Shame

by Salman Rushdie

  By the time of the move north, it was clear that Omar Khayyam had changed his ways. Like Iskander Harappa, but for different reasons, he gave up his old debauches: Raza Hyder would have settled for nothing less. The new, northern version of Omar Khayyam Shakil lived simply and worked hard: fourteen hours a day at the Mount Hira Hospital, except on those occasions when he stood in the General’s corner during wrestling bouts. He returned to the C-in-C’s residence only to eat and to sleep, but in spite of all the evidence of reformation, abstinence and dedication, Shahbanou continued to watch him like a hawk, not least because his already ample figure grew ever more corpulent in these days, so that when he joked with the ayah, ‘Well, Banou, am I being a good boy or not?’, she replied seriously, ‘Omar Sahib, I can see you filling up with God knows what, and you are eating so little that it can’t be food, so as far as I can tell it’s only a matter of time before you lose control or burst. How difficult to be a man,’ she said with a grave sympathy in her eyes.

  That night he recognized Shahbanou’s knock on his bedroom door. He hauled himself out of bed and arrived at the door puffing and patting his heart; to discover the ayah outside, holding a candle, her hair loose, her bony body of a tilyar bird half-visible through her cotton shift. ‘What are you thinking of?’ Omar Khayyam demanded in surprise, but she pushed her way past him and sat down solemnly on the bed.

  ‘I don’t want to kill anybody,’ she explained in neutral tones, ‘so I thought, better I do this instead.’

  ‘How much you must love her,’ Omar Khayyam marvelled. ‘More than you,’ she answered without criticism and quickly removed her shift.

  ‘I’m an old man,’ he told her later, ‘so three times is at least two too many. Maybe you want to kill me anyway, and this is a simpler method.’

  ‘It is not simple, Omar Sahib,’ she replied, ‘and you’re not such a wreck as you say.’

  After that she came to him every night, except during her times of the month and the days of fertility, and on those seven or eight nights he lay in the grip of his voluntary insomnia imagining her body like a wire beside him in the bed, and wondering about the strange destiny which had led him to marry one wife and to acquire quite a different one. After a while he realized that he had started to lose weight. The pounds were beginning to drop off him, and by the time of Harappa’s fall he had become not exactly slim, because he would never be that, but he had shrunk out of all his suits (so it will be seen that his life and Isky’s were still linked, because Isky, too, lost weight … but again, for different reasons. For different reasons); under the spell of the Parsee ayah he had diminished to remarkably normal dimensions. ‘I may be no movie star,’ he told his mirror, ‘but I have also ceased to be a cartoon.’ Omar Khayyam and Shahbanou: our peripheral hero has acquired a shadow bride, and his own shadow has been enabled, as a result, to grow less.

  And Sufiya Zinobia?

  … lies in bed squeezing her eyelids shut with her fingers hoping for the sleep she knows may never come. Feels on the skin of her eyelids the prickle of Shahbanou’s stare. The ayah on the mat, watching waiting. Then she, Sufiya Zinobia, decides sleep is impossible, relaxes completely, drops her hands, pretends. She has found that this mimicry, this simulacrum of sleep, makes other people happy. She does it automatically now, has had plenty of practice, her breathing settles into a certain rhythm, there is a certain way of shifting the body at certain intuited intervals, a certain pattern to the behaviour of the eyeballs beneath the lids. After some time she hears Shahbanou rise from her mat, slip out of the room, go a few steps down the passage, knock. Insomnia sharpens the ears. She hears bedsprings, his exhalations, her bony cries. There is a thing that people do at night. Her mother told her oceans and fish. Behind her eyes she sees the Parsee ayah metamorphosing, becoming liquid, flowing outwards until she fills the room. Melted Shahbanou, salty, immense, and a transmogrifying Omar growing scales, fins, gills and swimming in that sea. She wonders what it’s like afterwards, when they change back, how they tidy up the mess, how everything gets dry. (One morning she slipped into her husband’s bedroom after he left for the hospital and Shahbanou went to count dirty garments with the dhobi. She felt the sheets with her hands, found damp patches. But an ocean should leave its mark: she scanned the floor for starfish, seaweed, shells. And found none: a mystery.)

  She likes it now that she is sometimes left alone and the things can happen in her head, the favourite things she keeps in there, locked up; when people are present she never dares to take the things out and play with them in case they get taken away or broken by mistake. Big clumsy people all around, they don’t mean to break things but they do. Inside her head the precious fragile toys. One of the best inside-things is when her father picks her up. Hugs, smiles at, cries over her. Says things she doesn’t really understand but the sounds are nice. She takes him out of her head and makes him do it over and over, all of it, like having a bedtime story told six times running. You can’t do that with the things outside your head. Sometimes they only happen once and you have to be quick and grab them and stuff them away in your secret place. Sometimes they never happen at all. There is a thing she has inside that has never happened anywhere else: her mother skips with her. Bilquìs holds the skipping rope and the two of them jump together, fasterfaster, until they are going so fast you can’t see who is who any more, they could be one person held within the circle of the rope. It tires her out to play with this toy, not because of the skipping but because of the difficulty of doing things inside that you haven’t brought there from the outside. Why are these inside-only things so much harder to do? And almost impossible to repeat overandover.

  A special teacher comes most days and she likes that. She, the teacher, brings new things and Sufiya Zinobia puts some of these inside her head as well. There is a thing called the world that makes a hollow noise when you knock your knuckles on it or sometimes it’s flat and divided up in books. She knows it is really a picture of a much bigger place called everywhere but it isn’t a good picture because she can’t see herself in it, even with a magnifying glass. She puts a much better world into her head, she can see everyone she wants to there. Omar Shahbanou Bilquìs Raza tiny on the tin. She waves down, the little ant family waves back up. Also writing, she can do that, too. In her secret place her favourite letters, the bumpy sìn, hockeystick làm, mìm with its chest puffed out like a turkey, write themselves over and over.

  She packs her head full of good things so that there won’t be room for the other things, the things she hates.

  A picture of herself with dead birds. Who put that in there? And another one: she is biting somebody, hard. Sometimes these badnesses start repeating themselves like stuck records and it isn’t easy to push them away and pick up her father’s smile or the skipping rope instead. She knows she used to be ill and maybe these bad toys got left over from them.

  And there are other things that don’t seem to be from anywhere. They come most often during the sleepless nights, shapes that make her feel like crying, or places with people hanging upside-down from the roof. She feels the things that get inside her must be her own fault. If she were good the bad things would go elsewhere, so that means she is not good. Why is she so bad? What makes her rotten, evil? She tosses in her bed. And pouring out from inside the fearsome alien shapes.

  Often she thinks about husband. She knows what a husband is. Her father is a husband, also Talvar Ulhaq, and now she has one, too. What does that mean, to have a husband? What are they for? She can do most things for herself and Shahbanou helps with the rest. But she has a husband. It is another mystery.

  Before the marriage she asked Shahbanou about this and put Shahbanou-answering into her head. She takes the ayah out and hears her say, overandover: ‘They are for money and babies. But don’t worry, bibi, money is no problem and babies aren’t for you.’ She can’t understand this, no matter how often the picture plays. If money is no problem you shouldn’t need husbands for it. And babies aren’t for
you. Why? ‘Just, I say so.’ But why? ‘O shoo. Why why why away you fly.’ It always ends like that, without explaining anything. But this husband business is important. She has one. Everyone else must know but she doesn’t. Again her own stupid fault.

  The best thing that has happened recently is the babies, her sister’s babies. She, Sufiya, plays with them as often as she can. She likes watching them crawl, fall over, make funny noises, likes knowing more than them. She skips for them: O the wonder in their eyes. She puts them in her head and brings them out when the sleep won’t come. Good News never plays with the babies. Why? No point asking. ‘Why why pudding and pie.’ In her head the babies laugh.

  Then the bad shapes again, because if she has a husband, and a husband is for babies, but babies-aren’t-for-you, then something must be wrong. This gives her a feeling. Just like a blush, all over, hot hot. But although her skin tingles and her cheeks burn it is only happening on the inside; nobody notices these new internal blushes. That is strange also. It makes the feeling worse. Sometimes she thinks, ‘I am changing into something,’ but when those words come into her head she doesn’t know what they mean. How do you change into a something? The bad, wrong words and the feeling sharper and more painful. Go away go away go away. Go away.

  There is a thing that women do at night with husbands. She does not do it, Shahbanou does it for her. I hate fish. Her husband does not come to her at night. Here are two things she does not like: that he does not come, that’s one, and the thing itself makes two, it sounds horrible, it must be, the shrieks the moans the wet and smelly sheets. Chhi chhi. Disgusting. But she is a wife. She has a husband. She can’t work this out. The horrible thing and the horrible not-doing-the-thing. She squeezes her eyelids shut with her fingers and makes the babies play. There is no ocean but there is a feeling of sinking. It makes her sick.

  There is an ocean. She feels its tide. And, somewhere in its depths, a Beast, stirring.

  The business of the disappearing children had been going on in the country’s shanty-towns and slums for many years. There were various theories about these disappearances. It was suggested that the children were being abducted to the Gulf to provide cheap labour or to be exploited by Arab princelings in worse, unnamable ways. Some people maintained that the parents were the culprits, that they were doing away with the unwanted members of their outsize families. The mystery had never been solved. No arrests made, no slave-trade conspiracies unearthed. It became a fact of life: children simply vanished, in broad daylight, into thin air. Poof!

  Then they found the headless bodies.

  It was the year of the general election. After six years in power, Iskander Harappa and the Popular Front were campaigning hard. Opposition was fierce, however: Isky’s rivals had united to give him a tough fight. Economic criticisms were made; but also suggestions-of-Godlessness, vilification-of-arrogance, insinuations-of-corruption. It was widely supposed that the Front would lose every frontier constituency, both in the northwest and around Q. Also many seats in the towns. In short, people had plenty on their minds without worrying about a few dead paupers.

  The four bodies were all adolescent, male, pungent. The heads had been wrenched off their necks by some colossal force: literally torn from their shoulders. Traces of semen were detected on their tattered pants. They were found in a rubbish dump near a slum. It seemed that the four of them had died more or less simultaneously. The heads were never found.

  The election campaign was at fever-pitch. The murders barely made the newspapers; they were not reported on the radio. There were rumours, some gossip, but people were quickly bored. All kinds of God knows what-all could happen in those slums.

  This is what happened.

  The woman in the veil: a horror story.

  Talvar Ulhaq was flying back to the capital from Q. when he had the vision. In those days the chief of the Federal Security Force was a busy man, hardly sleeping, racing around the country. It was election time, and Talvar was a member of Iskander Harappa’s trusted inner circle, his act of betrayal was still in the future. So he was fully occupied, because Isky relied on the FSF to keep him one jump ahead of his opponents, to discover their plans, to infiltrate fifth-columnists into their headquarters and subvert their arrangements, to find grounds for arresting their leaders. He was busy with such matters in that aeroplane, so that when the damaged ligaments in his neck began to play up like the very devil, he gritted his teeth and ignored them, because he was running his eyes carefully over certain photographs of separatist Frontier politicos in bed with attractive young men who were, in fact, loyal employees of the FSF, working courageously and selflessly for their country. But then the vision came, and Talvar had to look up from his work, because it seemed to him that the cabin shimmered and dissolved, and then he was standing like a shadow on the wall of the Hyder residence, at night, watching the figure of Bilquìs Hyder, veiled as usual in a head-to-toe black burqa, moving towards him down a darkened corridor. As she passed him without glancing in his direction he was appalled to see that her burqa was sodden and dripping with something too thick to be water. The blood, black in the unlit corridor, left a trail down the passage behind her.

  The vision faded. When Talvar got home he checked things out and discovered that nothing seemed amiss at the Hyder house, Bilquìs had not left the premises and everyone was fine, so he put the matter out of his mind and got on with his job. Later he confessed to General Raza Hyder, ‘It’s my mistake. I should have seen at once what was going on; but my thoughts were on other things.’

  The day after his return from Q. Talvar Ulhaq heard about the four headless bodies, by the purest chance: two of his men were joking about the murders in the FSF canteen, wondering if they could pin the killings on well-known homosexual opposition bosses. Talvar went cold and cursed himself. ‘You idiot,’ he thought, ‘no wonder your neck was hurting.’

  He drove immediately to the Army GHQ, and asked Raza to accompany him into the gardens, to make sure they were not overheard. Hyder, in some confusion, did as his son-in-law requested.

  Once they were outside in the heat of the afternoon Talvar recounted his vision, and admitted shamefacedly that he should have known that the figure he had seen had been too physically small to have been Bilquìs Hyder. It seemed to him, to, that on reflection there had been something a little loose and uncoordinated about its walk … ‘Forgive me,’ he said, ‘but I think that Sufiya Zinobia has been sleepwalking again.’ Such was the respect for his clairvoyant powers that Raza Hyder listened giddily, but without interruption, as Talvar continued, expressing the opinion that were Sufiya Zinobia to be subjected to a medical examination she would be found not to be virgo intacta, which would be highly indicative, because they all knew that her husband did not share her bed. ‘Pardon my bluntness, sir, but I believe she had intercourse with the four young goondas before tearing off their heads.’

  The image of his deranged daughter surrendering to that multiple deflowering, and then rising in her vengeance to rip her lovers to shreds, made Raza Hyder feel physically ill … ‘Please understand, sir,’ Talvar was saying respectfully, ‘that I do not wish to proceed in this matter, except in accordance with your precise instructions. This is a family business.’

  ‘How was I to know?’ Raza Hyder, his voice arriving almost inaudibly from a great distance. ‘Some birds, a bad temper at a wedding, then nothing for years. Kept thinking, what problem? Would go away, had gone. Fooled ourselves. Fools,’ and then he was silent for several minutes. ‘Could be the finish for me,’ he added eventually, ‘funtoosh, kaput, good night.’

  ‘Can’t be allowed, sir,’ Talvar objected. ‘The Army needs you, sir.’

  ‘Good fellow, Talvar,’ Raza mumbled, and then drifted off again until his son-in-law coughed and asked, ‘So, how to proceed, sir?’

  General Hyder snapped out of it. ‘What do you mean?’ he inquired. ‘What is this proceed? What evidence is here? Only theory and mysticism. I will have none of it. How da
re you make allegations on such a basis? To hell with this tomfoolery, mister. Don’t waste my time.’

  ‘No, sir.’ Talvar Ulhaq came to attention. Tears were in the General’s eyes as he put his arm around the younger man’s braced shoulders.

  ‘Got the message, hey, Talvar, boy? Chup: mum’s the word.’

  In the depths of the ocean the sea-Beast stirs. Swelling slowly, feeding on inadequacy, guilt, shame, bloating towards the surface. The Beast has eyes like beacons, it can seize insomniacs and turn them into sleepwalkers. Sleeplessness into somnambulism, girl into fiend. Time moves differently for the Beast. The years fly past like birds. And as the girl grows, as her understanding increases, the Beast has more to eat … Sufiya Zinobia at twenty-eight had advanced to a mental age of approximately nine and a half, so that when Shahbanou the ayah became pregnant that year and was dismissed from service on the grounds of her immorality, Sufiya knew what had happened, she had heard the night-time noises, his grunts, her birdlike cries. In spite of her precautions the ayah had conceived a child, because it’s easy to miscalculate dates, and she left without a word, without attempting to apportion blame. Omar Khayyam kept in touch with her, he paid for the abortion and made sure she did not starve afterwards, but that solved nothing; the damage had been done.

  Sufiya Zinobia stiff as a board in bed. Trying to bring the good things out of her head, babies, her father’s smile. But instead there is only the thing inside Shahbanou, the thing that husbands make, because he did not give me the baby she took it inside her instead. She, Sufiya, possessed by fault and shame. That woman who loved me. And my husband, who can blame him, he never had a wife. Overandover in her empty room; she is a tide rising towards flood, she feels something coming, roaring, feels it take her, the thing, the flood or perhaps the thing in the flood, the Beast bursting forth to wreak its havoc on the world, and after that she knows nothing, will remember nothing, because it, the thing, is free.