Shame (20 page)

'That earthquake,' Babar Shakil wrote in his notebook, 'shook
something loose inside me. A minor tremor, but maybe it also
shook something into place.'

When the world was still again he made for a cheap brandy
den, picking his way through fragments of glass and past the
equally piercing howls of the proprietor; and as he entered (the
notebooks stated) he caught sight through the corner of his left
eye of a winged and golden-glowing man looking down on him
from a rooftop; but when he twisted his head upwards the
angel was no longer to be seen. Later, when he was in the moun-
tains with the separatist tribal guerrillas, he was told the story of
the angels and the earthquakes and the subterranean Paradise;
their belief that the golden angels were on their side gave the
guerrillas an unshakeable certainty of the justice of their cause, and
made it easy for them to die for it. 'Separatism,' Babar wrote, 'is
the belief that you are good enough to escape from the clutches
of hell.'

Shame ? 134

Babar Shakil spent his birthday getting drunk in that den of
broken bottles, picking out, more than once, long splinters of glass
from his mouth, so that by the evening's end his chin was streaked
with blood; but the splashing liquor disinfected the cuts and mini-
mized the risk of tetanus. In the brandy shop: tribals, a wall-eyed
whore, travelling jokers with drums and horns. The jokes grew
louder as the night wore on, and the mixture of humour and
booze was a cocktail that gave Babar a hangover of such colossal
proportions that he never recovered from it.

What jokes! Hee-hee-what-you-talking-man-someone-will-
hear ribaldry: � Listen, yaar, you know when children get cir-
cumcised the circumciser speaks holy words? � Yah, man, I
know. - Then what did he say when he did the cut on Old Razor
Guts? � I don't know, what what? �Just one word only, yaar, one
word and he got thrown out of the house! � God, must have been
a bad word, man, come on, tell. - This was it, sir: 'Oops.'

Babar Shakil in a dangerous veil of brandy. Comedy enters his
bloodstream, effects a permanent mutation. � Hey mister, you
know what they say about us tribals, too little patriotism and too
much sex-drive, well, it's all true, want to know why? � Yes. � So
take patriotism. Number one, government takes our rice for Army
troops, we should be proud, na, but we just complain there is
none for us. Number two, government mines our minerals and
economy gets a boost, but we just beef that nobody here sees the
cash. Number three, gas from Needle now provides sixty per cent
of national requirement, but still we are not happy, moaning all
the time how the gas is not domestically available in these parts.
Now how could people be less patriotic, you must agree. But for-
tunately our government loves us still, so much that it has made
our sex-drive the top national priority. � How's that? � But it is
obvious to see: this government is happy to go on screwing us
from now till doomsday.

� O, too good, yaar, too good.

The next day Babar left home before dawn to join the guerrillas
and his family never saw him alive again. From the bottomless
chests of'Nishapur' he took an old rifle and its accompanying car-

Shame, Good News and the Virgin ? 135

tridge boxes, a few books and one of Omar Khayyam's academic
medallions, which had been transmuted into base metal by a fire;
no doubt to remind himself of the causes of his own act of sepa-
ratism, of the origins of a hatred which had been powerful enough
to cause an earthquake. In his hideout in the Impossible Moun-
tains Babar grew a beard, studied the complex structure of the hill
clans, wrote poetry, rested between raids on military outposts and
railway lines and water reservoirs, and eventually, thanks to the
exigencies of that dislocated existence, was able to discuss in his
notebooks the relative merits of copulation with sheep and with
goats. There �were guerrillas who preferred the passivity of sheep;
for others the goats' greater friskiness was impossible to resist.
Many of Babar's companions went so far as to fall in love with
four-legged mistresses, and although they were all wanted men
they would risk their lives in the bazaars of Q. in order to pur-
chase gifts for their loved ones: combs for fleeces were acquired,
also ribbons and bells for darling nannies who never deigned to
express their gratitude. Babar's spirit (if not his body) rose above
such things; he poured his reservoir of unspent passion over the
mental image of a popular singer of whose features he remained
ignorant to his dying day, because he had only heard her sing on a
crackling transistor radio.

The guerrillas gave Babar a nickname of which he was inordi-
nately proud: they called him 'the emperor', in memory of that
other Babar whose throne was usurped, who took to the hills with
a ragged army and who at last founded that renowned dynasty of
monarchs whose family name is still used as an honorific title
bestowed on film tycoons. Babar, the Mogul of the Impossible
Mountains . . . two days before the departure of Raza Hyder
from Q., a sortie led for the last time by the great commander
himself was responsible for firing the bullet which knocked
Babar down.

But it didn't matter, because he had spent too long with the
angels; up in the shifting, treacherous mountains he had watched
them, golden-breasted and with gilded wings. Archangels flapped
over his head as he sat doing sentry duty on a fierce outcrop of

Shame ? 136

rock. Yes, perhaps Jibreel himself had hovered benignly over him
like a golden helicopter while he violated a sheep. And shortly
before his death the guerrillas noticed that their bearded comrade's
skin had begun to give off a yellow light; the little buds of new
wings were visible on his shoulders. It was a transformation
familiar to the denizens of the Impossible Mountains. 'You won't
be here much longer,' they told Babar with traces of envy in their
voices, 'Emperor, you're off; no more woolly fucks for you.' The
angeling of Babar must have been just about complete by the time
of his death, when his guerrilla unit attacked a seemingly broken-
down goods train and so fell into Raza Hyder's trap, because
although eighteen bullets pierced his body, which made an easy
target because it glowed yellow through his clothing in the night,
it was easy for him to skip out of his skin and soar lucent and
winged into the eternity of the mountains, where a great cloud of
seraphs rose up as the world shook and roared, and where to the
music of heavenly reed-flutes and celestial seven-stringed sarandas
and three-stringed dumbirs he was received into the elysian
bosom of the earth. His body, when they brought it down, was
said to be as insubstantial and feathery as an abandoned snakeskin,
such as cobras and playboys leave behind them when they change;
and he was gone, gone for good, the fool.

Of course his death was not described in any notebook; it was
enacted within the grieving imaginations of his three mothers,
because, as they told Omar while recounting the tale of their son's
transformation into an angel, 'We have the right to present him
with a good death, a death with which the living can live.' Under
the impact of the tragedy, Chhunni, Munnee and Bunny began to
crumble inside, becoming mere facades, beings as insubstantial as
the sloughed-off corpse of their son. (But they pulled themselves
together at the end.)

The body was returned to them some weeks after eighteen
bullets had entered it. They also received a letter on official
notepaper. 'Only the memory of the former prestige of your
family name protects you from the consequences of your son's
great infamy. It is our opinion that the families of these gangsters

Shame, Good News and the Virgin ? 137

have much to answer for.' The letter had been signed, before his
departure, by the former governor, Raza Hyder himself; who
must therefore have known that he had engineered the death of
the boy whom he had seen, years previously, watching him
through field-glasses from the upper windows of the sealed man-
sion between the Cantt and the bazaar.

Out of pity for Omar Khayyam Shakil � to spare, let us say, his
blushes - I shall not describe the scene at the gate of the Harappa
town house that took place when the doctor finally turned up in a
taxi-cab holding his brother's notebooks in his hand. He has been
bounced in enough dirt for the moment; suffice to say that under
the cold weight of Iskander's rejection, Omar Khayyam suffered
an attack of vertigo so severe that he was sick in the back of the
taxi. (Over that, too, I draw a fastidious veil.) Once again others
had acted and by so doing had shaped the story of his life: Babar's
flight, Hyder's bullets, the exaltation of Mir Harappa and the
resulting alteration in Iskander added up, as far as our hero was
concerned, to a kick in his personal teeth. Later, in his own home
(we have not yet visited the Shakil residence: an unglamorous
apartment in one of the city's older housing zones, four rooms
notable for the complete absence of all but the most essential
items of furniture, as though Shakil in his adulthood were
rebelling against the fantasticated clutter of his mothers' home, and
choosing, instead, the bare-walled asceticism of his selected father,
the vanished, birdcaged schoolteacher Eduardo Rodrigues. A
father is both a warning and a lure), which he had been obliged by
the outraged taxi-driver to reach stinking and on foot, he retired
to bed, heat-drained, his head still spinning; he placed a bundle of
tattered notebooks on his bedside table and said as he drifted into
sleep: 'Babar, life is long.'

The next day he returned to �work; and the day after that he
began to fall in love.

Once upon a time there was a plot of land. It was attractively situ-
ated in the heart of the First Phase of the Defense Services Offi-

I

Shame ? 138

cers' Co-operative Housing Society; to its right stood the official
residence of the national minister for education, information and
tourism, an imposing building whose walls were clad in green
onyx marble streaked with red, and to its left was the home of the
widow of the late Joint Chief of Staff, Marshal Aurangzeb. Despite
location and neighbours, however, the plot of land remained
empty; no foundations had been dug there, no shuttering raised to
build walls of reinforced cement concrete. The plot of land lay,
tragically for its owner, in a small hollow; so that when the two
days of pouring rain which the city enjoyed each year arrived, the
waters flooded into the empty plot and formed a muddy lake.
This unusual phenomenon of a lake which came into being for
two days a year and which was then boiled away by the sun,
leaving behind a thin mulch of water-transported garbage and
faeces, was enough to discourage all potential builders, even
though the plot was, as stated above, congenially sited: the Aga
Khan owned the lodge at the top of the nearby hill, and the eldest
son of the President, Field-Marshal Mohammad A., also lived
nearby. It was on this hapless patch of earth that Pinkie Aurangzeb
decided to raise turkeys.

Deserted by living lover as well as dead husband, the Marshal's
widow elected to turn her hand to business. Much taken by the
success of the new shaver-chicken scheme which the national air-
line had recently begun to operate from batteries on the periphery
of the airport, Pinkie decided to go for bigger birds. The officers
of the housing society were incapable of resisting Mrs Aurangzeb's
allure (it might have been fading, but it was still too much for
clerks), and turned blind eyes to the clouds of gobbling fowls
which she released into the vacant, walled-in property. The arrival
of the turkeys was treated by Mrs Bilquis Hyder as a personal
insult. A highly-strung lady, of whom it was said that troubles in
her marriage were placing her brain under increasing stress, she
took to leaning out of windows and abusing the noisy birds.
'Shoo! Shut up, crazy fellows! Turkeys making God knows what-
all racket right next to a minister's house! See if I don't slit your
throats!'

Shame, Good News and the Virgin � 139

When Bilquis appealed to her husband to do something about
the eternally gobbling birds who were destroying what remained
of her peace of mind, Raza Hyder replied calmly, 'She is the
widow of our great Marshal, wife. Allowances must be made.'
The minister for education, information and tourism was tired at
the end of a hard day's work in which he had approved measures
which would legalize the piracy by the government of Western
scientific text-books, personally supervised the smashing of one of
the small portable presses on which anti-state propaganda was
illicitly printed and which had been discovered in the basement of
an England-returned arts graduate who had been corrupted by
foreign ideas, and discussed with the city's leading art dealers the
growing problem of pilferage of antiquities from the country's
archaeological sites � discussed the issue, one should add, with
such sensitivity that the dealers had been moved to present him, in
recognition of his attitude, with a small stone head from Taxila,
dating from the time of Alexander the Great's expedition into the
north. In short, Raza Hyder was in no mood for turkeys.

Bilquis had not forgotten what a fat man had hinted about her
husband and Mrs Aurangzeb on the verandah of Mohenjo years
ago; she remembered the time when her husband had been
willing to stake himself to the ground on her behalf; and she was
also, in her thirty-second year, becoming increasingly shrill. That
was the year in which the Loo blew more fiercely than ever
before, and cases of fever and madness increased by four hundred
and twenty per cent . . . Bilquis placed her hands upon her hips
and yelled at Raza in the presence of both her daughters: 'O, a
fine day for me! Now you humiliate me with birds.' Her elder
daughter, the mental case, began to blush, because it was evident
that the gobbling turkeys did indeed represent one more victory
for Pinkie Aurangzeb over other men's wives, the last such vic-
tory, of which the victor was wholly unaware.