Shame Read online

  ‘Who was that fellow,’ she asked, ‘the fat one, whose horse sat down under him when your procession arrived? I think it must be that bad chap, that doctor or something, that everybody in town is calling such a bad influence on you.’

  Iskander Harappa turned his back on her and lit a cigar. ‘Get one thing clear,’ she heard him say, ‘you don’t pick and choose my friends.’

  But Rani, seized by helpless laughter under the influence of the remembered image of the proud horse that gave up and subsided, legs splayed to the four points of the compass, under the colossal weight of Omar Khayyam Shakil – and also basking in the soft heat of their recent lovemaking – made mollifying sounds: ‘I only meant, Isky, what a shameless type he must be, to carry all that tummy about and all.’

  Omar Khayyam at thirty: five years the senior of Iskander Harappa and more than a decade older than Isky’s bride, re-enters our little tale as a character with a high reputation as a doctor and a low reputation as a human being, a degenerate of whom it is often said that he appears to be entirely without shame, ‘fellow doesn’t know the meaning of the word,’ as if some essential part of his education has been overlooked; or perhaps he has deliberately chosen to expunge the word from his vocabulary, lest its explosive presence there amid the memories of his past and present actions shatter him like an old pot. Rani Harappa has correctly identified her enemy, and now remembers, shuddering, and for the hundred and first time since it happened, the moment during her wedding celebrations when a bearer brought Iskander Harappa a telephone message informing him that the Prime Minister had been assassinated. When Iskander Harappa stood, called for silence and relayed the message to the appalled guests, an awkward hush persisted for fully thirty seconds, and then the voice of Omar Khayyam Shakil, on which everyone could hear the splashing of alcohol, cried out, ‘That bastard! If he’s dead he’s dead. Why does he want to come here and spoil the party?’

  Back then everything was smaller than it is today; even Raza Hyder was only a Major. But he was like the city itself, going places, growing fast, but in a stupid way, so that the bigger they both got, the uglier they became. I must tell you what things were like in those early days after the partition: the city’s old inhabitants, who had become accustomed to living in a land older than time, and were therefore being slowly eroded by the implacably revenant tides of the past, had been given a bad shock by independence, by being told to think of themselves, as well as the country itself, as new.

  Well, their imaginations simply weren’t up to the job, you can understand that; so it was the ones who really were new, the distant cousins and half-acquaintances and total strangers who poured in from the east to settle in the Land of God, who took over and got things going. The newness of those days felt pretty unstable; it was a dislocated, rootless sort of thing. All over the city (which was, of course, the capital then) builders were cheating on the cement in the foundations of new houses, people – and not only Prime Ministers – got shot from time to time, throats got themselves slit in gullies, bandits became billionaires, but all this was expected. History was old and rusted, it was a machine nobody had plugged in for thousands of years, and here all of a sudden it was being asked for maximum output. Nobody was surprised that there were accidents … well, there were a few voices saying, if this is the country we dedicated to our God, what kind of God is it that permits – but these voices were silenced before they had finished their questions, kicked on the shins under tables, for their own sakes, because there are things that cannot be said. No, it’s more than that: there are things that cannot be permitted to be true.

  At any rate: Raza Hyder has already shown, in the taking of Aansu, the advantages of the energy-giving influx of immigrants, of novel beings; but energy or no energy, he was unable to prevent his first-born son from being strangled to death in the womb.

  Once again (in the opinion of his maternal grandmother) he cried too easily. Just when he should have been demonstrating the stiffness of his upper lip be began to bawl his eyes out, even in public. Tears were seen sliding off the wax on his bulbous moustache, and his black eye-pouches glistened once more like little pools of oil. His wife, Bilquìs, however, did not let fall a single tear.

  ‘Hey, Raz,’ she consoled her husband in words iced with the brittle certainty of her desperation, ‘Razzoo, chin up. We’ll get him back the next time.’

  ‘Old Razor Guts, my toe,’ Bariamma scoffed to all and sundry. ‘You know he invented that name for himself and forced his troops to call him so, by order? Old Leaky Water Reservoir, more like.’

  An umbilical cord wound itself around a baby’s neck and was transformed into a hangman’s noose (in which other nooses are prefigured), into the breath-stopping silken rumal of a Thug; and an infant came into the world handicapped by the irreversible misfortune of being dead before he was born. ‘Who knows why God will do such things?’ Bariamma, mercilessly, told her grandson. ‘But we submit, we must submit. And not take out baby-tears before women.’

  However: being stone dead was a handicap which the boy managed, with commendable gallantry, to surmount. Within a matter of months, or was it only weeks, the tragically cadaverous infant had ‘topped’ in school and at college, had fought bravely in war, had married the wealthiest beauty in town and risen to a high position in the government. He was dashing, popular, handsome, and the fact of his being a corpse now seemed of no more consequence than would a slight limp or a minor speech impediment.

  Of course I know perfectly well that the boy had in reality perished before he even had time to be given a name. His subsequent feats were performed entirely within the distracted imaginations of Raza and Bilquìs, where they acquired an air of such solid actuality that they began to insist on being provided with a living human being who would carry them out and make them real. Possessed by the fictive triumphs of their stillborn son, Raza and Bilquìs went at one another with a will, heaving silently in the blind-eyed dormitory of the family wives, having convinced themselves that a second pregnancy would be an act of replacement, that God (for Raza was, as we know, devout) had consented to send them a free substitute for the damaged goods they had received in the first delivery, as though He were the manager of a reputable mail-order firm. Bariamma, who found out everything, clicked her tongue noisily over this reincarnation nonsense, aware that is was something they had imported, like a germ, from that land of idolaters they had left; but curiously she was never harsh with them, understanding that the mind will find strange means of coping with grief. So she must bear her share of responsibility for what followed, she should not have neglected her duty just because it was painful, she should have dished that rebirth notion while she could, but it took root so fast, and then it was too late, not a matter for discussion any more.

  Many years later, when Iskander Harappa stood in the dock of the courtroom in which he was on trial for his life, his face as grey as the imported suit he wore, which had been tailored for him when he weighed twice as much, he taunted Raza with the memory of this reincarnation obsession. This leader who prays six times a day, and on national television too!’ Isky said in a voice whose siren melodies had been untuned by jail. ‘I recall when I had to remind him that the idea of avatars was a heresy. Of course he never listened, but then Raza Hyder has made a custom of not listening to friendly advice.’ And outside the courtroom, the bolder members of Harappa’s disintegrating entourage were heard to mutter that General Hyder had been raised in the enemy state across the border, after all, and there was evidence of a Hindu great-grandmother on his father’s side, so those ungodly philosophies had long ago infected his blood.

  And it is true that Iskander and Rani both tried to argue with the Hyders, but Bilquìs’s lips just got stretched tight as a drum by her obstinacy. At that time Rani Harappa was expecting, she had managed it like a shot, and Bilquìs was already making it a matter of principle not to do what her old dormitory buddy advised, one reason for which may have been that she, Bilquìs, in spit
e of all the nocturnal goings-on, was finding it very difficult to conceive.

  When Rani gave birth to a daughter, her failure to produce a male child offered Bilquìs a little consolation, but not much, because another dream had bitten the dust, the fantasy of a marriage between their firstborn children. Now, of course, the new-born Miss Arjumand Harappa was older than any future male Hyder could ever be, so the match was out of the question. Rani had, in fact, delivered her side of the deal; her efficiency deepened Bilquìs’s well-like gloom.

  And under Bariamma’s roof little sneers and comments began to be aimed at this unnatural female who could produce nothing but dead babies; the family was proud of its fecundity. One night, after Bilquìs had retired to bed, having washed the eyebrows off her face and regained her appearance of a startled rabbit, she was staring jealously at the empty bed which had once been occupied by Rani Harappa when, from her other flank, a particularly vicious cousin named Duniyazad Begum hissed night-dark insults: ‘The disgrace of your barrenness, Madam, is not yours alone. Don’t you know that shame is collective? The shame of any one of us sits on us all and bends our backs. See what you’re doing to your husband’s people, how you repay the ones who took you in when you came penniless and a fugitive from that godless country over there.’

  Bariamma had switched the lights out – the master-switch hung on a cord above her bed – and her snoring dominated the blackness of the zenana chamber. But Bilquìs did not lie still in her bed; she arose and fell upon Duniyazad Begum, who had been awaiting her eagerly, and the two of them, hands entangled in hair, knees driving into yielding fleshy zones, tumbled softly to the floor. The fight was conducted soundlessly, such was the power of the matriarch over the night; but the news spread through the room on ripples of darkness and the women sat up in their beds and watched. When the men came they, too, became mute spectators of this mortal combat, during which Duniyazad lost several handfuls of hair from her luxuriant armpits and Bilquìs broke a tooth on her adversary’s clawing fingers; until Raza Hyder entered the dormitory and pulled them apart. It was at this point that Bariamma ceased to snore and switched on the light, releasing into the illuminated air all the noise, all the cheers and screams, that had been held back by the darkness. As women rushed to prop up the bald, blind matriarch with gaotakia bolsters, Bilquìs, trembling in her husband’s arms, refused to go on living under that roof of her calumniation. ‘Husband, you know it,’ she pulled about herself the tattered shreds of her queenly childhood, ‘I was raised in a higher fashion than this; and if my children do not come it is because I cannot make them here, in this zoo, like they all do, like animals or what.’

  ‘Yes, yes, we know how you think yourself toogood for us,’ Bariamma, subsiding into gaotakias with a hissing noise, as of a deflating balloon, had the last word. ‘Then you take her away, Raza, boy,’ she said in her hornet’s whine of a voice. ‘You, Billoo Begum, begone. When you leave this house your shame leaves with you, and our dear Duniya, whom you attacked for speaking the truth, will sleep more easily. Come on, mohajir! Immigrant! Pack up double-quick and be off to what gutter you choose.’

  I, too, know something of this immigrant business. I am an emigrant from one country (India) and a newcomer in two (England, where I live, and Pakistan, to which my family moved against my will). And I have a theory that the resentments we mohajirs engender have something to do with our conquest of the force of gravity. We have performed the act of which all men anciently dream, the thing for which they envy the birds; that is to say, we have flown.

  I am comparing gravity with belonging. Both phenomena observably exist: my feet stay on the ground, and I have never been angrier than I was on the day my father told me he had sold my childhood home in Bombay. But neither is understood. We know the force of gravity, but not its origins; and to explain why we become attached to our birthplaces we pretend that we are trees and speak of roots. Look under your feet. You will not find gnarled growths sprouting through the soles. Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places.

  The anti-myths of gravity and of belonging bear the same name: flight. Migration, n., moving, for instance in flight, from one place to another. To fly and to flee: both are ways of seeking freedom … an odd thing about gravity, incidentally, is that while it remains uncomprehended everybody seems to find it easy to comprehend the notion of its theoretical counter-force: anti-gravity. But anti-belonging is not accepted by modern science … suppose ICI or Ciba-Geigy or Pfizer or Roche or even, I guess, NASA came up with an anti-gravity pill. The world’s airlines would go broke overnight, of course. Pill-poppers would come unstuck from the ground and float upwards until they sank into the clouds. It would be necessary to devise special waterproof flying garments. And when the effects of the pill wore off one would simply sink gently down to earth again, but in a different place, because of prevailing windspeeds and planetary rotation. Personalized international travel could be made possible by manufacturing pills of different strengths for different lengths of journey. Some kind of directional booster-engine would have to be constructed, perhaps in back-pack form. Mass production could bring this within the reach of every household. You see the connection between gravity and ‘roots’: the pill would make migrants of us all. We would float upwards, use our boosters to get ourselves to the right latitude, and let the rotating planet do the rest.

  When individuals come unstuck from their native land, they are called migrants. When nations do the same thing (Bangladesh), the act is called secession. What is the best thing about migrant peoples and seceded nations? I think it is their hopefulness. Look into the eyes of such folk in old photographs. Hope blazes undimmed through the fading sepia tints. And what’s the worst thing? It is the emptiness of one’s luggage. I’m speaking of invisible suitcases, not the physical, perhaps cardboard, variety containing a few meaning-drained mementoes: we have come unstuck from more than land. We have floated upwards from history, from memory, from Time.

  I may be such a person. Pakistan may be such a country.

  It is well known that the term ‘Pakistan’, an acronym, was originally thought up in England by a group of Muslim intellectuals. P for the Punjabis, A for the Afghans, K for the Kashmiris, S for Sind and the ‘tan’, they say, for Baluchistan. (No mention of the East Wing, you notice; Bangladesh never got its name in the tide, and so, eventually, it took the hint and seceded from the secessionists. Imagine what such a double secession does to people!) – So it was a word born in exile which then went East, was borne-across or trans-lated, and imposed itself on history; a returning migrant, settling down on partitioned land, forming a palimpsest on the past. A palimpsest obscures what lies beneath. To build Pakistan it was necessary to cover up Indian history, to deny that Indian centuries lay just beneath the surface of Pakistani Standard Time. The past was rewritten; there was nothing else to be done.

  Who commandeered the job of rewriting history? – The immigrants, the mohajirs. In what languages? – Urdu and English, both imported tongues, although one travelled less distance than the other. It is possible to see the subsequent history of Pakistan as a duel between two layers of time, the obscured world forcing its way back through what-had-been-imposed. It is the true desire of every artist to impose his or her vision on the world; and Pakistan, the peeling, fragmenting palimpsest, increasingly at war with itself, may be described as a failure of the dreaming mind. Perhaps the pigments used were the wrong ones, impermanent, like Leonardo’s; or perhaps the place was just insufficiently imagined, a picture full of irreconcilable elements, midriffbaring immigrant saris versus demure, indigenous Sindhi shalwar-kurtas, Urdu versus Punjabi, now versus then: a miracle that went wrong.

  As for me: I, too, like all migrants, am a fantasist. I build imaginary countries and try to impose them on the ones that exist. I, too, face the problem of history: what to retain, what to dump, how to hold on to what memory insists on relinquishing, how to deal with change. And to come back to the �
��roots’ idea, I should say that I haven’t managed to shake myself free of it completely. Sometimes I do see myself as a tree, even, rather grandly, as the ash Yggdrasil, the mythical world-tree of Norse legend. The ash Yggdrasil has three roots. One falls into the pool of knowledge by Valhalla, where Odin comes to drink. A second is being slowly consumed in the undying fire of Muspellheim, realm of the flame-god Surtur. The third is gradually being gnawed through by a fearsome beast called the Nidhögg. And when fire and monster have destroyed two of the three, the ash will fall, and darkness will descend. The twilight of the gods: a tree’s dream of death.

  My story’s palimpsest-country has, I repeat, no name of its own. The exiled Czech writer Kundera once wrote: ‘A name means continuity with the past and people without a past are people without a name.’ But I am dealing with a past that refuses to be suppressed, that is daily doing battle with the present; so it is perhaps unduly harsh of me to deny my fairyland a title.