Shame (4 page)

Escapes from the Mother Country ? 21

gave me the name of the informer who had infiltrated this par-
ticular group. They treated him civilly, without hinting that they
knew why he was there, because otherwise he would vanish,
and the next time they might not know who the informer was.
Later, I met the spy. He was a nice guy, pleasantly spoken, honest-
faced, and no doubt happy that he was hearing nothing worth
reporting. A kind of equilibrium had been achieved. Once again, I
was struck by how many nice guys there were in Pakistan, by the
civility growing in those gardens, perfuming the air.

Since my last visit to Karachi, my friend the poet had spent
many months in jail, for social reasons. That is to say, he knew
somebody who knew somebody who was the wife of the second
cousin by marriage of the step-uncle of somebody who might or
might not have shared a flat with someone who was running guns
to the guerrillas in Baluchistan. You can get anywhere in Pakistan
if you know people, even into jail. My friend still refuses to talk
about what happened to him during those months; but other
people told me that he was in bad shape for a long time after he
got out. They said he had been hung upside-down by the ankles
and beaten, as if he were a new-born baby whose lungs had to be
coerced into action so that he could squeal. I never asked him if
he screamed, or if there were upside-down mountain peaks visible
through a window.

Wherever I turn, there is something of which to be ashamed.
But shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and
it becomes part of the furniture. In 'Defence', you can find shame
in every house, burning in an ashtray, hanging framed upon a
wall, covering a bed. But nobody notices it any more. And
everyone is civilized.

Maybe my friend should be telling this story, or another one,
his own; but he doesn't write poetry any more. So here I am
instead, inventing what never happened to me, and you will note
that my hero has already been ankle-hung, and that his name is
the name of a famous poet; but no quatrains ever issued or will
issue from his pen.

Outsider! Trespasser! You have no right to this subject! ... I know:

Shame ? 22

nobody ever arrested me. Nor are they ever likely to. Poacher!
Pirate! We reject your authority. We know you, with your foreign lan-
guage wrapped around you like a flag: speaking about us in your forked
tongue, what can you tell but lies? I reply with more questions: is his-
tory to be considered the property of the participants solely? In
what courts are such claims staked, what boundary commissions
map out the territories?

Can only the dead speak?

I tell myself this will be a novel of leavetaking, my last words
on the East from which, many years ago, I began to come loose. I
do not always believe myself when I say this. It is a part of the
world to which, whether I like it or not, I am still joined, if only
by elastic bands.

As to Afghanistan: after returning to London, I met a senior
British diplomat at a dinner, a career specialist in 'my' part of the
world. He said it was quite proper, 'post-Afghanistan', for the
West to support the dictatorship of President Zia ul-Haq. I should
not have lost my temper, but I did. It wasn't any use. Then, as we
left the table, his wife, a quiet civil lady who had been making
pacifying noises, said to me, 'Tell me, why don't people in Paki-
stan get rid of Zia in, you know, the usual way?'

Shame, dear reader, is not the exclusive property of the East.

The country in this story is not Pakistan, or not quite. There are
two countries, real and fictional, occupying the same space, or
almost the same space. My story, my fictional country exist, like
myself, at a slight angle to reality. I have found this ofF-centring to
be necessary; but its value is, of course, open to debate. My view
is that I am not writing only about Pakistan.

I have not given the country a name. And Q. is not really
Quetta at all. But I don't want to be precious about this: when I
arrive at the big city, I shall call it Karachi. And it will contain a
'Defence'.

Omar Khayyam's position as a poet is curious. He was never very
popular in his native Persia; and he exists in the West in a transla-

Escapes from the Mother Country ? 23

tion that is really a complete reworking of his verses, in many cases
very different from the spirit (to say nothing of the content) of the
original. I, too, am a translated man. I have been borne across. It
is generally believed that something is always lost in translation;
I cling to the notion - and use, in evidence, the success of
Fitzgerald-Khayyam � that something can also be gained.

'The sight of you through my beloved telescope,' Omar Khayyam
Shakil told Farah Zoroaster the day he declared his love, 'gave me
the strength to break my mothers' power.'

'Voyeur,' she replied, 'I shit on your words. Your balls dropped
too soon and you got the hots, no more to it than that. Don't load
your family problems on to me.' She was two years his senior, but
Omar Khayyam was nevertheless forced to concede that his dar-
ling had a dirty mouth . . .

... As well as the name of a great poet, the child had been
given his mothers' family name. And as if to underline what they
meant by calling him after the immortal Khayyam the three sisters
gave a name, too, to that underlit corridory edifice that was now
all the country they possessed: the house was named 'Nishapur'.
Thus a second Omar grew up in a second place of that name, and
every so often, as he grew, would catch a strange look in his three
mothers' six eyes, a look that seemed to say Hurry up, we are
waiting for your poems. But (I repeat) no rubaiyat ever issued
from his pen.

His childhood had been exceptional by any standards, because
what applied to mothers and servants wentwithoutsaying for our
peripheral hero as well. Omar Khayyam passed twelve long years,
the most crucial years of his development, trapped inside that
reclusive mansion, that third world that was neither material nor
spiritual, but a sort of concentrated decrepitude made up of the
decomposing remnants of those two more familiar types of
cosmos, a world in which he would constantly run into � as well
as the mothballed, spider-webbed, dust-shrouded profusion of
crumbling objects - the lingering, fading miasmas of discarded
ideas and forgotten dreams. The finely-calculated gesture with

Shame ? 24

which his three mothers had sealed themselves off from the world
had created a sweltering, entropical zone in which, despite all the
rotting-down of the past, nothing new seemed capable of growth,
and from which it became Omar Khayyam's most cherished
youthful ambition quickly to escape. Unaware, in that hideously
indeterminate frontier universe, of the curvature of space and
time, thanks to which he who runs longest and hardest inevitably
ends up, gaspingpanting, with wrenched and screaming tendons,
at the starting line, he dreamed of exits, feeling that in the claus-
trophobis of 'Nishapur' his very life was at stake. He was, after
all, something new in that infertile and time-eroded labyrinth.

Have you heard of those wolf-children, suckled � we must sup-
pose - on the feral multiple breasts of a hairy moon-howling dam?
Rescued from the Pack, they bit their saviours vilely in the arm;
netted and caged, they are brought stinking of raw meat and faecal
matter into the emancipated light of the world, their brains too
imperfectly formed to be capable of acquiring more than the most
fundamental rudiments of civilization . . . Omar Khayyam, too,
fed at too-many mammary glands; and he wandered for some four
thousand days in the thing-infested jungle that was 'Nishapur', his
walled-in wild place, his mother-country; until he succeeded in
getting the frontiers opened by making a birthday wish that could
not be satisfied by anything lifted up in the machine of Mistri
Balloch.

'Drop this jungle-boy business,' Farah sneered when Omar
tried it on her, 'you're no fucking ape-man, sonny jim.' And,
educationally speaking, she was right; but she had also denied the
wildness, the evil within him; and he proved upon her own body
that she was wrong.

First things first: for twelve years, he had the run of the house.
Little (except freedom) was denied him. A spoiled and vulpine
brat; when he howled, his mothers caressed him . . . and after the
nightmares began and he started giving up sleep, he plunged
deeper and deeper into the seemingly bottomless depths of that
decaying realm. Believe me when I tell you that he stumbled
down corridors so long untrodden that his sandalled feet sank into

Escapes from the Mother Country ? 25

the dust right up to his ankles; that he discovered ruined staircases
made impassable by longago earthquakes which had caused them
to heave up into tooth-sharp mountains and also to fall away to
reveal dark abysses of fear ... in the silence of the night and the
first sounds of dawn he explored beyond history into what seemed
the positively archaeological antiquity of 'Nishapur', discovering
in almirahs the wood of whose doors disintegrated beneath his
tentative fingers the impossible forms of painted neolithic pottery
in the Kotdiji style; or in kitchen quarters whose existence was no
longer even suspected he would gaze ignorantly upon bronze
implements of utterly fabulous age; or in regions of that colossal
palace which had been abandoned long ago because of the col-
lapse of their plumbing he would delve into the quake-exposed
intricacies of brick drainage systems that had been out of date for
centuries.

On one occasion he lost his way completely and ran wildly
about like a time-traveller who has lost his magic capsule and fears
he will never emerge from the disintegrating history of his race -
and came to a dead stop, staring in horror at a room whose outer
wall had been partly demolished by great, thick, water-seeking
tree-roots. He was perhaps ten years old when he had this first
glimpse of the unfettered outside world. He had only to walk
through the shattered wall � but the gift had been sprung upon
him without sufficient warning, and, taken unawares by the
shocking promise of the dawn light streaming through the hole,
he turned tail and fled, his terror leading him blindly back to his
own comforting, comfortable room. Afterwards, when he had had
time to consider things, he tried to retrace his steps, armed with a
purloined ball of string; but try as he might, he never again found
his way to that place in the maze of his childhood where the
minotaur of forbidden sunlight lived.

'Sometimes I found skeletons,' he swore to disbelieving Farah,
'human as well as animal.' And even where bones were absent, the
house's long-dead occupants dogged his steps. Not in the way you
think! � No howls, no clanking chains! � But disembodied feel-
ings, the choking fumes of ancient hopes, fears, loves; and finally,

Shame ? 26

made wild by the ancestor-heavy, phantom oppressions of these
far recesses of the run-down building, Omar Khayyam took
his revenge (not long after the episode of the broken wall) on
his unnatural surroundings. I wince as I record his vandalism:
armed with broomstick and misappropriated hatchet, he rampaged
through dusty passages and maggoty bedrooms, smashing glass
cabinets, felling oblivion-sprinkled divans, pulverizing wormy
libraries; crystal, paintings, rusty helmets, the paper-thin remnants
of priceless silken carpets were destroyed beyond all possibility of
repair. 'Take that,' he screeched amidst the corpses of his useless,
massacred history, 'take that, old stuff!' - and then burst (dropping
guilty hatchet and clean-sweeping broom) into illogical tears.

It must be stated that even in those days nobody believed the
boy's stories about the far-flung infinities of the house. 'Only
child,' Hashmat Bibi creaked, 'always always they live in their
poor head.' And the three male servants laughed too: 'Listening to
you, baba, we are thinking this house has grown so huge huge,
there mustn't be room for anywhere else in the world!' And three
mothers, sitting tolerantly in their favourite swingseat, stretched
out patting hands and sealed the matter: 'At least he has a vivid
imagination,' said Munnee-in-the-middle, and Mother Bunny
concurred: 'Comes from his poetic name.' Worried that he might
be sleep-walking, Chhunni-ma detailed a servant to place his
sleeping-mat outside Omar Khayyam's room; but by then he had
placed the more fantasricated zones of 'Nishapur' off-limits
for ever. After he descended upon the cohorts of history like a
wolf (or wolf-child) on the fold, Omar Khayyam Shakil confined
himself to the well-trodden, swept and dusted, used regions
of the house.

Something - conceivably remorse - led him to his grandfather's
dark-panelled study, a book-lined room which the three sisters
had never entered since the old man's death. Here he discovered
that Mr Shakil's air of great learning had been a sham, just like his
supposed business acumen; because the books all bore the ex libris
plates of a certain Colonel Arthur Greenfield, and many of their
pages were uncut. It was a gentleman's library, bought in toto from

Escapes from the Mother Country ? 27

the unknown Colonel, and it had remained unused throughout its
residence in the Shakil household. Now Omar Khayyam fell upon
it with a will.

Here I must praise his autodidactic gifts. For by the time he left
'Nishapur' he had learned classical Arabic and Persian; also Latin,
French and German; all with the aid of leather-bound dictionaries
and the unused texts of his grandfather's deceptive vanity. In what
books the young fellow immersed himself! Illuminated manu-
scripts of the poetry of Ghalib; volumes of letters written by
Mughal emperors to their sons; the Burton translation of the Alf
laylah wa laylah, and the Travels of Ibn Battuta, and the Qissa or
tales of the legendary adventurer Hatim Tai . . . yes, yes, I see that
I must withdraw (as Farah instructed Omar to withdraw) the mis-
leading image of the mowgli, the junglee boy.