Shame (42 page)

Omar Khayyam felt the air congeal into soup, and the germs of
claustrophobia began to breed. But other germs, too, were in the
air, and when Bilquis collapsed in a boiling stupor Omar Khayyam
guessed the meaning of his own morning weakness, the hot
flushes, the rubbery legs. 'Malaria,' he made himself say, and then
the vertigo swirled around him and he fell down beside Bilquis
Hyder, out cold and blazing hot.

At that very instant Raza Hyder awoke from a sick dream
in which the several pieces of the late Sindbad Mengal had
appeared to him, all joined up in the wrong way, so that the dead
man's head was in the middle of his stomach and his feet stuck
out, soles upward, like asses' ears from his neck. Mengal had not
recriminated at all, but had warned Raza that the way things were

Shame ? 290

going the General sahib would be sliced up himself in a few
days. Old Razor Guts, still half-asleep, rose from his bed crying
danger, but the disease had begun to burn inside him, too, and
he fell back gasping for air and shivering as if it were winter.
The Shakil sisters came and stood beside his bed to watch
him shake.

'How nice,' Bunny Shakil said comfortably, 'the General seems
to be in no hurry to depart.'

The fever was a fire that made you cold. It burned away the bar-
riers between consciousness and sleep, so that Omar Khayyam
never knew whether things were really happening or not. At one
point as he lay in a darkened room he thought he heard Bilquis
shouting something about brain-fever, about visitations and judg-
ments, the sickness that crippled her daughter being visited upon
her parent in the city of her shame. He thought, too, that he
heard Raza yelling for pine-kernels. And at another time he was
sure that the forgotten figure of the schoolteacher Eduardo
Rodrigues had been standing accusingly by his bedside holding a
dead baby in its arms - but that couldn't be true, that must
have been the delirium. There were moments of what felt like
lucidity, during which he called for his mothers and dictated the
names of drugs. He had memories of receiving medication, he
recalled arms lifting his head and popping white pills into his
mouth, but when he bit one by mistake it tasted of calcium, so
that the suspicion was born in his fevered brain that his mothers
had not sent for the drugs at all. His thoughts heated up to the
point at which he could entertain the sick possibility that the
Shakil sisters were happy to let the malaria do their dirty work for
them, that they were willing to sacrifice their surviving son if he
took the Hyders along with him. Either they are mad or I am, he
thought, and then the fever took him again and made all thinking
impossible.

Sometimes, he believed, he had gained consciousness and heard
through the closed and shuttered windows snatches of angry

Judgment Day ? 291

voices below, also shots, explosions, breaking glass, and unless that
had been part of the delirium too it meant that troubles were
erupting in the town, yes, he could remember certain cries clearly,
for instance The hotel is on fire. Was it or wasn't it? Memories
lurched back towards him through the marshes of the disease, he
was almost positive now that he had heard the hotel burn, the
crash of the collapsing golden dome, the last suffocating squawks
of an orchestra crushed beneath the falling masonry. There had
been a morning on which the ash cloud of the dead hotel
had managed to get inside 'Nishapur', in spite of shutters and
windowpanes it had insinuated itself into his bedroom, covering
everything with the grey powder of the hotel's death and
strengthening his feeling of being stricken down in a house of
phantoms. But when he asked one � which? � of his three
mothers about the burning hotel she � who? � had replied, 'Close
your eyes now and don't worry. Ash everywhere, what an idea.'

He persisted in his belief that the world was changing outside,
old orders were passing, great structures were being cast down
while others rose up in their place. The world was an earthquake,
abysses yawned, dream-temples rose and fell, the logic of the
Impossible Mountains had come down to infect the plains. In his
delirium, however, in the burning clutches of the sickness and the
foetid atmosphere of the house, only endings seemed possible. He
could feel things caving in within him, landslips, heaves, the patter
of crumbling masonry in his chest, cog-wheels breaking, a false
note in the engine's hum. 'This motor,' he said aloud somewhere
in that halted time, 'will not run any more.'

Three mothers creaked on their swing-seat at his bedside. No,
how had they moved it, what was it doing here, it was a ghost, a
mirage, he refused to believe in it, closed his eyes, squeezed them
right, reopened them a minute or a week later, and they were still
there in the seat, so it was clear that the sickness was worse, the
hallucinations were gaining in confidence. The sisters were
explaining sadly that the house was no longer as big as it had once
been. 'We keep on losing rooms,' the spectre of Bunny mourned,

Shame ? 292

'today we mislaid your grandfather's study. You know where it
used to be, but now if you go through that door you turn up in
the dining room, which is impossible, because the dining room is
supposed to be on the other side of the passage.' And Chhunni-ma
nodded, 'It's so sad, son, look how life treats old people, you get
used to a certain bedroom and then one day, poof, it goes away,
the staircase vanishes, what to do.' 'The place is shrinking,'
middle-Munnee fumed. 'Honestly, too bad, like a cheap shirt. We
should have had it Sanforized. Soon the whole house will be
smaller than a matchbox and we will be out on the street.' And
Chhunni-ma had the last word. 'In that sunlight, without walls,'
the phantasm of his eldest mother prophesied, 'we will not be able
to survive. We will turn to dust and be blown away by the wind.'
Then he was unconscious again. When he surfaced there was
no swing-seat, there were no mothers, he was alone in that four-
poster bed with serpents coiled round the columns and Paradise
embroidered on the canopy. His grandfather's deathbed. He real-
ized that he felt as strong as a horse. Time to get up. He jumped
out of bed and had wandered barefoot and pajama-clad out of the
room before it occurred to him that this was only another illusion,
but by then he couldn't stop himself, his feet, which had stopped
hurting, walked him along the cluttered passages full of hatracks
and stuffed fishes in glass cases and broken ormolu clocks, and he
saw that far from having shrunk, the house had actually expanded,
it had grown so vast that it held within its walls every place in
which he had ever been. The sum of all his possibilities: he
opened one cobwebbed door and shrank back from the little,
brightly-lit group of white-masked figures stooping over a body.
It was an operating room at the Mount Hira Hospital. The figures
were beckoning to him in a friendly way, they wanted him to
help with the operation but he was afraid to see the patient's face.
He turned abruptly and felt pine-kernel shells crunching beneath
his heels as the rooms of the Commander-in-Chief's official resi-
dence began to form around him. At some point he began to run,
trying to find his way back to bed, but the corridors kept turning

Judgment Day ? 293

corners without warning, and he arrived panting at a mirror-
worked marquee in which a wedding banquet was being held, he
saw the bride's face in a fragment of mirror, she wore a noose
around her neck, and he shouted out, 'You should have stayed
dead,' making all the guests stare at him. They were all dressed in
rags because of the dangers of going well-dressed into the turbu-
lence of the streets and they were chanting in unison, shame,
shame, poppy-shame, all the girls, know your name. Then he was
running again, but slowing down, he was getting heavier, his
chins flopped sweatily down from his jaw until they touched his
nipples, the rolls of his obesity hung over his knees, until he could
not move, no matter how hard he tried, he was sweating like a
pig, the heat the cold, no escape, he thought, and tumbled back-
wards as a shroud fell softly over him, white, soaking wet, and he
realized that he was in bed.

He heard a voice, which he identified, after a struggle, as
Hashmat Bibi's. She spoke from within a cloud: 'Only child.
Always they live too much in their poor head.' But he had not
remained an only child.

Burning, burning in that cold fire. Brain-fever. Bilquis Hyder
at his bedside pointed angrily to the Peek Frean tin. 'Poison,' she
accused, 'germ poison in the cake. But we were hungry, we could
not resist and so we ate.' Upset by this slur on his family name, he
began to defend his mothers' hospitality, no, not the cake, it was
stale but don't be ridiculous, think of the bus-journey, look what
we drank, green pink yellow, our defences were low. Bilquis
shrugged and went over to a cupboard and pulled out every piece
of the Gardner china collection, one by one, and smashed them all
into pink-and-blue dust on the floor. He shut his eyes, but eyelids
were no defence any more, they were just doors into other places,
and there was Raza Hyder in uniform with a monkey on each
shoulder. The monkey on the right had the face of Maulana
Dawood and its hands were clasped over its mouth; on the left
shoulder sat Iskander Harappa scratching his langoor's armpit.
Hyder's hands went to his ears, Isky's, after scratching, covered his

Shame ? 294

eyes, but he was peeping through the fingers. 'Stories end, worlds
end', Isky the monkey said, 'and then it's judgment day.' Fire, and
the dead, rising up, dancing in the flames.

During recessions in the fever he remembered dreaming things
that he could not have known were true, visions of the future, of
what would happen after the end. Quarrels between three Gen-
erals. Continued public disturbances. Great powers shifting their
ground, deciding the Army had become unstable. And at last
Arjumand and Haroun set free, reborn into power, the virgin
Ironpants and her only love taking charge. The fall of God, and in
his place the myth of the Martyr Iskander. And after that arrests,
retribution, trials, hangings, blood, a new cycle of shamelessness
and shame. While at Mohenjo cracks appear in the earth.

A dream of Rani Harappa: who chooses to remain at Mohenjo,
and sends Arjumand, one day, a gift of eighteen exquisite
shawls. These shawls ensure that she will never leave the estate
again: Arjumand has her own mother placed under guard. People
engaged in building new myths have no time for embroidered
criticisms. Rani remains in that heavy-eaved house where the
water flows blood-red; she inclines her head in the direction of
Omar Khayyam Shakil. 'Seems the world can't be a safe place,'
she pronounces her epitaph, 'if Rani Harappa's on the loose.'

Stories end, worlds end; and then it's judgment day.

His mother Chhunni says: 'There is something you should know.'
He lies helpless between wooden serpents, burning, freezing,
red eyes wandering in his head. He gulps air; it feels somehow
fuzzy, as if he has been buried by divine justice beneath a gigantic
woollen mountain. He is beached, gasping, a whale pecked at by
birds. But this time the three of them are really there, no halluci-
nation, he is sure of it, they sit on his bed with a secret to reveal.
His head swims; he closes his eyes.

And hears, for the first time in his life, the last family secret, the
worst tale in history. The story of his great-grandfather and his
brother, Hafeezullah and Rumi Shakil. Each married a woman the
other found unsuitable, and when Hafeez spread it around town

Judgment Day ? 295

that his sister-in-law was a female as loose as a baggy pajama
whom Rumi had plucked out of the notorious Heeramandi red-
light district, the break between the brothers was complete. Then
Rumi's wife took her revenge. She convinced her husband that
the cause of Hafeez's sanctimonious disapproval was that he had
wanted to sleep with her, after her marriage, and she had turned
him down flat. Rumi Shakil became as cold as ice and went at
once to his writing-desk, where he composed an anonymous,
poison-pen letter to his brother, in which he accused Hafeez's
wife of having extramarital relations with a famous sitarist of the
time, an accusation which was lethal because it was true. Hafeez
Shakil had always trusted his wife bhndly, so he turned pale when
he read the letter, which he recognized instantly as having been
written in his brother's hand. When he questioned his wife she
confessed at once. She said she had always loved the sitarist and
would have run away with him if her parents hadn't married her
off to Hafeez. Omar Khayyam's great-grandfather took to his bed
and when his wife came to see him, holding their son in her arms,
he put his right hand on his chest and addressed his last words to
the baby boy.

'This motor,' he said sadly, 'will not run any more.'

He died that night.

'You said the same thing,' Munnee Shakil tells Omar
Khayyam, 'in your fever, when you didn't know what you were
talking about. The same thing in the same words. Now you know
why we told you the story.'

'You know everything now,' Chhunni-ma continues. 'You
know this is a family in which brothers have done the worst
of things to brothers, and maybe you even know that you are
just the same.'

'You also had a brother,' Bunny says, 'and you have treated his
memory like mud.'

Once, before he went out into the world, they had forbidden him
to feel shame; now they were turning that emotion upon him, slash-
ing him with that sword. 'Your brother's father was an anarchangel,'

Shame ? 296

Chhunni Shakil whispered at his bedside, 'so the boy was too good
for this world. But you, your maker was a devil out of hell.' He was
sinking back into the swamps of the fever, but this remark hit home,
because none of his mothers had ever spontaneously raised the sub-
ject of fathers before. It became obvious to him that his mothers
hated him, and to his surprise he found the idea of that hatred too
terrible to be borne.