Two tableaux. In the bridal chamber Naveed Hyder sits immovable and mulish while all around her are women frozen by their delight into living statues, women holding combs, brushes, silver-polish, antimony, staring at Naveed, disaster’s source, with petrified joy. Bariamma’s lips are the only moving features in the scene. Time-honoured words are dripping out of them: floozy, hussy, whore. And in Raza’s bedroom Bilquìs is clinging to her husband’s legs as he struggles into his pants.
Raza Hyder awoke to catastrophe from a dream in which he saw himself standing on the parade-ground of his failure before a phalanx of recruits all of whom were exact replicas of himself, except that they were incompetent, they could not march in step or dress to the left or polish their belt buckles properly. He had been screaming his despair at these shades of his own ineptitude, and the rage of the dream infected his waking mood. His first reaction to the news which Bilquìs forced past lips that did not want to let it through was that he had no option but to kill the girl. ‘Such shame,’ he said, ‘such havoc wrought to the plans of parents.’ He decided to shoot her in the head in front of his family members. Bilquìs clung to his thighs, slipped down as he began to move, and was dragged from the bedroom, her nails digging into his ankles. The cold sweat of her fear made her pencilled eyebrows run down her face. The ghost of Sindbad Mengal was not mentioned, but O, he was there all right. Army pistol in hand, Raza Hyder entered Good News’s room; the screams of women greeted him as he came.
But this is not the story of my discarded Anna M.; Raza, raising his gun, found himself unable to use it. ‘Throw her into the street,’ he said, and left the room.
Now the night is full of negotiations. Raza in his quarters stares at an unused pistol. Deputations are sent; he remains unbending. Then the ayah Shahbanou, rubbing sleep from black-rimmed eyes, so like Hyder’s own, is dispatched by Bilquìs to plead Good News’s cause. ‘He likes you because you are good with Sufiya Zinobia. He’ll listen maybe to you when he won’t to me.’ Bilquìs is crumbling visibly, has been reduced to pleading with servants. Shahbanou holds Good News’s future in her hands – Good News, who has kicked, abused, hit – ‘I’ll go, Begum Sahib,’ Shahbanou says. Ayah and father confer behind closed doors; ‘Forgive my saying, sir, but don’t pile shame on shame.’
At three a.m. Raza Hyder relents. There must be a wedding, the girl must be handed over to a husband, any husband. That will get rid of her and cause less of a stir than kicking her out. ‘A whore with a home,’ Raza summons Bilquìs to announce, ‘is better than a whore in the gutter.’ Naveed tells her mother the name: not without pride, she says clearly to one and all: ‘It must be Captain Talvar Ulhaq. Nobody else will do.’
Telephone calls. Mir Harappa awoken to be informed of the change of plan. ‘Your bastard family. Fuck me in the mouth if I don’t get even.’ Iskander Harappa receives the news calmly, relays it to Arjumand who is in her nightgown beside the telephone. Something flickers in her eyes.
It is Iskander who tells Haroun.
And one more call, to a police captain who has not slept a wink, who like Raza has spent part of the night fingering a pistol. ‘I will not tell you what I think of you,’ Raza Hyder roars into the mouthpiece, ‘but get your hide here tomorrow and take this no-good female off my hands. Not one paisa of dowry and keep out of my sight for ever after.’
‘Ji, I shall be honoured to marry your daughter,’ Talvar politely replies. And in the Hyder household, women who can scarcely believe their luck begin once again to make preparations for the great day. Naveed Hyder goes to bed and falls sound asleep with an innocent expression on her face. Dark henna on her soles turns orange while she rests.
‘Shame and scandal in the family,’ Shahbanou tells Sufiya Zinobia in the morning. ‘Bibi, you don’t know what you missed.’
Something else was happening that night. On university, campuses, in the bazaars of the cities, under cover of darkness, the people were assembling. By the time the sun rose it was clear that the government was going to fall. That morning the people took to the streets and set fire to motor cars, school buses, Army trucks and the libraries of the British Council and United States Information Service to express their displeasure. Field-Marshal A. ordered troops into the streets to restore peace. At eleven-fifteen he was visited by a General known to everyone by the nickname ‘Shaggy Dog’, an alleged associate of Chairman Iskander Harappa. General Shaggy Dog informed the distraught President that the armed forces were absolutely refusing to fire on civilians, and soldiers would shoot their officers rather than their fellow-countrymen. This statement convinced President A. that his time was up, and by lunchtime he had been replaced by General Shaggy, who placed A. under house arrest and appeared on the brand-new television service to announce that his sole purpose in assuming power was to lead the nation back towards democracy; elections would take place within eighteen months. The afternoon was spent by the people in joyful celebration; Datsuns, taxi-cabs, the Alliance Française building and the Goethe Institute provided the fuel for their incandescent happiness.
Mir Harappa heard about the bloodless coup of President Dog within eight minutes of Marshal A.’s resignation. This second major blow to his prestige drained all the fight out of Little Mir. Leaving a letter of resignation on his desk he fled to his Daro estate without bothering to await developments, and immured himself there in a mood of such desolation that the servants could hear him muttering under his breath that his days were numbered. ‘Two things have happened,’ he would say, ‘but the third is yet to come.’
Iskander and Arjumand spent the day with Haroun in Karachi. Iskander on the telephone all day, Arjumand so aroused by the news that she forgot to sympathize with Haroun about his cancelled wedding. ‘Stop looking so fish-faced,’ she told him, ‘the future has begun.’ Rani Harappa arrived by train from Mohenjo, thinking she was about to spend a carefree day at Good News’s Nikah celebrations, but Isky’s chauffeur Jokio told her at the station that the world had changed. He drove her to the town house, where Iskander embraced her warmly and said, ‘Good you came. Now we must stand together before the people; our moment has come.’ At once Rani forgot all about weddings and began to look, at forty, as young as her only daughter. ‘I knew it,’ she exulted inwardly. ‘Good old Shaggy Dog.’
So great was the excitement of that day that the news of the events in the Hyder household was blotted out completely, whereas on any other day the scandal would have been impossible to cover up. Captain Talvar Ulhaq came alone to the wedding, having chosen to involve neither friends nor family members in the shameful circumstances of his nuptials. He had to struggle through streets that were hot with burning cars in a police jeep that mercifully escaped the ministrations of the crowds, and was received by Raza Hyder with glacial formality and scorn. ‘It is my earnest intention,’ Talvar told Raza, ‘to be the finest son-in-law that you could wish for, so that in time you may reconsider your decision to cut your daughter out of your life.’ Raza gave the briefest of replies to this courageous speech. ‘I don’t care for polo players,’ he said.
Those guests who had managed to reach the Hyder residence through the unstable euphoria of the streets had taken the precaution of dressing in their oldest, most tattered clothes; nor did they wear any jewellery. They had put on these unfestive rags to avoid attracting the attention of the people, who usually put up with rich folk but might just have elected in their elation to add the city’s elite to their collection of burning symbols. The dilapidated condition of the guests was one of the strangest features of that day of strangenesses; Good News Hyder, oiled hennaed bejewelled, looked in that gathering of frightened celebrants even more out of place than she had appeared at the polo match of her inescapable destiny. ‘It’s like being married in a palace full of beggars,’ she whispered to Talvar, who sat flower-garlanded beside her on a little podium beneath the glittering, mirrorworked marquee. The sweetmeats and delicacies of Bilquìs’s motherly pride languished uneaten on long whiteclothed tables i
n the bizarre atmosphere of that horrified and dislocated time.
Why the guests refused to eat: already unbalanced by the dangers of the streets, they had been almost completely deranged by the information, which was conveyed to them on little handwritten erratum slips which Bilquìs had been writing out for hours, that while the bride was indeed the expected Good News Hyder there had been a last-minute change of groom. ‘Owing to circumstances beyond our control,’ read the little white chitties of humiliation, ‘the part of husband will be taken by Police Capt. Talvar Ulhaq.’ Bilquìs had had to write this line five hundred and fifty-five times over, and each successive inscription drove the nails of her shame deeper into her heart, so that by the time the guests arrived and the servants handed out the erratum slips she was as stiff with dishonour as if she had been impaled on a tree. As the shock of the coup was replaced on the guests’ faces by the awareness of the size of the catastrophe that had befallen the Hyders, Raza, too, became numb all over, anaesthetized by his public disgrace. The presence of the Himalayas of uneaten food struck the chill of shame into the soul of Shahbanou the ayah, who was standing by Sufiya Zinobia in a condition of such extreme despondency that she forgot to greet Omar Khayyam Shakil. The doctor had lumbered into that gathering of millionaires disguised as gardeners; his thoughts were so full of the ambiguities of his own engagement to the halfwit of his obsessions that he utterly failed to notice that he had walked into a mirage from the past, a ghost-image of the legendary party given by the three Shakil sisters in their old house in Q. The erratum slip rested unread in his plump tight fist until, belatedly, the meaning of the uneaten food dawned on him.
It was not an exact replica of that longago party. No food was eaten, but still a wedding took place. Can there ever have been a Nikah at which nobody flirted with anybody else, at which the hired musicians were so overwhelmed by the occasion that they neglected to play a single note? Certainly there could not have been many nuptial feasts at which the last-minute groom was all but murdered on his podium by his newly-acquired sister-in-law.
O dear, yes. I regret to have to inform you that (setting the seal, as it were, on that perfect disaster of a day) the somnolent demon of shame that had possessed Sufiya Zinobia on the day she slew the turkeys emerged once more beneath the mirror-shiny shamiana of disgrace.
A glazing-over of her eyes, which acquired the milky opacity of somnambulism. A pouring-in to her too-sensitive spirit of the great abundance of shame in that tormented tent. A fire beneath the skin, so that she began to flame all over, a golden blaze that dimmed the rouge on her cheeks and the paint on her fingers and toes … Omar Khayyam Shakil spotted what was going on, but too late, so that by the time he shouted ‘Look out!’ across that catatonic gathering the demon had already hurled Sufiya Zinobia across the party, and before anyone moved she had grabbed Captain Talvar Ulhaq by the head and begun to twist, to twist so hard that he screamed at the top of his voice, because his neck was on the point of snapping like a straw.
Good News Hyder grabbed her sister by the hair and pulled with all her might, feeling the burning heat of that supernatural passion scorch her fingers; then Omar Khayyam and Shahbanou and Raza Hyder and even Bilquìs joined in, as the guests sank further into their speechless stupor, aghast at this last expression of the impossible fantasy of the day. The combined efforts of the five desperate people succeeded in detaching Sufiya Zinobia’s hands before Talvar Ulhaq’s head was ripped off like a turkey’s; but then she buried her teeth in his neck, giving him a second scar to balance that famous love-bite, and sending his blood spurting long distances across the gathering, so that all her family and many of the camouflaged guests began to resemble workers in a halal slaughterhouse. Talvar was squealing like a pig, and when they finally dragged Sufiya Zinobia off him she had a morsel of his skin and flesh in her teeth. Afterwards, when he recovered, he was never able to move his head to the left. Sufiya Zinobia Hyder, the incarnation of her family’s shame and also, once again, its chief cause, fell limply into her fiancé’s arms, and Omar Khayyam had assailant and victim taken immediately to hospital, where Talvar Ulhaq remained on the critical list for one hundred and one hours, while Sufiya Zinobia had to be brought out of her self-induced trance by the exercise of more hypnotic skill than Omar had ever been required to display. Good News Hyder spent her wedding night weeping inconsolably on her mother’s shoulder in a hospital waiting-room. ‘That monster,’ she sobbed bitterly, ‘you should have had her drowned at birth.’
A short inventory of the effects of the wedding scandal: the stiff neck of Talvar Ulhaq, which terminated his career as a polo star; the birth of a spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation within Raza Hyder, who found it hard to ostracize a man whom his daughter had almost killed, so that Talvar and Good News were not, after all, cast out of the bosom of that accursed family; also the accelerated disintegration of Bilquìs Hyder, whose breakdown could no longer be concealed, even though she became, in the following years, little more than a whisper or rumour, because Raza Hyder kept her away from society, under a kind of unofficial house arrest.
What else? – When it became clear that Iskander Harappa’s Popular Front would do extremely well in the elections, Raza paid a call on Isky. Bilquìs stayed at home with her hair hanging loose, railing at the heavens because her husband, her Raza, had gone to abase himself before that blubber-lips who always got everything he wanted. Hyder tried to force himself to apologize for the wedding fiasco, but Iskander said merrily, ‘For God’s sake, Raza, Haroun can take care of himself, and as for your Talvar Ulhaq, I’m pretty impressed by the coup that fellow engineered. I tell you, he’s the man for me!’ Not long after this meeting, once the insanity of the elections had passed and President Shaggy Dog had retired into private life, Prime Minister Iskander Harappa made Talvar Ulhaq the youngest police chief in the country’s history, and also promoted Raza Hyder to the rank of General and placed him in command of the Army. Hyders and Harappas moved north to the new capital in the hills; Isky told Rani, ‘From now on Raza has no option but to be my man. With the amount of scandal sitting on his head, he knows he’d have been lucky to keep his commission if I hadn’t come along.’
Haroun Harappa, his heart broken by Good News, flung himself into the party work given him by Iskander, becoming an important figure in the Popular Front; and when, one day, Arjumand declared her love, he told her bluntly, ‘Nothing I can do. I have decided never to marry.’ The rejection of the virgin Iron-pants by Good News’s jilted fiancé engendered in that formidable young woman a hatred of all Hyders which she would never lose; she took the love she had intended to give Haroun and poured it like a votive offering over her father instead. Chairman and daughter, Iskander and Arjumand: ‘There are times,’ Rani thought, ‘when she seems more like his wife than I do.’ And another unspoken tension in the Harappa camp was that between Haroun Harappa and Talvar Ulhaq, who were obliged to work together, which they did for many years without ever finding it necessary to exchange a single spoken word.
The quiet marriage of Omar Khayyam Shakil and Sufiya Zinobia went off, by the way, without further incident. But what of Sufiya Zinobia? – Let me just say for the moment that what had reawoken in her did not go back to sleep for good. Her transformation from Miss Hyder into Mrs Shakil will not be (as we shall see) the last permanent change …
And along with Iskander, Rani, Arjumand, Haroun, Raza, Bilquìs, Dawood, Naveed, Talvar, Shahbanou, Sufiya Zinobia and Omar Khayyam, our story now moves north, to the new capital and the ancient mountains of its climactic phase.
Once upon a time there were two families, their destinies inseparable even by death. I had thought, before I began, that what I had on my hands was an almost excessively masculine tale, a saga of sexual rivalry, ambition, power, patronage, betrayal, death, revenge. But the women seem to have taken over; they marched in from the peripheries of the story to demand the inclusion of their own tragedies, histories and comedies, obliging me to couch my narrative in all mann
er of sinuous complexities, to see my ‘male’ plot refracted, so to speak, through the prisms of its reverse and ‘female’ side. It occurs to me that the women knew precisely what they were up to – that their stories explain, and even subsume, the men’s. Repression is a seamless garment; a society which is authoritarian in its social and sexual codes, which crushes its women beneath the intolerable burdens of honour and propriety, breeds repressions of other kinds as well. Contrariwise: dictators are always – or at least in public, on other people’s behalf – puritanical. So it turns out that my ‘male’ and ‘female’ plots are the same story, after all.
I hope that it goes without saying that not all women are crushed by any system, no matter how oppressive. It is commonly and, I believe, accurately said of Pakistan that her women are much more impressive than her men … their chains, nevertheless, are no fictions. They exist. And they are getting heavier.
If you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining.
In the end, though, it all blows up in your face.
IV
IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY
9
ALEXANDER THE GREAT
Iskander Harappa stands in the foreground, finger pointing towards the future, silhouetted against the dawn. Above his patrician profile the message curls; from right to left the flowing golden shapes. A NEW MAN FOR A NEW CENTURY. The fifteenth century (Hegiran calendar) peeps over the horizon, extending long fingers of radiance into the early sky. The sun rises rapidly in the tropics. And glinting on Isky’s finger is a ring of power, echoing the sun … the poster is omnipresent, stamping itself on the walls of mosques, graveyards, whorehouses, staining the mind: Isky the sorcerer, conjuring the sun from the black depths of the sea.