Shame (25 page)

Now Raza understood that his wife was as anxious to be rid of
this troublesome child as he was to see the back of her beloved
Good News. The realization that there was a kind of symmetry

Shame ? 168

here, a sort of fair exchange, weakened his resolve, so that Bilquis
detected the uncertainty in his voice when he asked, 'But a dam-
aged child: should we look for husbands at all? Should we not
accept the responsibility, wife? What is this marriage business
where such a girl is concerned?'

'She is not so stupid now,' Bilquis argued, 'she can dress herself,
go to the pot, and she does not wet her bed.'

'For God's sake,' Raza shouted, 'does that qualify her to
be a wife?'

'That frogspawn slime,' Dawood exclaimed, 'that messenger
of Shaitan. He has come here with his proposal to divide this
holy house.'

'Her vocabulary is improving,' Bilquis added, 'she sits with
Shahbanou and tells the dhobi what to wash. She can count the
garments and handle money.'

'But she is a child,' Raza said hopelessly.

Bilquis grew stronger as he weakened. 'In a woman's body,'
she replied, 'the child is nowhere to be seen. A woman does not
have to be a brainbox. In many opinions brains are a positive dis-
advantage to a �woman in marriage. She likes to go to the kitchen
and help the khansama with his work. At the bazaar she can
tell good vegetables from bad. You yourself have praised her
chutneys. She can tell when the servants have not polished the
furniture properly. She wears a brassiere and in other ways also
her body has become that of an adult woman. And she even does
not blush.'

This was true. The alarming reddenings of Sufiya Zinobia
were, it seemed, things of the past; nor had the turkey-
assassinating violence recurred. It was as if the girl had been
cleansed by her single, all-consuming explosion of shame.

'Maybe,' Raza Hyder slowly said, 'I am worrying too much.'

'Besides,' Bilquis said with finality, 'he is her doctor, this man.
He saved her life. Into whose hands could we more safely
place her? Into nobody's, I say. This proposal has come to us
from God.'

'Catch your ears,' Dawood shrieked, 'tobah, tobah! But your

Shame, Good News and the Virgin � 169

God is great, great in his greatness, and so he may forgive such
blasphemy.'

Raza Hyder looked old and sad. 'We must send Shahbanou
with her,' he insisted. 'And a quiet wedding. Too much hulla-
baloo would frighten her.'

'Just let me finish with Good News,' Bilquis said in delight,
'and we will have a wedding so quiet that only the birds will sing.'

Maulana Dawood withdrew from the scene of his defeat. 'Girls
married in the wrong order,' he said as he departed. 'What began
with a necklace of shoes cannot end well.'

On the day of the polo match between the Army and Police
teams Bilquis shook Good News awake early. The match was not
scheduled to begin until five o'clock in the afternoon, but Bilquis
said, 'Eleven hours dolling yourself up to meet your future hus-
band is like money in the bank.' By the time mother and daughter
arrived at the polo ground Good News was in such tip-top condi-
tion that people thought a bride had abandoned her wedding feast
to come and watch the game. Haroun Harappa met them by the
little table at which the match commentator sat surrounded by
microphones and led them to the chairs he had saved for them;
the spectacle of Good News's get-up was so overpowering that he
came away with a clearer impression of the design of her nose-
jewellery than of the fortunes of the game. Every so often during
that afternoon he ran off and returned bearing paper plates heaped
with samosas or jalebis, with cups of fizzing cola balanced along
his forearms. During his absences Bilquis watched her daughter
like a hawk, to make sure she tried no funny business like catching
the eyes of other boys; but when Haroun returned Bilquis became
unaccountably absorbed in the game. The great star of the Police
team was a certain Captain Talvar Ulhaq, and in that time of the
Army's unpopularity his annihilation of their polo squad that
afternoon turned him into something of a national hero, especially
as he conformed to all the usual heroic requirements, being tall,
dashing, mustachioed, with a tiny scar on his neck that looked
exactly like a love-bite. This Captain Talvar was to be the cause of

Shame ? 17 0

the wedding scandal out of which, it could be argued with some
plausibility, the whole of the future grew.

From the stammering and awkward conversation she had with
Haroun that day Good News discovered to her consternation that
her future husband had no ambitions and a tiny appetite. Nor was
he in any hurry to have children. The confidence with which
Naveed Hyder had stated, 'I'll fix him,' ebbed out of her in the
physical presence of this pudding of a young man, so it was per-
haps inevitable that her eyes should become glued to the upright,
capering, mythological figure of Talvar Ulhaq on his whirling
horse. And maybe it was also inevitable that her excessive dressi-
ness should attract the interest of the young police captain who
was famous for being the most successful stud in the city - so
maybe the whole thing was Bilquis's fault for dressing up her
daughter � at any rate, Bilquis for all her vigilance missed the
moment when their eyes met. Good News and Talvar stared at
each other through the dust and hooves and polo-sticks, and at
that moment the girl felt a pain shoot up her insides. She managed
to turn the shuddering moan which escaped her lips into a violent
sneeze and cough before anyone noticed, and was assisted in
her subterfuge by the commotion on the polo field, where Cap-
tain Talvar's horse had inexplicably reared and thrown him
down into the perils of the flying hooves and sticks. 'I just went
stiff all over,' Talvar told Naveed later, 'and the horse lost its
temper with me.'

The game ended shortly afterwards, and Good News went
home with Bilquis, knowing that she would never marry Haroun
Harappa, no, not in a million years. That night she heard pebbles
rattling on her bedroom window, tied her bedsheets together and
climbed down into the arms of the polo star, who drove her in a
police car to his beach hut at Fisherman's Cove. When they had
finished making love she asked the most modest question of her
life: 'I'm not so great looking,' she said, 'why me?' Talvar Ulhaq
sat up in bed and looked as serious as a schoolboy. 'On account of
the hunger of your womb,' he told her. 'You are appetite and I
am food.' Now she perceived that Talvar had a pretty high

Shame, Good News and the Virgin ? 171

opinion of himself and began to wonder whether she might have
bitten off more than she could chew.

It turned out that Talvar Ulhaq had had the gift of clairvoyancy
from childhood, a talent which assisted him greatly in his police
work, because he could divine where crimes were going to be
committed before the thieves had worked it out themselves, so
that his record of arrests was unbeatable. He had foreseen in
Naveed Hyder the children who had always been his greatest
dream, the profusion of children who would make him puff up
with pride while she disintegrated under the awesome chaos of
their numbers. This vision had made him willing to undertake the
extremely dangerous course of action to which he was now com-
mitted, because he knew that Raza Hyder's daughter was engaged
to be married to the favourite nephew of Chairman Iskander
Harappa, that the invitations to the wedding had already gone out,
and that by any normal standards his situation was hopeless.
'Nothing is impossible,' he told Naveed, got dressed, and went
outside into the salty night to find a sea-turtle to ride. Naveed
emerged a little later to find him whooping with joy as he stood
on a turtle's back, and while she was enjoying his simple pleasure
the fishermen came and grinned at them. Afterwards Naveed
Hyder was never sure whether this had been a part of Talvar's
plan, whether he had signalled to the fishermen from the back of
the weeping turtle, or if he had visited the Cove in advance to
plan the whole thing, because after all it was well-known that the
fishermen and the police force were great allies, being regularly in
cahoots for smuggling purposes . . . Talvar, however, never
admitted any responsibility for what happened.

What happened was that the fisherman's leader, a patriarch
with an honest and open face in which an unblemished set of
white teeth gleamed improbably in the moonlight, informed the
couple pleasantly that he and his fellows intended to blackmail
them. 'Such ungodly goings-on,' the old fisherman said sadly, 'it is
bad for our peace of mind. Some compensation, some comfort
must be given.'

Talvar Ulhaq paid up without arguing and drove Good News

Shame ? 172

home. With his help, she managed to climb up the rope of bed-
sheets without being discovered. 'I won't see you again,' he said at
their parting, 'until you break your engagement and allow what
must be to be.'

His second sight informed him that she would do as he had
asked, so he went home to prepare for marriage and for the storm
which would surely break.

Good News (let us remind ourselves) was her mother's
favourite daughter. Her fear of forfeiting this position fought
inside her with the equal and opposite fear that the fishermen
would continue their blackmail; the insane love she had conceived
for Talvar Ulhaq wrestled with the duty she owed to the boy her
parents had selected; the loss of her virginity drove her wild with
worry. But until the last evening before her wedding she
remained silent. Talvar Ulhaq told her afterwards that her inaction
had brought him close to the point of insanity, and that he had
resolved to turn up at the wedding and shoot Haroun Harappa,
whatever the consequences, if she had decided to go through with
the match. But at the eleventh hour Good News told her mother,
'I won't marry that stupid potato,' and all hell broke loose,
because love was the last thing anyone had been expecting to foul
up the arrangements.

O glee of female relatives in the face of unconcealable scandal! O
crocodile tears and insincere pummelling of breasts! O delighted
crowing of Duniyazad Begum as she dances upon the corpse of
Bilquis's honour! And the forktongued offers of hope: Who
knows, talk to her, many girls panic on their wedding eve, yes,
she'll see sense, just try only, time to be firm, time to be gentle,
beat her up a little, give her a loving hug, O God, but how ter-
rible, how can you cancel the guests?

And when it is clear that the girl cannot be moved, when the
delicious horror of it all is out in the open, when Good News
admits that there is Someone Else - then Bariamma stirs on her
bolsters and the room falls silent to hear her judgment.

'This is your failure as a mother,' Bariamma wheezes, 'so now

Shame, Good News and the Virgin ? 173

the father must be called. Go now and bring him, my Raza, run
and fetch.'

Two tableaux. In the bridal chamber Naveed Hyder sits immov-
able and mulish while all around her are women frozen by their
delight into living statues, women holding combs, brushes, silver-
polish, antimony, staring at Naveed, disaster's source, with petri-
fied joy. Bariamma's lips are the only moving features in the
scene. Time-honoured words are dripping out of them: floozy,
hussy, whore. And in Raza's bedroom Bilquis is clinging to her
husband's legs as he struggles into his pants.

Raza Hyder awoke to catastrophe from a dream in which he
saw himself standing on the parade-ground of his failure before a
phalanx of recruits all of whom were exact replicas of himself,
except that they were incompetent, they could not march in step
or dress to the left or polish their belt buckles properly. He had
been screaming his despair at these shades of his own ineptitude,
and the rage of the dream infected his waking mood. His first
reaction to the news which Bilquis forced past lips that did not
want to let it through was that he had no option but to kill the
girl. 'Such shame,' he said, 'such havoc wrought to the plans of
parents.' He decided to shoot her in the head in front of his family
members. Bilquis clung to his thighs, slipped down as he began to
move, and was dragged from the bedroom, her nails digging into
his ankles. The cold sweat of her fear made her pencilled eye-
brows run down her face. The ghost of Sindbad Mengal was not
mentioned, but O, he was there all right. Army pistol in hand,
Raza Hyder entered Good News's room; the screams of women
greeted him as he came.

But this is not the story of my discarded Anna M.; Raza, raising
his gun, found himself unable to use it. 'Throw her into the
street,' he said, and left the room.

Now the night is full of negotiations. Raza in his quarters stares at
an unused pistol. Deputations are sent; he remains unbending.
Then the ayah Shahbanou, rubbing sleep from black-rimmed

Shame � 174

eyes, so like Hyder's own, is dispatched by Bilquis to plead Good
News's cause. 'He likes you because you are good with Sufiya
Zinobia. He'll listen maybe to you when he won't to me.' Bilquis
is crumbling visibly, has been reduced to pleading with servants.
Shahbanou holds Good News's future in her hands � Good News,
who has kicked, abused, hit � 'I'll go, Begum Sahib,' Shahbanou
says. Ayah and father confer behind closed doors; 'Forgive my
saying, sir, but don't pile shame on shame.'

At three a.m. Raza Hyder relents. There must be a wedding,
the girl must be handed over to a husband, any husband. That will
get rid of her and cause less of a stir than kicking her out. 'A
whore with a home,' Raza summons Bilquis to announce, 'is
better than a whore in the gutter.' Naveed tells her mother the
name: not without pride, she says clearly to one and all: 'It must
be Captain Talvar Ulhaq. Nobody else will do.'