Shame (32 page)
Shame ? 21
n,A-
Hyder had to say something. 'Fourteen kids with the same
birthday,' he told the couple as sternly as he could manage, 'what
do you think you're up to? Haven't you heard of the population
problem? You should take, perhaps, certain steps, but at that
Talvar Ulhaq drew himself up until his whole body was as stiff as
his neck and replied, 'Sir, I never thought to hear you say such a
thing. You are a devout man, I thought. Maulana Dawood's ghost
would blush if it heard General Hyder recommend such Godless
procedures.' So Hyder felt ashamed and shut his mouth, and in
the fifth year Good News's womb released six more new lives,
three male, three female, because Talvar Ulhaq in the pride of his
manhood had chosen to ignore Hyder's remark about too-many-
grandsons; and in the year of Iskander Harappa's fall the number
rose to twenty-seven children in all, and by that time everyone
had lost count of how-many-boys-how-many-girls.
Begum Naveed Talvar, the former Good News Hyder, proved
utterly incapable of coping with the endless stream of humanity
flowing out between her thighs. But her husband was relentless,
insatiable, his dream of children had expanded to fill up the place
in his life previously occupied by polo, and owing to his clair-
voyant talents he always knew which nights were best for concep-
tion. He came to her once a year and ordered her to get ready,
because it was time to plant the seed, until she felt like a vegetable
patch whose naturally fertile soil was being worn out by an over-
zealous gardener, and understood that there was no hope for
women in the world, because whether you were respectable or
not the men got you anyway, no matter how hard you tried to be
the most proper of ladies the men would come and stuff you full
of alien unwanted life. Her old personality was getting squashed
by the presence of the children who were so numerous that she
forgot their names, she hired an army of ayahs and abandoned her
offspring to their fate, and then she gave up trying. No more
attempts to sit on her hair: the absolute determination to be beau-
tiful which had entranced first Haroun Harappa and then Cap-
tain Talvar faded from her features, and she stood revealed as the
plain, unremarkable matron she had always really been. Arjumand
In the Fifteenth Century ? 219
Harappa, �whose hatred of Good News had not been diminished
by the years, kept herself informed of her enemy's decline. A pho-
tographer who had once taken pictures of Pinkie Aurangzeb was
employed to snatch images of Good News; Arjumand showed
these slides to Haroun Harappa, carelessly, as if they didn't matter.
'Poor old bachelor boy,' she taunted him, 'to think you could
have spent your whole life with this gorgeous floozy if she hadn't
found somebody better.'
The Loo does not blow in the north, but still, on some afternoons,
Bilquis would hold the furniture down to stop it blowing away.
She roamed the corridors of her new, palatial home mumbling
inaudibly under her breath, until one day she raised her voice loud
enough for Raza Hyder to hear. 'How does a rocket rise to the
stars?' she asked vaguely, because she was really still talking to her-
self. 'It is never easy to leave the earth. As the machine rises up, it
loses parts of itself, they drop off and fall back, until finally the
nose, only the nose gets free of the pull of the land.' Raza Hyder
frowned and said, 'God knows what you're rambling on about,
woman,' but in spite of this remark, and his subsequent suggestion
to Omar Khayyam that Bilquis's mind had begun to wander like
her feet, he knew what she had meant, which was that although
he had risen, just as she had prophesied, to the very peak of his
profession, people had been falling away from him as he rose;
other human beings were the burned-out stages of his flight
towards shoulder-stars. Dawood, Good News, Bilquis herself:
'Why should I feel ashamed?' he asked himself. 'I did nothing
to them.'
Things had been chipping away at Bilquis for years, firewinds
and pennant-waving knights and murdered cinema managers and
not having sons and losing her husband's love and brain-fever and
turkeys and erratum slips, but the worst thing of all was to be
there, in that palace, that queenly residence of which she had
always dreamed, and to discover that that wasn't any good either,
that nothing worked out, everything turned to ashes. Ruined by
the hollowness of her glory, she was finally broken by the decline
Shame ? 220
of her favourite Good News, who lay suffocating beneath the soft
avalanche of her children and would not be comforted . . . one
morning they all saw Bilquis putting on a black burqa, taking the
veil or purdah, even though she was indoors and only family
members and servants were present. Raza Hyder asked her what
she thought she was doing, but she just shrugged and replied, 'It
was getting too hot, so I wanted to draw the curtains,' because by
now she was scarcely capable of speaking except in metaphors.
Her mumbles were full of curtains and oceans and rockets, and
soon everybody got used to it, and to that veil of her solipsism,
because everyone had their own problems. Bilquis Hyder became,
in those years, almost invisible, a shadow hunting the corridors for
something it had lost, the body, perhaps, from which it had come
unstuck. Raza Hyder made >sure she stayed indoors . . . and the
house ran itself, there were servants for everything, and the mis-
tress of the C-in-C's residence became less than a character, a
mirage, almost, a mumble in the corners of the palace, a rumour
in a veil.
Rani Harappa telephoned occasionally. Bilquis would some-
times come to the phone, sometimes not; when she did she spoke
so quietly and in such slurred accents that Rani found it hard to
understand what was being said, discerning only a deep bitterness,
as if Bilquis had begun to resent her friend, as if Hyder's almost
discarded wife still had enough pride to dislike the way Iskander
had picked up her husband and made him great. 'Your husband,
Rani,' she once said, loud and clear, 'he'll never be happy until
Raza lies down and licks his boots.'
General Hyder would remember to his dying day the time he had
visited Iskander Harappa to discuss the defence budget and been
slapped across the face for his pains. 'Expenditure is falling below
acceptable levels, Isky,' he informed the Prime Minister, and to
his astonishment Harappa banged on his desk so fiercely that the
Mont Blanc pens jumped in their holders and the shadows in
the corners hissed with alarm. 'Acceptable to whom?' Iskander
Harappa shouted. 'The Army does not say what goes, mister. No
In the Fifteenth Century
221
longer. Get that out of your head. If we allot you fifty paisa a year,
then that is what you must make do with. Get that straight and
get out.'
'Iskander,' Raza said without raising his voice, 'don't forget
your friends.'
'A man in my position has no friends,' Harappa replied. 'There
are only temporary alliances based on mutual self-interest.'
'Then you have ceased to be a human being,' Raza told him,
and added thoughtfully: 'A man who believes in God must also
believe in men.' Iskander Harappa flew into an even more terri-
fying rage. 'Look out, General,' he shrieked, 'because I can put
you back in that dustbin where I found you.' He had rushed out
from behind his desk and was screaming right into Raza's face,
depositing spittle on the General's cheeks. 'God forgive you, Isky,'
Raza murmured, 'you have forgotten that we are not your ser-
vants.' It was at this point that Iskander Harappa struck him on a
spittle-moistened cheek. He did not strike back, but remarked
softly, 'The blushes caused by such blows do not easily fade.'
Years later, Rani Harappa would prove his point, by immortal-
izing such blushes on a shawl.
And in those later years, when Iskander Harappa was safely
under the ground and his tough-as-nails daughter was locked
away with her mother, Raza Hyder would find himself dreaming
about that slap, and about all those years in which Isky Harappa
had treated him like dirt. And Arjumand had been even worse,
she had stared at him with such open hatred that he believed her
capable of anything. Once Isky sent her, in his place, to the annual
Army parade, just to humiliate the soldiers by making them salute
a woman, and a woman, what was more, who had no official
status in the government; and Raza had made the mistake of men-
tioning his worries to the virgin Ironpants. 'Maybe history
has come between our houses,' he said, 'and things have gone
wrong, but remember we aren't strangers, Arjumand, we go back
along way.'
'I know,' she said witheringly, 'my mother is your cousin, I
believe.'
Shame ? 222
I
And Sufiya Zinobia?
She was his wife but she was not his wife. In Karachi on his wed-
ding night Omar Khayyam had been prevented by a contractual
clause from taking his bride away; instead, he was shown to a
room containing a single bed and no Sufiya Zinobia anywhere.
Shahbanou the ayah ushered him in and then stood obstinately in
the doorway, her muscles tense. 'Doctor Sahib,' she said finally,
'you must tell me what are your intentions.' The fierce solicitude
for Sufiya Zinobia which had driven Shahbanou to commit so
outrageous a breach of social law, of the master-servant relation-
ship, also prevented Omar Khayyam from becoming angry.
'Don't worry,' he soothed the ayah, 'I know the girl is simple. I
have no desire to impose my, to force myself upon, to demand my
marital,' whereupon Shahbanou nodded and said, 'That's O.K. for
now, Sahib, but how long will you wait? Men are only men.'
'I will wait until my wife is agreeable,' Omar Khayyam replied
angrily, 'I am no junglee man.' (But once - we remember - he
had called himself a wolf-child.)
Shahbanou turned to go. 'Remember, if you get impatient,'
she told him in a matter-of-fact voice, 'that I am waiting to kill
you if you try.'
By the time of the move north, it was clear that Omar
Khayyam had changed his ways. Like Iskander Harappa, but for
different reasons, he gave up his old debauches: Raza Hyder
would have settled for nothing less. The new, northern version of
Omar Khayyam Shakil lived simply and worked hard: fourteen
hours a day at the Mount Hira Hospital, except on those occasions
when he stood in the General's corner during wrestling bouts. He
returned to the C-in-C's residence only to eat and to sleep, but in
spite of all the evidence of reformation, abstinence and dedication,
Shahbanou continued to watch him like a hawk, not least because
his already ample figure grew ever more corpulent in these days,
so that when he joked with the ayah, 'Well, Banou, am I being a
good boy or not?', she replied seriously, 'Omar Sahib, I can see
In the Fifteenth Century ? 223
you filling up with God knows what, and you are eating so little
that it can't be food, so as far as I can tell it's only a matter of time
before you lose control or burst. How difficult to be a man,' she
said with a grave sympathy in her eyes.
That night he recognized Shahbanou's knock on his bedroom
door. He hauled himself out of bed and arrived at the door puffing
and patting his heart; to discover the ayah outside, holding a
candle, her hair loose, her bony body of a tilyar bird half-visible
through her cotton shift. 'What are you thinking of?' Omar
Khayyam demanded in surprise, but she pushed her way past him
and sat down solemnly on the bed.
'I don't want to kill anybody,' she explained in neutral tones,
'so I thought, better I do this instead.'
'How much you must love her,' Omar Khayyam marvelled.
'More than you,' she answered without criticism and quickly
removed her shift.
'I'm an old man,' he told her later, 'so three times is at least two
too many. Maybe you want to kill me anyway, and this is a sim-
pler method.'
'It is not simple, Omar Sahib,' she replied, 'and you're not such
a wreck as you say.'
After that she came to him every night, except during her times
of the month and the days of fertility, and on those seven or eight
nights he lay in the grip of his voluntary insomnia imagining her
body like a wire beside him in the bed, and wondering about the
strange destiny which had led him to marry one wife and to
acquire quite a different one. After a while he realized that he had
started to lose weight. The pounds were beginning to drop off
him, and by the time of Harappa's fall he had become not exactly
slim, because he would never be that, but he had shrunk out of all
his suits (so it will be seen that his life and Isky's were still linked,
because Isky, too, lost weight . . . but again, for different reasons.
For different reasons); under the spell of the Parsee ayah he had
diminished to remarkably normal dimensions. 'I may be no movie
star,' he told his mirror, 'but I have also ceased to be a cartoon.'
Omar Khayyam and Shahbanou: our peripheral hero has acquired
Shame ? 224
a shadow bride, and his own shadow has been enabled, as a result,
to grow less.
And Sufiya Zinobia?
- lies in bed squeezing her eyelids shut with her fingers hoping
for the sleep she knows may never come. Feels on the skin of her
eyelids the prickle of Shahbanou's stare. The ayah on the mat,
watching waiting. Then she, Sufiya Zinobia, decides sleep is
impossible, relaxes completely, drops her hands, pretends. She has
found that this mimicry, this simulacrum of sleep, makes other
people happy. She does it automatically now, has had plenty of
practice, her breathing settles into a certain rhythm, there is a cer-
tain way of shifting the body at certain intuited intervals, a certain
pattern to the behaviour of the eyeballs beneath the lids. After
some time she hears Shahbanou rise from her mat, slip out of the
room, go a few steps down the passage, knock. Insomnia sharpens
the ears. She hears bedsprings, his exhalations, her bony cries.
There is a thing that people do at night. Her mother told her
oceans and fish. Behind her eyes she sees the Parsee ayah meta-
morphosing, becoming liquid, flowing outwards until she fills the
room. Melted Shahbanou, salty, immense, and a transmogrifying
Omar growing scales, fins, gills and swimming in that sea. She
wonders what it's like afterwards, when they change back, how
they tidy up the mess, how everything gets dry. (One morning she
slipped into her husband's bedroom after he left for the hospital
and Shahbanou went to count dirty garments with the dhobi. She
felt the sheets with her hands, found damp patches. But an ocean
should leave its mark: she scanned the floor for starfish, seaweed,
shells. And found none: a mystery.)
- lies in bed squeezing her eyelids shut with her fingers hoping