Shame (22 page)

You can imagine how depressed I am by the behaviour of Omar
Khayyam Shakil. I ask for the second time: what kind of hero is
this? Last seen slipping into unconsciousness, stinking of vomit
and swearing revenge; and now, going crazy for Hyder's daughter.
How is one to account for such a character? Is consistency too
much to ask? I accuse this so-called hero of giving me the most
Godawful headache.

Shame, Good News and the Virgin ? 147

Certainly (let's take this slowly; no sudden moves, please) he
was in a disturbed state of mind. A dead brother, rejection by his
best friend. These are extenuating circumstances. We shall take
them into account. It is also fair to assume that the vertigo which
assailed him in the taxi returned, over the next few days, to knock
him even further off balance. So there is some sort of flimsy case
for the defence.

Step by step, now. He wakes up, engulfed in the emptiness of
his life, alone in the insomnia of the dawn. He washes, dresses,
goes to work; and finds that by burying himself in his duties he can
manage to keep going; even the vertigo attacks are kept at bay.

What is his area of expertise? We know this: he is an immu-
nologist. So he cannot be blamed for the arrival at his hos-
pital of Hyder's daughter; suffering an immunological crisis,
Sufiya Zinobia is brought to the country's leading expert in the
field.

Carefully, now. Avoid loud noises. To an immunologist in
search of the calm that comes of challenging, absorbing work,
Sufiya Zinobia seems like a godsend. Delegating as many of his
responsibilities as possible, Omar Khayyam devotes himself more
or less full-time to the case of the simpleton girl whose body's
defence mechanisms have declared war against the very life they
are supposed to be protecting. His devotion is perfectly genuine
(the defence refuses to rest): in the succeeding weeks, he makes
himself fully acquainted with her medical background, and after-
wards he will set down in his treatise The Case of Miss H. the
important new evidence he has unearthed of the power of the
mind to affect, 'via direct nervous pathways', the workings of
the body. The case becomes famous in medical circles; doctor and
patient are forever linked in the history of science. Does this make
other, more personal links more palatable? I reserve judgement.
Go on one step:

He becomes convinced that Sufiya Zinobia is willing the
damage upon herself. This is the significance of her case: it shows
that even a broken mind is capable of marshalling macrophages
and polymorphs; even a stunted intelligence can lead a palace

Shame ? 148

revolution, a suicidal rebellion of the janissaries of the human
body against the castle itself.

'Total breakdown of the immune system,' he notes after his
first examination of the patient, 'most terrible uprising I ever saw.'

Now let us put this as kindly as possible for the moment. (I
have more accusations, but they will wait.) Afterwards, no matter
how furiously he concentrates, trying to summon up every last
detail of those days from the poisoned wells of memory, he is
unable to pinpoint the moment at which professional excite-
ment turned into tragic love. He does not claim that Sufiya
Zinobia has given him the least encouragement; that would, in
the circumstances, be patently absurd. But at some point, perhaps
during his night-long bedside vigils, spend monitoring the effects
of his prescribed course of immunosuppressive drugs, vigils in
which he is joined by the ayah Shahbanou, who consents to wear
sterile cap, coat, gloves and mask, but who absolutely refuses to
leave the girl alone with the male doctor � yes, perhaps during
those preposterously chaperoned nights, or possibly later, when it
is clear that he has triumphed, that the praetorian revolt has been
quelled, the mutiny suppressed by pharmaceutical mercenaries, so
that the hideous outcrops of Sufiya Zinobia's affliction fade from
her body and the colour returns to her cheeks - somewhere along
the line, it happens. Omar Khayyam falls stupidly, and irretriev-
ably, in love.

'It's not rational,' he reproaches himself, but his emotions,
unscientifically, ignore him. He finds himself behaving awkwardly
in her presence, and in his dreams he pursues her to the ends of
the earth, while the mournful remnant of Eduardo Rodrigues
looks down pityingly at his obsession from the sky. He, too,
thinks of the extenuating circumstances, tells himself that in his
distressed psychological condition he has become the victim of a
mental disorder, but he is too ashamed even to think of taking
advice . . . no, damn it! Headache or no headache, I will not let
him get off as lightly as this. I accuse him of being ugly inside as
well as out, a Beast, just as Farah Zoroaster had divined all those
years ago. I accuse him of playing God or at least Pygmalion,

Shame, Good News and the V/rgin ? 149

of feeling he had rights of ownership over the innocent whose
life he had saved. I accuse that fat pigmeat tub of working out
that the only chance he had of getting a beautiful wife was
to marry a nitwit, sacrificing wifely brains for the beauty of
the flesh.

Omar Khayyam claims his obsession with Sufiya Zinobia has
cured his vertigo. Poppycock! Flim-flam! I accuse the villain of
attempting a shameless piece of social climbing (he never felt
giddy when he did that!) � ditched by one great figure of the
period, Omar Khayyam seeks to hitch himself to another star. So
unscrupulous is he, so shameless, that he will court an idiot in
order to woo her father. Even a father who gave the order which
sent eighteen bullets into the body of Babar Shakil.

But we have heard him mumble: 'Babar, life is long.' - O, I'm
not fooled by that. You conceive of a revenge plot? � Omar
Khayyam, by marrying the unmarriageable child, is enabled to stay
close to Hyder for years, before, during and after his Presidency,
biding his time, because revenge is patient, it awaits its perfect
moment? � Piffle! Wind! Those sick (and no doubt whisky-
soaked) words of a fainting whale were no more than a fading,
hollow echo of the favourite threat of Mr Iskander Harappa, our
hero's erstwhile patron, fellow-debauchee and chum. Of course
he never meant them; he is not the avenging type. Did he feel
anything at all for that dead brother whom he never knew? I
doubt it; his three mothers, as we shall see, doubted it. This is not
a possibility one can take seriously. Revenge? Pah! Huh! Phooey!
If Omar Khayyam thought about his brother's demise, it is more
likely that he thought this: 'Fool, terrorist, gangster. What did
he expect?'

I have one last, and most damning, accusation. Men who deny
their pasts become incapable of thinking them real. Absorbed into
the great whore-city, having left the frontier universe of Q. far
behind him once again, Omar Khayyam Shakil's home-town now
seems to him like a sort of bad dream, a fantasy, a ghost. The
city and the frontier are incompatible worlds; choosing Karachi,
Shakil rejects the other. It becomes, for him, a feathery insubstan-

Shame ? 150

tial thing, a discarded skin. He is no longer affected by what
happens there, by its logic and demands. He is homeless: that is to
say, a metropolitan through and through. A city is a camp for
refugees.

God damn him! I'm stuck with him; and with his poxy love.

Very well; let's go on. I've lost another seven years of my story
while the headache banged and thumped. Seven years, and now
there are marriages to attend. How time flies!

I dislike arranged marriages. There are some mistakes for which
one should not be able to blame one's poor parents.

8

Beauty and the Beast

' I ust imagine having a fish up your fundament, an eel that spits at
J your insides,' Bilquis said, 'and you won't need me to tell you
what happens on a woman's wedding night.' Her daughter Good
News submitted to this teasing and to the tracing of henna pat-
terns upon the ticklish soles of her feet with the demure obstinacy
of one who is guarding a terrible secret. She was seventeen years
old and it was the eve of her wedding. The womenfolk of
Bariamma's family had assembled to prepare her; while Bilquis
applied henna, mother and daughter were surrounded by eager
relatives bearing oils for the skin, hairbrushes, kohl, silver polish,
flatirons. The mummified figure of Bariamma herself supervised
everything blindly from her vantage point of a takht over which a
Shirazi rug had been spread in her honour; gaotakia bolsters pre-
vented her from toppling over on to the floor when she guffawed
at the horrifically off-putting descriptions of married life with
which the matrons were persecuting Good News. 'Think of a sikh
kabab that leaks hot cooking fat,' Duniyazad Begum suggested,
old quarrels bright in her eyes. But the virgins offered more opti-
mistic images. 'It's like sitting on a rocket that sends you to the
moon,' one maiden conjectured, earning a rocket from Bariamma

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Shame ? 15 2

for her blasphemy, because the faith clearly stated that lunar
expeditions were impossible. The women sang songs insulting
Good News's fiance, young Haroun, the eldest son of Little Mir
Harappa: 'Face like a potato! Skin like a tomato! Walks like an
elephant! Tiny plantain in his pant.' But when Good News spoke
up for the first and last time that evening, nobody could think of a
single word to say.

'Mummy dear,' Naveed said firmly into the scandalized silence,
'I won't marry that stupid potato, you just see if I do.'

Haroun Harappa at twenty-six was already accustomed to noto-
riety, because during the one year he had spent at an Angrez uni-
versity he had published an article in the student paper in which
he had described the private dungeons at the vast Daro estate into
which his father would fling people for years on end. He had also
written about the punitive expedition which Mir Harappa once
led against the household of his cousin Iskander, and of the foreign
bank account (he gave the number) into which his father was
transferring large quantities of public money. The article was
reprinted in Newsweek, so that the authorities back home had to
intercept the entire shipment of that subversive issue and rip out
the offending pages from every copy; but still the contents became
common knowledge. When Haroun Harappa was expelled from
his college at the end of that year, on the grounds that after three
terms studying economics he had failed to master the concepts of
supply and demand, it was generally supposed that he had written
his article out of a genuine and innocent stupidity, hoping, no
doubt, to impress the foreigners with his family's acumen and
power. It was known that he had spent his university career
almost exclusively in the gaming clubs and whorehouses of
London, and the story went that when he entered the examina-
tion hall that summer he had glanced at the question paper
without sitting down, shrugged, announced cheerfully, 'No,
there's nothing here for me,' and strolled out to his Mercedes-
Benz coupe without more ado. 'The boy's a dope, I'm afraid,'

Shame, Good News and the Virgin ? 153

Little Mir told President A., 'no need to take steps against him, I
hope. He'll come home and settle down.'

Little Mir made one attempt to persuade Haroun's college to
keep him on. A large filigree-silver cigar box was presented to the
Senior Common Room. The fellows of the college refused, how-
ever, to believe that a man as distinguished as Mir Harappa would
try to bribe them, so they accepted the gift and chucked his son
out on his ear. Haroun Harappa came home with numerous
squash rackets, addresses of Arab princes, whisky decanters,
bespoke suits, silk shirts and erotic photographs, but without a for-
eign degree.

But the seditious Newsweek article had not been the product of
Haroun's stupidity. It had been born of the profound and undying
hatred the son felt for his father, a hatred which would even sur-
vive Mir Harappa's terrible death. Little Mir had been a sternly
authoritarian parent, but that in itself was not unusual and might
even have engendered love and respect if it had not been for the
matter of the dog. On Haroun's tenth birthday, at Daro, his father
had presented him with a large parcel, done up in green ribbon,
from which a muffled barking could clearly be heard. Haroun was
an inward and only child who had grown fond of solitude; he did
not really want the long-haired collie puppy who emerged from
the package^ and thanked his father with a perfunctory surliness
that irritated Little Mir intensely. In the next few days it became
obvious that Haroun intended to leave the dog to be cared for by
the servants; whereupon Mir with the foolhardy stubbornness of
his irritation issued orders that nobody was to lay a finger on the
animal. 'The damn hound is yours,' Mir told the boy, 'so you
look after it.' But Haroun was as obstinate as his father, and did
not so much as give the puppy a name, so that in the bitter heat of
the Daro sunshine the puppy had to forage for its own food and
drink, contracted mange, distemper and curious green spots on
the tongue, was driven mad by its long hair and finally died in
front of the main door to the house, emitting piteous yelps and
leaking a thick yellow porridge from its behind. 'Bury it,' Mir told

"I '

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Shame ? 154

Haroun, but the boy set his jaw and walked away, and the slowly
decomposing corpse of the unnamed pooch mirrored the growth
of the boy's loathing for his father, who was thereafter forever
associated in his mind with the stench of the rotting dog.

After that Mir Harappa understood his mistake and went to
great lengths to regain his son's affection. He was a widower
(Haroun's mother had died in childbirth) and the boy was gen-
uinely important to him. Haroun was outrageously spoiled,
because although he refused to ask his father for so much as a new
vest Mir was always trying to guess what was in the boy's heart, so
that Haroun was showered with gifts, including a complete set
of cricket equipment comprising six stumps, four bails, twelve
sets of pads, twenty-two white flannel shirts and trousers, eleven
bats of varying weight and enough red balls to last a lifetime.
There were even umpires' white coats and score-books, but
Haroun was uninterested in cricket and the lavish present lan-
guished, unused, in a forgotten corner of Daro, along with the
polo gear, the tent pegs, the imported gramophones and the
home-movie camera, projector and screen. When he was twelve
the boy learned to ride and after that was to be found gazing long-
ingly at the horizon beyond which lay the Mohenjo estate of his
uncle Iskander. Whenever he heard that Isky was visiting his
ancestral home Haroun would ride without stopping to sit at the
feet of the man who ought by rights, he believed, to have been his
father. Mir Harappa did not protest when Haroun expressed a
wish to move to Karachi; and as he grew up in that mushrooming
city Haroun's infatuation with his uncle mushroomed too, so that
he began to affect the same dandyism and bad language and admi-
ration for European culture that were Isky's trademarks before his
great conversion. This was why the young man insisted on being
sent to study abroad, and why he passed his time in London
engaged in whoring and gambling. After his return he went on in
the same way; it had become a habit by then and he was unable to
give it up even when his idolized uncle renounced such unstates-
manlike activities, so that the gossip in the town was that a little
Isky had taken over where the big one left off. Mir Harappa con-