Shame

by Salman Rushdie

  Reborn Alexanders, would-be Olympic champions must conform to the most stringent of training routines. So after he left Pinkie Aurangzeb, Isky Harappa also vowed to eschew everything else that could erode his spirit. His daughter Arjumand would always remember that that was when he gave up stud poker, chemin de fer, private roulette evenings, horse-race fixing, French food, opium and sleeping pills; when he broke his habit of seeking out beneath silver-heavy banqueting tables the excited ankles and compliant knees of society beauties, and when he stopped visiting the whores whom he had been fond of photographing with an eight millimetre Paillard Bolex movie camera while they performed, singly or in threes, upon his own person or that of Omar Khayyam, their musky languid rites. It was the beginning of that legendary political career which would culminate in his victory over death itself. These first triumphs, being merely victories over himself, were necessarily smaller. He expunged from his public, urban vocabulary his encyclopaedic repertoire of foul green village oaths, imprecations which could detach brim-full cut-glass tumblers from men’s hands and shatter them before they reached the floor. (But when campaigning in the villages he allowed the air to turn green with obscenity once again, understanding the vote-getting powers of the filth.) He stifled for ever the high-pitched giggle of his unreliable playboy self and substituted a rich, full-throated, statesmanlike guffaw. He gave up fooling around with the women servants in his city home.

  Did any man ever sacrifice more for his people? He gave up cock-fights, bear-fights, snake-and-mongoose duels; plus disco dancing, and his monthly evenings at the home of the chief film censor, where he had watched special compilations of the juiciest bits excised from incoming foreign films.

  He also decided to give up Omar Khayyam Shakil. ‘When that degenerate comes to call,’ Iskander instructed the gatekeeper, ‘just throw the badmash out on his fat bottom and watch him bounce.’ Then he retired into the white-and-gilt rococo bedroom at the cool heart of his mansion in ‘Defence’, an edifice of reinforced cement concrete and stone cladding that resembled a split-level Telefunken radiogram, and sank into meditation.

  But, for a long time, surprisingly, Omar Khayyam neither visited nor telephoned his old friend. Forty days passed before the doctor was made aware of the change in his carefree, shame-free world …

  Who sits at her father’s feet while, elsewhere, Pinkie Aurangzeb grows old in an empty house? Arjumand Harappa: thirteen years old and wearing an expression of huge satisfaction, she sits cross-legged on the marble-chip floor of a rococo bedroom, watching Isky complete the process of remaking himself; Arjumand, who has not yet acquired the notorious nickname (the ‘virgin Ironpants’) that will stick to her for most of her life. She has always known in the precocity of her years that there is a second man inside her father, growing, waiting, and now at last bursting out, while the old Iskander slips rustling and discarded to the floor, a shrivelled snakeskin in a hard diamond of sunlight. So what pleasure she takes in his transformation, in finally acquiring the father she deserves! ‘I did this,’ she tells Iskander, ‘my wanting it so badly finally made you see.’ Harappa smiles at his daughter, pats her hair. ‘That happens sometimes.’ ‘And no more Omar-uncle,’ Arjumand adds. ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish.’

  Arjumand Harappa, the virgin Ironpants, will always be ruled by extremes. Already, at thirteen, she has a gift for loathing; also for adulation. Whom she loathes: Shakil, the fat monkey who has been sitting on her father’s shoulders, holding him down in the slime; and also her own mother, Rani in her Mohenjo of burrowing owls, the epitome of defeat. Arjumand has persuaded her father to let her live and go to school in the city; and for this father she bears a reverence bordering on idolatry. Now that her worship is at last acquiring an object worthy of itself, Arjumand cannot restrain her joy. ‘What things won’t you do!’ she cries. ‘Just wait and see!’ Omar Khayyam’s absent bulk carries with it the shadows of the past.

  Iskander, supine in white-and-gold bed and sunk in frenzied reverie, states with sudden clarity: ‘It’s a man’s world, Arjumand. Rise above your gender as you grow. This is no place to be a woman in.’ The rueful nostalgia of these sentences marks the last death-throes of Iskander’s love for Pinkie Aurangzeb, but his daughter takes him at his word, and when her breasts begin to swell she will bind them tightly in linen bandages, so fiercely that she blushes with pain. She will come to enjoy the war against her body, the slow provisional victory over the soft, despised flesh … but let us leave them there, father and daughter, she already building in her heart that Alexandrine god-myth of Harappa to which she will only be able to give free rein after his death, he devising in the councils of his new cleanness the strategies of his future triumph, of his wooing of the age.

  Where is Omar Khayyam Shakil? What has become of our peripheral hero? He has aged, too; like Pinkie, he’s in his middle forties now. Age has treated him well, silvering his hair and goatee beard. Let us remind ourselves that he was a brilliant student in his day, and that scholarly brightness remains undimmed; lecher and rakehell he may be, but he is also the top man at the city’s leading hospital, and an immunologist of no small international renown. In the time since we last knew him well he has travelled to American seminars, published papers on the possibility of psychosomatic events occurring within the body’s immune system, becoming an important chap. He is still fat and ugly, but he dresses now with some distinction; some of Isky’s snappy sartorial ways have rubbed off on him. Omar Khayyam wears greys: grey suits, hats, ties, grey suede shoes, grey silk underpants, as if he hopes that the muteness of the colour will tone down the garish effect of his physiognomy. He carries a present from his friend Iskander: a silver-headed swordstick from the Aansu valley, twelve inches of polished steel concealed in intricately-carved walnut.

  By this time he is sleeping for barely two and a half hours a night, but the dream of falling off the world’s end still troubles him from time to time. Sometimes it comes to him when he is awake, because people who sleep too little can find the boundaries between the waking and sleeping worlds get difficult to police. Things skip between the unguarded bollards, avoiding the customs post … at such times he is assailed by a terrible vertigo, as if he were on top of a crumbling mountain, and then he leans heavily on his sword-concealing cane to prevent himself from falling. It should be said that his professional success, and his friendship with Iskander Harappa, have had the effect of reducing the frequency of these giddy spells, of keeping our hero’s feet a little more firmly on the ground. But still the dizziness comes, now and then, to remind him how close he is, will always be, to the edge.

  But where has he got to? Why does he not telephone, visit, get bounced out on his behind? – I discover him in Q., in the fortress home of his three mothers, and at once I know that a disaster has taken place, because nothing else could have lured Omar Khayyam into the mother country once again. He has not visited ‘Nishapur’ since the day he left with his feet on a cooling iceblock; bankers’ drafts have been sent in his stead. His money has paid for his absence … but there are other prices, too. And no escape is final. His willed severance from his past mingles with the chosen insomnia of his nights: their joint effect is to glaze his moral sense, to transform him into a kind of ethical zombie, so that his very act of distancing helps him to obey his mothers’ ancient injunction: the fellow feels no shame.

  He retains his mesmeric eyes, his level hypnotist’s voice. For many years now Iskander Harappa has accompanied those eyes, that voice to the Intercontinental Hotel and allowed them to go to work on his behalf. Omar Khayyam’s outsize ugliness, combined with eyes-and-voice, makes him attractive to white women of a certain type. They succumb to his flirtatious offers of hypnosis, his unspoken promises of the mysteries of the East; he takes them to a rented hotel suite and puts them under. Released from admittedly scanty inhibitions they provide Isky and Omar with some highly charged sex. Shakil defends his behaviour: ‘Impossible to persuade a subject to do anything she is unwilling to do.
’ Iskander Harappa, however, has never bothered with excuses … this, too, is a part of what Isky – as yet unbeknownst to Omar Khayyam – has forsaken. For History’s sake.

  Omar Khayyam is in ‘Nishapur’ because his brother, Babar, is dead. The brother whom he has never seen, dead before his twenty-third birthday, and all that is left of him is a bundle of dirty notebooks, which Omar Khayyam will bring with him when he returns to Karachi after the forty days of mourning. A brother reduced to tattered, scribbled words. Babar has been shot, and the order to fire was given by … but no, the notebooks first:

  When they brought his body down from the Impossible Mountains, smelling of corruption and goats, the notebooks they discovered in his pockets were returned to his family with many of their pages missing. Among the tattered remnants of these brutalized volumes it was possible to decipher a series of love-poems addressed to a famous playback singer whom he, Babar Shakil, could not possibly have met. And interspersed with the unevenly metrical expressions of this abstract love, in which hymns to the spirituality of her voice mingled uneasily with free verse of a distinctly pornographic sensuality, was to be found an account of his sojourn in an earlier hell, a record of the torment of having been the kid brother of Omar Khayyam.

  The shade of his elder sibling had haunted every corner of ‘Nishapur’. Their three mothers, who now subsisted on the doctor’s remittances and had no more dealings with the pawnbroker, had conspired in their gratitude to make Babar’s childhood a motionless journey through an unchanging shrine whose walls were impregnated by applause for the glorious, departed elder son. And because Omar Khayyam was so much his senior and had long since fled that provincial dustiness in whose streets, nowadays, drunken gas-field workers brawled desultorily with off-duty miners of coal, bauxite, onyx, copper and chrome, and over whose rooftops the cracked dome of Flashman’s Hotel presided with ever-increasing mournfulness, the younger child, Babar, had the feeling of having been at once oppressed and abandoned by a second father; and in that household of women atrophied by yesterdays he celebrated his twentieth birthday by carrying examination certificates and gold medals and newspaper cuttings and old schoolbooks and files of letters and cricket bats and, in short, all the souvenirs of his illustrious sibling into the shadowed lightlessness of the central compound, and setting fire to the whole lot before his three mothers could stop him. Turning his back on the inglorious spectacle of old crones scrabbling amongst hot ashes for the charred corners of snapshots and for medallions which the fire had transmuted from gold into lead, Babar made his way via the dumb-waiter into the streets of Q., his anniversary thoughts slow with uncertainties about the future. He was wandering aimlessly, brooding upon the narrowness of his possibilities, when the earthquake began.

  At first he mistook it for a shudder within his own body, but a blow to his cheek, inflicted by a tiny splinter of plunging sharpness, cleared the mists of self-absorption from the would-be poet’s eyes. ‘It’s raining glass,’ he thought in surprise, blinking rapidly at the lanes of the thieves’ bazaar into which his feet had led him without knowing it, lanes of little shanty-stalls among which his supposed inner shudder was making a fine mess: melons burst at his feet, pointy slippers fell from trembling shelves, gemstones and brocades and earthenware and combs tumbled pell-mell into the glass-dusted alleys. He stood stupidly in that vitreous downpour of broken windows, unable to shake off the feeling of having imposed his private turmoils on the world around him, resisting the insane compulsion to seize hold of someone, anyone, in the milling, panicky crowd of pickpockets, salesmen and shoppers, to apologize for the trouble he had caused.

  ‘That earthquake,’ Babar Shakil wrote in his notebook, ‘shook something loose inside me. A minor tremor, but maybe it also shook something into place.’

  When the world was still again he made for a cheap brandy den, picking his way through fragments of glass and past the equally piercing howls of the proprietor; and as he entered (the notebooks stated) he caught sight through the corner of his left eye of a winged and golden-glowing man looking down on him from a rooftop; but when he twisted his head upwards the angel was no longer to be seen. Later, when he was in the mountains with the separatist tribal guerrillas, he was told the story of the angels and the earthquakes and the subterranean Paradise; their belief that the golden angels were on their side gave the guerrillas an unshakeable certainty of the justice of their cause, and made it easy for them to die for it. ‘Separatism,’ Babar wrote, ‘is the belief that you are good enough to escape from the clutches of hell.’

  Babar Shakil spent his birthday getting drunk in that den of broken bottles, picking out, more than once, long splinters of glass from his mouth, so that by the evening’s end his chin was streaked with blood; but the splashing liquor disinfected the cuts and minimized the risk of tetanus. In the brandy shop: tribals, a wall-eyed whore, travelling jokers with drums and horns. The jokes grew louder as the night wore on, and the mixture of humour and booze was a cocktail that gave Babar a hangover of such colossal proportions that he never recovered from it.

  What jokes! Hee-hee-what-you-talking-man-someone-will-hear ribaldry: – Listen, yaar, you know when children get circumcised the circumciser speaks holy words? – Yah, man, I know. – Then what did he say when he did the cut on Old Razor Guts? – I don’t know, what what? – Just one word only, yaar, one word and he got thrown out of the house! – God, must have been a bad word, man, come on, tell. – This was it, sir: ‘Oops.’

  Babar Shakil in a dangerous veil of brandy. Comedy enters his bloodstream, effects a permanent mutation. – Hey mister, you know what they say about us tribals, too little patriotism and too much sex-drive, well, it’s all true, want to know why? – Yes. – So take patriotism. Number one, government takes our rice for Army troops, we should be proud, na, but we just complain there is none for us. Number two, government mines our minerals and economy gets a boost, but we just beef that nobody here sees the cash. Number three, gas from Needle now provides sixty per cent of national requirement, but still we are not happy, moaning all the time how the gas is not domestically available in these parts. Now how could people be less patriotic, you must agree. But fortunately our government loves us still, so much that it has made our sex-drive the top national priority. – How’s that? – But it is obvious to see: this government is happy to go on screwing us from now till doomsday.

  – O, too good, yaar, too good.

  The next day Babar left home before dawn to join the guerrillas and his family never saw him alive again. From the bottomless chests of ‘Nishapur’ he took an old rifle and its accompanying cartridge boxes, a few books and one of Omar Khayyam’s academic medallions, which had been transmuted into base metal by a fire; no doubt to remind himself of the causes of his own act of separatism, of the origins of a hatred which had been powerful enough to cause an earthquake. In his hideout in the Impossible Mountains Babar grew a beard, studied the complex structure of the hill clans, wrote poetry, rested between raids on military outposts and railway lines and water reservoirs, and eventually, thanks to the exigencies of that dislocated existence, was able to discuss in his notebooks the relative merits of copulation with sheep and with goats. There were guerrillas who preferred the passivity of sheep; for others the goats’ greater friskiness was impossible to resist. Many of Babar’s companions went so far as to fall in love with four-legged mistresses, and although they were all wanted men they would risk their lives in the bazaars of Q. in order to purchase gifts for their loved ones: combs for fleeces were acquired, also ribbons and bells for darling nannies who never deigned to express their gratitude. Babar’s spirit (if not his body) rose above such things; he poured his reservoir of unspent passion over the mental image of a popular singer of whose features he remained ignorant to his dying day, because he had only heard her sing on a crackling transistor radio.

  The guerrillas gave Babar a nickname of which he was inordinately proud: they called him ‘the emperor’, in memory of that ot
her Babar whose throne was usurped, who took to the hills with a ragged army and who at last founded that renowned dynasty of monarchs whose family name is still used as an honorific title bestowed on film tycoons. Babar, the Mogul of the Impossible Mountains … two days before the departure of Raza Hyder from Q., a sortie led for the last time by the great commander himself was responsible for firing the bullet which knocked Babar down.

  But it didn’t matter, because he had spent too long with the angels; up in the shifting, treacherous mountains he had watched them, golden-breasted and with gilded wings. Archangels flapped over his head as he sat doing sentry duty on a fierce outcrop of rock. Yes, perhaps Jibreel himself had hovered benignly over him like a golden helicopter while he violated a sheep. And shortly before his death the guerrillas noticed that their bearded comrade’s skin had begun to give off a yellow light; the little buds of new wings were visible on his shoulders. It was a transformation familiar to the denizens of the Impossible Mountains. ‘You won’t be here much longer,’ they told Babar with traces of envy in their voices, ‘Emperor, you’re off; no more woolly fucks for you.’ The angeling of Babar must have been just about complete by the time of his death, when his guerrilla unit attacked a seemingly broken-down goods train and so fell into Raza Hyder’s trap, because although eighteen bullets pierced his body, which made an easy target because it glowed yellow through his clothing in the night, it was easy for him to skip out of his skin and soar lucent and winged into the eternity of the mountains, where a great cloud of seraphs rose up as the world shook and roared, and where to the music of heavenly reed-flutes and celestial seven-stringed sarandas and three-stringed dumbirs he was received into the elysian bosom of the earth. His body, when they brought it down, was said to be as insubstantial and feathery as an abandoned snakeskin, such as cobras and playboys leave behind them when they change; and he was gone, gone for good, the fool.