Shame (23 page)

Shame, Good News and the Virgin ? 155

tinued to foot the bill for his son's outrageous behaviour, still
hoping to win back the love of his only progeny; to no avail.
Haroun in his habitually intoxicated state began to talk too much,
and in loose-mouthed company. He spouted, drunkenly, the revo-
lutionary political notions that had been current among European
students during his year abroad. He castigated Army rule and the
power of oligarchies with all the enthusiastic garrulity of one who
despises every word he is saying, but hopes that it will wound his
even more detested parent. When he went so far as to mention
the possibility of mass-producing Molotov cocktails, none of his
cronies took him seriously, because he said it at a beach party
while astride the shell of a weeping Galapagos turtle which was
dragging itself up to the sand to lay its infertile eggs; but the state
informant in the gathering made his or her report, and President
A., whose administration had become somewhat rocky, flew into
a rage so terrible that Little Mir had to prostrate himself on the
floor and beg for mercy for his wayward son. This incident would
have forced Mir into a confrontation with Haroun, which he
greatly feared, but he was spared the trouble by his cousin
Iskander, who had also heard about Haroun's latest outrage.
Haroun, summoned to Isky's split-level radiogram of a house,
shifted from foot to foot under the brilliantly scornful eyes of
Arjumand Harappa while her father spoke in gentle, implacable
tones. Iskander Harappa had taken to dressing in green outfits
styled by Pierre Cardin to resemble the uniforms of the Chinese
Red Guards, because as the Foreign Minister in the government
of President A. he had become famous as the architect of a friend-
ship treaty with Chairman Mao. A photograph of Isky embracing
the great Zedong hung on the wall of the room in which the
uncle informed his nephew: 'Your activities are becoming an
embarrassment to me. Time you settled down. Take a wife.' Arju-
mand Harappa stared furiously at Haroun and obliged him to do
as Iskander asked. 'But who?' he inquired lamely, and Isky
waved a dismissive hand. 'Some decent girl,' he said, 'plenty to
choose from.'

Haroun, realizing that the interview was at an end, turned to

Shame ? 156

go. Iskander Harappa called after him: 'And if you're interested
in politics you better stop riding sea-turtles and start working
for me.'

The transformation of Iskander Harappa into the most pow-
erful new force on the political scene was by this time complete.
He had set about engineering his rise with all the calculated bril-
liance of which Arjumand had always known him to be capable.
Concentrating on the high-profile world of international affairs,
he had written a series of articles analysing his country's require-
ments from the great powers, the Islamic world and the rest of
Asia, following these up with an arduous programme of speeches
whose arguments proved impossible to resist. When his notion of
'Islamic socialism' and of a close alliance with China had gained
such wide public support that he was effectively running the
nation's foreign policy without even being a member of the
cabinet, President A. had had no option but to invite him into
the government. His enormous personal charm, his way of
making the plain, bolster-chested wives of visiting world leaders
feel like Greta Garbo and his oratorical genius made him an
instant hit. 'The thing that satisfies me most,' he told his daughter,
'is that now we've given the go-ahead to the Karakoram road to
China, I can have fun kicking around the minister for public
works.' The works minister was Little Mir Harappa, his old
friendship with the President having failed to outweigh Iskander's
public appeal. 'That bastard,' Iskander said to Arjumand with glee,
'is finally under my thumb.'

When the A. regime started losing popularity, Iskander Har-
appa resigned and formed the Popular Front, the political party
which he funded out of his bottomless wealth and whose first
Chairman he became. 'For an ex-foreign minister,' Little Mir told
the President sourly, 'your protege seems to be concentrating
pretty heavily on the home front.' The President shrugged. 'He
knows what he's doing,' said Field-Marshal A., 'unfortunately.'

Rumours of the government's corruption provided the fuel;
but Isky's campaign for a return to democracy was perhaps
unstoppable anyway. He toured the villages and promised every

Shame, Good News and the Virgin ? 157

peasant one acre of land and a new water-well. He was put in jail;
huge demonstrations secured his release. He screamed in regional
dialects about the rape of the country by fat cats and tilyars, and
such was the power of his tongue, or perhaps of the sartorial tal-
ents of Monsieur Cardin, that nobody seemed to recall Isky's own
status as a landlord of a distinctly obese chunk of Sind . . . Iskander
Harappa offered Haroun political work in his home district. 'You
have anti-corruption credentials,' he told the youth. 'Tell them
about the Newsweek article.' Haroun Harappa, offered the golden
opportunity of running down his father on their home turf, took
the job at once.

'Well, Abba,' he thought happily, 'life is long.'

Two days after Haroun lectured an egg-laying turtle about revolu-
tion, Rani Harappa at Mohenjo was telephoned by a male voice
so muted, so crippled by apologies and embarrassment that it was a
few moments before she recognized it as belonging to Little Mir,
with whom she had had no contact since his looting of her
home, although his son Haroun had been a regular visitor. 'God
damn it, Rani,' Little Mir finally admitted through the spittle-
heavy clouds of his humiliation, 'I need a favour.'

Rani Harappa at forty had defeated Iskander's formidable ayah
by the simple method of outliving her. The days of irreverently
giggling village girls rummaging through her underwear were
long past; she had become the true mistress of Mohenjo by dint of
the unassailable calm with which she embroidered shawl after
shawl on the verandah of the house, persuading the villagers that
she was composing the tapestry of their fate, and that if she wished
to she could foul up their lives by choosing to sew a bad future
into the magical shawls. Having earned respect, Rani was
strangely content with her life, and maintained cordial relations
with her husband in spite of his long absences from her side and
his permanent absence from her bed. She knew all about the end
of the Pinkie affair and knew in the secret chambers of her heart
that a man embarking on a political career must sooner or later ask
his wife to stand beside him on the podium; secure in a future

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Shame ? 15 8

which would bring her Isky without her having to do a thing, she
discovered without surprise that her love for him had refused to
die, but had become, instead, a thing of quietness and strength.
This was a great difference between her and Bilquis Hyder: both
women had husbands who retreated from them into the enigmatic
palaces of their destinies, but while Bilquis sank into eccentricity,
not to say craziness, Rani had subsided into a sanity which made
her a powerful, and later on a dangerous, human being.

When Little Mir rang, Rani had been looking towards the vil-
lage where the white concubines were playing badminton in the
twilight. In those days many of the villagers had gone West to
work for a while, and those who returned had brought with them
white women for whom the prospect of life in a village as a
number-two wife seemed to hold an inexhaustibly erotic appeal.
The number-one wives treated these white girls as dolls or pets
and those husbands who failed to bring home a guddi, a white
doll, were soundly berated by their women. The village of the
white dolls had become famous in the region. Villagers came from
miles around to watch the girls in their neat, clean whites giggling
and squealing as they leapt for shuttlecocks and displayed their
frilly panties. The number-one wives cheered for their number-
twos, taking pride in their victories as in the successes of children,
and offering them consolation in defeat. Rani Harappa was
deriving such gentle pleasure from observing the dolls at play that
she forgot to listen to what Mir was saying. 'Fuck me in the
mouth, Rani,' he shouted at last with the fury of his suppressed
pride, 'forget our differences. This business is too important. I
need a wife, most urgently.'

'I see.'

'Ya Allah. Rani, don't be difficult, for God's sake. Not for me,
what do you think, would I ask? For Haroun. It's the only way.'

The desperation with which Little Mir stammered out the need
for a good woman to stabilize his wayward son overcame any ini-
tial reluctance Rani might have felt, and she said at once, 'Good
News.' 'Already?' Little Mir asked, misunderstanding her. 'You
women don't waste any time!'

Shame, Good News and the Virgin ? 159

How a marriage is made: Rani suggested Naveed Hyder,
thinking that a wedding in the family would do Bilquis good. By
that time the telephone link between the two women was no
longer a means by which Rani found out what was going on in
the city, no longer an excuse for Bilquis to gossip and condescend
while Rani humbly snatched from her friend's conversation what-
ever crumbs of life it offered. Now it was Rani who was strong,
and Bilquis, her old regal dreams in ruins since Raza's sacking
from the government, who needed support, and who found in the
unchanging solidity of Rani Harappa the strength to sustain her
through her increasingly bewildered days. 'Just what she needs,'
Rani thought with satisfaction, 'trousseau, marquees, sweetmeats,
too much to think about. And that daughter of hers can't wait to
get hitched.'

Little Mir consulted the President before agreeing to the match.
The Hyder family had become accident-prone of late: the old
rumours from Q. still circulated, and it had not been easy to keep
the incident of the dead turkeys out of the papers. But now, in the
mountainous coolness of the new northern capital, the President
had begun to feel the chilly winds of his unpopularity, and agreed
to the marriage, because, he decided, it was time to draw the hero
of Aansu close to him again, like a warm blanket or shawl. 'No
problem,' A. told Little Mir, 'my congrats to the happy pair.'

Mir Harappa visited Rani at Mohenjo to discuss the details. He
rode up stiff with embarrassment and behaved with bad-tempered
humility throughout. 'What a father will do for a son!' he burst
out at Rani as she sat on the verandah working on the inter-
minable shawl of her solitude. 'When my boy is a daddy himself
he will know how a daddy feels. I hope this Good News of yours
is a fertile girl.'

'Proper sowing ensures a good harvest,' Rani replied serenely.
'Please take some tea.'

Raza Hyder did not object to the betrothal. In those years
when his only responsibility was to oversee the intake and training
of raw recruits, when the fact of his decline stared him in the face
every day, multiplied, replicated in the gawky figures of youths

Shame ? 160

t !

i

who didn't know which end of a bayonet meant business, he had
been observing the rise of Iskander Harappa with barely sup-
pressed envy. 'The time will come,' he prophesied to himself,
'when I'll have to go begging that guy for an extra pip.' In the
turbulent climate of the government's instability Raza Hyder had
been wondering which way to jump, whether to come out in
support of the Popular Front's demand for elections, or to put
what remained of his reputation behind the government in the
hope of preferment. The offer of Haroun Harappa for a son-in-
law gave him the chance of having it both ways. The match
would please the President: that much had been made clear. But
Raza also knew of Haroun's hatred for his father, which had
placed the boy firmly in Isky Harappa's pocket. 'A foot in both
camps,' Raza thought, 'that's the ticket.'

And it is possible that Raza was delighted to be able to get rid
of Good News, because she had developed, as she grew, some-
thing of the full-mouthed insouciance of the late Sindbad Mengal.
Haroun's mouth was also thick and wide, a part of his family
inheritance. 'Two fat-lip types,' Raza Hyder told his wife in tones
more jovial than he normally used when addressing her, 'made for
each other, na? The babies will look like fishes.' Bilquis said,
'Never mind.'

How a marriage is made: I see that I have somehow omitted to
mention the views of the young persons concerned. Photographs
were exchanged. Haroun Harappa took his brown envelope to his
uncle's house and opened it in the presence of Iskander and Arju-
mand: there are times when young men turn to their families for
support. The monochrome photograph had been artistically
retouched to give Good News skin as pink as blotting-paper and
eyes as green as ink.

'You can see how he's made her pigtail longer,' Arjumand
pointed out.

'Let the boy make up his own mind,' Iskander reproved her,
but Arjumand at twenty had conceived a strange dislike of the
picture. 'Plain as a plate,' she announced, 'and not so fair-skinned
as all that.'

Shame, Good News and the Virgin ? 161

'It's got to be somebody,' Haroun stated, 'and there's nothing
wrong with her.' Arjumand cried, 'How can you just say that?
Got eyes in your head or ping-pong balls?' At this point Iskander
ordered his daughter to be quiet and told the bearer to bring
sweetmeats and celebratory glasses of lime juice. Haroun went on
staring at that photograph of Naveed Hyder, and because nothing,
not even the paintbrush of a zealous photographer, could mask
Good News's unquenchable determination to be beautiful, her
fiance was quickly overpowered by the iron will of her celluloid
eyes, and began to think her the loveliest bride on earth. This illu-
sion, which was entirely the product of Good News's imagina-
tion, entirely the result of the action of mind over matter, would
survive everything, even the wedding scandal; but it would not
survive Iskander Harappa's death.