Shame (26 page)

Telephone calls. Mir Harappa awoken to be informed of the
change of plan. 'Your bastard family. Fuck me in the mouth if I
don't get even.' Iskander Harappa receives the news calmly, relays
it to Arjumand who is in her nightgown beside the telephone.
Something flickers in her eyes.

It is Iskander who tells Haroun.

And one more call, to a police captain who has not slept a
wink, who like Raza has spent part of the night fingering a pistol.
'I will not tell you what I think of you,' Raza Hyder roars into the
mouthpiece, 'but get your hide here tomorrow and take this no-
good female off my hands. Not one paisa of dowry and keep out
of my sight for ever after.'

'Ji, I shall be honoured to marry your daughter,' Talvar politely
replies. And in the Hyder household, women who can scarcely
believe their luck begin once again to make preparations for the
great day. Naveed Hyder goes to bed and falls sound asleep with
an innocent expression on her face. Dark henna on her soles turns
orange while she rests.

'Shame and scandal in the family,' Shahbanou tells Sufiya
Zinobia in the morning. 'Bibi, you don't know what you missed.'

Shame, Good News and the Virgin ? 175

Something else was happening that night. On university, cam-
puses, in the bazaars of the cities, under cover of darkness, the
people were assembling. By the time the sun rose it was clear that
the government was going to fall. That morning the people took
to the streets and set fire to motor cars, school buses, Army trucks
and the libraries of the British Council and United States Informa-
tion Service to express their displeasure. Field-Marshal A. ordered
troops into the streets to restore peace. At eleven-fifteen he was
visited by a General known to everyone by the nickname 'Shaggy
Dog', an alleged associate of Chairman Iskander Harappa. General
Shaggy Dog informed the distraught President that the armed
forces were absolutely refusing to fire on civilians, and soldiers
would shoot their officers rather than their fellow-countrymen.
This statement convinced President A. that his time was up, and
by lunchtime he had been replaced by General Shaggy, who
placed A. under house arrest and appeared on the brand-new tele-
vision service to announce that his sole purpose in assuming
power was to lead the nation back towards democracy; elections
would take place within eighteen months. The afternoon was
spent by the people in joyful celebration; Datsuns, taxi-cabs, the
Alliance Francaise building and the Goethe Institute provided the
fuel for their incandescent happiness.

Mir Harappa heard about the bloodless coup of President Dog
within eight minutes of Marshal A.'s resignation. This second
major blow to his prestige drained all the fight out of Little Mir.
Leaving a letter of resignation on his desk he fled to his Daro
estate without bothering to await developments, and immured
himself there in a mood of such desolation that the servants could
hear him muttering under his breath that his days were numbered.
'Two things have happened,' he would say, 'but the third is
yet to come.'

Iskander and Arjumand spent the day with Haroun in Karachi.
Iskander on the telephone all day, Arjumand so aroused by the
news that she forgot to sympathize with Haroun about his can-

Shame ? 176

r

celled wedding. 'Stop looking so fish-faced,' she told him, 'the
future has begun.' Rani Harappa arrived by train from Mohenjo,
thinking she was about to spend a carefree day at Good News's
Nikah celebrations, but Isky's chauffeur Jokio told her at the sta-
tion that the world had changed. He drove her to the town house,
where Iskander embraced her warmly and said, 'Good you came.
Now we must stand together before the people; our moment has
come.' At once Rani forgot all about weddings and began to look,
at forty, as young as her only daughter. 'I knew it,' she exulted
inwardly. 'Good old Shaggy Dog.'

So great was the excitement of that day that the news of the
events in the Hyder household was blotted out completely,
whereas on any other day the scandal would have been impossible
to cover up. Captain Talvar Ulhaq came alone to the wedding,
having chosen to involve neither friends nor family members in
the shameful circumstances of his nuptials. He had to struggle
through streets that were hot with burning cars in a police jeep
that mercifully escaped the ministrations of the crowds, and was
received by Raza Hyder with glacial formality and scorn. 'It is my
earnest intention,' Talvar told Raza, 'to be the finest son-in-law
that you could wish for, so that in time you may reconsider your
decision to cut your daughter out of your life.' Raza gave the
briefest of replies to this courageous speech. 'I don't care for polo
players,' he said.

Those guests who had managed to reach the Hyder residence
through the unstable euphoria of the streets had taken the precau-
tion of dressing in their oldest, most tattered clothes; nor did they
wear any jewellery. They had put on these unfestive rags to avoid
attracting the attention of the people, who usually put up with
rich folk but might just have elected in their elation to add the
city's elite to their collection of burning symbols. The dilapidated
condition of the guests was one of the strangest features of that day
of strangenesses; Good News Hyder, oiled hennaed bejewelled,
looked in that gathering of frightened celebrants even more out of
place than she had appeared at the polo match of her inescapable
destiny. 'It's like being married in a palace full of beggars,' she

Shame, Good News and the Virgin ? 177

whispered to Talvar, who sat flower-garlanded beside her on a
little podium beneath the glittering, mirrorworked marquee. The
sweetmeats and delicacies of Bilquis's motherly pride languished
uneaten on long whiteclothed tables in the bizarre atmosphere of
that horrified and dislocated time.

Why the guests refused to eat: already unbalanced by the dan-
gers of the streets, they had been almost completely deranged by
the information, which was conveyed to them on little hand-
written erratum slips which Bilquis had been writing out for
hours, that while the bride was indeed the expected Good News
Hyder there had been a last-minute change of groom. 'Owing to
circumstances beyond our control,' read the little white chitties of
humiliation, 'the part of husband will be taken by Police Capt.
Talvar Ulhaq.' Bilquis had had to write this line five hundred and
fifty-five times over, and each successive inscription drove the
nails of her shame deeper into her heart, so that by the time the
guests arrived and the servants handed out the erratum slips
she was as stiff with dishonour as if she had been impaled on a
tree. As the shock of the coup was replaced on the guests' faces by
the awareness of the size of the catastrophe that had befallen the
Hyders, Raza, too, became numb all over, anaesthetized by his
public disgrace. The presence of the Himalayas of uneaten food
struck the chill of shame into the soul of Shahbanou the ayah,
who was standing by Sufiya Zinobia in a condition of such
extreme despondency that she forgot to greet Omar Khayyam
Shakil. The doctor had lumbered into that gathering of million-
aires disguised as gardeners; his thoughts were so full of the ambi-
guities of his own engagement to the halfwit of his obsessions that
he utterly failed to notice that he had walked into a mirage from
the past, a ghost-image of the legendary party given by the three
Shakil sisters in their old house in Q. The erratum slip rested
unread in his plump tight fist until, belatedly, the meaning of the
uneaten food dawned on him.

It was not an exact replica of that longago party. No food was
eaten, but still a wedding took place. Can there ever have been a
Nikah at which nobody flirted with anybody else, at which the

Shame ? 17 8

hired musicians were so overwhelmed by the occasion that they
neglected to play a single note? Certainly there could not have
been many nuptial feasts at which the last-minute groom was all
but murdered on his podium by his newly-acquired sister-in-law.

O dear, yes. I regret to have to inform you that (setting the seal,
as it were, on that perfect disaster of a day) the somnolent demon
of shame that had possessed Sufiya Zinobia on the day she slew
the turkeys emerged once more beneath the mirror-shiny
shamiana of disgrace.

A glazing-over of her eyes, which acquired the milky opacity
of somnambulism. A pouring-in to her too-sensitive spirit of the
great abundance of shame in that tormented tent. A fire beneath
the skin, so that she began to flame all over, a golden blaze that
dimmed the rouge on her cheeks and the paint on her fingers and
toes . . . Omar Khayyam Shakil spotted what was going on, but
too late, so that by the time he shouted 'Look out!' across that
catatonic gathering the demon had already hurled Sufiya Zinobia
across the party, and before anyone moved she had grabbed Cap-
tain Talvar Ulhaq by the head and begun to twist, to twist so hard
that he screamed at the top of his voice, because his neck was on
the point of snapping like a straw.

Good News Hyder grabbed her sister by the hair and pulled
with all her might, feeling the burning heat of that supernatural
passion scorch her fingers; then Omar Khayyam and Shahbanou
and Raza Hyder and even Bilquis joined in, as the guests sank fur-
ther into their speechless stupor, aghast at this last expression of
the impossible fantasy of the day. The combined efforts of the five
desperate people succeeded in detaching Sufiya Zinobia's hands
before Talvar Ulhaq's head was ripped off like a turkey's; but then
she buried her teeth in his neck, giving him a second scar to bal-
ance that famous love-bite, and sending his blood spurting long
distances across the gathering, so that all her family and many of
the camouflaged guests began to resemble workers in a halal
slaughterhouse. Talvar was squealing like a pig, and when they
finally dragged Sufiya Zinobia off him she had a morsel of his skin
and flesh in her teeth. Afterwards, when he recovered, he was

Shame, Good News and the Virgin ? 179

never able to move his head to the left. Sufiya Zinobia Hyder, the
incarnation of her family's shame and also, once again, its chief
cause, fell limply into her fiance's arms, and Omar Khayyam had
assailant and victim taken immediately to hospital, where Talvar
Ulhaq remained on the critical list for one hundred and one
hours, while Sufiya Zinobia had to be brought out of her self-
induced trance by the exercise of more hypnotic skill than Omar
had ever been required to display. Good News Hyder spent her
wedding night weeping inconsolably on her mother's shoulder in
a hospital waiting-room. 'That monster,' she sobbed bitterly, 'you
should have had her drowned at birth.'

A short inventory of the effects of the wedding scandal: the stiff
neck of Talvar Ulhaq, which terminated his career as a polo star;
the birth of a spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation within Raza
Hyder, who found it hard to ostracize a man whom his daughter
had almost killed, so that Talvar and Good News were not, after
all, cast out of the bosom of that accursed family; also the acceler-
ated disintegration of Bilquis Hyder, whose breakdown could no
longer be concealed, even though she became, in the following
years, little more than a whisper or rumour, because Raza Hyder
kept her away from society, under a kind of unofficial house
arrest.

What else? - When it became clear that Iskander Harappa's
Popular Front would do extremely well in the elections, Raza
paid a call on Isky. Bilquis stayed at home with her hair hanging
loose, railing at the heavens because her husband, her Raza, had
gone to abase himself before that blubber-lips who always got
everything he wanted. Hyder tried to force himself to apologize
for the wedding fiasco, but Iskander said merrily, 'For God's sake,
Raza, Haroun can take care of himself, and as for your Talvar
Ulhaq, I'm pretty impressed by the coup that fellow engineered. I
tell you, he's the man for me!' Not long after this meeting, once
the insanity of the elections had passed and President Shaggy Dog
had retired into private life, Prime Minister Iskander Harappa
made Talvar Ulhaq the youngest police chief in the country's his-

Shame ? 180

tory, and also promoted Raza Hyder to the rank of General and
placed him in command of the Army. Hyders and Harappas
moved north to the new capital in the hills; Isky told Rani, 'From
now on Raza has no option but to be my man. With the amount
of scandal sitting on his head, he knows he'd have been lucky to
keep his commission if I hadn't come along.'

Haroun Harappa, his heart broken by Good News, flung him-
self into the party work given him by Iskander, becoming an
important figure in the Popular Front; and when, one day, Arju-
mand declared her love, he told her bluntly, 'Nothing I can do. I
have decided never to marry.' The rejection of the virgin Iron-
pants by Good News's jilted fiance engendered in that formidable
young woman a hatred of all Hyders which she would never
lose; she took the love she had intended to give Haroun and
poured it like a votive offering over her father instead. Chairman
and daughter, Iskander and Arjumand: 'There are times,' Rani
thought, 'when she seems more like his wife than 1 do.' And
another unspoken tension in the Harappa camp was that between
Haroun Harappa and Talvar Ulhaq, who were obliged to work
together, which they did for many years without ever finding it
necessary to exchange a single spoken word.

The quiet marriage of Omar Khayyam Shakil and Sufiya
Zinobia went off, by the way, without further incident. But what
of Sufiya Zinobia? � Let me just say for the moment that what had
reawoken in her did not go back to sleep for good. Her transfor-
mation from Miss Hyder into Mrs Shakil will not be (as we shall
see) the last permanent change . . .