Shame

by Salman Rushdie

  People entered, excited, circled, laughed. After about forty minutes my friend said, ‘It’s O.K. now.’ I asked, ‘Who was it?’ He gave me the name of the informer who had infiltrated this particular group. They treated him civilly, without hinting that they knew why he was there, because otherwise he would vanish, and the next time they might not know who the informer was. Later, I met the spy. He was a nice guy, pleasantly spoken, honest-faced, and no doubt happy that he was hearing nothing worth reporting. A kind of equilibrium had been achieved. Once again, I was struck by how many nice guys there were in Pakistan, by the civility growing in those gardens, perfuming the air.

  Since my last visit to Karachi, my friend the poet had spent many months in jail, for social reasons. That is to say, he knew somebody who knew somebody who was the wife of the second cousin by marriage of the step-uncle of somebody who might or might not have shared a flat with someone who was running guns to the guerrillas in Baluchistan. You can get anywhere in Pakistan if you know people, even into jail. My friend still refuses to talk about what happened to him during those months; but other people told me that he was in bad shape for a long time after he got out. They said he had been hung upside-down by the ankles and beaten, as if he were a new-born baby whose lungs had to be coerced into action so that he could squeal. I never asked him if he screamed, or if there were upside-down mountain peaks visible through a window.

  Wherever I turn, there is something of which to be ashamed. But shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture. In ‘Defence’, you can find shame in every house, burning in an ashtray, hanging framed upon a wall, covering a bed. But nobody notices it any more. And everyone is civilized.

  Maybe my friend should be telling this story, or another one, his own; but he doesn’t write poetry any more. So here I am instead, inventing what never happened to me, and you will note that my hero has already been ankle-hung, and that his name is the name of a famous poet; but no quatrains ever issued or will issue from his pen.

  Outsider! Trespasser! You have no right to this subject! … I know: nobody ever arrested me. Nor are they ever likely to. Poacher! Pirate! We reject your authority. We know you, with your foreign language wrapped around you like a flag: speaking about us in your forked tongue, what can you tell but lies? I reply with more questions: is history to be considered the property of the participants solely? In what courts are such claims staked, what boundary commissions map out the territories?

  Can only the dead speak?

  I tell myself this will be a novel of leavetaking, my last words on the East from which, many years ago, I began to come loose. I do not always believe myself when I say this. It is a part of the world to which, whether I like it or not, I am still joined, if only by elastic bands.

  As to Afghanistan: after returning to London, I met a senior British diplomat at a dinner, a career specialist in ‘my’ part of the world. He said it was quite proper, ‘post-Afghanistan’, for the West to support the dictatorship of President Zia ul-Haq. I should not have lost my temper, but I did. It wasn’t any use. Then, as we left the table, his wife, a quiet civil lady who had been making pacifying noises, said to me, ‘Tell me, why don’t people in Pakistan get rid of Zia in, you know, the usual way?’

  Shame, dear reader, is not the exclusive property of the East.

  The country in this story is not Pakistan, or not quite. There are two countries, real and fictional, occupying the same space, or almost the same space. My story, my fictional country exist, like myself, at a slight angle to reality. I have found this off-centring to be necessary; but its value is, of course, open to debate. My view is that I am not writing only about Pakistan.

  I have not given the country a name. And Q. is not really Quetta at all. But I don’t want to be precious about this: when I arrive at the big city, I shall call it Karachi. And it will contain a ‘Defence’.

  Omar Khayyam’s position as a poet is curious. He was never very popular in his native Persia; and he exists in the West in a translation that is really a complete reworking of his verses, in many cases very different from the spirit (to say nothing of the content) of the original. I, too, am a translated man. I have been borne across. It is generally believed that something is always lost in translation; I cling to the notion – and use, in evidence, the success of Fitzgerald-Khayyam – that something can also be gained.

  The sight of you through my beloved telescope,’ Omar Khayyam Shakil told Farah Zoroaster the day he declared his love, ‘gave me the strength to break my mothers’ power.’

  ‘Voyeur,’ she replied, ‘I shit on your words. Your balls dropped too soon and you got the hots, no more to it than that. Don’t load your family problems on to me.’ She was two years his senior, but Omar Khayyam was nevertheless forced to concede that his darling had a dirty mouth …

  … As well as the name of a great poet, the child had been given his mothers’ family name. And as if to underline what they meant by calling him after the immortal Khayyam the three sisters gave a name, too, to that underlit corridory edifice that was now all the country they possessed: the house was named ‘Nishapur’. Thus a second Omar grew up in a second place of that name, and every so often, as he grew, would catch a strange look in his three mothers’ six eyes, a look that seemed to say Hurry up, we are waiting for your poems. But (I repeat) no rubaiyat ever issued from his pen.

  His childhood had been exceptional by any standards, because what applied to mothers and servants wentwithoutsaying for our peripheral hero as well. Omar Khayyam passed twelve long years, the most crucial years of his development, trapped inside that reclusive mansion, that third world that was neither material nor spiritual, but a sort of concentrated decrepitude made up of the decomposing remnants of those two more familiar types of cosmos, a world in which he would constantly run into – as well as the mothballed, spider-webbed, dust-shrouded profusion of crumbling objects – the lingering, fading miasmas of discarded ideas and forgotten dreams. The finely-calculated gesture with which his three mothers had sealed themselves off from the world had created a sweltering, entropical zone in which, despite all the rotting-down of the past, nothing new seemed capable of growth, and from which it became Omar Khayyam’s most cherished youthful ambition quickly to escape. Unaware, in that hideously indeterminate frontier universe, of the curvature of space and time, thanks to which he who runs longest and hardest inevitably ends up, gaspingpanting, with wrenched and screaming tendons, at the starting line, he dreamed of exits, feeling that in the claustrophobis of ‘Nishapur’ his very life was at stake. He was, after all, something new in that infertile and time-eroded labyrinth.

  Have you heard of those wolf-children, suckled – we must suppose – on the feral multiple breasts of a hairy moon-howling dam? Rescued from the Pack, they bit their saviours vilely in the arm; netted and caged, they are brought stinking of raw meat and faecal matter into the emancipated light of the world, their brains too imperfectly formed to be capable of acquiring more than the most fundamental rudiments of civilization … Omar Khayyam, too, fed at too-many mammary glands; and he wandered for some four thousand days in the thing-infested jungle that was ‘Nishapur’, his walled-in wild place, his mother-country; until he succeeded in getting the frontiers opened by making a birthday wish that could not be satisfied by anything lifted up in the machine of Mistri Balloch.

  ‘Drop this jungle-boy business,’ Farah sneered when Omar tried it on her, ‘you’re no fucking ape-man, sonny jim.’ And, educationally speaking, she was right; but she had also denied the wildness, the evil within him; and he proved upon her own body that she was wrong.

  First things first: for twelve years, he had the run of the house. Little (except freedom) was denied him. A spoiled and vulpine brat; when he howled, his mothers caressed him … and after the nightmares began and he started giving up sleep, he plunged deeper and deeper into the seemingly bottomless depths of that decaying realm. Believe me when I tell you that
he stumbled down corridors so long untrodden that his sandalled feet sank into the dust right up to his ankles; that he discovered ruined staircases made impassable by longago earthquakes which had caused them to heave up into tooth-sharp mountains and also to fall away to reveal dark abysses of fear … in the silence of the night and the first sounds of dawn he explored beyond history into what seemed the positively archaeological antiquity of ‘Nishapur’, discovering in almirahs the wood of whose doors disintegrated beneath his tentative fingers the impossible forms of painted neolithic pottery in the Kotdiji style; or in kitchen quarters whose existence was no longer even suspected he would gaze ignorantly upon bronze implements of utterly fabulous age; or in regions of that colossal palace which had been abandoned long ago because of the collapse of their plumbing he would delve into the quake-exposed intricacies of brick drainage systems that had been out of date for centuries.

  On one occasion he lost his way completely and ran wildly about like a time-traveller who has lost his magic capsule and fears he will never emerge from the disintegrating history of his race – and came to a dead stop, staring in horror at a room whose outer wall had been partly demolished by great, thick, water-seeking tree-roots. He was perhaps ten years old when he had this first glimpse of the unfettered outside world. He had only to walk through the shattered wall – but the gift had been sprung upon him without sufficient warning, and, taken unawares by the shocking promise of the dawn light streaming through the hole, he turned tail and fled, his terror leading him blindly back to his own comforting, comfortable room. Afterwards, when he had had time to consider things, he tried to retrace his steps, armed with a purloined ball of string; but try as he might, he never again found his way to that place in the maze of his childhood where the minotaur of forbidden sunlight lived.

  ‘Sometimes I found skeletons,’ he swore to disbelieving Farah, ‘human as well as animal.’ And even where bones were absent, the house’s long-dead occupants dogged his steps. Not in the way you think! – No howls, no clanking chains! – But disembodied feelings, the choking fumes of ancient hopes, fears, loves; and finally, made wild by the ancestor-heavy, phantom oppressions of these far recesses of the run-down building, Omar Khayyam took his revenge (not long after the episode of the broken wall) on his unnatural surroundings. I wince as I record his vandalism: armed with broomstick and misappropriated hatchet, he rampaged through dusty passages and maggoty bedrooms, smashing glass cabinets, felling oblivion-sprinkled divans, pulverizing wormy libraries; crystal, paintings, rusty helmets, the paper-thin remnants of priceless silken carpets were destroyed beyond all possibility of repair. ‘Take that,’ he screeched amidst the corpses of his useless, massacred history, ‘take that, old stuff!’ – and then burst (dropping guilty hatchet and clean-sweeping broom) into illogical tears.

  It must be stated that even in those days nobody believed the boy’s stories about the far-flung infinities of the house. ‘Only child,’ Hashmat Bibi creaked, ‘always always they live in their poor head.’ And the three male servants laughed too: ‘Listening to you, baba, we are thinking this house has grown so huge huge, there mustn’t be room for anywhere else in the world!’ And three mothers, sitting tolerantly in their favourite swingseat, stretched out patting hands and sealed the matter: ‘At least he has a vivid imagination,’ said Munnee-in-the-middle, and Mother Bunny concurred: ‘Comes from his poetic name.’ Worried that he might be sleep-walking, Chhunni-ma detailed a servant to place his sleeping-mat outside Omar Khayyam’s room; but by then he had placed the more fantasticated zones of ‘Nishapur’ off-limits for ever. After he descended upon the cohorts of history like a wolf (or wolf-child) on the fold, Omar Khayyam Shakil confined himself to the well-trodden, swept and dusted, used regions of the house.

  Something – conceivably remorse – led him to his grandfather’s dark-panelled study, a book-lined room which the three sisters had never entered since the old man’s death. Here he discovered that Mr Shakil’s air of great learning had been a sham, just like his supposed business acumen; because the books all bore the ex libris plates of a certain Colonel Arthur Greenfield, and many of their pages were uncut. It was a gentleman’s library, bought in toto from the unknown Colonel, and it had remained unused throughout its residence in the Shakil household. Now Omar Khayyam fell upon it with a will.

  Here I must praise his autodidactic gifts. For by the time he left ‘Nishapur’ he had learned classical Arabic and Persian; also Latin, French and German; all with the aid of leather-bound dictionaries and the unused texts of his grandfather’s deceptive vanity. In what books the young fellow immersed himself! Illuminated manuscripts of the poetry of Ghalib; volumes of letters written by Mughal emperors to their sons; the Burton translation of the Alf laylah wa laylah, and the Travels of Ibn Battuta, and the Qissa or tales of the legendary adventurer Hatim Tai … yes, yes, I see that I must withdraw (as Farah instructed Omar to withdraw) the misleading image of the mowgli, the junglee boy.

  The continual passage of items from living quarters via dumb-waiter to pawnshop brought concealed matter to light at regular intervals. Those outsize chambers stuffed brim-full with the material legacy of generations of rapaciously acquisitive forebears were being slowly emptied, so that by the time Omar Khayyam was ten and a half there was enough space to move around without bumping into the furniture at every step. And one day the three mothers sent a servant into the study to remove from their lives an exquisitely carved walnut screen on which was portrayed the mythical circular mountain of Qaf, complete with the thirty birds playing God thereupon. The flight of the bird-parliament revealed to Omar Khayyam a little bookcase stuffed with volumes on the theory and practice of hypnosis: Sanskrit mantras, compendiums of the lore of the Persian Magi, a leathern copy of the Kalevala of the Finns, an account of the hypno-exorcisms of Father Gassner of Klosters and a study of the ‘animal magnetism’ theory of Franz Mesmer himself; also (and most usefully) a number of cheaply printed do-it-yourself manuals. Greedily, Omar Khayyam began to devour these books, which alone in the library did not bear the name of the literary Colonel; they were his grandfather’s true legacy, and they led him into his lifelong involvement with that arcane science which has so awesome a power for good or ill.

  The household servants were as under-occupied as he; his mothers had gradually become very lax about such matters as cleanliness and cuisine. The trio of menservants became, therefore, Omar Khayyam’s first, willing subjects. Practising with the aid of a shiny four-anna coin he put them under, discovering with some pride his talent for the art: effortlessly keeping his voice on a flat, monotonous plane, he lulled them into trances, learning, among other things, that the sexual drives which his mothers appeared to have lost completely since his birth had not been similarly stilled in these men. Entranced, they happily confessed the secrets of their mutual caresses, and blessed the maternal trinity for having so altered the circumstances of their lives that their true desires could be revealed to them. The contented three-way love of the male servants provided a curious balance for the equal, but wholly platonic, love of the three sisters for one another. (But Omar Khayyam continued to grow bitter, despite being surrounded by so many intimacies and affections.)

  Hashmat Bibi also agreed to ‘go under’. Omar made her imagine she was floating on a soft pink cloud. ‘You are sinking deeper,’ he intoned as she lay upon her mat, ‘and deeper into the cloud. It is good to be in the cloud; you want to sink lower and lower.’ These experiments had a tragic side-effect. Soon after his twelfth birthday, his mothers were informed by the three loving menservants, who stared accusingly at the young master as they spoke, that Hashmat had apparently willed herself into death; at the very end she had been heard muttering, ‘… deeper and deeper into the heart of the rosy cloud.’ The old lady, having been given glimpses of non-being through the mediating powers of the young hypnotist’s voice, had finally relaxed the iron will with which she had clung to life for what she had claimed was more than one hundred and twe
nty years. The three mothers stopped swinging in their seat and ordered Omar Khayyam to abandon mesmerism. But by then the world had changed. I must go back a little way to describe the alteration.

  What was also found in the slowly emptying rooms: a previously mentioned telescope. With which Omar Khayyam spied out of upper-storey windows (those on the ground floor being permanently shuttered and barred): the world seen as a bright disc, a moon for his delight. He watched kite-fights between colourful, tailed patangs whose strings were black and dipped in glass to make them razor sharp; he heard the victors’ cries – ‘Boi-oi-oi! Boi-oi!’ – come towards him on the gritty breeze; once a green and white kite, its string severed, dropped in through his open window. And when, shortly before his twelfth birthday, there strolled on to this ocular moon the incomprehensibly appealing figure of Farah Zoroaster, at that time no more than fourteen but already possessed of a body that moved with the physical wisdom of a woman, then, in that exact moment, he felt his voice break in his throat, while below his belt other things slid downwards too, to take their appointed places, somewhat ahead of schedule, in hitherto-empty sacs. His longing for the outside was immediately transformed into a dull ache in the groin, a tearing in his loins; what followed was perhaps inevitable.

  He was not free. His roving freedom-of-the-house was only the pseudo-liberty of a zoo animal; and his mothers were his loving, caring keepers. His three mothers: who else implanted in his heart the conviction of being a sidelined personality, a watcher from the wings of his own life? He watched them for a dozen years, and, yes, it must be said, he hated them for their closeness, for the way they sat with arms entwined on their swinging, creaking seat, for their tendency to lapse giggling into the private languages of their girlhood, for their way of hugging each other, of putting their three heads together and whispering about whoknowswhat, of finishing one another’s sentences. Omar Khayyam, walled up in ‘Nishapur’ had been excluded from human society by his mothers’ strange resolve; and this, his mothers’ three-in-oneness, redoubled that sense of exclusion, of being, in the midst of objects, out of things.