Shame

  Twelve years take their toll. At first the high pride which had driven Chhunni, Munnee and Bunny to reject God, their father’s memory and their place in society had enabled them to maintain the standards of behaviour which were just about their father’s only legacy to them. They would rise, each morning, within seconds of one another, brush their teeth up, down and sideways fifty times each with eucalyptus sticks, and then, identically attired, would oil and comb each other’s hair and twine white flowers into the coiled black buns they made of their locks. They addressed the servants, and also each other, by the polite form of the second-person pronoun. The rigidity of their bearing and the precision of their household instructions gave a legitimizing sheen to all their actions, including (which was no doubt the point) the production of an illegitimate child. But slowly, slowly, they slipped.

  On the day of Omar Khayyam’s departure for the big city, his eldest mother told him a secret that put a date to the beginning of their decline. ‘We never wanted to stop breast-feeding you,’ she confessed. ‘By now you know that it is not usual for a six-year-old boy to be still on the nipple; but you drank from half a dozen, one for each year. On your sixth birthday we renounced this greatest of pleasures, and after that nothing was the same, we began to forget the point of things.’

  During the next six years, as breasts dried and shrank, the three sisters lost that firmness and erectness of body which had accounted for a good deal of their beauty. They became soft, there were knots in their hair, they lost interest in the kitchen, the servants got away with murder. But still they declined at the same rate and in identical fashion; the bonds of their identity remained unbroken.

  Remember this: the Shakil sisters had never received a proper education, except in manners; while their son, by the time his voice broke, was already something of a self-taught prodigy. He attempted to interest his mothers in his learning; but when he set out the most elegant proofs of Euclidian theorems or expatiated eloquently on the Platonic image of the Cave, they rejected the unfamiliar notions out of hand. ‘Angrez double-dutch,’ said Chhunni-ma, and the three mothers shrugged as one. ‘Who is to understand the brains of those crazy types?’ asked Munnee-in-the-middle, in tones of final dismissal. They read books from left to right.’

  The philistinism of his mothers accentuated Omar Khayyam’s feelings, inchoate and half-articulated, of being extraneous, both because he was a gifted child whose gifts were being returned-to-sender by his parents, and because, for all his learning, he guessed that his mothers’ point of view was holding him back. He suffered the sensation of being lost inside a cloud, whose curtains parted occasionally to offer tantalizing glimpses of the sky … in spite of what he murmured to Hashmat Bibi, cloudiness was not attractive to the boy.

  Now then. Omar Khayyam Shakil is almost twelve. He is over-weight, and his generative organ, newly potent, also possesses a fold of skin that should have been removed. His mothers are growing vague about the reasons for their life; while he, in contrast, has overnight become capable of levels of aggression previously foreign to his complaisant fat-boy nature. I offer (have already hinted at) three causes: one, his sighting of fourteen-year-old Farah on the moon of his telescopic lens; two, his awkwardness about his altered speech, which swings out of control between croaks and squeaks while an ugly lump bobs in his throat like a cork; and one must not forget three, namely the time-honoured (or dishonoured) mutations wrought by pubertal biochemistry upon the adolescent male personality … ignorant of this conjunction of diabolic forces within their son, the three mothers make the mistake of asking Omar Khayyam what he wants for his birthday.

  He surprises them by being sullen: ‘You’ll never give it, what’s the point?’ Horrified maternal gasps. Six hands fly to three heads and take up hear-no-see-no-speak-no-evil positions. Mother Chhunni (hands over ears): ‘How can he say this? The boy, what’s he talking?’ And middling-Munnee, peeping tragically through her fingers: ‘Somebody has upset our angel, plain to see.’ And Baby Bunny removes hands from lips to speaknoevil: ‘Ask! Ask only! What can we refuse? What’s so big that we won’t do?’

  It bursts out of him then: howling, ‘To let me out of this horrible house,’ and then, much more quietly, into the aching silence that his words have brought into being, ‘and to tell my father’s name.’

  ‘Cheek! Cheek of the chappie!’ – this from Munnee his middle mother; then her sisters draw her into an inward-facing huddle, arms round waists in that pose of obscene unity which the watching boy finds so hard to stomach.

  ‘Didn’t I tell?’ – in grunts and falsettos of anguish – ‘Then why get it out of me in the first place?’

  But now it is possible to observe a change. Quarrelsome syllables fly out of the maternal huddle, because the boy’s requests have divided the sisters for the first time in more than a decade. They are arguing, and the argument is a rusty, difficult business, a dispute between women who are trying to remember the people they once were.

  When they emerge from the rubble of their exploded identity they make heroic attempts to pretend to Omar, and to themselves, that nothing serious has happened; but although all three of them stick by the collective decision that has been made, the boy can see that this unanimity is a mask which is being held in place with considerable difficulty.

  ‘These are reasonable requests,’ Baby Bunny speaks first, ‘and one, at least, should be granted.’

  His triumph terrifies him; the cork in his throat jumps, almost as far as his tongue. ‘Whichwhichwhich?’ Fearfully, he asks.

  Munnee takes over. ‘A new satchel will be ordered and will come in the Mistri’s machine,’ she states gravely, ‘and you will go to school. You need not be too happy,’ she adds, ‘because when you leave this house you will be wounded by many sharp names, which people will throw at you, like knives, in the street.’ Munnee, the fiercest opponent of his freedom, has had her own tongue sharpened on the steel of her defeat.

  Finally, his eldest mother says her piece. ‘Come home without hitting anyone,’ she instructs, ‘or we will know that they have lowered your pride and made you feel the forbidden emotion of shame.’

  ‘That would be a completely debased effect,’ middle-Munnee says.

  This word: shame. No, I must write it in its original form, not in this peculiar language tainted by wrong concepts and the accumulated detritus of its owners’ unrepented past, this Angrezi in which I am forced to write, and so for ever alter what is written …

  Sharam, that’s the word. For which this paltry ‘shame’ is a wholly inadequate translation. Three letters, shìn rè mìm (written, naturally, from right to left); plus zabar accents indicating the short vowel sounds. A short word, but one containing encyclopaedias of nuance. It was not only shame that his mothers forbade Omar Khayyam to feel, but also embarrassment, discomfiture, decency, modesty, shyness, the sense of having an ordained place in the world, and other dialects of emotion for which English has no counterparts. No matter how determinedly one flees a country, one is obliged to take along some hand-luggage; and can it be doubted that Omar Khayyam (to concentrate on him), having been barred from feeling shame (vb. int.: sharmàna) at an early age, continued to be affected by that remarkable ban throughout his later years, yes, long after his escape from his mothers’ zone of influence?

  Reader: it cannot.

  What’s the opposite of shame? What’s left when sharam is subtracted? That’s obvious: shamelessness.

  Owing to the pride of his parents and the singular circumstances of his life, Omar Khayyam Shakil, at the age of twelve, was wholly unfamiliar with the emotion in which he was now being forbidden to indulge.

  ‘What does it feel like?’ he asked – and his mothers, seeing his bewilderment, essayed explanations. ‘Your face gets hot,’ said Bunny-the-youngest, ‘but your heart starts shivering.’

  ‘It makes women feel like to cry and die,’ said Chhunni-ma, ‘but men, it makes them go wild.’

  ‘Except sometimes,’ his middl
e mother muttered with prophetic spite, ‘it happens the other way around.’

  The division of the three mothers into separate beings became, in the following years, more and more plaintosee. They squabbled over the most alarming trifles, such as who should write the notes that were placed in the dumb-waiter, or whether to take their mid-morning mint tea and biskuts in the drawing room or on the landing. It was as if by sending their son out into the sunlit arenas of the town they had exposed themselves to the very thing they denied him the freedom to experience; as if on the day when the world laid eyes for the first time on their Omar Khayyam the three sisters were finally pierced by the forbidden arrows of sharam. Their quarrels died down when he made his second escape; but they were never properly reunited until they decided to repeat the act of motherhood …

  And there is an even stranger matter to report. It is this: when they were divided by Omar Khayyam’s birthday wishes, they had been indistinguishable too long to retain any exact sense of their former selves – and, well, to come right out with it, the result was that they divided up in the wrong way, they got all mixed up, so that Bunny, the youngest, sprouted the premature grey hairs and took on the queenly airs that ought to have been the prerogative of the senior sibling; while big Chhunni seemed to become a torn, uncertain soul, a sister of middles and vacillations; and Munnee developed the histrionic gadfly petulance that is the traditional characteristic of the baby in any generation, and which never ceases to be that baby’s right, no matter how old she gets. In the chaos of their regeneration the wrong heads ended up on the wrong bodies; they became psychological centaurs, fish-women, hybrids; and of course this confused separation of personalities carried with it the implication that they were still not genuinely discrete, because they could only be comprehended if you took them as a whole.

  Who would not have wanted to escape from such mothers? – In later years, Omar Khayyam would remember his childhood as a lover, abandoned, remembers his beloved: changeless, incapable of ageing, a memory kept prisoner in a circle of heart’s fire. Only he remembered with hatred instead of love; not with flames, but icily, icily. The other Omar wrote great things out of love; our hero’s story is poorer, no doubt because it was marinated in bile.

  – And it would be easy to argue that he developed pronounced misogynist tendencies at an early age. – That all his subsequent dealings with women were acts of revenge against the memory of his mothers. – But I say in Omar Khayyam’s defence: all his life, whatever he did, whoever he became, he did his filial duty and paid their bills. The pawnbroker Chalaak Sahib ceased to pay visits to the dumb-waiter; which indicates the existence of love, love of some sort … but he is not grown-up yet. Just now the satchel has arrived via the Mistri’s machine; now it hangs over the shoulder of the twelve-year-old escapologist; now he enters the dumb-waiter and the satchel begins its descent back to earth. Omar Khayyam’s twelfth birthday brought him freedom instead of cake; also, inside the satchel, blue-lined copybooks, a slate, a washable wooden board and some quill pens with which to practise the sinuous script of his mother tongue, chalks, pencils, a wooden ruler and a box of geometry instruments, protractor, dividers, compass. Plus a small aluminum etherizing box in which to murder frogs. With the weapons of learning hanging over his shoulder, Omar Khayyam left his mothers, who wordlessly (and still in unison) waved goodbye.

  Omar Khayyam Shakil never forgot the moment of his emergence from the dumb-waiter into the dust of the no-man’s-land around the high mansion of his childhood which stood like a pariah between the Cantonment and the town; or the first sight of the reception committee, one of whose members was carrying a most unexpected sort of garland.

  When the wife of Q.’s finest leather-goods merchant received the sisters’ order for a school satchel from the peon whom she dispatched to the dumb-waiter once a fortnight in accordance with the Shakils’ standing orders, she, Zeenat Kabuli, at once ran round to the house of her best friend, the widow Farida Balloch, who lived with her brother Bilal. The three of them, who had never ceased to believe that Yakoob Balloch’s street-death was the direct result of his getting mixed up with the anchoritic sisters, agreed that the flesh-and-blood product of the longago scandal must be about to emerge into plain daylight. They stationed themselves outside the Shakil household to await this event, but not before Zeenat Kabuli had pulled out from the back of her shop a gunny sack filled with old rotting shoes and sandals and slippers of no conceivable value to anyone, annihilated footwear that had been awaiting just such an occasion, and which was now strung together to form the worst of all insults, that is, a necklace of shoes. ‘The shoe garland,’ the widow Balloch swore to Zeenat Kabuli, ‘just see if I don’t hang it on that child’s neck, personal.’

  The week-long vigil of Farida, Zeenat and Bilal inevitably attracted attention, so that by the time Omar Khayyam jumped out of the dumb-waiter they had been joined by divers other gawpers and taunters, raggedy urchins and unemployed clerks and washerwomen on their way to the ghats. Also present was the town postman, Muhammad Ibadalla, who bore upon his forehead the gatta or permanent bruise which revealed him to be a religious fanatic who pressed brow to prayer-mat on at least five occasions per diem, and probably at the sixth, optional time as well. This Ibadalla had found his job through the malign influence of the beardy serpent who stood beside him in the heat, the local divine, the notorious Maulana Dawood who rode around town on a motor-scooter donated by the Angrez shabis, threatening the citizens with damnation. It turned out that this Ibadalla had been incensed by the Shakil ladies’ decision not to send their letter to the headmaster of the Cantt school via the postal services. It had been included, instead, in the envelope they had sent down in the dumb-waiter to the flower-girl Azra, along with a small extra fee. Ibadalla had been wooing this Azra for some time, but she laughed at him, ‘I don’t care for a type who spends so much time with his backside higher than his head.’ So the sisters’ decision to place their letter in her care struck the postman as a personal insult, a way of undermining his status, and also as further proof of their Godlessness, for had they not allied themselves by this infamous act of correspondence with a slut who cracked jokes about prayer? ‘Behold,’ Ibadalla yelled energetically as Omar Khayyam touched the ground, ‘there stands the Devil’s seed.’

  There now occurred an unfortunate incident. Ibadalla, incensed by the Azra business, had spoken up first, thus incurring the displeasure of his patron Maulana Dawood, a loss of divine support which ruined the postman’s chance of future promotion and intensified his hatred of all Shakils; because of course the Maulana thought it his right to begin the assault on the poor, fat, prematurely-pubescent symbol of incarnate sin. In an attempt to regain the initiative Dawood flung himself to his knees in the dust at Omar’s feet; he ground his forehead ecstatically into the dirt by Omar’s toes, and called out: ‘O God! O scourging Lord! Bring down upon this human abomination Thy sizzling fountain of fire!’ Etcetera. This grotesque display greatly irritated the three who had kept the original vigil. ‘Whose husband died for a dumb-waiter?’ Farida Balloch hissed to her friend. ‘That shouting oldie’s? Then who should be speaking now?’ Her brother Bilal did not stop for speech; rope of shoes in hand, he strode forward, bellowing in that stentorian voice that was almost the equal of the fabled voice of his namesake, that first, black Bilal, the Prophet’s muezzin: ‘Boy! Flesh of infamy! Think yourself lucky I do no more than this! You think I couldn’t squash you flat like one mosquito?’ – And in the background, like raucous echoes, urchins washerwomen clerks were chanting: ‘Devil’s seed! – Fountain of fire! – Whose husband died? – Like one mosquito!’ – They were all closing in, Ibadalla and Maulana and three vengeful vigilantes, while Omar stood like a cobra-hypnotized mongoose, but all around him things were unfreezing, the twelve-year-old, suspended prejudices of the town were springing back to life … and Bilal could wait no longer, he rushed up to the boy as Dawood prostrated himself for the seventeenth time; the garland of shoes was
hurled in Omar’s direction; and just then the Maulana straightened up to howl at God, interposing scrawny gizzard between insulting footwear and its target, and there, next thing anyone knew, was the fateful necklace, hanging around the divine’s accidental neck.

  Omar Khayyam began to giggle: such can be the effects of fear. And urchins giggled with him; even the widow Balloch had to fight back the laughter until it came out as water from her eyes. In those days, people were not so keen on the servants of God as we are told they have become at present … Maulana Dawood rose up with murder in his face. Being no fool, however, he quickly turned this face away from the giant Bilal and reached out his claws for Omar Khayyam – who was saved by the blessed figure, shouldering its way through the mob, of Mr Eduardo Rodrigues, schoolmaster, who had arrived as arranged to fetch the new pupil to class. And with Rodrigues was a vision of such joy that moon-struck Khayyam at once forgot the danger that had come so close. ‘This is Farah,’ Rodrigues told him, ‘she is two standards senior to you.’ The vision looked at Omar; then at the shoe-necked Maulana, who in his rage had neglected to remove the garland; then put back its head and roared.

  ‘God, yaar,’ she said to Omar, her first word a casual blasphemy, ‘why you didn’t sit on at home? This town was already full of fools.’