Shame

Shame

Also by Salman Rushdie

FICTION

Grimus

Midnight's Children

The Satanic Verses

Haroun and the Sea of Stories

East, West

The Moor's Last Sigh
The Ground Beneath Her Feet

NONFICTION

The Jaguar Smile

Imaginary Homelands

The Wizard of Oz

SCREENPLAY

Midnight's Children

ANTHOLOGY
Mirrorwork (co-editor)

SALMAN
RUSHDIE

Shame

A NOVEL

Picador USA

Henry Holt and Company
New York

SHAME: A NOVEL. Copyright � 1983 by Salman Rushdie. All rights

reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of

this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever

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embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address:

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Design by Kathryn Parise

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rushdie, Salman.

Shame: a novel / Salman Rushdie.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-312-27093-3
I. Title.

PR6068.U757S5

823'.914�dc21 97-5633

CIP

First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd.

First published in the United States by Knopf

First Picador USA Edition: December 2000

10 987654321

For Sameen

CONTENTS

I Escapes from the Mother Country 1

Chapter One The Dumb-Waiter 3

Chapter Two A Necklace of Shoes 19

Chapter Three Melting Ice 39

II The Duellists 53
Chapter Four Behind the Screen 55
Chapter Five The Wrong Miracle 69
Chapter Six Affairs of Honour 90

III Shame, Good News and the Virgin 115

Chapter Seven Blushing 117

Chapter Eight Beauty and the Beast 151

IV In the Fifteenth Century 183

Chapter Nine Alexander the Great 185

Chapter Ten The Woman in the Veil 207

Chapter Eleven Monologue of a Hanged Man 233

Chapter Twelve Stability 254

V Judgment Day 281
Acknowledgments 307

I

Escapes from the
Mother Country

Hafeezullah
Shakil

Old Mr Shakil

Chhunni, Munnee, and Bunny
Shakil (the "three mothers")

Rumi
Shakil

Bariamma 2 sisters

I
3 brothers--------

I

11 legitimate sons

(many illegitimate offspring)

1 daughter

32 boys

Mahmoud
"the Woman'

I

Sir Mir
Harappa

brother

Kaza Hyder =

Bilquis Rani Humayun = Iskander Harappa Little Mir

Harappa

Babar Shakil Omar Khayyam
Shakil

Sufiya Zinobia Naveed = Talvar Arjumand Harappa

Hyder Hyder Ulhaq (the "virgin Ironpants") Haroun

("Good News") Harappa

27 children

1

The Dumb-Waiter

In the remote border town of Q., which when seen from the air
resembles nothing so much as an ill-proportioned dumb-bell,
there once lived three lovely, and loving, sisters. Their names . . .
but their real names were never used, like the best household
china, which was locked away after the night of their joint tragedy
in a cupboard whose location was eventually forgotten, so that the
great thousand-piece service from the Gardner potteries in Tsarist
Russia became a family myth in whose factuality they almost
ceased to believe . . . the three sisters, I should state without
further delay, bore the family name of Shakil, and were universally
known (in descending order of age) as Chhunni, Munnee
and Bunny.

And one day their father died.

Old Mr Shakil, at the time of his death a widower for eighteen
years, had developed the habit of referring to the town in which
he lived as 'a hell hole'. During his last delirium he embarked on a
ceaseless and largely incomprehensible monologue amidst whose
turbid peregrinations the household servants could make out long
passages of obscenity, oaths and curses of a ferocity that made the
air boil violently around his bed. In this peroration the embittered

3

Shame ? 4

old recluse rehearsed his lifelong hatred for his home town, now
calling down demons to destroy the clutter of low, dun-coloured,
'higgling and piggling' edifices around the bazaar, now annihi-
lating with his death-encrusted words the cool whitewashed
smugness of the Cantonment district. These were the two orbs of
the town's dumb-bell shape: old town and Cantt, the former
inhabited by the indigenous, colonized population and the latter
by the alien colonizers, the Angrez, or British, sahibs. Old Shakil
loathed both worlds and had for many years remained immured in
his high, fortress-like, gigantic residence which faced inwards to a
well-like and lightless compound yard. The house was positioned
beside an open maidan, and it was equidistant from the bazaar and
the Cantt. Through one of the building's few outward-facing
windows Mr Shakil on his death-bed was able to stare out at the
dome of a large Palladian hotel, which rose out of the intolerable
Cantonment streets like a mirage, and inside which were to
be found golden cuspidors and tame spider-monkeys in brass-
buttoned uniforms and bellhop hats and a full-sized orchestra
playing every evening in a stuccoed ballroom amidst an energetic
riot of fantastic plants, yellow roses and white magnolias and roof-
high emerald-green palms � the Hotel Flashman, in short, whose
great golden dome was cracked even then but shone nevertheless
with the tedious pride of its brief doomed glory; that dome under
which the suited-and-booted Angrez officers and white-tied civil-
ians and ringleted ladies with hungry eyes would congregate
nightly, assembling here from their bungalows to dance and to
share the illusion of being colourful - whereas in fact they were
merely white, or actually grey, owing to the deleterious effect
of that stony heat upon their frail cloud-nurtured skins, and also
to their habit of drinking dark Burgundies in the noonday insanity
of the sun, with a fine disregard for their livers. The old man
heard the music of the imperialists issuing from the golden hotel,
heavy with the gaiety of despair, and he cursed the hotel of
dreams in a loud, clear voice.

'Shut that window,' he shouted, 'so that I don't have to die lis-
tening to that racket,' and when the old womanservant Hashmat

Escapes from the Mother Country ? 5

Bibi had fastened the shutters he relaxed slightly and, summoning
up the last reserves of his energy, altered the course of his fatal,
delirious flow.

'Come quickly,' Hashmat Bibi ran from the room yelling for
the old man's daughters, 'your fatherji is sending himself to the
devil.' Mr Shakil, having dismissed the outside world, had turned
the rage of his dying monologue against himself, calling eternal
damnation down upon his soul. 'God knows what got his goat,'
Hashmat despaired, 'but he is going in an incorrect way.'

The widower had raised his children with the help of Parsee
wet-nurses, Christian ayahs and an iron morality that was mostly
Muslim, although Chhunni used to say that he had been made
harder by the sun. The three girls had been kept inside that
labyrinthine mansion until his dying day; virtually uneducated,
they were imprisoned in the zenana wing where they amused
each other by inventing private languages and fantasizing about
what a man might look like when undressed, imagining, during
their pre-pubertal years, bizarre genitalia such as holes in the chest
into which their own nipples might snugly fit, 'because for all we
knew in those days,' they would remind each other amazedly in
later life, 'fertilization might have been supposed to happen
through the breast.' This interminable captivity forged between
the three sisters a bond of intimacy that would never completely
be broken. They spent their evenings seated at a window behind a
lattice-work screen, looking towards the golden dome of the great
hotel and swaying to the strains of the enigmatic dance music . . .
and there are rumours that they would indolently explore each
other's bodies during the languorous drowsiness of the afternoons,
and, at night, would weave occult spells to hasten the moment of
their father's demise. But evil tongues will say anything, especially
about beautiful women who live far away from the denuding eyes
of men. What is almost certainly true is that it was during these
years, long before the baby scandal, that the three of them, all of
whom longed for children with the abstract passion of their vir-
ginity, made their secret compact to remain triune, forever bound
by the intimacies of their youth, even after the children came: that

Shame ? 6

is to say, they resolved to share the babies. I cannot prove or dis-
prove the foul story that this treaty was written down and signed
in the commingled menstrual blood of the isolated trinity, and
then burned to ashes, being preserved only in the cloisters of their
memories.

But for twenty years, they would have only one child. His
name would be Omar Khayyam.

All this happened in the fourteenth century. I'm using the
Hegiran calendar, naturally: don't imagine that stories of this type
always take place longlong ago. Time cannot be homogenized as
easily as milk, and in those parts, until quite recently, the thirteen-
hundreds were still in full swing.

When Hashmat Bibi told them that their father had arrived at his
final moments, the sisters went to visit him, dressed in their
brightest clothes. They found him in the grip of an asphyxiating
fist of shame, demanding of God, in gasps of imperious gloomi-
ness, that he be consigned for all eternity to some desert outpost of
Jahannum, some borderland of hell. Then he fell silent, and
Chhunni, the eldest daughter, quickly asked him the only ques-
tion of any interest to the three young women: 'Father, we are
going to be very rich now, is that not so?'

'Whores,' the dying man cursed them, 'don't count on it.'
The bottomless sea of wealth on which everyone had supposed
the Shakil family fortunes to be sailing proved, on the morning
after his foulmouthed death, to be an arid crater. The fierce sun of
his financial incompetence (which he had successfully concealed
for decades behind his imposing patriarchal facade, his filthy
temper and the overweening hauteur which was his most poi-
sonous legacy to his daughters) had dried out all the oceans of
cash, so that Chhunni, Munnee and bunny spent the entire period
of mourning settling the debts for which his creditors had never
dared to press the old man while he lived, but for payment of
which (plus compound interest) they now absolutely refused to
wait one moment longer. The girls emerged from their lifelong

Escapes from the Mother Country ? 7

sequestration wearing expressions of well-bred disgust for these
vultures swooping down to feast upon the carcass of their parent's
great improvidence; and because they had been raised to think of
money as one of the two subjects that it is forbidden to discuss
with strangers, they signed away their fortune without even trou-
bling to read the documents which the money-lenders presented.
At the end of it all the vast estates around Q., which comprised
approximately eighty-five per cent of the only good orchards and
rich agricultural lands in that largely infertile region, had been lost
in their entirety; the three sisters were left with nothing but the
unmanageably infinite mansion stuffed from floor to ceiling with
possessions and haunted by the few servants who refused to leave,
less out of loyalty than from that terror of the life-prisoner for the
outside world. And - as is perhaps the universal custom of aristo-
cratically bred persons - they reacted to the news of their ruin by
resolving to throw a party.