Shame (17 page)

'Here I stand,' he shouted, 'let the one who slanders my
honour come out and find me.' And there, all night long, he
remained; because Omar Khayyam Shakil rushed indoors, to faint
of alcohol and fright.

Hyder like a bull paced in circles, the rope a radius stretching
taut from ankle to stake. The night thickened; the guests, embar-
rassed, drifted away to bed. But Isky Harappa stayed on the
verandah, knowing that although the folly had been the fat man's,
the true quarrel stood between the Colonel and himself. The
starlet Zehra, on her way to a bed which it would be unforgivably
loose-tongued of me to suggest was already occupied � so I shall
say nothing at all on the subject � offered her host a warning.
'Don't go getting any stupid ideas, Isky darling, you hear? Don't
you dare go out there. He's a soldier, look at him, like a tank, he'll

The Duellists ? 111

kill you for sure. Just let him cool off, O.K.?' But Rani Harappa
gave her husband no advice. ('You see, Arjumand,' she told her
daughter, years later, 'I recall your daddy when he was too
mousey to take his medicine like a man.')

How it ended: badly, as it had to. Just before dawn. You can
understand: Raza had been awake all night, stamping in the circle
of his pride, his eyes red with rage and fatigue. Red eyes don't see
clearly - and the light was poor - and who sees servants coming,
anyway? � what I'm trying to say is that old Gulbaba woke early
and walked across the yard with a brass lotah jug, on his way to
ablute before saying his prayers; and, seeing Colonel Hyder tied to
a stake, crept up behind him to ask, sir, what are you doing, will it
not be better if you come . . . ? Old servants take liberties. It is the
privilege of their years. But Raza, sleep-deafened, heard only
steps, a voice; felt a tap on his shoulder; swung round; and with
one terrible blow, felled Gulbaba like a twig. The violence loos-
ened something inside the old man; let us call it life, because
within a month old Gul was dead, with a confused expression on
his face, like a man who knows he has mislaid an important pos-
session and can't remember what it is.

In the aftermath of that murderous punch Bilquis relented,
emerging from the shadow of the house to persuade Raza to
unhitch himself from his post. 'The poor girl, Raza, don't make
her see this thing.' And when Raza came back to the verandah,
Iskander Harappa, himself unslept and unshaven, offered his arms
in embrace, and Raza, with considerable grace, hugged Isky,
shoulder against shoulder, allowing their necks to meet, as the
saying goes.

When Rani Harappa emerged from her boudoir the next day
to say goodbye to her husband, Iskander went pale at the sight of
the shawl she had wrapped around her shoulders, a completed
shawl as delicately worked as anything made by the craftswonien
of Aansu, a masterpiece amidst whose minuscule arabesques a
thousand and one stories had been portrayed, so artfully that it
seemed as though horsemen were galloping along her collarbone,

Shame ? 112

while tiny birds flew along the soft meridian of her spine.
'Good-bye, Iskander,' she told him, 'and do not forget that the
love of some women is not blind.'

Well, well, friendship is a bad word for the thing between Raza
and Iskander, but for a long time after the incident of the stake
it was the word they both used. Sometimes the good words can't
be found.

She has always wanted to be a queen, but now that Raza Hyder is
at last a sort of prince the ambition has gone sour on her lips. A
second baby has been born, six weeks early, but Raza has uttered
no word of suspicion. Another daughter, but he hasn't com-
plained about that either, saying only that it is quite proper that
the first should be a boy and the second a girl, so one must not
blame the new arrival for her elder sister's mistake. The girl has
been named Naveed, that is Good News, and she is a model baby.
But the mother has been damaged by this birth. Something has
been torn inside, and the medical opinion is that she must have no
more children. Raza Hyder will never have a son. He has spoken,
just once, of the boy with field-glasses at the window of the
witches' house, but this subject, too, has been closed. He is with-
drawing from her down the corridors of his mind, closing the
doors behind him. Sindbad Mengal, Mohenjo, love: all these
doors are closed. She sleeps alone, so that her old fears have her at
their mercy, and it is in these days that she begins to be afraid of
the hot afternoon wind that flows so fiercely out of her past.

Martial law has been declared. Raza has arrested Chief Minister
Gichki and been appointed administrator of the region. He has
moved into the Ministerial residence with his wife and children,
abandoning to its memories that cracking hotel in which the last
trained monkey has taken to wandering listlessly amidst the dying
palms of the dining hall while ageing musicians scratch at their
rotting riddles for an audience of empty tables. She does not see
much of Raza these days. He has work to do. The gas pipeline is
progressing well, and now that Gichki is out of the way a pro-
gramme of making examples of arrested tribals has been inaugu-

The Duellists ? 113

rated. She fears that the bodies of hanged men will turn the citi-
zens of Q. against her husband, but she does not say this to him.
He is taking a firm line, and Maulana Dawood gives him all the
advice he needs.

The last time I visited Pakistan, I was told this joke. God came
down to Pakistan to see how things were going. He asked General
Ayub Khan why the place was in such a mess. Ayub replied: 'It's
these no-good corrupt civilians, sir. Just get rid of them and leave
the rest to me.' So God eliminated the politicos. After a while, He
returned; things were even worse than before. This time He asked
Yahya Khan for an explanation. Yahya blamed Ayub, his sons and
their hangers-on for the troubles. 'Do the needful,' Yahya begged,
'and I'll clean the place up good and proper.' So God's thunder-
bolts wiped out Ayub. On His third visit, He found a catastrophe,
so He agreed with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto that democracy must
return. He turned Yahya into a cockroach and swept him under a
carpet; but, a few years later, he noticed the situation was still
pretty awful. He went to General Zia and offered him supreme
power: on one condition. 'Anything, God,' the General replied,
'You name it.' So God said, 'Answer me one question and I'll
flatten Bhutto for you like a chapati.' Zia said: 'Fire away.' So
God whispered in his ear: 'Look, I do all these things for this
country, but what I don't understand is: why don't people seem to
love me any more?'

It seems clear that the President of Pakistan managed to give
God a satisfactory answer. I wonder what it was.

III

Shame, Good News
and the Virgin

7

Blushing

Not so long ago, in the East End of London, a Pakistani father
murdered his only child, a daughter, because by making love
to a white boy she had brought such dishonour upon her family
that only her blood could wash away the stain. The tragedy was
intensified by the father's enormous and obvious love for his
butchered child, and by the beleaguered reluctance of his friends
and relatives (all 'Asians', to use the confusing term of these trying
days) to condemn his actions. Sorrowing, they told radio micro-
phones and television cameras that they understood the man's
point of view, and went on supporting him even when it turned
out that the girl had never actually 'gone all the way' with her
boyfriend. The story appalled me when I heard it, appalled me in
a fairly obvious way. I had recently become a father myself and
was therefore newly capable of estimating how colossal a force
would be required to make a man turn a knife-blade against his
own flesh and blood. But even more appalling was my realization
that, like the interviewed friends etc., I, too, found myself under-
standing the killer. The news did not seem alien to me. We who
have grown up on a diet of honour and shame can still grasp what
must seem unthinkable to peoples living in the aftermath of the

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Shame ? 118

death of God and of tragedy: that men will sacrifice their dearest
love on the implacable altars of their pride. (And not only men. I
have since heard of a case in which a woman committed the iden-
tical crime for identical reasons.) Between shame and shameless-
ness lies the axis upon which we turn; meteorological conditions
at both these poles are of the most extreme, ferocious type.
Shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence.

My Sufiya Zinobia grew out of the corpse of that murdered
girl, although she will not (have no fear) be slaughtered by Raza
Hyder. Wanting to write about shame, I was at first haunted by
the imagined spectre of that dead body, its throat slit like a halal
chicken, lying in a London night across a zebra crossing, slumped
across black and white, black and white, while above her a Belisha
beacon blinked, orange, not-orange, orange. I thought of the
crime as having been committed right there, publicly, ritually,
while at the windows eyes. And no mouth opened in protest. And
when the police knocked on doors, what hope of assistance had
they? Inscrutability of the 'Asian' face under the eyes of the foe. It
seems even the insomniacs at their windows closed their eyelids
and saw nothing. And the father left with blood-cleansed name
and grief.

I even went so far as to give the dead girl a name: Anahita
Muhammad, known as Anna. In my imagination she spoke with
an East London accent but wore jeans, blue brown pink, out of
some atavistic reluctance to show her legs. She would certainly
have understood the language her parents spoke at home, but
would obstinately have refused to utter a word of it herself.
Anna Muhammad: lively, no doubt attractive, a little too danger-
ously so at sixteen. Mecca meant ballrooms to her, rotating
silver balls, strobe lighting, youth. She danced behind my eyes, her
nature changing each time I glimpsed her: now innocent, now
whore, then a third and a fourth thing. But finally she eluded
me, she became a ghost, and I realized that to write about
her, about shame, I would have to go back East, to let the idea
breathe its favourite air. Anna, deported, repatriated to a country

'I

Shame, Good News and the Virgin ? 119

she had never seen, caught brain-fever and turned into a sort
of idiot.

Why did I do that to her? � Or maybe the fever was a lie, a fig-
ment of Bilquis Hyder's imagination, intended to cover up the
damage done by repeated blows to the head: hate can turn a
miracle-gone-wrong into a basket case. And that hakimi potion
sounds pretty unconvincing. How hard to pin down the truth,
especially when one is obliged to see the world in shces; snapshots
conceal as much as they make plain.

All stories are haunted by the ghosts of the stories they might
have been. Anna Muhammad haunts this book; I'll never write
about her now. And other phantoms are here as well, earlier and
now ectoplasmic images connecting shame and violence. These
ghosts, like Anna, inhabit a country that is entirely unghostly: no
spectral 'Peccavistan', but Proper London. I'll mention two: a girl
set upon in a late-night underground train by a group of teenage
boys is the first. The girl 'Asian' again, the boys predictably white.
Afterwards, remembering her beating, she feels not angry but
ashamed. She does not want to talk about what happened, she
makes no official complaint, she hopes the story won't get out: it
is a typical reaction, and the girl is not one girl but many. Looking
at smoking cities on my television screen, I see groups of young
people running through the streets, the shame burning on their
brows and setting fire to shops, police shields, cars. They remind
me of my anonymous girl. Humiliate people for long enough and
a wildness bursts out of them. Afterwards, surveying the wreckage
of their rage, they look bewildered, uncomprehending, young.
Did we do such things? Us? But we're just ordinary kids, nice
people, we didn't know we could . . . then, slowly, pride dawns
on them, pride in their power, in having learned to hit back. And
I imagine what would have happened if such a fury could have
been released in that girl on her underground train - how she
would have thrashed the white kids within an inch of their lives,
breaking arms legs noses balls, without knowing whence the vio-
lence came, without seeing how she, so slight a figure, could

Shame ? 120

command such awesome strength. And they, what would they
have done? How to tell the police they were beaten up by a mere
girl, just one weak female against the lot of them? How to look
their comrades in the face? I feel gleeful about this notion: it's a
seductive, silky thing, this violence, yes it is.

I never gave this second girl a name. But she, too, is inside my
Sufiya Zinobia now, and you'll recognize her when she pops out.

The last ghost inside my heroine is male, a boy from a news
clipping. You may have read about him, or at least his prototype:
he was found blazing in a parking lot, his skin on fire. He burned
to death, and the experts who examined his body and the
scene of the incident were forced to accept what seemed impos-
sible: namely that the boy had simply ignited of his own
accord, without dousing himself in petrol or applying any external
flame. We are energy; we are fire; we are light. Finding the key,
stepping through into that truth, a boy began to burn.

Enough. Ten years have slipped by in my story while I've been
seeing ghosts. - But one last word on the subject: the first time I
sat down to think about Anahita Muhammad, I recalled the last
sentence of The Trial by Franz Kafka, the sentence in which
Joseph K. is stabbed to death. My Anna, like Kafka's Joseph, died
under a knife. Not so Sufiya Zinobia Hyder; but that sentence,
the ghost of an epigraph, hangs over her story still: