Shame (7 page)
To be frank: what a telescope began at long distance, Omar
Khayyam continued in close-up. Let us not be afraid to mention
the word 'voyeur', remembering that it has already been men-
tioned (in telescopic context) by Farah Zoroaster. But now that
Escapes from the Mother Country ? 41
we have named him peeping-tom, we should also say that he was
never caught, unlike that bold fellow in Agra who, they say,
looked over a high wall to spy on the building of the Taj Mahal.
He had his eyes put out, or so the story goes; whereas Omar
Khayyam's peepers were opened wide by his voyeurism, which
revealed to him both the infinitely rich and cryptic texture of
human life and also the bitter-sweet delights of living through
other human beings.
He had one total failure. Needless to say, what mothers had
hidden from him for twelve years, schoolboys unveiled in twelve
minutes: that is, the story of the legendary party at which musta-
chioed officers had been eyed, sized up, and afterwards . . . Omar
Khayyam Shakil, obeying maternal orders, engaged in no fisticuffs
when taunted with this saga. He existed in a kind of Eden of the
morals, and shrugged the insults off; but after that he began
watching the Angrez gentlemen for signs, examining them for
facial resemblances to himself, waiting to pounce on some casual
or inadvertent expression or gesture that might reveal the identity
of his unknown male progenitor. He had no success. Perhaps the
father was long gone, and living, if still alive, in some seaside bun-
galow lapped by tides of nostalgia for the horizons of his departed
glory, fingering the few miserable artifacts - ivory hunting horns,
kukri knives, a photograph of himself at a Maharaja's tiger hunt �
which preserved, on the mantels of his declining years, the dying
echoes of the past, like seashells that sing of distant seas . . . but
these are fruitless speculations. Unable to locate a father, the boy^
selected one for himself out of available personnel, bestowing the
accolade without any reservations upon Mr Eduardo Rodrigues
the schoolmaster, who was himself a recent arrival in Q., having
alighted jauntily from a bus one day some years previously, dressed
in whites, with a white fedora on his head and an empty birdcage
in his hand.
And one last word about Omar Khayyam's peepings: because
of course his three mothers had begun to live vicariously too, they
couldn't help themselves, in those days of their weakening resolve
they quizzed him eagerly upon his return from Outside about
Shame ? 42
ladies' fashions and all the minutiae of town life, and had he heard
anything about them; from time to time they covered their faces
with their shawls, so that it was evident that they could no longer
seal themselves off from the emotion they had anathematized . . .
spying on the world through the unreliable eyes of their son (and
naturally he did not tell them everything), their own voyeurism-
by-proxy had the effect that such things are classically supposed to
have: that is, it weakened their moral fibre. Perhaps this is why
they were able to contemplate a repetition of their crime.
Mr Eduardo Rodrigues was as slim and sharp as his enormous col-
lection of pencils, and nobody knew his age. According to the
angle at which the light caught his face he could take on the
bright-eyed insolent appearance of a teenager or the doleful aspect
of a man drowning in half-spent yesterdays. An unexplained
southerner, he cut a mysterious figure in the town, having gone
directly from the bus depot of his arrival to the Cantonment
School, where he had succeeded in talking his way into a teaching
post before night fell. 'It is necessary to be unusual,' was all the
explanation he would give, 'if one wants to spread the Word.'
He lived in a puritanical room as the paying guest of one of the
less fortunate Angrez sahibs. On his walls he hung a crucifix, and
also glued up a number of cheap pictures, excised from calendars,
of a balmy coastal land in which palm trees swayed against impos-
sibly orange sunsets and a Baroque cathedral stood, partially over-
grown by creepers, on an ocean inlet crowded with flame-sailed
dhows. Omar Khayyam Shakil and Farah Zoroaster, the only stu-
dents who ever entered this sanctum, saw no signs of anything
more personal; it seemed as if Eduardo were hiding his past from
the fierce rays of the desert sun, to prevent it from fading. Such
was the blinding emptiness of the teacher's quarters that Omar
Khayyam did not notice until his third visit the cheap birdcage sit-
ting on top of the room's one cupboard, a cage from which the
gold paint had long ago begun to peel, and which was just as
empty as it had been on the day of his arrival at the bus depot, 'As
Escapes from the Mother Country ? 43
if,' Farah whispered scornfully, 'he came up here to catch a bird,
and couldn't, the stupid type.'
Eduardo and Omar, each in his separate way an outsider in Q.,
may have been drawn to each other by the half-conscious percep-
tion of their likeness; but there were also other forces at work.
These forces may all be conveniently collected under a single
heading, and this phrase, too, has been mentioned before: it is
'courting Disaster'.
It had not escaped the notice of the town gossips that Eduardo had
arrived, birdcage in hand, fedora on head, a mere two months
after the customs officer Zoroaster had been sent up to these parts,
minus wife, plus eight-year-old daughter. So it wasn't long before
mule-wallahs and ironmongers and scootered divines had worked
out that this Zoroaster's previous posting had been in the same
zone of creepery cathedrals and coconut beaches whose memory
could be smelled on Rodrigues's white suit and in his Portuguese
name. Tongues began to wag: 'So where is that customs-wallah's
wife? Divorced, sent back to her mother, murdered in a rage of
the passions? Look at that Farah, she doesn't look like her daddy,
not one bit!' But these tongues were also obliged to admit that
Farah Zoroaster did not look one bit like the teacher either, so
that avenue was reluctantly closed off, especially when it became
plain that Rodrigues and Zoroaster were on extremely cordial
terms. 'So why does a customs officer get shunted out here to
this end-of-the-earth job?' Farah had a simple answer. 'My stupid
father is a type who goes on dreaming after he has woken up. He
thinks one day we will return to where we have never been,
that damn land of Ahuramazda, and this no-good Irani frontier is
the closest we could get. Can you imagine?' she howled, 'He
volunteered.'
Gossip is like water. It probes surfaces for their weak places,
until it finds the breakthrough point; so it was only a matter of
time before the good people of Q. hit upon the most shameful,
scandalous explanation of all. 'O God, a grown man in love with
Shame ? 44
a little child. Eduardo and Farah - what do you mean it can't
happen, happens every day, only a few years back there was that
other � yes, that must be it, these Christians are big perverts, God
preserve us, he follows his little floozy up here to the backyard of
the universe, and who knows what encouragement she gives,
because a woman knows how to tell a man if he is wanted or not
wanted, of course, even at eight years old, these things are in the
blood.'
Neither Eduardo nor Farah gave, in their behaviour, the slightest
indication that the rumours were rooted in fact. It is true that
Eduardo did not marry during the years of Farah's growing
towards womanhood; but it is also true that Farah, known as 'Disas-
ter', was also called 'the ice block' on account of her sub-zero
coldness towards her many admirers, a frigidity which extended
also to her relations with Eduardo Rodrigues. 'But of course they
put up a good front, what do you think?' - the gossips were able
to point out, triumphantly, that they had been justified by events
in the end.
Omar Khayyam Shakil, for all his love of watching-and-
listening, pretended to turn a deaf ear to all these stories; such are
the effects of love. But they got inside him anyway, they got
under his skin and into his blood and worked their way, like little
splinters, to his heart; until he, too, proved himself guilty of the
alleged Christian perversions of the schoolteacher Rodrigues.
Choose yourself a father and you also choose your inheritance.
(But Sufiya Zinobia must wait for a few pages yet.)
I have idled away too many paragraphs in the company of
gossips; let's get back on to solid ground: Eduardo Rodrigues,
accompanied gossip-feedingly by Farah, collecting Omar Khayyam
on his first schoolday, a fact which bore witness to the residual
influence of the Shakil name in the town. In the following
months, Eduardo discovered the boy's exceptional aptitude for
learning, and wrote to his mothers offering his services as a private
tutor who could help realize their child's potential. It is a matter of
record that this mothers agreed to the schoolteacher's suggestion;
also that Eduardo's only other private pupil was Farah Zoroaster,
Escapes from the Mother Country ? 45
whose father was excused from paying any fee, because Eduardo
was a genuinely dedicated teacher; and thirdly, that as the years
passed the threesome of Omar, Eduardo and Farah became a
common sight in the town.
It was Rodrigues, who had the ability of speaking in capital let-
ters, who steered Omar towards a medical career, 'To Succeed in
Life,' he told the boy amid beach-postcards and empty birdcage,
'one must be Of the Essence. Yes, make yourself Essential, that's
the Ticket . . . and who is most Indispensable? Why, the fellow
who does the Dispensing! I mean of Advice, Diagnosis, Restricted
Drugs. Be a Doctor; it is what I have Seen in You.'
What Eduardo saw in Omar (in my opinion): the possibilities
of his true, peripheral nature. What's a doctor, after all? � A legiti-
mized voyeur, a stranger whom we permit to poke fingers and
even hands into places where we would not permit most people
to insert so much as a finger-tip, who gazes on what we take most
trouble to hide; a sitter-at-bedsides, an outsider admitted to our
most intimate moments (birthdeathetc), anonymous, a minor
character, yet also, paradoxically, central, especially at the crisis. . .
yes, yes. Eduardo was a far-sighted teacher, and no mistake. And
Omar Khayyam, who had picked Rodrigues for a father, never
once considered going against his tutor's wishes. This is how lives
are made.
But not only in this way; also by dog-eared books discovered
accidentally at home, and by long-suppressed first loves . . . when
Omar Khayyam Shakil was sixteen years old, he was flung into a
great vortex of fearful joy, because Farah the Parsee, Disaster
Zoroaster, invited him one day to come out and see her father's
customs post.
'. . . and fainted, though both his feet had been on solid ground.'
We have already been told something of what transpired at the
frontier: how a cloud descended, and Omar Khayyam, mistaking
it for his childhood nightmare of the void at the end of the earth,
passed out. It is possible that this fainting fit gave him the idea for
what he did later that day.
Shame ? 46
Details first: what was the tone of Farah's invitation? - Grace-
less, curt, I-don't-care-if-you-don't. Its motivation, whence? �
From Eduardo, who had urged her privately: 'That is one lonely
boy, be nice. You bright ones should stick together.' (Omar
Khayyam was the brighter of the pair; although two years still
stood between them, he had caught up Farah in other ways, and
was now in the self-same standard.) How rapidly did Omar
Khayyam accept? - Ek dum. Fut-a-fut. At once, or even quicker.
On weekdays, during term, Farah lodged in Q. at the home of a
Parsee mechanic and his wife, with whom her father had culti-
vated a friendship for this very purpose. This mechanic, an unim-
portant Jamshed who does not even merit a description, drove
them out to the frontier on the selected holiday in a jeep he was
repairing. And as they neared the border, Farah's spirits rose while
Omar's fell . . .
- His fear of the Edge mounted, irrationally, as they drove, as
he sat behind her in the roofless vehicle while her open, wind-
whipped hair flickered in front of him like black fire. Whereas her
mood was lightened by the drive, around a spur of the mountains,
through a pass in which they were watched by the invisible eyes
of suspicious tribals. The emptiness of the frontier pleased Farah,
no matter how openly she sneered at her father for having taken
this dead-end job. She even began to sing; revealing that she had a
melodious voice.
- His fear of the Edge mounted, irrationally, as they drove, as
At the frontier: clouds, fainting fit, water sprinkled on face,
reawakening, whereaml. Omar Khayyam comes round to find
that the cloud has lifted, so that it is possible to see that the frontier
is an unimpressive place: no wall, no police, no barbed wire or
floodlights, no red-and-white striped barriers, nothing but a row
of concrete bollards at hundred-foot intervals, bollards driven into
the hard and barren ground. There is a small customs house, and a
railhead that has turned brown with rust; on the rails stands a
single forgotten goods van, also browned by oblivion. 'The trains
don't come any more,' Farah says, 'the international situation does
not permit it.'
Escapes from the Mother Country ? 47
A customs officer depends, for a decent income, on traffic.
Goods pass through, he not unreasonably impounds them, their
owners see reason, an accommodation is reached, the customs
man's family gets new clothes. Nobody minds this arrangement;
everyone knows how little public officials are paid. Negotiations
are honourably conducted on both sides.
But very little in the way of dutiable items passes through the
small brick building that is Mr Zoroaster's power centre. Under
cover of night, tribals stroll back and forth between the countries
through bollards and rocks. Who knows what they carry forth and
back? This is Zoroaster's tragedy; and, in spite of her scholarship,
he has trouble financing his daughter's fine education. How he
consoles himself: 'Soon, soon the railway line will open . . .' But
the rust is accumulating on this belief as well; he gazes across bol-
lards to the ancestral land of Zarathustra and tries to gain solace
from its proximity, but there is, these days, a strain in his expres-
sion . . . Farah Zoroaster claps her hands and runs in and out
between the interminable bollards. 'Fun, na?' she yells, 'Teep-
taap!' Omar Khayyam, for the sake of maintaining her affable
mood, agrees that the place is quite tip-top. Zoroaster shrugs
without bitterness and retreats into his office with the jeep-driver,
warning the young people not to stay out too long in the sun.