Shame (6 page)

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

Shame ? 34

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

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

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

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

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

Escapes from the Mother Country ? 35

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

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

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

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

Shame � 36

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

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

Escapes from the Mother Country ? 37

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

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

Shame ? 38

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

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

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

3

Melting Ice

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

39

Shame ? 40

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

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

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