He had two-way bugs placed in their telephones and after that the Soviet Ambassador was plagued by interminable recordings of Hail to the Chief whenever he picked up his receiver, while the American got the complete thoughts of Chairman Mao. He smuggled a series of beautiful young boys into the British Ambassador’s bed, much to the consternation, not to say delight, of his wife, who developed thereafter the habit of retiring to her room very early, just in case. He expelled cultural attachés and agricultural attachés. He summoned the Ambassadors to his office at three in the morning and screamed at them until dawn, accusing them of conspiring with religious fanatics and disaffected textile tycoons. He blocked their drains and censored their incoming mail, depriving the English of their subscription copies of horse-racing journals, the Russians of Playboy and the Americans of everything else. The last of the nine Americans lasted only eight weeks, dying of a heart attack two days before the coup which dethroned Isky and ended the game. ‘If I last long enough,’ the Chairman mused, ‘maybe I can destroy the whole international diplomatic network. They’ll run out of Ambassadors before I run out of steam.’
In the fifteenth century a great man came to power. Yes, he seemed omnipotent, he could trifle with the emissaries of the might, look at me, he was saying, you can’t catch me. Immortal, invulnerable Harappa. He gave people pride … the tenth American Ambassador arrived after Iskander’s arrest, and expression of blessed relief on his face. When he presented his credentials to Raza Hyder he murmured quietly, ‘Forgive me, sir, but I hope you lack your predecessor’s sense of humour.’
‘The question of national stability,’ Hyder replied, ‘is no joke.’
Once, when Arjumand visited her father in his hell-hole of a jail, Iskander, bruised, wasted, sick with dysentery, forced a grin to his lips. ‘This tenth bastard sounds like a real shit,’ he said painfully. ‘I wish I could have made it into double figures.’
In the fifteenth century … but the century did not, despite posters, turn in the year of his accession. That happened later. But such was the impact of his coming that the actual change, thirteen hundred into fourteen hundred, felt like an anticlimax when it finally occurred. His greatness overpowered Time itself. A NEW MAN FOR A NEW CENTURY … yes, he ushered it in, ahead of Time. But it did the dirty on him. Time’s revenge: it hung him out to dry.
They hanged him in the middle of the night, cut him down, wrapped him up and gave him to Talvar Ulhaq, who put him into a plane and flew him to Mohenjo, where two women waited, under guard. When the body had been unloaded the pilot and crew of the Fokker Friendship refused to leave the aircraft. The plane waited for Talvar at the top of Mohenjo’s runway, giving off a nervous haze, as if it could not bear to stay in that place an instant longer than necessary. Rani and Arjumand were driven by staff car to Sikandra, that outlying zone of Mohenjo where Harappas had always been buried. And saw amid the marble umbrellas of the tombs a fresh, deep hole. Talvar Ulhaq at attention beside the white-swathed body. Rani Harappa, white-haired now, like the phantom of Pinkie Aurangzeb, refused to cry. ‘So it’s him,’ she said. Talvar bowed, stiff-necked, from the waist. ‘Prove it,’ said Rani Harappa. ‘Show me my husband’s face.’
‘You should spare yourself,’ Talvar replied. ‘He was hanged.’
‘Be quiet,’ Rani said. ‘Pull back the sheet.’
‘I greatly regret,’ Talvar Ulhaq bowed again, ‘but I have orders.’
‘What orders?’ Rani did not raise her voice. ‘Who can deny me such a thing?’ But Talvar said again, ‘Sincerely. I regret,’ and lowered his traitor’s eyes. Talvar and Raza, policeman and soldier: Isky’s men.
‘Then something is the matter with the body,’ Rani said, at which Talvar stiffened. ‘Your husband is dead,’ he snapped, ‘what can be the matter with him now?’
‘Then let me kiss him through the sheet,’ Rani whispered, and bent down to the swaddled shape. Talvar did not attempt to stop her, until he realized what she was up to, and by then her nails had clawed a great hole in the cloth, and there, staring up at her with open eyes, was Iskander’s ash-grey face.
‘You didn’t even close them,’ Arjumand spoke for the first time. But her mother fell silent, staring intently at fleshy lips, at silver hair, until they pulled her away … ‘Go on,’ Rani said, ‘bury the evidence of your shame. I have seen it now.’ The sun leapt over the horizon as they laid Iskander down.
‘When you hang a man,’ Rani Harappa said distantly in the returning car, ‘the eyes bulge. The face turns blue. The tongue sticks out.’
‘Amma, for God’s sake.’
‘The bowels open, but they could have cleaned that up. I smelled some disinfectant.’
‘I won’t listen to this.’
‘Maybe even the face, they have people to fix such things, to cut off the tongue so that the lips will shut. Maybe make-up artists were employed.’
Arjumand Harappa covered her ears.
‘But one thing remains. On a hanged man’s neck the rope leaves its mark. Iskander’s neck was clean.’
‘This is disgusting,’ Arjumand said, ‘I’ll be sick.’
‘Don’t you understand?’ Rani Harappa shouted at her. ‘If the rope did not mark him, it must be because he was already dead. Are you to stupid to see? They hanged a corpse.’
Arjumand’s hands fell to her lap. ‘O God.’ The mark-free neck: absence of death’s visiting card. Seized by a sudden unreason, Arjumand cried, ‘Why are you talking so big, Amma? What do you know about hangings and all?’
‘You have forgotten,’ Rani said mildly, ‘I saw Little Mir.’
That day Rani Harappa tried, for the last time, to call her old friend Bilquìs Hyder on the telephone.
‘I’m sorry,’ a voice said, ‘Begum Hyder cannot come to talk.’
‘Then it’s true,’ Rani thought, ‘poor Bilquìs. He has her shut away as well.’
Rani and Arjumand were kept under house arrest for six years exactly, two before the execution of Iskander Harappa, four after it. During that time they completely failed to draw closer to each other, owing to the incompatibility of their memories. But the one thing they did have in common was that neither of them ever wept over Iskander’s death. The presence at Mohenjo of a small canvas mountain-range of Army tents, which had been thrown up as if by an earthquake in that same courtyard in which Raza Hyder had once staked himself to the ground, kept their eyes dry. That is to say, they were living on usurped soil, in occupied territory, and they were determined not to let the invaders see their tears. Their chief warder, a certain Captain Ijazz, a young barrel of a fellow with toothbrush hair and a persistent fuzz on his upper lip which obstinately refused to thicken into a moustache, at first attempted to goad them into it. ‘God knows what you women are,’ he shrugged. ‘You rich bitches. Your man is dead but you will not wet his grave.’ Rani Harappa refused to be provoked. ‘You are right,’ she replied, ‘God knows. And He also knows about young men in uniforms. Brass buttons cannot hide a thing from Him.’
During those years spent beneath the suspicious eyes of soldiers and in the cold breezes of her daughter’s solitude Rani Harappa continued to embroider woollen shawls. ‘House arrest changes very little,’ she admitted to Captain Ijazz at the very beginning, ‘speaking for myself. It just means there are new faces around to say a few words to now and then.’
‘Don’t start imagining I’m your friend,’ Ijazz shouted, the sweat glistening on his fuzzy mouth. ‘Once we’ve killed that bastard we’ll confiscate this house. All this gold, silver, all those dirty foreign paintings of naked women and of men who are half horse. It must go.’
‘Start with the pictures in my bedroom,’ Rani advised him. ‘They are worth the most money. And let me know if you need help to sort out the real silver from the plate.’
Captain Ijazz was less than nineteen years old when he came to Mohenjo, and in the confusion of his youth he swung violently between the braggadocio born of his embarrassment at being sent to guard such illustrious l
adies, and the incompetent awkward shyness of his years. When Rani Harappa offered to assist him with the looting of Mohenjo the flint of his shame ignited the tinder of his pride and he ordered his men to make a pile of valuables in front of the verandah where she sat, her face neutral and composed, and worked upon a shawl. Babar Shakil in his brief youth had burned one heap of relics; Captain Ijazz, who had never heard of the boy who became an angel, reignited that bonfire at Mohenjo, the bonfire in which men burn what oppresses them about the past. And throughout that day of flame Rani Harappa guided the vandalizing soldiers, making sure the choicest pieces of furniture and the finest works of art found their way into the blaze.
Two days later Ijazz came up to Rani, who was in her rocking-chair as usual, and apologized gracelessly for his intemperate deed. ‘No, it was a good idea,’ she replied, ‘I didn’t like that old stuff anyway, but Isky would have gone wild if I’d tried to throw it out.’ After the fire-looting of Mohenjo, Ijazz started treating Rani Harappa with respect, and by the end of the six years he had begun to think of her as a parent, because he had grown up in front of her eyes. Deprived of a normal life and of the camaraderie of the barracks, Ijazz took to pouring his heart out to Rani, all his half-formed dreams of women and of a small farm in the north.
‘It’s my fate,’ Rani thought, ‘to get mistaken for people’s mothers.’ She remembered that even Iskander had started making that mistake by the end. The last time he visited Mohenjo he bent down and kissed her feet.
The two women each took their revenge on their captor. Rani made him love her, with the result that he hated himself; but Arjumand began to do what she had never done in her life, that is, she dressed to kill. The virgin Ironpants swung her hips and wiggled her behind and flashed her eyes at all the soldiers, but most of all at the peach-faced Captain Ijazz. The effect of her behaviour was dramatic. Fights broke out in the little canvas Himalayas, teeth were broken, soldiers inflicted knife-wounds on their comrades. Ijazz himself was screaming inwardly, in the grip of a lust so fierce that he thought he would explode, like a balloon full of coloured water. He cornered Arjumand one afternoon while her mother was asleep. ‘Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to,’ he warned her, ‘you millionaire whores. Think you can do anything. In my village a girl would have been stoned for acting like you do, such cheapness, you know what I mean.’
‘Then have me stoned,’ Arjumand retorted, ‘I dare you.’
One month later Ijazz spoke to her again. ‘The men want to rape you,’ he yelled helplessly, ‘I can see it in their faces. Why should I stop them? I should permit it; you are bringing this shame on your own head.’
‘Let them come, by all means,’ Arjumand replied, ‘but you must be the first.’
‘Harlot,’ he cursed her in his impotence, ‘don’t you know you’re in our power? Nobody cares one paisa what happens to you.’
‘I know,’ she said.
By the end of the period of house arrest, when Arjumand had Captain Ijazz imprisoned and tortured slowly to death, he was twenty-four years old; but his hair, like that of the late Iskander Harappa, had gone permanently white as snow. When they took him to the torture chambers he said just three words before he started screaming: ‘So, what’s new?’
Rani Harappa, rocking on her verandah, completed in six years of embroidery a total of eighteen shawls, the most exquisite pieces she ever created; but instead of showing off her work to daughter or soldiers, she placed each shawl, on completion, in a black metal trunk full of naphthalene balls and fastened the lock. The key to this trunk was the only one she had been permitted to keep. Captain Ijazz kept all the rest on a large ring hanging from his belt, which reminded Rani of Bilquìs Hyder, the Bilquìs who locked doors compulsively under the influence of the afternoon wind. Poor Bilquìs. She, Rani, missed their telephone conversations. The deeds of men had severed that link between the women, that nourishing cord which had, at different times, carried messages of support first one way, then the other, along its unseen pulses.
Can’t be helped. Rani, phlegmatically, worked on her perfect shawls. At first Captain Ijazz had tried to deny her needles and thread, but she shamed him out of that quickly enough. ‘Don’t think I’m going to stab myself on account of you, boy,’ she told him. ‘Or what do you suppose? Will I hang myself, perhaps, by a noose of embroidery wool?’ The serenity of Iskander’s wife (this was before he died) won the day. Ijazz even agreed to requisition balls of wool in the colours and weights she specified from the military quartermaster-stores; and then once again she began to work, to weave the shawls, those soft fields, and then to raise upon them the vivid and magical crops of her sorceress’s art.
Eighteen shawls locked in a truck: Rani, too, was perpetuating memories. Harappa the martyr, the demigod, lived on in his daughter’s thoughts; but no two sets of memories ever match, even when their subject is the same … Rani never showed her work to anyone until, years later, she sent the trunk to Arjumand as a gift. Nobody ever looked over her shoulder as she worked. Neither soldiers nor daughter were interested in what Mrs Harappa did to while away her life.
An epitaph of wool. The eighteen shawls of memory. Every artist has the right to name her creation, and Rani would put a piece of paper inside the trunk before she sent it off to her newly powerful daughter. On this piece of paper she would write her chosen title: The Shamelessness of Iskander the Great.’ And she would add a surprising signature: Rani Humayun. Her own name, retrieved from the mothballs of the past.
What did eighteen shawls depict?
Locked in their trunk, they said unspeakable things which nobody wanted to hear: the badminton shawl, on which, against a lime-green background and within a delicate border of overlapping racquets and shuttlecocks and frilly underpants, the great man lay unclothed, while all about him the pink-skinned concubines cavorted, their sporting outfits falling lightly from their bodies; how brilliantly the folds of breeze-caught garments were portrayed, how subtle the felicities of light and shade! – the female figures seemed unable to bear the confinements of white shirts, brassières, gymshoes, they flung them off, while Isky lounging on his left flank, propped up on an elbow, received their ministrations, yes, I know, you have made a saint of him, my daughter, you swallowed everything he dished out, his abstinence, his celibacy of an Oriental Pope, but he could not do without for long, that man of pleasure masquerading as a servant of Duty, that aristocrat who insisted on his seigneurial rights, no man better at hiding his sins, but I knew him, he hid nothing from me, I saw the white girls in the village swell and pop, I knew about the small but regular donations he sent them, Harappa children must not starve, and after he fell they came to me; and the slapping shawl, Iskander a thousand times over raising his hand, lifting it against ministers, ambassadors, argumentative holy men, mill-owners, servants, friends, it seemed as if every slap he ever delivered was here, and how many times he did it, Arjumand, not to you, to you he would not have, so you will not believe, but see upon the cheeks of his contemporaries the indelible blushes engendered by his palm; and the kicking shawl, Iskander booting bottoms and provoking in their owners other feelings than love; and the hissing shawl, Iskander seated in the office of his glory, its details accurate in the most minute degree, so that one could almost smell that awesome chamber, that place of pointed concrete arches with his own Thoughts framed upon the wall, and the Mont Blanc pens like black alps in their holders on his desk, even their white stars picked out by her scrupulous needle; that room of shadows and of power, in which no shadow was empty, eyes glinted in every area of shade, red tongues flicked, silver-threaded whispers susurrated across the cloth: Iskander and his spies, the head spider at the heart of that web of listeners and whisperers, she has sewn the silvery threads of the web, they radiated out from his face, in silver thread she revealed the arachnid terrors of the days, when men lied to their sons and angry women had only to murmur to the breeze to bring a fearsome revenge down upon their lovers, you never felt the fear, Arjuman
d, of wondering what he knew; and the torture shawl, on which she embroidered the foetid violence of his jails, blindfolded prisoners tied to chairs while jailers hurled buckets of water, now boiling hot (the thread-steam rose), now freezing cold, until the bodies of the victims grew confused and cold water raised hot burns upon their skins: weals of red embroidery rose scarlike on the shawl; and the white shawl, embroidered white on white, so that it revealed its secrets only to the most meticulous and squinting eyes: it showed policemen, because he had given them new uniforms, white from head to toe, white helmets with silver spikes, white leather holsters, white jackboots up to the knee, policemen running discothèques in which the booze flowed freely, white bottles with white labels, white powders sniffed from the white backs of gloves, he turned a blind eye, understand, he wanted the police strong and the Army weak, he was dazzled, daughter, by whiteness; and the swearing shawl, Iskander’s mouth as wide as the Abyss, the oaths represented by foul creatures crawling from his lips, vermilion cockroaches, magenta lizards, turquoise leeches, ochre scorpions, indigo spiders, albino rats, because he never stopped that either, how selective, Arjumand, your ears; and the shawls of international shame, Isky grovelling at primrose Chinese feet, Isky conspiring with Pahlevi, embracing Dada Amin; eschatological Iskander, riding an atomic bomb; Harappa and Shaggy Dog like cruel boys slitting the throat of an emerald chicken and plucking the feathers from its east wing, one by one; and the election shawls, one for the day of suffrage that began his reign, one for the day that led to his downfall, shawls swarming with figures, each one a breathtakingly lifelike portrait of a member of the Front, figures breaking seals, stuffing ballot-boxes, smashing heads, figures swaggering into polling booths to watch the peasants vote, stick-waving rifle-toting figures, fire-raisers, mobs, and on the shawl of the second election there were three times as many figures as on the first, but despite the crowded field of her art not a single face was anonymous, every tiny being had a name, it was an act of accusation on the grandest conceivable scale, and of course he’d have won anyway, daughter, no question, a respectable victory, but he wanted more, only annihilation was good enough for his opponents, he wanted them squashed like cockroaches under his boot, yes, obliteration, and in the end it came to him instead, don’t think he wasn’t surprised, he had forgotten he was only a man; and the allegorical shawl, Iskander and the Death of Democracy, his hands around her throat, squeezing Democracy’s gullet, while her eyes bulged, her face turned blue, her tongue protruded, she shat in her pajamas, her hands became hooks trying to grab the wind, and Iskander with his eyes shut squeezed and squeezed, while in the background the Generals watched, the murder reflected by a miracle of the needlewoman’s skill in the mirrored glasses they all wore, all except one, with deep black circles around his eyes and easy tears on his cheeks, and behind the Generals other figures, peeping over uniformed shoulders, through epaulettes, under armpits, crew-cut Americans and Russians in baggy suits and even the great Zedong himself, they all watched, they didn’t have to lift a finger, no need to look beyond your father, Arjumand, no need to hunt conspirators, he did their work for them, they didn’t even have to break wind, I am hope, he used to say, and so he was, but he took off that cloak and turned into something else, Iskander the assassin of possibility, immortalized on a cloth, on which she, the artist, had depicted his victim as a young girl, small, physically frail, internally damaged: she had taken for her model her memory of an idiot, and consequently innocent, child, Sufiya Zinobia Hyder (now Shakil), gasping and empurpled in Iskander’s unyielding fist; and the autobiographical shawl, the portrait of the artist as an old crone, that self-portrait in which Rani had depicted herself as being composed of the same materials as the house, wood, brick, tin, her body merging into the fabric of Mohenjo, she was earth and cracks and spiders, and a fine mist of oblivion clouded the scene; that was the fourteenth shawl, and the fifteenth was the shawl of the fifteenth century, the famous poster recreated in thread, Iskander pointing at the future, only there was nothing on the horizon, no dawn-fingers, just the endless waves of night; and then Pinkie’s shawl, on which she committed suicide; and the last two were the worst: the shawl of hell, which, as Omar Khayyam Shakil had discovered as a child, lay in the west of the country in the vicinity of Q., where the separatist movement had grown out of all recognition in the wake of the secession of the East, proliferation of sheep-fuckers, but Iskander had done for them, there it all was in scarlet, scarlet and nothing but scarlet, what he did for the sake of no-more-secessions, in the name of never-another-East-Wing, the bodies sprawled across the shawl, the men without genitals, the sundered legs, the intestines in place of faces, the alien legion of the dead blotting out the memory of Raza Hyder’s governorship, or even giving that period, in retrospect, a kindly, tolerant glow, because there was no comparison, daughter, your man of the people, your master of the common touch, I have lost count of the corpses on my shawl, twenty, fifty, a hundred thousand dead, who knows, and not enough scarlet thread on earth to show the blood, the people hanging upside down with dogs at their open guts, the people grinning lifelessly with bullet-holes for second mouths, the people united in the worm-feast of that shawl of flesh and death; and Little Mir Harappa on the last of all the shawls, Little Mir buried at the bottom of a trunk, but of course he rose to clasp his cousin in his own phantasmal grip, to drag Iskander Harappa down to hell … her eighteenth shawl and her supreme masterpiece, a panoramic landscape, the hard earth of her exile stretched across the cloth, from Mohenjo as far as Daro, villagers balancing buckets on shoulder-poles, horses running free, women tilling the soil, the dawn light kindled in miracles of rose and blue embroidery: Daro was coming awake, and from its great verandah, by the steps, something long and heavy was swinging in the breeze, a single death after the carnage of the seventeenth shawl, Little Mir Harappa dangling by the neck under the eaves of his family home, dead in the first months of the Chairman’s reign, his sightless eyes staring down at the very spot where, once upon a time, the cadaver of an unloved dog had been permitted to decay, yes, she had delineated his body with an accuracy that stopped the heart, leaving out nothing, not the disembowelling, not the tear in the armpit through which Mir’s own heart had been removed, not the torn-out tongue, nothing, and there was a villager standing beside the corpse, with his bewildered remark sewn in black above his head, ‘It looks as if,’ the fellow said, ‘his body has been looted, like a house.’