Shame (14 page)

At that time his daughter Sufiya Zinobia was fifteen months
old. She, and his wife Bilquis, accompanied Colonel Hyder on his
journey towards the Impossible Mountains. And no sooner had
their train pulled out of the station than sounds of 'Godless
carousing' (Raza's phrase) began to filter into their compartment.
Raza asked the guard for the identities of his neighbours. "Very
big persons, sir,' was the reply, 'certain executives and also lady
stars of a famous bioscope company.' Raza Hyder shrugged.
'Then we must put up with the racket, because I will not lower
myself by disputing with filmi types.' When she heard this Bilquis
set her lips in a tight and bloodless smile, and her eyes stared fero-
ciously through the mirror on the wall which divided her from
the empires of her past.

The carriage was a new model with a corridor running past the
compartment doors, and a few hours later Bilquis was returning
from the Ladies when a youth with lips as fat as Iskander
Harappa's leaned out of the depraved compartment of the cinema
people and made kissing noises at her, whispering whiskied
endearments: 'I swear, yaar, you can keep your goods from for-
eign, the home produce is the best, no question.' Bilquis could
feel his eyes squeezing her breasts, but for some unaccountable
reason she did not mention this insult to her honour when she
returned to her husband's side.

Raza Hyder's honour also received an insulting blow on that
trip, or, to be precise, at its conclusion, because when they arrived
at the Cantt station in Q. they found a crowd of locust propor-
tions awaiting them on the platform, singing hit songs and
throwing flowers and waving banners and flags of welcome, and
although Bilquis could see Raza twirling his moustache her
smiling lips never moved to warn him of the obvious truth, which
was that the welcome was not for the Colonel but for the cheap

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Shame ? 92

riff-raff next door. Hyder descended from the train with arms
spread wide and a speech guaranteeing the safety of the crucial gas
seams dripping from his lips, and was almost knocked over by the
rush of autograph hunters and hem-kissers towards the demure
lady actresses. (Off balance, he failed to notice a fat-lipped youth
wiggling his fingers in farewell in the direction of Bilquis.) The
injury sustained here by his pride explained much of what fol-
lowed; in the illogical manner of the humiliated, he began taking
it out on his wife, who shared a bioscopic background with his
adversaries � whereupon his rage at the botched reincarnation of
his only son awoke again, and crossed over the newly-established
bridge between his wife and the cinema fans, until Raza began,
unconsciously, to hold his progenitorial difficulties against the
shallow moviegoers of Q.

Trouble in a marriage is like monsoon water accumulating on a
flat roof. You don't realize it's up there, but it gets heavier and
heavier, until one day, with a great crash, the whole roof falls in
on your head . . . leaving Sindbad Mengal, the kiss-lipped boy
who was the youngest son of the president of the bioscope corpo-
ration, and who had arrived to take charge of cinematic activity in
that region, making promises of weekly programme changes, new
picture palaces, and regular personal appearances by top stars and
playback singers, the Hyders packed away their own assurances of
triumph and pushed their way out of the station through the
rejoicing crowd.

At Flashman's Hotel, they were shown into a honeymoon suite
which smelled oppressively of naphthalene balls by an enfeebled
bearer who was accompanied by the last of the trained monkeys in
bellhop uniform, and who could not, in the depths of his despair,
resist touching Raza Hyder on the arm and inquiring, 'Please,
great sir, do you know, when are the Angrez sahibs coming back?'

And Rani Harappa?

Wherever she looks are peering faces; wherever she listens, voices,
using a vocabulary of such multicoloured obscenity that it dyes

The Duellists ? 93

her listening ears in rainbow colours. She wakes up one morning
soon after her arrival at her new home to find peasant girls rum-
maging through her clothes drawers, taking out and holding up
lacy imported lingerie, examining ruby lipsticks. 'What do you
think you're doing?' � The two girls, unashamed, turn to stare,
still holding garments, cosmetics, combs. 'O, Isky's wife, nothing
to worry, Isky's ayah said to look.' 'We polished floors and so she
gave permission.' 'Ohe, Isky's wife, look out on those floors we
polished! Slipperier than a monkey's bottom, I swear.' - Rani rises
to her elbows in bed; her voice fights off sleep. 'Get out! Don't
you blush to be here? Go on, flee before I.' The girls fan them-
selves as if a fire were blazing in the room. 'O, God, too hot!'
'Hey, Isky's wife, dip your tongue in water!' She shouts, 'Don't
be insol. . .', but they interrupt. 'Never mind all that, lady, in this
house it's still what Isky's ayah says.' The girls move, wiggling
cheeky hips, towards the door. And pause in the doorway for a
parting shot: 'Shit, but Isky gives his wife good clothes, the best of
everything, no mistake.' 'That is true. But if a peacock dances in
the jungle, there is nobody to see its tail.'

'And tell Isky's - tell the ayah I want to see my daughter,' she
cries, but the girls have closed the door, and one of them shouts
through it, 'Why be so high and mighty? The child will come
when she's ready.'

Rani Harappa no longer weeps, no longer tells her mirror This
can't be happening or sighs with inaccurate nostalgia for the dormi-
tory of the forty thieves. Plus daughter, minus husband, she is
stranded in this backyard of the universe: Mohenjo, the Harappa
country estate in Sind, stretching from horizon to horizon,
afflicted by a chronic water shortage, populated by laughing
scornful monsters, 'Frankensteins, absolutely.' She no longer
imagines that Iskander does not know how she is treated here. 'He
knows,' she says to her mirror. Her beloved husband, her groom
on the golden plate. 'A woman becomes looser after having a
child,' she confides to the glass, 'and my Isky, he likes things
tight.' Then her hand covers her lips and she runs to door and
windows to make sure nobody has heard.

Shame ? 94

Later, she sits in shalwar and kurta of Italian crepe-de-chine on
the coolest porch, embroidering a shawl, watching a little dust
cloud on the horizon. No, how can it be Isky, he is in town with
his bosom pal Shakil; I knew trouble, knew it the moment I saw
him, the fat pigmeat tub. Probably just one of those little whirl-
winds that skip across the scrub.

Mohenjo earth is obstinate. It bakes its people hard as rocks in
the heat. The horses in the stables are made of iron, the cattle have
diamond bones. The birds here beak up clods of earth, spit, build
nests out of mud; there are few trees, except in the little haunted
wood, where even the iron horses bolt ... an owl, while Rani
embroiders, lies sleeping in a burrow in the ground. Only a
wingtip can be seen.

'If I was murdered here, the news would never leave the
estate.' Rani is uncertain whether or not she has spoken aloud.
Her thoughts, loosened by solitude, often burst these days through
her unconscious lips; and often contradict one another, because
the very next notion to form in her mind as she sits on the heavy-
eaved verandah is this: 'I love the house.'

Verandahs run along all four walls; a long covered mosquito-
netted walkway joins the house to the kitchen bungalow. It is one
of the miracles of the place that chapatis do not cool down on
their journey along this wood-floored avenue to the dining hall;
nor do souffles ever fall. And oil paintings and chandeliers and
high ceilings and a flat tar-macadamed roof upon which, once,
before he abandoned her there, she knelt giggling through a
morning skylight at her husband still in bed. Iskander Harappa's
family home. 'At least I have this piece of him, this soil, his first
place. Bilquis, what a shameless person I must be, to settle for such
a small part of my man.' And Bilquis, on the telephone from Q.:
'Maybe it's O.K. for you, darling, but I could never put up with
it, no sir, anyway my Raza is away at the gas, but spare me your
sympathy, dear, when he comes home he may be tired as hell but
never so tired, you understand what I mean.'

The dust cloud has reached Mir Village now, so it is a visitor
and not a whirlwind. She tries to suppress her excitement. The

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village bears the name of Iskander's father, Sir Mir Harappa, now
deceased, once proudly knighted by the Angrez authorities for
services rendered. The birdshit is cleaned off his equestrian statue
every day. Sir Mir in stone gazes with equal hauteur upon village
hospital and brothel, the epitome of an enlightened zamindar . . .
'A visitor.' She claps her hands, rings a bell. Nothing. Until at
length Isky's ayah, a heavy-boned woman with soft uncallused
hands, brings out a jug of pomegranate water. 'No need to make
such noise, Isky's wife, your husband's household knows how to
entertain.' Behind the ayah is old Gulbaba, deaf, half-blind, and
behind him a trail of spilled pistachio nuts leading to the half-
empty dish in his hands. 'O God your servants darling,' Bilquis has
offered long-distance views, 'all those fogey types left over from
five hundred years ago. I swear you should take them to the
doctor and give the painless injections. What you put up with!
Queen by name, you must make yourself queen by fame.'

She rocks in her verandah chair, the needle moving unhur-
riedly, and feels the youth and gaiety being crushed out of her,
drop by drop, by the pressure of the passing moments, and then
the horsemen ride into the courtyard and she recognizes
Iskander's cousin, Little Mir Harappa from the Daro estate that
begins just over the northern horizon. In these parts horizons
serve as boundary fences.

'Rani Begum,' Little Mir shouts from horseback, 'no point you
blaming me for this. Blame your husband, you should keep him
on a tighter rein. Excuse me, but the fellow's a real motherfucker,
he's got me all worked up.'

A dozen armed horsemen dismount and begin to loot the
house, while Mir wheels and rears his mount and hurls justifica-
tions at his cousin's wife, in the throes of a giddy, neighing frenzy
that sets his tongue free of all constraints. 'What do you know
about that bullock's arsehole, madam? Fuck me in the mouth, but
I know. That pizzle of a homosexual pig. Ask the villagers how his
great father locked up his wife and spent every night in the
brothel, how a whore disappeared when her fat stomach couldn't
be explained by what she ate, and then the next thing Lady

Shame ? 96

Harappa was holding the baby even though everyone knew she
hadn't been screwed in a decade. Like rather, like son, my honest
opinion, sorry if you don't like it. Sisterfucking bastard spawn of
corpse-eating vultures. Does he think he can insult me in public
and get away with it? Who is the elder, me or that sucker of shit
from the rectums of diseased donkeys? Who is the bigger
landowner, me or him with his six inches of land on which even
the lice cannot grow fat? You tell him who is king in these parts.
Tell him who can do what he likes round here, and that he should
come crawling to kiss my feet like a murdering rapist of his own
grandmother and beg for pardon. That nibbler of a crow's left
nipple. This day shows him who's the boss.'

Looters cut from gilded frames paintings of the school of
Rubens; Sheraton chairs have their legs amputated. Antique silver
is placed in worn old saddle-bags. Cut-glass decanters splinter on
thousand-knot carpets. She, Rani, goes on with her embroidery
in the midst of the punitive riot. The old servants, the ayah, Gul-
baba, the polishing girls, syces, villagers from Mir Village stand
and watch, squat and listen. Little Mir, a proud equestrian figure,
the tall hawkish avatar of the statue in the village, does not fall
silent until his men are back upon their horses. 'A man's honour is
in his women,' he shouts. 'So when he took that whore from me
he took my honour, tell him that, the little jumped-up piss
drinker. Tell him about the frog in the well, and how the giant
frog replied. Tell him to be afraid and to think himself lucky I am
a mild-mannered man. I could have regained my honour by
depriving him of his. Lady, I could do to you anything, anything,
and who would dare say no? Here it is my law, Mir's law, that
runs. Salaam aleikum.' The dust of the departing horsemen settles
on the surface of the untouched pomegranate water, then sinks to
form a thick sediment at the bottom of the jug. 'I just can't tell
him yet,' Rani tells Bilquis on the telephone. 'It makes me feel
too ashamed.'

'O, Rani, you got your problems, darling,' Bilquis sympathizes
down the Army telephone line. 'What do you mean you don't
know? Here 1 am, stuck away just like you, and even in this zero-

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town I know what the whole of Karachi is saying. Darling, who
hasn't seen how your Isky and that fat doctor run around, belly-
dancer shows, international hotel swimming-pools where the
naked white women go, why do you think he puts you where
you are? Alcohol, gambling, opium, who knows that. Those
women in their waterproof fig leaves. Excuse me darling but
somebody has to tell you. Cock-fights, bear-fights, snake-and-
mongoose fights, that Shakil fixes everything like a pimp or what.
And how many women? O baba. Under banquet tables he grabs
their thighs. They say the two of them go to the red-light district
with movie cameras. Of course it's clear what that Shakil is up to,
that nobody from nowhere is getting the high life on a plate,
maybe some of those women are willing to be passed on, crumbs
from the rich man's table, you understand my meaning. Anyway
the point is darling your Isky pinched his cousin's juiciest little
French tart from right under his nose, at some big cultural event,
I'm sorry to say it but it was all over town, so funny to see Mir
standing there while Isky walked off with the floozy, O God I
don't know why you don't just cry and cry. Now what's to get
worked up about, honestly you should know who is your friend
and who is poisoning your name behind your back. You should
hear me on the phone, darling, how I defend you, like a tiger,
you've got no idea, sweetie, sitting up there and lording it over
your antique Gulbabas and all.'