Shame (3 page)

Our hero, Omar Khayyam, first drew breath in that improbable
mansion which was too large for its rooms to be counted; opened
his eyes; and saw, upside-down through an open window, the
macabre peaks of the Impossible Mountains on the horizon.
One � but which? � of his three mothers had picked him up by
the ankles, had pummelled the first breath into his lungs . . . until,
still staring at the inverted summits, the baby began to scream.

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When Hashmat Bibi heard a key turning in the door and came
timidly into the room with food and drink and fresh sheets and
sponges and soap and towels, she found the three sisters sitting up
together in the capacious bed, the same bed in which their father
had died, a huge mahogany four-poster around whose columns
carved serpents coiled upwards to the brocade Eden of the
canopy. They were all wearing the flushed expression of dilated
joy that is the mother's true prerogative; and the baby was passed
from breast to breast, and none of the six was dry.

Young Omar Khayyam was gradually made aware that certain
irregularities had both preceded and succeeded his birth. We have
dealt with the pre-; and as for the sue-:

'I refused completely,' his eldest mother Chhunni told him on
his seventh birthday, 'to whisper the name of God into your ear.'

On his eighth birthday, middle-Munnee confided: 'There was
no question of shaving your head. Such beautiful black-black hair
you came with, nobody was cutting it off under my nose, no sir!'

Exactly one year later, his youngest mother adopted a stern
expression. 'Under no circs,' Bunny announced, 'would I have
permitted the foreskin to be removed. What is this idea? It is not
like banana peel.'

Omar Khayyam Shakil entered life without benefit of mutila-
tion, barbery or divine approval. There are many who would con-
sider this a handicap.

Born in a death-bed, about which there hung (as well as curtains
and mosquito-netting) the ghost-image of a grandfather who,
dying, had consigned himself to the peripheries of hell; his first
sight the spectacle of a range of topsy-turvy mountains . . . Omar
Khayyam Shakil was afflicted, from his earliest days, by a sense of
inversion, of a world turned upside-down. And by something
worse: the fear that he was living at the edge of the world, so close
that he might fall off at any moment. Through an old telescope,
from the upper-storey windows of the house, the child Omar
Khayyam surveyed the emptiness of the landscape around Q.,

Escapes from the Mother Country � 15

which convinced him that he must be near the very Rim of
Things, and that beyond the Impossible Mountains on the hori-
zon must lie the great nothing into which, in his nightmares, he
had begun to tumble with monotonous regularity. The most
alarming aspect of these dreams was the sleep-sense that his
plunges into the void were somehow appropriate, that he deserved
no better ... he awoke amidst mosquito-netting, sweating freely
and even shrieking at the realization that his dreams were
informing him of his worthlessness. He did not relish the news.

So it was in those half-formed years that Omar Khayyam took
the never-to-be-reversed decision to cut down on his sleeping
time, a lifelong endeavour which had brought him, by the end, by
the time his wife went up in smoke � but no, ends must not be
permitted to precede beginnings and middles, even if recent scien-
tific experiments have shown us that within certain types of closed
system, under intense pressure, time can be persuaded to run
backwards, so that effects precede their causes. This is precisely the
sort of unhelpful advance of which storytellers must take no notice
whatsoever; that way madness lies! - to the point at which a mere
forty minutes a night, the famous forty winks, sufficed to refresh
him. How young he was when he made the surprisingly adult
resolution to escape from the unpalatable reality of dreams into
the slightly more acceptable illusions of his everyday, waking life!
'Little bat,' his three mothers called him tolerantly when they
learned of his nocturnal flittings through the inexhaustible cham-
bers of their home, a dark-grey chadar flapping around his shoul-
ders, providing protection against the cold of the winter nights;
but as to whether he grew up into caped crusader or cloaked
bloodsucker, into Batman or Dracula, I leave it to the reader to
decide.

(His wife, the elder daughter of General Raza Hyder, was an
insomniac too; but Omar Khayyam's sleeplessness is not to be
compared with hers, for while his was willed, she, foolish Sufiya
Zinobia, would lie in bed squeezing her eyelids shut between her
thumbs and forefingers, as if she could extrude consciousness
through her eyelashes, like motes of dust, or tears. And she

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burned, she fried, in that very room of her husband's birth and his
grandfather's death, beside that bed of snakes and Paradise ... a
plague on this disobedient Time! I command this death scene
back into the wings at once: shazam!)

By the age of ten young Omar had already begun to feel
grateful for the enclosing, protective presence of the mountains on
the western and southern skyline. The Impossible Mountains: you
will not find that name in your atlases, no matter how large-scale.
Geographers have their limitations, however; the young Omar
Khayyam, who fell in love with a miraculously shiny brass tele-
scope which he unearthed from the wild abundance of things that
clogged his home, was always aware that any silicon creatures or
gas monsters inhabiting the stars of the Milky Way which flowed
overhead each night would never have recognized their homes by
the names in his much-thumbed star charts. 'We had our reasons,'
he said throughout his life, 'for the name we gave to our personal
mountain range.'

The thin-eyed, rock-hard tribals who dwelt in those moun-
tains and who were occasionally to be seen in the streets of Q.
(whose softer inhabitants crossed streets to avoid the tribals'
mountainous stench and barging, unceremonious shoulders) also
called the range 'the roof of Paradise'. The mountains, in fact the
whole region, even Q. itself, suffered from periodic earthquakes;
it was a zone of instability, and the tribals believed that the tremors
were caused by the emergence of angels through fissures in the
rocks. Long before his own brother saw a winged and golden-
glowing man watching him from a rooftop, Omar Khayyam
Shakil had become aware of the plausible theory that Paradise
was located not in the sky but beneath his very feet, so that the
earth movements were proof of the angels' interest in scru-
tinizing world affairs. The shape of the mountain range altered
constantly under this angelic pressure. From its crumpled ochre
slopes rose an infinite number of stratified pillar-like formations
whose geological strata were so sharply defined that the titanic
columns seemed to have been erected by colossi skilled in stone-

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masonry . . . these divine dream-temples, too, rose and fell as the
angels came and went.

Hell above, Paradise below; I have lingered on this account of
Omar Khayyam's original, unstable wilderness to underline the
propositions that he grew up between twin eternities, whose con-
ventional order was, in his experience, precisely inverted; that
such headstandings have effects harder to measure than earth-
quakes, for what inventor has patented a seismograph of the
soul?; and that, for Omar Khayyam, uncircumcised, unwhispered-
to, unshaven, their presence heightened his feeling of being a
person apart.

But I have been out of doors for quite long enough now, and
must get my narrative out of the sun before it is afflicted by
mirages or heat-stroke. � Afterwards, at the other end of his life (it
seems that the future cannot be restrained, and insists on seeping
back into the past), when he got his name into all the papers over
the scandal of the headless murders, the customs official's daughter
Farah Rodrigues unlocked her lips and released from her custody
the story of the day on which the adolescent Omar Khayyam,
even then a fat fellow with a missing shirt-button at navel height,
had accompanied her to her father's post at the land border forty
miles to the west of Q. She sat in an illicit brandy den and spoke
to the room in general, in the cackle of splintered glass to which
time and the wilderness air had reduced her formerly crystal laugh:
'Incredible, I swear,' she reminisced, 'we just reached there in the
jeep and at once a cloud came down and sat on the ground, right
along the frontier, like it couldn't get across without a visa, and
that Shakil was so scared he passed out, he got vertigo and fainted,
even though both his feet had been on solid ground.'

Even in the days of his greatest distinction, even when he
married Hyder's daughter, even after Raza Hyder became Presi-
dent, Omar Khayyam Shakil was sometimes plagued by that
improbable vertigo, by the sense of being a creature of the edge: a
peripheral man. Once, during the time of his drinking and
carousing friendship with Iskander Harappa, millionaire playboy,

Shame ? 18

radical thinker, Prime Minister and finally miracle-working corpse,
Omar Khayyam in his cups described himself to Isky. 'You see
before you,' he confided, 'a fellow who is not even the hero of his
own life; a man born and raised in the condition of being out of
things. Heredity counts, dontyouthinkso?'

'That is an oppressive notion,' Iskander Harappa replied.

Omar Khayyam Shakil �was raised by no fewer than three mothers,
with not a solitary father in sight, a mystery which was later deep-
ened by the birth, when Omar was already twenty years old, of a
younger brother who was likewise claimed by all three female
parents and whose conception seemed to have been no less
immaculate. Equally disturbing, for the growing youth, was his
first experience of falling in love, of pursuing with waddling and
heated resolution the voluptuously unattainable figure of a certain
Farah the Parsee (nee Zoroaster), an occupation known to all the
local lads, with the solitary exception of his congenitally isolated
self, as: 'courting Disaster'.

Dizzy, peripheral, inverted, infatuated, insomniac, stargazing,
fat: what manner of hero is this?

2

A Necklace of Shoes

A few weeks after Russian troops entered Afghanistan, I
returned home, to visit my parents and sisters and to show
off my firstborn son. My family lives in 'Defence', the Pakistan
Defence Services Officers' Co-Operative Housing Society,
although it is not a military family. 'Defence' is a fashionable part
of Karachi; few of the soldiers who were permitted to buy land
there at rock-bottom prices could afford to build on it.

But they weren't allowed to sell the empty plots, either. To
buy an officer's piece of'Defence', you had to draw up a complex
contract. Under the terms of this contract the land remained the
property of the vendor, even though you had paid him the full
market price and were now spending a small fortune building
your own house on it to your own specifications. In theory you
were just being a nice guy, a benefactor who had chosen to give
the poor officer a home out of your boundless charity. But the
contract also obliged the vendor to name a third party who would
have plenipotentiary authority over the property once the house
was finished. This third party was your nominee, and when the
construction workers went home he simply handed the property
over to you. Thus two separate acts of goodwill were necessary to

19

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the process. 'Defence' was almost entirely developed on this nice-
guy basis. This spirit of comradeship, of working selflessly together
towards a common goal, is worthy of remark.

It was an elegant procedure. The vendor got rich, the interme-
diary got his fee, you got your house, and nobody broke any laws.
So naturally nobody ever questioned how it came about that the
city's most highly desirable development zone had been allotted to
the defence services in this way. This attitude, too, remains a part
of the foundations of 'Defence': the air there is full of unasked
questions. But their smell is faint, and the flowers in the many
maturing gardens, the trees lining the avenues, the perfumes worn
by the beautiful soignee ladies of the neighbourhood quite over-
power this other, too-abstract odour. Diplomats, international
businessmen, the sons of former dictators, singing stars, textile
moguls, Test cricketers come and go. There are many new Datsun
and Toyota motor cars. And the name 'Defence Society', which
might sound to some ears like a symbol (representing the mutually
advantageous relationship between the country's establishment
and its armed forces), holds no such resonance in the city. It is
only a name.

One evening, soon after my arrival, I visited an old friend, a
poet. I had been looking forward to one of our long conversa-
tions, to hearing his views about recent events in Pakistan, and
about Afghanistan, of course. His house was full of visitors as
usual; nobody seemed interested in talking about anything except
the cricket series between Pakistan and India. I sat down at a table
with my friend and began an idle game of chess. But I really
wanted to get the low-down on things, and at length I brought up
the stuff that was on my mind, beginning with a question about
the execution of Zulfikar AH Bhutto. But only half the question
got past my lips; the other half joined the ranks of the area's many
unasked queries, because I felt an extremely painful kick land on
my shins and, without crying out, switched in mid-sentence back
to sporting topics. We also discussed the incipient video boom.

People entered, excited, circled, laughed. After about forty
minutes my friend said, 'It's O.K. now.' I asked, 'Who was it?' He