Shame (43 page)

The illness was lapping at his eyelashes now, offering oblivion.
He fought against it, a man of sixty-five overwhelmed by moth-
erly disgust. He saw it as a living thing, huge and greasy. They had
been feeding it for years, handing it morsels of themselves, holding
out pieces of their memories of dead Babar to their hateful pet.
Who gobbled them up, snatching them greedily from the sisters'
long bony fingers.

Their dead Babar, who, during his short life, had never been
permitted to forget his inferiority to his elder brother, the great
man, the success, the man who enabled them to shoo away the
pawnbroker, to save their past from ending up on the shelves of
Chalaak Sahib. The brother whom he, Omar Khayyam, had
never known. Mothers use their children as sticks � each brother
a rod with which to chastise the other. Asphyxiated by the hot
wind of his mothers' worship of Omar Khayyam, Babar fled into
the mountains; now the mothers had changed sides, and the dead
boy was their weapon against the living. You married into the mur-
derer's family. You licked the shoes of the great. Behind his eyelids
Omar Khayyam saw his mothers placing, around his neck, the
garland of their hatred. This time there was no mistake; his
sweat-drenched beard rubbed against the frayed laces, the
tattered leathery tongues, the laughing mouths of the necklace of
discarded shoes.

The Beast has many faces. It takes any shape it chooses. He felt
it crawl into his belly and begin to feed.

General Raza Hyder awoke one morning at dawn with his ears
full of a tinkling, splintering sound like the breaking of a thou-
sand windows, and realized that it was the noise of the sickness

Judgment Day ? 297

breaking. He took a deep breath and sat upright in bed. 'Fever,'
he said happily, 'I beat you. Old Razor Guts isn't finished yet.'
The noise ended and he had the feeling of floating across a lake of
silence, because the voice of Iskander Harappa had fallen silent for
the first time in four long years. He heard birds outside; they were
only crows, but they sounded as sweet as bulbuls. 'Things are on
the mend,' Raza Hyder thought. Then he noticed the state he was
in. They had left him to rot in the bog of his own juices. It was
obvious that nobody had been to see him for days. He was lying
in the pestilential squashiness of his own excrement, in sheets
turned yellow by perspiration and urine. Mould had begun to
form on the bedclothes, and there was green fungus on his body as
well. 'So this is what they think of me,' he exclaimed to the empty
room, 'those witches, I'll give them what for.' But in spite of the
hideous condition of the sick-bed his new mood of optimism
refused to be punctured. He stood up on legs which were only
slightly wobbly and threw off the stinking garments of his illness;
then, with great delicacy and distaste, he gathered together a
bundle of suppurating linen and dropped it out of a window.
'Hags,' he chuckled to himself, 'let them get their own dirty
laundry from the street, it serves them right.' Naked now, he went
into the bathroom and showered. As he soaped away the fever-
stink a daydream of a return to power flitted across his mind.
'Sure,' he told himself, 'we'll do it, why not? Before anyone
knows what's what.' He felt a great surge of fondness for the wife
who had rescued him from the jaws of his enemies, and was filled
with the desire to make things right between the two of them. 'I
treated her badly,' he accused himself guiltily, 'but she came up
trumps all right.' The memory of Sufiya Zinobia had become little
more than a bad dream; he was not even sure of its basis in fact,
half-believing it was just one of the many hallucinations which the
disease had sent to torment him. He stepped out of the shower,
wrapped a towel around himself and went in search of clothes.
'If Bilquis hasn't recovered yet,' he vowed, 'I'll nurse her night
and day. I'm not leaving her to the mercy of those three crazy
vultures.'

Shame ? 298

There were no clothes anywhere. 'God damn it,' Raza blas-
phemed, 'couldn't they have left me a shalwar and a shirt?'

He opened the door of his room and called out, 'Anyone
there?' But there was no reply. The lake of silence filled the
house. 'O.K.,' thought Raza Hyder, 'then they'll just have to take
me as they find me.' Wrapping his towel firmly around his waist,
he set off in search of his wife.

Three empty, darkened rooms and then a fourth which he
knew was the right place by the smell. 'Bitches!' he yelled savagely
to the echoing house. 'Have you no shame?' Then he went inside.

The stench was even worse than it had been in his own room,
and Bilquis Hyder lay still in the obscenity of her shit. 'Don't
worry, Billoo,' he whispered to her, 'Raz is here. I'll clean you up
good and proper and then you'll see. Those animal women, I'll
make them pick up turds with their eyelashes and stuff them up
their nostrils.'

Bilquis did not reply, and it took Raza a few moments to sniff
out the reason for her silence. Then he smelt the other smell
beneath the putrid odours of waste matter, and he felt as if a
hangman's knot had smashed him in the back of the neck. He sat
down on the floor and began drumming his fingers on the stone.
When he spoke it came out all wrong, he hadn't meant to sound
bad-tempered, but what came out was this: 'For God's sake,
Billoo, what are you up to? I hope you are not acting or some-
thing. What's the meaning of this, you're not supposed to die?'
But Bilquis had crossed her frontier.

After his querulous words had come out to embarrass him he
looked up to find the three Shakil sisters standing in front of him
with scented handkerchiefs over their noses. Chhunni-ma also
held, in her other hand, an antique blunderbuss which had once
belonged to her grandfather Hafeezullah Shakil. She was pointing
it at Raza's chest, but it was waggling about so much that her
chances of hitting him were remote, and anyway the piece was so
impossibly old that it would probably blow up in her face if she
pulled the trigger. Unfortunately for Raza's chances, however, her
sisters were also armed. Handkerchiefs were in their left hands, but

Judgment Day ? 299

in Munnee's right was a fierce-looking scimitar with a jewelled
haft, while Bunny's fist was closed around the shaft of a spear with
a badly rusted, but undeniably pointy, head. Optimism left Raza
Hyder without bothering to say good-bye.

'You should be dead instead of her,' Chhunni Shakil declared.

The anger had gone out with the optimism. 'Go ahead,' he
encouraged the sisters. 'God will judge us all.'

'He did well to bring you here,' Bunny reflected, 'our son. He
did well to wait for your fall. There is no shame in killing you
now, because you are a dead man anyway. It is only the execution
of a corpse.'

'Also,' Munnee Shakil said, 'there is no God.'

Chhunni waved the blunderbuss in the direction of Bilquis.
'Pick her up,' she ordered. 'Just as she is. Pick her and bring her
quick.' He rose to his feet; the towel slipped; he made a grab for
it, missed, and stood naked before the old women, who had the
grace to gasp . . . freshly showered, and wholly undressed, General
Raza Hyder carried the stinking, mould-encrusted body of his
wife through the corridors of 'Nishapur', while three sisters hov-
ered around him like carrion crows. 'You must go in here,'
Chhunni stated, pushing the barrel of the blunderbuss into his
back, and he entered the last room of all the rooms in his life, and
recognized the dark bulk of the dumb-waiter hanging outside the
window and blocking most of the light. He had resolved to
remain silent whatever happened, but his surprise made him
speak: 'What's this?' he asked. 'Are you sending us outside?'

'How well known the General must be in our town,' Munnee
mused. 'So many friends eager to meet you again, don't you
think? What a reception they will make when they find out who
is here.'

Raza Hyder naked in the dumb-waiter beside Bilquis's corpse.
The three sisten moved to a panel on the wall: buttons switches
levers. 'This machine was built by a master craftsman,' Chhunni
explained, 'in the old days, when nothing was beyond doing. A
certain Mistri Balloch; and at our request, which we conveyed to
him through our dear departed Hashmat Bibi, he included in the

Shame ? 300

contrivance some extra fitments, which we now propose to use
for the first and last time.'

'Let me go,' Raza Hyder cried, understanding nothing. 'What
are you wasting time for?'

They were his last words. 'We asked for these arrangements,'
Munnee Shakil said as the three sisters each placed a hand upon
one of the levers, 'thinking self-defence is no offence. But also,
you must agree, revenge is sweet.' The image of Sindbad Mengal
flashed into Raza's mind as the three sisters pulled down the lever,
acting in perfect unison, so that it was impossible to say who
pulled first or hardest, and the ancient spring-releases of Yakoob
Balloch worked like a treat, the secret panels sprang back and
the eighteen-inch stiletto blades of death drove into Raza's body,
cutting him to pieces, their reddened points emerging, among
other places, through his eyeballs, adam's-apple, navel, groin
and mouth. His tongue, severed cleanly by a laterally spearing
knife, fell out on to his lap. He made strange clicking noises;
shivered; froze.

'Leave them in there,' Chhunni instructed her sisters. 'We will
not be needing this contraption any more.'

The contractions were coming regularly, squeezing his temples, as
if something were trying to be born. The cell was swarming with
malaria-bearing anopheles mosquitoes, but for some reason they
did not seem to be biting the stiff-necked figure of the inter-
rogator, who wore a white helmet and carried a riding whip. 'Pen
and paper is before you,' the interrogator said. 'No pardon can be
considered until a full confession has been made.'

'Where are my mothers?' Omar Khayyam asked piteously, in a
voice that was in the process of breaking. It soared-high-plunged-
low; he was embarrassed by its antics.

'Sixty-five years old,' the other sneered, 'and acting like a baby.
Get a move on, I haven't got all day. I am expected at the polo
ground very shortly.'

'A pardon is really possible?' Omar Khayyam inquired. The

Judgment Day ? 301

interrogator shrugged in a bored way. 'Anything is possible,' he
replied, 'God is great, as you will doubtless be aware.'

'What shall I put,' Omar Khayyam wondered, picking up
the pen, 'I can confess to many things. Fleeing-from-roots, obesity,
drunkenness, hypnosis. Getting girls in the family way, not
sleeping with my wife, too-many-pine-kernels, peeing-tommery
as a boy. Sexual obsession with under-age brain-damaged female,
resultant failure to avenge my brother's death. I didn't know him.
It is difficult to commit such acts on behalf of strangers. I confess
to making strangers of my kin.'

'This is not helpful,' the interrogator interrupted. 'What kind
of man are you? What type of bounder will wriggle out of his
guilt and let his mothers take the rap?'

'I am a peripheral man,' Omar Khayyam answered. 'Other
persons have been the principal actors in my life-story. Hyder and
Harappa, my leading men. Immigrant and native, Godly and pro-
fane, military and civilian. And several leading ladies. I watched
from the wings, not knowing how to act. I confess to social
climbing, to only-doing-my-job, to being cornerman in other
people's wrestling matches. I confess to fearing sleep.'

'We are getting nowhere.' The interrogator sounded angry.
'Evidence is beyond dispute. Your swordstick, gifted to you by
Iskander Harappa, the victim's arch-enemy. Motive and opportu-
nity, plenty of both. Why keep up this pretence? You bided your
time, for years you lived a false life, you won their trust, finally
you drew them to the killing ground. Promising flight across the
frontier to lure them on. Most effective bait. Then you pounced,
stab stab stab, over and over. This is all obvious to see. Cut the
cackle now, and write.'

'I am not guilty,' Omar Khayyam began, 'I left the swordstick
at the C-in-C's,' but just then his pockets started feeling very
heavy, and the interrogator stretched out his hands to pluck out
what-weighed-pockets-down. When Omar Khayyam saw what
Talvar Ulhaq was holding out to him on an accusing palm, his
voice turned falsetto. 'My mothers must have put them in there,'

Shame ? 302

he shrieked, but there was no point in going on, because
staring up at him from his inquisitor's hand were the terrible
exhibits, pieces of Raza Hyder, neatly sliced, his moustache, his
eyeballs, teeth.

'You are damned,' Talvar Ulhaq said, and, raising his pistol,
shot Omar Khayyam Shakil through the heart. The cell had begun
to burn. Omar Khayyam saw the abyss open up beneath his feet,
felt the vertigo come as the world dissolved. 'I confess,' he cried,
but it was too late. He tumbled into the black fire and was
burned.

Because they had grown accustomed to ignoring the house, it was
not until that evening that someone noticed a change, and
shouted out that the great front doors of the Shakil mansion were
standing open for the first time that anybody could remember; but
then they all knew at once that something important had hap-
pened, so that it hardly seemed like a surprise when they found
the congealing pool of blood below the dumb-waiter of Mistri
Balloch. For a long while they stood transfixed by the open doors,
unable to go inside, even for a peep, in spite of their curiosity;
then all in a moment they rushed in, as if some unseen voice had
given them permission: cobblers, beggars, gas-miners, policemen,
milkmen, bank clerks, women on donkeys, children with metal
hoops and sticks, gram vendors, acrobats, blacksmiths, wives,
mothers, everyone.