Shame (24 page)

'What a girl,' said Haroun Harappa, driving Arjumand from the
room in disgust.

As for Good News: 'I don't need to look at any stupid photo-
graph,' she told Bilquis, 'he's famous, he's rich, he's a husband,
let's catch him quick.' 'His reputation is bad,' Bilquis said, as a
mother should, offering her daughter the chance to withdraw,
'and he is bad to his daddy.'

'I'll fix him,' Good News replied.

Later, alone with Shahbanou as the ayah brushed her hair,
Good News added some further thoughts. 'Hey, you with the
eyes at the bottom of a well,' she said, 'you know what marriage is
for a woman?'

'I am a virgin,' Shahbanou replied.

'Marriage is power,' Naveed Hyder said. 'It is freedom. You
stop being someone's daughter and become someone's mother
instead, ek dum, fut-a-fut, pronto. Then who can tell you what to
do? � What do you mean,' a terrible notion occurred to her, 'do
you think I'm not a virgin also? You shut your dirtyfilthy mouth,
with one word I could put you on the street.'

'What are you talking, bibi, I only said.'

'I tell you, how great to be away from this house. Haroun
Harappa, I swear. Too good, yaar. Too good.'

I I

Shame ? 162

'We are modern people,' Bilquis told her daughter. 'Now
that you have accepted you must get to know the boy. It will be a
love match.'

Miss Arjumand Harappa, the 'virgin Ironpants', had rejected so
many suitors that although she was barely twenty years old the
city's matchmakers had already begun to think of her as being on
the shelf. The flood of proposals was not entirely, or even pri-
marily, the result of her extreme eligibility as the only child of
Chairman Iskander Harappa; it had its true source in that extraor-
dinary, defiant beauty with which, or so it seemed to her, her
body taunted her mind. I must say that of all the beautiful women
in that country packed full of improbable lovelies, there is no
doubt who took the prize. In spite of bound and still-apple-sized
breasts, Arjumand carried off the palm.

Loathing her sex, Arjumand went to great lengths to disguise
her looks. She cut her hair short, �wore no cosmetics or perfume,
dressed in her father's old shirts and the baggiest trousers she could
find, developed a stooped and slouching walk. But the harder she
tried, the more insistently her blossoming body outshone her dis-
guises. The short hair was luminous, the unadorned face learned
expressions of infinite sensuality which she could do nothing to
control, and the more she stooped, the taller and more desirable
she grew. By the age of sixteen she had been obliged to become
expert in the arts of self-defence. Iskander Harappa had never tried
to keep her away from men. She accompanied him on his diplo-
matic rounds, and at many embassy receptions elderly ambassadors
were found clutching their groins and throwing up in the toilet
after their groping hands had been answered by a well-aimed
knee. By her eighteenth birthday the throng of the city's most
coveted bachelors outside the gate of the Harappa house had
become so swollen as to constitute an impediment to traffic, and
at her own request she was sent away to Lahore to a Christian
boarding college for ladies, whose anti-male rules were so severe
that even her father could see her only by appointment in a tat-

Shame, Good News and the Virgin ? 163

tered garden of dying roses and balding lawns. But she found no
respite in that prison populated exclusively by females, all of
whom she scorned for their gender; the girls fell for her just
as hard as the men, and final-year students would clutch at
her behind when she passed. One lovelorn nineteen-year-old,
despairing of catching Ironpants's eye, pretended to sleepwalk into
the empty swimming pool and was removed to hospital with mul-
tiple fractures of the skull. Another, crazed by love, climbed out of
the college compound and went to sit at a cafe in the famous red-
light district of Heeramandi, having decided to become a whore if
she could not have Arjumand's heart. This distressed girl was
abducted from the cafe by the local pimps, who forced her father,
a textile magnate, to pay a ransom of one lakh of rupees for her
safe return. She never married, because although the pimps
insisted that they had their honour, too, nobody believed she had
not been touched, and after a medical inspection the college's
devoutly Catholic headmistress absolutely refused to concede that
the wretch might have been deflowered upon her antiseptic
premises. Arjumand Harappa wrote to her father and asked him to
take her away from the college. 'It's no relief,' the letter said. 'I
should have known girls would be worse than boys.'

The return from London of Haroun Harappa unleashed a civil
war inside the virgin Ironpants. His remarkable physical resem-
blance to photographs of her father at twenty-six unnerved Arju-
mand, and his fondness for whoring, gambling and other forms of
debauchery convinced her that reincarnation was not simply a
crazy notion imported by the Hyders from the country of the
idolaters. She attempted to suppress the idea that beneath
Haroun's dissolute exterior a second great man, almost the equal
of her father, lay concealed, and that, with her help, he could dis-
cover his true nature, just as the Chairman had . . . refusing even
to whisper such things to herself in the privacy of her room, she
cultivated in Haroun's presence that attitude of scornful conde-
scension which quickly persuaded him that there was no point in
his trying where so many others had failed. He was not insensible

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Shame ? 164

to her fatal beauty, but the reputation of the virgin Ironpants,
when combined with that terrible and uninterruptedly disgusted
gaze, was enough to send him elsewhere; and then the photo-
graph of Naveed Hyder bewitched him, and it was too late for
Arjumand to change her approach. Haroun Harappa was the only
man, other than her father, whom Arjumand ever loved, and her
rage in the days after his betrothal was awful to behold. But
Iskander was preoccupied in those days, and failed to pay any
attention to the war inside his child.

'God damn,' Arjumand said to her mirror, unconsciously
reflecting the former habit of her mother alone in Mohenjo, 'life
is shit.'

It was once explained to me by one of the world's Greatest Living
Poets � we mere prose scribblers must turn to poets for wisdom,
which is why this book is littered with them; there was my friend
who hung upside-down and had the poetry shaken out of him,
and Babar Shakil, who wanted to be a poet, and I suppose Omar
Khayyam, who was named for one but never was � that the
classic fable Beauty and the Beast is simply the story of an arranged
marriage.

'A merchant is down on his luck, so he promises his daughter
to a wealthy but reclusive landowner, Beast Sahib, and receives a
lavish dowry in exchange � a great chest, I believe, of broad pieces
of gold. Beauty Bibi dutifully marries the zamindar, thus restoring
her father's fortunes, and naturally at first her husband, a total
stranger, seems horrible to her, monstrous even. But eventually,
under the benign influence of her obedient love, he turns into a
Prince.'

'Do you mean,' I ventured, 'that he inherits a title?' The Great
Living Poet looked tolerant and tossed back his silvery shoulder-
length hair.

'That is a bourgeois remark,' he chided me. 'No, of course the
transformation would have taken place neither in his social status
nor in his actual, corporeal self, but in her perception of him. Pic-

Shame, Good News and the Virgin ? 165

ture them as they grow closer to each other, as they move inwards
over the years from the opposed poles of Beautyness and
Beastdom, and become at last, and happily, just plain Mr Husband
and Mrs Wife.'

The Great Living Poet was well-known for his radical ideas and
for the chaotic complexity of his extramarital love life, so I
thought I would please him by commenting slyly: 'Why is it that
fairy-tales always treat marriage as an ending? And always such a
perfectly happy one?'

But instead of the man-to-man wink or guffaw for which I'd
been hoping (I was very young), the Great Living Poet adopted a
grave expression. 'That is a masculine question,' he replied, 'no
woman would be so puzzled. The proposition of the fable is clear.
Woman must make the best of her fate; for if she does not love
Man, why then he dies, the Beast perishes, and Woman is left a
widow, that is to say less than a daughter, less than a wife, worth-
less.' Mildly, he sipped his Scotch.

'Whatif, whatif,' I stammered, 'I mean, uncle, whatif the girl
really couldn't bear the husband chosen for her?' The Poet, who
had begun to hum Persian verses under his breath, frowned in dis-
tant disappointment.

'You have become too Westernized,' he said. 'You should
spend some time, maybe seven years or so, not too long, with our
village people. Then you will understand that this is a completely
Eastern story, and stop this whatif foolishness.'

The Great Poet is unfortunately no longer living, so I cannot
ask him whatif the story of Good News Hyder were true; nor can
I hope for the benefit of his advice on an even more ticklish sub-
ject: whatif, whatif a Beastji somehow lurked inside Beauty Bibi?
Whatif the beauty were herself the beast? But I think he might
have said I was confusing matters: 'As Mr Stevenson has shown in
his Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, such saint-and-monster conjunctions
are conceivable in the case of men; alas! such is our nature. But
the whole essence of Woman denies such a possibility.'

The reader may have divined from my last whatifs that I have

Shame ? 166

two marriages to describe; and the second, waiting in the periph-
eries of the first, is of course the long-hinted-at Nikah of Sufiya
Zinobia Hyder and Omar Khayyam Shakil.

Omar Khayyam finally screwed up the courage to ask for Sufiya
Zinobia's hand when he heard about the betrothal of her youn-
ger sister. When he arrived, grey respectable fifty, at her marble
home and made his extraordinary request, the impossibly old and
decrepit divine Maulana Dawood let out a scream that made
Raza Hyder look around for demons. 'Spawn of obscene hags,'
Dawood addressed Shakil, 'from the day you descended to earth
in the machine of your mothers' iniquity I knew you. Such filthy
suggestions you come to make in this house of lovers of God! May
your time in hell be longer than a thousand lifetimes.' The rage of
Maulana Dawood created, in Bilquis, a mood of perverse obsti-
nacy. In those days she was still prone to lock doors furiously, to
defend herself against the incursions of the afternoon wind; the
light in her eyes was a little too bright. But the engagement of
Good News had given her a new purpose, just as Rani had hoped;
so it was with a fair approximation of her old arrogance that she
spoke to Omar Khayyam: 'We understand that you have been
obliged to bring your own proposal because of the absence of
your family members from Town. The irregularity is forgiven, but
we must now consider in private. Our decision will be communi-
cated to you in due course.' Raza Hyder, struck dumb by this
reappearance of the old Bilquis, was unable to disagree until Shakil
had left; Omar Khayyam, arising, placing grey hat on grey hair,
was betrayed by a sudden reddening beneath the pallor of his skin.
'Blushing,' Maulana Dawood screeched, extending a sharp-nailed
finger, 'that is only a trick. Such persons have no shame.'

After Sufiya Zinobia recovered from the immunological
catastrophe that followed the turkey massacre, Raza Hyder had
discovered that he could no longer see her through the veil of his
disappointment in her sex. The memory of the tenderness with
which he had lifted her out of the scene of her somnambulist vio-
lence refused to leave him, as did the realization that while she was

Shame, Good News and the Virgin ? 167

ill he had been beset by emotions that could only be described as
arising out of fatherly love. In short, Hyder had changed his
opinion of his retarded child, and had begun to play with her,
to take pride in her tiny advances. Together with the ayah
Shahbanou the great war hero would play at being a train or
steamroller or crane, and would lift the girl and throw her in the
air as if she really were still the small child whose brain she had
been forced to retain. This new pattern of behaviour had per-
plexed Bilquis, whose affections remained concentrated on the
younger girl ... at any rate, Sufiya Zinobia's condition had
improved. She had grown two and a half inches, put on a little
weight, and her mental age had risen to about six and a half. She
was nineteen years old, and had conceived for her newly loving
father a child's version of that same devotion which Arjumand
Harappa felt for her father the Chairman.

'Men,' Bilquis told Rani on the telephone, 'you can't depend
on them.'

As for Omar Khayyam: the complexity of his motives has
already been discussed. He had spent seven years failing to cure
himself of that obsession which relieved him of vertigo attacks,
but during those years of struggle he had also arranged to examine
Sufiya Zinobia at regular intervals, and had ingratiated himself
with her father, building on the gratitude Raza felt towards him
for having saved his daughter's life. But a proposal of marriage was
something else again, and once he was safely out of the house
Raza Hyder began to voice his doubts.

'The man is fat,' Raza reasoned. 'Ugly also. And we must not
forget his debauched past.'

'A debauched life led by the child of debauched persons,'
Dawood added, 'and a brother shot for politics.'

But Bilquis did not mention her memory of Shakil drunk at
Mohenjo. Instead she said, 'Where are we going to find the girl a
better match?'