Shame (27 page)
And along with Iskander, Rani, Arjumand, Haroun, Raza,
Bilquis, Dawood, Naveed, Talvar, Shahbanou, Sufiya Zinobia and
Omar Khayyam, our story now moves north, to the new capital
and the ancient mountains of its climactic phase.
Once upon a time there were two families, their destinies insepa-
rable even by death. I had thought, before I began, that what I had
on my hands was an almost excessively masculine tale, a saga
of sexual rivalry, ambition, power, patronage, betrayal, death,
Shame, Good News and the Virgin ? 181
revenge. But the women seem to have taken over; they marched
in from the peripheries of the story to demand the inclusion of
their own tragedies, histories and comedies, obliging me to couch
my narrative in all manner of sinuous complexities, to see my
'male' plot refracted, so to speak, through the prisms of its reverse
and 'female' side. It occurs to me that the women knew
precisely what they were up to � that their stories explain, and
even subsume, the men's. Repression is a seamless garment; a
society which is authoritarian in its social and sexual codes, which
crushes its women beneath the intolerable burdens of honour
and propriety, breeds repressions of other kinds as well. Contrari-
wise: dictators are always � or at least in public, on other people's
behalf� puritanical. So it turns out that my 'male' and 'female'
plots are the same story, after all.
I hope that it goes without saying that not all women are
crushed by any system, no matter how oppressive. It is commonly
and, I believe, accurately said of Pakistan that her women are
much more impressive than her men . . . their chains, neverthe-
less, are no fictions. They exist. And they are getting heavier.
If you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining.
In the end, though, it all blows up in your face.
IV
In the Fifteenth
Century
9
Alexander the Great
Iskander Harappa stands in the foreground, finger pointing
towards the future, silhouetted against the dawn. Above his
patrician profile the message curls; from right to left the flowing
golden shapes. A NEW man for a new century. The fifteenth
century (Hegiran calendar) peeps over the horizon, extending
long fingers of radiance into the early sky. The sun rises rapidly
in the tropics. And glinting on Isky's finger is a ring of power,
echoing the sun . . . the poster is omnipresent, stamping itself on
the walls of mosques, graveyards, whorehouses, staining the mind:
Isky the sorcerer, conjuring the sun from the black depths of
the sea.
What is being bom?--A legend. Isky Harappa rising, falling; Isky
condemned to death, the world horrified, his executioner
drowned in telegrams, but rising above them, shrugging them off,
a compassionless hangman, desperate, afraid. Then Isky dead and
buried; blind men regain their sight beside his martyr's grave. And
in the desert a thousand flowers bloom. Six years in power, two in
jail, an eternity underground . . . the sun sets quickly, too. You
can stand on the coastal sandspits and watch it dive into the sea.
Chairman Iskander Harappa, dead, stripped of Pierre Cardin
1 8 5
Shame ? 186
and of history, continues to cast his shadow. His voice murmurs
in his enemies' secret ears, a melodious, relentless monologue
gnawing their brains like a worm. A ring finger points across the
grave, glinting its accusations. Iskander haunts the living; the
beautiful voice, golden, a voice holding rays of dawn, whispers
on, unsilenced, unstoppable. Arjumand is sure of this. Afterwards,
when the posters have been torn down, in the aftermath of the
noose which, winding round him like a baby's umbilical cord,
maintained such respect for his person that it left no mark upon
his neck; when she, Arjumand, has been shut away in once-more-
looted Mohenjo, along with a mother who looks like a grand-
mother and who will not accept her dead husband's divinity; then
the daughter remembers, concentrating on details, telling herself
the time will come for Iskander to be restored to history. His
legend is in her care. Arjumand stalks the brutalized passages of the
house, reads cheap love-fiction, eats like a bird and takes laxatives,
empties herself of everything to make room for the memories.
They fill her up, her bowels, her lungs, her nostrils; she is her
father's epitaph, and she knows.
From the beginning, then. The elections which brought
Iskander Harappa to power were not (it must be said) as straight-
forward as I have made them sound. As how could they be, in that
country divided into two Wings a thousand miles apart, that fan-
tastic bird of a place, two Wings without a body, sundered by the
land-mass of its greatest foe, joined by nothing but God . . . she
remembers that first day, the thunderous crowds around
the polling stations. O confusion of people who have lived too
long under military rule, who have forgotten the simplest things
about democracy! Large numbers of men and women were swept
away by the oceans of bewilderment, unable to locate ballot-
boxes or even ballots, and failed to cast their votes. Others,
stronger swimmers in those seas, succeeded in expressing their
preferences twelve or thirteen times. Popular Front workers, dis-
tressed by the general lack of electoral decorum, made heroic
attempts to save the day. Those few urban constituencies making
returns incompatible with the West-Wing-wide polling pattern
In the Fifteenth Century ? 187
were visited at night by groups of enthusiastic party members,
who helped the returning officers to make a recount. Matters
were much clarified in this way. Outside the errant polling sta-
tions large numbers of democrats assembled, many holding
burning brands above their heads in the hope of shedding new
light on the count. Dawn light flamed in the streets, while the
crowds chanted loudly, rhythmically, spurring on the returning
officers in their labours. And by morning the people's will had
been expressed, and Chairman Isky had won a huge and absolute
majority of the West Wing's seats in the new National Assembly.
Rough justice, Arjumand remembers, but justice all the same.
The real trouble, however, started over in the East Wing, that
festering swamp. Populated by whom?�O, savages, breeding end-
lessly, jungle-bunnies good for nothing but growing jute and rice,
knifing each other, cultivating traitors in their paddies. Perfidy of
the East: proved by the Popular Front's failure to win a single seat
there, while the riff-raff of the People's League, a regional party
of bourgeois malcontents led by the well-known incompetent
Sheikh Bismillah, gained so overwhelming a victory that they
ended up with more Assembly seats than Harappa had won in the
West. Give people democracy and look what they do with it. The West
in a state of shock, the sound of one Wing flapping, beset by the
appalling notion of surrendering the government to a party of
swamp aborigines, little dark men with their unpronounceable
language of distorted vowels and slurred consonants; perhaps not
foreigners exactly, but aliens without a doubt. President Shaggy
Dog, sorrowing, dispatched an enormous Army to restore a sense
of proportion in the East.
Her thoughts, Arjumand's, do not dwell on the war that fol-
lowed, except to note that of course the idolatrous nation posi-
tioned between the Wings backed the Eastern bastards to the hilt,
for obvious, divide-and-rule reasons. A fearful war. In the West,
oil-refineries, airports, the homes of God-fearing civilians bom-
barded by heathen explosives. The final defeat of the Western
forces, which led to the reconstitution of the East Wing as an
autonomous {that's a laugh) nation and international basket case,
Shame ? 188
was obviously engineered by outsiders: stonewashers and damn-
yankees, yes. The Chairman visited the United Nations and
bawled those eunuchs out: 'You won't destroy us while I'm alive.'
He stormed out of the General Assembly, handsome, intemperate,
great: 'My country hearkens for me! Why should I stay in this
harem of transvestite whores?'�and returned home to take up the
reins of government in what was left of the land of God. Sheikh
Bismillah, the architect of division, became chief of the junglees.
Later, inevitably, they swarmed into his palace and shot him and
his family full of holes. Sort of behaviour one expects from types
like that.
The catastrophe: throughout the war, hourly radio bulletins
described the glorious triumphs of the Western regiments in the
East. On that last day, at eleven a.m., the radio announced the last
and most spectacular of these feats of arms; at noon, it curtly
informed its audience of the impossible: unconditional surrender,
humiliation, defeat. The traffic stood still in city streets. The
nation's lunch remained uncooked. In the villages, the cattle went
unfed and the crops unwatered despite the heat. Chairman
Iskander Harappa, on becoming Prime Minister, correctly identi-
fied the national reaction to the astounding capitulation as one of
just rage, fuelled by shame. What calamity could have befallen an
Army so rapidly? What reversal could have been so sudden and so
total as to turn victory into disaster in a mere sixty minutes?
'Responsibility for that fatal hour,' Iskander pronounced, 'lies, as
it must, at the top.' Policemen, also dogs, surrounded the home of
ex-President Shaggy within fifteen minutes of this decree. He was
taken to jail, to be tried for war crimes; but then the Chairman,
reflecting, once again, the mood of a people sickened by defeat
and yearning for reconciliation, for an end to analyses of shame,
offered Shaggy a pardon in return for his acceptance of house
arrest. 'You are our dirty laundry,' Iskander told the incompetent
old man, 'but, lucky for you, the people don't want to see you
beaten clean upon a stone.'
There were cynical people who sneered at this pardon; that is
needless-to-say, since all nations have their nihilists. These ele-
In the Fifteenth Century ? 189
ments pointed out that Iskander Harappa had been the principal
beneficiary of the civil war that ripped his country in half; they
spread rumours of his complicity in the whole sad affair. 'Shaggy
Dog,' they muttered in their shabby dens, 'was always Harappa's
pet; ate out of Isky's hand.' Such negativistic elements are an ugly
fact of life. The Chairman treated them with contempt. At a rally
attended by two million people, Iskander Harappa unbuttoned his
shirt. 'What have I to hide?' he shouted. 'They say I have bene-
fited; but I have lost fully half my beloved country. Then tell me,
is this gain? Is this advantage? Is this luck? My people, your hearts
are scarred by grief; behold, my heart bears the same wounds as
yours.' Iskander Harappa tore off his shirt and ripped it in half; he
bared his hairless breast to the cheering, weeping crowd. (The
young Richard Burton once did the same thing, in the film
Alexander the Great. The soldiers loved Alexander because he
showed them his battle scars.)
Some men are so great that they can be unmade only by them-
selves. The defeated Army needed new leadership; Isky packed off
the discredited old guard into early retirement, and put Raza
Hyder in control. 'He will be my man. And with such a compro-
mised leader the Army can't get too strong.' This single error
proved to be the undoing of the ablest statesman who ever
ruled that country which had been so tragically misfortunate, so
accursed, in its heads of state.
They could never forgive him for his power of inspiring love. Arjumand at
Mohenjo, replete with memories, allows her remembering mind
to transmute the preserved fragments of the past into the gold of
myth. During the election campaign it had been common for
women to come up to him, in full view of his wife and daughter,
and declare their love. Grandmothers in villages perched on trees
and called down as he passed: 'O, you, if I were thirty years
younger!' Men felt no shame when they kissed his feet. Why did
they love him? 'I am hope,' Iskander told his daughter . . . and
love is an emotion that recognizes itself in others. People could
see it in Isky, he was plainly full of the stuff, up to the brim, it
Shame ? 190
spilled out of him and washed them clean. - Where did it come
from? - Arjumand knows; so does her mother. It was a diverted
torrent. He had built a dam between the river and its destination.
Between himself and Pinkie Aurangzeb.
In the beginning Arjumand had hired photographers to snap
Pinkie secretly, Pinkie in the bazaar with a plucked chicken,
Pinkie in the garden leaning on a stick, Pinkie naked in the
shower like a long dried date. She left these pictures for the
Chairman to see. 'Look, Allah, she's fifty years old, looks a hun-
dred, or seventy anyway, what is kept in her?' In the photographs
the face was puffy, the legs vein-scarred, the hair careless, thin,
white. 'Stop showing me these pictures,' Iskander shouted at his
daughter (she remembers because he almost never lost his temper
with her), 'don't you think I know what I did to her?'
If a great man touches you, you age too quickly, you live too much and
are used up. Iskander Harappa possessed the power of accelerating
the ageing processes of the women in his life. Pinkie at fifty was
beyond turkeys, beyond even the memory of her beauty. And
Rani had suffered, too, not so badly because she had seen less of
him. She had been hoping, of course; but when it became clear
that he only wanted her to stand on election platforms, that her
time was past and would not return, then she went back to
Mohenjo without any argument, becoming once more the mis-
tress of peacocks and game-birds and badminton-playing concu-
bines and empty beds, not so much a person as an aspect of the
estate, the benign familiar spirit of the place, cracked and cob-
webby just like the ageing house. And Arjumand herself has
always been accelerated, mature too young, precocious, quick as
needles. 'Your love is too much for us,' she told the Chairman,
'we'll all be dead before you. You feed on us.'