Shame (2 page)

In later years, they told each other the story of that notorious
gala night with a simple glee that restored to them the illusion of
being young. 'I had invitations printed in the Cantt,' Chhunni
Shakil would begin, seated beside her sisters on an old wooden
swing-seat. Giggling happily about the old adventure, she con-
tinued, 'And what invitations! Embossed, with gold lettering, on
cards stiff as wood. They were like spits in the eye of fate.'

'Also in the closed eyes of our dead father,' Munnee added. 'To
him it would have seemed like a completely shameless going-on,
an abhorrence, the proof of his failure to impose his will on us.'

'Just as,' Bunny continued, 'our ruin proved his failure in
another sphere.'

At first it seemed to them that the dying shame of their father
had been born of his knowledge of the coming bankruptcy. Later,
however, they began to consider less prosaic possibilities. 'Maybe,'
Chhunni hypothesized, 'he saw on his death-bed a vision of the
future.'

'Good,' her sisters said, 'then he will have died as miserably as
he made us live.'

The news of the emergence into society of the Shakil sisters

Shame � 8

spread rapidly through the town. And on the much-anticipated
evening, the old house was invaded by an army of musical
geniuses, whose three-stringed dumbirs, seven-stringed sarandas,
reed flutes and drums filled that puritanical mansion with celebra-
tory music for the first time in two decades; regiments of bakers
and confectioners and snack-wallahs marched in with arsenals of
eats, denuding the shop-counters of the town and filling up
the interior of the huge multicoloured shamiana tent that had
been erected in the central compound, its mirrorworked fabric
reflecting the glory of the arrangements. It became clear, how-
ever, that the snobbishness which their father had bred into the
sisters' bone-marrow had fatally infected the guest list. Most of the
burghers of Q. had already been mortally insulted to find them-
selves deemed unworthy of the company of the three lustrous
ladies, whose gilt-edged invitations were the talk of the town.
Now the crimes of omission were compounded by those of com-
mission, because it was seen that the sisters had committed the
ultimate solecism: invitations, scorning the doormats of the
indigenous worthies, had found their way into the Angrez Can-
tonment, and into the ballroom of the dancing sahibs. The long-
forbidden household remained barred to all but a few locals;
but after the cocktail hour at Flashman's, the sisters were visited by
a uniformed and ball-gowned crowd of foreigners. The imperial-
ists! � the grey-skinned sahibs and their gloved begums! �
raucous-voiced and glittering with condescension, they entered
the mirrorworked marquee.

'Alcohol was served.' Old mother Chhunni, reminiscing,
clapped her hands delightedly at the horror of the memory. But
that was the point at which the reminiscing always ceased, and all
three ladies became curiously vague; so that I am unable to clear
away the improbabilities which have mushroomed around that
party during the dark passage of the years.

Can it really have been the case that the few non-white
guests � local zamindars and their wives, whose wealth had once
been trifling in comparison with the Shakil crores � stood together
in a tight clump of rage, gazing balefully at the cavorting sahibs?

Escapes from the Mother Country ? 9

That all these persons left simultaneously after a very few mo-
ments, without having broken bread or eaten salt, abandoning the
sisters to the colonial authorities? How likely is it that the three
sisters, their eyes shining with antimony and arousal, moved in
grave silence from officer to officer, as though they were sizing
them up, as if mustachioes were being checked for glossiness and
jaws evaluated by the angles of their jutting? � And then (the
legend goes) that they, the Shakil girls, clapped their hands in
unison and ordered the musicians to start playing Western-style
dance music, minuets, waltzes, fox-trots, polkas, gavottes, music
that acquired a fatally demonic quality when forced out of the vir-
tuosi's outraged instruments?

All night, they say, the dancing continued. The scandal of such
an event would have placed the newly orphaned girls beyond
the pale in any case, but there was worse to come. Shortly after
the party ended, after the infuriated geniuses has departed and the
mountains of uneaten food had been thrown to the pie-dogs � for
the sisters in their grandeur would not permit food intended
for their peers to be distributed among the poor - it began to be
bruited about the bazaars of Q. that one of the three nose-in-air
girls had been put, on that wild night, into the family way.

O shame, shame, poppy-shame!

But if the sisters Shakil were overwhelmed by any feelings of
dishonour, they gave no sign of it. Instead, they dispatched
Hashmat Bibi, one of the servants who had refused to leave, into
Q., where she commissioned the services of the town's finest
handyman, a certain Mistri Yakoob Balloch, and also purchased
the largest imported padlock to be found in the God-Willing
Ironmongery Store. This padlock was so large and heavy that
Hashmat Bibi was obliged to have it carried home on the back
of a rented mule, whose owner inquired of the servant woman:
'For what your begums want this lock-shock now? Invasion
has already occurred.' Hashmat replied, crossing her eyes for
emphasis: 'May your grandsons urinate upon your pauper's grave.'

The hired handyman, Mistri Yakoob, was so impressed by the
ferocious calm of the antediluvian crone that he worked willingly

Shame ? 10

under her supervision without daring to pass a comment. She had
him construct a strange external elevator, or dumb-waiter, large
enough to hold three grown adults, by means of which items
could be winched by a system of motorized pulleys from the street
into the upper storeys of the house, or vice versa. Hashmat Bibi
stressed the importance of constructing the whole contraption in
such a way that it could be operated without requiring the man-
sion's inhabitants to show themselves an any window � not so
much as a little finger must be capable of being glimpsed. Then
she listed the unusual security features which she wished him to
install in the bizarre mechanism. 'Put here,' she ordered him, 'a
spring release which can be worked from inside the house. When
triggered, it should make the whole bottom of the lift fall offjust-
likethat. Put there, and there, and there, some secret panels which
can shoot out eighteen-inch stiletto blades, sharp sharp. My ladies
must be defended against intruders.'

The dumb-waiter contained, then, many terrible secrets. The
Mistri completed his work without once laying eyes on any of the
three sisters Shakil, but when he died a few weeks later, clutching
his stomach and rolling about in a gully, spitting blood on to the
dirt, it got about that those shameless women had had him poi-
soned to ensure his silence on the subject of his last and most mys-
terious commission. It is only fair to state, however, that the
medical evidence in the case runs strongly against this version of
events. Yakoob Balloch, who had been suffering for some time
from sporadic pains in the region of the appendix, almost certainly
died of natural causes, his death-throes caused not by the spectral
poisons of the putatively murderous sisters, but by the genuinely
fatal banality of peritonitis. Or some such thing.

The day came when the three remaining male employees of the
Shakil sisters were seen pushing shut the enormous front doors of
solid teak and brass. Just before those gates of solitude closed upon
the sisters, to remain unopened for more than half a century, the
little crowd of curious townsfolk outside caught sight of a wheel-
barrow on which there gleamed, dully, the outsize lock of their
withdrawal. And when the doors were shut, the sounds of the

Escapes from the Mother Country ? 11

great lock being hauled into place, and of the key being turned,
heralded the beginning of the strange confinement of the scan-
dalous ladies and their servants too.

It turned out that on her last trip into town Hashmat Bibi had
left a number of sealed envelopes containing detailed instructions
at the establishments of the community's leading suppliers of
goods and services; so that afterwards, on the appointed days
and at the hours specified, the chosen washerwoman, the tailor,
the cobbler, as well as the selected vendors of meats, fruits,
haberdashery, flowers, stationery, vegetables, pulses, books, flat
drinks, fizzy drinks, foreign magazines, newspapers, unguents,
perfumes, antimony, strips of eucalyptus bark for tooth-cleaning,
spices, starch, soaps, kitchen utensils, picture frames, playing cards
and strings for musical instruments, would present themselves at
the foot of Mistri Yakoob's last construction. They would emit
coded whistles, and the dumb-waiter would descend, humming,
to street level bearing written instructions. In this way the Shakil
ladies managed to recede entirely and for all time from the world,
returning of their own volition into that anchoritic existence
whose end they had been so briefly able to celebrate after their
father's death; and such was the hauteur of their arrangements that
their withdrawal seemed like an act not of contrition but of pride.

There arises a delicate question: how did they pay for it all?

With some embarrassment on their behalf, and purely to show
that the present author, who has already been obliged to leave
many questions in a state of unanswered ambiguity, is capable of
giving clear replies when absolutely necessary, I reveal that
Hashmat Bibi had delivered a last sealed envelope to the door of
the town's least savoury establishment, wherein the Quranic stric-
tures against usury counted for nothing, whose shelves and storage
chests groaned under the weight of the accumulated debris of
innumerable decayed histories. . . damn and blast it. To be frank �
she went to the pawnshop. And he, the pawnbroker, the ageless,
pencil-thin, innocently wide-eyed Chalaak Sahib, would also pre-
sent himself thereafter at the dumb-waiter (under cover of night,
as instructed), to assess the worth of the items he found therein,

Shame ? 12

and to send up into the heart of the silent house cash monies on
the nail to a total of eighteen point five per cent approx. of the
market value of the irredeemably pawned treasures. The three
mothers of the imminent Omar Khayyam Shakil were using the
past, their only remaining capital, as a means of purchasing the
future.

But who was pregnant?

Chhunni, the eldest, or Munnee-in-the-middle, or 'little'
Bunny, the baby of the three? � Nobody ever discovered, not
even the child that was born. Their closing of ranks was absolute,
and effected with the most meticulous attention to detail. Just
imagine: they made the servants swear loyalty oaths on the Book.
The servants joined them in their self-imposed captivity, and only
left the house feet first, wrapped in white sheets, and via, of
course, the route constructed by Yakoob Balloch. During the
entire term of that pregnancy, no doctor was summoned to the
house. And as it proceeded, the sisters, understanding that unkept
secrets always manage to escape, under a door, through a keyhole
or an open window, until everyone knows everything and
nobody knows how . . . the sisters, I repeat, displayed the
uniquely passionate solidarity that was their most remarkable char-
acteristic by feigning � in the case of two of them � the entire
range of symptoms that the third was obliged to display.

Although some five years separated Chhunni from Bunny, it
was at this time that the sisters, by virtue of dressing identically
and through the incomprehensible effects of their unusual, chosen
life, began to resemble each other so closely that even the servants
made mistakes. I have described them as beauties; but they were
not the moon-faced almond-eyed types so beloved of poets in that
neck of the woods, but rather strong-chinned, powerfully built,
purposefully striding women of an almost oppressively charismatic
force. Now the three of them began, simultaneously, to thicken at
the waist and in the breast; when one was sick in the morning, the
other two began to puke in such perfectly synchronized sympathy
that it was impossible to tell which stomach had heaved first.
Identically, their wombs ballooned towards the pregnancy's full

Escapes from the Mother Country ? 13

term. It is naturally possible that all this was achieved with the help
of physical contrivances, cushions and padding and even faint-
inducing vapours; but it is my unshakeable opinion that such an
analysis grossly demeans the love that existed between the sisters.
In spite of biological improbability, I am prepared to swear that so
wholeheartedly did they wish to share the motherhood of their
sibling � to transform the public shame of unwedlocked concep-
tion into the private triumph of the longed-for group baby � that,
in short, twin phantom pregnancies accompanied the real one;
while the simultaneity of their behavior suggests the operation of
some form of communal mind.

They slept in the same room. They endured the same crav-
ings - marzipan, jasmine-petals, pine-kernels, mud - at the same
times; their metabolic rates altered in parallel. They began to
weigh the same, to feel exhausted at the same moment, and to
awake together, each morning, as if somebody had rung a bell.
They felt identical pains; in three wombs, a single baby and its two
ghostly mirror-images kicked and turned with the precision of a
well-drilled dance troupe . . . suffering identically, the three of
them - I will go so far as to say - fully earned the right to be con-
sidered joint mothers of the forthcoming child. And when one � I
will not even guess at the name � came to her time, nobody else
saw whose waters broke; nor whose hand locked a bedroom door
from the inside. No outside eyes witnessed the passage of the
three labours, two phantom one genuine; or the moment when
empty balloons subsided, while between a third pair of thighs, as if
in an alleyway, there appeared the illegitimate child; or when
hands lifted Omar Khayyam Shakil by the ankles, held him
upside-down, and thumped him on the back.