Shame

by Salman Rushdie

My Sufiya Zinobia grew out of the corpse of that murdered girl, although she will not (have no fear) be slaughtered by Raza Hyder. Wanting to write about shame, I was at first haunted by the imagined spectre of that dead body, its throat slit like a halal chicken, lying in a London night across a zebra crossing, slumped across black and white, black and white, while above her a Belisha beacon blinked, orange, not-orange, orange. I thought of the crime as having been committed right there, publicly, ritually, while at the windows eyes. And no mouth opened in protest. And when the police knocked on doors, what hope of assistance had they? Inscrutability of the ‘Asian’ face under the eyes of the foe. It seems even the insomniacs at their windows closed their eyelids and saw nothing. And the father left with blood-cleansed name and grief.

  I even went so far as to give the dead girl a name: Anahita Muhammad, known as Anna. In my imagination she spoke with an East London accent but wore jeans, blue brown pink, out of some atavistic reluctance to show her legs. She would certainly have understood the language her parents spoke at home, but would obstinately have refused to utter a word of it herself. Anna Muhammad: lively, no doubt attractive, a little too dangerously so at sixteen. Mecca meant ballrooms to her, rotating silver balls, strobe lighting, youth. She danced behind my eyes, her nature changing each time I glimpsed her: now innocent, now whore, then a third and a fourth thing. But finally she eluded me, she became a ghost, and I realized that to write about her, about shame, I would have to go back East, to let the idea breathe its favourite air. Anna, deported, repatriated to a country she had never seen, caught brain-fever and turned into a sort of idiot.

  Why did I do that to her? – Or maybe the fever was a lie, a figment of Bilquìs Hyder’s imagination, intended to cover up the damage done by repeated blows to the head: hate can turn a miracle-gone-wrong into a basket case. And that hakimi potion sounds pretty unconvincing. How hard to pin down the truth, especially when one is obliged to see the world in slices; snapshots conceal as much as they make plain.

  All stories are haunted by the ghosts of the stories they might have been. Anna Muhammad haunts this book; I’ll never write about her now. And other phantoms are here as well, earlier and now ectoplasmic images connecting shame and violence. These ghosts, like Anna, inhabit a country that is entirely unghostly: no spectral ‘Peccavistan’, but Proper London. I’ll mention two: a girl set upon in a late-night underground train by a group of teenage boys is the first. The girl ‘Asian’ again, the boys predictably white. Afterwards, remembering her beating, she feels not angry but ashamed. She does not want to talk about what happened, she makes no official complaint, she hopes the story won’t get out: it is a typical reaction, and the girl is not one girl but many. Looking at smoking cities on my television screen, I see groups of young people running through the streets, the shame burning on their brows and setting fire to shops, police shields, cars. They remind me of my anonymous girl. Humiliate people for long enough and a wildness bursts out of them. Afterwards, surveying the wreckage of their rage, they look bewildered, uncomprehending, young. Did we do such things? Us? But we’re just ordinary kids, nice people, we didn’t know we could … then, slowly, pride dawns on them, pride in their power, in having learned to hit back. And I imagine what would have happened if such a fury could have been released in that girl on her underground train – how she would have thrashed the white kids within an inch of their lives, breaking arms legs noses balls, without knowing whence the violence came, without seeing how she, so slight a figure, could command such awesome strength. And they, what would they have done? How to tell the police they were beaten up by a mere girl, just one weak female against the lot of them? How to look their comrades in the face? I feel gleeful about this notion: it’s a seductive, silky thing, this violence, yes it is.

  I never gave this second girl a name. But she, too, is inside my Sufiya Zinobia now, and you’ll recognize her when she pops out.

  The last ghost inside my heroine is male, a boy from a news clipping. You may have read about him, or at least his prototype: he was found blazing in a parking lot, his skin on fire. He burned to death, and the experts who examined his body and the scene of the incident were forced to accept what seemed impossible: namely that the boy had simply ignited of his own accord, without dousing himself in petrol or applying any external flame. We are energy; we are fire; we are light. Finding the key, stepping through into that truth, a boy began to burn.

  Enough. Ten years have slipped by in my story while I’ve been seeing ghosts. – But one last word on the subject: the first time I sat down to think about Anahita Muhammad, I recalled the last sentence of The Trial by Franz Kafka, the sentence in which Joseph K. is stabbed to death. My Anna, like Kafka’s Joseph, died under a knife. Not so Sufiya Zinobia Hyder; but that sentence, the ghost of an epigraph, hangs over her story still:

  ‘ “Like a dog!” he said: it was as if he meant the shame of it to outlive him.’

  By the year of the Hyders’ return from Q. the capital had grown, Karachi had become fat, so that people who had been there from the beginning could no longer recognize the slender girlish town of their youth in this obese harridan of a metropolis. The great fleshy folds of its endless expansion had swallowed up the primeval salt marshes, and all along the sandspit there erupted, like boils, the gaudily painted beach houses of the rich. The streets were full of the darkened faces of young men who had been drawn to the painted lady by her overblown charms, only to find that her price was too high for them to pay; something puritan and violent sat on their foreheads and it was frightening to walk amongst their disillusions in the heat. The night held smugglers who rode in scooter-rickshaws to the coast; and the Army, of course, was in power.

  Raza Hyder got off the railway train from the west wreathed in rumours. This was the period shortly after the disappearance of the former Chief Minister Aladdin Gichki, who had finally been released from captivity for lack of hard evidence against him; he lived quietly with his wife and dog for several weeks until the day he went out to walk the Alsatian and never returned, even though his last words to Begum Gichki had been, ‘Tell the cook to make a dozen extra meatballs for dinner, I’m starving to death today.’ Meatballs, one to twelve, steamed expectantly in a dish, but something must have spoiled Gichki’s appetite, because he never ate them. Possibly he was unable to resist the pangs of hunger and ate the Alsatian instead, because they never found the dog either, not so much as a hair of its tail. The Gichki mystery kept cropping up in conversations, and Hyder’s name often got into these chats, perhaps because the mutual hatred between Gichki and the divine Maulana Dawood was well known, and Dawood’s intimacy with Hyder was no secret either. Strange stories filtered back to Karachi from Q. and hung in the air-conditioned urban air.

  The official version of Hyder’s period of power in the west was that it had been an unmitigated success, and his career was continuing along its upward path. Dacoity had been eliminated, the mosques were full, the organs of state had been purged of Gichkism, of the corruption disease, and separatism was a dead duck. Old Razor Guts was now a Brigadier … but, as Iskander Harappa was fond of telling Omar Khayyam Shakil when the pair of them were in their cups, ‘Fuck me in the mouth, yaar, everybody knows those tribals are running wild out there because Hyder kept hanging innocent people by the balls.’ There were also whispers about marital troubles in the Hyder household. Even Rani Harappa in exile heard the rumours of dissension, of the idiot child whose mother called her ‘Shame’ and treated her like mud, of the internal injury which made sons impossible and which was leading Bilquìs down dark corridors towards a crack-up; but she, Rani, did not know how to talk to Bilquìs about these things, and the telephone receiver remained untouched on its hook.

  Some things did not get talked about. Nobody mentioned a fat-mouthed boy called Sindbad Mengal, or speculated on the parentage of the younger Hyder girl … Brigadier Raza Hyder was driven directly from the station to the inner sanctum of the President, Field-Marshal Mohammad
A., where according to some reports he was hugged affectionately and had his cheeks pulled in friendship, while others hinted that the blast of angry air issuing from the keyholes of that room was so intensely hot that Raza Hyder, standing to attention before his outraged President, must have been badly singed. What is certain is that he emerged from the Presidential presence as the national minister of education, information and tourism, while someone else climbed aboard a westbound train to assume the governorship of Q. And Raza Hyder’s eyebrows remained intact.

  Also intact: the alliance between Raza and Maulana Dawood, who had accompanied the Hyders to Karachi and who, once he was installed in the official residence of the new minister, at once distinguished himself by launching a vociferous public campaign against the consumption of prawns and blue-bellied crabs, which, being scavengers, were as unclean as any pig, and which, although understandably unavailable in far-off Q., were both plentiful and popular in the capital by the sea. The Maulana was deeply affronted to find these armoured monsters of the deep freely available in the fishmarkets, and succeeded in enlisting the support of urban divines who did not know how to object. The city’s fishermen found that the sales of shellfish began to drop alarmingly, and were therefore obliged to rely more than ever on the income they gained from the smuggling of contraband goods. Illicit booze and cigarettes replaced blue crabs in the holds of many dhows. No booze or cigarettes found their way into the Hyder residence, however. Dawood made unheralded raids on the servants’ quarters to check that God was in charge. ‘Even a city of scuttling monstrosities,’ he assured Raza Hyder, ‘can be purified with the help of the Almighty.’

  Three years after Raza Hyder’s return to Q., it became clear that his star had secretly been in decline, because the rumours from Q. (Mengal, Gichki, ball-hung tribals) never died down entirely; so that when the capital was shifted away from Karachi and taken up north into the clean mountain air and placed in hideous new buildings specially constructed for the purpose, Raza Hyder stayed put on the coast. The ministry of education, information and tourism went north along with the rest of the administration; but Raza Hyder (to be blunt) was sacked. He was returned to military duty, and given the futureless job of commanding the Military Training Academy. They permitted him to keep his house, but Maulana Dawood told him: ‘So what if you still have the marble walls? They have made you a crab in this marble shell. Na-pak: unclean.’

  We have leapt too far ahead: it is time to conclude our remarks about rumours and shellfish. Sufiya Zinobia, the idiot, is blushing.

  I did it to her, I think, to make her pure. Couldn’t think of another way of creating purity in what is supposed to be the Land of the Pure … and idiots are, by definition, innocent. Too romantic a use to make of mental disability? Perhaps; but it’s too late for such doubts. Sufiya Zinobia has grown, her mind more slowly than her body, and owing to this slowness she remains, for me, somehow clean (pak) in the midst of a dirty world. See how, growing, she caresses a pebble in her hand, unable to say why goodness seems to lie within this smooth flat stone; how she glows with pleasure when she hears loving words, even though they are almost always meant for someone else … Bilquìs poured all her affection over her younger daughter, Naveed. ‘Good News’ – the nickname had stuck, like a pulled face in the wind – was soaked in it, a monsoon of love, while Sufiya Zinobia, her parents’ burden, her mother’s shame, remained as dry as the desert. Groans, insults, even the wild blows of exasperation rained on her instead; but such rain yields no moisture. Her spirit parched for lack of affection, she nevertheless managed, when love was in her vicinity, to glow happily just to be near the precious thing.

  She also blushed. You recall she blushed at birth. Ten years later, her parents were still perplexed by these reddenings, these blushes like petrol fires. The fearful incandescence of Sufiya Zinobia had been, it seemed, intensified by the desert years in Q. When the Hyders paid the obligatory courtesy call on Bariamma and her tribe, the ancient lady bent to kiss the girls and was alarmed to find that her lips had been mildly burned by a sudden rush of heat to Sufiya Zinobia’s cheek; the burn was bad enough to necessitate twice-daily applications of lip salve for a week. This misbehaviour of the child’s thermostatic mechanisms roused in her mother what looked like a practised wrath: ‘That moron,’ Bliquìs shouted beneath the amused gaze of Duniyad Begum and the rest, ‘just don’t even look at her now! What is this? Anyone puts eyes on her or tells her two words and she goes red, red like a chilli! I swear. What normal child goes so beetroot hot that her clothes can smell of burning? But what to do, she went wrong and that’s that, we must just grin and bear.’ The disappointment of the Hyders in their elder daughter had also been hardened in the noonday rays of the wilderness into a thing as pitiless as that shadow-frying sun.

  The affliction was real enough. Miss Shahbanou, the Parsee ayah whom Bliquìs had employed on her return to Karachi, complained on her first day that when she gave Sufiya Zinobia a bath the water had scalded her hands, having been brought close to boiling point by a red flame of embarrassment that spread from the roots of the damaged girl’s hair to the tips of her curling toes.

  To speak plainly: Sufiya Zinobia Hyder blushed uncontrollably whenever her presence in the world was noticed by others. But she also, I believe, blushed for the world.

  Let me voice my suspicion: the brain-fever that made Sufiya Zinobia preternaturally receptive to all sorts of things that float around in the ether enabled her to absorb, like a sponge, a host of unfelt feelings.

  Where do you imagine they go? – I mean emotions that should have been felt, but were not – such as regret for a harsh word, guilt for a crime, embarrassment, propriety, shame? – Imagine shame as a liquid, let’s say a sweet fizzy tooth-rotting drink, stored in a vending machine. Push the right button and a cup plops down under a pissing stream of the fluid. How to push the button? Nothing to it. Tell a lie, sleep with a white boy, get born the wrong sex. Out flows the bubbling emotion and you drink your fill … but how many human beings refuse to follow these simple instructions! Shameful things are done: lies, loose living, disrespect for one’s elders, failure to love one’s national flag, incorrect voting at elections, over-eating, extramarital sex, autobiographical novels, cheating at cards, maltreatment of womenfolk, examination failures, smuggling, throwing one’s wicket away at the crucial point of a Test Match: and they are done shamelessly. Then what happens to all that unfelt shame? What of the unquaffed cups of pop? Think again of the vending machine. The button is pushed; but then in comes the shameless hand and jerks away the cup! The button-pusher does not drink what was ordered; and the fluid of shame spills, spreading in a frothy lake across the floor.

  But we are discussing an abstract, an entirely ethereal vending machine; so into the ether goes the unfelt shame of the world. Whence, I submit, it is siphoned off by the misfortunate few, janitors of the unseen, their souls the buckets into which squeegees drip what-was-spilled. We keep such buckets in special cupboards. Nor do we think much of them, although they clean up our dirty waters.

  Well then: Sufiya the moron blushed. Her mother said to the assembled relatives, ‘She does it to get attention. O, you don’t know what it’s like, the mess, the anguish, and for what? For no reward. For air. Thank God for my Good News.’ But goof or no goof, Sufiya Zinobia – by blushing furiously each time her mother looked sidelong at her father – revealed to watching family eyes that something was piling up between those two. Yes. Idiots can feel such things, that’s all.

  Blushing is slow burning. But it is also another thing: it is a psychosomatic event. I quote: ‘A sudden shut-down of the arterio-venous anastomoses of the face floods the capillaries with the blood that produces the characteristically heightened colour. People who do not believe in psychosomatic events and do not believe that the mind can influence the body by direct nervous pathways should reflect upon blushing, which in people of heightened sensibility can be brought on even by the recollection of an embarrassment of which t
hey have been the subject – as clear an example of mind over matter as one could wish for.’

  Like the authors of the above words, our hero, Omar Khayyam Shakil, is a practitioner of medicine. He is, furthermore, interested in the action of mind over matter: in behaviour under hypnosis, for example; in the entranced self-mutilations of those fanatical Shias whom Iskander Harappa disparagingly calls ‘bedbugs’; in blushing. So it will not be long before Sufiya Zinobia and Omar Khayyam, patient and doctor, future wife and husband, come together. As they must; because what I have to tell is – cannot be described as anything but – a love story.

  An account of what happened that year, the fortieth year in the life of Isky Harappa as well as Raza Hyder, probably ought to begin with the moment when Iskander heard that his cousin Little Mir had ingratiated himself with President A., and was about to be elevated to high office. He jumped clean out of bed when he heard the news, but Pinkie Aurangzeb, the owner of the bed and the source of the information, did not budge, even though she knew that a crisis had burst upon her, and that her forty-three-year-old body which Iskander had unveiled by jumping out of bed without letting go of the sheet no longer radiated the kind of light that could get men’s minds off whatever was bugging them. ‘Shit on my mother’s grave,’ Iskander Harappa yelled, ‘first Hyder becomes a minister and now him. Life gets serious when a man is pushing forty.’

  ‘Things are starting to fade,’ Pinkie Aurangzeb thought as she lay smoking eleven consecutive cigarettes while Iskander stalked the room wrapped in the bedsheet. She lit her twelfth cigarette as Isky absently let the sheet fall. Then she watched him in the nudity of his prime as he silently broke his ties with his present, and turned towards the future. Pinkie was a widow; old Marshal Aurangzeb had kicked the bucket at last, and nowadays her soirees were not quite such essential affairs, and the city gossip had begun to reach her late. ‘The ancient Greeks,’ Iskander said out of the blue, making Pinkie spill the ash off her cigarette-tip, ‘kept, in the Olympic games, no records of runners-up.’ Then he dressed quickly, but with the meticulous dandyism that she had always loved, and left her for good; that sentence was the only explanation she ever got. But in the years of her isolation she worked it out, she knew that History had been waiting for Iskander Harappa to notice Her, and a man who catches History’s eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape. History is natural selection. Mutant versions of the past struggle for dominance; new species of fact arise, and old, saurian truths go to the wall, blindfolded and smoking last cigarettes. Only the mutations of the strong survive. The weak, the anonymous, the defeated leave few marks: field-patterns, axe-heads, folk-tales, broken pitchers, burial mounds, the fading memory of their youthful beauty. History loves only those who dominate her: it is a relationship of mutual enslavement. No room in it for Pinkies; or, in Isky’s view, for the likes of Omar Khayyam Shakil.