Shame (19 page)

Shame, Good News and the Virgin ? 127

lay smoking eleven consecutive cigarettes while Iskander
stalked the room wrapped in the bedsheet. She lit her twelfth
cigarette as Isky absently let the sheet fall. Then she watched him
in the nudity of his prime as he silently broke his ties with his pre-
sent, and turned towards the future. Pinkie was a widow; old
Marshal Aurangzeb had kicked the bucket at last, and nowadays
her soirees were not quite such essential affairs, and the city gossip
had begun to reach her late. 'The ancient Greeks,' Iskander said
out of the blue, making Pinkie spill the ash off her cigarette-tip,
'kept, in the Olympic games, no records of runners-up.' Then he
dressed quickly, but with the meticulous dandyism that she had
always loved, and left her for good; that sentence was the only
explanation she ever got. But in the years of her isolation she
worked it out, she knew that History had been waiting for
Iskander Harappa to notice Her, and a man who catches History's
eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never
escape. History is natural selection. Mutant versions of the
past struggle for dominance; new species of fact arise, and old,
saurian truths go to the wall, blindfolded and smoking last
cigarettes. Only the mutations of the strong survive. The weak,
the anonymous, the defeated leave few marks: field-patterns, axe-
heads, folk-tales, broken pitchers, burial mounds, the fading
memory of their youthful beauty. History loves only those
who dominate her: it is a relationship of mutual enslavement. No
room in it for Pinkies; or, in Isky's view, for the likes of Omar
Khayyam Shakil.

Reborn Alexanders, would-be Olympic champions must con-
form to the most stringent of training routines. So after he left
Pinkie Aurangzeb, Isky Harappa also vowed to eschew everything
else that could erode his spirit. His daughter Arjumand would
always remember that that was when he gave up stud poker,
chemin de fer, private roulette evenings, horse-race fixing, French
food, opium and sleeping pills; when he broke his habit of seeking
out beneath silver-heavy banqueting tables the excited ankles and
compliant knees of society beauties, and when he stopped visiting
the whores whom he had been fond of photographing with an

Shame ? 12!

I

eight millimetre Paillard Bolex movie camera while they per-
formed, singly or in threes, upon his own person or that of Omar
Khayyam, their musky languid rites. It was the beginning of that
legendary political career which would culminate in his victory
over death itself. These first triumphs, being merely victories over
himself, were necessarily smaller. He expunged from his public,
urban vocabulary his encyclopaedic repertoire of foul green village
oaths, imprecations which could detach brim-full cut-glass tum-
blers from men's hands and shatter them before they reached the
floor. (But when campaigning in the villages he allowed the air to
turn green with obscenity once again, understanding the vote-
getting powers of the filth.) He stifled for ever the high-pitched
giggle of his unreliable playboy self and substituted a rich, full-
throated, statesmanlike guffaw. He gave up fooling around with
the women servants in his city home.

Did any man ever sacrifice more for his people? He gave up
cock-fights, bear-fights, snake-and-mongoose duels; plus disco
dancing, and his monthly evenings at the home of the chief film
censor, where he had watched special compilations of the juiciest
bits excised from incoming foreign films.

He also decided to give up Omar Khayyam Shakil. 'When that
degenerate comes to call,' Iskander instructed the gatekeeper, 'just
throw the badmash out on his fat bottom and watch him bounce.'
Then he retired into the white-and-gilt rococo bedroom at the
cool heart of his mansion in 'Defence', an edifice of reinforced
cement concrete and stone cladding that resembled a split-level
Telefunken radiogram, and sank into meditation.

But, for a long time, surprisingly, Omar Khayyam neither
visited nor telephoned his old friend. Forty days passed before
the doctor was made aware of the change in his carefree, shame-
free world . . .

Who sits at her father's feet while, elsewhere, Pinkie Aurangzeb
grows old in an empty house? Arjumand Harappa: thirteen years
old and wearing an expression of huge satisfaction, she sits cross-
legged on the marble-chip floor of a rococo bedroom, watching

Shame, Good News and the Virgin ? 129

Isky complete the process of remaking himself; Arjumand, who
has not yet acquired the notorious nickname (the 'virgin Iron-
pants') that will stick to her for most of her life. She has always
known in the precocity of her years that there is a second man
inside her father, growing, waiting, and now at last bursting out,
while the old Iskander slips rustling and discarded to the floor, a
shrivelled snakeskin in a hard diamond of sunlight. So what plea-
sure she takes in his transformation, in finally acquiring the father
she deserves! 'I did this,' she tells Iskander, 'my wanting it so badly
finally made you see.' Harappa smiles at his daughter, pats her
hair. 'That happens sometimes.' 'And no more Omar-uncle,'
Arjumand adds. 'Good riddance to bad rubbish.'

Arjumand Harappa, the virgin Ironpants, will always be ruled
by extremes. Already, at thirteen, she has a gift for loathing; also
for adulation. Whom she loathes: Shakil, the fat monkey who has
been sitting on her father's shoulders, holding him down in the
slime; and also her own mother, Rani in her Mohenjo of bur-
rowing owls, the epitome of defeat. Arjumand has persuaded her
father to let her live and go to school in the city; and for this father
she bears a reverence bordering on idolatry. Now that her wor-
ship is at last acquiring an object worthy of itself, Arjumand
cannot restrain her joy. 'What things won't you do!' she cries.
'Just wait and see!' Omar Khayyam's absent bulk carries with it
the shadows of the past.

Iskander, supine in white-and-gold bed and sunk in frenzied
reverie, states with sudden clarity: 'It's a man's world, Arjumand.
Rise above your gender as you grow. This is no place to be a
woman in.' The rueful nostalgia of these sentences marks the last
death-throes of Iskander's love for Pinkie Aurangzeb, but his
daughter takes him at his word, and when her breasts begin to
swell she will bind them tightly in linen bandages, so fiercely that
she blushes with pain. She will come to enjoy the war against her
body, the slow provisional victory over the soft, despised flesh . . .
but let us leave them there, father and daughter, she already
building in her heart that Alexandrine god-myth of Harappa to

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Shame ? 130

which she will only be able to give free rein after his death, he
devising in the councils of his new cleanness the strategies of his
future triumph, of his wooing of the age.

Where is Omar Khayyam Shakil? What has become of our
peripheral hero? He has aged, too; like Pinkie, he's in his middle
forties now. Age has treated him well, silvering his hair and goatee
beard. Let us remind ourselves that he was a brilliant student in his
day, and that scholarly brightness remains undimmed; lecher and
rakehell he may be, but he is also the top man at the city's leading
hospital, and an immunologist of no small international renown.
In the time since we last knew him well he has travelled to
American seminars, published papers on the possibility of psycho-
somatic events occurring within the body's immune system,
becoming an important chap. He is still fat and ugly, but
he dresses now with some distinction; some of Isky's snappy sarto-
rial ways have rubbed off on him. Omar Khayyam wears greys:
grey suits, hats, ties, grey suede shoes, grey silk underpants, as
if he hopes that the muteness of the colour will tone down the
garish effect of his physiognomy. He carries a present from his
friend Iskander: a silver-headed swordstick from the Aansu
valley, twelve inches of polished steel concealed in intricately-
carved walnut.

By this time he is sleeping for barely two and a half hours a
night, but the dream of falling off the world's end still troubles
him from time to time. Sometimes it comes to him when he is
awake, because people who sleep too little can find the boundaries
between the waking and sleeping worlds get difficult to police.
Things skip between the unguarded bollards, avoiding the cus-
toms post ... at such times he is assailed by a terrible vertigo, as if
he were on top of a crumbling mountain, and then he leans
heavily on his sword-concealing cane to prevent himself from
falling. It should be said that his professional success, and his
friendship with Iskander Harappa, have had the effect of reducing
the frequency of these giddy spells, of keeping our hero's feet a
little more firmly on the ground. But still the dizziness comes,

Shame, Good News and the Virgin ? 131

now and then, to remind him how close he is, will always be, to
the edge.

But where has he got to? Why does he not telephone, visit, get
bounced out on his behind? � I discover him in Q., in the fortress
home of his three mothers, and at once I know that a disaster has
taken place, because nothing else could have lured Omar
Khayyam into the mother country once again. He has not visited
'Nishapur' since the day he left with his feet on a cooling ice-
block; bankers' drafts have been sent in his stead. His money has
paid for his absence . . . but there are other prices, too. And no
escape is final. His willed severance from his past mingles with the
chosen insomnia of his nights: their joint effect is to glaze his
moral sense, to transform him into a kind of ethical zombie, so
that his very act of distancing helps him to obey his mothers'
ancient injunction: the fellow feels no shame.

He retains his mesmeric eyes, his level hypnotist's voice. For
many years now Iskander Harappa has accompanied those eyes,
that voice to the Intercontinental Hotel and allowed them to go
to work on his behalf. Omar Khayyam's outsize ugliness, com-
bined with eyes-and-voice, makes him attractive to white women
of a certain type. They succumb to his flirtatious offers of hyp-
nosis, his unspoken promises of the mysteries of the East; he takes
them to a rented hotel suite and puts them under. Released from
admittedly scanty inhibitions they provide Isky and Omar with
some highly charged sex. Shakil defends his behaviour: 'Impos-
sible to persuade a subject to do anything she is unwilling to do.'
Iskander Harappa, however, has never bothered with excuses . . .
this, too, is a part of what Isky - as yet unbeknownst to Omar
Khayyam � has forsaken. For History's sake.

Omar Khayyam is in 'Nishapur' because his brother, Babar, is
dead. The brother whom he has never seen, dead before his
twenty-third birthday, and all that is left of him is a bundle of dirty
notebooks, which Omar Khayyam will bring with him when he
returns to Karachi after the forty days of mourning. A brother
reduced to tattered, scribbled words. Babar has been shot, and the
order to fire was given by ... but no, the notebooks first:

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Shame ? 132

When they brought his body down from the Impossible Moun-
tains, smelling of corruption and goats, the notebooks they dis-
covered in his pockets were returned to his family with many of
their pages missing. Among the tattered remnants of these brutal-
ized volumes it was possible to decipher a series of love-poems
addressed to a famous playback singer whom he, Babar Shakil,
could not possibly have met. And interspersed with the unevenly
metrical expressions of this abstract love, in which hymns to the
spirituality of her voice mingled uneasily with free verse of a dis-
tinctly pornographic sensuality, was to be found an account of his
sojourn in an earlier hell, a record of the torment of having been
the kid brother of Omar Khayyam.

The shade of his elder sibling had haunted every corner of
'Nishapur'. Their three mothers, who now subsisted on the
doctor's remittances and had no more dealings with the pawn-
broker, had conspired in their gratitude to make Babar's child-
hood a motionless journey through an unchanging shrine whose
walls were impregnated by applause for the glorious, departed
elder son. And because Omar Khayyam was so much his senior
and had long since fled that provincial dustiness in whose streets,
nowadays, drunken gas-field workers brawled desultorily with ofF-
duty miners of coal, bauxite, onyx, copper and chrome, and over
whose rooftops the cracked dome of Flashman's Hotel presided
with ever-increasing mournfulness, the younger child, Babar, had
the feeling of having been at once oppressed and abandoned by a
second father; and in that household of women atrophied by yes-
terdays he celebrated his twentieth birthday by carrying examina-
tion certificates and gold medals and newspaper cuttings and old
schoolbooks and files of letters and cricket bats and, in short, all
the souvenirs of his illustrious sibling into the shadowed lightless-
ness of the central compound, and setting fire to the whole lot
before his three mothers could stop him. Turning his back on the
inglorious spectacle of old crones scrabbling amongst hot ashes for
the charred corners of snapshots and for medallions which the fire
had transmuted from gold into lead, Babar made his way via the

Shame, Good News and the Virgin ? 133

dumb-waiter into the streets of Q., his anniversary thoughts slow
with uncertainties about the future. He was wandering aimlessly,
brooding upon the narrowness of his possibilities, when the earth-
quake began.

At first he mistook it for a shudder within his own body, but a
blow to his cheek, inflicted by a tiny splinter of plunging sharp-
ness, cleared the mists of self-absorption from the would-be poet's
eyes. 'It's raining glass,' he thought in surprise, blinking rapidly at
the lanes of the thieves' bazaar into which his feet had led him
without knowing it, lanes of little shanty-stalls among which his
supposed inner shudder was making a fine mess: melons burst at
his feet, pointy slippers fell from trembling shelves, gemstones and
brocades and earthenware and combs tumbled pell-mell into the
glass-dusted alleys. He stood stupidly in that vitreous downpour of
broken windows, unable to shake off the feeling of having
imposed his private turmoils on the world around him, resisting
the insane compulsion to seize hold of someone, anyone, in the
milling, panicky crowd of pickpockets, salesmen and shoppers, to
apologize for the trouble he had caused.