Shame (12 page)

The Duellists ? 77

to defend the place; - the fighting was fierce as ice - and with
twenty men only he took the valley! That little band of giants, that
daredevil crew, and Old Razor Guts at their head � who could
have denied them? Who could have stood in their path?

'For all peoples, there are places that mean too much. "Aansu!"
we wept with pride; with true patriotism we sobbed, "Only
imagine � he has taken the Aansu-ki-Wadi!" It's true: the capture
of that fabled "valley of tears" made us all weep as uncontrollably
as, in later years, its conqueror became famous for doing. - But
after a while it was clear that nobody knew what to do with that
place where your spit froze before it hit the ground; except
Iskander Harappa, of course; - who, dry-eyed as ever, went off to
the Tribal Agencies Department and purchased more or less the
whole caboodle, dirt-cheap, snow-cheap, for cash money on the
nail, - and a few years later there were ski-lodges up there, and
scheduled air flights, and European goings-on at night that made
the local tribals faint for shame. � But did Raz, our great hero, see
anything of that foreign exchange?' (Here the teller invariably
smites her forehead with the palm of her hand.) 'No, how would
he, that great Army dumbo? Isky always got there first. But' (and
now the narrator adopts the most cryptic, menacing tone of which
she is capable), 'it is being there last that counts.'

At this point I must interrupt the legend. The duel between
Raza Hyder (promoted to Major for his Aansu exploit) and
Iskander Harappa, which began, but certainly did not end, in
Aansu, will have to wait yet awhile; because now that Old Razor
Guts is back in town, and it is peacetime again, the wedding is
about to be celebrated which will make the mortal adversaries into
cousins-in-laws: into family.

Rani Humayun, eyes downcast, watches in a mirror-ring her
bridegroom approaching her; borne shoulder-high by a turbaned
retinue of friends, he sits on a golden plate. Later, after she had
fainted under the weight of her jewellery; been revived by the
pregnant Bilquis who then passed out herself; had money thrown

Shame ? 71

in her lap by every member of her family in turn; watched
through her veil as her ancient lecherous great-uncle pinched the
bottoms of her new husband's female relations, knowing that his
grey hairs would prevent them from complaining; and finally
lifted the veil beside her while a hand raised her own, and looked
long and hard into the face of Iskander Harappa, whose over-
powering sexual appeal owed much to the unlined softness of his
twenty-five-year-old cheeks - around which curled long hair that
was already, and freakishly, the colour of pure silver, and thinning
on top to reveal the golden dome of his skull � and between
which, also curled, she discovered lips whose patrician cruelty was
alleviated by their sensual thickness, the lips, she thought, of a
black hubshee, and idea which gave her a peculiarly sinful frisson of
delight . . . later, after she had ridden with him to a bedchamber
opulent with ancient swords and imported French tapestries and
Russian novels, after she had descended full of terror from a white
stallion whose sex was quite patently standing to attention, after
she had heard the doors of her marriage closing behind her in this
other home whose grandeur made Bariamma's place look like a
village hovel � then, oiled and naked on a bed before which the
man who had just turned her into a grown woman stood staring
indolently down upon her beauty, she, Rani Harappa, made her
first genuinely wifely remark.

'Who was that fellow,' she asked, 'the fat one, whose horse sat
down under him when your procession arrived? I think it must be
that bad chap, that doctor or something, that everybody in town is
calling such a bad influence on you.'

Iskander Harappa turned his back on her and lit a cigar. 'Get
one thing clear,' she heard him say, 'you don't pick and choose
my friends.'

But Rani, seized by helpless laughter under the influence of the
remembered image of the proud horse that gave up and subsided,
legs splayed to the four points of the compass, under the colossal
weight of Omar Khayyam Shakil � and also basking in the soft
heat of their recent lovemaking � made mollifying sounds: 'I only

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meant, Isky, what a shameless type he must be, to carry all that
tummy about and all.'

Omar Khayyam at thirty: five years the senior of Iskander Harappa
and more than a decade older than Isky's bride, re-enters our little
tale as a character with a high reputation as a doctor and a low
reputation as a human being, a degenerate of whom it is often said
that he appears to be entirely without shame, 'fellow doesn't
know the meaning of the word,' as if some essential part of his
education has been overlooked; or perhaps he has deliberately
chosen to expunge the word from his vocabulary, lest its explosive
presence there amid the memories of his past and present actions
shatter him like an old pot. Rani Harappa has correctly identified
her enemy, and now remembers, shuddering, and for the hundred
and first time since it happened, the moment during her wedding
celebrations when a bearer brought Iskander Harappa a telephone
message informing him that the Prime Minister had been assassi-
nated. When Iskander Harappa stood, called for silence and
relayed the message to the appalled guests, an awkward hush per-
sisted for fully thirty seconds, and then the voice of Omar
Khayyam Shakil, on which everyone could hear the splashing of
alcohol, cried out, 'That bastard! If he's dead he's dead. Why does
he want to come here and spoil the party?'

Back then everything was smaller than it is today; even Raza
Hyder was only a Major. But he was like the city itself, going
places, growing fast, but in a stupid way, so that the bigger they
both got, the uglier they became. I must tell you what things were
like in those early days after the partition: the city's old inhabi-
tants, who had become accustomed to living in a land older than
time, and were therefore being slowly eroded by the implacably
revenant tides of the past, had been given a bad shock by indepen-
dence, by being told to think of themselves, as well as the country
itself, as new.

Well, their imaginations simply weren't up to the job, you can

I

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understand that; so it was the ones who really were new, the dis-
tant cousins and half-acquaintances and total strangers who poured
in from the east to settle in the Land of God, who took over and
got things going. The newness of those days felt pretty unstable; it
was a dislocated, rootless sort of thing. All over the city (which
was, of course, the capital then) builders were cheating on the
cement in the foundations of new houses, people - and not only
Prime Ministers - got shot from time to time, throats got them-
selves slit in gullies, bandits became billionaires, but all this was
expected. History was old and rusted, it was a machine nobody
had plugged in for thousands of years, and here all of a sudden it
was being asked for maximum output. Nobody was surprised that
there were accidents . . . well, there were a few voices saying, if
this is the country we dedicated to our God, what kind of God is
it that permits � but these voices were silenced before they had
finished their questions, kicked on the shins under tables, for their
own sakes, because there are things that cannot be said. No, it's
more than that: there are things that cannot be permitted to
be true.

At any rate: Raza Hyder has already shown, in the taking of
Aansu, the advantages of the energy-giving influx of immigrants,
of novel beings; but energy or no energy, he was unable to pre-
vent his first-born son from being strangled to death in the womb.

Once again (in the opinion of his maternal grandmother) he cried
too easily. Just when he should have been demonstrating the stiff-
ness of his upper lip be began to bawl his eyes out, even in public.
Tears were seen sliding off the wax on his bulbous moustache, and
his black eye-pouches glistened once more like little pools of oil.
His wife, Bilquis, however, did not let fall a single tear.

'Hey, Raz,' she consoled her husband in words iced with the
brittle certainty of her desperation, 'Razzoo, chin up. We'll get
him back the next time.'

'Old Razor Guts, my toe,' Bariamma scoffed to all and
sundry. 'You know he invented that name for himself and forced

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his troops to call him so, by order? Old Leaky Water Reservoir,
more like.'

An umbilical cord wound itself around a baby's neck and was
transformed into a hangman's noose (in which other nooses are
prefigured), into the breath-stopping silken rumal of a Thug;
and an infant came into the world handicapped by the irreversible
misfortune of being dead before he was born. 'Who knows
why God will do such things?' Bariamma, mercilessly, told her
grandson. 'But we submit, we must submit. And not take out
baby-tears before women.'

However: being stone dead was a handicap which the boy
managed, with commendable gallantry, to surmount. Within a
matter of months, or was it only weeks, the tragically cadaverous
infant had 'topped' in school and at college, had fought bravely in
war, had married the wealthiest beauty in town and risen to a high
position in the government. He was dashing, popular, handsome,
and the fact of his being a corpse now seemed of no more conse-
quence than would a slight limp or a minor speech impediment.

Of course I know perfectly well that the boy had in reality per-
ished before he even had time to be given a name. His subsequent
feats were performed entirely within the distracted imaginations of
Raza and Bilquis, where they acquired an air of such solid actu-
ality that they began to insist on being provided with a living
human being who would carry them out and make them real.
Possessed by the fictive triumphs of their stillborn son, Raza and
Bilquis went at one another with a will, heaving silently in the
blind-eyed dormitory of the family wives, having convinced
themselves that a second pregnancy would be an act of replace-
ment, that God (for Raza was, as we know, devout) had con-
sented to send them a free substitute for the damaged goods they
had received in the first delivery, as though He were the manager
of a reputable mail-order firm. Bariamma, who found out every-
thing, clicked her tongue noisily over this reincarnation nonsense,
aware that is was something they had imported, like a germ, from
that land of idolaters they had left; but curiously she was never

Shame ? 82

harsh with them, understanding that the mind will find strange
means of coping with grief. So she must bear her share of respon-
sibility for what followed, she should not have neglected her duty
just because it was painful, she should have dished that rebirth
notion while she could, but it took root so fast, and then it was
too late, not a matter for discussion any more.

Many years later, when Iskander Harappa stood in the dock of
the courtroom in which he was on trial for his life, his face as grey
as the imported suit he wore, which had been tailored for him
when he weighed twice as much, he taunted Raza with the
memory of this reincarnation obsession. 'This leader who prays six
times a day, and on national television too!' Isky said in a voice
whose siren melodies had been untuned by jail. 'I recall when I
had to remind him that the idea of avatars was a heresy. Of course
he never listened, but then Raza Hyder has made a custom of not
listening to friendly advice.' And outside the courtroom, the
bolder members of Harappa's disintegrating entourage were heard
to mutter that General Hyder had been raised in the enemy state
across the border, after all, and there was evidence of a Hindu
great-grandmother on his father's side, so those ungodly philoso-
phies had long ago infected his blood.

And it is true that Iskander and Rani both tried to argue with
the Hyders, but Bilquis's lips just got stretched tight as a drum by
her obstinacy. At that time Rani Harappa was expecting, she had
managed it like a shot, and Bilquis was already making it a matter
of principle not to do what her old dormitory buddy advised, one
reason for which may have been that she, Bilquis, in spite of all
the nocturnal goings-on, was finding it very difficult to conceive.

When Rani gave birth to a daughter, her failure to produce a
male child offered Bilquis a little consolation, but not much,
because another dream had bitten the dust, the fantasy of a mar-
riage between their firstborn children. Now, of course, the new-
born Miss Arjumand Harappa was older than any future male
Hyder could ever be, so the match was out of the question. Rani
had, in fact, delivered her side of the deal; her efficiency deepened
Bilquis's well-like gloom.

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And under Bariamma's roof little sneers and comments began
to be aimed at this unnatural female who could produce nothing
but dead babies; the family was proud of its fecundity. One night,
after Bilquis had retired to bed, having washed the eyebrows off
her face and regained her appearance of a startled rabbit, she was
staring jealously at the empty bed which had once been occupied
by Rani Harappa when, from her other flank, a particularly
vicious cousin named Duniyazad Begum hissed night-dark insults:
'The disgrace of your barrenness, Madam, is not yours alone.
Don't you know that shame is collective? The shame of any one
of us sits on us all and bends our backs. See what you're doing to
your husband's people, how you repay the ones who took you in
when you came penniless and a fugitive from that godless country
over there.'

Bariamma had switched the lights out - the master-switch hung
on a cord above her bed � and her snoring dominated the black-
ness of the zenana chamber. But Bilquis did not lie still in her bed;
she arose and fell upon Duniyazad Begum, who had been
awaiting her eagerly, and the two of them, hands entangled in
hair, knees driving into yielding fleshy zones, tumbled softly to the
floor. The fight was conducted soundlessly, such was the power of
the matriarch over the night; but the news spread through the
room on ripples of darkness and the women sat up in their beds
and watched. When the men came they, too, became mute spec-
tators of this mortal combat, during which Duniyazad lost several
handfuls of hair from her luxuriant armpits and Bilquis broke a
tooth on her adversary's clawing fingers; until Raza Hyder
entered the dormitory and pulled them apart. It was at this point
that Bariamma ceased to snore and switched on the light, releasing
into the illuminated air all the noise, all the cheers and screams,
that had been held back by the darkness. As women rushed to
prop up the bald, blind matriarch with gaotakia bolsters, Bilquis,
trembling in her husband's arms, refused to go on living under
that roof of her calumniation. 'Husband, you know it,' she pulled
about herself the tattered shreds of her queenly childhood, 'I was
raised in a higher fashion than this; and if my children do not