Shame

by Salman Rushdie

  It was, of course, for his alleged complicity in the murder of Little Mir Harappa that Iskander was put on trial for his life. Also indicted, for the actual performance of the crime, was the dead man’s son Haroun. He, however, was tried in absentia, having fled the country, it was thought, although it was possible that he had simply vanished, gone to ground.

  No murderers were depicted on Rani’s eighteenth shawl … but now that all eighteen have been spread out and admired, it is time to turn away from Harappas, from Rani and Arjumand sequestered in that house whose decay had reached the point at which the water trickled blood-red from rust-corroded taps. Time to turn back the clock, so that Iskander rises from the grave, but recedes, as well, into the background of the tale. Other people have been living lives while Harappas rose and fell.

  10

  THE WOMAN IN THE VEIL

  There was once a young woman, Sufiya Zinobia, also known as ‘Shame’. She was of slight build, had a weakness for pine-kernels, and her arms and legs were imperfectly co-ordinated when she walked. Despite this ambulatory awkwardness, however, she would not have struck a stranger as being particularly abnormal, having acquired in the first twenty-one years of life the usual complement of physical attributes, including a small severe face that made her seem unusually mature, disguising the fact that she had only managed to get hold of around seven years’ worth of brains. She even had a husband, Omar Khayyam Shakil, and never complained that her parents had chosen for her a man fully thirty-one years her senior, that is to say, older than her own father. Appearances notwithstanding, however, this Sufiya Zinobia turned out to be, in reality, one of those supernatural beings, those exterminating or avenging angels, or werewolves, or vampires, about whom we are happy to read in stories, sighing thankfully or even a little smugly while they scare the pants off us that it’s just as well they are no more than abstractions or figments; because we know (but do not say) that the mere likelihood of their existence would utterly subvert the laws by which we live, the processes by which we understand the world.

  Lurking inside Sufiya Zinobia Shakil there was a Beast. We have already seen something of the growth of this unspeakable monster; we have seen how, feeding on certain emotions, it took possession of the girl from time to time. On two occasions she fell grievously ill and almost died; and perhaps both illnesses, brain-fever and immunological collapse, were attempts by her ordinary self, by the Sufiya-Zinobia-ness of her, to defeat the Beast, even at the cost of her own life. But the Beast was not destroyed. And maybe somebody should have guessed, after the attack on her brother-in-law, that whatever other-than-Beastly part of her remained was gradually losing its ability to resist the blood-creature within. But when Omar Khayyam’s whispering voice finally found the way to unlock her trance, she woke up fresh and relaxed and seemingly unaware of having terminated Talvar’s polo-playing career. The Beast had nodded off again, but the bars of its cage had been broken. Still, there was general relief. ‘Poor girl got so upset she went wild, that’s all,’ Shahbanou the ayah told Omar Khayyam, ‘but she’s O.K. now, thank God.’

  Raza Hyder summoned Shakil to a conference and honourably offered him the opportunity of withdrawing from the proposed marriage. On hearing this the antique divine Maulana Dawood, who was also present, refused to remain silent. His original opposition to the nuptials lost in the foggy labyrinths of his great age, the old man whined like a malicious bullet. ‘That she-devil and this child of she-devils,’ he cried, ‘let them make their hell together, in some other place.’ Omar Khayyam replied with dignity, ‘Sir, I am a man of science; to the devil with this talk of devils. I will not cast off a loved one because she fell ill; it is, rather, my duty to make her well. And this is being done.’

  I am no less disappointed in my hero than I was; not being the obsessive type, I find it difficult to comprehend his obsession. – But I must admit that his love for the damaged girl is beginning to seem as if it might be genuine … which does not invalidate my criticisms of the fellow. Human beings have a remarkable talent for persuading themselves of the authenticity and nobility of aspects of themselves which are in fact expedient, spurious, base. – At any rate: Omar Khayyam insisted on going ahead with the match.

  Bilquìs Hyder, her senses distracted by the events of Good News’s wedding day, proved incapable of entering into the spirit of a second marriage. When Sufiya Zinobia left hospital her mother refused to speak to her; but on the eve of the wedding she came to where Shahbanou was oiling the girl and twining her hair, and spoke so ponderously that it was plain that each word was a heavy weight which she was hauling up from the fathomless well of her duty. ‘You must think of yourself as the ocean,’ she told Sufiya Zinobia. ‘Yes, and he, the man, imagine him a sea creature, because that is what men are like, to live they must drown in you, in the tides of your secret flesh.’ Her eyes roamed loosely around her face. Sufiya Zinobia pulled a face at these incomprehensible maternal abstractions and replied obstinately in her voice of a seven-year-old girl, which was also the eerily disguised voice of the latent monster: ‘I hate fish.’

  What is the most powerful impulse of human beings in the face of night, of danger, of the unknown? – It is to run away; to avert the eyes and flee; to pretend the menace is not loping towards them in seven-league boots. It is the will to ignorance, the iron folly with which we exercise from consciousness whatever consciousness cannot bear. No need to invoke the ostrich to give this impulse symbolic form; humanity is more wilfully blind than any flightless bird.

  At Sufiya Zinobia’s wedding (a private affair; no guests, no marquees; the three mothers of Q. stayed away, Dawood absented himself also, leaving only Hyders and lawyers and Shakil) Raza Hyder forced Omar Khayyam to agree to the insertion in the Nikah contract of a clause forbidding him, Omar, to remove his bride from her parents’ home without their prior permission. ‘A father,’ Raza explained, ‘cannot do without the precious pieces of his heart,’ from which it can be seen that his new love for Sufiya was burning more brightly than ever, and blinded by the glare of that flame he refused to see the truth of her. In the following years he persuaded himself that by locking up his wife, by veiling her in walls and shuttered windows, he could save his family from the malign legacy of her blood, from its passions and its torments (for if Sufiya Zinobia’s soul was in agony, she was also the child of a frenzied woman, and that, too, may be an explanation of a kind).

  Omar Khayyam also refused to see. Blinded by science, he married Hyder’s daughter. Sufiya Zinobia smiled and ate a plate of laddoos decorated with silver paper. Shahbanou the ayah fussed round her like a mother.

  I repeat: there is no place for monsters in civilized society. If such creatures roam the earth, they do so out on its uttermost rim, consigned to peripheries by conventions of disbelief … but once in a blue moon something goes wrong. A Beast is born, a ‘wrong miracle’, within the citadels of propriety and decorum. This was the danger of Sufiya Zinobia: that she came to pass, not in any wilderness of basilisks and fiends, but in the heart of the respectable world. And as a result that world made a huge effort of the will to ignore the reality of her, to avoid bringing matters to the point at which she, disorder’s avatar, would have to be dealt with, expelled – because her expulsion would have laid bare what-must-on-no-account-be-known, namely the impossible verity that barbarism could grow in cultured soil, that savagery could He concealed beneath decency’s well-pressed shirt. That she was, as her mother had said, the incarnation of their shame. To comprehend Sufiya Zinobia would be to shatter, as if it were a crystal, these people’s sense of themselves; and so of course they would not do it, they did not, not for years. The more powerful the Beast became, the greater grew the efforts to deny its very being … Sufiya Zinobia outlived most members of her family. There were those who died for her.

  No more dreams of failure, no more square-bashing with green recruits; Raza Hyder got his promotion from Iskander Harappa, and Omar Khayyam Shakil agreed to move north with everyone els
e. His high medical reputation and Hyder’s renewed influence secured for Omar the post of senior consultant at the Mount Hira hospital in the new capital, and then they were off, bedrolls and ayahs and all, and soon they were airborne over the wide northern plateau that lay between two great rivers, the Potwar plateau, the stage on which great scenes were to be played out, seventeen hundred feet above sea-level.

  Thin soil over porous pudding-stone … but in spite of the soil’s thinness the plateau produced improbable quantities of rain-nourished crops; it was a terrain of such unlikely fertility that it had managed to raise a whole new city like a blister on the hip of an old town. Islamabad (you might say) out of Rawalpindi’s rib.

  Maulana Dawood, looking down from the skies and seeing the Potwar plateau with its cities gleaming in the distance, banged on the cabin window in dribbling, half-senile delight. ‘Arafat,’ he shouted at the top of his voice, alarming a stewardess, ‘we are come to Arafat,’ and nobody, not Raza his friend, not Bilquìs his enemy, had the heart to set him right, because if the old man had chosen to believe that they were about to land on the holy ground of the Arafat plain outside Mecca Sharif, well, that, too, was a kind of blindness, a fantasy forgivable in the old.

  General Raza Hyder inherited from his predecessor a lugubrious seven-foot ADC named Major Shuja, and also an Army so unnerved by its defeat in the former East Wing that it could no longer win so much as a football game. Understanding the intimate relationship between sport and war, the new Commander-in-Chief took it upon himself to attend every possible athletic contest involving his boys, hoping to inspire the teams by his presence. So it was that during the first months of his chieftancy Raza Hyder was present at the most remarkable series of humiliations in the annals of Army sport, beginning with the legendary inter-services cricket game in which the Army XI lost all ten firstinnings wickets without scoring a single run off the bat. Their Air Force opponents piled up a formidable reply, because the war had largely been an Army disaster, and so the airmen remained, for the most part, unaffected by the disgrace. The Army cricketers finally lost the game by an innings and 420 runs; it would have been 419 except that one of the Army’s second-innings runs was never completed, because the player in question appeared to lose heart in mid-sprint, stopped, scratched his head, stared about distractedly, and failed even to notice when he was run out … Hyder witnessed, too, the hockey match in which the Navy boys scored forty times in eighty minutes while the soldiers stared glumly at their curved sticks as if they were rifles, such as the ones surrendered on the day of reckoning in the East; and at the new National Swimming Baths he saw with his own eyes a double tragedy, one Army diver never surfacing after botching a dive so completely that he preferred to drown rather than emerge from the waters of his shame, while another got himself in an even worse tangle, taking off from the high board and landing on his belly with a noise like a gunshot, bursting open like a paint-balloon and forcing the authorities to drain the pool so that they could tidy away his guts. After this the mournful figure of Major Shuja presented itself to the General in his office and suggested that perhaps it would be better, begging for pardon, sir, if the C-in-C Sahib would stay away from such events, as his presence was intensifying the jawans’ shame and making matters worse than ever.

  ‘Son of a gun,’ Raza cried, ‘how come the entire Army turned into a bunch of blushing women overnight?’

  ‘The war, sir,’ replied Shuja, speaking from the well of a desolation so profound that he no longer cared about his career prospects, ‘and, beg for pardon, General, but you weren’t involved in that scrap.’

  Now Raza understood that his troops were joined in the terrible solidarity of their shared humiliation, and guessed at last why it was that not one of his fellow officers had ever offered him a fizzy drink in the officers’ mess. ‘I thought it was jealousy,’ he rebuked himself, and said to Shuja, who was waiting glumly at attention for the demotion his insolence deserved: ‘O.K., Major; what’s your solution?’

  The unexpectedness of the question startled Shuja into honesty. ‘Permission to speak frankly, sir?’ Hyder nodded: ‘Man to man. You, me and the gatepost.’

  ‘Then, beg for pardon, sir, but a return to Army rule. Takeover, sir.’

  Hyder was amazed. ‘Do people always talk treason in this town?’

  The gloom surrounding the ADC thickened further. ‘The General Sahib asked, sir, and I only said. Young officers are restless, sir, this is an Army town, the Army is used to power, and sir, everyone knows what these politicos are like, no good, sir, not suitable, the officers remember when they had respect, but now they feel so depressed, sir, seems like anyone can kick the Army around these days. Beg for pardon, sir.’

  ‘The devil with your coup,’ Hyder told him fiercely, ‘the way things are right now half a dozen of Isky Harappa’s ex-mistresses could take the whole Army apart.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Shuja said, and burst, astoundingly, into tears. General Hyder reminded himself that the young giant wasn’t much over eighteen; and then his own notoriously over-active tear-ducts began to smart in sympathy, so he said quickly, ‘For God’s sake, man. Nobody’s going to court-martial you. Just get your priorities right. Let’s win a few polo matches before thinking of taking over the country.’