Shame (40 page)

'So, so,' Raza Hyder said, 'I had almost deceived myself she
was dead.'

' "I would compare her to an impetuous river," ' Iskander
Harappa whispered in his ear, ' "that, when turbulent, inundates
the plains, casts down trees and buildings; everyone flees before it,
and everything yields to its fury without being able to oppose it.
So it is with Fortune, which shows her power where no measures
have been taken to resist her, and directs her fury where she
knows that no dykes or barriers have been made to hold her." '

'What barriers?' Raza Hyder cried aloud, convincing Omar
Khayyam that the President was cracking up under stress. 'What
walls can I build against my child?' But Maulana Dawood, his
angel of the right, said nothing.

How does a dictator fall? There is an old saw which states, with
absurd optimism, that it is in the nature of tyrannies to end. One
might as well say that it is also in their nature to begin, to con-
tinue, to dig themselves in, and, often, to be preserved by greater
powers than their own.

Well, well, I mustn't forget I'm only telling a fairy-story. My
dictator will be toppled by goblinish, faery means. 'Makes it pretty
easy for you,' is the obvious criticism; and I agree, I agree. But
add, even if it does sound a little peevish: ' You try and get rid of a
dictator some time.'

When Raza Hyder had been President for nearly four years, the
white panther started coming closer to the capital. That is to say,
the murders and animal-slayings grew closer together, the sight-
ings grew more frequent, the stories linked up with each other
and formed a ring around the city. General Raddi told Raza

In the Fifteenth Century ? 273

Hyder that it was clear to him that these acts of terrorism were the
work of the Al-Iskander group commanded by Haroun Harappa;
whereupon, to his great surprise, the President thumped him
heartily on the back. 'Good show, Raddi,' Hyder roared, 'you
aren't such an idiot as I thought.' Raza convened a Presidential
press briefing, at which he pinned the blame for the so-called
'headless murders' on those infamous dacoits and gangsters who
were being backed by the Russians and acting under the orders of
the arch-bandit Haroun, and whose purpose was to sap the moral
fibre of the nation, 'to weaken our Godly resolve,' Raza said;
'destabilization is their intention, but I tell you they will never
succeed.'

Secretly, however, he was aghast at this latest proof of his help-
lessness to resist his daughter. It seemed to him once again that the
years of his greatness and of the construction of the great edifice of
national stability had been no more than self-delusory lies, that this
nemesis had been stalking him all along, permitting him to rise
higher and higher so that his fall might be greater; his own flesh
had turned against him, and no man has a defence against such
treason. Yielding to a fatalistic melancholy born of his certainty of
approaching doom, he left the day-to-day running of the govern-
ment in the hands of his three elevated Generals, knowing that if
Sufiya Zinobia were killed by the large search parties which were
now scouring the countryside for terrorists, she would also be
identified, and the shame of that naming would bring him down;
but if she eluded her pursuers, that would be no help either,
because he saw that what she was doing was moving slowly
inwards, spiralling inexorably in to the centre, to the very room in
which he paced, sleeplessly, crunching with every step the carpet
of pine-kernel shells covering the floor, while Omar Khayyam
Shakil, similarly insomniac, stared out through the attic window at
the menacing night.

Silence in his right ear. Maulana Dawood had vanished, never
to speak to him again. Plagued by this silence, which was now as
oppressive as the increasingly gloating sibilances of Iskander
Harappa on his left side, Raza Hyder sank ever deeper into the

Shame ? 274

quicksands of his despair, understanding that he had been left to
his fate by God.

I have not changed my opinion of Mr Haroun Harappa: the man
was a buffoon. Time inflicts strange ironies on its victims, how-
ever, and Haroun, who had once mouthed insincere revolu-
tionary slogans and cracked jokes about Molotov cocktails while
he perched on a sea-turtle's back, was now the incarnation of the
thing he had once despised, a notorious gang-leader with a band
of desperadoes to command.

Both Rani and Arjumand Harappa were permitted by the
authorities to issue public statements from Mohenjo deploring ter-
rorist activity. But Haroun had developed the unstoppable mul-
ishness of the genuinely stupid man; and the death of Isky Harappa
had finally cured him of his obsession with the memory of Good
News Hyder. It is not uncommon for a dead love to be reborn as
its opposite, and nowadays the name 'Hyder' made Haroun see
nothing but red. It was a further irony, therefore, that his
hijacking of a civilian aircraft on the tarmac of the airport at Q.
only served to distract attention, for a few moments, from the
scandal of the white panther murders and the crisis of the Hyder
regime.

When General Raddi was alerted to the seizure of the aero-
plane at Q., he initiated a remarkable plan, instructing the local
police authorities to flatter Harappa's men as effusively as possible.
'Tell them that a coup is in progress,' Raddi suggested, amazing
himself by the inspiration of his idea, 'that Hyder has been seized
and the women of Mohenjo will soon be free.' Haroun Harappa
fell for it, the fool, and he kept the aircraft on the ground, with its
full complement of passengers, and awaited the call to power.

The day grew hotter. Condensation formed on the roof of the
passenger cabin and fell on the occupants like rain. The aircraft's
supplies of food and drink ran low, and Haroun in the impatience
of his naivety radioed the control tower and demanded to be sent
a meal. His request was greeted with great politeness; he was told

In the Fifteenth Century ? 275

that nothing was too good for the future leader of the people, and
very soon a banquet of lavish proportions was sent to the aircraft,
while the control tower begged Haroun to eat and drink his fill,
assuring him that he would be informed the minute it was safe for
him to emerge. The terrorists gorged themselves on that food of
dreams, on the meatballs of hope-beyond-hope and the fizzy
drinks of delusion, and within an hour of finishing they had all
fallen fast asleep in the heat, with the top buttons of their trousers
open. The police boarded the aircraft and manacled them all
without firing a single shot.

General Raddi searched the C-in-C's residence for Hyder, and
found him in the attic of his despair. He entered to discover Raza
and Omar Khayyam lost in silences. 'Wonderful news, sir,' he
announced, but when he had completed his report he realized at
once that he had somehow managed to put his foot in it once
again, because the President rounded on him and roared: 'So
you've got Harappa in the lock-up, eh? So who do you propose
to blame for the panther killings now?' General Raddi blushed
like a bride and began to apologize, but his puzzlement got
the better of him, and he blurted out: 'But sir, surely, the elimina-
tion of the Al-Iskander threat means that the headless murders
will cease?'

'Go, go, get away from me,' Raza muttered, and Raddi
saw that the President's anger was muted, distant, as if he had
accepted some secret fate. Nutshells crackled beneath Raddi's
departing boots.

The killings continued: farmers, pie-dogs, goats. The murders
formed a death-ring round the house; they had reached the out-
skirts of the two cities, new capital and old town. Murders
without rhyme or reason, done, it seemed, for the love of killing,
or to satisfy some hideous need. The crushing of Haroun Harappa
removed the rational explanation; panic began to mount. The
search parties were doubled, then doubled again; still the slow,
circling pattern of blood continued. The idea of the monster

Shame ? 276

began to be treated with incredulous seriousness by the news-
papers. 'It is as if this beast can bewitch its victims,' one article
said. 'Never any sign of a struggle.' A cartoonist drew a picture of
a giant cobra mesmerizing heavily-armed, but powerless, mon-
goose hordes.

'Not long now,' Raza Hyder said aloud in the attic. 'This is the
last act.' Omar Khayyam agreed. It seemed to him that Sufiya
Zinobia was trying her strength, testing the powers of those hyp-
notic eyes on larger and larger groups, petrifying her adversaries,
who stood incapable of self-defence as her hands closed round
their necks. 'God knows how many she can take on,' he thought,
'maybe by now a regiment, the full Army, the whole world.'

Let us state plainly that Omar Khayyam was afraid. Raza had
become fatalistically convinced that his daughter was coming for
him, but she might just as easily be searching out the husband who
drugged and chained her. Or the mother who named her Shame.
'We must run,' he told Raza, but Hyder seemed not to hear; the
deafness of acceptance, of silence-in-the-right-ear and Isky-in-
the-left had stopped his ears. A man abandoned by his God may
choose to die.

When the lid blew off their secret, it began to seem like a miracle
to Omar Khayyam that the truth had been kept hidden so long.
Asgari the sweeperwoman had vanished without giving notice,
unable, perhaps, to put up with the proliferation of pine-kernel
shells; or maybe she was just the first of the servants to flee the
terror, the first of them to guess what was likely to happen to
anyone who stayed in that house ... it seems probable, at any
rate, that it was Asgari who spilled the beans. It was a sign of
Raza's declining power that two newspapers felt able to run sto-
ries hinting that the President's daughter was a dangerous mad-
woman whom her father had permitted to escape from his
residence some considerable time back, 'without even bothering
to advise the proper authorities,' one journal cheekily said. Nei-
ther the press nor the radio went so far as to link the disappearance

In the Fifteenth Century ? 277

of Sufiya Zinobia with the 'headless murders', but it was in the
wind, and in the bazaars and at the bus depots and over the tables
of cheap cafes the monster began to be given its true name.

Raza summoned his triumvirate of Generals. Raddi, Bekar and
Phisaddi arrived, to hear Hyder dredge up, for the last time, a
few shards of his old authority. 'Arrest these subversives!' he
demanded, waving newspapers at the Generals. 'I want them in
the darkest jail, I want them finished, defunct, kaput!' The three
officers waited until he had finished and then General Raddi said
with the utter delight of a man who has long looked forward to
such a moment: 'Mr President, we do not believe such action
would be wise.'

'House arrest will follow in a day or two,' Hyder told Omar
Khayyam, 'when they have prepared the ground. I told you: the
final curtain. That Raddi, I should have known, I'm losing my
grip. When a General dreams up a coup in this blasted country,
you can bet he'll try and carry it out, even if he only meant it in
the beginning as a sort of joke, or trick.'

How does a dictator fall? Raddi Bekar Phisaddi lift journalistic
embargoes. Certain fatal connections are hinted at in print: the
dead turkeys of Pinkie Aurangzeb, Good News Hyder's wedding-
day fiasco and the stiff neck of Talvar Ulhaq, theories about the
dead boys in the slums make the news at last. 'The people are like
dry wood,' Raza Hyder says. 'These sparks will start a fire.'
Then the last night comes.

All day a crowd has been gathering around the compound walls,
growing angrier as it grows larger. Now it is night and they hear it
milling around: chants, shouts, jeers. And sounds from further
away like whistles, the glow of fires, shrieks. Where is she, Shakil
wonders, will she come now, or when? How will it end, he
muses: with the mob surging into the palace, lynchings, lootings,
flames - or in the other, the stranger way, the people parting like

Shame ? 278

mythological waters, averting their eyes, allowing her through,
their champion, to do their dirty work: their Beast with her fiery
eyes? Of course, he thinks insanely, of course they have not sent
soldiers to guard us, what soldier would set foot in this house of
imminent death . . . and then he hears in the corridors below the
soft rat-like sounds, the susurrations of servants fleeing the house,
their bedrolls on their heads: bearers and hamals and sweeper-
boys, gardeners and odd-job men, ayahs and maids. Some of them
are accompanied by children, who might in the daylight look too
well-fed for their ragged clothes, but who will pass, in the night,
for the offspring of the poor. Twenty-seven children; as he hean
them go he counts, in his imagination, their padding steps. And
feels, from the invisible night-mob, an expectancy, filling the air.

'For pity's sake,' he pleads with Raza, 'let's try and get out.'
But Hyder is a crushed figure, incapable for the first time in his
life of producing moisture from his eyes. 'Impossible,' he shrugs,
'the crowds. And beyond them there will be troops.'

The door creaks; a woman's feet crush scattered empty shells.
Approaching across the pine-kernel droppings is � is the forgotten
figure of Bilquis Hyder. Who is carrying a heap of shapeless gar-
ments, a selection from the work of her isolated years. Burqas,
Omar Khayyam realizes, as hope bursts inside him; head-to-toe
cloaks of invisibility, veils. The living wear shrouds as well as the dead.
Bilquis Hyder says simply, 'Put these on.' Shakil seizes, rushes into
his womanly disguise; Bilquis pulls the black fabric over her hus-
band's unresisting head. 'Your son became a daughter,' she tells
him, 'so now you must change shape also. I knew I was sewing
these for a reason.' The President is passive, allows himself to be
led. Black-veiled fugitives mingle with escaping servants in the
darkened corridors of the house.