Shame (5 page)

The continual passage of items from living quarters via dumb-
waiter to pawnshop brought concealed matter to light at regular
intervals. Those outsize chambers stuffed brim-full with the mate-
rial legacy of generations of rapaciously acquisitive forebears were
being slowly emptied, so that by the time Omar Khayyam was ten
and a half there was enough space to move around without
bumping into the furniture at every step. And one day the three
mothers sent a servant into the study to remove from their lives an
exquisitely carved walnut screen on which was portrayed the
mythical circular mountain of Qaf, complete with the thirty birds
playing God thereupon. The flight of the bird-parliament revealed
to Omar Khayyam a little bookcase stuffed with volumes on the
theory and practice of hypnosis: Sanskrit mantras, compendiums
of the lore of the Persian Magi, a leathern copy of the Kalevala of
the Finns, an account of the hypno-exorcisms of Father Gassner of
Klosters and a study of the 'animal magnetism' theory of Franz
Mesmer himself; also (and most usefully) a number of cheaply
printed do-it-yourself manuals. Greedily, Omar Khayyam began
to devour these books, which alone in the library did not bear the
name of the literary Colonel; they were his grandfather's true
legacy, and they led him into his lifelong involvement with that
arcane science which has so awesome a power for good or ill.

Shame ? 28

The household servants were as under-occupied as he; his
mothers had gradually become very lax about such matters as
cleanliness and cuisine. The trio of menservants became, there-
fore, Omar Khayyam's first, willing subjects. Practising with the
aid of a shiny four-anna coin he put them under, discovering with
some pride his talent for the art: effortlessly keeping his voice on a
flat, monotonous plane, he lulled them into trances, learning,
among other things, that the sexual drives which his mothers
appeared to have lost completely since his birth had not been simi-
larly stilled in these men. Entranced, they happily confessed the
secrets of their mutual caresses, and blessed the maternal trinity for
having so altered the circumstances of their lives that their true
desires could be revealed to them. The contented three-way love
of the male servants provided a curious balance for the equal, but
wholly platonic, love of the three sisters for one another. (But
Omar Khayyam continued to grow bitter, despite being sur-
rounded by so many intimacies and affections.)

Hashmat Bibi also agreed to 'go under'. Omar made her
imagine she was floating on a soft pink cloud. 'You are sinking
deeper,' he intoned as she lay upon her mat, 'and deeper into the
cloud. It is good to be in the cloud; you want to sink lower and
lower.' These experiments had a tragic side-effect. Soon after his
twelfth birthday, his mothers were informed by the three loving
menservants, who stared accusingly at the young master as they
spoke, that Hashmat had apparently willed herself into death; at
the very end she had been heard muttering, '. . . deeper and
deeper into the heart of the rosy cloud.' The old lady, having been
given glimpses of non-being through the mediating powers of the
young hypnotist's voice, had finally relaxed the iron will with
which she had clung to life for what she had claimed was more
than one hundred and twenty years. The three mothers stopped
swinging in their seat and ordered Omar Khayyam to abandon
mesmerism. But by then the world had changed. I must go back a
little way to describe the alteration.

What was also found in the slowly emptying rooms: a previ-
ously mentioned telescope. With which Omar Khayyam spied out

Escapes from the Mother Country ? 29

of upper-storey windows (those on the ground floor being perma-
nently shuttered and barred): the world seen as a bright disc, a
moon for his delight. He watched kite-fights between colourful,
tailed patangs whose strings were black and dipped in glass to make
them razor sharp; he heard the victors' cries - 'Boi-oi-oi! Boi-oi!' -
come towards him on the gritty breeze; once a green and white
kite, its string severed, dropped in through his open window. And
when, shortly before his twelfth birthday, there strolled on to this
ocular moon the incomprehensibly appealing figure of Farah
Zoroaster, at that time no more than fourteen but already pos-
sessed of a body that moved with the physical wisdom of a
woman, then, in that exact moment, he felt his voice break in
his throat, while below his belt other things slid downwards too,
to take their appointed places, somewhat ahead of schedule, in
hitherto-empty sacs. His longing for the outside was immediately
transformed into a dull ache in the groin, a tearing in his loins;
what followed was perhaps inevitable.

He was not free. His roving freedom-of-the-house was only the
pseudo-liberty of a zoo animal; and his mothers were his loving,
caring keepers. His three mothers: who else implanted in his heart
the conviction of being a sidelined personality, a watcher from the
wings of his own life? He watched them for a dozen years, and,
yes, it must be said, he hated them for their closeness, for the way
they sat with arms entwined on their swinging, creaking seat, for
their tendency to lapse giggling into the private languages of their
girlhood, for their way of hugging each other, of putting their
three heads together and whispering about whoknowswhat, of
finishing one another's sentences. Omar Khayyam, walled up in
'Nishapur' had been excluded from human society by his mothers'
strange resolve; and this, his mothers' three-in-oneness, redoubled
that sense of exclusion, of being, in the midst of objects, out of
things.

Twelve years take their toll. At first the high pride which had
driven Chhunni, Munnee and Bunny to reject God, their father's
memory and their place in society had enabled them to maintain

Shame ? 30

the standards of behaviour which were just about their father's
only legacy to them. They would rise, each morning, within sec-
onds of one another, brush their teeth up, down and sideways fifty
times each with eucalyptus sticks, and then, identically attired,
would oil and comb each other's hair and twine white flowers
into the coiled black buns they made of their locks. They
addressed the servants, and also each other, by the polite form
of the second-person pronoun. The rigidity of their bearing and
the precision of their household instructions gave a legitimizing
sheen to all their actions, including (which was no doubt the
point) the production of an illegitimate child. But slowly, slowly,
they slipped.

On the day of Omar Khayyam's departure for the big city, his
eldest mother told him a secret that put a date to the beginning of
their decline. 'We never wanted to stop breast-feeding you,' she
confessed. 'By now you know that it is not usual for a six-year-old
boy to be still on the nipple; but you drank from half a dozen, one
for each year. On your sixth birthday we renounced this greatest
of pleasures, and after that nothing was the same, we began to
forget the point of things.'

During the next six years, as breasts dried and shrank, the three
sisters lost that firmness and erectness of body which had
accounted for a good deal of their beauty. They became soft, there
were knots in their hair, they lost interest in the kitchen, the ser-
vants got away with murder. But still they declined at the same
rate and in identical fashion; the bonds of their identity remained
unbroken.

Remember this: the Shakil sisters had never received a proper
education, except in manners; while their son, by the time his
voice broke, was already something of a self-taught prodigy. He
attempted to interest his mothers in his learning; but when he set
out the most elegant proofs of Euclidian theorems or expatiated
eloquently on the Platonic image of the Cave, they rejected the
unfamiliar notions out of hand. 'Angrez double-dutch,' said
Chhunni-ma, and the three mothers shrugged as one. 'Who is
to understand the brains of those crazy types?' asked Munnee-in-

Escapes from the Mother Country ? 31

the-middle, in tones of final dismissal. 'They read books from left
to right.'

The philistinism of his mothers accentuated Omar Khayyam's
feelings, inchoate and half-articulated, of being extraneous, both
because he was a gifted child whose gifts were being returned-to-
sender by his parents, and because, for all his learning, he guessed
that his mothers' point of view was holding him back. He suffered
the sensation of being lost inside a cloud, whose curtains parted
occasionally to offer tantalizing glimpses of the sky ... in spite of
what he murmured to Hashmat Bibi, cloudiness was not attractive
to the boy.

Now then. Omar Khayyam Shakil is almost twelve. He is over-
weight, and his generative organ, newly potent, also possesses a
fold of skin that should have been removed. His mothers are
growing vague about the reasons for their life; while he, in con-
trast, has overnight become capable of levels of aggression previ-
ously foreign to his complaisant fat-boy nature. I offer (have
already hinted at) three causes: one, his sighting of fourteen-year-
old Farah on the moon of his telescopic lens; two, his awkward-
ness about his altered speech, which swings out of control
between croaks and squeaks while an ugly lump bobs in his throat
like a cork; and one must not forget three, namely the time-
honoured (or dishonoured) mutations wrought by pubertal bio-
chemistry upon the adolescent male personality . . . ignorant of
this conjunction of diabolic forces within their son, the three
mothers make the mistake of asking Omar Khayyam what he
wants for his birthday.

He surprises them by being sullen: 'You'll never give it, what's
the point?' Horrified maternal gasps. Six hands fly to three heads
and take up hear-no-see-no-speak-no-evil positions. Mother
Chhunni (hands over ears): 'How can he say this? The boy, what's
he talking?' And middling-Munnee, peeping tragically through
her fingers: 'Somebody has upset our angel, plain to see.' And
Baby Bunny removes hands from lips to speaknoevil: 'Ask! Ask
only! What can we refuse? What's so big that we won't do?'

Shame ? 32

It bursts out of him then: howling, 'To let me out of this
horrible house,' and then, much more quietly, into the aching
silence that his words have brought into being, 'and to tell my
father's name.'

'Cheek! Cheek of the chappie!' � this from Munnee his middle
mother; then her sisters draw her into an inward-facing huddle,
arms round waists in that pose of obscene unity which the
watching boy finds so hard to stomach.

'Didn't I tell?' - in grunts and falsettos of anguish - 'Then why
get it out of me in the first place?'

But now it is possible to observe a change. Quarrelsome syl-
lables fly out of the maternal huddle, because the boy's requests
have divided the sisters for the first time in more than a decade.
They are arguing, and the argument is a rusty, difficult business, a
dispute between women who are trying to remember the people
they once were.

When they emerge from the rubble of their exploded identity
they make heroic attempts to pretend to Omar, and to themselves,
that nothing serious has happened; but although all three of them
stick by the collective decision that has been made, the boy can
see that this unanimity is a mask which is being held in place with
considerable difficulty.

'These are reasonable requests,' Baby Bunny speaks first, 'and
one, at least, should be granted.'

His triumph terrifies him; the cork in his throat jumps, almost
as far as his tongue. 'Whichwhichwhich?' Fearfully, he asks.

Munnee takes over. 'A new satchel will be ordered and will
come in the Mistri's machine,' she states gravely, 'and you will go
to school. You need not be too happy,' she adds, 'because when
you leave this house you will be wounded by many sharp names,
which people will throw at you, like knives, in the street.'
Munnee, the fiercest opponent of his freedom, has had her own
tongue sharpened on the steel of her defeat.

Finally, his eldest mother says her piece. 'Come home without
hitting anyone,' she instructs, 'or we will know that they have

Escapes from the Mother Country ? 33

lowered your pride and made you feel the forbidden emotion of
shame.'

'That would be a completely debased effect,' middle-Mun-
nee says.

This word: shame. No, I must write it in its original form, not in
this peculiar language tainted by wrong concepts and the accumu-
lated detritus of its owners' unrepented past, this Angrezi in which
I am forced to write, and so for ever alter what is written . . .

Sharam, that's the word. For which this paltry 'shame' is a
wholly inadequate translation. Three letters, shin re mim (written,
naturally, from right to left); plus zabar accents indicating the short
vowel sounds. A short word, but one containing encyclopaedias
of nuance. It was not only shame that his mothers forbade Omar
Khayyam to feel, but also embarrassment, discomfiture, decency,
modesty, shyness, the sense of having an ordained place in the
world, and other dialects of emotion for which English has no
counterparts. No matter how determinedly one flees a country,
one is obliged to take along some hand-luggage; and can it be
doubted that Omar Khayyam (to concentrate on him), having
been barred from feeling shame (vb. int.: sharmhna) at an early age,
continued to be affected by that remarkable ban throughout his
later years, yes, long after his escape from his mothers' zone of
influence?

Reader: it cannot.

What's the opposite of shame? What's left when sharam is sub-
tracted? That's obvious: shamelessness.

Owing to the pride of his parents and the singular circumstances
of his life, Omar Khayyam Shakil, at the age of twelve, was
wholly unfamiliar with the emotion in which he was now being
forbidden to indulge.