Shame (9 page)
Yes: it was a fifth-rate Empire. But to Mahmoud it was quite
something, a Slave King's estate, for had he not begun his career
out on the suppurating streets as one of those no-account types
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who push the movie adverts around town on wheelbarrows,
shouting, 'It is now-showing!' and also 'Plans filling up fast!' � and
did he not now sit in a manager's office, complete with cashbox
and keys? You see: even family jokes run the risk of being taken
seriously, and there lurked in the natures of both father and
daughter a literalism, a humourlessness owing to which Bilquis
grew up with an unspoken fantasy of queenhood simmering in the
corners of her downcast eyes. 'I tell you,' she would apostrophize
the angelic mirror after her father had left for work, 'with me it
would be absolute control or zero! These badmashes would not
get away with their whistling shistling if it was my affair!' Thus
Bilquis invented a secret self far more imperious than her father
the emperor. And in the darkness of his Empire, night after night,
she studied the giant, shimmering illusions of princesses who
danced before the rackety audience beneath the gold-painted
equestrian figure of an armoured medieval knight who bore a
pennant on which was inscribed the meaningless word Excelsior.
Illusions fed illusions, and Bilquis began to carry herself with the
grandeur befitting a dream-empress, taking as compliments the
taunts of the street-urchins in the gullies around her home: 'Tan-
tara!' they greeted her as she sailed by, 'Have mercy, O gracious
lady, O Rani of Khansi!' Khansi-ki-Rani, they named her: queen
of coughs, that is to say of expelled air, of sickness and hot wind.
'Be careful,' her father warned her, 'things are changing in this
city; even the most affectionate nicknames are acquiring new and
so-dark meanings.'
This was the time immediately before the famous moth-eaten
partition that chopped up the old country and handed Al-Lah a
few insect-nibbled slices of it, some dusty western acres and jungly
eastern swamps that the ungodly were happy to do without. (Al-
Lah's new country: two chunks of land a thousand miles apart. A
country so improbable that it could almost exist.) But let's be
unemotional and state merely that feelings were running so high
that even going to the pictures had become a political act. The
one-godly went to these cinemas and the washers of stone gods to
those; movie-fans had been partitioned already, in advance of the
Shame ? 58
tired old land. The stone-godly ran the movie business, that goes
without saying, and being vegetarians they made a very famous
film: Gai-Wallah. Perhaps you've heard of it? An unusual fantasy
about a lone, masked hero who roamed the Indo-Gangetic
plain liberating herds of beef-cattle from their keepers, saving
the sacred, horned, uddered beasts from the slaughterhouse.
The stone-gang packed out the cinemas where this movie was
shown; the one-godly riposted by rushing to see imported, non-
vegetarian Westerns in which cows got massacred and the good
guys feasted on steaks. And mobs of irate film buffs attacked the
cinemas of their enemies . . . well, it was a time for all types of
craziness, that's all.
Mahmoud the Woman lost his Empire because of a single
error, which arose out of his fatal personality flaw, namely toler-
ance. 'Time to rise above all this partition foolishness,' he
informed his mirror one morning, and that same day he booked a
double bill into his Talkies: Randolph Scott and Gai-Wallah
would succeed one another on his screen.
On the opening day of the double bill of his destruction the
meaning of his nickname changed for ever. He had been named
The Woman by the street urchins because, being a widower, he
had been obliged to act as a mother to Bilquis ever since his wife
died when the girl was barely two. But now this affectionate title
came to mean something more dangerous, and when children
spoke of Mahmoud the Woman they meant Mahmoud the
Weakling, the Shameful, the Fool. 'Woman,' he sighed resignedly
to his daughter, 'what a term! Is there no end to the burdens this
word is capable of bearing? Was there ever such a broad-backed
and also such a dirty word?'
How the double bill was settled: both sides, veg and non-veg,
boycotted the Empire. For five, six, seven days films played to an
empty house in which peeling plaster and slowly rotating ceiling
fans and the intermission gram-vendors gazed down upon rows of
undoubtedly rickety and equally certainly unoccupied seats; three-
thirty, six-thirty and nine-thirty shows were all the same, not even
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the special Sunday-morning show could tempt anyone through
the swing doors. 'Give it up,' Bilquis urged her father. 'What do
you want? You miss your wheelbarrow or what?'
But now an unfamiliar stubbornness entered Mahmoud the
Woman, and he announced that the double bill would be held
over for a Second Sensational Week. His own barrow-boys
deserted him; nobody was willing to cry these ambiguous wares
through the electric gullies; no voice dared announce, 'Plans now
open!' or, 'Don't wait or it's too late!'
Mahmoud and Bilquis lived in a high thin house behind the
Empire, 'straight through the screen,' as he said; and on that after-
noon when the world ended and began again the emperor's
daughter, who was alone with the servant at home, was suddenly
choked by the certainty that her father had chosen, with the mad
logic of his romanticism, to persist with his crazy scheme until it
killed him. Terrified by a sound like the beating wings of an angel,
a sound for which she could afterwards find no good explanation
but which pounded in her ears until her head ached, she ran out
of her house, pausing only to wrap around her shoulders the green
dupatta of modesty; which was how she came to be standing,
catching her breath, in front of the heavy doors of the cinema
behind which her father sat grimly amidst vacant seats watching
the show, when the hot firewind of apocalypse began to blow.
The walls of her father's Empire puffed outwards like a hot puri
while that wind like the cough of a sick giant burned away her
eyebrows (which never grew again), and tore the clothes off her
body until she stood infant-naked in the street; but she failed to
notice her nudity because the universe was ending, and in the
echoing alienness of the deadly wind her burning eyes saw every-
thing come flying out, seats, ticket books, fans, and then pieces of
her father's shattered corpse and the charred shards of the future.
'Suicide!' she cursed Mahmoud the Woman at the top of a voice
made shrieky by the bomb. 'You chose this!' - and turning and
running homewards she saw that the back wall of the cinema had
been blown away, and embedded in the topmost storey of her
Shame ? 60
high thin house was the figure of a golden knight on whose
pennant she did not need to read the comically unknown word
Excelsior.
Don't ask who planted the bomb; in those days there were
many such planters, many gardeners of violence. Perhaps it was
even a one-godly bomb, seeded in the Empire by one of Mah-
moud's more fanatical co-religionists, because it seems that the
timer reached zero during a particularly suggestive love scene, and
we know what the godly think of love, or the illusion of it, espe-
cially when admission money must be paid to see it ... they are
Against. They cut it out. Love corrupts.
O Bilquis. Naked and eyebrowless beneath the golden knight,
wrapped in the delirium of the firewind, she saw her youth flying
past her, borne away on the wings of the explosion which were
still beating in her ears. All migrants leave their pasts behind,
although some try to pack it into bundles and boxes � but on the
journey something seeps out of the treasured mementoes and old
photographs, until even their owners fail to recognize them,
because it is the fate of migrants to be stripped of history, to stand
naked amidst the scorn of strangers upon whom they see the
rich clothing, the brocades of continuity and the eyebrows of
belonging � at any rate, my point is that Bilquis's past left her even
before she left that city; she stood in a gully, denuded by the sui-
cide of her father, and watched it go. In later years it would visit
her sometimes, the way a forgotten relative comes to call, but for a
long time she was suspicious of history, she was the wife of a hero
with a great future, so naturally she pushed the past away, as one
rebufls those poor cousins when they come to borrow money.
She must have walked, or run, unless a miracle occurred and
she was lifted by some divine power out of that wind of her deso-
lation. Returning to her senses, she felt the pressure of red stone
against her skin; it was night, and the stone was cool upon her
back in the dark dry heat. People were surging past her in great
herds, a crowd so large and urgent that her first thought was that it
was being propelled by some unimaginable explosion: 'Another
bomb, my God, all these persons blown away by its power!' But it
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was not a bomb. She understood that she was leaning against the
endless wall of the red fortress that dominated the old city, while
soldiers shepherded the crowd through its yawning gates; her feet
began to move, faster than her brain, and led her into the throng.
An instant later she was crushed by the reborn awareness of her
nudity, and began to cry out: 'Give me a cloth!', until she saw that
nobody was listening, nobody even glanced at the body of the
singed, but still beautiful, naked girl. Yet she clutched at herself for
shame, holding on to herself in that rushing sea as if she were a
straw; and felt around her neck the remnants of a length of muslin.
The dupatta of modesty had stuck to her body, fixed there by the
congealed blood of the many cuts and scratches of whose very
existence she had been unaware. Holding the blackened remnants
of the garment of womanly honour over her secret places, she
entered the dull redness of the fort, and heard the boom of its
closing doors.
In Delhi, in the days before partition, the authorities rounded
up any Muslims, for their own safety, it was said, and locked them
up in the red fortress, away from the wrath of the stonewashers.
Whole families were sealed up there, grandmothers, young chil-
dren, wicked uncles . . . including members of my own family.
It's easy to imagine that as my relatives moved through the Red
Fort in the parallel universe of history, they might have felt some
hint of the fictional presence of Bilquis Kemal, rushing cut and
naked past them like a ghost ... or vice versa. Yes. Or vice versa.
The tide of human beings carried Bilquis along as far as the
large, low, ornately rectangular pavilion that had once been an
emperor's hall of public audience; and in that echoing diwan,
overwhelmed by the humiliation of her undress, she passed out. In
that generation many women, ordinary decent respectable ladies
of the type to whom nothing ever happens, to whom nothing is
supposed to happen except marriage children death, had this sort
of strange story to tell. It was a rich time for stories, if you lived to
tell your tale.
Shortly before the scandalous marriage of her younger daugh-
ter, Good News Hyder, Bilquis told the girl the story of her meet-
Shame ? 6 2
ing with her husband. 'When I woke up,' she said, 'it was daytime
and I was wrapped in an officer's coat. But whose do you think,
goof, of course his, your own father Raza's; what to tell you, he
saw me lying there, with all my goods on display in the window,
you know, and I suppose the bold fellow just liked what there was
to see.' Good News went haal and tch tchl, feigning shock at her
mother's sauciness, and Bilquis said shyly: 'Such encounters were
not uncommon then.' Good News dutifully replied, 'Well,
Amma, as for his being impressed, I'm not one bit surprised.'
Raza arriving in the hall of public audience came to attention
before Bilquis, who was decently coated; he clicked his heels,
saluted, grinned. 'It is normal during a courtship,' he told his
future wife, 'for clothes to be worn. It is the privilege of a husband
eventually to remove . . . but in our case, the reverse procedure
will be true. I must dress you, top to toe, as befits a blushing
bride.' (Good News, full of marriage juices, sighed when she
heard this. 'His first words! My God, too romantic!')
How he seemed to military-coated Bilquis: 'So tall! So fair-
skinned! So proud, like a king!' No photographs were taken of
their meeting, but allowances must be made for her state of mind.
Raza Hyder was five foot eight: no giant, you'll agree. And as for
his skin - it was certainly darker than Bilquis's adoring eyes were
willing to concede. But proud, like a king? That is likely. He was
only a Captain then; but it is, nevertheless, a plausible description.
What may also be said fairly of Raza Hyder: that he possessed
enough energy to light up a street; that his manners were always
impeccable � even when he became President, he met people
with such an air of humility (which is not irreconcilable with
pride) that very few were willing to speak ill of him afterwards,
and those that did so would feel, as they spoke, as if they were
betraying a friend; and that he bore, upon his forehead, the light
but permanent bruise which we have previously noted on the
devout forehead of Ibadalla, the postman of Q.: the gatta marked
Raza for a religious man.
One last detail. It was said of Captain Hyder that he did not
sleep for four hundred and twenty hours after the Muslims were
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X'
gathered in the red fortress, which would explain the black
pouches under his eyes. These pouches would grow blacker and
baggier as his power increased, until he no longer needed to wear
sunglasses the way the other top brass did, because he looked like
he had a pair on anyway, all the time, even in bed. The future
General Hyder: Razzoo, Raz-Matazz, Old Razor Guts himself]
How could Bilquis have resisted such a one? She was conquered
in double-quick time.