Shame

by Salman Rushdie

  He understood that she was no longer the luminous girl with whom he had fallen in love in a different universe, her reason had gone, and so he made Colonel Shuja escort her home before the funeral rites were completed. Sometimes he thinks the walls are throbbing, as if the water-stained concrete has developed a tic, and then he allows himself to close his eyelids which are as heavy as iron shields, so that he can tell himself who he is. In the armour of this blindness he recites: I, Iskander Harappa, Prime Minister, Chairman of the Popular Front, husband of Rani, father to Arjumand, formerly devoted lover of. He has forgotten her name and forces his eyelids open, he has to use his fingers to push them up, and the walls are still pulsating. Cockroaches dislodged by the movement fall down upon his head; they are three inches long and when he brushes them to the floor he has to crush them with his bare heels; they crackle like pine-kernel shells on the cement. There is a drumming in his ears.

  What is the shape of death? Death’s cell is ten feet long, seven wide, eight high, twenty point seven four cubic yards of finality beyond which there awaits a certain courtyard, a last cigar, silence. I will insist on Romeo y Juliettas. That story also ends in death … They call this solitary confinement but he is not alone, there are flies fornicating on his toenails and mosquitoes drinking from the pools of his wrists, putting the blood to some use before it all goes to waste. Four guards in the corridor, too: in short, plenty of company. And sometimes they let his lawyers pay a call.

  Through the door of the iron bars comes the stink of the latrine. In the winter he shivers but the low temperature takes the edge off that brown and foetid smell. In the hot season they switch off the ceiling fan and the odour bubbles and swells, stuffing its putrid fingers up his nose, making his eyes bulge even though his tear ducts are dry. He goes on hunger strike and when he is almost too weak to move they hang a blanket over the latrine door and switch on the fan. But when he asks for drinking water they bring it boiling hot and he has to wait many hours for it to cool.

  Pains in the chest. He vomits blood. There are nosebleeds, too.

  Two years from fall to hanging, and almost the whole time spent in the enclosed space of death. First in Kot Lakhpat, then in the District Jail from which, if he had a window, he could see the palace of his former glory. When they moved him from the first death-cell to the second he formed the giddy conviction that no move had taken place, that although he had experienced the sack over the head, the shovings, the sensations of travel, of flight, they had simply done it to disorient him, and brought him back to his starting-place. Or finishing-place. The two cells were so alike that he would not believe he had been moved to the capital until they let his lawyers in to tell him so.

  They keep him chained around the clock. When he turns too suddenly in his sleep the metal cuffs bite into his ankles. For one hour a day they remove the chains; he shits, walks. And is shackled once again. ‘My morale is high,’ he tells his lawyers, ‘because I am not made of the wood whick burns easily.’

  The death-cell, its proportions, its contents. He focuses his mind on what is concrete, tangible, there. These flies and mosquitoes and cockroaches, they are his friends, he counts them, they can be touched or crushed or borne. These iron bars enclosing him, one to six. This flea-bag mattress, provided after he made a fuss daily for five months, it is a victory, perhaps his last. These chains, that lotah pot full of water too hot to touch. Something is meant here, something intended. The death-cell holds the key to the mystery of dying. But nobody scratched a code on any wall.

  If it is a dream, and sometimes in the fever of his days he thinks it is, then (he also knows) the dreamer is someone else. He is inside the dream, or he would not be able to touch dream-insects; dream-water would not burn him … someone is dreaming him. God, then? No, not God. He struggles to remember Raza Hyder’s face.

  Comprehension comes before the end. He, Harappa, brought the General from the wilderness into the world. The General of whom this cell is one small aspect, who is general, omnipresent, omnivorous: it is a cell inside his head. Death and the General: Iskander sees no difference between the terms. From darkness into light, from nothingness into somethingness. I made him, I was his father, he is my seed. And now I am less than he. They accuse Haroun of killing his father because that is what Hyder is doing to me.

  Then another step, which takes him beyond such aching simplicities. The father should be superior and the son, inferior. But now I am low and he, high. An inversion: the parent become the child. He is turning me into his son.

  His son. Who emerged dead from the womb with a noose about his neck. That noose seals my fate. Because now he understands the cell, the throbbing walls, the smell of excrement, the drumbeat of a foul invisible heart: death’s belly, an inverse womb, dark mirror of a birthplace, its purpose is to suck him in, to draw him back and down through time, until he hangs foetal in his own waters, with an umbilical cord hung fatally round his neck. He will leave this place only when its mechanisms have done their work, death’s baby, travelling down the death canal, and the noose will tighten its grip.

  A man will wait a lifetime for revenge. The killing of Iskander Harappa avenges the still-born child. Yes: I am being unmade.

  Iskander Harappa was persuaded by his lawyers to lodge an appeal against the High Court’s sentence of death. The appeal was heard by a bench of seven judges sitting in the Supreme Court in the new capital. By the time the Supreme Court hearings ended he had been in captivity for a year and a half; and a further six months were to pass before the body of the former Prime Minister arrived at Mohenjo in the care of Talvar Ulhaq, who had, by then, been returned to active police duty.

  Elections were not held. Raza Hyder became President. All this is well know.

  And Sufiya Zinobia?

  Back goes the clock once again. It was election day and there were many fires. Raza Hyder pouring ashes from the window of a moving car. Isky Harappa unaware of the death-cells of the future. And Omar Khayyam Shakil in a blue funk.

  After the dismissal of Shahbanou the Parsee ayah, Omar Khayyam grew afraid, because he saw the shapes of his early life rising up to haunt his adulthood. Once again a Parsee girl had been made pregnant; once again, there was a mother with a fatherless child. The idea that there could be no escape wrapped itself round his head like a hot towel and made it hard for him to breathe; and on top of that he was extremely nervous of what General Hyder might do now that the ayah had been dismissed for the crime of pregnancy and it was no longer possible to keep the secret of whom Shahbanou had been visiting every night. What was out in the open: the most grievous of faults, the infidelity of a husband beneath his wife’s father’s roof. A betrayal of salt.

  But Raza Hyder was just as agitated as Omar Khayyam, and was not thinking about salt. After the burning of the blood-encrusted veil he had been assailed by the thought that perhaps Talvar Ulhaq was just a little too good to be true with his pose of ideal son-in-lawship. Whose neck got bitten? Whose polo career was vampirically terminated? Who might, very plausibly, have bided his time and waited for revenge? ‘Fool that I am,’ Raza cursed himself, ‘I should have had the blood analysed. Maybe it was only a goat’s; but now it’s all up in smoke.’

  O reluctance of a father to accept his daughter’s Beastliness! Up in smoke: certainty, obligation, responsibility. Raza Hyder considered the option of forgetting the whole thing … that night, however, he was visited by a dream of Maulana Dawood, and the dead divine yelled at him that it was about time he started believing that a devil had got inside his daughter, because the whole business was a test of his faith devised by God, and he had better choose what he really cared about, his daughter’s life or the eternal love of the Deity. Maulana Dawood, who had apparently gone on ageing after death and was more decrepit-looking than ever, added unkindly that if it was any help he could assure Hyder that Sufiya Zinobia’s antics would get worse rather than better, and in the end they would certainly terminate Raza’s career. Raza Hyder woke up and burst i
nto tears, because the dream had shown him his true nature, which was that of a man who was prepared to sacrifice everything, even his child, to God. ‘Remember Abraham,’ he told himself as he mopped his eyes.

  So Hyder and Shakil were both distressed, that morning, by the sense of being out of control of their lives – by the stifling presence of Fate … Raza realized that he had no option but to talk to Sufiya Zinobia’s husband. Never mind that foolishness with the ayah; this was serious, and the fellow had a right to know.

  When the General’s ADC presented himself to Omar Khayyam Shakil and said sadly and in some puzzlement that the C-in-C required the doctor’s presence on a little fishing expedition, Omar began to quake in his boots. What could be so important as to make Hyder spend the day with him while the city was exploding with post-electoral fireworks? ‘This is it,’ he thought, ‘that ayah has done for me.’ On the drive into the Bagheeragali hills he was too afraid to open his mouth.

  Raza Hyder told him that they were going to a stream that was famous both for the beauty of the surrounding wooded slopes and for the legend that its waters were haunted by a fish-hating ghost of such ferocity that the many plump mahaseer trout who passed that way preferred to leap on to the hooks of any anglers who fished there, no matter how incompetent they were. That day, however, neither Raza nor Omar Khayyam would succeed in landing a single fish.

  Rejection by mahaseer trout: why did the fish not bite? What made the two distinguished gentlemen less appealing than the ghostfish? Being unable to enter into the imagination of a trout, I offer my own (fishy enough) explanation. A fish seeks, in a fishook, a kind of confidence, the hook communicating its inevitability to fishlips. Angling is a battle of wits; the thoughts of the fishermen pass down rods and lines, and are divined by finny creatures. Who, on this occasion, found haunted waters easier to stomach than the ugly descending thoughts … well, accept don’t accept, but facts are facts. A day in wading boots and empty baskets at the end of it. The fish delivered their verdict on the men.

  Two men in water discussed impossible things. While all around them koels, pine-trees, butterflies added a fantastic improbability to their words … Raza Hyder, unable to get revenge-plots out of his mind, found himself thinking that he was placing his fate in the hands of a man whose brother he had exterminated. O suspect sons-in-law! Doubt and gloom hung over Hyder’s head and scared away the fish.

  But – even though Iskander Harappa in his death-cell believed that men would wait a lifetime for revenge – even though I am going to have to reopen this blasted possibility, because Hyder has got it into his head – I simply cannot bring myself to see our hero as a brooding, biding-his-time menace out of a revenge tragedy. I have conceded that his obsession with Sufiya Zinobia might have been genuine; beyond that, or even because of that, I stick to my guns. Too much time has passed without any hint from Omar Khayyam that some terrible deed of retribution was in the offing; it seems to me that he has made his choice, choosing Hyders, rejecting family; that Omar-the-husband, Omar-the-son-in-law, has long since disposed of the shade of Omar-the-brother, mourning for the sibling he never knew, darkest of horses, waiting for his chance. – It is tiresome when one’s characters see less clearly than oneself; but I have his three mothers on my side. – And Raza can’t have taken his own worries too seriously, because he ended up telling Omar Khayyam everything, the headless boys, the semen traces, the veil. – And if he didn’t, well, then, nor shall we.

  Two men in a fast-flowing stream, and over their heads thunderclouds, invisible to human eyes but alarming to fishy ones. Omar Khayyam’s bladder had begun to ache with fear, the fear of Sufiya Zinobia replacing his fear of Raza Hyder, now that he had realized that Raza was turning a blind eye to the Shahbanou affair; and a third fear, too, the fear of what Raza Hyder was proposing.

  The sacrifice of Abraham was mentioned. The painless, fatal injection. Tears streamed from Hyder’s eyes, plopped into water, their saltiness further discouraging the already scornful fish. ‘You are a doctor,’ Hyder said, ‘and a husband. I leave it up to you.’

  The action of mind over matter. In a hypnotic trance the subject can acquire what seems like superhuman strength. Pain is not felt, arms become as strong as iron bars, feet run like the wind. Extraordinary things. Sufiya Zinobia could enter such a state, it seemed, without external help. Perhaps, under hypnosis, a cure could be effected? The wellsprings of the rage located, burned away, drained … the source of her anger discovered, and made still. Let us recall that Omar Khayyam Shakil was an illustrious medical man, and the professional excitement had led him to Sufiya Zinobia years ago. That old challenge had been renewed. Raza and Omar Khayyam: both men felt themselves being tested, the one by God, the other by his science. And it is common for males of the species to be incapable of resisting the idea of a test … ‘I shall watch her closely,’ Omar Khayyam said. ‘There is a possible treatment.’

  Nobody does anything for just one reason. It is not possible that Omar Khayyam, for so long shameless, was made brave by a twinge of shame? That his guilt over the Shahbanou business made him say, ‘There is a treatment,’ and so face the worst danger of his life? – But what is undeniable, what I do not attempt to deny, is that courage was shown. And courage is a rarer thing than evil, after all. Credit where it’s due.

  But what confusion swept over Raza Hyder! A man who has decided to do away with his daughter for religious reasons does not relish being told he has been too hasty.

  ‘You’re a fool,’ General Hyder told his son-in-law. ‘If the devil comes out again she will tear off your stupid head.’

  To come to the point: for some days Omar Khayyam watched Sufiya at home, playing with the numberless children, skipping for them and shelling pine-kernels, and he could see that she was getting worse, because this was the first time that the violence bursting from her had left no after-effects, no immune-disorder, no comatose trance; she was becoming habituated to it, he thought in fright, it could happen again at any time, the children. Yes, he saw the danger, now that he was looking for it he caught the flickers in her eyes, the coming and going of little pricks of yellow light. He was watching her carefully so he saw what casual eyes would have missed, which was that the edges of Sufiya Zinobia were beginning to become uncertain, as if there were two beings occupying that air-space, competing for it, two entities of identical shape but of tragically opposed natures. From the flickering points of light he began to learn that science was not enough, that even though he rejected possession-by-devils as a way of denying human responsibility for human actions, even though God had never meant much to him, still his reason could not erase the evidence of those eyes, could not blind him to that unearthly glow, the smouldering fire of the Beast. And around Sufiya Zinobia her nephews and nieces played.

  ‘It’s now or never,’ he thought, and spoke to her in the fashion of an old-fashioned husband: ‘Wife, kindly accompany me to my quarters.’ She rose and followed him without a word, because the Beast was not in charge; but once they were there he made the mistake of commanding her to lie down on the bed, without explaining that he had no intention of forcing her to, of demanding his marital, so of course she misunderstood his purpose and at once the thing began, the yellow fire burning from her eyes, and she leapt from the bed and came at him with her hands stuck out like hooks.

  He opened his mouth to scream but the sight of her sucked the breath from his lungs; he stared into those eyes of Hell with his mouth open like asphyxiating fishlips. Then she fell to the floor and began to writhe and to gag, and purple bubbles formed on her protruding tongue. It was impossible not to believe that a struggle was taking place, Sufiya Zinobia against the Beast, that what was left of that poor girl had hurled itself against the creature, that the wife was protecting her husband against herself. This was how it came about that Omar Khayyam Shakil looked into the eyes of the Beast of shame and survived, because although he had been paralysed by that basilisk flame she had snuffed it out long enough to bre
ak the spell, and he managed to shake himself free of its power. She was flinging herself around the floor so violently that she splintered the frame of his bed when she collided with it, and while she thrashed about he managed to reach his medicine bag, his fingers managed to reach the hypodermic and the sedative, and in the very last instant of Sufiya Zinobia’s struggle, when for a fraction of a second she acquired the serene air of a slumbrous infant, just before the final assault of the Beast, which would have destroyed Sufiya Zinobia Shakil for ever, Omar Khayyam stuck the needle, without benefit of local anaesthetic, deep into her rump and pushed the plunger, and she subsided into unconsciousness with a sigh.

  There was an attic room. (It was a house designed by Angrez architects.) At night, when the servants were asleep, Raza Hyder and Omar Khayyam carried the drugged form of Sufiya Zinobia up attic stairs. It is even possible (difficult to see in the dark) that they wrapped her in a carpet.

  Omar Khayyam had refused to administer the final, painless injection. I will not kill her. Because she saved my life. And because, once, I saved hers. But he no longer believed treatment was possible; he had seen the golden eyes of the most powerful mesmerist on earth. Neither kill nor cure … Hyder and Shakil agreed that Sufiya Zinobia was to be kept unconscious until further notice. She was to enter a state of suspended animation; Hyder brought long chains and they padlocked her to the attic beams; in the nights that followed they bricked up the attic window and fastened huge bolts to the door; and twice in every twenty-four hours, Omar Khayyam would go unobserved into that darkened room, that echo of other death-cells, to inject into the tiny body lying on its thin carpet the fluids of nourishment and of unconsciousness, to administer the drugs that turned her from one fairy-tale into another, into sleeping-beauty instead of beauty-and-beast. ‘What else to do?’ Hyder said helplessly. ‘Because I cannot kill her either, don’t you see.’