Shame (10 page)

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

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

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

Shame ? 6 4

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

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

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

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

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

The Duellists ? 65

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

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

The Loo is an evil wind.

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

Shame ? 66

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shame ? 68

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

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

What a relief]

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

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

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

5

The Wrong Miracle

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

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

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

69

Shame ? 70

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

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

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