Shame (37 page)

1'

ll'!

Shame ? 252

And Pinkie's suicide; no need to go into all that again. She
stayed dead; she never haunted anybody.

President Raza Hyder in a prison courtyard with a dangling
corpse remembered what Bilquis had said. 'They are falling away,'
he thought, 'like rocket stages.' Dawood gone to Mecca, Bilquis
and Sufiya lost behind different veils, Good News and now Isky
twirling on their ropes. Distrusting his sons-in-law, but bound to
them by necessity, Raza felt around him the enclosing emptiness
of the void. It was at this moment, when Harappa hung from a
noose with a bag over his head, that Raza Hyder heard Iskander's
voice. 'Never fear, old boy, it's pretty difficult to get rid of me. I
can be an obstinate bastard when I choose.'

The golden voice, clear as a bell. And Raza Hyder in shock
shouted, 'The motherfucker isn't dead!' The obscenity from his
lips astonished the still-unvanished hangman, and at once in his
ear the laughing Isky-voice: 'Don't be silly, yaar. You know
what's going on here.'

O unceasing monologue of a hanged man! Because it never left
him, from the day of Iskander's death to the morning of his own,
that voice, sardonic lilting dry, now advising him not to fire his
ADC because that would let the truth out for sure, now teasing
him, President sahib, you've got a lot to learn about running the
show; words dripping on his ear-drum like Chinese tortures, even
in his sleep; sometimes anecdotal, reminding him of tilyars and
tied-to-a-stake, at other times taunting, how long do you think
you'll last, Raz, one year, two?

Nor was Iskander's the only voice. We have already seen the
first appearance of the spectre of Maulana Dawood; it returned to
perch, invisibly, on the President's right shoulder, to whisper in
his ear. God on his right shoulder, the devil on his left; this was
the unseen truth about the Presidency of Old Razor Guts, these
two conflicting soliloquies inside his skull, marching leftright left-
right leftright down the years.

From The Suicide, a play by the Russian writer Nikolai Erdman:
'Only the dead can say what the living are thinking.'

In the Fifteenth Century ? 253

Reappearances of the dead must be offset by disappearances of the
living. A hangman: poof! And Pinkie Aurangzeb. And I've saved
the worst for last: on the night of the Harappa hanging, Omar
Khayyam Shakil discovered that Sufiya Zinobia, his wife, Hyder's
daughter, had escaped.

An empty attic. Broken chains, cracked beams. There was a
hole in the bricked-up window. It had a head, arms, legs.

'God help us,' said Omar Khayyam, in spite of his uncircum-
cised, unshaven, unwhispered-to beginnings. It was as though he
had divined that it was time for the Almighty to step forward and
take charge of events.

12

Stability

The great French revolutionary hero Danton, who will lose his
head during the 'Terror', is making a rueful remark. '. . . But
Robespierre and the people', he observes, 'are virtuous.' Danton
is on a London stage, not really Danton at all but an actor speaking
the lines of Georg Biichner in English translation; and the time is
not then, but now. I don't know if the thought originated in
French, German or English, but I do know that it seems astonish-
ingly bleak - because what it means, obviously, is that the people are
like Robespierre. Danton may be a hero of the revolution, but he
also likes wine, fine clothes, whores; weaknesses which (the audi-
ence instantly sees) will enable Robespierre, a good actor in a
green coat, to cut him down. When Danton is sent to visit the
widow, old Madame Guillotine with her basket of heads, we
know it isn't really on account of any real or trumped-up political
crimes. He gets the chop (miraculously staged) because he is too
fond of pleasure. Epicureanism is subversive. The people are like
Robespierre. They distrust fun.

This opposition � the epicure against the puritan � is, the play
tells us, the true dialectic of history. Forget left-right, capitalism-
socialism, black-white. Virtue versus vice, ascetic versus bawd,

254

In the Fifteenth Century ? 255

God against the Devil: that's the game. Messieurs, mesdames: faites
vosjeux.

I watched the play in a large theatre that was two-thirds empty.
Politics empties theatres in old London town. Afterwards, the
departing audience made disapproving remarks. The trouble with
the play, apparently, was that there was too much of ranting
Danton and not enough of sinister Robespierre. The customers
bemoaned the imbalance. 'I liked the nasty one,' someone said.
Her companions agreed.

I was with three visitors from Pakistan. They all loved the play.
'How lucky you are,' they envied me, 'to live where such things
can be put on.' They told me the story of a recent attempt to stage
Julius Caesar at the University of P. It seems that the authorities
became very agitated when they heard that the script called for the
assassination of a Head of State. What was more, the production
was to be in modern dress: General Caesar would be in full dress
uniform when the knives got to work. Extreme pressure was
brought to bear on the University to scrap the production. The
academics, honourably, resisted, defending an ancient writer with
a rather martial name against this assault-of-the-Generals. At one
point the military censors suggested a compromise: would the
University not agree to mount the whole production, just as
scripted, with the single exception of that unpalatable killing?
Surely that scene was not absolutely necessary?

Finally, the producer came up with a brilliant, a positively
Solomonic solution. He invited a prominent British diplomat to
play Caesar, dressed in (British) Imperial regalia. The Army relaxed;
the play opened; and when the first-night curtain fell, the house
lights went up to reveal a front row full of Generals, all applauding
wildly to signify their enjoyment of this patriotic work depict-
ing the overthrow of imperialism by the freedom movement
of Rome.

I insist: I have not made this up ... and I am reminded of a
British diplomat's wife whom I mentioned earlier. 'Why don't
people in Rome,' she might well have inquired, 'get rid of Gen-
eral Caesar in, you know, the usual way?'

Shame ? 256

But I was talking about Biichner. My friends and I had liked
Danton's Death; in the age of Khomeini, etc., it seemed most
apposite. But Danton's (Biichner's?) view of'the people' bothered
us. If the people were like Robespierre, how did Danton ever get
to be a hero? Why was he cheered in court?

'The point is,' one of my friends argued, 'that this opposition
exists all right; but it is an internal dialectic' That made sense. The
people are not only like Robespierre. They, we, are Danton, too.
We are Robeston and Danpierre. The inconsistency doesn't
matter; I myself manage to hold large numbers of wholly irrecon-
cilable views simultaneously, without the least difficulty. I do not
think others are less versatile.

Iskander Harappa was not just Danton; Raza Hyder wasn't
Robespierre pure-and-simple. Isky certainly lived it up, perhaps
he was something of an epicure, but he also believed that he was
always, unarguably, right. And eighteen shawls have shown us that
he wasn't averse to Terror, either. What befell him in his death-
cell befell others because of him. That is important. (But if we
mind about the others, we must also, unfortunately, mind about
Iskander.) And Raza Hyder? It is possible to believe that he took
no pleasure in what he did, that the pleasure principle was not in
operation, even though he claimed to act in the name of God? I
don't think so.

Isky and Raza. They, too, were Danpierre and Robeston.
Which may be an explanation; but it cannot, of course, be an

excuse.

When Omar Khayyam Shakil saw the Sufiya-Zinobia-shaped hole
in a bricked-up window, the idea came to him that his wife was
dead. Which is not to say that he expected to find her lifeless body
on the lawn below the window, but that he guessed that the crea-
ture inside her, the hot thing, the yellow fire, had by now con-
sumed her utterly, like a house-gutting blaze, so that the girl
whose fate had prevented her from becoming complete had finally
diminished to the vanishing point. What had escaped, what now
roamed free in the unsuspecting air, was not Sufiya Zinobia Shakil

In the Fifteenth Century ? 257

at all, but something more like a principle, the embodiment of
violence, the pure malevolent strength of the Beast.

'Damn it,' he told himself, 'the world is going mad.'

There was once a wife, whose husband injected her with
knock-out drugs twice daily. For two years she lay on a carpet,
like a girl in a fantasy who can only be awoken by the blue-
blooded kiss of a prince; but kisses were not her destiny. She
appeared to be spellbound by the sorceries of the drug, but the
monster inside her never slept, the violence which had been born
of shame, but which by now lived its own life beneath her skin; it
fought the narcoleptic fluids, it took its time, spreading slowly
through her body until it had occupied every cell, until she had
become the violence, which no longer needed anything to set it
off, because once a carnivore has tasted blood you can't fool
it with vegetables any more. And in the end it defeated the drug,
it lifted its body up and broke the restraining chains.

Pandora, possessed by the unleashed contents of her box.

Yellow fire behind her closed eyelids, fire under her fingernails
and beneath the roots of her hair. Yes, she was dead all right, I'm
sure of it, no more Sufiya-Zinobia-ness, everything burned up in
that Hell. Throw a body on a funeral pyre and it will jerk, genu-
flect, sit up, dance, smile; the fire pulls the nerve-strings of the
corpse, which becomes the fire's puppet, conveying a ghastly illu-
sion of life amidst the flames . . .

There was once a Beast. When it was sure of its strength, it
chose its moment, and sprang through a wall of brick.

During the next four years, that is to say the period of the Presi-
dency of Raza Hyder, Omar Khayyam Shakil grew old. Nobody
noticed at first, because he had been grey for years; but once he
had turned sixty his feet, which had been obliged for most of their
lives to bear the impossible burden of his obesity, staged a revolt,
because in the aftermath of the departure of Shahbanou the ayah,
when he had been deprived of the mint teas and nocturnal nour-
ishments of her loyalty, he began to put on weight again. Buttons
popped off trouser waistbands, and his feet went on strike. Omar

Shame ? 258

Khayyam's steps became agonies, even when he leaned on the
sword-concealing cane which he had carried down all the years,
ever since the time of his lecherous alliance with Iskander Harappa.
He took to spending hours on end seated in a cane chair in what
had once been Sufiya Zinobia's prison cell, staring out through
the window which held, in fantastic outline, the red brick after-
image of his departed wife.

He retired from Mount Hira Hospital and sent most of his pen-
sion money to an old house in Q. inhabited by three old women
who refused to die, unlike Bariamma, who had long since done
the decent thing and expired, propped up by bolsters, so that it
was almost a full day before anyone saw what had happened . . .
more money was sent to a Parsee ayah, and Omar Khayyam lived
quietly under Raza Hyder's roof, shelling pine-kernels while his
eyes, roving outwards through the attic window, seemed to be
following someone, although there was nobody there.

Because he was familiar with the theory that susceptibility to
hypnosis was the sign of a highly developed imaginative faculty -
that the hypnotic trance is a form of inward creativity, during
which the subject remakes herself and her world as she chooses �
he sometimes thought that Sufiya Zinobia's metamorphosis must
have been willed, because even an autohypnotist cannot ask her-
self to do what she would be unwilling to do. So then she had
chosen, she had created the Beast ... in which event, he rumi-
nated in a cane chair with a mouth full of pine-kernels, her case is
an object lesson. It demonstrates the danger of permitting the
imagination too free a rein. The rampages of Sufiya Zinobia were
the results of a fancy that ran wild.

'Shame should come to me,' he informed the koel perching on
the window, 'here I sit doing what I'm criticizing, thinking God
knows what, living too much in my head.'

Raza Hyder also thought: 'Shame should come to me.' Now that
she was gone his thoughts were plagued by her. That something-
too-loose in her muscles, that something-half-coordinated in her
gait had stopped him loving her for a time. She had to almost die

In the Fifteenth Century ? 259

before I. And of course it wasn't enough. His head was bursting with
voices: Isky Dawood Isky Dawood. Hard to think straight. . . and
now she would take her revenge. Somehow, some time, she
would drag him down. Unless he found her first. But who to
send, who to brief? 'My daughter, the idiot with brain-fever, has
become a human guillotine and started ripping off men's heads.
This is her photo, wanted dead or alive, handsome reward.'
Impossible. No can do.

O impotence of power. The President persuading himself not
to be stupid, she won't survive, she hasn't, nothing heard for some
time now, no news is good news. Or she'll turn up somewhere
and then we'll hush it up. But still there cropped up in his
thoughts the picture of a tiny girl with a face of classical severity; it
was an accusation . . . throbbing at his temples, Isky and Dawood
whispered and argued, rightleftright. But one can be haunted by
the living as well as the dead. A wild look appeared in his eyes.

Like Omar Khayyam Shakil, President Raza Hyder began to
shell and eat large quantities of pine-kernels, Sufiya Zinobia's
favourite treat, which she had spent long and happy hours
releasing from their shells, with crazy dedication, because the
shelling of pine-kernels is a form of lunacy, you spend more
energy getting the damn things out than they give you when
you eat.