Shame (13 page)

Shame � 84

come it is because I cannot make them here, in this zoo, like they
all do, like animals or what.'

'Yes, yes, we know how you think yourself toogood for us,'
Bariamma, subsiding into gaotakias with a hissing noise, as of a
deflating balloon, had the last word. 'Then you take her away,
Raza, boy,' she said in her hornet's whine of a voice. 'You, Billoo
Begum, begone. When you leave this house your shame leaves
with you, and our dear Duniya, whom you attacked for speaking
the truth, will sleep more easily. Come on, mohajirl Immigrant!
Pack up double-quick and be off to what gutter you choose.'

I, too, know something of this immigrant business. I am an emi-
grant from one country (India) and a newcomer in two (England,
where I live, and Pakistan, to which my family moved against my
will). And I have a theory that the resentments we mohajirs
engender have something to do with our conquest of the force of
gravity. We have performed the act of which all men anciently
dream, the thing for which they envy the birds; that is to say, we
have flown.

I am comparing gravity with belonging. Both phenomena
observably exist: my feet stay on the ground, and I have never
been angrier than I was on the day my father told me he had sold
my childhood home in Bombay. But neither is understood. We
know the force of gravity, but not its origins; and to explain why
we become attached to our birthplaces we pretend that we are
trees and speak of roots. Look under your feet. You will not find
gnarled growths sprouting through the soles. Roots, I sometimes
think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places.

The anti-myths of gravity and of belonging bear the same
name: flight. Migration, n., moving, for instance in flight, from one place
to another. To fly and to flee: both are ways of seeking freedom . . .
an odd thing about gravity, incidentally, is that while it remains
uncomprehended everybody seems to find it easy to comprehend
the notion of its theoretical counter-force: anti-gravity. But anti-
belonging is not accepted by modern science . . . suppose ICI or

The Duellists � 85

Ciba-Geigy or Pfizer or Roche or even, I guess, NASA came up
with an anti-gravity pill. The world's airlines would go broke
overnight, of course. Pill-poppers would come unstuck from the
ground and float upwards until they sank into the clouds. It would
be necessary to devise special waterproof flying garments. And
when the effects of the pill wore off one would simply sink gently
down to earth again, but in a different place, because of prevailing
windspeeds and planetary rotation. Personalized international
travel could be made possible by manufacturing pills of different
strengths for different lengths of journey. Some kind of directional
booster-engine would have to be constructed, perhaps in back-
pack form. Mass production could bring this within the reach of
every household. You see the connection between gravity and
'roots': the pill would make migrants of us all. We would float
upwards, use our boosters to get ourselves to the right latitude,
and let the rotating planet do the rest.

When individuals come unstuck from their native land, they
are called migrants. When nations do the same thing (Bangladesh),
the act is called secession. What is the best thing about migrant
peoples and seceded nations? I think it is their hopefulness. Look
into the eyes of such folk in old photographs. Hope blazes
undimmed through the fading sepia tints. And what's the worst
thing? It is the emptiness of one's luggage. I'm speaking of
invisible suitcases, not the physical, perhaps cardboard, variety
containing a few meaning-drained mementoes: we have come
unstuck from more than land. We have floated upwards from his-
tory, from memory, from Time.

I may be such a person. Pakistan may be such a country.

It is well known that the term 'Pakistan', an acronym, was origi-
nally thought up in England by a group of Muslim intellectuals. P
for the Punjabis, A for the Afghans, K for the Kashmiris, S for
Sind and the 'tan', they say, for Baluchistan. (No mention of
the East Wing, you notice; Bangladesh never got its name in the
title, and so, eventually, it took the hint and seceded from the
secessionists. Imagine what such a double secession does to
people!) � So it was a word born in exile which then went East,

Shame ? 86

was borne-across or trans-lated, and imposed itself on history; a
returning migrant, settling down on partitioned land, forming a
palimpsest on the past. A palimpsest obscures what lies beneath.
To build Pakistan it was necessary to cover up Indian history, to
deny that Indian centuries lay just beneath the surface of Pakistani
Standard Time. The past was rewritten; there was nothing else to
be done.

Who commandeered the job of rewriting history? � The immi-
grants, the mohajirs. In what languages? - Urdu and English, both
imported tongues, although one travelled less distance than the
other. It is possible to see the subsequent history of Pakistan as a
duel between two layers of time, the obscured world forcing its
way back through what-had-been-imposed. It is the true desire of
every artist to impose his or her vision on the world; and Pakistan,
the peeling, fragmenting palimpsest, increasingly at war with
itself, may be described as a failure of the dreaming mind. Perhaps
the pigments used were the wrong ones, impermanent, like
Leonardo's; or perhaps the place was just insufficiently imagined, a
picture full of irreconcilable elements, midriffbaring immigrant
saris versus demure, indigenous Sindhi shalwar-kurtas, Urdu
versus Punjabi, now versus then: a miracle that went wrong.

As for me: I, too, like all migrants, am a fantasist. I build imagi-
nary countries and try to impose them on the ones that exist. I,
too, face the problem of history: what to retain, what to dump,
how to hold on to what memory insists on relinquishing, how to
deal with change. And to come back to the 'roots' idea, I should
say that I haven't managed to shake myself free of it completely.
Sometimes I do see myself as a tree, even, rather grandly, as the
ash Yggdrasil, the mythical world-tree of Norse legend. The ash
Yggdrasil has three roots. One falls into the pool of knowledge by
Valhalla, where Odin comes to drink. A second is being slowly
consumed in the undying fire of Muspellheim, realm of the flame-
god Surtur. The third is gradually being gnawed through by a
fearsome beast called the Nidhogg. And when fire and monster
have destroyed two of the three, the ash will fall, and darkness will
descend. The twilight of the gods: a tree's dream of death.

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My story's palimpsest-country has, I repeat, no name of its
own. The exiled Czech writer Kundera once wrote: 'A name
means continuity with the past and people without a past are
people without a name.' But I am dealing with a past that refuses
to be suppressed, that is daily doing battle with the present; so it is
perhaps unduly harsh of me to deny my fairyland a title.

There's an apocryphal story that Napier, after a successful cam-
paign in what is now the south of Pakistan, sent back to England
the guilty, one-word message, 'Peccavi'. / have Sind. I'm tempted
to name my looking-glass Pakistan in honour of this bilingual (and
fictional, because never really uttered) pun. Let it be Peccavistan.

It was the day on which the only son of the future General Raza
Hyder was going to be reincarnated.

Bilquis had moved out of Bariamma's contraceptive presence
into a simple residence for married officers and wives in the com-
pound of the Army base; and not long after her escape she had
conceived, just as prophesied. 'What did I say?' she triumphed,
'Raz, he's coming back, the little angel, just you wait and see.'
Bilquis put her new-found fertility down to the fact that she was
finally able to make a noise during their lovemaking, 'so that the
little angel, waiting to be born, can hear what's going on and
respond accordingly,' she told her husband fondly, and the happi-
ness of the remark prevented him from replying that it was not
only angels who were within earshot of her passionate love-moans
and ululations, but also every other married officer on the base,
including his immediate superior and also some junior chaps, so
that he had been obliged to put up with a fair amount of raillery in
the mess.

Bilquis entered labour - the rebirth was imminent - Raza
Hyder awaited it, stiffly seated in an anteroom of the military hos-
pital's maternity ward. And after eight hours of howling and
heaving and bursting blood-vessels in her cheeks and using the
filthy language that is permitted to ladies only during parturition,
at last, pop! she managed it, the miracle of life. Raza Hyder's
daughter was born at two-fifteen in the afternoon, and born,

Shame ? 88

what's more, as vivaciously alive and kicking as her big brother
had been dead.

When the swaddled child was handed to Bilquis, that lady
could not forbear to cry, faintly, 'Is that all, my God? So much
huffery and puffery to push out only this mouse?'

The heroine of our story, the wrong miracle, Sufiya Zinobia,
was as small a baby as anyone had ever seen. (She remained small
when she grew up, taking after her near-midget paternal great-
grandmother, whose name, Bariamma, Big Mother, had always
been a sort of family joke.)

A surprisingly small bundle was returned by Bilquis to the mid-
wife, who bore it out to the anxious father. 'A daughter, Major
Sahib, and so beautiful, like the day, dontyouthinkso?' In the
delivery room, silence flooded from the pores of the exhausted
mother; in the anteroom, Raza was quiet, too. Silence: the
ancient language of defeat.

Defeat? But this was Old Razor Guts himself, conqueror of
glaciers, vanquisher of frosty meadows and ice-fleeced mountain
sheep! Was the future strong-man of the nation so easily crushed?
Not a bit of it. Did the midwife's bombshell lead to unconditional
surrender? Certainly not. Raza began to argue; and the words
came in rushes, inexorable as tanks. The walls of the hospital
shook and retreated; horses shied, unseating riders, on the nearby
polo fields.

'Mistakes are often made!' Raza shouted. 'Terrible blunders are
not unknown! Why, my own fifth cousin by marriage when he
was born. . . ! But me no buts, woman, I demand to see the hos-
pital supervisor!'

And even louder: 'Babies do not come clean into this world!'

And blasted from his lips like cannonballs: 'Genitalia! Can! Be!
Obscured!'

Raza Hyder raging roaring. The midwife stiffened, saluted; this
was a military hospital, don't forget, and Raza outranked her, so
she admitted yes, what the Major Sahib was saying was possible
certainly. And fled. Hope rose in the moist eyes of the father, also
in the dilated pupils of Bilquis, who had heard the noise, of

The Duellists ? 89

course. And now it was the baby, its very essence in doubt, who
fell silent and began to muse.

The supervisor (a Brigadier) entered the quaking room in
which the future President was trying to affect biology by a super-
human act of will. His words, weighty, final, outranking Raza's
murdered hope. The stillborn son died again, even his ghost
snuffed out by the medico's fatal speech: 'No possibility of error.
Please to note that the child has been washed. Prior to swaddling
procedure. Matter of sex is beyond dispute. Permit me to tender
my congratulations.' But what father would allow his son, twice-
conceived, to be executed thus, without a fight? Raza tore away
swaddling cloth; having penetrated to the baby within, he jabbed
at its nether zones: 'There! I ask you, sir, what is that?' - 'We see
here the expected configuration, also the not uncommon post-
natal swelling, of the female . . .' � 'A bump!' Raza shrieked hope-
lessly. 'Is it not, doctor, an absolute and unquestionable bump?'

But the Brigadier had left the room.

'And at this point' � I am quoting from the family legend again
� 'when her parents had to admit the immutability of her gender,
to submit, as faith demands, to God; at this very instant the
extremely new and soporific being in Raza's arms began � it's
true! - to blush.'

O rubescent Sufiya Zinobia!

It is possible that the above incident has been a little embell-
ished during its many tellings and retellings; but I shall not be the
one to question the veracity of oral tradition. They say the baby
blushed at birth.

Then, even then, she was too easily shamed.

6

Affairs of Honour

There is a saying that the frog who croaks in the shaft of a well
will be frightened by the booming voice of the giant frog
who answers him.

When the great gas fields were discovered in Needle Valley in the
district of Q., the unpatriotic behaviour of the intemperate local
tribals became a matter for national concern. After the team of
drilling engineers, surveyors and gas scientists which was sent to
Needle to plan the construction of the butane mines had been
attacked by the tribals, who raped each member of the team eigh-
teen point six times on average (of which thirteen point nine
seven assaults were from the rear and only four point six nine in
the mouth) before slitting one hundred per cent of the expert gul-
lets, the State Chief Minister Aladdin Gichki requested military
assistance. The commander of the forces appointed for the protec-
tion of the invaluable gas resources was none other than Raza
Hyder, hero of the Aansu-ki-Wadi expedition, and already a full
Colonel. It was a popular appointment. 'Who better to defend
one precious mountain valley,' the nation's premier daily paper
War rhetorically inquired, 'than the conqueror of another such

90

The Duellists ? 91

jewel?' Old Razor Guts himself made the following statement, to
a reporter from the same journal, on the steps of the newly air-
conditioned mail train to the west: 'These brigands are the frogs in
the well, good sir, and, God willing, I intend to be the giant who
scares off their pants.'