Shame (16 page)

Politeness can be a trap, and Bilquis was caught in the web of
her husband's courtesy. 'As you wish,' she wrote back, and what
made her write this was not entirely guilt, but also something
untranslatable, a law which obliged her to pretend that Raza's
words meant no more than they said. This law is called takallouf.
To unlock a society, look at its untranslatable words. Takallouf is a
member of that opaque, world-wide sect of concepts which refuse
to travel across linguistic frontiers: it refers to a form of tongue-
typing formality, a social restraint so extreme as to make it impos-
sible for the victim to express what he or she really means, a
species of compulsory irony which insists, for the sake of good
form, on being taken literally. When takallouf gets between a hus-
band and a wife, look out.

Raza travelled alone to the capital. . . and now that an untrans-
latable word has brought Hyder and Harappa, unencumbered by
spouses, very near to meeting once again, it is time to take stock
of the situation, because our two duellists will shortly find them-
selves doing battle. Even now, the cause of their first altercation is
allowing a servant girl to oil and braid her hair. She, Atiyah
Aurangzeb, known to her intimates as "Pinkie', is contemplating,
coolly, the soiree which she has decided to arrange in the name of
her almost senile husband, the crumbling Marshal Aurangzeb,
Joint Chief of Staff. Pinkie Aurangzeb is in her middle thirties,
several years older than Raza and Iskander, but this does not
diminish her allure; mature women have charms of their own, as
is well known. Trapped in a marriage with a dotard, Pinkie finds
her pleasures wherever she can.

Meanwhile, two wives are abandoned in their separate exiles,
each with a daughter who should have been a son (more
needs to be said about young Arjumand Harappa, more will

The Duellists ? 105

certainly be written about poor, idiot Sufiya Zinobia). Two dif-
ferent approaches to the matter of revenge have been outlined.
And while Iskander Harappa consorts with a fat pigment tub
named Omar Khayyam Shakil for purposes of debauchery etc.,
Raza Hyder would seem to have fallen under the influence of a
grey eminence, who whispers austere secrets in the backs of Army
limousines. Cinemas, sons of witches, bruises on foreheads, frogs,
peacocks have all worked to create an atmosphere in which the
stink of honour is all-pervasive.

Yes, it is high time the combatants took the field.

The fact is that Raza Hyder was smitten right between the eyes by
Pinkie Aurangzeb. He desired her so badly that it made the bruise
on his forehead ache, but he lost her to Iskander Harappa, right
there at the Marshall's reception, while the old soldier slept in an
armchair, relegated to a corner of the glittering throng, but even
in that condition of somnolent cuckolded dotage never spilling a
drop from the brimming tumbler of whisky-soda he clutched in
his sleeping hand.

On that fateful occasion began a duel which was to continue at
least until both protagonists were dead, if not longer. Its initial
prize was the body of the Marshal's wife, but after that it moved
on to higher things. First things first, however: and Pinkie's body,
excitingly on display, in a green sari worn dangerously low upon
the hips in the fashion of the women of the East Wing; with
silver-and-diamond earrings in the form of crescent-and-star
hanging brightly from pierced lobes; and bearing upon irresistibly
vulnerable shoulders a light shawl whose miraculous work could
only have been the product of the fabled embroiderers of Aansu,
because amidst its miniscule arabesques a thousand and one stories
had been portrayed in threads of gold, so vividly that it seemed
the tiny horsemen were actually galloping along her collarbone,
while minute birds appeared to be flying, actually flying, down
the graceful meridian of her spine . . . this body is worth linger-
ing over.

And lingering over it, when Raza had managed to fight his way

Shame � 106

through the whirlpools and eddies of young bucks and jealous
women surrounding Pinkie Aurangzeb, was the half-drunk
Iskander Harappa, city playboy number one, at whom the vision
of loveliness was smiling with a warmth that froze the thick per-
spiration of his arousal on to Raza's waxed moustache, while that
notorious degenerate with his filthy tongue that put even his
cousin Mir to shame told the goddess dirty jokes.

Raza Hyder stiff, at embarrassed attention, the garment of his
lust rendered rigid by the starch of takallouf. . . but Isky hiccuped,
'Look who's here! Our goddamn hero, the tilyar!' Pinkie tittered as
Iskander adopted a professional stance, adjusting invisible pince-
nez: 'The tilyar, madam, as you are possibly aware, is a skinny little
migrating bird good for nothing but shooting out of the sky.' Rip-
ples of laughter spread outwards through the eddying bucks.
Pinkie, annihilating Raza with a look, murmured, 'Pleased to
meet,' and Raza found himself replying with a ruinously awkward
and bombastic formality, 'My honour, lady, and may I say that in
my opinion and with the grace of God the new blood is going to
be the making of our great new nation,' but Pinkie Aurangzeb was
pretending to stifle a laugh. 'Fuck me in the mouth, tilyar,'
Iskander Harappa shouted gaily, 'this is a party, yaar, no mother-
fucking speeches, for God's sake.' The rage buried beneath Hyder's
good manners was bubbling higher, but it was impotent against this
sophistication that permitted obscenity and blasphemy and could
murder a man's desire and his pride with clever laughter. 'Cousin,'
he attempted catastrophically, 'I am just a simple soldier,' but now
his hostess stopped pretending not to laugh at him, drew the shawl
tighter around her shoulders, put a hand on Iskander Harappa's
arm and said, 'Take me into the garden, Isky. The air-conditioning
is too cold in here, and outside it's nice and warm.'

'Then into the warm, pronto!' Harappa cried gallantly, pressing
his glass into Raza's hand for safe-keeping. 'For you, Pinkie, I
would enter the furnaces of hell, if you desire protection when
you get there. My teetotal relative Raza is no less brave,' he added
over his departing shoulder, 'only he goes to hell not for ladies,
but for gas.'

The Duellists ? 107

Watching from the sidelines as Iskander Harappa bore his prize
away into the close, musky twilight of the garden was the flabby
Himalayan figure of our peripheral hero, the doctor, Omar
Khayyam Shakil.

Do not form too low an opinion of Atiyah Aurangzeb. She
remained faithful to Iskander Harappa even after he turned serious
and dispensed with her services, and retired without a word of
complaint into the stoic tragedy of her private life, until the day of
his death, when after setting fire to an old embroidered shawl she
hacked out her own heart with a nine-inch kitchen knife. And
Isky, too, was faithful to her in his fashion. From the time that she
became his mistress he stopped sleeping with his wife Rani alto-
gether, thus ensuring that she would have no more children, and
that he would be the last of his line, an idea which, he told Omar
Khayyam Shakil, was not without a certain appeal.

(Here I should explain the matter of daughters-who-should-
have-been-sons. Sufiya Zinobia was the 'wrong miracle' because
her father had wanted a boy; but this was not Arjumand Harappa's
problem. Arjumand, the famous 'virgin Ironpants', regretted her
female sex for wholly non-parental reasons. 'This woman's body,'
she told her father on the day she became a grown woman, 'it
brings a person nothing but babies, pinches and shame.')

Iskander reappeared from the garden as Raza was preparing to
leave, and attempted to make peace. With a formality the equal of
Raza's own, he said: 'Dear fellow, before you go back to Needle
you must come up to Mohenjo; Rani would be so happy. Poor
girl, I wish she enjoyed this city life . . . and I insist that you call
your Billoo there also. Let the ladies have a good chat while we
shoot tilyars all day long. What do you say?'

And takallouf obliged Raza Hyder to answer: 'Thank you, yes.'

The day before they passed the sentence of death Iskander
Harappa would be permitted to telephone his daughter for one
minute exactly. The last words he ever addressed to her in private
were acrid with the hopeless nostalgia of those shrunken times:

Shame � 108

'Arjumand, my love, I should have gone out to fight this buffalo-
fucker Hyder when he staked himself to the ground. I left that
business unfinished; it was my biggest mistake.'

Even in his playboy period Iskander occasionally felt bad about
his sequestered wife. At such moments he rounded up a few
cronies, bundled them into station-wagons and led a convoy of
urban gaiety up to his country estate. Pinkie Aurangzeb was con-
spicuous by her absence; and Rani was queen for a day.

When Raza Hyder accepted Isky's invitation to Mohenjo, the
two of them drove up together, followed by five other vehicles
containing an ample supply of whisky, film starlets, sons of textile
magnates, European diplomats, soda siphons and wives. Bilquis,
Sufiya Zinobia and the ayah were met at the private railway sta-
tion Sir Mir Harappa had constructed on the main line from the
capital to Q. And, for one day, nothing bad happened at all.

After the death of Isky Harappa, Rani and Arjumand Harappa
were kept locked up in Mohenjo for several years, and to fill the
silences the mother told the daughter about the business of the
shawl. 'I had begun to embroider it before I heard that I was
sharing my husband with Little Mir's woman, but it turned out to
be a premonition of another woman entirely.' By that time Arju-
mand Harappa had already reached the stage of refusing to hear
anything bad about her father. She snapped back: 'Allah, mother,
all you can do is bitch about the Chairman. If he did not love you,
you must have done something to deserve it.' Rani Harappa
shrugged. 'Chairman Iskander Harappa, your father, whom I
always loved,' she replied, 'was world champion of shamelessness;
he was international rogue and bastard number one. You see,
daughter, I remember those days, I remember Raza Hyder when
he was not a devil with horns and a tail, and also Isky, before he
became a saint.'

The bad thing that happened at Mohenjo when the Hyders
were there was started by a fat man who had had too much to
drink. It happened on the second evening of that visit, on the very
verandah on which Rani Harappa had gone on with her embroi-

The Duellists ? 109

dery while Little Mir's men looted her home - an incursion
whose effects could still be seen, in the empty picture-frames with
fragments of canvas adhering to the corners, in the sofas whose
stuffing stuck out through the ripped leather, in the odd assort-
ment of cutlery at the dining table and the obscene slogans in the
hall, which could still be made out beneath the coats of white-
wash. The partial wreckage of the Mohenjo house gave the guests
the feeling of holding a celebration in the midst of a disaster, and
made them expect more trouble, so that the bright laughter of the
film starlet Zehra acquired an edge of hysteria and the men all
drank too fast. And all the time Rani Harappa sat in her rocking-
chair and worked on her shawl, leaving the organization of
Mohenjo to the ayah who was fawning over Iskander as if he were
three years old, or a deity, or both. And finally the trouble did
come, and because it was the fate of Omar Khayyam Shakil to
affect, from his position on the periphery, the great events whose
central figures were other people but which collectively made up
his own life, it was he who said with a tongue made too loose by
the neurotic drinking of the evening that Mrs Bilquis Hyder was a
lucky woman, Iskander had done her a favour by pinching Pinkie
Aurangzeb from under Raza's nose. 'If Isky hadn't been there
maybe our hero's Begum would have to console herself with chil-
dren, because there would be no man to fill her bed.' Shakil had
spoken too loud, to gain the attention of the starlet Zehra, who
was more interested in the over-bright looks she was getting from
a certain Akbar Junejo, a well-known gambler and film producer;
when Zehra moved away without bothering to make any excuses,
Shakil was faced with the spectacle of a wide-eyed Bilquis, who
had just emerged on to the verandah after seeing her daughter
into bed, and on whom the pregnancy was showing much too
early ... so who knows if that was the reason for Bilquis's stand, if
she was just trying to transfer her own guilt on to the shoulders of
a husband whose probity was now also the subject of gossip? �
Anyway, what happened was this: after it became clear to
the guests that Omar Khayyam's words had been heard and
understood by the woman who stood blazing on the evening

Shame ? 110

verandah, a silence fell, and a stillness which reduced the party to a
tableau of fear, and into that stillness Bilquis Hyder shrieked her
husband's name.

It must not be forgotten that she was a woman to whom the
dupatta of womanly honour had clung even when the rest of her
clothing had been torn off her body; not a woman to turn a deaf
ear to public slanders. Raza Hyder and Iskander Harappa stared
wordlessly at each other while Bilquis pointed a long-nailed index
finger at the heart of Omar Khayyam Shakil.

'You hear that man, husband? Hear what shame he is making
for me.'

O, the hush, the muteness, like a cloud that obscured the
horizon! Even the owls forbore to screech.

Raza Hyder came to attention, because once the afrit of
honour has been summoned from its sleep, it will not depart until
satisfied. 'Iskander,' Raza said, 'I will not fight inside your house.'
Then he did a strange and a wild thing. He marched off the
verandah, entered the stables, returned with a wooden stake, a
mallet and a length of good stout rope. The stake was driven into
the rock-hard earth; and then Colonel Hyder, future President,
tethered himself to it by the ankle and hurled the mallet away.