Shame (21 page)

And once upon a time there was a retarded daughter, who for
twelve years had been given to understand that she embodied her
mother's shame. Yes, now I must come to you, Sufiya Zinobia, in
your outsize cot with the rubber sheeting, in that ministerial resi-

Shame ? 140

dence of marble walls, in an upstairs bedroom through whose
windows turkeys gobbled at you, while at a dressing table of onyx
marble your sister screamed at the ayah to pull her hair.

Sufiya Zinobia at the age of twelve had formed the unattractive
habit of tearing her hair. When her dark-brown locks were being
washed by Shahbanou the Parsee ayah, she would continually
kick and scream; the ayah was always forced to give up before
the last of the soap had been rinsed out. The constant presence of
sandalwood-scented detergent gave Sufiya Zinobia an appalling
case of split ends, and she would sit in the enormous cot
which her parents had constructed for her (and which they had
brought all the way from Q., complete with expanses of rubber
undersheets and large-size babies' comforters) and tear each dam-
aged hair in two, all the way down to the root. This she did
seriously, systematically, as if inflicting ritual injury upon herself
like one of Iskander Harappa's bedbugs, the Shia dervishes in
the processions of IO Muharram. Her eyes, while she worked,
acquired a dull glint, a gleam of distant ice or fire from far below
their habitually opaque surface; and the torn cloud of hairs stood
out around her face and formed in the sunlight a kind of halo of
destruction.

It was the day after the turkey outburst of Bilquis Hyder. Sufiya
Zinobia tore her hair in her cot; but Good News, plain-faced as a
chapati, was determined to prove that her great thick mane had
grown long enough to sit upon. Straining her head backwards she
shouted at pale Shahbanou: 'Pull down! Hard as you can! What're
you waiting for, stupid? Yank!' � and the ayah, hollow-eyed, frail,
tried to tuck hair-tips under Good News's bony rump. Tears of
pain stood in the girl's determined eyes: 'A woman's beauty,'
Good News gasped, 'grows down from the top of her head. It is
well known that men go crazy for shiny hair that you can put
under your bums.' Shahbanou in flat tones stated: 'No good, bibi,
won't go.' Good News pummelling the ayah turned on her sister
in her wrath: 'You. Thing. Look at you. Who would marry you
with that hair, even if you had a brain? Turnip. Beetroot. Angrez
radish. See how you make trouble for me with your tearing. Elder

Shame, Good News and the Virgin ? 141

sister should marry first but who will come for her, ayah? I swear,
my tragedy, what do you know. Come on now, pull again, this
time don't pretend it won't reach - no, never mind that fool now,
leave her with her stinky blushes and her wetting. She doesn't
understand, what could she understand, zero.' And Shahbanou,
shrugging, impervious to Naveed Hyder's blows: 'You shouldn't
talk so bad to your sister, bibi, one day your tongue will go black
and fall off.'

Two sisters in a room while outside the hot wind begins to
blow. Shutters are put up against the wildness of the blast, and
over the garden wall turkeys panic in the feverish clutches of the
gale. As the Loo increases in fury, the house subsides into sleep.
Shahbanou on a mat on the floor beside Sufiya Zinobia's cot;
Good News, exhausted by hair-pullery, sprawls on her ten-year-
old's bed.

Two sisters asleep: in repose, the younger girl's face revealed its
plainness, stripped of its waking determination to be attractive;
while the simpleton lost, in sleep, the bland vacuity of her expres-
sion, and the severe classicism of her features would have pleased
any watching eye. What contrasts in these girls! Sufiya Zinobia,
embarrassingly small (no, we shall avoid, at all costs, comparing
her to an Oriental miniature), and Good News rangy, elongated.
Sufiya and Naveed, shame and good news: the one slow and
silent, the other quick with her noise. Good News would stare
brazenly at her elders; Sufiya averted her eyes. But Naveed Hyder
was her mother's little angel, she got away with everything.
'Imagine,' Omar Khayyam would think in later years, 'if that mar-
riage scandal had happened to Sufiya Zinobia! They'd have cut
her skin off and sent it to the dhobi.'

Listen: you could have taken the whole quantity of sisterly love
inside Good News Hyder, sealed it in an envelope and posted it
anywhere in the world for one rupee airmail, that's how much it
weighed . . . where was I? Oh, yes, the hot wind blew, its howl a
maw of sound that swallowed all other noise, that dry gale bearing
disease and madness upon its sand-sharp wings, the worst Loo in
living memory, releasing demons into the world, forcing its way

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Shame ? 142

through shutters to plague Bilquis with the insupportable phan-
toms of her past, so that although she buried her head under a
pillow she still saw before her eyes a golden equestrian figure car-
rying a pennant on which there flamed the terrifyingly cryptic
word Excelsior. Not even the gobbling of the turkeys could be
heard above the gale, as the world took shelter; then the searing
fingers of the wind penetrated a bedroom in which two sisters
slept, and one of them began to stir.

It's easy to blame trouble on a wind. Maybe that pestilential
blast did have something to do with it � maybe, when it touched
Sufiya Zinobia, she reddened under its awful hand, she burned,
and maybe that's why she got up, eyes blank as milk, and left the
room � but I prefer to believe that the wind was no more than a
coincidence, an excuse; that what happened happened because
twelve years of unloved humiliation take their toll, even on an
idiot, and there is always a point at which something breaks, even
though the last straw cannot be identified with any certainty: was
it Good News's marriage worries? Or Raza's calmness in the face
of shrieking Bilquis? Impossible to say.

She must have been sleepwalking, because when they found
her she looked rested, as if she'd had a good deep sleep. When
the wind died and the household awoke from its turbulent after-
noon slumber Shahbanou noticed the empty cot at once and
raised the alarm. Afterwards nobody could work out how the girl
had escaped, how she managed to sleepwalk through an entire
houseful of government furniture and sentries. Shahbanou would
always say that it must have been quite a wind, it sent soldiers to
sleep at the gate and wrought a somnambulist miracle of such
potency that Sufiya Zinobia's passage through the house, into the
garden and over the wall acquired the power of infecting anyone
she passed, who must have fallen instantly into a wind-sick trance.
But it is my opinion that the source of the power, the worker of
the miracle, was Sufiya Zinobia herself; there would be other such
occasions, when one could not blame the wind . . .

They found her in the aftermath of the Loo, sitting fast asleep
under the sun's ferocity in the turkey-yard of the widow Aurang-

Shame, Good News and the Virgin ? 143

zeb, a little huddled figure snoring gently amidst the corpses of the
birds. Yes, they were all dead, every one of the two hundred and
eighteen turkeys of Pinkie's loneliness, and people were so
shocked that they forgot to clear away the corpses for a whole day,
leaving the dead birds to rot in the heat and in the crepuscular
gloom of the evening and beneath the ice-hot stars, two hundred
and eighteen that would never find their way into ovens or on to
dining tables. Sufiya Zinobia had torn off their heads and then
reached down into their bodies to draw their guts up through
their necks with her tiny and weaponless hands. Shahbanou, who
found her first, did not dare to approach her; then Raza and
Bilquis arrived, and soon everybody, sister, servants, neighbours,
was standing and gaping at the spectacle of the bloodied girl and
the decapitated creatures with intestines instead of heads. Pinki
Aurangzeb looked hollowly upon the carnage, and was struck by
the meaningless hatred in Bilquis's eyes; the two women remained
silent, each in the grip of a different horror, so that it was Raza
Hyder, his watery black-rimmed eyes riveted upon the face of his
daughter with her bloodied lips, who spoke first in a voice
echoing with admiration as well as revulsion: 'With her bare
hands,' the new government minister trembled, 'what gave the
child such strength?'

Now that the iron hoops of the silence had been snapped Shah-
banou the ayah began wailing at the top of her voice: 'Ullu-ullu-
ullu!', a gibberish lament of such high pitch that it dragged Sufiya
Zinobia out of her lethal sleep; she opened those eyes of watered
milk and on seeing the devastation around her she fainted,
echoing her own mother on that far-off day when Bilquis found
herself naked in a crowd and passed out cold for shame.

What forces moved that sleeping three-year-old mind in its
twelve-year-old body to order an all-out assault upon feathered
turkey-cocks and hens? One can only speculate: was Sufiya
Zinobia trying, like a good daughter, to rid her mother of
the gobbler plague? Or did the anger, the proud outrage which
Raza Hyder ought to have felt, but refused to do so, preferring
to make allowances for Pinkie, find its way into his daughter

'1'

Shame ? 144

instead? - What seems certain is that Sufiya Zinobia, for so long
burdened with being a miracle-gone-wrong, a family's shame
made flesh, had discovered in the labyrinths of her unconscious
self the hidden path that links sharam to violence; and that, awak-
ening, she was as surprised as anyone by the force of what had
been unleashed.

The beast inside the beauty. Opposing elements of a fairy-tale
combined in a single character . . . Bilquis did not, on this occa-
sion, faint. The embarrassment of her daughter's deed, the ice of
this latest shame lent a frozen rigidity to her bearing. 'Be quiet,'
she ordered the ululating ayah, 'go in and bring out scissors.' Until
the ayah had completed her enigmatic errand Bilquis would let
nobody touch the girl; she circled her in a manner so forbidding
that not even Raza Hyder dared go near. While Shahbanou ran
for scissors Bilquis spoke softly, under her breath, so that only a
few words wafted as far as the watching husband, widow, younger
daughter, servants, anonymous passers-by. '. . . Tear your hair . . .
birthright . . . woman's pride ... all fuzzy-wuzzy like a hubshee
female . . . cheapness . . . loose . . . crazy,' and then the scissors
came, and still nobody dared intervene, as Bilquis grabbed hold of
great clumps of her daughter's savaged tresses, and cut, and cut,
and cut. At last she stood up, out of breath, and working the scis-
sors absently with her fingers she turned away. Sufiya Zinobia's
head looked like a cornfield after a fire; sad, black stubble, a cata-
strophic desolation wrought by maternal rage. Raza Hyder picked
his daughter up with a gentleness born of his infinite puzzlement
and carried her indoors, away from the scissors that were still snip-
ping at air in Bilquis's uncontrollable hand.

Scissors cutting air mean trouble in the family.

'O, Mummy!' Good News giggled with fear. 'What did you
do? She looks like . . .'

'We always wanted a boy,' Bilquis replied, 'but God knows best.'

In spite of being shaken, timidly by Shahbanou and more roughly
by Good News, Sufiya Zinobia did not awaken from her faint. By

Shame, Good News and the Virgin � 145

the next evening a fever had mounted in her, a hot flush spread
from her scalp to the soles of her feet. The fragile-looking Parsee
ayah, whose sunken eyes made her seem forty-three years old but
who turned out to be only nineteen, never moved from the side
of the great barred cot except to fetch fresh cold compresses for
Sufiya's brow. 'You Parsees,' Good News told Shahbanou,
'you've got a soft spot for mental cases, seems to me. Must be all
your experience.' Bilquis showed no interest in the application of
compresses. She sat in her room with the scissors that seemed to
be stuck to her fingers, snipping at empty air. 'Wind fever,' Shah-
banou called her charge's nameless affliction, which had made that
shorn head blaze; but on the second night it cooled, she opened
her eyes, it was thought that she had recovered. The next
morning, however, Shahbanou noticed that something frightful
had begun to happen to the girl's tiny body. It had started to come
out in huge blotchy rashes, red and purple with small hard pimples
in the middle; boils were forming between her toes and her back
was bubbling up into extraordinary vermilion lumps. Sufiya
Zinobia was over-salivating; great jets of spittle flew out through
her lips. Appalling black buboes were forming in her armpits. It
was as though the dark violence which had been engendered
within that small physique had turned inwards, had forsaken
turkeys and gone for the girl herself; as if, like her grandfather
Mahmoud the Woman who sat in an empty cinema and waited to
pay for his double bill, or like a soldier falling on his sword, Sufiya
Zinobia had chosen the form of her own end. The plague of
shame - in which I insist on including the unfelt shame of those
around her, for instance what had not been felt by Raza Hyder
when he gunned down Babar Shakil - as well as the unceasing
shame of her own existence, and of her hacked-off hair - the
plague, I say, spread rapidly through that tragic being whose chief
defining characteristic was her excessive sensitivity to the bacilli of
humiliation. She was taken to hospital with pus bursting from her
sores, dribbling, incontinent, with the rough, cropped proof of
her mother's loathing on her head.

Shame ? 146

What is a saint? A saint is a person who suffers in our stead.

On the night when all this happened, Omar Khayyam Shakil had
been beset, during his brief sleep, by vivid dreams of the past, in
all of which the white-clothed figure of the disgraced teacher
Eduardo Rodrigues played a leading role. In the dreams Omar
Khayyam was a boy again. He kept trying to follow Eduardo
everywhere, to the toilet, into bed, convinced that if he could just
catch up with the teacher he would be able to jump inside him
and be happy at long last; but Eduardo kept shooing him away
with his white fedora, slapping at him and motioning to him to
go, get lost, buzz off. This mystified the doctor until many days
later, when he realized that the dreams had been prescient warn-
ings against the dangers of falling in love with under-age females
and then following them to the ends of the earth, where they
inevitably cast you aside, the blast of their rejection picks you up
and hurls you out into the great starry nothingness beyond gravity
and sense. He recalled the end of the dream, in which Eduardo,
his white garments now blackened and tattered and singed,
seemed to be flying away from him, floating above a bursting
cloud of fire, with one hand raised above his head, as if in farewell
... a father is a warning; but he is also a lure, a precedent impos-
sible to resist, and so by the time that Omar Khayyam deciphered
his dreams it was already far too late to take their advice, because
he had fallen for his destiny, Sufiya Zinobia Hyder, a twelve-year-
old girl with a three-year-old mind, the daughter of the man who
killed his brother.