Shame (30 page)

Shame ? 204

except one, with deep black circles around his eyes and easy tears
on his cheeks, and behind the Generals other figures, peeping
over uniformed shoulders, through epaulettes, under armpits,
crew-cut Americans and Russians in baggy suits and even the
great Zedong himself, they all watched, they didn't have to lift a
finger, no need to look beyond your father, Arjumand, no need to hunt
conspirators, he did their work for them, they didn't even have to break
wind, I am hope, he used to say, and so he was, but he took off that cloak
and turned into something else, Iskander the assassin of possibility,
immortalized on a cloth, on which she, the artist, had depicted his
victim as a young girl, small, physically frail, internally damaged:
she had taken for her model her memory of an idiot, and conse-
quently innocent, child, Sufiya Zinobia Hyder (now Shakil),
gasping and empurpled in Iskander's unyielding fist; and the auto-
biographical shawl, the portrait of the artist as an old crone, that
self-portrait in which Rani had depicted herself as being com-
posed of the same materials as the house, wood, brick, tin, her
body merging into the fabric of Mohenjo, she was earth and
cracks and spiders, and a fine mist of oblivion clouded the scene;
that was the fourteenth shawl, and the fifteenth was the shawl of
the fifteenth century, the famous poster recreated in thread,
Iskander pointing at the future, only there was nothing on the
horizon, no dawn-fingers, just the endless waves of night; and
then Pinkie's shawl, on which she committed suicide; and the last
two were the worst: the shawl of hell, which, as Omar Khayyam
Shakil had discovered as a child, lay in the west of the country in
the vicinity of Q., where the separatist movement had grown out
of all recognition in the wake of the secession of the East, prolif-
eration of sheep-fuckers, but Iskander had done for them, there it
all was in scarlet, scarlet and nothing but scarlet, what he did for
the sake of no-more-secessions, in the name of never-another-
East-Wing, the bodies sprawled across the shawl, the men without
genitals, the sundered legs, the intestines in place of faces, the alien
legion of the dead blotting out the memory of Raza Hyder's
governorship, or even giving that period, in retrospect, a kindly,
tolerant glow, because there was no comparison, daughter, your man of

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the people, your master of the common touch, I have lost count of the
corpses on my shawl, twenty, fifty, a hundred thousand dead, who
knows, and not enough scarlet thread on earth to show the blood, the
people hanging upside down with dogs at their open guts, the
people grinning lifelessly with bullet-holes for second mouths,
the people united in the worm-feast of that shawl of flesh and
death; and Little Mir Harappa on the last of all the shawls, Little
Mir buried at the bottom of a trunk, but of course he rose to clasp
his cousin in his own phantasmal grip, to drag Iskander Harappa
down to hell . . . her eighteenth shawl and her supreme master-
piece, a panoramic landscape, the hard earth of her exile stretched
across the cloth, from Mohenjo as far as Daro, villagers balancing
buckets on shoulder-poles, horses running free, women tilling the
soil, the dawn light kindled in miracles of rose and blue embroi-
dery: Daro was coming awake, and from its great verandah, by the
steps, something long and heavy was swinging in the breeze, a
single death after the carnage of the seventeenth shawl, Little Mir
Harappa dangling by the neck under the eaves of his family home,
dead in the first months of the Chairman's reign, his sightless eyes
staring down at the very spot where, once upon a time, the
cadaver of an unloved dog had been permitted to decay, yes, she
had delineated his body with an accuracy that stopped the heart,
leaving out nothing, not the disembowelling, not the tear in the
armpit through which Mir's own heart had been removed, not
the torn-out tongue, nothing, and there was a villager standing
beside the corpse, with his bewildered remark sewn in black
above his head, 'It looks as if,' the fellow said, 'his body has been
looted, like a house.'

It was, of course, for his alleged complicity in the murder of Little
Mir Harappa that Iskander was put on trial for his life. Also
indicted, for the actual performance of the crime, was the dead
man's son Haroun. He, however, was tried in absentia, having fled
the country, it was thought, although it was possible that he had
simply vanished, gone to ground.

No murderers were depicted on Rani's eighteenth shawl . . .

Shame ? 206

but now that all eighteen have been spread out and admired, it is
time to turn away from Harappas, from Rani and Arjumand
sequestered in that house whose decay had reached the point at
which the water trickled blood-red from rust-corroded taps. Time
to turn back the clock, so that Iskander rises from the grave, but
recedes, as well, into the background of the tale. Other people
have been living lives while Harappas rose and fell.

10

The Woman in the Veil

There was once a young woman, Sufiya Zinobia, also known
as 'Shame'. She �was of slight build, had a weakness for pine-
kernels, and her arms and legs were imperfectly co-ordinated
when she walked. Despite this ambulatory awkwardness, how-
ever, she would not have struck a stranger as being particularly
abnormal, having acquired in the first twenty-one years of life the
usual complement of physical attributes, including a small severe
face that made her seem unusually mature, disguising the fact that
she had only managed to get hold of around seven years' worth of
brains. She even had a husband, Omar Khayyam Shakil, and
never complained that her parents had chosen for her a man fully
thirty-one years her senior, that is to say, older than her own
father. Appearances notwithstanding, however, this Sufiya Zino-
bia turned out to be, in reality, one of those supernatural beings,
those exterminating or avenging angels, or werewolves, or vam-
pires, about whom we are happy to read in stories, sighing thank-
fully or even a little smugly while they scare the pants off us that
it's just as well they are no more than abstractions or figments;
because we know (but do not say) that the mere likelihood of

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Shame ? 208

their existence would utterly subvert the laws by which we live,
the processes by which we understand the world.

Lurking inside Sufiya Zinobia Shakil there was a Beast. We
have already seen something of the growth of this unspeakable
monster; we have seen how, feeding on certain emotions, it took
possession of the girl from time to time. On two occasions she fell
grievously ill and almost died; and perhaps both illnesses, brain-
fever and immunological collapse, were attempts by her ordinary
self, by the Sufiya-Zinobia-ness of her, to defeat the Beast, even
at the cost of her own life. But the Beast was not destroyed. And
maybe somebody should have guessed, after the attack on her
brother-in-law, that whatever other-than-Beastly part of her
remained was gradually losing its ability to resist the blood-
creature within. But when Omar Khayyam's whispering voice
finally found the way to unlock her trance, she woke up fresh and
relaxed and seemingly unaware of having terminated Talvar's
polo-playing career. The Beast had nodded off again, but the bars
of its cage had been broken. Still, there was general relief. 'Poor
girl got so upset she went wild, that's all,' Shahbanou the ayah told
Omar Khayyam, 'but she's O.K. now, thank God.'

Raza Hyder summoned Shakil to a conference and honourably
offered him the opportunity of withdrawing from the proposed
marriage. On hearing this the antique divine Maulana Dawood,
who was also present, refused to remain silent. His original oppo-
sition to the nuptials lost in the foggy labyrinths of his great age,
the old man whined like a malicious bullet. 'That she-devil and
this child of she-devils,' he cried, 'let them make their hell
together, in some other place.' Omar Khayyam replied with dig-
nity, 'Sir, I am a man of science; to the devil with this talk of
devils. I will not cast off a loved one because she fell ill; it is,
rather, my duty to make her well. And this is being done.'

I am no less disappointed in my hero than I was; not being the
obsessive type, I find it difficult to comprehend his obsession. -
But I must admit that his love for the damaged girl is beginning to
seem as if it might be genuine . . . which does not invalidate my
criticisms of the fellow. Human beings have a remarkable talent

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for persuading themselves of the authenticity and nobility of
aspects of themselves which are in fact expedient, spurious, base. -
At any rate: Omar Khayyam insisted on going ahead with
the match.

Bilquis Hyder, her senses distracted by the events of Good
News's wedding day, proved incapable of entering into the spirit
of a second marriage. When Sufiya Zinobia left hospital her
mother refused to speak to her; but on the eve of the wedding she
came to where Shahbanou was oiling the girl and twining her
hair, and spoke so ponderously that it was plain that each word
was a heavy weight which she was hauling up from the fathomless
well of her duty. 'You must think of yourself as the ocean,' she
told Sufiya Zinobia. 'Yes, and he, the man, imagine him a sea
creature, because that is what men are like, to live they must
drown in you, in the tides of your secret flesh.' Her eyes roamed
loosely around her face. Sufiya Zinobia pulled a face at these
incomprehensible maternal abstractions and replied obstinately in
her voice of a seven-year-old girl, which was also the eerily dis-
guised voice of the latent monster: 'I hate fish.'

What is the most powerful impulse of human beings in the face of
night, of danger, of the unknown? - It is to run away; to avert the
eyes and flee; to pretend the menace is not loping towards them in
seven-league boots. It is the will to ignorance, the iron folly with
which we exercise from consciousness whatever consciousness
cannot bear. No need to invoke the ostrich to give this impulse
symbolic form; humanity is more wilfully blind than any flight-
less bird.

At Sufiya Zinobia's wedding (a private affair; no guests, no
marquees; the three mothers of Q. stayed away, Dawood absented
himself also, leaving only Hyders and lawyers and Shakil) Raza
Hyder forced Omar Khayyam to agree to the insertion in the
Nikah contract of a clause forbidding him, Omar, to remove his
bride from her parents' home without their prior permission. 'A
father,' Raza explained, 'cannot do without the precious pieces of
his heart,' from which it can be seen that his new love for Sufiya

Shame ? 2 10

�was burning more brightly than ever, and blinded by the glare of
that flame he refused to see the truth of her. In the following years
he persuaded himself that by locking up his wife, by veiling her in
walls and shuttered windows, he could save his family from the
malign legacy of her blood, from its passions and its torments (for
if Sufiya Zinobia's soul was in agony, she was also the child of a
frenzied woman, and that, too, may be an explanation of a kind).

Omar Khayyam also refused to see. Blinded by science, he
married Hyder's daughter. Sufiya Zinobia smiled and ate a plate of
laddoos decorated with silver paper. Shahbanou the ayah fussed
round her like a mother.

I repeat: there is no place for monsters in civilized society. If
such creatures roam the earth, they do so out on its uttermost rim,
consigned to peripheries by conventions of disbelief. . . but once
in a blue moon something goes wrong. A Beast is born, a 'wrong
miracle', within the citadels of propriety and decorum. This was
the danger of Sufiya Zinobia: that she came to pass, not in any
wilderness of basilisks and fiends, but in the heart of the
respectable world. And as a result that world made a huge effort
of the will to ignore the reality of her, to avoid bringing matters
to the point at which she, disorder's avatar, would have to be
dealt with, expelled - because her expulsion would have laid bare
what-must-on-no-account-be-known, namely the impossible
verity that barbarism could grow in cultured soil, that savagery
could lie concealed beneath decency's well-pressed shirt. That she
was, as her mother had said, the incarnation of their shame. To
comprehend Sufiya Zinobia would be to shatter, as if it were a
crystal, these people's sense of themselves; and so of course they
would not do it, they did not, not for years. The more powerful
the Beast became, the greater grew the efforts to deny its very
being . . . Sufiya Zinobia outlived most members of her family.
There were those who died for her.

No more dreams of failure, no more square-bashing with green
recruits; Raza Hyder got his promotion from Iskander Harappa,
and Omar Khayyam Shakil agreed to move north with everyone

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else. His high medical reputation and Hyder's renewed influence
secured for Omar the post of senior consultant at the Mount Hira
hospital in the new capital, and then they were off, bedrolls and
ayahs and all, and soon they were airborne over the wide northern
plateau that lay between two great rivers, the Potwar plateau, the
stage on which great scenes were to be played out, seventeen hun-
dred feet above sea-level.

Thin soil over porous pudding-stone . . . but in spite of the
soil's thinness the plateau produced improbable quantities of rain-
nourished crops; it was a terrain of such unlikely fertility that it
had managed to raise a whole new city like a blister on the hip of
an old town. Islamabad (you might say) out of Rawalpindi's rib.

Maulana Dawood, looking down from the skies and seeing the
Potwar plateau with its cities gleaming in the distance, banged on
the cabin window in dribbling, half-senile delight. 'Arafat,' he
shouted at the top of his voice, alarming a stewardess, 'we are
come to Arafat,' and nobody, not Raza his friend, not Bilquis his
enemy, had the heart to set him right, because if the old man had
chosen to believe that they were about to land on the holy ground
of the Arafat plain outside Mecca Sharif, well, that, too, was a kind
of blindness, a fantasy forgivable in the old.