Of course his death was not described in any notebook; it was enacted within the grieving imaginations of his three mothers, because, as they told Omar while recounting the tale of their son’s transformation into an angel, ‘We have the right to present him with a good death, a death with which the living can live.’ Under the impact of the tragedy, Chhunni, Munnee and Bunny began to crumble inside, becoming mere façades, beings as insubstantial as the sloughed-off corpse of their son. (But they pulled themselves together at the end.)
The body was returned to them some weeks after eighteen bullets had entered it. They also received a letter on official notepaper. ‘Only the memory of the former prestige of your family name protects you from the consequences of your son’s great infamy. It is our opinion that the families of these gangsters have much to answer for.’ The letter had been signed, before his departure, by the former governor, Raza Hyder himself; who must therefore have known that he had engineered the death of the boy whom he had seen, years previously, watching him through field-glasses from the upper windows of the sealed mansion between the Cantt and the bazaar.
Out of pity for Omar Khayyam Shakil – to spare, let us say, his blushes – I shall not describe the scene at the gate of the Harappa town house that took place when the doctor finally turned up in a taxi-cab holding his brother’s notebooks in his hand. He has been bounced in enough dirt for the moment; suffice to say that under the cold weight of Iskander’s rejection, Omar Khayyam suffered an attack of vertigo so severe that he was sick in the back of the taxi. (Over that, too, I draw a fastidious veil.) Once again others had acted and by so doing had shaped the story of his life: Babar’s flight, Hyder’s bullets, the exaltation of Mir Harappa and the resulting alteration in Iskander added up, as far as our hero was concerned, to a kick in his personal teeth. Later, in his own home (we have not yet visited the Shakil residence: an unglamorous apartment in one of the city’s older housing zones, four rooms notable for the complete absence of all but the most essential items of furniture, as though Shakil in his adulthood were rebelling against the fantasticated clutter of his mothers’ home, and choosing, instead, the bare-walled asceticism of his selected father, the vanished, birdcaged schoolteacher Eduardo Rodrigues. A father is both a warning and a lure), which he had been obliged by the outraged taxi-driver to reach stinking and on foot, he retired to bed, heat-drained, his head still spinning; he placed a bundle of tattered notebooks on his bedside table and said as he drifted into sleep: ‘Babar, life is long.’
The next day he returned to work; and the day after that he began to fall in love.
Once upon a time there was a plot of land. It was attractively situated in the heart of the First Phase of the Defense Services Officers’ Co-operative Housing Society; to its right stood the official residence of the national minister for education, information and tourism, an imposing building whose walls were clad in green onyx marble streaked with red, and to its left was the home of the widow of the late Joint Chief of Staff, Marshal Aurangzeb. Despite location and neighbours, however, the plot of land remained empty; no foundations had been dug there, no shuttering raised to build walls of reinforced cement concrete. The plot of land lay, tragically for its owner, in a small hollow; so that when the two days of pouring rain which the city enjoyed each year arrived, the waters flooded into the empty plot and formed a muddy lake. This unusual phenomenon of a lake which came into being for two days a year and which was then boiled away by the sun, leaving behind a thin mulch of water-transported garbage and faeces, was enough to discourage all potential builders, even though the plot was, as stated above, congenially sited: the Aga Khan owned the lodge at the top of the nearby hill, and the eldest son of the President, Field-Marshal Mohammad A., also lived nearby. It was on this hapless patch of earth that Pinkie Aurangzeb decided to raise turkeys.
Deserted by living lover as well as dead husband, the Marshal’s widow elected to turn her hand to business. Much taken by the success of the new shaver-chicken scheme which the national airline had recently begun to operate from batteries on the periphery of the airport, Pinkie decided to go for bigger birds. The officers of the housing society were incapable of resisting Mrs Aurangzeb’s allure (it might have been fading, but it was still too much for clerks), and turned blind eyes to the clouds of gobbling fowls which she released into the vacant, walled-in property. The arrival of the turkeys was treated by Mrs Bilquìs Hyder as a personal insult. A highly-strung lady, of whom it was said that troubles in her marriage were placing her brain under increasing stress, she took to leaning out of windows and abusing the noisy birds. ‘Shoo! Shut up, crazy fellows! Turkeys making God knows what-all racket right next to a minister’s house! See if I don’t slit your throats!’
When Bilquìs appealed to her husband to do something about the eternally gobbling birds who were destroying what remained of her peace of mind, Raza Hyder replied calmly, ‘She is the widow of our great Marshal, wife. Allowances must be made.’ The minister for education, information and tourism was tired at the end of a hard day’s work in which he had approved measures which would legalize the piracy by the government of Western scientific text-books, personally supervised the smashing of one of the small portable presses on which anti-state propaganda was illicitly printed and which had been discovered in the basement of an England-returned arts graduate who had been corrupted by foreign ideas, and discussed with the city’s leading art dealers the growing problem of pilferage of antiquities from the country’s archaeological sites – discussed the issue, one should add, with such sensitivity that the dealers had been moved to present him, in recognition of his attitude, with a small stone head from Taxila, dating from the time of Alexander the Great’s expedition into the north. In short, Raza Hyder was in no mood for turkeys.
Bilquìs had not forgotten what a fat man had hinted about her husband and Mrs Aurangzeb on the verandah of Mohenjo years ago; she remembered the time when her husband had been willing to stake himself to the ground on her behalf; and she was also, in her thirty-second year, becoming increasingly shrill. That was the year in which the Loo blew more fiercely than ever before, and cases of fever and madness increased by four hundred and twenty per cent … Bilquìs placed her hands upon her hips and yelled at Raza in the presence of both her daughters: ‘O, a fine day for me! Now you humiliate me with birds.’ Her elder daughter, the mental case, began to blush, because it was evident that the gobbling turkeys did indeed represent one more victory for Pinkie Aurangzeb over other men’s wives, the last such victory, of which the victor was wholly unaware.
And once upon a time there was a retarded daughter, who for twelve years had been given to understand that she embodied her mother’s shame. Yes, now I must come to you, Sufiya Zinobia, in your outsize cot with the rubber sheeting, in that ministerial residence of marble walls, in an upstairs bedroom through whose windows turkeys gobbled at you, while at a dressing table of onyx marble your sister screamed at the ayah to pull her hair.
Sufiya Zinobia at the age of twelve had formed the unattractive habit of tearing her hair. When her dark-brown locks were being washed by Shahbanou the Parsee ayah, she would continually kick and scream; the ayah was always forced to give up before the last of the soap had been rinsed out. The constant presence of sandalwood-scented detergent gave Sufiya Zinobia an appalling case of split ends, and she would sit in the enormous cot which her parents had constructed for her (and which they had brought all the way from Q., complete with expanses of rubber undersheets and large-size babies’ comforters) and tear each damaged hair in two, all the way down to the root. This she did seriously, systematically, as if inflicting ritual injury upon herself like one of Iskander Harappa’s bedbugs, the Shia dervishes in the processions of 10 Muharram. Her eyes, while she worked, acquired a dull glint, a gleam of distant ice or fire from far below their habitually opaque surface; and the torn cloud of hairs stood out around her face and formed in the sunlight a kind of halo of destruction.
It was the d
ay after the turkey outburst of Bilquìs Hyder. Sufiya Zinobia tore her hair in her cot; but Good News, plain-faced as a chapati, was determined to prove that her great thick mane had grown long enough to sit upon. Straining her head backwards she shouted at pale Shahbanou: ‘Pull down! Hard as you can! What’re you waiting for, stupid? Yank!’ – and the ayah, hollow-eyed, frail, tried to tuck hair-tips under Good News’s bony rump. Tears of pain stood in the girl’s determined eyes: ‘A woman’s beauty,’ Good News gasped, ‘grows down from the top of her head. It is well known that men go crazy for shiny hair that you can put under your bums.’ Shahbanou in flat tones stated: ‘No good, bibi, won’t go.’ Good News pummelling the ayah turned on her sister in her wrath: ‘You. Thing. Look at you. Who would marry you with that hair, even if you had a brain? Turnip. Beetroot. Angrez radish. See how you make trouble for me with your tearing. Elder sister should marry first but who will come for her, ayah? I swear, my tragedy, what do you know. Come on now, pull again, this time don’t pretend it won’t reach – no, never mind that fool now, leave her with her stinky blushes and her wetting. She doesn’t understand, what could she understand, zero.’ And Shahbanou, shrugging, impervious to Naveed Hyder’s blows: ‘You shouldn’t talk so bad to your sister, bibi, one day your tongue will go black and fall off.’
Two sisters in a room while outside the hot wind begins to blow. Shutters are put up against the wildness of the blast, and over the garden wall turkeys panic in the feverish clutches of the gale. As the Loo increases in fury, the house subsides into sleep. Shahbanou on a mat on the floor beside Sufiya Zinobia’s cot; Good News, exhausted by hair-pullery, sprawls on her ten-year-old’s bed.
Two sisters asleep: in repose, the younger girl’s face revealed its plainness, stripped of its waking determination to be attractive; while the simpleton lost, in sleep, the bland vacuity of her expression, and the severe classicism of her features would have pleased any watching eye. What contrasts in these girls! Sufiya Zinobia, embarrassingly small (no, we shall avoid, at all costs, comparing her to an Oriental miniature), and Good News rangy, elongated. Sufiya and Naveed, shame and good news: the one slow and silent, the other quick with her noise. Good News would stare brazenly at her elders; Sufiya averted her eyes. But Naveed Hyder was her mother’s little angel, she got away with everything. ‘Imagine,’ Omar Khayyam would think in later years, ‘if that marriage scandal had happened to Sufiya Zinobia! They’d have cut her skin off and sent it to the dhobi.’
Listen: you could have taken the whole quantity of sisterly love inside Good News Hyder, sealed it in an envelope and posted it anywhere in the world for one rupee airmail, that’s how much it weighed … where was I? Oh, yes, the hot wind blew, its howl a maw of sound that swallowed all other noise, that dry gale bearing disease and madness upon its sand-sharp wings, the worst Loo in living memory, releasing demons into the world, forcing its way through shutters to plague Bilquìs with the insupportable phantoms of her past, so that although she buried her head under a pillow she still saw before her eyes a golden equestrian figure carrying a pennant on which there flamed the terrifyingly cryptic word Excelsior. Not even the gobbling of the turkeys could be heard above the gale, as the world took shelter; then the searing fingers of the wind penetrated a bedroom in which two sisters slept, and one of them began to stir.
It’s easy to blame trouble on a wind. Maybe that pestilential blast did have something to do with it – maybe, when it touched Sufiya Zinobia, she reddened under its awful hand, she burned, and maybe that’s why she got up, eyes blank as milk, and left the room – but I prefer to believe that the wind was no more than a coincidence, an excuse; that what happened happened because twelve years of unloved humiliation take their toll, even on an idiot, and there is always a point at which something breaks, even though the last straw cannot be identified with any certainty: was it Good News’s marriage worries? Or Raza’s calmness in the face of shrieking Bilquìs? Impossible to say.
She must have been sleepwalking, because when they found her she looked rested, as if she’d had a good deep sleep. When the wind died and the household awoke from its turbulent afternoon slumber Shahbanou noticed the empty cot at once and raised the alarm. Afterwards nobody could work out how the girl had escaped, how she managed to sleepwalk through an entire houseful of government furniture and sentries. Shahbanou would always say that it must have been quite a wind, it sent soldiers to sleep at the gate and wrought a somnambulist miracle of such potency that Sufiya Zinobia’s passage through the house, into the garden and over the wall acquired the power of infecting anyone she passed, who must have fallen instantly into a wind-sick trance. But it is my opinion that the source of the power, the worker of the miracle, was Sufiya Zinobia herself; there would be other such occasions, when one could not blame the wind …
They found her in the aftermath of the Loo, sitting fast asleep under the sun’s ferocity in the turkey-yard of the widow Aurangzeb, a little huddled figure snoring gently amidst the corpses of the birds. Yes, they were all dead, every one of the two hundred and eighteen turkeys of Pinkie’s loneliness, and people were so shocked that they forgot to clear away the corpses for a whole day, leaving the dead birds to rot in the heat and in the crepuscular gloom of the evening and beneath the ice-hot stars, two hundred and eighteen that would never find their way into ovens or on to dining tables. Sufiya Zinobia had torn off their heads and then reached down into their bodies to draw their guts up through their necks with her tiny and weaponless hands. Shahbanou, who found her first, did not dare to approach her; then Raza and Bilquìs arrived, and soon everybody, sister, servants, neighbours, was standing and gaping at the spectacle of the bloodied girl and the decapitated creatures with intestines instead of heads. Pinki Aurangzeb looked hollowly upon the carnage, and was struck by the meaningless hatred in Bilquìs’s eyes; the two women remained silent, each in the grip of a different horror, so that it was Raza Hyder, his watery black-rimmed eyes riveted upon the face of his daughter with her bloodied lips, who spoke first in a voice echoing with admiration as well as revulsion: ‘With her bare hands,’ the new government minister trembled, ‘what gave the child such strength?’
Now that the iron hoops of the silence had been snapped Shahbanou the ayah began wailing at the top of her voice: ‘Ullu-ullu-ullu!’, a gibberish lament of such high pitch that it dragged Sufiya Zinobia out of her lethal sleep; she opened those eyes of watered milk and on seeing the devastation around her she fainted, echoing her own mother on that far-off day when Bilquìs found herself naked in a crowd and passed out cold for shame.
What forces moved that sleeping three-year-old mind in its twelve-year-old body to order an all-out assault upon feathered turkey-cocks and hens? One can only speculate: was Sufiya Zinobia trying, like a good daughter, to rid her mother of the gobbler plague? Or did the anger, the proud outrage which Raza Hyder ought to have felt, but refused to do so, preferring to make allowances for Pinkie, find its way into his daughter instead? – What seems certain is that Sufiya Zinobia, for so long burdened with being a miracle-gone-wrong, a family’s shame made flesh, had discovered in the labyrinths of her unconscious self the hidden path that links sharam to violence; and that, awakening, she was as surprised as anyone by the force of what had been unleashed.
The beast inside the beauty. Opposing elements of a fairy-tale combined in a single character … Bilquìs did not, on this occasion, faint. The embarrassment of her daughter’s deed, the ice of this latest shame lent a frozen rigidity to her bearing. ‘Be quiet,’ she ordered the ululating ayah, ‘go in and bring out scissors.’ Until the ayah had completed her enigmatic errand Bilquìs would let nobody touch the girl; she circled her in a manner so forbidding that not even Raza Hyder dared go near. While Shahbanou ran for scissors Bilquìs spoke softly, under her breath, so that only a few words wafted as far as the watching husband, widow, younger daughter, servants, anonymous passers-by. ‘… Tear your hair … birthright … woman’s pride … all fuzzy-wuzzy like a hubshee
female … cheapness … loose … crazy,’ and then the scissors came, and still nobody dared intervene, as Bilquìs grabbed hold of great clumps of her daughter’s savaged tresses, and cut, and cut, and cut. At last she stood up, out of breath, and working the scissors absently with her fingers she turned away. Sufiya Zinobia’s head looked like a cornfield after a fire; sad, black stubble, a catastrophic desolation wrought by maternal rage. Raza Hyder picked his daughter up with a gentleness born of his infinite puzzlement and carried her indoors, away from the scissors that were still snipping at air in Bilquìs’s uncontrollable hand.
Scissors cutting air mean trouble in the family.
‘O, Mummy!’ Good News giggled with fear. ‘What did you do? She looks like …’