Shame (18 page)

' "Like a dog!" he said: it was as if he meant the shame of it to
outlive him.'

By the year of the Hyders' return from Q. the capital had grown,
Karachi had become fat, so that people who had been there from
the beginning could no longer recognize the slender girlish town
of their youth in this obese harridan of a metropolis. The great
fleshy folds of its endless expansion had swallowed up the primeval
salt marshes, and all along the sandspit there erupted, like boils, the
gaudily painted beach houses of the rich. The streets were full of
the darkened faces of young men who had been drawn to the
painted lady by her overblown charms, only to find that her price
was too high for them to pay; something puritan and violent sat

Shame, Good News and the Virgin ? 121

on their foreheads and it was frightening to walk amongst their
disillusions in the heat. The night held smugglers who rode in
scooter-rickshaws to the coast; and the Army, of course, was
in power.

Raza Hyder got off the railway train from the west wreathed in
rumours. This was the period shortly after the disappearance of
the former Chief Minister Aladdin Gichki, who had finally been
released from captivity for lack of hard evidence against him; he
lived quietly with his wife and dog for several weeks until the day
he went out to walk the Alsatian and never returned, even though
his last words to Begum Gichki had been, 'Tell the cook to make
a dozen extra meatballs for dinner, I'm starving to death today.'
Meatballs, one to twelve, steamed expectantly in a dish, but some-
thing must have spoiled Gichki's appetite, because he never ate
them. Possibly he was unable to resist the pangs of hunger and
ate the Alsatian instead, because they never found the dog either,
not so much as a hair of its tail. The Gichki mystery kept cropping
up in conversations, and Hyder's name often got into these chats,
perhaps because the mutual hatred between Gichki and the divine
Maulana Dawood was well known, and Dawood's intimacy with
Hyder was no secret either. Strange stories filtered back to Karachi
from Q. and hung in the air-conditioned urban air.

The official version of Hyder's period of power in the west
was that it had been an unmitigated success, and his career was
continuing along its upward path. Dacoity had been eliminated,
the mosques were full, the organs of state had been purged of
Gichkism, of the corruption disease, and separatism was a dead
duck. Old Razor Guts was now a Brigadier . . . but, as Iskander
Harappa was fond of telling Omar Khayyam Shakil when the pair
of them were in their cups, 'Fuck me in the mouth, yaar, every-
body knows those tribals are running wild out there because
Hyder kept hanging innocent people by the balls.' There were
also whispers about marital troubles in the Hyder household. Even
Rani Harappa in exile heard the rumours of dissension, of the
idiot child whose mother called her 'Shame' and treated her like
mud, of the internal injury which made sons impossible and

Shame ? 122

which was leading Bilquis down dark corridors towards a crack-
up; but she, Rani, did not know how to talk to Bilquis about
these things, and the telephone receiver remained untouched on
its hook.

Some things did not get talked about. Nobody mentioned a
fat-mouthed boy called Sindbad Mengal, or speculated on the
parentage of the younger Hyder girl . . . Brigadier Raza Hyder
was driven directly from the station to the inner sanctum of the
President, Field-Marshal Mohammad A., where according to
some reports he was hugged affectionately and had his cheeks
pulled in friendship, while others hinted that the blast of angry air
issuing from the keyholes of that room was so intensely hot that
Raza Hyder, standing to attention before his outraged President,
must have been badly singed. What is certain is that he emerged
from the Presidential presence as the national minister of educa-
tion, information and tourism, while someone else climbed
aboard a westbound train to assume the governorship of Q. And
Raza Hyder's eyebrows remained intact.

Also intact: the alliance between Raza and Maulana Dawood,
who had accompanied the Hyders to Karachi and who, once he
was installed in the official residence of the new minister, at once
distinguished himself by launching a vociferous public campaign
against the consumption of prawns and blue-bellied crabs, which,
being scavengers, were as unclean as any pig, and which, although
understandably unavailable in far-off Q., were both plentiful
and popular in the capital by the sea. The Maulana was deeply
affronted to find these armoured monsters of the deep freely avail-
able in the fishmarkets, and succeeded in enlisting the support of
urban divines who did not know how to object. The city's fisher-
men found that the sales of shellfish began to drop alarmingly, and
were therefore obliged to rely more than ever on the income they
gained from the smuggling of contraband goods. Illicit booze and
cigarettes replaced blue crabs in the holds of many dhows. No
booze or cigarettes found their way into the Hyder residence,
however. Dawood made unheralded raids on the servants' quar-
ters to check that God was in charge. 'Even a city of scuttling

Shame, Good News and the Virgin ? 123

monstrosities,' he assured Raza Hyder, 'can be purified with the
help of the Almighty.'

Three years after Raza Hyder's return to Q., it became clear
that his star had secretly been in decline, because the rumours
from Q. (Mengal, Gichki, ball-hung tribals) never died down
entirely; so that when the capital was shifted away from Karachi
and taken up north into the clean mountain air and placed in
hideous new buildings specially constructed for the purpose, Raza
Hyder stayed put on the coast. The ministry of education, infor-
mation and tourism went north along with the rest of the admin-
istration; but Raza Hyder (to be blunt) was sacked. He was
returned to military duty, and given the futureless job of com-
manding the Military Training Academy. They permitted him to
keep his house, but Maulana Dawood told him: 'So what if you
still have the marble walls? They have made you a crab in this
marble shell. Na-pak: unclean.'

We have leapt too far ahead: it is time to conclude our remarks
about rumours and shellfish. Sufiya Zinobia, the idiot, is blushing.

I did it to her, I think, to make her pure. Couldn't think of
another way of creating purity in what is supposed to be the Land
of the Pure . . . and idiots are, by definition, innocent. Too
romantic a use to make of mental disability? Perhaps; but it's too
late for such doubts. Sufiya Zinobia has grown, her mind more
slowly than her body, and owing to this slowness she remains, for
me, somehow clean (pak) in the midst of a dirty world. See how,
growing, she caresses a pebble in her hand, unable to say why
goodness seems to lie within this smooth flat stone; how she glows
with pleasure when she hears loving words, even though they are
almost always meant for someone else . . . Bilquis poured all her
affection over her younger daughter, Naveed. 'Good News' � the
nickname had stuck, like a pulled face in the wind � was soaked
in it, a monsoon of love, while Sufiya Zinobia, her parents'
burden, her mother's shame, remained as dry as the desert. Groans,
insults, even the wild blows of exasperation rained on her instead;
but such rain yields no moisture. Her spirit parched for lack of

Shame ? 124

affection, she nevertheless managed, when love was in her
vicinity, to glow happily just to be near the precious thing.

She also blushed. You recall she blushed at birth. Ten years
later, her parents were still perplexed by these reddenings, these
blushes like petrol fires. The fearful incandescence of Sufiya
Zinobia had been, it seemed, intensified by the desert years in Q.
When the Hyders paid the obligatory courtesy call on Bariamma
and her tribe, the ancient lady bent to kiss the girls and was
alarmed to find that her lips had been mildly burned by a sudden
rush of heat to Sufiya Zinobia's cheek; the burn was bad enough
to necessitate twice-daily applications of lip salve for a week. This
misbehaviour of the child's thermostatic mechanisms roused in her
mother what looked like a practised wrath: 'That moron,' Bliquis
shouted beneath the amused gaze of Duniyad Begum and the rest,
'just don't even look at her now! What is this? Anyone puts eyes
on her or tells her two words and she goes red, red like a chilli! I
swear. What normal child goes so beetroot hot that her clothes
can smell of burning? But what to do, she went wrong and that's
that, we must just grin and bear.' The disappointment of the
Hyders in their elder daughter had also been hardened in the
noonday rays of the wilderness into a thing as pitiless as that
shadow-frying sun.

The affliction was real enough. Miss Shahbanou, the Parsee
ayah whom Bliquis had employed on her return to Karachi, com-
plained on her first day that when she gave Sufiya Zinobia a bath
the water had scalded her hands, having been brought close to
boiling point by a red flame of embarrassment that spread from the
roots of the damaged girl's hair to the tips of her curling toes.

To speak plainly: Sufiya Zinobia Hyder blushed uncontrollably
whenever her presence in the world was noticed by others. But
she also, I believe, blushed for the world.

Let me voice my suspicion: the brain-fever that made Sufiya
Zinobia preternaturally receptive to all sorts of things that float
around in the ether enabled her to absorb, like a sponge, a host of
unfelt feelings.

Where do you imagine they go? - I mean emotions that should

Shame, Good News and the Virgin ? 125

have been felt, but were not � such as regret for a harsh word,
guilt for a crime, embarrassment, propriety, shame? � Imagine
shame as a liquid, let's say a sweet fizzy tooth-rotting drink, stored
in a vending machine. Push the right button and a cup plops
down under a pissing stream of the fluid. How to push the
button? Nothing to it. Tell a lie, sleep with a white boy, get
born the wrong sex. Out flows the bubbling emotion and you
drink your fill . . . but how many human beings refuse to fol-
low these simple instructions! Shameful things are done: lies,
loose living, disrespect for one's elders, failure to love one's
national flag, incorrect voting at elections, over-eating, extra-
marital sex, autobiographical novels, cheating at cards, maltreat-
ment of womenfolk, examination failures, smuggling, throwing
one's wicket away at the crucial point of a Test Match: and they
are done shamelessly. Then what happens to all that unfelt shame?
What of the unquaffed cups of pop? Think again of the vending
machine. The button is pushed; but then in comes the shameless
hand and jerks away the cup! The button-pusher does not drink
what was ordered; and the fluid of shame spills, spreading in a
frothy lake across the floor.

But we are discussing an abstract, an entirely ethereal vending
machine; so into the ether goes the unfelt shame of the world.
Whence, I submit, it is siphoned off by the misfortunate few,
janitors of the unseen, their souls the buckets into which
squeegees drip what-was-spilled. We keep such buckets in special
cupboards. Nor do we think much of them, although they clean
up our dirty waters.

Well then: Sufiya the moron blushed. Her mother said to the
assembled relatives, 'She does it to get attention. O, you don't
know what it's like, the mess, the anguish, and for what? For no
reward. For air. Thank God for my Good News.' But goof or no
goof, Sufiya Zinobia - by blushing furiously each time her mother
looked sidelong at her father - revealed to watching family eyes
that something was piling up between those two. Yes. Idiots can
feel such things, that's all.

Shame ? 126

<-*�>

Blushing is slow burning. But it is also another thing: it is a psycho-
somatic event. I quote: 'A sudden shut-down of the arterio-venous
anastomoses of the face floods the capillaries with the blood that
produces the characteristically heightened colour. People who do
not believe in psychosomatic events and do not believe that the
mind can influence the body by direct nervous pathways should
reflect upon blushing, which in people of heightened sensibility
can be brought on even by the recollection of an embarrassment
of which they have been the subject - as clear an example of mind
over matter as one could wish for.'

Like the authors of the above words, our hero, Omar Khayyam
Shakil, is a practitioner of medicine. He is, furthermore, interested
in the action of mind over matter: in behaviour under hypnosis,
for example; in the entranced self-mutilations of those fanatical
Shias whom Iskander Harappa disparagingly calls 'bedbugs'; in
blushing. So it will not be long before Sufiya Zinobia and Omar
Khayyam, patient and doctor, future wife and husband, come
together. As they must; because what I have to tell is � cannot be
described as anything but - a love story.

An account of what happened that year, the fortieth year in the
life of Isky Harappa as well as Raza Hyder, probably ought to
begin with the moment when Iskander heard that his cousin Little
Mir had ingratiated himself with President A., and was about to be
elevated to high office. He jumped clean out of bed when he
heard the news, but Pinkie Aurangzeb, the owner of the bed and
the source of the information, did not budge, even though she
knew that a crisis had burst upon her, and that her forty-three-
year-old body which Iskander had unveiled by jumping out of
bed without letting go of the sheet no longer radiated the kind of
light that could get men's minds off whatever was bugging them.
'Shit on my mother's grave,' Iskander Harappa yelled, 'first Hyder
becomes a minister and now him. Life gets serious when a man is
pushing forty.'

'Things are starting to fade,' Pinkie Aurangzeb thought as she