which smelled strongly of the disinfectants/tee/: 'That beast should come here and finish off all inconsiderate persons who won't let an honest woman finish her job.' The word 'beast' penetrated the mists of Omar Khayyam's reverie, and he alarmed the old lady by demanding loudly, 'What is the meaning of that remark?' Once she had been convinced that he wasn't going to

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have her fired like Shahbanou, that he did not think of her harm- less sourness as a curse, she relaxed and scolded him, in the manner of old retainers, for taking things too seriously. 'Those stories have started up again, that's all,' she said, 'idle tongues need exercise. No need for the big sahib to get so hot.'

For the rest of that day Omar Khayyam was buffeted by an inner storm whose cause he did not dare to name, even to himself, but at night during his forty-odd winks a dream of Sufiya Zinobia came to him. She was on all fours and stripped as naked as her mother had been by the legendary firewind of her youth - no, more so, because there was nothing clinging to her shoulders, no dupatta of modesty-and-shame. He woke up, but the dream refused to leave him. It hung before his eyes, that spectre of his wife in the wilderness, hunting human and animal prey.

In the following weeks he threw off the lethargy of his more- than-sixty years. In spite of bad feet he became a familiar, eccen- tric figure at the bus depot, where he would limp up to fearsome Frontier types and offer them money in return for certain infor- mation. He hung around the halal slaughterhouses, leaning on his cane, on the days when the peasants brought animals in from the outlying districts. He frequented bazaars and ramshackle cafes, an incongruous figure in a grey suit, supported by a swordstick, asking questions, listening, listening.

Slowly it became clear to him that the stories of the white pan- ther were indeed being told again; but what was remarkable was that they had begun to come from all over the country, in the bus-top bundles of gas-field workers returning from Needle and in the cartridge belts of rifle-toting tribesmen from the north. It was a large country, even without its East Wing, a land of wilder- nesses and marshy deltas studded with mangrove trees and moun- tain fastnesses and voids; and from every out-of-the-way corner of the nation, it seemed, the tale of the panther was travel- ling to the capital. Black head, pale hairless body, awkward gait. Ghaffar's derided description was repeated to Omar Khayyam, over and over again, by illiterate voyagers, all of whom believed

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the rumour to be unique to their own part of the world. He did not disabuse them of this belief.

Murders of animals and men, villages raided in the dark, dead children, slaughtered flocks, blood-curdling howls: it was the time- honoured man-eater scare, but with a new and terrifying twist: 'What animal', a six-foot Frontiersman asked Omar Khayyam with the innocent awe of a child, 'can tear a man's head offhis shoulders and drag his insides out through the hole to eat?'

He heard of villages that had formed vigilante groups, of mountain tribals who had placed all-night sentries on the lookout. Tales of sightings were accompanied by boastful claims of having winged the monster, or even less credible yarns, you'll never believe it, sahib, I hit it right between the eyes with a shikar rifle, but the thing is a demon, it just turned round and vanished into the air, you can't kill such creatures, God protect us ... so it appeared that the white panther was already being mythologized. There were those who said it could fly, or dematerialize, or grow until it was bigger than a tree.

She grew, too, in the imagination of Omar Khayyam Shakil. For a long time he told nobody about his suspicions, but they swarmed round his sleepless nocturnal form, they surrounded the armchair of his pine-kernel-shelling days. He imagined her, it, the Beast, choosing in the craftiness of its spirit to distance itself from cities, knowing, perhaps, that in spite of its, her, colossal strength she was vulnerable, that in cities there were bullets, gases, tanks. And how fast she had become, how much ground she covered, spreading herself so widely across the peripheries of the land that years had passed before her various legends had been able to encounter one another, to be united in his thoughts, forming the pattern which uncovered her night-obscured shape. 'Sufiya Zinobia,' he said to the open window, 'I can see you now.'

On all fours, the calluses thick on her palms and soles. The black hair, once shorn by Bilquis Hyder, long now and matted around her face, enclosing it like fur; the pale skin of her mohajir ancestry burned and toughened by the sun, bearing like battle

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scars the lacerations of bushes, animals, her own itch-scratching nails. Fiery eyes and the stink of ordure and death. 'For the first time in her life' - he shocked himself by the sympathy in the thought - 'that girl is free.' He imagined her proud; proud of her strength, proud of the violence that was making her a legend, that prohibited anyone from telling her what to do, or whom to be, or what she should have been and was not; yes, she had risen above everything she did not wish to hear. Can it be possible, he won- dered, that human beings are capable of discovering their nobility in their savagery? Then he was angry with himself, remembering that she was no longer Sufiya Zinobia, that nothing was left in her which could be recognized as the daughter of Bilquis Hyder, that the Beast within had changed her for all time. 'I should stop calling her by her name,' he thought; but found that he could not. Hyder's daughter. My unfe. Sufiya Zinobia Shakil.

When he decided he could not keep his secret any longer and went to inform Raza Hyder of his daughter's activities, he found the three Generals, Raddi, Bekar and Phisaddi, emerging from the President's office wearing identical expressions of slightly stunned beatitude. They had been walking on cloud nine ever since Hyder promoted them to his inner cabinet in the aftermath of the Tughlak coup, but on this occasion they were intoxicated by an excess of prayer. They had just told Raza that the Russians had sent an army into the country of A. across the north-west frontier, and to their astonishment the President had leapt from his chair, unrolled four prayer-mats on the floor and insisted that they all give thanks, pronto, fut-a-fut, for this blessing that had been bestowed on them by God. They had been rising and falling for an hour and a half, developing on their foreheads the first traces of the bruise which Raza wore with pride, when he stopped and explained to them that the Russian attack was the final step in God's strategy, because now the stability of his government would have to be ensured by the great powers. General Raddi replied a little too sourly that the Americans' policy was centred on staging a dramatic counter-coup against the Olympic Games, but before

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Raza could lose his temper Raddi's friends Phisaddi and Bekar began to shake each other's hands and congratulate themselves noisily. 'That fat-arsed Yankee,' Phisaddi shouted, referring to the American Ambassador, 'he'll have to foot the bills now,' and Bekar began to fantasize about five billion dollars' worth of new military equipment, the latest stuff at last, missiles that could fly sideways without starving their engines of oxygen and tracking systems that could detect an alien anopheles mosquito at a range of ten thousand miles. They were so carried away that they conve- niently forgot to tell the President the rest of the news; but Raddi remembered, and blurted out before anyone could stop him the intelligence that Mr Haroun Harappa had taken up residence in an elite apartment block situated in the centre of Cabul, the capital city of A. His colleagues, alarmed by Raddi's second misjudgment of the President's mood, tried to cover for him again, reassuring Raza that the report was unconfirmed, all kinds of disinformation were emerging from Cabul in the wake of the Russian occupa- tion; they tried to divert his attention to the question of refugees, but the President just beamed and beamed. 'They can send us ten million refugees,' he cried, 'because by taking that one in they have completed by royal flush.'

Now all three Generals were confused; all three felt obliged to explain that their best information was that Haroun Harappa was being given the full and active support of the new Russian-backed regime over the border, that he was assembling a terrorist group which was being given Soviet arms and Palestinian training, and which he had named Al-Iskander in memory of his beloved uncle. 'Excellent,' Hyder grinned, 'now at last we can show the people that the Popular Front is nothing but a bunch of assassins and bad- mashes,' and he made the three Generals get down and give thanks to God all over again.

So it was that Raza Hyder saw his colleagues to the door of his office with true happiness in his heart, and as the dazed triumvi- rate staggered off the President greeted Omar Khayyam Shakil with genuine warmth: 'Well, you old dog, what brings you here?'

The appalling good humour of Raza Hyder stirred up curious

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emotions inside Omar Khayyam, so that it was almost with plea- sure that he answered, 'A most delicate and confidential matter'; and behind the locked doors of the President's office a mood of grim contentment settled on him while he advised Raza of his speculations and researches and watched the good news drain out of the President's face, to be replaced by a grey pallor of fear.

'So, so,' Raza Hyder said, 'I had almost deceived myself she was dead.'

' "I would compare her to an impetuous river," ' Iskander Harappa whispered in his ear, ' "that, when turbulent, inundates the plains, casts down trees and buildings; everyone flees before it, and everything yields to its fury without being able to oppose it. So it is with Fortune, which shows her power where no measures have been taken to resist her, and directs her fury where she knows that no dykes or barriers have been made to hold her." '

'What barriers?' Raza Hyder cried aloud, convincing Omar Khayyam that the President was cracking up under stress. 'What walls can I build against my child?' But Maulana Dawood, his angel of the right, said nothing.

How does a dictator fall? There is an old saw which states, with absurd optimism, that it is in the nature of tyrannies to end. One might as well say that it is also in their nature to begin, to con- tinue, to dig themselves in, and, often, to be preserved by greater powers than their own.

Well, well, I mustn't forget I'm only telling a fairy-story. My dictator will be toppled by goblinish, faery means. 'Makes it pretty easy for you,' is the obvious criticism; and I agree, I agree. But add, even if it does sound a little peevish: ' You try and get rid of a dictator some time.'

When Raza Hyder had been President for nearly four years, the white panther started coming closer to the capital. That is to say, the murders and animal-slayings grew closer together, the sight- ings grew more frequent, the stories linked up with each other and formed a ring around the city. General Raddi told Raza

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Hyder that it was clear to him that these acts of terrorism were the work of the Al-Iskander group commanded by Haroun Harappa; whereupon, to his great surprise, the President thumped him heartily on the back. 'Good show, Raddi,' Hyder roared, 'you aren't such an idiot as I thought.' Raza convened a Presidential press briefing, at which he pinned the blame for the so-called 'headless murders' on those infamous dacoits and gangsters who were being backed by the Russians and acting under the orders of the arch-bandit Haroun, and whose purpose was to sap the moral fibre of the nation, 'to weaken our Godly resolve,' Raza said; 'destabilization is their intention, but I tell you they will never succeed.'

Secretly, however, he was aghast at this latest proof of his help- lessness to resist his daughter. It seemed to him once again that the years of his greatness and of the construction of the great edifice of national stability had been no more than self-delusory lies, that this nemesis had been stalking him all along, permitting him to rise higher and higher so that his fall might be greater; his own flesh had turned against him, and no man has a defence against such treason. Yielding to a fatalistic melancholy born of his certainty of approaching doom, he left the day-to-day running of the govern- ment in the hands of his three elevated Generals, knowing that if Sufiya Zinobia were killed by the large search parties which were now scouring the countryside for terrorists, she would also be identified, and the shame of that naming would bring him down; but if she eluded her pursuers, that would be no help either, because he saw that what she was doing was moving slowly inwards, spiralling inexorably in to the centre, to the very room in which he paced, sleeplessly, crunching with every step the carpet of pine-kernel shells covering the floor, while Omar Khayyam Shakil, similarly insomniac, stared out through the attic window at the menacing night.

Silence in his right ear. Maulana Dawood had vanished, never to speak to him again. Plagued by this silence, which was now as oppressive as the increasingly gloating sibilances of Iskander Harappa on his left side, Raza Hyder sank ever deeper into the

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quicksands of his despair, understanding that he had been left to his fate by God.

I have not changed my opinion of Mr Haroun Harappa: the man was a buffoon. Time inflicts strange ironies on its victims, how- ever, and Haroun, who had once mouthed insincere revolu- tionary slogans and cracked jokes about Molotov cocktails while he perched on a sea-turtle's back, was now the incarnation of the thing he had once despised, a notorious gang-leader with a band of desperadoes to command.

Both Rani and Arjumand Harappa were permitted by the authorities to issue public statements from Mohenjo deploring ter- rorist activity. But Haroun had developed the unstoppable mul- ishness of the genuinely stupid man; and the death of Isky Harappa had finally cured him of his obsession with the memory of Good News Hyder. It is not uncommon for a dead love to be reborn as its opposite, and nowadays the name 'Hyder' made Haroun see nothing but red. It was a further irony, therefore, that his hijacking of a civilian aircraft on the tarmac of the airport at Q. only served to distract attention, for a few moments, from the scandal of the white panther murders and the crisis of the Hyder regime.

When General Raddi was alerted to the seizure of the aero- plane at Q., he initiated a remarkable plan, instructing the local police authorities to flatter Harappa's men as effusively as possible. 'Tell them that a coup is in progress,' Raddi suggested, amazing himself by the inspiration of his idea, 'that Hyder has been seized and the women of Mohenjo will soon be free.' Haroun Harappa fell for it, the fool, and he kept the aircraft on the ground, with its full complement of passengers, and awaited the call to power.

The day grew hotter. Condensation formed on the roof of the passenger cabin and fell on the occupants like rain. The aircraft's supplies of food and drink ran low, and Haroun in the impatience of his naivety radioed the control tower and demanded to be sent a meal. His request was greeted with great politeness; he was told

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that nothing was too good for the future leader of the people, and very soon a banquet of lavish proportions was sent to the aircraft, while the control tower begged Haroun to eat and drink his fill, assuring him that he would be informed the minute it was safe for him to emerge. The terrorists gorged themselves on that food of dreams, on the meatballs of hope-beyond-hope and the fizzy drinks of delusion, and within an hour of finishing they had all fallen fast asleep in the heat, with the top buttons of their trousers open. The police boarded the aircraft and manacled them all without firing a single shot.

General Raddi searched the C-in-C's residence for Hyder, and found him in the attic of his despair. He entered to discover Raza and Omar Khayyam lost in silences. 'Wonderful news, sir,' he announced, but when he had completed his report he realized at once that he had somehow managed to put his foot in it once again, because the President rounded on him and roared: 'So you've got Harappa in the lock-up, eh? So who do you propose to blame for the panther killings now?' General Raddi blushed like a bride and began to apologize, but his puzzlement got the better of him, and he blurted out: 'But sir, surely, the elimina- tion of the Al-Iskander threat means that the headless murders will cease?'

'Go, go, get away from me,' Raza muttered, and Raddi saw that the President's anger was muted, distant, as if he had accepted some secret fate. Nutshells crackled beneath Raddi's departing boots.

The killings continued: farmers, pie-dogs, goats. The murders formed a death-ring round the house; they had reached the out- skirts of the two cities, new capital and old town. Murders without rhyme or reason, done, it seemed, for the love of killing, or to satisfy some hideous need. The crushing of Haroun Harappa removed the rational explanation; panic began to mount. The search parties were doubled, then doubled again; still the slow, circling pattern of blood continued. The idea of the monster

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began to be treated with incredulous seriousness by the news- papers. 'It is as if this beast can bewitch its victims,' one article said. 'Never any sign of a struggle.' A cartoonist drew a picture of a giant cobra mesmerizing heavily-armed, but powerless, mon- goose hordes.

'Not long now,' Raza Hyder said aloud in the attic. 'This is the last act.' Omar Khayyam agreed. It seemed to him that Sufiya Zinobia was trying her strength, testing the powers of those hyp- notic eyes on larger and larger groups, petrifying her adversaries, who stood incapable of self-defence as her hands closed round their necks. 'God knows how many she can take on,' he thought, 'maybe by now a regiment, the full Army, the whole world.'

Let us state plainly that Omar Khayyam was afraid. Raza had become fatalistically convinced that his daughter was coming for him, but she might just as easily be searching out the husband who drugged and chained her. Or the mother who named her Shame. 'We must run,' he told Raza, but Hyder seemed not to hear; the deafness of acceptance, of silence-in-the-right-ear and Isky-in- the-left had stopped his ears. A man abandoned by his God may choose to die.

When the lid blew off their secret, it began to seem like a miracle to Omar Khayyam that the truth had been kept hidden so long. Asgari the sweeperwoman had vanished without giving notice, unable, perhaps, to put up with the proliferation of pine-kernel shells; or maybe she was just the first of the servants to flee the terror, the first of them to guess what was likely to happen to anyone who stayed in that house ... it seems probable, at any rate, that it was Asgari who spilled the beans. It was a sign of Raza's declining power that two newspapers felt able to run sto- ries hinting that the President's daughter was a dangerous mad- woman whom her father had permitted to escape from his residence some considerable time back, 'without even bothering to advise the proper authorities,' one journal cheekily said. Nei- ther the press nor the radio went so far as to link the disappearance

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of Sufiya Zinobia with the 'headless murders', but it was in the wind, and in the bazaars and at the bus depots and over the tables of cheap cafes the monster began to be given its true name.

Raza summoned his triumvirate of Generals. Raddi, Bekar and Phisaddi arrived, to hear Hyder dredge up, for the last time, a few shards of his old authority. 'Arrest these subversives!' he demanded, waving newspapers at the Generals. 'I want them in the darkest jail, I want them finished, defunct, kaput!' The three officers waited until he had finished and then General Raddi said with the utter delight of a man who has long looked forward to such a moment: 'Mr President, we do not believe such action would be wise.'

'House arrest will follow in a day or two,' Hyder told Omar Khayyam, 'when they have prepared the ground. I told you: the final curtain. That Raddi, I should have known, I'm losing my grip. When a General dreams up a coup in this blasted country, you can bet he'll try and carry it out, even if he only meant it in the beginning as a sort of joke, or trick.'

How does a dictator fall? Raddi Bekar Phisaddi lift journalistic embargoes. Certain fatal connections are hinted at in print: the dead turkeys of Pinkie Aurangzeb, Good News Hyder's wedding- day fiasco and the stiff neck of Talvar Ulhaq, theories about the dead boys in the slums make the news at last. 'The people are like dry wood,' Raza Hyder says. 'These sparks will start a fire.' Then the last night comes.

All day a crowd has been gathering around the compound walls, growing angrier as it grows larger. Now it is night and they hear it milling around: chants, shouts, jeers. And sounds from further away like whistles, the glow of fires, shrieks. Where is she, Shakil wonders, will she come now, or when? How will it end, he muses: with the mob surging into the palace, lynchings, lootings, flames - or in the other, the stranger way, the people parting like

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mythological waters, averting their eyes, allowing her through, their champion, to do their dirty work: their Beast with her fiery eyes? Of course, he thinks insanely, of course they have not sent soldiers to guard us, what soldier would set foot in this house of imminent death . . . and then he hears in the corridors below the soft rat-like sounds, the susurrations of servants fleeing the house, their bedrolls on their heads: bearers and hamals and sweeper- boys, gardeners and odd-job men, ayahs and maids. Some of them are accompanied by children, who might in the daylight look too well-fed for their ragged clothes, but who will pass, in the night, for the offspring of the poor. Twenty-seven children; as he hean them go he counts, in his imagination, their padding steps. And feels, from the invisible night-mob, an expectancy, filling the air.

'For pity's sake,' he pleads with Raza, 'let's try and get out.' But Hyder is a crushed figure, incapable for the first time in his life of producing moisture from his eyes. 'Impossible,' he shrugs, 'the crowds. And beyond them there will be troops.'

The door creaks; a woman's feet crush scattered empty shells. Approaching across the pine-kernel droppings is � is the forgotten figure of Bilquis Hyder. Who is carrying a heap of shapeless gar- ments, a selection from the work of her isolated years. Burqas, Omar Khayyam realizes, as hope bursts inside him; head-to-toe cloaks of invisibility, veils. The living wear shrouds as well as the dead. Bilquis Hyder says simply, 'Put these on.' Shakil seizes, rushes into his womanly disguise; Bilquis pulls the black fabric over her hus- band's unresisting head. 'Your son became a daughter,' she tells him, 'so now you must change shape also. I knew I was sewing these for a reason.' The President is passive, allows himself to be led. Black-veiled fugitives mingle with escaping servants in the darkened corridors of the house.

How Raza Hyder fell: in improbability; in chaos; in women's clothing; in black.

Nobody questions women wearing veils. They pass through the mob and the ring of soldiers, jeeps, trucks. Finally Raza speaks: 'So what now? Where to go from here?'

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And because Omar Khayyam is filled with the sense of having walked out into the middle of a dream, he hears himself replying: 'I think I know a place.'

And Sufiya Zinobia?

She did not attack the empty palace. She was not caught, nor killed, nor seen again in that part of the country. It was as if her hunger had been satisfied; or as though she had never been more than a rumour, a chimaera, the collective fantasy of a stifled people, a dream born of their rage; or even as if, sensing a change in the order of the world, she had retreated, and was prepared to wait a little longer, in that fifteenth century, for her time.

Judgment Day

It is almost over. Veiled, bumping on buses, cowering in the shadows of bus sta- tions, they head south and west. Always on the short-haul routes, the stopping buses, avoiding the Trunk Road mail expresses. Off the Potwar plateau, down into the riverine plains, their faces set towards the land-border beyond Q. They have only the money they find in their pockets, so they eat little, drink as much as possible: livid green cordials, pink tea scooped out of large alu- minium pots, water drawn from yellow lakes in which enervated water-buffalo sprawl. For days they scarcely speak, and force themselves to remain impassive when policemen walk squinting along queues of waiting travellers at small-town depots, tapping their lathis against short-trousered thighs. For Shakil and Hyder, the humiliation of the ladies' latrines. There is no country poorer than Escape.

They are not caught; nobody expects a fleeing President to be found in women's clothing on a rutputty third-class bus. But there are sleepless days and nights; there is fear, and despair. A flight through an exploding land. In the lassitudinous heat of the rural areas bus radios interrupt the swooning agonies of singers to speak

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of riots and gunshots. On two occasions they sit in buses sur- rounded by demonstrators, and wonder if they are to die in an anonymous sandy town, engulfed by petrol fire. But the buses are allowed to pass, and slowly the border approaches. And beyond the border, the possibility of hope: yes, there might be sanctuary across the frontier, in that neighbouring country of priest-kings, godly men who would surely give refuge to a fallen leader with a bruise upon his brow. And then they might even be far enough from her, from feral nemesis, from the revenge of flesh against flesh. Raza Hyder, unmanned by wife-sewn veils, clings to such optimistic straws.

The border is impossible to police. Concrete posts marching across the wastes. Omar Khayyam remembers the stories of people crossing it at will, of old man Zoroaster impoverished by that open frontier, deprived by wasteland of all supplements to his income. The memory of Farah Rodrigues which this recollection triggers almost chokes him, mingling in his gullet with the history of the ayah Shahbanou; then the dizziness begins. As he recalls the cloud which descended along the frontier and frightened him so badly that he fainted in Farah's arms, he realizes that his old ver- tigo is returning to torment him, it rushes upon him as he sits in a jolting bus with chickens pecking at his neck and travel-sick sharecroppers in the aisles, vomiting on his toes. The vertigo carries him back to his childhood and shows him once again the worst of all his nightmares, the gaping mouth of the void. The deepest parts of Omar Khayyam are stirring once more, the dizziness is churning them up, they are warning him that whatever anyone says he ought to know that the border is the edge of his world, the rim of things, and that the real dreams are these far-fetched notions of getting across that supernatural frontier into some wild hallucination of a promised land. Get back into 'Nishapur', the inner voices whisper, because that's where you've been heading, all your life, ever since the day you left.

Fear fights off the vertigo; it gives him the power not to faint.

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The worst moment comes almost at the end. They are climbing aboard the last of the buses of their flight, the bus which is to bear them to the depot at Q., when they hear the terrifying joke. 'Look where we've got to in this country,' the bus-driver sneers, he is enormous, with tree-trunk arms and a face like a horsehair cushion, 'even the transvestites are going into purdah now.' At once the busload of gas-miners and bauxite quarrymen starts up a racket of wolf-whistles, dirty laughs, obscenities, ulula- tions, songs; hands reach out to pinch the hijra bottoms. 'This is it,' Omar Khayyam thinks, 'done for, trapped, funtoosh,' because he is sure that someone will tear off their veils, and Hyder's is a famous face, after all � but just then Bilquis Hyder speaks up and silences the passengers completely. 'Shame should come to you, she cries in her unquestionably female voice, 'have the men in this region sunk so low that ladies must be treated like whores?' A hush of embarrassment in the bus. The driver, blushing, orders three farm labourers to vacate their seats at the very front of the vehicle, 'to make sure, begums, that you are not molested further; yes, it is a question of honour for me, the dignity of my autobus has been dirtied.'

So: in a silent and apologetic bus, and after surviving a bad scare, Omar Khayyam Shakil and his two companions arrive, soon after midnight, at the bus station in the outskirts of Q. Hobbling on bad feet, unsupported by the stick he has been obliged to leave behind, exhausted, he leads them through unlit streets to a large building between the Cantonment and the bazaar, where he unveils himself and emits a certain whistle, repeating it until he sees the movement at an upstairs window; and then the contrap- tion of Mistri Yakoob Balloch begins its descent, and they are raised into 'Nishapur', the mother-country, home, like buckets drawn from a well.

When Omar Khayyam's three mothers understood who had been brought into their presence they emitted little sighs, as if after many years they had been released from some particularly con-

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stricting garments, and settling down comfortably side-by-side on their creaky old swing-seat they began to smile. The smile was beatific, innocent, but somehow its replication on the three identically ancient mouths gave it a quality of distinct, though indefinable, menace. It was the middle of the night, but one of the three old ladies, whom Omar Khayyam in the exhaustion of his travels had barely recognized as Chhunni-ma, ordered him to go at once into the kitchen and boil some tea, as if he had just come in after popping out for a couple of minutes. 'No servants any more,' Chhunni Shakil apologized gracefully to Raza Hyder, who had torn off his burqa and collapsed into a chair in a dazed condi- tion for which fatigue was only a partial explanation, 'but our first visitors for over fifty years must take a welcoming cup.' Omar Khayyam lumbered off and returned with the tray, only to be scolded affectionately by a second mother, the withered remnant of Munnee-in-the-middle: 'Hopeless, I swear. What pot are you bringing, boy? Go to the almirah and fetch out the best.' He fol- lowed her pointing finger to a large teak cupboard in which he discovered, to his great amazement, the long-lost thousand-piece china service from the Gardner works in Tsarist Russia, those miracles of the crockery-maker's art which had faded into mere legends as long ago as his childhood. The revenant dishes and plates brought a hot flush to his face, filling his spinning thoughts with a nostalgic terror, inspiring in him the fleeting but awesome idea that he had come back to a household populated only by ghosts. But the blue-and-pink cups and saucers and quarterplates were solid enough; he arranged them on his tray with a shiver of disbelief.

'Now go quickly to the Peek Frean tin and bring out cake,' commanded his youngest mother, Bunny, her octogenarian voice trembling with a delight she made no effort to explain; Omar Khayyam muttered something puzzled and inaudible and limped away in search of the stale chocolate gateau which added the final touch of quaint improbability to that takallouf-ridden nightmare of a tea-party. 'This is more like it,' Chhunni approved as she cut

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and handed out slices of dried-out cake. 'For such honoured guests, this is the usual way.'

Omar Khayyam observed that while he had been out of the room fetching the cake his mothers had obliged Bilquis Hyder, by the inexorable force of their courtly charm, to remove her burqa. Her face, eyebrowless, dust-pale, sleep-starved, was a death-mask, with only the high points of red colour on her cheekbones to indicate that she was alive; it made the bad feelings Omar Khayyam had been having even worse than before. His teacup rattled on its saucer while his heart was squeezed by a renewed fear of the cryptic atmosphere of his childhood home, which could turn living persons into the mirrors of their ghosts; then Bilquis spoke, and he was jerked out of these exhausted fantasies by her expression of a most peculiar idea.

'Once there were giants,' Bilquis Hyder carefully, and wistfully, pronounced.

The laws of takalloufh&d forced her to make conversation, but it had been too long since Bilquis had indulged in chit-chat; she had lost the knack of it, and there was the tension and debilitation of the long escape to consider besides, to say nothing of the eccentricity of her latter years. Sipping tea as she spoke, smiling brightly in response to the triple smile of her hostesses, she seemed to imagine herself to be recounting some tiny, amusing anecdote, or expatiating wittily upon a sophisticated point of fashion. 'Once giants walked the earth,' she repeated, emphatically. 'Yes, titans absolutely, it's a fact.'

Three mothers creaked and swung with expressions of fasci- nated absorption upon their smiling faces; but Raza Hyder took no notice, closed his eyes, grunted from time to time. 'Now the pygmies have t&ken over, however,' Bilquis confided. 'Tiny per- sonages. Ants. Once he was a giant,' she jerked a thumb in the direction of her somnolent husband, 'you would not believe to look, but he was. Streets where he walked shook with fear and respect, even here, in this very town. But, you see, even a giant can be pygmified, and he has shrunk now, he is smaller than a

Shame ? 288

bug. Pygmies pygmies everywhere, also insects and ants � shame on the giants, isn't it? Shame on them for shrinking. That's my opinion.' Three old ladies nodded gravely while Bilquis made her lament; then they hastened to agree with her. 'Quite right,' Chhunni pronounced courteously, and Munnee chimed in, 'Giants, how true, there must have been,' and then Bunny Shakil concluded: 'Because after all there are angels also, they are still around, oh yes, we are sure of that.'

An unnaturally high colour suffused Bilquis's face as she sipped her tea, annihilating the image of the death-mask; she was appar- ently determined to find solace in that appalling scene, to con- vince herself of her safety by forging a desperate and over-rapid intimacy between herself and the three creaking ancients . . . but Omar Khayyam had stopped noticing things, because at the moment when his youngest mother mentioned angels he had understood the strange high spirits of the Shakil sisters. His three mothers were improvising this instant of demented theatre so as to avoid having to mention a certain dead youth; there was a hole at the heart of their smiling hospitality, and they were skirting around its periphery, around that void such as escaping creatures make in bricked-up windows, that absence the shape of the unnamable Babar Shakil. Yes, that was it, they were in a state of elation, because they had Raza Hyder in their clutches at last, and could see no reason except one for Omar Khayyam to have brought the fellow here; so they were trying not to spoil things, seeking to lull their victims into a sense of false security, they didn't want the Hyders to get worried and try to run away. And at the same time they were sighing happily, con- vinced it was finally going to happen, revenge, right under their noses. Omar Khayyam Shakil's head swam with the knowledge that the three of them would force him to do it � remorselessly and in cold blood to do Raza Hyder to death under his mothers' roof.

The next morning he awoke to the sound of Bilquis Hyder slam- ming windows. Omar Khayyam struggled out of a bed which was

Judgment Day ? 289

unaccountably soaked in perspiration, his legs weaker, his feet more painful than usual, and hobbled off to see what was hap- pening. He found his three mothers watching Bilquis as she stormed around the house, pulling windows shut, fiercely, as if she were angry about something; she fastened shutters and lowered chick-blinds. It struck Omar Khayyam as if for the first time how tall his mothers were, like arms stretched up into the sky. They stood in attitudes of mutual solicitude, supporting each other at the elbows, making no attempt to interfere with Bilquis's window-shutting frenzy. Omar Khayyam wanted to stop her, because as the windows closed the air inside the house became thicker and lumpier, until he felt as if he were inhaling mulli- gatawny soup, but his three mothers motioned him to be still. 'She is our guest,' whispered Chhunni-ma, 'so she can stay for ever if she likes,' because the old woman had divined that Bilquis's behaviour was that of a woman who has gone far enough already, too far, a woman who has ceased to believe in frontiers and whatever-might-lie-beyond. Bilquis was barricad- ing herself against the outside world in the hope that it might go away, and that was an activity which the Shakil sisters could understand without a word being said. 'She has suffered,' Munnee Shakil stated with a mysterious smile, 'but she is wel- come to be here.'

Omar Khayyam felt the air congeal into soup, and the germs of claustrophobia began to breed. But other germs, too, were in the air, and when Bilquis collapsed in a boiling stupor Omar Khayyam guessed the meaning of his own morning weakness, the hot flushes, the rubbery legs. 'Malaria,' he made himself say, and then the vertigo swirled around him and he fell down beside Bilquis Hyder, out cold and blazing hot.

At that very instant Raza Hyder awoke from a sick dream in which the several pieces of the late Sindbad Mengal had appeared to him, all joined up in the wrong way, so that the dead man's head was in the middle of his stomach and his feet stuck out, soles upward, like asses' ears from his neck. Mengal had not recriminated at all, but had warned Raza that the way things were

Shame ? 290

going the General sahib would be sliced up himself in a few days. Old Razor Guts, still half-asleep, rose from his bed crying danger, but the disease had begun to burn inside him, too, and he fell back gasping for air and shivering as if it were winter. The Shakil sisters came and stood beside his bed to watch him shake.

'How nice,' Bunny Shakil said comfortably, 'the General seems to be in no hurry to depart.'

The fever was a fire that made you cold. It burned away the bar- riers between consciousness and sleep, so that Omar Khayyam never knew whether things were really happening or not. At one point as he lay in a darkened room he thought he heard Bilquis shouting something about brain-fever, about visitations and judg- ments, the sickness that crippled her daughter being visited upon her parent in the city of her shame. He thought, too, that he heard Raza yelling for pine-kernels. And at another time he was sure that the forgotten figure of the schoolteacher Eduardo Rodrigues had been standing accusingly by his bedside holding a dead baby in its arms - but that couldn't be true, that must have been the delirium. There were moments of what felt like lucidity, during which he called for his mothers and dictated the names of drugs. He had memories of receiving medication, he recalled arms lifting his head and popping white pills into his mouth, but when he bit one by mistake it tasted of calcium, so that the suspicion was born in his fevered brain that his mothers had not sent for the drugs at all. His thoughts heated up to the point at which he could entertain the sick possibility that the Shakil sisters were happy to let the malaria do their dirty work for them, that they were willing to sacrifice their surviving son if he took the Hyders along with him. Either they are mad or I am, he thought, and then the fever took him again and made all thinking impossible.

Sometimes, he believed, he had gained consciousness and heard through the closed and shuttered windows snatches of angry

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voices below, also shots, explosions, breaking glass, and unless that had been part of the delirium too it meant that troubles were erupting in the town, yes, he could remember certain cries clearly, for instance The hotel is on fire. Was it or wasn't it? Memories lurched back towards him through the marshes of the disease, he was almost positive now that he had heard the hotel burn, the crash of the collapsing golden dome, the last suffocating squawks of an orchestra crushed beneath the falling masonry. There had been a morning on which the ash cloud of the dead hotel had managed to get inside 'Nishapur', in spite of shutters and windowpanes it had insinuated itself into his bedroom, covering everything with the grey powder of the hotel's death and strengthening his feeling of being stricken down in a house of phantoms. But when he asked one � which? � of his three mothers about the burning hotel she � who? � had replied, 'Close your eyes now and don't worry. Ash everywhere, what an idea.'

He persisted in his belief that the world was changing outside, old orders were passing, great structures were being cast down while others rose up in their place. The world was an earthquake, abysses yawned, dream-temples rose and fell, the logic of the Impossible Mountains had come down to infect the plains. In his delirium, however, in the burning clutches of the sickness and the foetid atmosphere of the house, only endings seemed possible. He could feel things caving in within him, landslips, heaves, the patter of crumbling masonry in his chest, cog-wheels breaking, a false note in the engine's hum. 'This motor,' he said aloud somewhere in that halted time, 'will not run any more.'

Three mothers creaked on their swing-seat at his bedside. No, how had they moved it, what was it doing here, it was a ghost, a mirage, he refused to believe in it, closed his eyes, squeezed them right, reopened them a minute or a week later, and they were still there in the seat, so it was clear that the sickness was worse, the hallucinations were gaining in confidence. The sisters were explaining sadly that the house was no longer as big as it had once been. 'We keep on losing rooms,' the spectre of Bunny mourned,

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'today we mislaid your grandfather's study. You know where it used to be, but now if you go through that door you turn up in the dining room, which is impossible, because the dining room is supposed to be on the other side of the passage.' And Chhunni-ma nodded, 'It's so sad, son, look how life treats old people, you get used to a certain bedroom and then one day, poof, it goes away, the staircase vanishes, what to do.' 'The place is shrinking,' middle-Munnee fumed. 'Honestly, too bad, like a cheap shirt. We should have had it Sanforized. Soon the whole house will be smaller than a matchbox and we will be out on the street.' And Chhunni-ma had the last word. 'In that sunlight, without walls,' the phantasm of his eldest mother prophesied, 'we will not be able to survive. We will turn to dust and be blown away by the wind.' Then he was unconscious again. When he surfaced there was no swing-seat, there were no mothers, he was alone in that four- poster bed with serpents coiled round the columns and Paradise embroidered on the canopy. His grandfather's deathbed. He real- ized that he felt as strong as a horse. Time to get up. He jumped out of bed and had wandered barefoot and pajama-clad out of the room before it occurred to him that this was only another illusion, but by then he couldn't stop himself, his feet, which had stopped hurting, walked him along the cluttered passages full of hatracks and stuffed fishes in glass cases and broken ormolu clocks, and he saw that far from having shrunk, the house had actually expanded, it had grown so vast that it held within its walls every place in which he had ever been. The sum of all his possibilities: he opened one cobwebbed door and shrank back from the little, brightly-lit group of white-masked figures stooping over a body. It was an operating room at the Mount Hira Hospital. The figures were beckoning to him in a friendly way, they wanted him to help with the operation but he was afraid to see the patient's face. He turned abruptly and felt pine-kernel shells crunching beneath his heels as the rooms of the Commander-in-Chief's official resi- dence began to form around him. At some point he began to run, trying to find his way back to bed, but the corridors kept turning

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corners without warning, and he arrived panting at a mirror- worked marquee in which a wedding banquet was being held, he saw the bride's face in a fragment of mirror, she wore a noose around her neck, and he shouted out, 'You should have stayed dead,' making all the guests stare at him. They were all dressed in rags because of the dangers of going well-dressed into the turbu- lence of the streets and they were chanting in unison, shame, shame, poppy-shame, all the girls, know your name. Then he was running again, but slowing down, he was getting heavier, his chins flopped sweatily down from his jaw until they touched his nipples, the rolls of his obesity hung over his knees, until he could not move, no matter how hard he tried, he was sweating like a pig, the heat the cold, no escape, he thought, and tumbled back- wards as a shroud fell softly over him, white, soaking wet, and he realized that he was in bed.

He heard a voice, which he identified, after a struggle, as Hashmat Bibi's. She spoke from within a cloud: 'Only child. Always they live too much in their poor head.' But he had not remained an only child.

Burning, burning in that cold fire. Brain-fever. Bilquis Hyder at his bedside pointed angrily to the Peek Frean tin. 'Poison,' she accused, 'germ poison in the cake. But we were hungry, we could not resist and so we ate.' Upset by this slur on his family name, he began to defend his mothers' hospitality, no, not the cake, it was stale but don't be ridiculous, think of the bus-journey, look what we drank, green pink yellow, our defences were low. Bilquis shrugged and went over to a cupboard and pulled out every piece of the Gardner china collection, one by one, and smashed them all into pink-and-blue dust on the floor. He shut his eyes, but eyelids were no defence any more, they were just doors into other places, and there was Raza Hyder in uniform with a monkey on each shoulder. The monkey on the right had the face of Maulana Dawood and its hands were clasped over its mouth; on the left shoulder sat Iskander Harappa scratching his langoor's armpit. Hyder's hands went to his ears, Isky's, after scratching, covered his

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eyes, but he was peeping through the fingers. 'Stories end, worlds end', Isky the monkey said, 'and then it's judgment day.' Fire, and the dead, rising up, dancing in the flames.

During recessions in the fever he remembered dreaming things that he could not have known were true, visions of the future, of what would happen after the end. Quarrels between three Gen- erals. Continued public disturbances. Great powers shifting their ground, deciding the Army had become unstable. And at last Arjumand and Haroun set free, reborn into power, the virgin Ironpants and her only love taking charge. The fall of God, and in his place the myth of the Martyr Iskander. And after that arrests, retribution, trials, hangings, blood, a new cycle of shamelessness and shame. While at Mohenjo cracks appear in the earth.

A dream of Rani Harappa: who chooses to remain at Mohenjo, and sends Arjumand, one day, a gift of eighteen exquisite shawls. These shawls ensure that she will never leave the estate again: Arjumand has her own mother placed under guard. People engaged in building new myths have no time for embroidered criticisms. Rani remains in that heavy-eaved house where the water flows blood-red; she inclines her head in the direction of Omar Khayyam Shakil. 'Seems the world can't be a safe place,' she pronounces her epitaph, 'if Rani Harappa's on the loose.'

Stories end, worlds end; and then it's judgment day.

His mother Chhunni says: 'There is something you should know.' He lies helpless between wooden serpents, burning, freezing, red eyes wandering in his head. He gulps air; it feels somehow fuzzy, as if he has been buried by divine justice beneath a gigantic woollen mountain. He is beached, gasping, a whale pecked at by birds. But this time the three of them are really there, no halluci- nation, he is sure of it, they sit on his bed with a secret to reveal. His head swims; he closes his eyes.

And hears, for the first time in his life, the last family secret, the worst tale in history. The story of his great-grandfather and his brother, Hafeezullah and Rumi Shakil. Each married a woman the other found unsuitable, and when Hafeez spread it around town

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that his sister-in-law was a female as loose as a baggy pajama whom Rumi had plucked out of the notorious Heeramandi red- light district, the break between the brothers was complete. Then Rumi's wife took her revenge. She convinced her husband that the cause of Hafeez's sanctimonious disapproval was that he had wanted to sleep with her, after her marriage, and she had turned him down flat. Rumi Shakil became as cold as ice and went at once to his writing-desk, where he composed an anonymous, poison-pen letter to his brother, in which he accused Hafeez's wife of having extramarital relations with a famous sitarist of the time, an accusation which was lethal because it was true. Hafeez Shakil had always trusted his wife bhndly, so he turned pale when he read the letter, which he recognized instantly as having been written in his brother's hand. When he questioned his wife she confessed at once. She said she had always loved the sitarist and would have run away with him if her parents hadn't married her off to Hafeez. Omar Khayyam's great-grandfather took to his bed and when his wife came to see him, holding their son in her arms, he put his right hand on his chest and addressed his last words to the baby boy.

'This motor,' he said sadly, 'will not run any more.'

He died that night.

'You said the same thing,' Munnee Shakil tells Omar Khayyam, 'in your fever, when you didn't know what you were talking about. The same thing in the same words. Now you know why we told you the story.'

'You know everything now,' Chhunni-ma continues. 'You know this is a family in which brothers have done the worst of things to brothers, and maybe you even know that you are just the same.'

'You also had a brother,' Bunny says, 'and you have treated his memory like mud.'

Once, before he went out into the world, they had forbidden him to feel shame; now they were turning that emotion upon him, slash- ing him with that sword. 'Your brother's father was an anarchangel,'

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Chhunni Shakil whispered at his bedside, 'so the boy was too good for this world. But you, your maker was a devil out of hell.' He was sinking back into the swamps of the fever, but this remark hit home, because none of his mothers had ever spontaneously raised the sub- ject of fathers before. It became obvious to him that his mothers hated him, and to his surprise he found the idea of that hatred too terrible to be borne.

The illness was lapping at his eyelashes now, offering oblivion. He fought against it, a man of sixty-five overwhelmed by moth- erly disgust. He saw it as a living thing, huge and greasy. They had been feeding it for years, handing it morsels of themselves, holding out pieces of their memories of dead Babar to their hateful pet. Who gobbled them up, snatching them greedily from the sisters' long bony fingers.

Their dead Babar, who, during his short life, had never been permitted to forget his inferiority to his elder brother, the great man, the success, the man who enabled them to shoo away the pawnbroker, to save their past from ending up on the shelves of Chalaak Sahib. The brother whom he, Omar Khayyam, had never known. Mothers use their children as sticks � each brother a rod with which to chastise the other. Asphyxiated by the hot wind of his mothers' worship of Omar Khayyam, Babar fled into the mountains; now the mothers had changed sides, and the dead boy was their weapon against the living. You married into the mur- derer's family. You licked the shoes of the great. Behind his eyelids Omar Khayyam saw his mothers placing, around his neck, the garland of their hatred. This time there was no mistake; his sweat-drenched beard rubbed against the frayed laces, the tattered leathery tongues, the laughing mouths of the necklace of discarded shoes.

The Beast has many faces. It takes any shape it chooses. He felt it crawl into his belly and begin to feed.

General Raza Hyder awoke one morning at dawn with his ears full of a tinkling, splintering sound like the breaking of a thou- sand windows, and realized that it was the noise of the sickness

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breaking. He took a deep breath and sat upright in bed. 'Fever,' he said happily, 'I beat you. Old Razor Guts isn't finished yet.' The noise ended and he had the feeling of floating across a lake of silence, because the voice of Iskander Harappa had fallen silent for the first time in four long years. He heard birds outside; they were only crows, but they sounded as sweet as bulbuls. 'Things are on the mend,' Raza Hyder thought. Then he noticed the state he was in. They had left him to rot in the bog of his own juices. It was obvious that nobody had been to see him for days. He was lying in the pestilential squashiness of his own excrement, in sheets turned yellow by perspiration and urine. Mould had begun to form on the bedclothes, and there was green fungus on his body as well. 'So this is what they think of me,' he exclaimed to the empty room, 'those witches, I'll give them what for.' But in spite of the hideous condition of the sick-bed his new mood of optimism refused to be punctured. He stood up on legs which were only slightly wobbly and threw off the stinking garments of his illness; then, with great delicacy and distaste, he gathered together a bundle of suppurating linen and dropped it out of a window. 'Hags,' he chuckled to himself, 'let them get their own dirty laundry from the street, it serves them right.' Naked now, he went into the bathroom and showered. As he soaped away the fever- stink a daydream of a return to power flitted across his mind. 'Sure,' he told himself, 'we'll do it, why not? Before anyone knows what's what.' He felt a great surge of fondness for the wife who had rescued him from the jaws of his enemies, and was filled with the desire to make things right between the two of them. 'I treated her badly,' he accused himself guiltily, 'but she came up trumps all right.' The memory of Sufiya Zinobia had become little more than a bad dream; he was not even sure of its basis in fact, half-believing it was just one of the many hallucinations which the disease had sent to torment him. He stepped out of the shower, wrapped a towel around himself and went in search of clothes. 'If Bilquis hasn't recovered yet,' he vowed, 'I'll nurse her night and day. I'm not leaving her to the mercy of those three crazy vultures.'

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There were no clothes anywhere. 'God damn it,' Raza blas- phemed, 'couldn't they have left me a shalwar and a shirt?'

He opened the door of his room and called out, 'Anyone there?' But there was no reply. The lake of silence filled the house. 'O.K.,' thought Raza Hyder, 'then they'll just have to take me as they find me.' Wrapping his towel firmly around his waist, he set off in search of his wife.

Three empty, darkened rooms and then a fourth which he knew was the right place by the smell. 'Bitches!' he yelled savagely to the echoing house. 'Have you no shame?' Then he went inside.

The stench was even worse than it had been in his own room, and Bilquis Hyder lay still in the obscenity of her shit. 'Don't worry, Billoo,' he whispered to her, 'Raz is here. I'll clean you up good and proper and then you'll see. Those animal women, I'll make them pick up turds with their eyelashes and stuff them up their nostrils.'

Bilquis did not reply, and it took Raza a few moments to sniff out the reason for her silence. Then he smelt the other smell beneath the putrid odours of waste matter, and he felt as if a hangman's knot had smashed him in the back of the neck. He sat down on the floor and began drumming his fingers on the stone. When he spoke it came out all wrong, he hadn't meant to sound bad-tempered, but what came out was this: 'For God's sake, Billoo, what are you up to? I hope you are not acting or some- thing. What's the meaning of this, you're not supposed to die?' But Bilquis had crossed her frontier.

After his querulous words had come out to embarrass him he looked up to find the three Shakil sisters standing in front of him with scented handkerchiefs over their noses. Chhunni-ma also held, in her other hand, an antique blunderbuss which had once belonged to her grandfather Hafeezullah Shakil. She was pointing it at Raza's chest, but it was waggling about so much that her chances of hitting him were remote, and anyway the piece was so impossibly old that it would probably blow up in her face if she pulled the trigger. Unfortunately for Raza's chances, however, her sisters were also armed. Handkerchiefs were in their left hands, but

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in Munnee's right was a fierce-looking scimitar with a jewelled haft, while Bunny's fist was closed around the shaft of a spear with a badly rusted, but undeniably pointy, head. Optimism left Raza Hyder without bothering to say good-bye.

'You should be dead instead of her,' Chhunni Shakil declared.

The anger had gone out with the optimism. 'Go ahead,' he encouraged the sisters. 'God will judge us all.'

'He did well to bring you here,' Bunny reflected, 'our son. He did well to wait for your fall. There is no shame in killing you now, because you are a dead man anyway. It is only the execution of a corpse.'

'Also,' Munnee Shakil said, 'there is no God.'

Chhunni waved the blunderbuss in the direction of Bilquis. 'Pick her up,' she ordered. 'Just as she is. Pick her and bring her quick.' He rose to his feet; the towel slipped; he made a grab for it, missed, and stood naked before the old women, who had the grace to gasp . . . freshly showered, and wholly undressed, General Raza Hyder carried the stinking, mould-encrusted body of his wife through the corridors of 'Nishapur', while three sisters hov- ered around him like carrion crows. 'You must go in here,' Chhunni stated, pushing the barrel of the blunderbuss into his back, and he entered the last room of all the rooms in his life, and recognized the dark bulk of the dumb-waiter hanging outside the window and blocking most of the light. He had resolved to remain silent whatever happened, but his surprise made him speak: 'What's this?' he asked. 'Are you sending us outside?'

'How well known the General must be in our town,' Munnee mused. 'So many friends eager to meet you again, don't you think? What a reception they will make when they find out who is here.'

Raza Hyder naked in the dumb-waiter beside Bilquis's corpse. The three sisten moved to a panel on the wall: buttons switches levers. 'This machine was built by a master craftsman,' Chhunni explained, 'in the old days, when nothing was beyond doing. A certain Mistri Balloch; and at our request, which we conveyed to him through our dear departed Hashmat Bibi, he included in the

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contrivance some extra fitments, which we now propose to use for the first and last time.'

'Let me go,' Raza Hyder cried, understanding nothing. 'What are you wasting time for?'

They were his last words. 'We asked for these arrangements,' Munnee Shakil said as the three sisters each placed a hand upon one of the levers, 'thinking self-defence is no offence. But also, you must agree, revenge is sweet.' The image of Sindbad Mengal flashed into Raza's mind as the three sisters pulled down the lever, acting in perfect unison, so that it was impossible to say who pulled first or hardest, and the ancient spring-releases of Yakoob Balloch worked like a treat, the secret panels sprang back and the eighteen-inch stiletto blades of death drove into Raza's body, cutting him to pieces, their reddened points emerging, among other places, through his eyeballs, adam's-apple, navel, groin and mouth. His tongue, severed cleanly by a laterally spearing knife, fell out on to his lap. He made strange clicking noises; shivered; froze.

'Leave them in there,' Chhunni instructed her sisters. 'We will not be needing this contraption any more.'

The contractions were coming regularly, squeezing his temples, as if something were trying to be born. The cell was swarming with malaria-bearing anopheles mosquitoes, but for some reason they did not seem to be biting the stiff-necked figure of the inter- rogator, who wore a white helmet and carried a riding whip. 'Pen and paper is before you,' the interrogator said. 'No pardon can be considered until a full confession has been made.'

'Where are my mothers?' Omar Khayyam asked piteously, in a voice that was in the process of breaking. It soared-high-plunged- low; he was embarrassed by its antics.

'Sixty-five years old,' the other sneered, 'and acting like a baby. Get a move on, I haven't got all day. I am expected at the polo ground very shortly.'

'A pardon is really possible?' Omar Khayyam inquired. The

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interrogator shrugged in a bored way. 'Anything is possible,' he replied, 'God is great, as you will doubtless be aware.'

'What shall I put,' Omar Khayyam wondered, picking up the pen, 'I can confess to many things. Fleeing-from-roots, obesity, drunkenness, hypnosis. Getting girls in the family way, not sleeping with my wife, too-many-pine-kernels, peeing-tommery as a boy. Sexual obsession with under-age brain-damaged female, resultant failure to avenge my brother's death. I didn't know him. It is difficult to commit such acts on behalf of strangers. I confess to making strangers of my kin.'

'This is not helpful,' the interrogator interrupted. 'What kind of man are you? What type of bounder will wriggle out of his guilt and let his mothers take the rap?'

'I am a peripheral man,' Omar Khayyam answered. 'Other persons have been the principal actors in my life-story. Hyder and Harappa, my leading men. Immigrant and native, Godly and pro- fane, military and civilian. And several leading ladies. I watched from the wings, not knowing how to act. I confess to social climbing, to only-doing-my-job, to being cornerman in other people's wrestling matches. I confess to fearing sleep.'

'We are getting nowhere.' The interrogator sounded angry. 'Evidence is beyond dispute. Your swordstick, gifted to you by Iskander Harappa, the victim's arch-enemy. Motive and opportu- nity, plenty of both. Why keep up this pretence? You bided your time, for years you lived a false life, you won their trust, finally you drew them to the killing ground. Promising flight across the frontier to lure them on. Most effective bait. Then you pounced, stab stab stab, over and over. This is all obvious to see. Cut the cackle now, and write.'

'I am not guilty,' Omar Khayyam began, 'I left the swordstick at the C-in-C's,' but just then his pockets started feeling very heavy, and the interrogator stretched out his hands to pluck out what-weighed-pockets-down. When Omar Khayyam saw what Talvar Ulhaq was holding out to him on an accusing palm, his voice turned falsetto. 'My mothers must have put them in there,'

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he shrieked, but there was no point in going on, because staring up at him from his inquisitor's hand were the terrible exhibits, pieces of Raza Hyder, neatly sliced, his moustache, his eyeballs, teeth.

'You are damned,' Talvar Ulhaq said, and, raising his pistol, shot Omar Khayyam Shakil through the heart. The cell had begun to burn. Omar Khayyam saw the abyss open up beneath his feet, felt the vertigo come as the world dissolved. 'I confess,' he cried, but it was too late. He tumbled into the black fire and was burned.

Because they had grown accustomed to ignoring the house, it was not until that evening that someone noticed a change, and shouted out that the great front doors of the Shakil mansion were standing open for the first time that anybody could remember; but then they all knew at once that something important had hap- pened, so that it hardly seemed like a surprise when they found the congealing pool of blood below the dumb-waiter of Mistri Balloch. For a long while they stood transfixed by the open doors, unable to go inside, even for a peep, in spite of their curiosity; then all in a moment they rushed in, as if some unseen voice had given them permission: cobblers, beggars, gas-miners, policemen, milkmen, bank clerks, women on donkeys, children with metal hoops and sticks, gram vendors, acrobats, blacksmiths, wives, mothers, everyone.

They found the dejected palace of the sisters' haughty pride standing defenceless, at their mercy, and they were amazed by themselves, by their hatred of the place, a hatred which oozed out of sixty-five-year-old, forgotten wells; they ripped the house to pieces as they hunted for the old women. They were like locusts. They dragged the ancient tapestries off the walls and the fabric turned to dust in their hands, they forced open money-boxes which were full of discontinued notes and coins, they flung open doors which cracked and fell off their hinges, they turned beds upside-down and ransacked the contents of silver canteens, they

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tore baths from their moorings for the sake of their gilded feet and pulled out the stuffing from the sofas in search of hidden treasure, they threw the useless old swing-seat out of the nearest window. It was as if a spell had been broken, as if an old and infuriating conjuring trick had finally been explained. Afterwards, they would look at each other with a disbelief in their eyes that was half proud and half ashamed and ask, did we really do that? But we are ordinary people . . .

It grew dark. They did not find the sisters.

They found the bodies in the dumb-waiter, but the Shakil sis- ters had vanished, and nobody would ever see them again, not in 'Nishapur' nor anywhere on earth. They had deserted their home but they kept their vows of retreat, crumbling, perhaps, into powder under the rays of the sun, or growing wings and flying off into the Impossible Mountains in the west. Women as formidable as the three sisters Shakil never do less than they intend.

Night. In a room near the top of the house they found an old man frowning in a four-poster bed with wooden snakes winding around the columns. The noise had woken him up; he was sitting bolt upright and muttering, 'So, I'm still alive.' He was grey all over, ashen from head to foot, and so eaten up by sickness that it was impossible to say who he was; and because he had the air of a spirit who had returned from the dead they backed away from him. 'I'm hungry,' he said, looking surprised, and then peered at the cheap electric torches and smouldering firebrands of the invaders and demanded to know what they were doing in his quarters; whereupon they turned and fled, shouting to the police officers that someone was up there, maybe alive, maybe dead, but at any rate someone in that house of death, sitting up in bed and acting smart. The police officers were on their way up when they heard a sort of panic starting in the street outside, and they ran off to investigate, blowing their whistles, leaving the old man to get up and put on the grey silk dressing-gown which his mothers had left neatly folded at the foot of his bed, and to take a long drink from the jug of fresh lime-juice which had been there just long

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enough for the ice-cubes to melt. Then he, too, heard the screams.

They were strange screams. He heard them rise to their peaks and then die with uncanny abruptness, and then he knew what was coming into the house, something that could freeze a shriek in the middle, something that petrified. Something that would not, this time, be sated before it reached him, or cheated, or escaped from; that had entered the night-streets of the city and would not be denied. Something coming up the stairs: he heard it roar.

He stood beside the bed and waited for her like a bridegroom on his wedding night, as she climbed towards him, roaring, like a fire driven by the wind. The door blew open. And he in the darkness, erect, watching the approaching glow, and then she was there, on all fours, naked, coated in mud and blood and shit, with twigs sticking to her back and beetles in her hair. She saw him and shuddered; then she rose up on her hind legs with her forepaws outstretched and he had just enough time to say, 'Well, wife, so here you are at last,' before her eyes forced him to look.

He struggled against their hypnotic power, their gravitational pull, but it was no use, his eyes lifted, until he was staring into the fiery yellow heart of her, and saw there, just for an instant, some flickering, some dimming of the flame in doubt, as though she had entertained for that tiny fragment of time the wild fantasy that she was indeed a bride entering the chamber of her beloved; but the furnace burned the doubts away, and as he stood before her, unable to move, her hands, his wife's hands, reached out to him and closed.

His body was falling away from her, a headless drunk, and after that the Beast faded in her once again, she stood there blinking stupidly, unsteady on her feet, as if she didn't know that all the stories had to end together, that the fire was just gathering its strength, that on the day of reckoning the judges are not exempt from judgment, and that the power of the Beast of shame cannot

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be held for long within any one frame of flesh and blood, because it grows, it feeds and swells, until the vessel bursts.

And then the explosion comes, a shock-wave that demolishes the house, and after it the fireball of her burning, rolling outwards to the horizon like the sea, and last of all the cloud, which rises and spreads and hangs over the nothingness of the scene, until I can no longer see what is no longer there; the silent cloud, in the shape of a giant, grey and headless man, a figure of dreams, a phantom with one arm lifted in a gesture of farewell.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book was written with the financial assistance of the Arts Council of Great Britain. It also owes a good deal to the entirely non-financial assistance of many others, my gratitude to whom will perhaps best be expressed by leaving them unnamed.

The unattributed quotation on page 126 has been taken from The Life Science by P.B. and J.S. Medawar (Wildwood House, 1977). The italicized line on page 181 is from Saul Bellow's The Adventures ofAugie March (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1954). I have also quoted from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera, translated by Michael Henry Heim (Faber and Faber, 1982); from the Muirs' translation of The Trial by Franz Kafka (Victor Gollancz, 1935); from The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli, in the.translation by Luigi Ricci, edited by E.R.P. Vincent, for World's Classics, Oxford University Press (1935); from NJ. Dawood's translation of The Koran (Penguin Classics, 1956); and from the plays The Suicide by Nikolai Erdman, translated by P. Tegel (Pluto Press, 1979), and Danton's Death by Georg Biichner, in the version by Howard Brenton from a translation by Jane Fry (Methuen, 1982). My thanks to all concerned; and to the many journalists and writers, both Western and Eastern, to whom I am indebted.

My gratitude, too, to Walter, for letting go; and finally, and as always, to Clarissa, for everything.

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