Shame

by Salman Rushdie

  What is being born?-A legend. Isky Harappa rising, falling; Isky condemned to death, the world horrified, his executioner drowned in telegrams, but rising above them, shrugging them off, a compassionless hangman, desperate, afraid. Then Isky dead and buried; blind men regain their sight beside his martyr’s grave. And in the desert a thousand flowers bloom. Six years in power, two in jail, an eternity underground … the sun sets quickly, too. You can stand on the coastal sandspits and watch it dive into the sea.

  Chairman Iskander Harappa, dead, stripped of Pierre Cardin and of history, continues to cast his shadow. His voice murmurs in his enemies’ secret ears, a melodious, relentless monologue gnawing their brains like a worm. A ring finger points across the grave, glinting its accusations. Iskander haunts the living; the beautiful voice, golden, a voice holding rays of dawn, whispers on, unsilenced, unstoppable. Arjumand is sure of this. Afterwards, when the posters have been torn down, in the aftermath of the noose which, winding round him like a baby’s umbilical cord, maintained such respect for his person that it left no mark upon his neck; when she, Arjumand, has been shut away in once-more-looted Mohenjo, along with a mother who looks like a grandmother and who will not accept her dead husband’s divinity; then the daughter remembers, concentrating on details, telling herself the time will come for Iskander to be restored to history. His legend is in her care. Arjumand stalks the brutalized passages of the house, reads cheap love-fiction, eats like a bird and takes laxatives, empties herself of everything to make room for the memories. They fill her up, her bowels, her lungs, her nostrils; she is her father’s epitaph, and she knows.

  From the beginning, then. The elections which brought Iskander Harappa to power were not (it must be said) as straight-forward as I have made them sound. As how could they be, in that country divided into two Wings a thousand miles apart, that fantastic bird of a place, two Wings without a body, sundered by the land-mass of its greatest foe, joined by nothing but God … she remembers that first day, the thunderous crowds around the polling stations. O confusion of people who have lived too long under military rule, who have forgotten the simplest things about democracy! Large numbers of men and women were swept away by the oceans of bewilderment, unable to locate ballot-boxes or even ballots, and failed to cast their votes. Others, stronger swimmers in those seas, succeeded in expressing their preferences twelve or thirteen times. Popular Front workers, distressed by the general lack of electoral decorum, made heroic attempts to save the day. Those few urban constituencies making returns incompatible with the West-Wing-wide polling pattern were visited at night by groups of enthusiastic party members, who helped the returning officers to make a recount. Matters were much clarified in this way. Outside the errant polling stations large numbers of democrats assembled, many holding burning brands above their heads in the hope of shedding new light on the count. Dawn light flamed in the streets, while the crowds chanted loudly, rhythmically, spurring on the returning officers in their labours. And by morning the people’s will had been expressed, and Chairman Isky had won a huge and absolute majority of the West Wing’s seats in the new National Assembly. Rough justice, Arjumand remembers, but justice all the same.

  The real trouble, however, started over in the East Wing, that festering swamp. Populated by whom?–O, savages, breeding endlessly, jungle-bunnies good for nothing but growing jute and rice, knifing each other, cultivating traitors in their paddies. Perfidy of the East: proved by the Popular Front’s failure to win a single seat there, while the riff-raff of the People’s League, a regional party of bourgeois malcontents led by the well-known incompetent Sheikh Bismillah, gained so overwhelming a victory that they ended up with more Assembly seats than Harappa had won in the West. Give people democracy and look what they do with it. The West in a state of shock, the sound of one Wing flapping, beset by the appalling notion of surrendering the government to a party of swamp aborigines, little dark men with their unpronounceable language of distorted vowels and slurred consonants; perhaps not foreigners exactly, but aliens without a doubt. President Shaggy Dog, sorrowing, dispatched an enormous Army to restore a sense of proportion in the East.

  Her thoughts, Arjumand’s, do not dwell on the war that followed, except to note that of course the idolatrous nation positioned between the Wings backed the Eastern bastards to the hilt, for obvious, divide-and-rule reasons. A fearful war. In the West, oil-refineries, airports, the homes of God-fearing civilians bombarded by heathen explosives. The final defeat of the Western forces, which led to the reconstitution of the East Wing as an autonomous (that’s a laugh) nation and international basket case, was obviously engineered by outsiders: stonewashers and damnyankees, yes. The Chairman visited the United Nations and bawled those eunuchs out: ‘You won’t destroy us while I’m alive.’ He stormed out of the General Assembly, handsome, intemperate, great: ‘My country hearkens for me! Why should I stay in this harem of transvestite whores?’- and returned home to take up the reins of government in what was left of the land of God. Sheikh Bismillah, the architect of division, became chief of the junglees. Later, inevitably, they swarmed into his palace and shot him and his family full of holes. Sort of behaviour one expects from types like that.

  The catastrophe: throughout the war, hourly radio bulletins described the glorious triumphs of the Western regiments in the East. On that last day, at eleven a.m., the radio announced the last and most spectacular of these feats of arms; at noon, it curtly informed its audience of the impossible: unconditional surrender, humiliation, defeat. The traffic stood still in city streets. The nation’s lunch remained uncooked. In the villages, the cattle went unfed and the crops unwatered despite the heat. Chairman Iskander Harappa, on becoming Prime Minister, correctly identified the national reaction to the astounding capitulation as one of just rage, fuelled by shame. What calamity could have befallen an Army so rapidly? What reversal could have been so sudden and so total as to turn victory into disaster in a mere sixty minutes? ‘Responsibility for that fatal hour,’ Iskander pronounced, ‘lies, as it must, at the top.’ Policemen, also dogs, surrounded the home of ex-President Shaggy within fifteen minutes of this decree. He was taken to jail, to be tried for war crimes; but then the Chairman, reflecting, once again, the mood of a people sickened by defeat and yearning for reconciliation, for an end to analyses of shame, offered Shaggy a pardon in return for his acceptance of house arrest. ‘You are our dirty laundry,’ Iskander told the incompetent old man, ‘but, lucky for you, the people don’t want to see you beaten clean upon a stone.’

  There were cynical people who sneered at this pardon; that is needless-to-say, since all nations have their nihilists. These elements pointed out that Iskander Harappa had been the principal beneficiary of the civil war that ripped his country in half; they spread rumours of his complicity in the whole sad affair. ‘Shaggy Dog,’ they muttered in their shabby dens, ‘was always Harappa’s pet; ate out of Isky’s hand.’ Such negativistic elements are an ugly fact of life. The Chairman treated them with contempt. At a rally attended by two million people, Iskander Harappa unbuttoned his shirt. ‘What have I to hide?’ he shouted. ‘They say I have benefited; but I have lost fully half my beloved country. Then tell me, is this gain? Is this advantage? Is this luck? My people, your hearts are scarred by grief; behold, my heart bears the same wounds as yours.’ Iskander Harappa tore off his shirt and ripped it in half; he bared his hairless breast to the cheering, weeping crowd. (The young Richard Burton once did the same thing, in the film Alexander the Great. The soldiers loved Alexander because he showed them his battle scars.)

  Some men are so great that they can be unmade only by themselves. The defeated Army needed new leadership; Isky packed off the discredited old guard into early retirement, and put Raza Hyder in control. ‘He will be my man. And with such a compromised leader the Army can’t get too strong.’ This single error proved to be the undoing of the ablest statesman who ever ruled that country which had been so tragically misfortunate, so accursed, in its heads
of state.

  They could never forgive him for his power of inspiring love. Arjumand at Mohenjo, replete with memories, allows her remembering mind to transmute the preserved fragments of the past into the gold of myth. During the election campaign it had been common for women to come up to him, in full view of his wife and daughter, and declare their love. Grandmothers in villages perched on trees and called down as he passed: ‘O, you, if I were thirty years younger!’ Men felt no shame when they kissed his feet. Why did they love him? ‘I am hope,’ Iskander told his daughter … and love is an emotion that recognizes itself in others. People could see it in Isky, he was plainly full of the stuff, up to the brim, it spilled out of him and washed them clean. – Where did it come from? – Arjumand knows; so does her mother. It was a diverted torrent. He had built a dam between the river and its destination. Between himself and Pinkie Aurangzeb.

  In the beginning Arjumand had hired photographers to snap Pinkie secretly, Pinkie in the bazaar with a plucked chicken, Pinkie in the garden leaning on a stick, Pinkie naked in the shower like a long dried date. She left these pictures for the Chairman to see. ‘Look, Allah, she’s fifty years old, looks a hundred, or seventy anyway, what is kept in her?’ In the photographs the face was puffy, the legs vein-scarred, the hair careless, thin, white. ‘Stop showing me these pictures,’ Iskander shouted at his daughter (she remembers because he almost never lost his temper with her), ‘don’t you think I know what I did to her?’

  If a great man touches you, you age too quickly, you live too much and are used up. Iskander Harappa possessed the power of accelerating the ageing processes of the women in his life. Pinkie at fifty was beyond turkeys, beyond even the memory of her beauty. And Rani had suffered, too, not so badly because she had seen less of him. She had been hoping, of course; but when it became clear that he only wanted her to stand on election platforms, that her time was past and would not return, then she went back to Mohenjo without any argument, becoming once more the mistress of peacocks and game-birds and badminton-playing concubines and empty beds, not so much a person as an aspect of the estate, the benign familiar spirit of the place, cracked and cobwebby just like the ageing house. And Arjumand herself has always been accelerated, mature too young, precocious, quick as needles. ‘Your love is too much for us,’ she told the Chairman, ‘we’ll all be dead before you. You feed on us.’

  But they all outlived him, as it turned out. His diverted love (because he never saw Pinkie again, never lifted a telephone or wrote a letter, her name never passed his lips; he saw the photographs and after that nothing) splashed over the people, until one day Hyder choked off the spring.

  It splashed, too, over Arjumand; for whom it was more than enough. She moved in with him to the Prime Minister’s residence in the new northern capital, and for a while Rani kept writing to her, suggesting boys, even sending photographs; but Arjumand would return the letters and the photographs to her mother after ripping them to shreds. After several years of tearing potential husbands in half the virgin Ironpants finally defeated Rani’s hopes, and was allowed to continue down her chosen road. She was twenty-three when Isky became Prime Minister, she looked older, and although she was still far too beautiful for her own good the passage of time eroded her prospects, and at last she ran out of suitors. Between Arjumand and Haroun nothing more was said. He tore me in half long ago.

  Arjumand Harappa qualified in the law, became active in the green revolution, threw zamindars out of their palaces, opened dungeons, led raids on the homes of film stars and slit open their mattresses with a long two-edged knife, laughed as the black money poured out from between the pocketed springs. In court she prosecuted the enemies of the state with a scrupulous ferocity that gave her nickname a new and less ribald meaning; once she arrived at her chambers to find that some joker had broken in during the night and had left, standing in the centre of the room, a mocking gift: the lower half of an antique and rusty suit of armour, a pair of satirical metal legs placed at attention, heels together, on the rug. And laid neatly across the hollow waist, a padlocked metal belt. Arjumand Harappa, the virgin Ironpants.

  That night she cried, sitting on the floor of her father’s study, her head resting on his knee. ‘They hate me.’ Iskander grabbed her and shook her until the astonishment dried the tears. ‘Who hates you?’ he demanded, ‘just ask that. It is my enemies who are yours, and our enemies are the enemies of the people. Where’s the shame in being hated by those bastards?’ She understood then how love engenders hate. ‘I am making this country,’ Iskander told her quietly, ‘making it as a man would build a marriage. With strength as well as caring. No time for tears if you’re going to help.’ She wiped her eyes and grinned. ‘Polygamist,’ she punched his leg, ‘what an old-fashioned backward type at heart! It’s just marriages and concubines you want. Modern man, my foot.’

  ‘Mr. Harappa,’ the Angrez television interviewer is asking, ‘many commentators would say, there is a widely-held view, some sectors of opinion maintain, your opponents allege, what would you say to the suggestion, that by some standards, from certain points of view, in a way, your style of government might be described as being perhaps, to some extent …’

  ‘I see they are sending children to interview me now,’ Isky interposes. The interviewer has begun to sweat. Off-camera, but Arjumand remembers.

  ‘… patrician,’ he finishes, ‘autocratic, intolerant, repressive?’

  Iskander Harappa smiles, sits back in his Louis Quinze chair, sips roohafza from a cut-glass tumbler. ‘You could say,’ he replies, ‘that I do not suffer fools gladly. But, as you see, I suffer them.’

  Arjumand at Mohenjo replays her father’s videotapes. Played in the room where it was made, this conversation overwhelms her, this electronic resurrection by remote control. Yes, he suffered them. His name was etched on history in letters of burning gold; why should he go for brassy types? Here they are on the tape, trust a Western journalist to go digging in the cess-tank and come up holding handfuls of scum. He tortured me, they whine, he fired me, he put me in jail, I ran for my life. Good television: make our leaders look like primitives, wild men, even when they have foreign educations and fancy suits. Yes, always the malcontents, that’s all they care about.

  He never liked arguments. Do as he ordered and do it now, fut-a-fut, or out on your ear you go. This was as it should be. Look what he had to work with – even his ministers. Turncoats, nest-featherers, quislings, timeservers, the lot of them. He trusted none of these characters, so he set up the Federal Security Force with Talvar Ulhaq at its head. ‘Information is light,’ Chairman Iskander Harappa said.

  The clairvoyancy of Talvar Ulhaq enabled him to compile exhaustive dossiers on who-was-bribing-whom, on conspiracies, tax evasion, dangerous talk at dinner parties, student sects, homosexuality, the roots of treason. Clairvoyancy made it possible for him to arrest a future traitor before he committed his act of treason, and thus save the fellow’s life. The negativist elements attacked the FSF, they would have put out that great cleansing light, so off to jail they went, best place for malcontents. No time for such types during a period of national regeneration. ‘As a nation we have a positive genius for self-destruction,’ Iskander told Arjumand once, ‘we nibble away at ourselves, we eat our children, we pull down anyone who climbs up. But I insist that we shall survive.’

  ‘Nobody can topple me,’ Isky’s ghost tells the electronic shade of the Angrez journalist, ‘not the fat cats, not the Americans, not even you. Who am I? I am the incarnation of the people’s love.’

  Masses versus classes, the age-old opposition. Who loved him? ‘The people’, who are no mere romantic abstractions: who are sensible, and smart enough to know what serves them best. Who loved him? Pinkie Aurangzeb, Rani Harappa, Arjumand, Talvar, Haroun. What dissensions among this quintet! – Between wife and mistress, mother and daughter, jilted Arjumand and jilting Haroun, jilted Haroun and usurping Talvar … perhaps, Arjumand muses, his fall was our fault. Through our divi
ded ranks they drove the regiments of his defeat.

  They. Fat cats, smugglers, priests. City socialites who remembered his carefree youth and could not tolerate the thought that a great man had sprung out of that debauched cocoon. Factory bosses who had never paid as much attention to the maintenance of their workers as they lavished on the servicing of their imported looms, and whom he, the Chairman, forced to accept the unthinkable, that is, unionization. Usurers, swindlers, banks. The American Ambassador.

  Ambassadors: he got through nine of them in his six years. Also five English and three Russian heads of mission. Arjumand and Iskander would place bets on how long each new arrival would survive; then, happy as a boy with a new stick and hoop, he would set about giving them hell. He made them wait weeks for audiences, interrupted their sentences, denied them hunting licences. He invited them to banquets at which the Russian Ambassador was served birds’-nest soup and Peking Duck, while the American got borshch and blinis. He refused to flirt with their wives. With the British Ambassador he would pretend to be a hick just down from the villages, and speak only in an obscure regional dialect; in the case of the United States, however, he took the opposite tack and addressed their legate in incomprehensibly florid French. Embassies would constantly be subjected to power cuts. Isky would open their diplomatic bags and personally add outrageous remarks to the Ambassadors’ reports, so that one Russian was summoned home to explain certain unusual theories of his about the parentage of various leading Politburo chiefs; he never returned. The Jack Anderson column in America carried a leaked document in which the U.S. delegate to Iskander’s court had apparently confessed that he had long felt a strong sexual attraction towards Secretary Kissinger. That was the end of that Ambassador. ‘It took time to get into my stride,’ Iskander admitted to Arjumand, ‘but once I got the hang of it, those guys never got any sleep.’