Shame (39 page)

May I interpose a few words here on the subject of the Islamic
revival? It won't take long.

Pakistan is not Iran. This may sound like a strange thing to say

Shame ? 266

about the country which was, until Khomeini, one of the only
two theocracies on earth (Israel being the other one), but it's
my opinion that Pakistan has never been a mullah-dominated
society. The religious extremists of the Jamaat party have their
supporters among college students and so forth, but relatively few
people have ever voted Jamaat in an election. Jinnah himself, the
Founder or Quaid-i-Azam, doesn't strike me as a particularly
God-bothered type. Islam and the Muslim State were, for him,
political and cultural ideas; the theology was not the point.

What I am saying will probably be anathematized by the
present regime in that hapless country. Too bad. My point is that
Islam might well have proved an effective unifying force in post-
Bangladesh Pakistan, if people hadn't tried to make it into such an
almighty big deal. Maybe Sindhis, Baluchis, Punjabis and Pathans,
not to mention the immigrants, would have sunk their differences
for the sake of their common faith.

Few mythologies survive close examination, however. And
they can become very unpopular indeed if they're rammed down
people's throats.

What happens if one is force-fed such outsize, indigestible
meals? - One gets sick. One rejects their nourishment. Reader:
one pukes.

So-called Islamic 'fundamentalism' does not spring, in Pakistan,
from the people. It is imposed on them from above. Autocratic
regimes find it useful to espouse the rhetoric of faith, because
people respect that language, are reluctant to oppose it. This is
how religions shore up dictators; by encircling them with words
of power, words which the people are reluctant to see discredited,
disenfranchised, mocked.

But the ramming-down-the-throat point stands. In the end you
get sick of it, you lose faith in the faith, if not qua faith then cer-
tainly as the basis for a state. And then the dictator falls, and it is
discovered that he has brought God down with him, that the jus-
tifying myth of the nation has been unmade. This leaves only two
options: disintegration, or a new dictatorship . . . no, there is a
third, and I shall not be so pessimistic as to deny its possibility.

In the Fifteenth Century ? 267

The third option is the substitution of a new myth for the old one.
Here are three such myths, all available from stock at short notice:
liberty; equality; fraternity.
I recommend them highly.

Afterwards, during his terror-stricken flight from the capital, Raza
Hyder would remember the story of the white panther that had
been in circulation at the time of Iskander Harappa's arrest, and
would shudder with recognition and fear. The rumour had died
down quickly enough, because nobody ever reported an actual
sighting of the fabulous animal, except for one rather unreliable
village boy named Ghaffar, and his description had been so cock-
eyed that people had decided that the panther had sprung from
inside GhafFar's notoriously untruthful head. The improbable
beast of the boy's imagination had been, he said, 'not white all
over, it had a black head and no hair anywhere else, like it had
gone bald; also, it walked funnily.' The newspapers had reported
this statement jokily, knowing that their readers had a tolerant
fondness for monster stories; but General Hyder, recalling the
affair, was seized by the fearful notion that the white panther of
Bagheeragali had been a proleptic miracle, a minatory prophecy,
Time's ghost, the future stalking the forests of the past. 'He saw
her all right,' Raza bitterly thought, 'and nobody believed.'

She reappeared in this way:

One morning Omar Khayyam Shakil was sitting looking out of
the attic window as usual when Asgari the sweeperwoman, who
had been driven wild by this habit of his, which obliged her to
come up and sweep the floors of that forgotten room, and also by
his absent-minded way of dropping pine-kernel shells on the floor
while she worked, muttered under her toothless old woman's
breath which smelled strongly of the disinfectants/tee/: 'That beast
should come here and finish off all inconsiderate persons who
won't let an honest woman finish her job.' The word 'beast'
penetrated the mists of Omar Khayyam's reverie, and he alarmed
the old lady by demanding loudly, 'What is the meaning of that
remark?' Once she had been convinced that he wasn't going to

Shame ? 268

have her fired like Shahbanou, that he did not think of her harm-
less sourness as a curse, she relaxed and scolded him, in the
manner of old retainers, for taking things too seriously. 'Those
stories have started up again, that's all,' she said, 'idle tongues need
exercise. No need for the big sahib to get so hot.'

For the rest of that day Omar Khayyam was buffeted by an
inner storm whose cause he did not dare to name, even to himself,
but at night during his forty-odd winks a dream of Sufiya Zinobia
came to him. She was on all fours and stripped as naked as her
mother had been by the legendary firewind of her youth - no,
more so, because there was nothing clinging to her shoulders, no
dupatta of modesty-and-shame. He woke up, but the dream
refused to leave him. It hung before his eyes, that spectre of his
wife in the wilderness, hunting human and animal prey.

In the following weeks he threw off the lethargy of his more-
than-sixty years. In spite of bad feet he became a familiar, eccen-
tric figure at the bus depot, where he would limp up to fearsome
Frontier types and offer them money in return for certain infor-
mation. He hung around the halal slaughterhouses, leaning on his
cane, on the days when the peasants brought animals in from the
outlying districts. He frequented bazaars and ramshackle cafes, an
incongruous figure in a grey suit, supported by a swordstick,
asking questions, listening, listening.

Slowly it became clear to him that the stories of the white pan-
ther were indeed being told again; but what was remarkable was
that they had begun to come from all over the country, in the
bus-top bundles of gas-field workers returning from Needle and
in the cartridge belts of rifle-toting tribesmen from the north. It
was a large country, even without its East Wing, a land of wilder-
nesses and marshy deltas studded with mangrove trees and moun-
tain fastnesses and voids; and from every out-of-the-way corner
of the nation, it seemed, the tale of the panther was travel-
ling to the capital. Black head, pale hairless body, awkward gait.
Ghaffar's derided description was repeated to Omar Khayyam,
over and over again, by illiterate voyagers, all of whom believed

In the Fifteenth Century � 269

the rumour to be unique to their own part of the world. He did
not disabuse them of this belief.

Murders of animals and men, villages raided in the dark, dead
children, slaughtered flocks, blood-curdling howls: it was the time-
honoured man-eater scare, but with a new and terrifying twist:
'What animal', a six-foot Frontiersman asked Omar Khayyam with
the innocent awe of a child, 'can tear a man's head offhis shoulders
and drag his insides out through the hole to eat?'

He heard of villages that had formed vigilante groups, of
mountain tribals who had placed all-night sentries on the lookout.
Tales of sightings were accompanied by boastful claims of having
winged the monster, or even less credible yarns, you'll never
believe it, sahib, I hit it right between the eyes with a shikar rifle,
but the thing is a demon, it just turned round and vanished into
the air, you can't kill such creatures, God protect us ... so it
appeared that the white panther was already being mythologized.
There were those who said it could fly, or dematerialize, or grow
until it was bigger than a tree.

She grew, too, in the imagination of Omar Khayyam Shakil.
For a long time he told nobody about his suspicions, but they
swarmed round his sleepless nocturnal form, they surrounded the
armchair of his pine-kernel-shelling days. He imagined her, it, the
Beast, choosing in the craftiness of its spirit to distance itself from
cities, knowing, perhaps, that in spite of its, her, colossal strength
she was vulnerable, that in cities there were bullets, gases, tanks.
And how fast she had become, how much ground she covered,
spreading herself so widely across the peripheries of the land that
years had passed before her various legends had been able to
encounter one another, to be united in his thoughts, forming the
pattern which uncovered her night-obscured shape. 'Sufiya
Zinobia,' he said to the open window, 'I can see you now.'

On all fours, the calluses thick on her palms and soles. The
black hair, once shorn by Bilquis Hyder, long now and matted
around her face, enclosing it like fur; the pale skin of her mohajir
ancestry burned and toughened by the sun, bearing like battle

Shame ? 270

scars the lacerations of bushes, animals, her own itch-scratching
nails. Fiery eyes and the stink of ordure and death. 'For the first
time in her life' - he shocked himself by the sympathy in the
thought - 'that girl is free.' He imagined her proud; proud of her
strength, proud of the violence that was making her a legend, that
prohibited anyone from telling her what to do, or whom to be, or
what she should have been and was not; yes, she had risen above
everything she did not wish to hear. Can it be possible, he won-
dered, that human beings are capable of discovering their nobility
in their savagery? Then he was angry with himself, remembering
that she was no longer Sufiya Zinobia, that nothing was left in her
which could be recognized as the daughter of Bilquis Hyder, that
the Beast within had changed her for all time. 'I should stop
calling her by her name,' he thought; but found that he could not.
Hyder's daughter. My unfe. Sufiya Zinobia Shakil.

When he decided he could not keep his secret any longer and
went to inform Raza Hyder of his daughter's activities, he found
the three Generals, Raddi, Bekar and Phisaddi, emerging from the
President's office wearing identical expressions of slightly stunned
beatitude. They had been walking on cloud nine ever since Hyder
promoted them to his inner cabinet in the aftermath of the
Tughlak coup, but on this occasion they were intoxicated by an
excess of prayer. They had just told Raza that the Russians had
sent an army into the country of A. across the north-west frontier,
and to their astonishment the President had leapt from his chair,
unrolled four prayer-mats on the floor and insisted that they all
give thanks, pronto, fut-a-fut, for this blessing that had been
bestowed on them by God. They had been rising and falling for
an hour and a half, developing on their foreheads the first traces of
the bruise which Raza wore with pride, when he stopped and
explained to them that the Russian attack was the final step in
God's strategy, because now the stability of his government would
have to be ensured by the great powers. General Raddi replied a
little too sourly that the Americans' policy was centred on staging
a dramatic counter-coup against the Olympic Games, but before

In the Fifteenth Century ? 271

Raza could lose his temper Raddi's friends Phisaddi and Bekar
began to shake each other's hands and congratulate themselves
noisily. 'That fat-arsed Yankee,' Phisaddi shouted, referring to the
American Ambassador, 'he'll have to foot the bills now,' and
Bekar began to fantasize about five billion dollars' worth of new
military equipment, the latest stuff at last, missiles that could fly
sideways without starving their engines of oxygen and tracking
systems that could detect an alien anopheles mosquito at a range of
ten thousand miles. They were so carried away that they conve-
niently forgot to tell the President the rest of the news; but Raddi
remembered, and blurted out before anyone could stop him the
intelligence that Mr Haroun Harappa had taken up residence in an
elite apartment block situated in the centre of Cabul, the capital
city of A. His colleagues, alarmed by Raddi's second misjudgment
of the President's mood, tried to cover for him again, reassuring
Raza that the report was unconfirmed, all kinds of disinformation
were emerging from Cabul in the wake of the Russian occupa-
tion; they tried to divert his attention to the question of refugees,
but the President just beamed and beamed. 'They can send us ten
million refugees,' he cried, 'because by taking that one in they
have completed by royal flush.'

Now all three Generals were confused; all three felt obliged to
explain that their best information was that Haroun Harappa was
being given the full and active support of the new Russian-backed
regime over the border, that he was assembling a terrorist group
which was being given Soviet arms and Palestinian training, and
which he had named Al-Iskander in memory of his beloved uncle.
'Excellent,' Hyder grinned, 'now at last we can show the people
that the Popular Front is nothing but a bunch of assassins and bad-
mashes,' and he made the three Generals get down and give
thanks to God all over again.

So it was that Raza Hyder saw his colleagues to the door of his
office with true happiness in his heart, and as the dazed triumvi-
rate staggered off the President greeted Omar Khayyam Shakil
with genuine warmth: 'Well, you old dog, what brings you here?'

The appalling good humour of Raza Hyder stirred up curious

Shame ? 272

emotions inside Omar Khayyam, so that it was almost with plea-
sure that he answered, 'A most delicate and confidential matter';
and behind the locked doors of the President's office a mood of
grim contentment settled on him while he advised Raza of his
speculations and researches and watched the good news drain out
of the President's face, to be replaced by a grey pallor of fear.