Shame (31 page)

General Raza Hyder inherited from his predecessor a lugubrious
seven-foot ADC named Major Shuja, and also an Army so
unnerved by its defeat in the former East Wing that it could no
longer win so much as a football game. Understanding the inti-
mate relationship between sport and war, the new Commander-
in-Chief took it upon himself to attend every possible athletic
contest involving his boys, hoping to inspire the teams by his pres-
ence. So it was that during the first months of his chieftancy Raza
Hyder was present at the most remarkable series of humiliations in
the annals of Army sport, beginning with the legendary inter-
services cricket game in which the Army XI lost all ten first-
innings wickets without scoring a single run off the bat. Their Air
Force opponents piled up a formidable reply, because the war had
largely been an Army disaster, and so the airmen remained, for the

Shame � 212

most part, unaffected by the disgrace. The Army cricketers finally
lost the game by an innings and 420 runs; it would have been 419
except that one of the Army's second-innings runs was never
completed, because the player in question appeared to lose heart
in mid-sprint, stopped, scratched his head, stared about distract-
edly, and failed even to notice when he was run out . . . Hyder
witnessed, too, the hockey match in which the Navy boys scored
forty times in eighty minutes while the soldiers stared glumly at
their curved sticks as if they were rifles, such as the ones surren-
dered on the day of reckoning in the East; and at the new
National Swimming Baths he saw with his own eyes a double
tragedy, one Army diver never surfacing after botching a dive so
completely that he preferred to drown rather than emerge from
the waters of his shame, while another got himself in an even
worse tangle, taking off from the high board and landing on his
belly with a noise like a gunshot, bursting open like a paint-
balloon and forcing the authorities to drain the pool so that they
could tidy away his guts. After this the mournful figure of Major
Shuja presented itself to the General in his office and suggested
that perhaps it would be better, begging for pardon, sir, if the
C-in-C Sahib would stay away from such events, as his presence
was intensifying the jawans' shame and making matters worse
than ever.

'Son of a gun,' Raza cried, 'how come the entire Army turned
into a bunch of blushing women overnight?'

'The war, sir,' replied Shuja, speaking from the well of a
desolation so profound that he no longer cared about his
career prospects, 'and, beg for pardon, General, but you weren't
involved in that scrap.'

Now Raza understood that his troops were joined in the ter-
rible solidarity of their shared humiliation, and guessed at last why
it was that not one of his fellow officers had ever offered him a
fizzy drink in the officers' mess. 'I thought it was jealousy,' he
rebuked himself, and said to Shuja, who was waiting glumly at
attention for the demotion his insolence deserved: 'O.K., Major;
what's your solution?'

In the Fifteenth Century ? 213

The unexpectedness of the question startled Shuja into
honesty. 'Permission to speak frankly, sir?' Hyder nodded: 'Man
to man. You, me and the gatepost.'

'Then, beg for pardon, sir, but a return to Army rule.
Takeover, sir.'

Hyder was amazed. 'Do people always talk treason in
this town?'

The gloom surrounding the ADC thickened further. 'The
General Sahib asked, sir, and I only said. Young officers are rest-
less, sir, this is an Army town, the Army is used to power, and sir,
everyone knows what these politicos are like, no good, sir, not
suitable, the officers remember when they had respect, but now
they feel so depressed, sir, seems like anyone can kick the Army
around these days. Beg for pardon, sir.'

'The devil with your coup,' Hyder told him fiercely, 'the way
things are right now half a dozen of Isky Harappa's ex-mistresses
could take the whole Army apart.'

'Yes, sir,' Shuja said, and burst, astoundingly, into tears. Gen-
eral Hyder reminded himself that the young giant wasn't much
over eighteen; and then his own notoriously over-active tear-
ducts began to smart in sympathy, so he said quickly, 'For God's
sake, man. Nobody's going to court-martial you. Just get your
priorities right. Let's win a few polo matches before thinking of
taking over the country.'

'Very good, sir,' Shuja controlled himself, 'I shall convey the
General's view to the polo squad, sir.'

'What a life,' Raza Hyder said aloud when he was alone. 'The
higher you climb, the thicker the blasted mud.' It was lucky for
the country, he mused, that Old Razor Guts was accustomed to
standing on his own two feet.

The restoration of the Army's morale, it would be fair to say,
was the crowning glory of Raza Hyder's career � it was a tougher
job, in my opinion, than anything he undertook when President.
How did he do it? - He lost wrestling matches.

The morning after his conversation with Major Shuja he
instructed the ADC to select opponents for him, mostly from the

Shame ? 2 14

common soldiers, but also from a cross-section of the officers. 'I
am keen on wrestling,' he lied, 'and it's time I saw what stuff our
Army phaelwans are made of.'

General Raza Hyder fought with one hundred and eleven sol-
diers and was thrashed by them all. He made no attempt to win,
concentrating, instead, on the far more difficult business of losing
against opponents who had forgotten that it was possible to win;
of losing, moreover, while giving the impression of struggling for
victory with all his might. 'You can see what good it's doing,' he
told Omar Khayyam Shakil, who acted as the General's personal
physician before and after each bout, and who was alarmed by the
phenomenal battering being given to that forty-nine-year-old
body. 'Yes,' Omar Khayyam replied, ministering to aching bones
and rainbow bruises, 'any fool can see that.' Raza Hyder wept
freely as he lay beneath Shakil's probing fingers, but he called
them tears of joy.

The wrestling strategy of Raza Hyder gained him a double vic-
tory. It helped the Army to accept his leadership, because now
he was united with his men in that macabre fellowship of shame.
As Old Razor Guts was drop-kicked in the jaw, dumped on
canvas with his ankles knotted round his neck, throttled by an
infantryman's arm; as his ribs snapped and his arms left their
sockets, the old popularity of the hero of Aansu was reborn;
cleansed of the dust and anonymity of his Staff College years, it
shone once again, like new. Yes, Razor Guts was back, bigger
than ever . . . but Raza had been after more than that, and his
second purpose was also achieved, because as the soldiers in camp
after camp participated in, or witnessed from roaring ringsides, the
pulverization of the one genuine war hero left in the Army, they
began to regain faith in themselves, they began to believe that if
they were good enough to dump the General in the dirt they
couldn't be such pathetic fighting men as they had come to
imagine. After one year of wrestling Raza Hyder called a halt. He
had lost both upper central incisors and sustained countless other
injuries. 'I don't have to take this any more,' he told Shuja, whose
air of permanent dejection (although somewhat reduced) now

In the Fifteenth Century ? 215

stood revealed as a personality flaw and not simply the product of
the lost, and now almost forgotten, war.

'Tell those bastards,' Raza instructed him, 'that I expect all per-
sonnel to win every competition they enter from now on, or else.'
There followed an electrifying improvement in Army sporting
results.

I have lingered on this business of Army morale to indicate
why it was that during his years as Commander-in-Chief Raza
Hyder did not have the time or the mental energy to pay proper
attention to what his daughter Sufiya Zinobia was getting up to
in the nights.

The politicos and diplomats were in charge of the new city but
the Army dominated the old town. The new capital was com-
posed of numerous concrete edifices which exuded an air of
philistine transience. The geodesic dome of the Friday Mosque
had already begun to crack, and all around it the new official
buildings preened themselves as they, too, fell apart. The air-
conditioning broke down, the electric circuits shorted, flush water
kept bubbling up into washbasins to the consternation of the
plumbers . . . O vilest of cities! Those buildings represented the
final triumph of a modernism that was really a kind of pre-stressed
nostalgia, form without function, the effigy of Islamic architecture
without its heart, buildings containing more Mughal arches than
the Mughals could ever have imagined, arches reduced by pre-
stressed concrete to mere pointy holes in walls. The new capital
was in reality the biggest collection of airport terminals on earth, a
garbage dump for unwanted transit lounges and customs halls, and
maybe that was appropriate, because democracy had never been
more than a bird of passage in those parts, after all ... the old
town possessed, by contrast, the confident provinciality of its
years. Old, wide, tree-lined streets, chaotic bazaars, slums, the
solidly outsized mansions of the departed Angrez rulers. The
C-in-C's official residence was a neo-classical palace of stone por-
ticoes with massive fluted pillars supporting mock-Grecian,
friezed pediments, and there were little piles of cannonballs lining

Shame ? 216

the grand steps up to the front door; a wheeled gun apocryphally
named 'Little Zamzama' guarded the bright-green lawn. The
place was spacious that the whole family moved in without
any arguments, so that Good News and Talvar Ulhaq, Omar
Khayyam and Sufiya Zinobia, Dawood and Shahbanou the ayah,
as well as Raza and Bilquis, pursued their several destinies beneath
that ample roof, while the alien gods of Greece and Rome, posing
stonily against the high blue sky, looked down on them with
supercilious expressions on their faces.

Things did not go well.

'As if this crazy Army isn't bad enough,' Raza told himself in
those first northern days, 'here's my own house filling up with
mad persons,' and it seemed as though the occupants of that
anachronistic palace set about turning his angry exaggeration into
the literal truth.

When Maulana Dawood appeared one morning wearing the tra-
ditional garb of a pilgrim on the Hajj, in two white cloths, one
wound around his loins and the other hooped negligently across
his chest, General Raza Hyder was forced to entertain the possi-
bility that the fossilized divine had finally succumbed to the tide of
senility which had begun washing over him during their flight
into the north. At first he tried to deal kindly with his old ally.
'Maulanaji,' he said, 'if you want to perform the pilgrimage you
just have to say the word, I'll fix everything, plane tickets to
Arabia and all,' but Dawood only replied, 'Why do I need aircraft
when I am already walking upon this sacred ground?' After that
the Maulana took to tottering around town with his hands opened
before him like a book, intoning verses from the Quran in an
Arabic which the loss of his reason led him to adulterate with
other, coarser dialects; and in the grip of that senility which made
him imagine that he saw the peaks of faraway Abu Qubais, Thabir
and Hira behind the town, and which led him to mistake a bicycle
factory for the cemetery in which the Prophet's wife lay buried,
he began to abuse the townspeople for their irreligious blas-
phemies, because of course the men were improperly attired and

In the Fifteenth Century ? 217

the women were a disgrace, they laughed in his face when he
called them whores. He was a mad old man asking the way to the
Kaaba, a beardy fool in his second childhood who prostrated him-
self outside fish-shops as if they were the holy places of Mecca and
yelled 'Ya Allah!' In the end his body was brought back to the
Hyder residence on a donkey-cart, whose puzzled owner said
that the old fellow had expired with the words, 'There it is! � And
they are covering it with shit.' He had wandered to the edge of
the old town to the place where the new water purification tanks
had recently been filled with activated sludge, and Raza Hyder
tried hard to pretend that this was the obvious, banal reason for
the Maulana's last words; but in reality he was profoundly dis-
turbed, because being a religious man he had never found himself
capable of dismissing Maulana Dawood's antics as mere senilities;
the gatta bruise on Raza's forehead ached and suggested to him
that perhaps the old Maulana really had seen a vision of Mecca, a
revelation of holiness in the midst of this unholy town, so that his
dying words might contain an awful, cryptic warning. 'The
Kaaba,' Raza's own voice whispered tremulously in his ear, 'it
must have been, he must have seen it at last, and they were
pouring excrement on it.' Later, when he was President, he would
be unable to get this vision out of his mind.

At the end of the first year of civilian rule, General Raza Hyder
became a grandfather. Good News gave birth to fine, healthy twin
sons, and the General was so delighted that he forgot all about
Sindbad Mengal. Exactly one year later Good News became a
mother again; this time she produced triplets. Raza Hyder was a
little alarmed and joked nervously to Talvar Ulhaq: 'You said you
would be the perfect son-in-law, but, baba, five grandsons is
enough, maybe you are overdoing your duty.' Precisely twelve
months later Good News brought forth a beautiful quartet of baby
girls, whom Hyder loved so much that he decided not to express
his concern about the growing numbers of cradles and comforters
and washing-lines and rattles clogging up the house. Five more
granddaughters turned up one year later to the day, and now