Shame Read online

  Don’t ask who planted the bomb; in those days there were many such planters, many gardeners of violence. Perhaps it was even a one-godly bomb, seeded in the Empire by one of Mahmoud’s more fanatical co-religionists, because it seems that the timer reached zero during a particularly suggestive love scene, and we know what the godly think of love, or the illusion of it, especially when admission money must be paid to see it … they are Against. They cut it out. Love corrupts.

  O Bilquìs. Naked and eyebrowless beneath the golden knight, wrapped in the delirium of the firewind, she saw her youth flying past her, borne away on the wings of the explosion which were still beating in her ears. All migrants leave their pasts behind, although some try to pack it into bundles and boxes – but on the journey something seeps out of the treasured mementoes and old photographs, until even their owners fail to recognize them, because it is the fate of migrants to be stripped of history, to stand naked amidst the scorn of strangers upon whom they see the rich clothing, the brocades of continuity and the eyebrows of belonging – at any rate, my point is that Bilquìs’s past left her even before she left that city; she stood in a gully, denuded by the suicide of her father, and watched it go. In later years it would visit her sometimes, the way a forgotten relative comes to call, but for a long time she was suspicious of history, she was the wife of a hero with a great future, so naturally she pushed the past away, as one rebuffs those poor cousins when they come to borrow money.

  She must have walked, or run, unless a miracle occurred and she was lifted by some divine power out of that wind of her desolation. Returning to her senses, she felt the pressure of red stone against her skin; it was night, and the stone was cool upon her back in the dark dry heat. People were surging past her in great herds, a crowd so large and urgent that her first thought was that it was being propelled by some unimaginable explosion: ‘Another bomb, my God, all these persons blown away by its power!’ But it was not a bomb. She understood that she was leaning against the endless wall of the red fortress that dominated the old city, while soldiers shepherded the crowd through its yawning gates; her feet began to move, faster than her brain, and led her into the throng. An instant later she was crushed by the reborn awareness of her nudity, and began to cry out: ‘Give me a cloth!’, until she saw that nobody was listening, nobody even glanced at the body of the singed, but still beautiful, naked girl. Yet she clutched at herself for shame, holding on to herself in that rushing sea as if she were a straw; and felt around her neck the remnants of a length of muslin. The dupatta of modesty had stuck to her body, fixed there by the congealed blood of the many cuts and scratches of whose very existence she had been unaware. Holding the blackened remnants of the garment of womanly honour over her secret places, she entered the dull redness of the fort, and heard the boom of its closing doors.

  In Delhi, in the days before partition, the authorities rounded up any Muslims, for their own safety, it was said, and locked them up in the red fortress, away from the wrath of the stonewashers. Whole families were sealed up there, grandmothers, young children, wicked uncles … including members of my own family. It’s easy to imagine that as my relatives moved through the Red Fort in the parallel universe of history, they might have felt some hint of the fictional presence of Bilquìs Kemal, rushing cut and naked past them like a ghost … or vice versa. Yes. Or vice versa.

  The tide of human beings carried Bilquìs along as far as the large, low, ornately rectangular pavilion that had once been an emperor’s hall of public audience; and in that echoing diwan, overwhelmed by the humiliation of her undress, she passed out. In that generation many women, ordinary decent respectable ladies of the type to whom nothing ever happens, to whom nothing is supposed to happen except marriage children death, had this sort of strange story to tell. It was a rich time for stories, if you lived to tell your tale.

  Shortly before the scandalous marriage of her younger daughter, Good News Hyder, Bilquìs told the girl the story of her meeting with her husband. ‘When I woke up,’ she said, ‘it was daytime and I was wrapped in an officer’s coat. But whose do you think, goof, of course his, your own father Raza’s; what to tell you, he saw me lying there, with all my goods on display in the window, you know, and I suppose the bold fellow just liked what there was to see.’ Good News went haa! and tch tch!, feigning shock at her mother’s sauciness, and Bilquìs said shyly: ‘Such encounters were not uncommon then.’ Good News dutifully replied, ‘Well, Amma, as for his being impressed, I’m not one bit surprised.’

  Raza arriving in the hall of public audience came to attention before Bilquìs, who was decently coated; he clicked his heels, saluted, grinned. ‘It is normal during a courtship,’ he told his future wife, ‘for clothes to be worn. It is the privilege of a husband eventually to remove … but in our case, the reverse procedure will be true. I must dress you, top to toe, as befits a blushing bride.’ (Good News, full of marriage juices, sighed when she heard this. ‘His first words! My God, too romantic!’)

  How he seemed to military-coated Bilquìs: ‘So tall! So fair-skinned! So proud, like a king!’ No photographs were taken of their meeting, but allowances must be made for her state of mind. Raza Hyder was five foot eight: no giant, you’ll agree. And as for his skin – it was certainly darker than Bilquìs’s adoring eyes were willing to concede. But proud, like a king? That is likely. He was only a Captain then; but it is, nevertheless, a plausible description.

  What may also be said fairly of Raza Hyder: that he possessed enough energy to light up a street; that his manners were always impeccable – even when he became President, he met people with such an air of humility (which is not irreconcilable with pride) that very few were willing to speak ill of him afterwards, and those that did so would feel, as they spoke, as if they were betraying a friend; and that he bore, upon his forehead, the light but permanent bruise which we have previously noted on the devout forehead of Ibadalla, the postman of Q.: the gatta marked Raza for a religious man.

  One last detail. It was said of Captain Hyder that he did not sleep for four hundred and twenty hours after the Muslims were gathered in the red fortress, which would explain the black pouches under his eyes. These pouches would grow blacker and baggier as his power increased, until he no longer needed to wear sunglasses the way the other top brass did, because he looked like he had a pair on anyway, all the time, even in bed. The future General Hyder: Razzoo, Raz-Matazz, Old Razor Guts himself! How could Bilquìs have resisted such a one? She was conquered in double-quick time.

  During their days in the fort, the pouch-eyed Captain visited Bilquìs regularly, always bringing with him some item of clothing or beautification: blouses, saris, sandals, eyebrow pencils with which to replace the lost hairs, brassières, lipsticks were showered on her. Saturation bombing techniques are designed to force an early surrender … when her wardrobe had grown large enough to permit the removal of the military overcoat, she paraded for him in the hall. ‘Come to think of it,’ Bilquìs told Good News, ‘maybe that was when he made that dressing-up remark.’ Because she remembered how she had replied: lowering her eyes in the elite actressy manner which her father had once praised, she said sadly, ‘But what husband could I, without hope of dowry, ever find? Certainly not such a generous Captain who outfits strange ladies like queens.’

  Raza and Bilquìs were betrothed beneath the bitter eyes of the dispossessed multitudes; and afterwards the gifts continued, sweetmeats as well as bangles, soft drinks and square meals as well as henna and rings. Raza established his fiancée behind a screen of stone lattice-work, and set a young foot-soldier on guard to defend her territory. Isolated behind this screen from the dull, debilitated anger of the mob, Bilquìs dreamed of her wedding day, defended against guilt by that old dream of queenliness which she had invented long ago. ‘Tch tch,’ she reproached the glowering refugees, ‘but this envy is a too terrible thing.’

  Barbs were flung through the stone lattice: ‘Ohé, madam! Where do you think he gets your grand-grand c
lothes? From handicraft emporia? Watch the mud-flats of the river beneath the fortress walls, count the looted naked bodies flung there every night!’ Dangerous words, penetrating lattice-work: scavenger, harlot, whore. But Bilquìs set her jaw against such coarseness and told herself: ‘How bad-mannered it would be to ask a man from where he brought his gifts! Such cheapness, I will never do it, no.’ This sentiment, her reply to the gibes of her fellow refugees, never actually passed her lips, but it filled up her mouth, making it puff up into a pout.

  I do not judge her. In those days, people survived any way they could.

  The Army was partitioned like everything else, and Captain Hyder went west to the new, moth-nibbled land of God. There was a marriage ceremony, and then Bilquìs Hyder sat beside her new husband in a troop transport, a new woman, newly-wed, flying to a bright new world.

  ‘What things won’t you do there, Raz!’ she cried. ‘What greatness, no? What fame!’ Raza’s ears went red under the eyes (hot with amusement) of his companions in that bumping, rackety Dakota; but he looked pleased all the same. And Bilquìs’s prophecy came true, after all. She, whose life had blown up, emptying her of history and leaving in its place only that dark dream of majesty, that illusion so powerful that it demanded to enter the sphere of what-was-real – she, rootless Bilquìs, who now longed for stability, for no-more-explosions, had discerned in Raza a boulder-like quality on which she would build her life. He was a man rooted solidly in an indeflectible sense of himself, and that made him seem invincible, ‘A giant absolutely,’ she flattered him, whispering in his ear so as not to set off the giggles of the other officers in the cabin, ‘shining, like the actors on the screen.’

  I am wondering how best to describe Bilquìs. As a woman who was unclothed by change, but who wrapped herself in certainties; or as a girl who became a queen, but lost the ability possessed by every beggar-woman, that is, the power of bearing sons; or as that lady whose father was a Woman and whose son turned out to be girl as well; and whose man of men, her Razzoo or Raz-Matazz, was himself obliged, in the end, to put on the humiliating black shroud of womanhood; or perhaps as a being in the secret grip of fate–for did not the umbilical noose that stifled her son find its echo, or twin, in another and more terrible rope? … But I find that I must, after all, return to my starting point, because to me she is, and will always be, the Bilquìs who was afraid of the wind.

  I’ll be fair: nobody likes the Loo, that hot afternoon breath-that-chokes. We pull down our shutters, hang damp cloths over the windows, try to sleep. But as she grew older the wind awakened strange terrors in Bilquìs. Her husband and children noticed how nervous and snappish she became in the afternoons; how she took to pacing about, slamming and locking doors, until Raza Hyder protested against living in a house where you had to ask your wife for a key before you could go to the pot. From her slender wrist there hung, jingling, the ten-ton key-ring of her neurosis. She developed a horror of movement, and placed an embargo on the relocation of even the most trivial of household items. Chairs, ashtrays, flowerpots took root, rendered immobile by the force of her fearful will. ‘My Hyder likes everything in its place,’ she would say, but the disease of fixity was hers. And there were days when she had to be kept indoors as a virtual prisoner, because it would have been a shame and a scandal if any outsider had seen her in that state; when the Loo blew she would screech like a hoosh or an afrit or some such demon, she would shout for the household servants to come and hold down the furniture in case the wind blew it away like the contents of a long-lost Empire, and scream at her daughters (when they were present) to cling tight to something heavy, something fixed, lest the firewind bear them off into the sky.

  The Loo is an evil wind.

  If this were a realistic novel about Pakistan, I would not be writing about Bilquìs and the wind; I would be talking about my youngest sister. Who is twenty-two, and studying engineering in Karachi; who can’t sit on her hair any more, and who (unlike me) is a Pakistani citizen. On my good days, I think of her as Pakistan, and then I feel very fond of the place, and find it easy to forgive its (her) love of Coca-Cola and imported motor cars.

  Although I have known Pakistan for a long time, I have never lived there for longer than six months at a stretch. Once I went for just two weeks. Between these sixmonthses and fortnights there have been gaps of varying duration. I have learned Pakistan in slices, the same way as I have learned my growing sister. I first saw her at the age of zero (I, at fourteen, bent over her crib as she screamed into my face); then at three, four, six, seven, ten, fourteen, eighteen and twenty-one. So there have been nine youngest-sisters for me to get to know. I have felt closer to each successive incarnation than to the one before. (This goes for the country, too.)

  I think what I’m confessing is that, however I choose to write about over-there, I am forced to reflect that world in fragments of broken mirrors, the way Farah Zoroaster saw her face at the bollarded frontier. I must reconcile myself to the inevitability of the missing bits.

  But suppose this were a realistic novel! Just think what else I might have to put in. The business, for instance, of the illegal installation, by the richest inhabitants of ‘Defence’, of covert, subterranean water pumps that steal water from their neighbours’ mains – so that you can always tell the people with the most pull by the greenness of their lawns (such clues are not confined to the Cantonment of Q.). – And would I also have to describe the Sind Club in Karachi, where there is still a sign reading ‘Woman and Dogs Not Allowed Beyond This Point’? Or to analyse the subtle logic of an industrial programme that builds nuclear reactors but cannot develop a refrigerator? O dear – and the school text-books which say, ‘England is not an agricultural country’, and the teacher who once docked two marks from my youngest sister’s geography essay because it differed at two points from the exact wording of this same text-book … how awkward, dear reader, all this could turn out to be.

  How much real-life material might become compulsory! – About, for example, the longago Deputy Speaker who was killed in the National Assembly when the furniture was flung at him by elected representatives; or about the film censor who took his red pencil to each frame of the scene in the film Night of the Generals in which General Peter O’Toole visits an art gallery, and scratched out all the paintings of naked ladies hanging on the walls, so that audiences were dazzled by the surreal spectacle of General Peter strolling through a gallery of dancing red blobs; or about the TV chief who once told me solemnly that pork was a four-letter word; or about the issue of Time magazine (or was it Newsweek?) which never got into the country because it carried an article about President Ayub Khan’s alleged Swiss bank account; or about the bandits on the trunk roads who are condemned for doing, as private enterprise, what the government does as public policy; or about genocide in Baluchistan; or about the recent preferential awards of State scholarships, to pay for postgraduate studies abroad, to members of the fanatical Jamaat party; or about the attempt to declare the sari an obscene garment; or about the extra hangings – the first for twenty years – that were ordered purely to legitimize the execution of Mr Zulfikar Ali Bhutto; or about why Bhutto’s hangman has vanished into thin air, just like the many street-urchins who are being stolen every day in broad daylight; or about anti-Semitism, an interesting phenomenon, under whose influence people who have never met a Jew vilify all Jews for the sake of maintaining solidarity with the Arab states which offer Pakistan workers, these days, employment and much-needed foreign exchange; or about smuggling, the boom in heroin exports, military dictators, venal civilians, corrupt civil servants, bought judges, newspapers of whose stories the only thing that can confidently be said is that they are lies; or about the apportioning of the national budget, with special reference to the percentages set aside for defence (huge) and for education (not huge). Imagine my difficulties!

  By now, if I had been writing a book of this nature, it would have done me no good to protest that I was writing universally, not only ab
out Pakistan. The book would have been banned, dumped in the rubbish bin, burned. All that effort for nothing! Realism can break a writer’s heart.

  Fortunately, however, I am only telling a sort of modern fairy-tale, so that’s all right; nobody need get upset, or take anything I say too seriously. No drastic action need be taken, either.

  What a relief!

  And now I must stop saying what I am not writing about, because there’s nothing so special about that; every story one chooses to tell is a kind of censorship, it prevents the telling of other tales … I must get back to my fairy-story, because things have been happening while I’ve been talking too much.

  On my way back to the story, I pass Omar Khayyam Shakil, my sidelined hero, who is waiting patiently for me to get to the point at which his future bride, poor Sufiya Zinobia, can enter the narrative, head first down the birth canal. He won’t have to wait long; she’s almost on her way.

  I shall pause only to note (because it is not inappropriate to mention this here) that during his married life Omar Khayyam was forced to accept without argument Sufiya Zinobia’s childlike fondness for moving the furniture around. Intensely aroused by these forbidden deeds, she rearranged tables, chairs, lamps, whenever nobody was watching, like a favourite secret game, which she played with a frightening stubborn gravity. Omar Khayyam found protests rising to his lips, but he bit them back, knowing that to say anything would be useless: ‘Honestly, wife,’ he wanted to exclaim, ‘God knows what you’ll change with all this shifting shifting.’