Shame (29 page)

'You have forgotten,' Rani said mildly, 'I saw Little Mir.'

That day Rani Harappa tried, for the last time, to call her old
friend Bilquis Hyder on the telephone.

'I'm sorry,' a voice said, 'Begum Hyder cannot come to talk.'
'Then it's true,' Rani thought, 'poor Bilquis. He has her shut
away as well.'

Rani and Arjumand were kept under house arrest for six years
exactly, two before the execution of Iskander Harappa, four after
it. During that time they completely failed to draw closer to each
other, owing to the incompatibility of their memories. But the
one thing they did have in common was that neither of them ever
wept over Iskander's death. The presence at Mohenjo of a small
canvas mountain-range of Army tents, which had been thrown up
as if by an earthquake in that same courtyard in which Raza
Hyder had once staked himself to the ground, kept their eyes dry.
That is to say, they were living on usurped soil, in occupied terri-
tory, and they were determined not to let the invaders see their
tears. Their chief warder, a certain Captain Ijazz, a young barrel of
a fellow with toothbrush hair and a persistent fuzz on his upper lip
which obstinately refused to thicken into a moustache, at first
attempted to goad them into it. 'God knows what you women

Shame ? 191

are,' he shrugged. 'You rich bitches. Your man is dead but you
will not wet his grave.' Rani Harappa refused to be provoked.
'You are right,' she replied, 'God knows. And He also knows
about young men in uniforms. Brass buttons cannot hide a thing
from Him.'

During those years spent beneath the suspicious eyes of soldiers
and in the cold breezes of her daughter's solitude Rani Harappa
continued to embroider woollen shawls. 'House arrest changes
very little,' she admitted to Captain Ijazz at the very beginning,
'speaking for myself. It just means there are new faces around to
say a few words to now and then.'

'Don't start imagining I'm your friend,' Ijazz shouted, the sweat
glistening on his fuzzy mouth. 'Once we've killed that bastard
we'll confiscate this house. All this gold, silver, all those dirty for-
eign paintings of naked women and of men who are half horse. It
must go.'

'Start with the pictures in my bedroom,' Rani advised him.
'They are worth the most money. And let me know if you need
help to sort out the real silver from the plate.'

Captain Ijazz was less than nineteen years old when he came to
Mohenjo, and in the confusion of his youth he swung violently
between the braggadocio born of his embarrassment at being sent
to guard such illustrious ladies, and the incompetent awkward
shyness of his years. When Rani Harappa offered to assist him
with the looting of Mohenjo the flint of his shame ignited the
tinder of his pride and he ordered his men to make a pile of valu-
ables in front of the verandah where she sat, her face neutral and
composed, and worked upon a shawl. Babar Shakil in his brief
youth had burned one heap of relics; Captain Ijazz, who had
never heard of the boy who became an angel, reignited that bon-
fire at Mohenjo, the bonfire in which men burn what oppresses
them about the past. And throughout that day of flame Rani
Harappa guided the vandalizing soldiers, making sure the choicest
pieces of furniture and the finest works of art found their way into
the blaze.

Two days later Ijazz came up to Rani, who was in her rocking-

In the Fifteenth Century ? 199

chair as usual, and apologized gracelessly for his intemperate deed.
'No, it was a good idea,' she replied, 'I didn't like that old stuff
anyway, but Isky would have gone wild if I'd tried to throw it
out.' After the fire-looting of Mohenjo, Ijazz started treating Rani
Harappa with respect, and by the end of the six years he
had begun to think of her as a parent, because he had grown
up in front of her eyes. Deprived of a normal life and of the cama-
raderie of the barracks, Ijazz took to pouring his heart out to
Rani, all his half-formed dreams of women and of a small farm
in the north.

'It's my fate,' Rani thought, 'to get mistaken for people's
mothers.' She remembered that even Iskander had started making
that mistake by the end. The last time he visited Mohenjo he bent
down and kissed her feet.

The two women each took their revenge on their captor. Rani
made him love her, with the result that he hated himself; but
Arjumand began to do what she had never done in her life, that
is, she dressed to kill. The virgin Ironpants swung her hips and
wiggled her behind and flashed her eyes at all the soldiers, but
most of all at the peach-faced Captain Ijazz. The effect of her
behaviour was dramatic. Fights broke out in the little canvas
Himalayas, teeth were broken, soldiers inflicted knife-wounds on
their comrades. Ijazz himself was screaming inwardly, in the grip
of a lust so fierce that he thought he would explode, like a balloon
full of coloured water. He cornered Arjumand one afternoon
while her mother was asleep. 'Don't think I don't know what
you're up to,' he warned her, 'you millionaire whores. Think you
can do anything. In my village a girl would have been stoned for
acting like you do, such cheapness, you know what I mean.'

'Then have me stoned,' Arjumand retorted, 'I dare you.'

One month later Ijazz spoke to her again. 'The men want to
rape you,' he yelled helplessly, 'I can see it in their faces. Why
should I stop them? I should permit it; you are bringing this shame
on your own head.'

'Let them come, by all means,' Arjumand replied, 'but you
must be the first.'

Shame ? 200

'Harlot,' he cursed her in his impotence, 'don't you know
you're in our power? Nobody cares one paisa what happens
to you.'

'I know,' she said.

By the end of the period of house arrest, when Arjumand had
Captain Ijazz imprisoned and tortured slowly to death, he was
twenty-four years old; but his hair, like that of the late Iskander
Harappa, had gone permanently white as snow. When they took
him to the torture chambers he said just three words before he
started screaming". 'So, what's new?'

Rani Harappa, rocking on her verandah, completed in six years of
embroidery a total of eighteen shawls, the most exquisite pieces
she ever created; but instead of showing off her work to daughter
or soldiers, she placed each shawl, on completion, in a black metal
trunk full of naphthalene balls and fastened the lock. The key to
this trunk was the only one she had been permitted to keep.
Captain Ijazz kept all the rest on a large ring hanging from
his belt, which reminded Rani of Bilquis Hyder, the Bilquis who
locked doors compulsively under the influence of the afternoon
wind. Poor Bilquis. She, Rani, missed their telephone conversa-
tions. The deeds of men had severed that link between the
women, that nourishing cord which had, at different times, car-
ried messages of support first one way, then the other, along its
unseen pulses.

Can't be helped. Rani, phlegmatically, worked on her perfect
shawls. At first Captain Ijazz had tried to deny her needles and
thread, but she shamed him out of that quickly enough. 'Don't
think I'm going to stab myself on account of you, boy,' she told
him. 'Or what do you suppose? Will I hang myself, perhaps, by a
noose of embroidery wool?' The serenity of Iskander's wife
(this was before he died) won the day. Ijazz even agreed to requi-
sition balls of wool in the colours and weights she specified
from the military quartermaster-stores; and then once again
she began to work, to weave the shawls, those soft fields, and

In the Fifteenth Century � 20 1

then to raise upon them the vivid and magical crops of her
sorceress's art.

Eighteen shawls locked in a truck: Rani, too, was perpetuating
memories. Harappa the martyr, the demigod, lived on in his
daughter's thoughts; but no two sets of memories ever match,
even when their subject is the same . . . Rani never showed her
work to anyone until, years later, she sent the trunk to Arjumand
as a gift. Nobody ever looked over her shoulder as she worked.
Neither soldiers nor daughter were interested in what Mrs
Harappa did to while away her life.

An epitaph of wool. The eighteen shawls of memory. Every
artist has the right to name her creation, and Rani would put a
piece of paper inside the trunk before she sent it off to her newly
powerful daughter. On this piece of paper she would write her
chosen title: 'The Shamelessness of Iskander the Great.' And she
would add a surprising signature: Rani Humayun. Her own name,
retrieved from the mothballs of the past.

What did eighteen shawls depict?

Locked in their trunk, they said unspeakable things which nobody
wanted to hear: the badminton shawl, on which, against a lime-
green background and within a delicate border of overlapping rac-
quets and shuttlecocks and frilly underpants, the great man lay
unclothed, while all about him the pink-skinned concubines
cavorted, their sporting outfits falling lightly from their bodies;
how brilliantly the folds of breeze-caught garments were por-
trayed, how subtle the felicities of light and shade! � the female
figures seemed unable to bear the confinements of white shirts,
brassieres, gymshoes, they flung them off, while Isky lounging on
his left flank, propped up on an elbow, received their ministra-
tions, yes, I know, you have made a saint of him, my daughter, you
swallowed everything he dished out, his abstinence, his celibacy of an Ori-
ental Pope, but he could not do without for long, that man of pleasure
masquerading as a servant of Duty, that aristocrat who insisted on his
seigneurial rights, no man better at hiding his sins, but I knew him, he

Shame ? 202

hid nothing from me, I saw the white girls in the village swell and pop, I
knew about the small but regular donations he sent them, Harappa
children must not starve, and after he fell they came to me; and the
slapping shawl, Iskander a thousand times over raising his hand,
lifting it against ministers, ambassadors, argumentative holy men,
mill-owners, servants, friends, it seemed as if every slap he ever
delivered was here, and how many times he did it, Arjumand, not to
you, to you he would not have, so you will not believe, but see upon the
cheeks of his contemporaries the indelible blushes engendered by his palm;
and the kicking shawl, Iskander booting bottoms and provoking
in their owners other feelings than love; and the hissing shawl,
Iskander seated in the office of his glory, its details accurate in the
most minute degree, so that one could almost smell that awesome
chamber, that place of pointed concrete arches with his own
Thoughts framed upon the wall, and the Mont Blanc pens like
black alps in their holders on his desk, even their white stars
picked out by her scrupulous needle; that room of shadows and of
power, in which no shadow was empty, eyes glinted in every area
of shade, red tongues flicked, silver-threaded whispers susurrated
across the cloth: Iskander and his spies, the head spider at the heart
of that web of listeners and whisperers, she has sewn the silvery
threads of the web, they radiated out from his face, in silver thread
she revealed the arachnid terrors of the days, when men lied to
their sons and angry women had only to murmur to the breeze to
bring a fearsome revenge down upon their lovers, you never felt the
fear, Arjumand, of wondering what he knew; and the torture shawl, on
which she embroidered the foetid violence of his jails, blindfolded
prisoners tied to chairs while jailers hurled buckets of water, now
boiling hot (the thread-steam rose), now freezing cold, until the
bodies of the victims grew confused and cold water raised hot
burns upon their skins: weals of red embroidery rose scarlike on
the shawl; and the white shawl, embroidered white on white, so
that it revealed its secrets only to the most meticulous and
squinting eyes: it showed policemen, because he had given them
new uniforms, white from head to toe, white helmets with silver
spikes, white leather holsters, white jackboots up to the knee,

In the Fifteenth Century ? 203

policemen running discotheques in which the booze flowed
freely, white bottles with white labels, white powders sniffed from
the white backs of gloves, he turned a blind eye, understand, he
wanted the police strong and the Army weak, he was dazzled, daughter,
by whiteness; and the swearing shawl, Iskander's mouth as wide as
the Abyss, the oaths represented by foul creatures crawling from
his lips, vermilion cockroaches, magenta lizards, turquoise leeches,
ochre scorpions, indigo spiders, albino rats, because he never stopped
that either, how selective, Arjumand, your ears; and the shawls of inter-
national shame, Isky grovelling at primrose Chinese feet, Isky
conspiring with Pahlevi, embracing Dada Amin; eschatological
Iskander, riding an atomic bomb; Harappa and Shaggy Dog like
cruel boys slitting the throat of an emerald chicken and plucking
the feathers from its east wing, one by one; and the election
shawls, one for the day of suffrage that began his reign, one for the
day that led to his downfall, shawls swarming with figures, each
one a breathtakingly lifelike portrait of a member of the Front,
figures breaking seals, stuffing ballot-boxes, smashing heads, fig-
ures swaggering into polling booths to watch the peasants vote,
stick-waving rifle-toting figures, fire-raisers, mobs, and on the
shawl of the second election there were three times as many fig-
ures as on the first, but despite the crowded field of her art not a
single face was anonymous, every tiny being had a name, it was an
act of accusation on the grandest conceivable scale, and of course
he'd have won anyway, daughter, no question, a respectable victory, but
he wanted more, only annihilation was good enough for his opponents, he
wanted them squashed like cockroaches under his boot, yes, obliteration,
and in the end it came to him instead, don't think he wasn't surprised, he
had forgotten he was only a man; and the allegorical shawl, Iskander
and the Death of Democracy, his hands around her throat,
squeezing Democracy's gullet, while her eyes bulged, her face
turned blue, her tongue protruded, she shat in her pajamas, her
hands became hooks trying to grab the wind, and Iskander with
his eyes shut squeezed and squeezed, while in the background the
Generals watched, the murder reflected by a miracle of the
needlewoman's skill in the mirrored glasses they all wore, all