Shame (41 page)

How Raza Hyder fell: in improbability; in chaos; in women's
clothing; in black.

Nobody questions women wearing veils. They pass through
the mob and the ring of soldiers, jeeps, trucks. Finally Raza
speaks: 'So what now? Where to go from here?'

In the Fifteenth Century ? 279

And because Omar Khayyam is filled with the sense of having
walked out into the middle of a dream, he hears himself replying:
'I think I know a place.'

And Sufiya Zinobia?

She did not attack the empty palace. She was not caught, nor
killed, nor seen again in that part of the country. It was as if her
hunger had been satisfied; or as though she had never been more
than a rumour, a chimaera, the collective fantasy of a stifled
people, a dream born of their rage; or even as if, sensing a change
in the order of the world, she had retreated, and was prepared to
wait a little longer, in that fifteenth century, for her time.

Judgment Day

It is almost over.
Veiled, bumping on buses, cowering in the shadows of bus sta-
tions, they head south and west. Always on the short-haul routes,
the stopping buses, avoiding the Trunk Road mail expresses. Off
the Potwar plateau, down into the riverine plains, their faces set
towards the land-border beyond Q. They have only the money
they find in their pockets, so they eat little, drink as much as
possible: livid green cordials, pink tea scooped out of large alu-
minium pots, water drawn from yellow lakes in which enervated
water-buffalo sprawl. For days they scarcely speak, and force
themselves to remain impassive when policemen walk squinting
along queues of waiting travellers at small-town depots, tapping
their lathis against short-trousered thighs. For Shakil and Hyder, the
humiliation of the ladies' latrines. There is no country poorer
than Escape.

They are not caught; nobody expects a fleeing President to be
found in women's clothing on a rutputty third-class bus. But there
are sleepless days and nights; there is fear, and despair. A flight
through an exploding land. In the lassitudinous heat of the rural
areas bus radios interrupt the swooning agonies of singers to speak

283

Shame ? 284

of riots and gunshots. On two occasions they sit in buses sur-
rounded by demonstrators, and wonder if they are to die in an
anonymous sandy town, engulfed by petrol fire. But the buses are
allowed to pass, and slowly the border approaches. And beyond
the border, the possibility of hope: yes, there might be sanctuary
across the frontier, in that neighbouring country of priest-kings,
godly men who would surely give refuge to a fallen leader with a
bruise upon his brow. And then they might even be far enough
from her, from feral nemesis, from the revenge of flesh against
flesh. Raza Hyder, unmanned by wife-sewn veils, clings to such
optimistic straws.

The border is impossible to police. Concrete posts marching
across the wastes. Omar Khayyam remembers the stories of people
crossing it at will, of old man Zoroaster impoverished by that
open frontier, deprived by wasteland of all supplements to his
income. The memory of Farah Rodrigues which this recollection
triggers almost chokes him, mingling in his gullet with the history
of the ayah Shahbanou; then the dizziness begins. As he recalls the
cloud which descended along the frontier and frightened him so
badly that he fainted in Farah's arms, he realizes that his old ver-
tigo is returning to torment him, it rushes upon him as he sits in a
jolting bus with chickens pecking at his neck and travel-sick
sharecroppers in the aisles, vomiting on his toes. The vertigo
carries him back to his childhood and shows him once again
the worst of all his nightmares, the gaping mouth of the void. The
deepest parts of Omar Khayyam are stirring once more, the
dizziness is churning them up, they are warning him that
whatever anyone says he ought to know that the border is the
edge of his world, the rim of things, and that the real dreams are
these far-fetched notions of getting across that supernatural
frontier into some wild hallucination of a promised land. Get
back into 'Nishapur', the inner voices whisper, because that's
where you've been heading, all your life, ever since the day
you left.

Fear fights off the vertigo; it gives him the power not to faint.

Judgment Day ? 285

The worst moment comes almost at the end. They are
climbing aboard the last of the buses of their flight, the bus which
is to bear them to the depot at Q., when they hear the terrifying
joke. 'Look where we've got to in this country,' the bus-driver
sneers, he is enormous, with tree-trunk arms and a face like a
horsehair cushion, 'even the transvestites are going into purdah
now.' At once the busload of gas-miners and bauxite quarrymen
starts up a racket of wolf-whistles, dirty laughs, obscenities, ulula-
tions, songs; hands reach out to pinch the hijra bottoms. 'This is
it,' Omar Khayyam thinks, 'done for, trapped, funtoosh,' because
he is sure that someone will tear off their veils, and Hyder's is a
famous face, after all � but just then Bilquis Hyder speaks up and
silences the passengers completely. 'Shame should come to you,
she cries in her unquestionably female voice, 'have the men in this
region sunk so low that ladies must be treated like whores?' A
hush of embarrassment in the bus. The driver, blushing, orders
three farm labourers to vacate their seats at the very front of the
vehicle, 'to make sure, begums, that you are not molested further;
yes, it is a question of honour for me, the dignity of my autobus
has been dirtied.'

So: in a silent and apologetic bus, and after surviving a bad
scare, Omar Khayyam Shakil and his two companions arrive, soon
after midnight, at the bus station in the outskirts of Q. Hobbling
on bad feet, unsupported by the stick he has been obliged to leave
behind, exhausted, he leads them through unlit streets to a large
building between the Cantonment and the bazaar, where he
unveils himself and emits a certain whistle, repeating it until he
sees the movement at an upstairs window; and then the contrap-
tion of Mistri Yakoob Balloch begins its descent, and they are
raised into 'Nishapur', the mother-country, home, like buckets
drawn from a well.

When Omar Khayyam's three mothers understood who had been
brought into their presence they emitted little sighs, as if after
many years they had been released from some particularly con-

Shame ? 286

stricting garments, and settling down comfortably side-by-side
on their creaky old swing-seat they began to smile. The smile
was beatific, innocent, but somehow its replication on the three
identically ancient mouths gave it a quality of distinct, though
indefinable, menace. It was the middle of the night, but one of the
three old ladies, whom Omar Khayyam in the exhaustion of his
travels had barely recognized as Chhunni-ma, ordered him to go
at once into the kitchen and boil some tea, as if he had just come
in after popping out for a couple of minutes. 'No servants any
more,' Chhunni Shakil apologized gracefully to Raza Hyder, who
had torn off his burqa and collapsed into a chair in a dazed condi-
tion for which fatigue was only a partial explanation, 'but our first
visitors for over fifty years must take a welcoming cup.' Omar
Khayyam lumbered off and returned with the tray, only to be
scolded affectionately by a second mother, the withered remnant
of Munnee-in-the-middle: 'Hopeless, I swear. What pot are you
bringing, boy? Go to the almirah and fetch out the best.' He fol-
lowed her pointing finger to a large teak cupboard in which he
discovered, to his great amazement, the long-lost thousand-piece
china service from the Gardner works in Tsarist Russia, those
miracles of the crockery-maker's art which had faded into mere
legends as long ago as his childhood. The revenant dishes and
plates brought a hot flush to his face, filling his spinning thoughts
with a nostalgic terror, inspiring in him the fleeting but awesome
idea that he had come back to a household populated only by
ghosts. But the blue-and-pink cups and saucers and quarterplates
were solid enough; he arranged them on his tray with a shiver of
disbelief.

'Now go quickly to the Peek Frean tin and bring out cake,'
commanded his youngest mother, Bunny, her octogenarian voice
trembling with a delight she made no effort to explain; Omar
Khayyam muttered something puzzled and inaudible and limped
away in search of the stale chocolate gateau which added the final
touch of quaint improbability to that takallouf-ridden nightmare of
a tea-party. 'This is more like it,' Chhunni approved as she cut

Judgment Day � 287

and handed out slices of dried-out cake. 'For such honoured
guests, this is the usual way.'

Omar Khayyam observed that while he had been out of the
room fetching the cake his mothers had obliged Bilquis Hyder, by
the inexorable force of their courtly charm, to remove her burqa.
Her face, eyebrowless, dust-pale, sleep-starved, was a death-mask,
with only the high points of red colour on her cheekbones to
indicate that she was alive; it made the bad feelings Omar
Khayyam had been having even worse than before. His teacup
rattled on its saucer while his heart was squeezed by a renewed
fear of the cryptic atmosphere of his childhood home, which
could turn living persons into the mirrors of their ghosts; then
Bilquis spoke, and he was jerked out of these exhausted fantasies
by her expression of a most peculiar idea.

'Once there were giants,' Bilquis Hyder carefully, and wistfully,
pronounced.

The laws of takalloufh&d forced her to make conversation, but
it had been too long since Bilquis had indulged in chit-chat; she
had lost the knack of it, and there was the tension and debilitation
of the long escape to consider besides, to say nothing of the
eccentricity of her latter years. Sipping tea as she spoke, smiling
brightly in response to the triple smile of her hostesses, she seemed
to imagine herself to be recounting some tiny, amusing anecdote,
or expatiating wittily upon a sophisticated point of fashion. 'Once
giants walked the earth,' she repeated, emphatically. 'Yes, titans
absolutely, it's a fact.'

Three mothers creaked and swung with expressions of fasci-
nated absorption upon their smiling faces; but Raza Hyder took
no notice, closed his eyes, grunted from time to time. 'Now the
pygmies have t&ken over, however,' Bilquis confided. 'Tiny per-
sonages. Ants. Once he was a giant,' she jerked a thumb in the
direction of her somnolent husband, 'you would not believe to
look, but he was. Streets where he walked shook with fear and
respect, even here, in this very town. But, you see, even a giant
can be pygmified, and he has shrunk now, he is smaller than a

Shame ? 288

bug. Pygmies pygmies everywhere, also insects and ants � shame
on the giants, isn't it? Shame on them for shrinking. That's
my opinion.' Three old ladies nodded gravely while Bilquis
made her lament; then they hastened to agree with her. 'Quite
right,' Chhunni pronounced courteously, and Munnee chimed in,
'Giants, how true, there must have been,' and then Bunny Shakil
concluded: 'Because after all there are angels also, they are still
around, oh yes, we are sure of that.'

An unnaturally high colour suffused Bilquis's face as she sipped
her tea, annihilating the image of the death-mask; she was appar-
ently determined to find solace in that appalling scene, to con-
vince herself of her safety by forging a desperate and over-rapid
intimacy between herself and the three creaking ancients . . . but
Omar Khayyam had stopped noticing things, because at the
moment when his youngest mother mentioned angels he had
understood the strange high spirits of the Shakil sisters. His three
mothers were improvising this instant of demented theatre so as to
avoid having to mention a certain dead youth; there was a hole at
the heart of their smiling hospitality, and they were skirting
around its periphery, around that void such as escaping creatures
make in bricked-up windows, that absence the shape of the
unnamable Babar Shakil. Yes, that was it, they were in a state
of elation, because they had Raza Hyder in their clutches at
last, and could see no reason except one for Omar Khayyam
to have brought the fellow here; so they were trying not to
spoil things, seeking to lull their victims into a sense of false
security, they didn't want the Hyders to get worried and try to
run away. And at the same time they were sighing happily, con-
vinced it was finally going to happen, revenge, right under their
noses. Omar Khayyam Shakil's head swam with the knowledge
that the three of them would force him to do it � remorselessly
and in cold blood to do Raza Hyder to death under his
mothers' roof.

The next morning he awoke to the sound of Bilquis Hyder slam-
ming windows. Omar Khayyam struggled out of a bed which was

Judgment Day ? 289

unaccountably soaked in perspiration, his legs weaker, his feet
more painful than usual, and hobbled off to see what was hap-
pening. He found his three mothers watching Bilquis as she
stormed around the house, pulling windows shut, fiercely, as if she
were angry about something; she fastened shutters and lowered
chick-blinds. It struck Omar Khayyam as if for the first time how
tall his mothers were, like arms stretched up into the sky. They
stood in attitudes of mutual solicitude, supporting each other
at the elbows, making no attempt to interfere with Bilquis's
window-shutting frenzy. Omar Khayyam wanted to stop her,
because as the windows closed the air inside the house became
thicker and lumpier, until he felt as if he were inhaling mulli-
gatawny soup, but his three mothers motioned him to be still.
'She is our guest,' whispered Chhunni-ma, 'so she can stay for
ever if she likes,' because the old woman had divined that
Bilquis's behaviour was that of a woman who has gone far
enough already, too far, a woman who has ceased to believe in
frontiers and whatever-might-lie-beyond. Bilquis was barricad-
ing herself against the outside world in the hope that it might
go away, and that was an activity which the Shakil sisters
could understand without a word being said. 'She has suffered,'
Munnee Shakil stated with a mysterious smile, 'but she is wel-
come to be here.'