How Raza Hyder fell: in improbability; in chaos; in women’s clothing; in black.
Nobody questions women wearing veils. They pass through the mob and the ring of soldiers, jeeps, trucks. Finally Raza speaks: ‘So what now? Where to go from here?’
And because Omar Khayyam is filled with the sense of having walked out into the middle of a dream, he hears himself replying: ‘I think I know a place.’
And Sufiya Zinobia?
She did not attack the empty palace. She was not caught, nor killed, nor seen again in that part of the country. It was as if her hunger had been satisfied; or as though she had never been more than a rumour, a chimaera, the collective fantasy of a stifled people, a dream born of their rage; or even as if, sensing a change in the order of the world, she had retreated, and was prepared to wait a little longer, in that fifteenth century, for her time.
V
JUDGMENT DAY
It is almost over.
Veiled, bumping on buses, cowering in the shadows of bus stations, they head south and west. Always on the short-haul routes, the stopping buses, avoiding the Trunk Road mail expresses. Off the Potwar plateau, down into the riverine plains, their faces set towards the land-border beyond Q. They have only the money they find in their pockets, so they eat little, drink as much as possible: livid green cordials, pink tea scooped out of large aluminium pots, water drawn from yellow lakes in which enervated water-buffalo sprawl. For days they scarcely speak, and force themselves to remain impassive when policemen walk squinting along queues of waiting travellers at small-town depots, tapping their lathis against short-trousered thighs. For Shakil and Hyder, the humiliation of the ladies’ latrines. There is no country poorer than Escape.
They are not caught; nobody expects a fleeing President to be found in women’s clothing on a rutputty third-class bus. But there are sleepless days and nights; there is fear, and despair. A flight through an exploding land. In the lassitudinous heat of the rural areas bus radios interrupt the swooning agonies of singers to speak of riots and gunshots. On two occasions they sit in buses surrounded by demonstrators, and wonder if they are to die in an anonymous sandy town, engulfed by petrol fire. But the buses are allowed to pass, and slowly the border approaches. And beyond the border, the possibility of hope: yes, there might be sanctuary across the frontier, in that neighbouring country of priest-kings, godly men who would surely give refuge to a fallen leader with a bruise upon his brow. And then they might even be far enough from her, from feral nemesis, from the revenge of flesh against flesh. Raza Hyder, unmanned by wife-sewn veils, clings to such optimistic straws.
The border is impossible to police. Concrete posts marching across the wastes. Omar Khayyam remembers the stories of people crossing it at will, of old man Zoroaster impoverished by that open frontier, deprived by wasteland of all supplements to his income. The memory of Farah Rodrigues which this recollection triggers almost chokes him, mingling in his gullet with the history of the ayah Shahbanou; then the dizziness begins. As he recalls the cloud which descended along the frontier and frightened him so badly that he fainted in Farah’s arms, he realizes that his old vertigo is returning to torment him, it rushes upon him as he sits in a jolting bus with chickens pecking at his neck and travel-sick sharecroppers in the aisles, vomiting on his toes. The vertigo carries him back to his childhood and shows him once again the worst of all his nightmares, the gaping mouth of the void. The deepest parts of Omar Khayyam are stirring once more, the dizziness is churning them up, they are warning him that whatever anyone says he ought to know that the border is the edge of his world, the rim of things, and that the real dreams are these far-fetched notions of getting across that supernatural frontier into some wild hallucination of a promised land. Get back into ‘Nishapur’, the inner voices whisper, because that’s where you’ve been heading, all your life, ever since the day you left.
Fear fights off the vertigo; it gives him the power not to faint.
The worst moment comes almost at the end. They are climbing aboard the last of the buses of their flight, the bus which is to bear them to the depot at Q., when they hear the terrifying joke. ‘Look where we’ve got to in this country,’ the bus-driver sneers, he is enormous, with tree-trunk arms and a face like a horsehair cushion, ‘even the transvestites are going into purdah now.’ At once the busload of gas-miners and bauxite quarrymen starts up a racket of wolf-whistles, dirty laughs, obscenities, ululations, songs; hands reach out to pinch the hijra bottoms. ‘This is it,’ Omar Khayyam thinks, ‘done for, trapped, funtoosh,’ because he is sure that someone will tear off their veils, and Hyder’s is a famous face, after all – but just then Bilquìs Hyder speaks up and silences the passengers completely. ‘Shame should come to you, she cries in her unquestionably female voice, ‘have the men in this region sunk so low that ladies must be treated like whores?’ A hush of embarrassment in the bus. The driver, blushing, orders three farm labourers to vacate their seats at the very front of the vehicle, ‘to make sure, begums, that you are not molested further; yes, it is a question of honour for me, the dignity of my autobus has been dirtied.’
So: in a silent and apologetic bus, and after surviving a bad scare, Omar Khayyam Shakil and his two companions arrive, soon after midnight, at the bus station in the outskirts of Q. Hobbling on bad feet, unsupported by the stick he has been obliged to leave behind, exhausted, he leads them through unlit streets to a large building between the Cantonment and the bazaar, where he unveils himself and emits a certain whistle, repeating it until he sees the movement at an upstairs window; and then the contraption of Mistri Yakoob Balloch begins its descent, and they are raised into ‘Nishapur’, the mother-country, home, like buckets drawn from a well.
When Omar Khayyam’s three mothers understood who had been brought into their presence they emitted little sighs, as if after many years they had been released from some particularly constricting garments, and settling down comfortably side-by-side on their creaky old swing-seat they began to smile. The smile was beatific, innocent, but somehow its replication on the three identically ancient mouths gave it a quality of distinct, though indefinable, menace. It was the middle of the night, but one of the three old ladies, whom Omar Khayyam in the exhaustion of his travels had barely recognized as Chhunni-ma, ordered him to go at once into the kitchen and boil some tea, as if he had just come in after popping out for a couple of minutes. ‘No servants any more,’ Chhunni Shakil apologized gracefully to Raza Hyder, who had torn off his burqa and collapsed into a chair in a dazed condition for which fatigue was only a partial explanation, ‘but our first visitors for over fifty years must take a welcoming cup.’ Omar Khayyam lumbered off and returned with the tray, only to be scolded affectionately by a second mother, the withered remnant of Munnee-in-the-middle: ‘Hopeless, I swear. What pot are you bringing, boy? Go to the almirah and fetch out the best.’ He followed her pointing finger to a large teak cupboard in which he discovered, to his great amazement, the long-lost thousand-piece china service from the Gardner works in Tsarist Russia, those miracles of the crockery-maker’s art which had faded into mere legends as long ago as his childhood. The revenant dishes and plates brought a hot flush to his face, filling his spinning thoughts with a nostalgic terror, inspiring in him the fleeting but awesome idea that he had come back to a household populated only by ghosts. But the blue-and-pink cups and saucers and quarterplates were solid enough; he arranged them on his tray with a shiver of disbelief.
‘Now go quickly to the Peek Frean tin and bring out cake,’ commanded his youngest mother, Bunny, her octogenarian voice trembling with a delight she made no effort to explain; Omar Khayyam muttered something puzzled and inaudible and limped away in search of the stale chocolate gateau which added the final touch of quaint improbability to that takallouf-ridden nightmare of a tea-party. ‘This is more like it,’ Chhunni approved as she cut and handed out slices of dried-out cake. ‘For such honoured guests, this is the usual way.’
Omar Khayyam observ
ed that while he had been out of the room fetching the cake his mothers had obliged Bilquìs Hyder, by the inexorable force of their courtly charm, to remove her burqa. Her face, eyebrowless, dust-pale, sleep-starved, was a death-mask, with only the high points of red colour on her cheekbones to indicate that she was alive; it made the bad feelings Omar Khayyam had been having even worse than before. His teacup rattled on its saucer while his heart was squeezed by a renewed fear of the cryptic atmosphere of his childhood home, which could turn living persons into the mirrors of their ghosts; then Bilquìs spoke, and he was jerked out of these exhausted fantasies by her expression of a most peculiar idea.
‘Once there were giants,’ Bilquìs Hyder carefully, and wistfully, pronounced.
The laws of takallouf had forced her to make conversation, but it had been too long since Bilquìs had indulged in chit-chat; she had lost the knack of it, and there was the tension and debilitation of the long escape to consider besides, to say nothing of the eccentricity of her latter years. Sipping tea as she spoke, smiling brightly in response to the triple smile of her hostesses, she seemed to imagine herself to be recounting some tiny, amusing anecdote, or expatiating wittily upon a sophisticated point of fashion. ‘Once giants walked the earth,’ she repeated, emphatically. ‘Yes, titans absolutely, it’s a fact.’
Three mothers creaked and swung with expressions of fascinated absorption upon their smiling faces; but Raza Hyder took no notice, closed his eyes, grunted from time to time. ‘Now the pygmies have taken over, however,’ Bilquìs confided. ‘Tiny personages. Ants. Once he was a giant,’ she jerked a thumb in the direction of her somnolent husband, ‘you would not believe to look, but he was. Streets where he walked shook with fear and respect, even here, in this very town. But, you see, even a giant can be pygmified, and he has shrunk now, he is smaller than a bug. Pygmies pygmies everywhere, also insects and ants – shame on the giants, isn’t it? Shame on them for shrinking. That’s my opinion.’ Three old ladies nodded gravely while Bilquìs made her lament; then they hastened to agree with her. ‘Quite right,’ Chhunni pronounced courteously, and Munnee chimed in, ‘Giants, how true, there must have been,’ and then Bunny Shakil concluded: ‘Because after all there are angels also, they are still around, oh yes, we are sure of that.’
An unnaturally high colour suffused Bilquìs’s face as she sipped her tea, annihilating the image of the death-mask; she was apparently determined to find solace in that appalling scene, to convince herself of her safety by forging a desperate and over-rapid intimacy between herself and the three creaking ancients … but Omar Khayyam had stopped noticing things, because at the moment when his youngest mother mentioned angels he had understood the strange high spirits of the Shakil sisters. His three mothers were improvising this instant of demented theatre so as to avoid having to mention a certain dead youth; there was a hole at the heart of their smiling hospitality, and they were skirting around its periphery, around that void such as escaping creatures make in bricked-up windows, that absence the shape of the unnamable Babar Shakil. Yes, that was it, they were in a state of elation, because they had Raza Hyder in their clutches at last, and could see no reason except one for Omar Khayyam to have brought the fellow here; so they were trying not to spoil things, seeking to lull their victims into a sense of false security, they didn’t want the Hyders to get worried and try to run away. And at the same time they were sighing happily, convinced it was finally going to happen, revenge, right under their noses. Omar Khayyam Shakil’s head swam with the knowledge that the three of them would force him to do it – remorselessly and in cold blood to do Raza Hyder to death under his mothers’ roof.
The next morning he awoke to the sound of Bilquìs Hyder slamming windows. Omar Khayyam struggled out of a bed which was unaccountably soaked in perspiration, his legs weaker, his feet more painful than usual, and hobbled off to see what was happening. He found his three mothers watching Bilquìs as she stormed around the house, pulling windows shut, fiercely, as if she were angry about something; she fastened shutters and lowered chick-blinds. It struck Omar Khayyam as if for the first time how tall his mothers were, like arms stretched up into the sky. They stood in attitudes of mutual solicitude, supporting each other at the elbows, making no attempt to interfere with Bilquìs’s window-shutting frenzy. Omar Khayyam wanted to stop her, because as the windows closed the air inside the house became thicker and lumpier, until he felt as if he were inhaling mulligatawny soup, but his three mothers motioned him to be still. ‘She is our guest,’ whispered Chhunni-ma, ‘so she can stay for ever if she likes,’ because the old woman had divined that Bilquìs’s behaviour was that of a woman who has gone far enough already, too far, a woman who has ceased to believe in frontiers and whatever-might-lie-beyond. Bilquìs was barricading herself against the outside world in the hope that it might go away, and that was an activity which the Shakil sisters could understand without a word being said. ‘She has suffered,’ Munnee Shakil stated with a mysterious smile, ‘but she is welcome to be here.’
Omar Khayyam felt the air congeal into soup, and the germs of claustrophobia began to breed. But other germs, too, were in the air, and when Bilquìs collapsed in a boiling stupor Omar Khayyam guessed the meaning of his own morning weakness, the hot flushes, the rubbery legs. ‘Malaria,’ he made himself say, and then the vertigo swirled around him and he fell down beside Bilquìs Hyder, out cold and blazing hot.
At that very instant Raza Hyder awoke from a sick dream in which the several pieces of the late Sindbad Mengal had appeared to him, all joined up in the wrong way, so that the dead man’s head was in the middle of his stomach and his feet stuck out, soles upward, like asses’ ears from his neck. Mengal had not recriminated at all, but had warned Raza that the way things were going the General sahib would be sliced up himself in a few days. Old Razor Guts, still half-asleep, rose from his bed crying danger, but the disease had begun to burn inside him, too, and he fell back gasping for air and shivering as if it were winter. The Shakil sisters came and stood beside his bed to watch him shake.
‘How nice,’ Bunny Shakil said comfortably, ‘the General seems to be in no hurry to depart.’
The fever was a fire that made you cold. It burned away the barriers between consciousness and sleep, so that Omar Khayyam never knew whether things were really happening or not. At one point as he lay in a darkened room he thought he heard Bilquìs shouting something about brain-fever, about visitations and judgments, the sickness that crippled her daughter being visited upon her parent in the city of her shame. He thought, too, that he heard Raza yelling for pine-kernels. And at another time he was sure that the forgotten figure of the schoolteacher Eduardo Rodrigues had been standing accusingly by his bedside holding a dead baby in its arms – but that couldn’t be true, that must have been the delirium. There were moments of what felt like lucidity, during which he called for his mothers and dictated the names of drugs. He had memories of receiving medication, he recalled arms lifting his head and popping white pills into his mouth, but when he bit one by mistake it tasted of calcium, so that the suspicion was born in his fevered brain that his mothers had not sent for the drugs at all. His thoughts heated up to the point at which he could entertain the sick possibility that the Shakil sisters were happy to let the malaria do their dirty work for them, that they were willing to sacrifice their surviving son if he took the Hyders along with him. Either they are mad or I am, he thought, and then the fever took him again and made all thinking impossible.
Sometimes, he believed, he had gained consciousness and heard through the closed and shuttered windows snatches of angry voices below, also shots, explosions, breaking glass, and unless that had been part of the delirium too it meant that troubles were erupting in the town, yes, he could remember certain cries clearly, for instance The hotel is on fire. Was it or wasn’t it? Memories lurched back towards him through the marshes of the disease, he was almost positive now that he had heard the hotel burn, the crash of the collapsing golden dome, th
e last suffocating squawks of an orchestra crushed beneath the falling masonry. There had been a morning on which the ash cloud of the dead hotel had managed to get inside ‘Nishapur’, in spite of shutters and windowpanes it had insinuated itself into his bedroom, covering everything with the grey powder of the hotel’s death and strengthening his feeling of being stricken down in a house of phantoms. But when he asked one – which? – of his three mothers about the burning hotel she – who? – had replied, ‘Close your eyes now and don’t worry. Ash everywhere, what an idea.’
He persisted in his belief that the world was changing outside, old orders were passing, great structures were being cast down while others rose up in their place. The world was an earthquake, abysses yawned, dream-temples rose and fell, the logic of the Impossible Mountains had come down to infect the plains. In his delirium, however, in the burning clutches of the sickness and the foetid atmosphere of the house, only endings seemed possible. He could feel things caving in within him, landslips, heaves, the patter of crumbling masonry in his chest, cog-wheels breaking, a false note in the engine’s hum. ‘This motor,’ he said aloud somewhere in that halted time, ‘will not run any more.’
Three mothers creaked on their swing-seat at his bedside. No, how had they moved it, what was it doing here, it was a ghost, a mirage, he refused to believe in it, closed his eyes, squeezed them tight, reopened them a minute or a week later, and they were still there in the seat, so it was clear that the sickness was worse, the hallucinations were gaining in confidence. The sisters were explaining sadly that the house was no longer as big as it had once been. ‘We keep on losing rooms,’ the spectre of Bunny mourned, ‘today we mislaid your grandfather’s study. You know where it used to be, but now if you go through that door you turn up in the dining room, which is impossible, because the dining room is supposed to be on the other side of the passage.’ And Chhunni-ma nodded, ‘It’s so sad, son, look how life treats old people, you get used to a certain bedroom and then one day, poof, it goes away, the staircase vanishes, what to do.’ ‘The place is shrinking,’ middle-Munnee fumed. ‘Honestly, too bad, like a cheap shirt. We should have had it Sanforized. Soon the whole house will be smaller than a matchbox and we will be out on the street.’ And Chhunni-ma had the last word. ‘In that sunlight, without walls,’ the phantasm of his eldest mother prophesied, ‘we will not be able to survive. We will turn to dust and be blown away by the wind.’