Shame (8 page)

Perhaps they stayed out too long, and that was what gave Omar
Khayyam the courage to declare his love: 'The sight of you
through my telescope,' etc., but there is no need to repeat
his speech, or Farah's coarse reply. Rejected, Omar Khayyam
unleashes piteous questions: 'Why? Why not? Because I'm fat?'
And Farah replies, 'Fat would be all right; but there is something
ugly about you, you know that?' - 'Ugly?' - 'Don't ask me what,
I dunno. Something. Must be in your personality or somewhere.'

Silence between them until late afternoon. Omar meandering
in Farah's wake between bollards. He notices that broken pieces
of mirrors have been tied to many of the posts with pieces of
string; as Farah approaches each fragment she sees shards of herself
reflected in the glass, and smiles her private smile. Omar Khayyam
Shakil understands that his beloved is a being too self-contained to

Shame ? 48

succumb to any conventional assault; she and her mirrors are twins
and need no outsiders to make them feel complete . . . and then,
in the late afternoon, inspired by too-much-sun or fainting fit, he
has his idea. 'Have you ever,' he asks Farah Zoroaster, 'been hyp-
notized?' - And for the first time in history, she looks at him with
interest.

Afterwards, when her womb began to swell; when an outraged
headmaster called her into his office and expelled her for calling
down shame upon the school; when she was thrown out by
her father, who had suddenly found that his empty customs
house was too full to accommodate a daughter whose belly
revealed her adherence to other, unacceptable customs; when
Eduardo Rodrigues had taken her, pulling and fighting against his
inexorable, gripping hand, to the Cantt padre and married her by
force; Eduardo, having thus declared himself the guilty party for
all to see, was dismissed from his job for conduct unbecoming;
when Farah and Eduardo had left for the railway station in a tonga
notable for the almost total absence of luggage (although a bird-
cage, still empty, was present, and malicious tongues said that
Eduardo Rodrigues had finally caught two birds instead of one);
when they had gone and the town had settled back into ashen
nothingness, after the brief blaze of the wicked drama that had
been played out in its streets . . . then Omar Khayyam tried,
futilely, to find consolation in the fact that, as every hypnotist
knows, one of the first reassurances in the hypnotic process, a for-
mula which is repeated many times, runs as follows:

'You will do anything that I ask you to do, but I will ask you to
do nothing that you will be unwilling to do.'

'She was willing,' he told himself. 'Then where's the blame?
She must have been willing, and everybody knows the risk.'

But in spite of nothing-that-you-will-be-unwilling-to-do; in
spite, too, of the actions of Eduardo Rodrigues, which had been
at once so resolute and so resigned that Omar Khayyam had
almost been convinced that the teacher really was the father-why
not, after all? A woman who is willing with one will be willing

Escapes from the Mother Country ? 49

with two! - in spite of everything, I say, Omar Khayyam Shakil
was possessed by a demon which made him shake in the middle of
breakfast and go hot in the night and cold in the day and some-
times cry out for no reason in the street or while ascending in the
dumb-waiter. Its fingers reached outwards from his stomach to
clutch, without warning, various interior parts of himself, from
adam's-apple to large (and also small) intestine, so that he suffered
from moments of near-strangulation and spent long unproductive
hours on the pot. It made his limbs mysteriously heavy in the
mornings so that sometimes he was unable to get out of bed. It
made his tongue dry and his knees knock. It led his teenage feet
into cheap brandy shops. Tottering drunkenly home to the rage of
his three mothers, he would be heard telling a swaying group of
fellow-sufferers: 'The only thing about this business is that it has
made me understand my mothers at last. This must be what they
locked themselves up to avoid, and baba, who would not?' Vom-
iting out the thin yellow fluid of his shame while the dumb-waiter
descended, he swore to his companions, who were falling asleep
in the dirt: 'Me, too, man. I've got to escape this also.'

On the evening when Omar Khayyam, eighteen years old and
already fatter than fifty melons, came home to inform Chhunni,
Munnee and Bunny that he had won a scholarship at the best
medical college in Karachi, the three sisters were only able to hide
their grief at his imminent departure by erecting around it a great
barrier of objects, the most valuable jewels and paintings in the
house, which they scurried to collect from room to room until a
pile of ancient beauty stood in front of their old, favourite swing-
seat. 'Scholarship is all very well,' his youngest mother told him,
'but we also can give money to our boy when he goes into the
world.' 'What do these doctors think?' Chhunni demanded in a
king of fury. 'We are too poor to pay for your education? Let
them take charity to the devil, your family has money in abun-
dance.' 'Old money,' Munnee concurred. Unable to persuade
them that the award was an honour he did not wish to refuse,
Omar Khayyam was obliged to leave for the railway station with

ll

Shame � 50

his pockets bulging with the pawnbroker's banknotes. Around his
neck was a garland whose one-hundred and one fresh-cut flowers
gave off an aroma which quite obliterated the memory-stink of
the necklace of shoes which had once so narrowly missed his
neck. The perfume of this garland was so intense that he forgot to
tell his mothers a last bit of gossip, which was that Zoroaster the
customs officer had fallen sick under the spell of the bribeless
desert and had taken to standing stark naked on top of concrete
bollards while mirror-fragments ripped his feet. Arms outstretched
and daughterless, Zoroaster addressed the sun, begging it to come
down to earth and engulf the planet in its brilliant cleansing fire.
The tribals who bore this tale into the bazaar of Q. were of the
opinion that the customs-wallah's fervour was so great that he
would undoubtedly succeed, so that it was worth making prepara-
tions for the end of the word.

The last person to whom Omar Khayyam spoke before making
his escape from the town of shame was a certain Chand Moham-
mad who said afterwards, 'That fat guy didn't look so hot when I
started talking to him and he looked twice as sick when I fin-
ished.' This Chand Mohammad was a vendor of ice. As Omar
Khayyam, still unable to shake off the terribly debility which had
gripped him ever since the incident at the frontier, hauled his obe-
sity into a first-class carriage, Chand ran up and said, 'Hot day,
sahib. Ice is needed.' At first, Shakil, out of breath and gloomy,
told him, 'Be off and sell other fools your frozen water.' But
Chand persisted: 'Sahib, in the afternoon the Loo wind will blow,
and if you do not have my ice at your feet the heat will melt the
marrow out of your bones.'

Persuaded by this convincing argument, Omar Khayyam pur-
chased a long tin tub, four feet long, eighteen inches wide, one
foot deep, in which there lay a solid slab of ice, sprinkled with
sawdust and sand to prolong its life. Grunting as he heaved it into
the carriage, the ice vendor made a joke. 'Such is life,' he said,
'one ice block returns to town and another sets off in the opposite
direction.'

Escapes from the Mother Country ? 51

Omar Khayyam unbuckled his sandals and placed his bare feet
on the ice, feeling the healing solace of its coldness. Peeling off
too many rupees for Chand Mohammad as he cheered up, he
asked idly, 'What rubbish are you talking? How can a block of ice
return unmelted after the journey? The tin tub, empty, or full of
melted water, you must be meaning that.'

'O, no, sahib, great lord,' the ice-vendor grinned as he pock-
eted the cash, 'this is one ice block that goes everywhere without
melting at all.'

Colour drained from fat cheeks. Plump feet jumped off ice.
Omar Khayyam, looking around fearfully as if he thought she
might materialize at any moment, spoke in tones so altered by fury
that the ice-vendor backed off, frightened. 'Her? When? You are
trying to insult . . . ?' He caught the ice-man by his ragged shirt,
and the poor wretch had no option but to tell it all, to reveal that
on this very train, a few hours back, Mrs Farah Rodrigues (nee
Zoroaster) had returned shamelessly to the scene of her infamy
and headed straight out to her father's frontier post, 'even
though he threw her in the street like a bucket of dirty water,
sahib, just think.'

When Farah came back, she brought neither husband nor child.
Nobody ever found out what had become of Eduardo and the
baby for which he had sacrificed everything, so of course the sto-
ries could circulate without fear of disproof: a miscarriage, an
abortion in spite of Rodrigues's Catholic faith, the baby exposed
on a rock after birth, the baby stifled in its crib, the baby given to
the orphanage or left in the street, while Farah and Eduardo like
wild lovers copulated on the postcard beaches or in the aisle of the
vegetation-covered house of the Christian God, until they tired of
each other, she gave him the boot, he (tired of her lascivious flirt-
ings) gave her the boot, they gave each other simultaneous boots,
who cares who it was, she is back so lock up your sons.

Farah Rodrigues in her pride spoke to no one in Q. except to
order food and supplies in the shops; until, in her old age, she
began to frequent the covert liquor joints, which was where she

Shame ? 52

would reminisce, years later, about Omar Khayyam, after his
name got into the papers. On her rare visits to the bazaar she made
her purchases without looking anyone in the eye, pausing only to
gaze at herself in every available mirror with a frank affection
which proved to the town that she regretted nothing. So even
when it got about that she had come back to look after her crazy
father and to run the customs post, to prevent his dismissal by his
Angrez bosses, even then the town's attitude did not soften; who
knows what they get up to out there, people said, naked father
and whore-child, best place for them is out there in the desert
where nobody has to look except God and the Devil, and they
know it all already.

And on his train, his feet once more resting on a block of
melting ice, Omar Khayyam Shakil was borne away into the
future, convinced that he had finally managed to escape, and the
cool pleasure of that notion and also of the ice brought a smile to
his lips, even while the hot wind blew.

Two years later, his mothers wrote to tell him that he had a
brother, whom they had named Babar after the first Emperor of
the Mughals who had marched over the Impossible Mountains
and conquered wherever he went. After that the three sisters, uni-
fied once again by motherhood, were happy and indistinguishable
for many years within the walls of'Nishapur'.

When Omar Khayyam read the letter, his first reaction was to
whistle softly with something very like admiration.

'The old witches,' he said aloud, 'they managed to do it again.'

II

The Duellists

4

Behind the Screen

This is a novel about Sufiya Zinobia, elder daughter of General
Raza Hyder and his wife Bilquis, about what happened
between her father and Chairman Iskander Harappa, formerly
Prime Minister, now defunct, and about her surprising marriage
to a certain Omar Khayyam Shakil, physician, fat man, and for a
time the intimate crony of that same Isky Harappa, whose neck
had the miraculous power of remaining unbruised, even by a
hangman's rope. Or perhaps it would be more accurate, if also
more opaque, to say that Sufiya Zinobia is about this novel.

At any rate, it is not possible even to begin to know a person
without first gaining some knowledge of her family background;
so I must proceed in this way, by explaining how it was that
Bilquis grew frightened of the hot afternoon wind called the Loo:

On the last morning of his life, her father Mahmoud Kemal,
known as Mahmoud the Woman, dressed as usual in a shiny blue
two-piece suit shot with brilliant streaks of red, looked approv-
ingly at himself in the ornate mirror which he had removed from
the foyer of his theatre on account of its irresistible frame of naked
cherubs shooting arrows and blowing golden horns, hugged his
eighteen-year-old daughter, and announced: 'So you see, girl,

55

Shame ? 56

your father dresses finely, as befits the chief administrative officer
of a glorious Empire.' And at breakfast, when she began dutifully
to spoon khichri on to his plate, he roared in good-natured fury,
'Why do you lift your hand, daughter? A princess does not serve.'
Bilquis bowed her head and stared out of the bottom left-hand
corner of her eyes, whereupon her father applauded loudly. 'O,
too good, Billoo! What elite acting, I swear!'

It's a fact, strange-but-true, that the city of idolaters in which
this scene took place - call it Indraprastha, Puranaqila, even Delhi -
had often been ruled by men who believed (like Mahmoud) in
Al-Lah, The God. Their artifacts litter the city to this day, ancient
observatories and victory towers and of course that great red
fortress, Al-Hambra, the red one, which will play an important
part in our story. And, what is more, many of these godly rulers
had come up from the humblest of origins; every schoolchild
knows about the Slave Kings . . . but anyway, the point is that
this whole business of ruling-an-Empire was just a family joke,
because of course Mahmoud's domain was only the Empire
Talkies, a fleapit of a picture theatre in the old quarter of
the town.

'The greatness of a picture house,' Mahmoud liked to say, 'can
be deduced from the noisiness of its customers. Go to those
deelux palaces in the new city, see their velvet thrones of seats and
the mirror tiling all over the vestibules, feel the air-conditioning
and you'll understand why the audiences sit as quiet as hell. They
are tamed by the splendour of the surroundings, also by the price
of the seats. But in the Empire of Mahmoud the paying customers
make the very devil of a din, except during the hit song numbers.
We are not absolute monarchs, child, don't forget it; especially in
these days when the police are turning against us and refuse to
come and eject even the biggest badmashes, who make whistlings
that split your ears. Never mind. It is a question of freedom of
individuals, after all.'