‘You will do anything that I ask you to do, but I will ask you to do nothing that you will be unwilling to do.’
‘She was willing,’ he told himself. ‘Then Where’s the blame? She must have been willing, and everybody knows the risk.’
But in spite of nothing-that-you-will-be-unwilling-to-do; in spite, too, of the actions of Eduardo Rodrigues, which had been at once so resolute and so resigned that Omar Khayyam had almost been convinced that the teacher really was the father-why not, after all? A woman who is willing with one will be willing with two! – in spite of everything, I say, Omar Khayyam Shakil was possessed by a demon which made him shake in the middle of breakfast and go hot in the night and cold in the day and sometimes cry out for no reason in the street or while ascending in the dumb-waiter. Its fingers reached outwards from his stomach to clutch, without warning, various interior parts of himself, from adam’s-apple to large (and also small) intestine, so that he suffered from moments of near-strangulation and spent long unproductive hours on the pot. It made his limbs mysteriously heavy in the mornings so that sometimes he was unable to get out of bed. It made his tongue dry and his knees knock. It led his teenage feet into cheap brandy shops. Tottering drunkenly home to the rage of his three mothers, he would be heard telling a swaying group of fellow-sufferers: ‘The only thing about this business is that it has made me understand my mothers at last. This must be what they locked themselves up to avoid, and baba, who would not?’ Vomiting out the thin yellow fluid of his shame while the dumb-waiter descended, he swore to his companions, who were falling asleep in the dirt: ‘Me, too, man. I’ve got to escape this also.’
On the evening when Omar Khayyam, eighteen years old and already fatter than fifty melons, came home to inform Chhunni, Munnee and Bunny that he had won a scholarship at the best medical college in Karachi, the three sisters were only able to hide their grief at his imminent departure by erecting around it a great barrier of objects, the most valuable jewels and paintings in the house, which they scurried to collect from room to room until a pile of ancient beauty stood in front of their old, favourite swingseat. ‘Scholarship is all very well,’ his youngest mother told him, ‘but we also can give money to our boy when he goes into the world.’ ‘What do these doctors think?’ Chhunni demanded in a king of fury. ‘We are too poor to pay for your education? Let them take charity to the devil, your family has money in abundance.’ ‘Old money,’ Munnee concurred. Unable to persuade them that the award was an honour he did not wish to refuse, Omar Khayyam was obliged to leave for the railway station with his pockets bulging with the pawnbroker’s banknotes. Around his neck was a garland whose one-hundred and one fresh-cut flowers gave off an aroma which quite obliterated the memory-stink of the necklace of shoes which had once so narrowly missed his neck. The perfume of this garland was so intense that he forgot to tell his mothers a last bit of gossip, which was that Zoroaster the customs officer had fallen sick under the spell of the bribeless desert and had taken to standing stark naked on top of concrete bollards while mirror-fragments ripped his feet. Arms outstretched and daughterless, Zoroaster addressed the sun, begging it to come down to earth and engulf the planet in its brilliant cleansing fire. The tribals who bore this tale into the bazaar of Q. were of the opinion that the customs-wallah’s fervour was so great that he would undoubtedly succeed, so that it was worth making preparations for the end of the word.
The last person to whom Omar Khayyam spoke before making his escape from the town of shame was a certain Chand Mohammad who said afterwards, That fat guy didn’t look so hot when I started talking to him and he looked twice as sick when I finished.’ This Chand Mohammad was a vendor of ice. As Omar Khayyam, still unable to shake off the terribly debility which had gripped him ever since the incident at the frontier, hauled his obesity into a first-class carriage, Chand ran up and said, ‘Hot day, sahib. Ice is needed.’ At first, Shakil, out of breath and gloomy, told him, ‘Be off and sell other fools your frozen water.’ But Chand persisted: ‘Sahib, in the afternoon the Loo wind will blow, and if you do not have my ice at your feet the heat will melt the marrow out of your bones.’
Persuaded by this convincing argument, Omar Khayyam purchased a long tin tub, four feet long, eighteen inches wide, one foot deep, in which there lay a solid slab of ice, sprinkled with sawdust and sand to prolong its life. Grunting as he heaved it into the carriage, the ice vendor made a joke. ‘Such is life,’ he said, ‘one ice block returns to town and another sets off in the opposite direction.’
Omar Khayyam unbuckled his sandals and placed his bare feet on the ice, feeling the healing solace of its coldness. Peeling off too many rupees for Chand Mohammad as he cheered up, he asked idly, ‘What rubbish are you talking? How can a block of ice return unmelted after the journey? The tin tub, empty, or full of melted water, you must be meaning that.’
‘O, no, sahib, great lord,’ the ice-vendor grinned as he pocketed the cash, ‘this is one ice block that goes everywhere without melting at all.’
Colour drained from fat cheeks. Plump feet jumped off ice. Omar Khayyam, looking around fearfully as if he thought she might materialize at any moment, spoke in tones so altered by fury that the ice-vendor backed off, frightened. ‘Her? When? You are trying to insult …?’ He caught the ice-man by his ragged shirt, and the poor wretch had no option but to tell it all, to reveal that on this very train, a few hours back, Mrs Farah Rodrigues (née Zoroaster) had returned shamelessly to the scene of her infamy and headed straight out to her father’s frontier post, ‘even though he threw her in the street like a bucket of dirty water, sahib, just think.’
When Farah came back, she brought neither husband nor child. Nobody ever found out what had become of Eduardo and the baby for which he had sacrificed everything, so of course the stories could circulate without fear of disproof: a miscarriage, an abortion in spite of Rodrigues’s Catholic faith, the baby exposed on a rock after birth, the baby stifled in its crib, the baby given to the orphanage or left in the street, while Farah and Eduardo like wild lovers copulated on the postcard beaches or in the aisle of the vegetation-covered house of the Christian God, until they tired of each other, she gave him the boot, he (tired of her lascivious flirtings) gave her the boot, they gave each other simultaneous boots, who cares who it was, she is back so lock up your sons.
Farah Rodrigues in her pride spoke to no one in Q. except to order food and supplies in the shops; until, in her old age, she began to frequent the covert liquor joints, which was where she would reminisce, years later, about Omar Khayyam, after his name got into the papers. On her rare visits to the bazaar she made her purchases without looking anyone in the eye, pausing only to gaze at herself in every available mirror with a frank affection which proved to the town that she regretted nothing. So even when it got about that she had come back to look after her crazy father and to run the customs post, to prevent his dismissal by his Angrez bosses, even then the town’s attitude did not soften; who knows what they get up to out there, people said, naked father and whore-child, best place for them is out there in the desert where nobody has to look except God and the Devil, and they know it all already.
And on his train, his feet once more resting on a block of melting ice, Omar Khayyam Shakil was borne away into the future, convinced that he had finally managed to escape, and the cool pleasure of that notion and also of the ice brought a smile to his lips, even while the hot wind blew.
Two years later, his mothers wrote to tell him that he had a brother, whom they had named Babar after the first Emperor of the Mughals who had marched over the Impossible Mountains and conquered wherever he went. After that the three sisters, unified once again by motherhood, were happy and indistinguishable for many years within the walls of ‘Nishapur’.
When Omar Khayyam read the letter, his first reaction was to whistle softly with something very like admiration.
‘The old witches,’ he said aloud, ‘they managed to do it again.’
II
THE DUELLISTS
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BEHIND THE SCREEN
This is a novel about Sufiya Zinobia, elder daughter of General Raza Hyder and his wife Bilquìs, about what happened between her father and Chairman Iskander Harappa, formerly Prime Minister, now defunct, and about her surprising marriage to a certain Omar Khayyam Shakil, physician, fat man, and for a time the intimate crony of that same Isky Harappa, whose neck had the miraculous power of remaining unbruised, even by a hangman’s rope. Or perhaps it would be more accurate, if also more opaque, to say that Sufiya Zinobia is about this novel.
At any rate, it is not possible even to begin to know a person without first gaining some knowledge of her family background; so I must proceed in this way, by explaining how it was that Bilquìs grew frightened of the hot afternoon wind called the Loo:
On the last morning of his life, her father Mahmoud Kemal, known as Mahmoud the Woman, dressed as usual in a shiny blue two-piece suit shot with brilliant streaks of red, looked approvingly at himself in the ornate mirror which he had removed from the foyer of his theatre on account of its irresistible frame of naked cherubs shooting arrows and blowing golden horns, hugged his eighteen-year-old daughter, and announced: ‘So you see, girl, your father dresses finely, as befits the chief administrative officer of a glorious Empire.’ And at breakfast, when she began dutifully to spoon khichri on to his plate, he roared in good-natured fury, ‘Why do you lift your hand, daughter? A princess does not serve.’ Bilquìs bowed her head and stared out of the bottom left-hand corner of her eyes, whereupon her father applauded loudly. ‘O, too good, Billoo! What elite acting, I swear!’
It’s a fact, strange-but-true, that the city of idolaters in which this scene took place – call it Indraprastha, Puranaqila, even Delhi – had often been ruled by men who believed (like Mahmoud) in Al-Lah, The God. Their artifacts litter the city to this day, ancient observatories and victory towers and of course that great red fortress, Al-Hambra, the red one, which will play an important part in our story. And, what is more, many of these godly rulers had come up from the humblest of origins; every schoolchild knows about the Slave Kings … but anyway, the point is that this whole business of ruling-an-Empire was just a family joke, because of course Mahmoud’s domain was only the Empire Talkies, a fleapit of a picture theatre in the old quarter of the town.
‘The greatness of a picture house,’ Mahmoud liked to say, ‘can be deduced from the noisiness of its customers. Go to those deelux palaces in the new city, see their velvet thrones of seats and the mirror tiling all over the vestibules, feel the air-conditioning and you’ll understand why the audiences sit as quiet as hell. They are tamed by the splendour of the surroundings, also by the price of the seats. But in the Empire of Mahmoud the paying customers make the very devil of a din, except during the hit song numbers. We are not absolute monarchs, child, don’t forget it; especially in these days when the police are turning against us and refuse to come and eject even the biggest badmashes, who make whistlings that split your ears. Never mind. It is a question of freedom of individuals, after all.’
Yes: it was a fifth-rate Empire. But to Mahmoud it was quite something, a Slave King’s estate, for had he not begun his career out on the suppurating streets as one of those no-account types who push the movie adverts around town on wheelbarrows, shouting, ‘It is now-showing!’ and also ‘Plans filling up fast!’ – and did he not now sit in a manager’s office, complete with cashbox and keys? You see: even family jokes run the risk of being taken seriously, and there lurked in the natures of both father and daughter a literalism, a humourlessness owing to which Bilquìs grew up with an unspoken fantasy of queenhood simmering in the corners of her downcast eyes. ‘I tell you,’ she would apostrophize the angelic mirror after her father had left for work, ‘with me it would be absolute control or zero! These badmashes would not get away with their whistling shistling if it was my affair!’ Thus Bilquìs invented a secret self far more imperious than her father the emperor. And in the darkness of his Empire, night after night, she studied the giant, shimmering illusions of princesses who danced before the rackety audience beneath the gold-painted equestrian figure of an armoured medieval knight who bore a pennant on which was inscribed the meaningless word Excelsior. Illusions fed illusions, and Bilquìs began to carry herself with the grandeur befitting a dream-empress, taking as compliments the taunts of the street-urchins in the gullies around her home: ‘Tan-tara!’ they greeted her as she sailed by, ‘Have mercy, O gracious lady, O Rani of Khansi!’ Khansi-ki-Rani, they named her: queen of coughs, that is to say of expelled air, of sickness and hot wind.
‘Be careful,’ her father warned her, ‘things are changing in this city; even the most affectionate nicknames are acquiring new and so-dark meanings.’
This was the time immediately before the famous moth-eaten partition that chopped up the old country and handed Al-Lah a few insect-nibbled slices of it, some dusty western acres and jungly eastern swamps that the ungodly were happy to do without. (Al-Lah’s new country: two chunks of land a thousand miles apart. A country so improbable that it could almost exist.) But let’s be unemotional and state merely that feelings were running so high that even going to the pictures had become a political act. The one-godly went to these cinemas and the washers of stone gods to those; movie-fans had been partitioned already, in advance of the tired old land. The stone-godly ran the movie business, that goes without saying, and being vegetarians they made a very famous film: Gai-Wallah. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? An unusual fantasy about a lone, masked hero who roamed the Indo-Gangetic plain liberating herds of beef-cattle from their keepers, saving the sacred, horned, uddered beasts from the slaughterhouse. The stone-gang packed out the cinemas where this movie was shown; the one-godly riposted by rushing to see imported, non-vegetarian Westerns in which cows got massacred and the good guys feasted on steaks. And mobs of irate film buffs attacked the cinemas of their enemies … well, it was a time for all types of craziness, that’s all.
Mahmoud the Woman lost his Empire because of a single error, which arose out of his fatal personality flaw, namely tolerance. ‘Time to rise above all this partition foolishness,’ he informed his mirror one morning, and that same day he booked a double bill into his Talkies: Randolph Scott and Gai-Wallah would succeed one another on his screen.
On the opening day of the double bill of his destruction the meaning of his nickname changed for ever. He had been named The Woman by the street urchins because, being a widower, he had been obliged to act as a mother to Bilquìs ever since his wife died when the girl was barely two. But now this affectionate title came to mean something more dangerous, and when children spoke of Mahmoud the Woman they meant Mahmoud the Weakling, the Shameful, the Fool. ‘Woman,’ he sighed resignedly to his daughter, ‘what a term! Is there no end to the burdens this word is capable of bearing? Was there ever such a broad-backed and also such a dirty word?’
How the double bill was settled: both sides, veg and non-veg, boycotted the Empire. For five, six, seven days films played to an empty house in which peeling plaster and slowly rotating ceiling fans and the intermission gram-vendors gazed down upon rows of undoubtedly rickety and equally certainly unoccupied seats; three-thirty, six-thirty and nine-thirty shows were all the same, not even the special Sunday-morning show could tempt anyone through the swing doors. ‘Give it up,’ Bilquìs urged her father. ‘What do you want? You miss your wheelbarrow or what?’
But now an unfamiliar stubbornness entered Mahmoud the Woman, and he announced that the double bill would be held over for a Second Sensational Week. His own barrow-boys deserted him; nobody was willing to cry these ambiguous wares through the electric gullies; no voice dared announce, ‘Plans now open!’ or, ‘Don’t wait or it’s too late!’
Mahmoud and Bilquìs lived in a high thin house behind the Empire, ‘straight through the screen,’ as he said; and on that afternoon when the world ended and began again the emperor’s daughter, who was alone with the serv
ant at home, was suddenly choked by the certainty that her father had chosen, with the mad logic of his romanticism, to persist with his crazy scheme until it killed him. Terrified by a sound like the beating wings of an angel, a sound for which she could afterwards find no good explanation but which pounded in her ears until her head ached, she ran out of her house, pausing only to wrap around her shoulders the green dupatta of modesty; which was how she came to be standing, catching her breath, in front of the heavy doors of the cinema behind which her father sat grimly amidst vacant seats watching the show, when the hot firewind of apocalypse began to blow.
The walls of her father’s Empire puffed outwards like a hot puri while that wind like the cough of a sick giant burned away her eyebrows (which never grew again), and tore the clothes off her body until she stood infant-naked in the street; but she failed to notice her nudity because the universe was ending, and in the echoing alienness of the deadly wind her burning eyes saw everything come flying out, seats, ticket books, fans, and then pieces of her father’s shattered corpse and the charred shards of the future. ‘Suicide!’ she cursed Mahmoud the Woman at the top of a voice made shrieky by the bomb. ‘You chose this!’ – and turning and running homewards she saw that the back wall of the cinema had been blown away, and embedded in the topmost storey of her high thin house was the figure of a golden knight on whose pennant she did not need to read the comically unknown word Excelsior.
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