Shame (28 page)

But they all outlived him, as it turned out. His diverted love
(because he never saw Pinkie again, never lifted a telephone or
wrote a letter, her name never passed his lips; he saw the photo-
graphs and after that nothing) splashed over the people, until one
day Hyder choked off the spring.

In the Fifteenth Century ? 191

It splashed, too, over Arjumand; for whom it was more than
enough. She moved in with him to the Prime Minister's residence
in the new northern capital, and for a while Rani kept writing to
her, suggesting boys, even sending photographs; but Arjumand
would return the letters and the photographs to her mother after
ripping them to shreds. After several years of tearing potential hus-
bands in half the virgin Ironpants finally defeated Rani's hopes,
and was allowed to continue down her chosen road. She was
twenty-three when Isky became Prime Minister, she looked
older, and although she was still far too beautiful for her own
good the passage of time eroded her prospects, and at last she ran
out of suitors. Between Arjumand and Haroun nothing more was
said. He tore me in half long ago.

Arjumand Harappa qualified in the law, became active in the
green revolution, threw zamindars out of their palaces, opened
dungeons, led raids on the homes of film stars and slit open their
mattresses with a long two-edged knife, laughed as the black
money poured out from between the pocketed springs. In court
she prosecuted the enemies of the state with a scrupulous ferocity
that gave her nickname a new and less ribald meaning; once she
arrived at her chambers to find that some joker had broken in
during the night and had left, standing in the centre of the room, a
mocking gift: the lower half of an antique and rusty suit of armour,
a pair of satirical metal legs placed at attention, heels together, on
the rug. And laid neatly across the hollow waist, a padlocked metal
belt. Arjumand Harappa, the virgin Ironpants.

That night she cried, sitting on the floor of her father's study,
her head resting on his knee. 'They hate me.' Iskander grabbed
her and shook her until the astonishment dried the tears. 'Who
hates you?' he demanded, 'just ask that. It is my enemies who are
yours, and our enemies are the enemies of the people. Where's
the shame in being hated by those bastards?' She understood then
how love engenders hate. 'I am making this country,' Iskander
told her quietly, 'making it as a man would build a marriage. With
strength as well as caring. No time for tears if you're going to

Shame � 192

help.' She wiped her eyes and grinned. 'Polygamist,' she punched
his leg, 'what an old-fashioned backward type at heart! It's just
marriages and concubines you want. Modern man, my foot.'

'Mr. Harappa,' the Angrez television interviewer is asking, 'many
commentators would say, there is a widely-held view, some sec-
tors of opinion maintain, your opponents allege, what would you
say to the suggestion, that by some standards, from certain points
of view, in a way, your style of government might be described as
being perhaps, to some extent..."

'I see they are sending children to interview me now,' Isky
interposes. The interviewer has begun to sweat. Off-camera, but
Arjumand remembers.

'. . . patrician,' he finishes, 'autocratic, intolerant, repressive?'

Iskander Harappa smiles, sits back in his Louis Quinze chair,
sips roohafza from a cut-glass tumbler. 'You could say,' he replies,
'that I do not suffer fools gladly. But, as you see, I suffer them.'

Arjumand at Mohenjo replays her father's videotapes. Played in
the room where it was made, this conversation overwhelms her,
this electronic resurrection by remote control. Yes, he suffered
them. His name was etched on history in letters of burning gold;
why should he go for brassy types? Here they are on the tape, trust
a Western journalist to go digging in the cess-tank and come up
holding handfuls of scum. He tortured me, they whine, he fired
me, he put me in jail, I ran for my life. Good television: make our
leaders look like primitives, wild men, even when they have for-
eign educations and fancy suits. Yes, always the malcontents, that's
all they care about.

He never liked arguments. Do as he ordered and do it now,
fut-a-fut, or out on your ear you go. This was as it should
be. Look what he had to work with � even his ministers. Turn-
coats, nest-featherers, quislings, timeservers, the lot of them. He
trusted none of these characters, so he set up the Federal Security
Force with Talvar Ulhaq at its head. 'Information is light,' Chair-
man Iskander Harappa said.

The clairvoyancy of Talvar Ulhaq enabled him to compile

In the Fifteenth Century ? 193

exhaustive dossiers on who-was-bribing-whom, on conspiracies,
tax evasion, dangerous talk at dinner parties, student sects, homo-
sexuality, the roots of treason. Clairvoyancy made it possible for
him to arrest a future traitor before he committed his act of
treason, and thus save the fellow's life. The negativist elements
attacked the FSF, they would have put out that great cleansing
light, so off to jail they went, best place for malcontents. No time
for such types during a period of national regeneration. 'As a
nation we have a positive genius for self-destruction,' Iskander
told Arjumand once, 'we nibble away at ourselves, we eat our
children, we pull down anyone who climbs up. But I insist that
we shall survive.'

'Nobody can topple me,' Isky's ghost tells the electronic shade
of the Angrez journalist, 'not the fat cats, not the Americans, not
even you. Who am I? I am the incarnation of the people's love.'

Masses versus classes, the age-old opposition. Who loved him?
'The people', who are no mere romantic abstractions: who are
sensible, and smart enough to know what serves them best. Who
loved him? Pinkie Aurangzeb, Rani Harappa, Arjumand, Talvar,
Haroun. What dissensions among this quintet! - Between wife
and mistress, mother and daughter, jilted Arjumand and jilting
Haroun, jilted Haroun and usurping Talvar . . . perhaps, Arju-
mand muses, his fall was our fault. Through our divided ranks
they drove the regiments of his defeat.

They. Fat cats, smugglers, priests. City socialites who remem-
bered his carefree youth and could not tolerate the thought that a
great man had sprung out of that debauched cocoon. Factory
bosses who had never paid as much attention to the maintenance
of their workers as they lavished on the servicing of their imported
looms, and whom he, the Chairman, forced to accept the
unthinkable, that is, unionization. Usurers, swindlers, banks. The
American Ambassador.

Ambassadors: he got through nine of them in his six years. Also
five English and three Russian heads of mission. Arjumand and

I1

Shame ? 194

Iskander would place bets on how long each new arrival would
survive; then, happy as a boy with a new stick and hoop, he
would set about giving them hell. He made them wait weeks for
audiences, interrupted their sentences, denied them hunting
licences. He invited them to banquets at which the Russian
Ambassador was served birds'-nest soup and Peking Duck, while
the American got borshch and blinis. He refused to flirt with their
wives. With the British Ambassador he would pretend to be a
hick just down from the villages, and speak only in an obscure
regional dialect; in the case of the United States, however, he took
the opposite tack and addressed their legate in incomprehensibly
florid French. Embassies would constantly be subjected to power
cuts. Isky would open their diplomatic bags and personally add
outrageous remarks to the Ambassadors' reports, so that one Rus-
sian was summoned home to explain certain unusual theories of
his about the parentage of various leading Politburo chiefs; he
never returned. The Jack Anderson column in America carried a
leaked document in which the U.S. delegate to Iskander's court
had apparently confessed that he had long felt a strong sexual
attraction towards Secretary Kissinger. That was the end of that
Ambassador. 'It took time to get into my stride,' Iskander
admitted to Arjumand, 'but once I got the hang of it, those guys
never got any sleep.'

He had two-way bugs placed in their telephones and after that
the Soviet Ambassador was plagued by interminable recordings of
Hail to the Chief whenever he picked up his receiver, while the
American got the complete thoughts of Chairman Mao. He
smuggled a series of beautiful young boys into the British Ambas-
sador's bed, much to the consternation, not to say delight, of his
wife, who developed thereafter the habit of retiring to her room
very early, just in case. He expelled cultural attaches and agricul-
tural attaches. He summoned the Ambassadors to his office at
three in the morning and screamed at them until dawn, accusing
them of conspiring with religious fanatics and disaffected textile
tycoons. He blocked their drains and censored their incoming
mail, depriving the English of their subscription copies of horse-

In the Fifteenth Century � 195

racing journals, the Russians of Playboy and the Americans of
everything else. The last of the nine Americans lasted only eight
weeks, dying of a heart attack two days before the coup which
dethroned Isky and ended the game. 'If I last long enough,' the
Chairman mused, 'maybe I can destroy the whole international
diplomatic network. They'll run out of Ambassadors before I run
out of steam.'

In the fifteenth century a great man came to power. Yes, he
seemed omnipotent, he could trifle with the emissaries of the
might, look at me, he was saying, you can't catch me. Immortal, invul-
nerable Harappa. He gave people pride . . . the tenth American
Ambassador arrived after Iskander's arrest, and expression of blessed
relief on his face. When he presented his credentials to Raza Hyder
he murmured quietly, 'Forgive me, sir, but I hope you lack your
predecessor's sense of humour.'

'The question of national stability,' Hyder replied, 'is no joke.'

Once, when Arjumand visited her father in his hell-hole of a
jail, Iskander, bruised, wasted, sick with dysentery, forced a grin to
his lips. 'This tenth bastard sounds like a real shit,' he said pain-
fully. 'I wish I could have made it into double figures.'

In the fifteenth century . . . but the century did not, despite
posters, turn in the year of his accession. That happened later. But
such was the impact of his coming that the actual change, thirteen
hundred into fourteen hundred, felt like an anticlimax when
it finally occurred. His greatness overpowered Time itself. A NEW
MAN FOR A NEW century . . . yes, he ushered it in, ahead of
Time. But it did the dirty on him. Time's revenge: it hung him
out to dry.

They hanged him in the middle of the night, cut him down,
wrapped him up and gave him to Talvar Ulhaq, who put him into
a plane and flew him to Mohenjo, where two women waited,
under guard. When the body had been unloaded the pilot and
crew of the Fokker Friendship refused to leave the aircraft. The
plane waited for Talvar at the top of Mohenjo's runway, giving off
a nervous haze, as if it could not bear to stay in that place an

Shame ? 196

instant longer than necessary. Rani and Arjumand were driven by
staff car to Sikandra, that outlying zone of Mohenjo where
Harappas had always been buried. And saw amid the marble
umbrellas of the tombs a fresh, deep hole. Talvar Ulhaq at atten-
tion beside the white-swathed body. Rani Harappa, white-haired
now, like the phantom of Pinkie Aurangzeb, refused to cry. 'So
it's him,' she said. Talvar bowed, stiff-necked, from the waist.
'Prove it,' said Rani Harappa. 'Show me my husband's face.'

'You should spare yourself,' Talvar replied. 'He was hanged.'

'Be quiet,' Rani said. 'Pull back the sheet.'

'I greatly regret,' Talvar Ulhaq bowed again, 'but I have
orders.'

'What orders?' Rani did not raise her voice. 'Who can deny me
such a thing?' But Talvar said again, 'Sincerely. I regret,' and low-
ered his traitor's eyes. Talvar and Raza, policeman and soldier:
Isky's men.

'Then something is the matter with the body,' Rani said, at
which Talvar stiffened. 'Your husband is dead,' he snapped, 'what
can be the matter with him now?'

'Then let me kiss him through the sheet,' Rani whispered, and
bent down to the swaddled shape. Talvar did not attempt to stop
her, until he realized what she was up to, and by then her nails had
clawed a great hole in the cloth, and there, staring up at her with
open eyes, was Iskander's ash-grey face.

'You didn't even close them,' Arjumand spoke for the first
time. But her mother fell silent, staring intently at fleshy lips, at
silver hair, until they pulled her away . . . 'Go on,' Rani said,
'bury the evidence of your shame. I have seen it now.' The sun
leapt over the horizon as they laid Iskander down.

'When you hang a man,' Rani Harappa said distantly in the
returning car, 'the eyes bulge. The face turns blue. The tongue
sticks out.'

'Amma, for God's sake.'

'The bowels open, but they could have cleaned that up. I
smelled some disinfectant.'

'I won't listen to this.'

In the Fifteenth Century ? 197

'Maybe even the face, they have people to fix such things, to
cut off the tongue so that the lips will shut. Maybe make-up artists
were employed.'

Arjumand Harappa covered her ears.

'But one thing remains. On a hanged man's neck the rope
leaves its mark. Iskander's neck was clean.'

'This is disgusting,' Arjumand said, 'I'll be sick.'

'Don't you understand?' Rani Harappa shouted at her. 'If the
rope did not mark him, it must be because he was already dead.
Are you to stupid to see? They hanged a corpse.'

Arjumand's hands fell to her lap. 'O God.' The mark-free neck:
absence of death's visiting card. Seized by a sudden unreason,
Arjumand cried, 'Why are you talking so big, Amma? What do
you know about hangings and all?'