‘We always wanted a boy,’ Bilquìs replied, ‘but God knows best.’
In spite of being shaken, timidly by Shahbanou and more roughly by Good News, Sufiya Zinobia did not awaken from her faint. By the next evening a fever had mounted in her, a hot flush spread from her scalp to the soles of her feet. The fragile-looking Parsee ayah, whose sunken eyes made her seem forty-three years old but who turned out to be only nineteen, never moved from the side of the great barred cot except to fetch fresh cold compresses for Sufiya’s brow. ‘You Parsees,’ Good News told Shahbanou, ‘you’ve got a soft spot for mental cases, seems to me. Must be all your experience.’ Bilquìs showed no interest in the application of compresses. She sat in her room with the scissors that seemed to be stuck to her fingers, snipping at empty air. ‘Wind fever,’ Shahbanou called her charge’s nameless affliction, which had made that shorn head blaze; but on the second night it cooled, she opened her eyes, it was thought that she had recovered. The next morning, however, Shahbanou noticed that something frightful had begun to happen to the girl’s tiny body. It had started to come out in huge blotchy rashes, red and purple with small hard pimples in the middle; boils were forming between her toes and her back was bubbling up into extraordinary vermilion lumps. Sufiya Zinobia was over-salivating; great jets of spittle flew out through her lips. Appalling black buboes were forming in her armpits. It was as though the dark violence which had been engendered within that small physique had turned inwards, had forsaken turkeys and gone for the girl herself; as if, like her grandfather Mahmoud the Woman who sat in an empty cinema and waited to pay for his double bill, or like a soldier falling on his sword, Sufiya Zinobia had chosen the form of her own end. The plague of shame – in which I insist on including the unfelt shame of those around her, for instance what had not been felt by Raza Hyder when he gunned down Babar Shakil – as well as the unceasing shame of her own existence, and of her hacked-off hair – the plague, I say, spread rapidly through that tragic being whose chief defining characteristic was her excessive sensitivity to the bacilli of humiliation. She was taken to hospital with pus bursting from her sores, dribbling, incontinent, with the rough, cropped proof of her mother’s loathing on her head.
What is a saint? A saint is a person who suffers in our stead.
On the night when all this happened, Omar Khayyam Shakil had been beset, during his brief sleep, by vivid dreams of the past, in all of which the white-clothed figure of the disgraced teacher Eduardo Rodrigues played a leading role. In the dreams Omar Khayyam was a boy again. He kept trying to follow Eduardo everywhere, to the toilet, into bed, convinced that if he could just catch up with the teacher he would be able to jump inside him and be happy at long last; but Eduardo kept shooing him away with his white fedora, slapping at him and motioning to him to go, get lost, buzz off. This mystified the doctor until many days later, when he realized that the dreams had been prescient warnings against the dangers of falling in love with under-age females and then following them to the ends of the earth, where they inevitably cast you aside, the blast of their rejection picks you up and hurls you out into the great starry nothingness beyond gravity and sense. He recalled the end of the dream, in which Eduardo, his white garments now blackened and tattered and singed, seemed to be flying away from him, floating above a bursting cloud of fire, with one hand raised above his head, as if in farewell … a father is a warning; but he is also a lure, a precedent impossible to resist, and so by the time that Omar Khayyam deciphered his dreams it was already far too late to take their advice, because he had fallen for his destiny, Sufiya Zinobia Hyder, a twelve-year-old girl with a three-year-old mind, the daughter of the man who killed his brother.
You can imagine how depressed I am by the behaviour of Omar Khayyam Shakil. I ask for the second time: what kind of hero is this? Last seen slipping into unconsciousness, stinking of vomit and swearing revenge; and now, going crazy for Hyder’s daughter. How is one to account for such a character? Is consistency too much to ask? I accuse this so-called hero of giving me the most Godawful headache.
Certainly (let’s take this slowly; no sudden moves, please) he was in a disturbed state of mind. A dead brother, rejection by his best friend. These are extenuating circumstances. We shall take them into account. It is also fair to assume that the vertigo which assailed him in the taxi returned, over the next few days, to knock him even further off balance. So there is some sort of flimsy case for the defence.
Step by step, now. He wakes up, engulfed in the emptiness of his life, alone in the insomnia of the dawn. He washes, dresses, goes to work; and finds that by burying himself in his duties he can manage to keep going; even the vertigo attacks are kept at bay.
What is his area of expertise? We know this: he is an immunologist. So he cannot be blamed for the arrival at his hospital of Hyder’s daughter; suffering an immunological crisis, Sufiya Zinobia is brought to the country’s leading expert in the field.
Carefully, now. Avoid loud noises. To an immunologist in search of the calm that comes of challenging, absorbing work, Sufiya Zinobia seems like a godsend. Delegating as many of his responsibilities as possible, Omar Khayyam devotes himself more or less full-time to the case of the simpleton girl whose body’s defence mechanisms have declared war against the very life they are supposed to be protecting. His devotion is perfectly genuine (the defence refuses to rest): in the succeeding weeks, he makes himself fully acquainted with her medical background, and afterwards he will set down in his treatise The Case of Miss H. the important new evidence he has unearthed of the power of the mind to affect, ‘via direct nervous pathways’, the workings of the body. The case becomes famous in medical circles; doctor and patient are forever linked in the history of science. Does this make other, more personal links more palatable? I reserve judgement. Go on one step:
He becomes convinced that Sufiya Zinobia is willing the damage upon herself. This is the significance of her case: it shows that even a broken mind is capable of marshalling macrophages and polymorphs; even a stunted intelligence can lead a palace revolution, a suicidal rebellion of the janissaries of the human body against the castle itself.
‘Total breakdown of the immune system,’ he notes after his first examination of the patient, ‘most terrible uprising I ever saw.’
Now let us put this as kindly as possible for the moment. (I have more accusations, but they will wait.) Afterwards, no matter how furiously he concentrates, trying to summon up every last detail of those days from the poisoned wells of memory, he is unable to pinpoint the moment at which professional excitement turned into tragic love. He does not claim that Sufiya Zinobia has given him the least encouragement; that would, in the circumstances, be patently absurd. But at some point, perhaps during his night-long bedside vigils, spend monitoring the effects of his prescribed course of immunosuppressive drugs, vigils in which he is joined by the ayah Shahbanou, who consents to wear sterile cap, coat, gloves and mask, but who absolutely refuses to leave the girl alone with the male doctor – yes, perhaps during those preposterously chaperoned nights, or possibly later, when it is clear that he has triumphed, that the praetorian revolt has been quelled, the mutiny suppressed by pharmaceutical mercenaries, so that the hideous outcrops of Sufiya Zinobia’s affliction fade from her body and the colour returns to her cheeks – somewhere along the line, it happens. Omar Khayyam falls stupidly, and irretrievably, in love.
‘It’s not rational,’ he reproaches himself, but his emotions, unscientifically, ignore him. He finds himself behaving awkwardly in her presence, and in his dreams he pursues her to the ends of the earth, while the mournful remnant of Eduardo Rodrigues looks down pityingly at his obsession from the sky. He, too, thinks of the extenuating circumstances, tells himself that in his distressed psychological condition he has become the victim of a mental disorder, but he is too ashamed even to think of taking advice … no, damn it! Headache or no headache, I will not let him get off as lightly as this. I accuse him of being ugly inside as well as out
, a Beast, just as Farah Zoroaster had divined all those years ago. I accuse him of playing God or at least Pygmalion, of feeling he had rights of ownership over the innocent whose life he had saved. I accuse that fat pigmeat tub of working out that the only chance he had of getting a beautiful wife was to marry a nitwit, sacrificing wifely brains for the beauty of the flesh.
Omar Khayyam claims his obsession with Sufiya Zinobia has cured his vertigo. Poppycock! Flim-flam! I accuse the villain of attempting a shameless piece of social climbing (he never felt giddy when he did that!) – ditched by one great figure of the period, Omar Khayyam seeks to hitch himself to another star. So unscrupulous is he, so shameless, that he will court an idiot in order to woo her father. Even a father who gave the order which sent eighteen bullets into the body of Babar Shakil.
But we have heard him mumble: ‘Babar, life is long.’ – O, I’m not fooled by that. You conceive of a revenge plot? – Omar Khayyam, by marrying the unmarriageable child, is enabled to stay close to Hyder for years, before, during and after his Presidency, biding his time, because revenge is patient, it awaits its perfect moment? – Piffle! Wind! Those sick (and no doubt whisky-soaked) words of a fainting whale were no more than a fading, hollow echo of the favourite threat of Mr Iskander Harappa, our hero’s erstwhile patron, fellow-debauchee and chum. Of course he never meant them; he is not the avenging type. Did he feel anything at all for that dead brother whom he never knew? I doubt it; his three mothers, as we shall see, doubted it. This is not a possibility one can take seriously. Revenge? Pah! Huh! Phooey! If Omar Khayyam thought about his brother’s demise, it is more likely that he thought this: ‘Fool, terrorist, gangster. What did he expect?’
I have one last, and most damning, accusation. Men who deny their pasts become incapable of thinking them real. Absorbed into the great whore-city, having left the frontier universe of Q. far behind him once again, Omar Khayyam Shakil’s home-town now seems to him like a sort of bad dream, a fantasy, a ghost. The city and the frontier are incompatible worlds; choosing Karachi, Shakil rejects the other. It becomes, for him, a feathery insubstantial thing, a discarded skin. He is no longer affected by what happens there, by its logic and demands. He is homeless: that is to say, a metropolitan through and through. A city is a camp for refugees.
God damn him! I’m stuck with him; and with his poxy love.
Very well; let’s go on. I’ve lost another seven years of my story while the headache banged and thumped. Seven years, and now there are marriages to attend. How time flies!
I dislike arranged marriages. There are some mistakes for which one should not be able to blame one’s poor parents.
8
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
‘Just imagine having a fish up your fundament, an eel that spits at your insides,’ Bilquìs said, ‘and you won’t need me to tell you what happens on a woman’s wedding night.’ Her daughter Good News submitted to this teasing and to the tracing of henna patterns upon the ticklish soles of her feet with the demure obstinacy of one who is guarding a terrible secret. She was seventeen years old and it was the eve of her wedding. The womenfolk of Bariamma’s family had assembled to prepare her; while Bilquìs applied henna, mother and daughter were surrounded by eager relatives bearing oils for the skin, hairbrushes, kohl, silver polish, flatirons. The mummified figure of Bariamma herself supervised everything blindly from her vantage point of a takht over which a Shirazi rug had been spread in her honour; gaotakia bolsters prevented her from toppling over on to the floor when she guffawed at the horrifically off-putting descriptions of married life with which the matrons were persecuting Good News. ‘Think of a sikh kabab that leaks hot cooking fat,’ Duniyazad Begum suggested, old quarrels bright in her eyes. But the virgins offered more optimistic images. ‘It’s like sitting on a rocket that sends you to the moon,’ one maiden conjectured, earning a rocket from Bariamma for her blasphemy, because the faith clearly stated that lunar expeditions were impossible. The women sang songs insulting Good News’s fiancé, young Haroun, the eldest son of Little Mir Harappa: ‘Face like a potato! Skin like a tomato! Walks like an elephant! Tiny plantain in his pant.’ But when Good News spoke up for the first and last time that evening, nobody could think of a single word to say.
‘Mummy dear,’ Naveed said firmly into the scandalized silence, ‘I won’t marry that stupid potato, you just see if I do.’
Haroun Harappa at twenty-six was already accustomed to notoriety, because during the one year he had spent at an Angrez university he had published an article in the student paper in which he had described the private dungeons at the vast Daro estate into which his father would fling people for years on end. He had also written about the punitive expedition which Mir Harappa once led against the household of his cousin Iskander, and of the foreign bank account (he gave the number) into which his father was transferring large quantities of public money. The article was reprinted in Newsweek, so that the authorities back home had to intercept the entire shipment of that subversive issue and rip out the offending pages from every copy; but still the contents became common knowledge. When Haroun Harappa was expelled from his college at the end of that year, on the grounds that after three terms studying economics he had failed to master the concepts of supply and demand, it was generally supposed that he had written his article out of a genuine and innocent stupidity, hoping, no doubt, to impress the foreigners with his family’s acumen and power. It was known that he had spent his university career almost exclusively in the gaming clubs and whorehouses of London, and the story went that when he entered the examination hall that summer he had glanced at the question paper without sitting down, shrugged, announced cheerfully, ‘No, there’s nothing here for me,’ and strolled out to his Mercedes-Benz coupé without more ado. ‘The boy’s a dope, I’m afraid,’ Little Mir told President A., ‘no need to take steps against him, I hope. He’ll come home and settle down.’
Little Mir made one attempt to persuade Haroun’s college to keep him on. A large filigree-silver cigar box was presented to the Senior Common Room. The fellows of the college refused, however, to believe that a man as distinguished as Mir Harappa would try to bribe them, so they accepted the gift and chucked his son out on his ear. Haroun Harappa came home with numerous squash rackets, addresses of Arab princes, whisky decanters, bespoke suits, silk shirts and erotic photographs, but without a foreign degree.
But the seditious Newsweek article had not been the product of Haroun’s stupidity. It had been born of the profound and undying hatred the son felt for his father, a hatred which would even survive Mir Harappa’s terrible death. Little Mir had been a sternly authoritarian parent, but that in itself was not unusual and might even have engendered love and respect if it had not been for the matter of the dog. On Haroun’s tenth birthday, at Daro, his father had presented him with a large parcel, done up in green ribbon, from which a muffled barking could clearly be heard. Haroun was an inward and only child who had grown fond of solitude; he did not really want the long-haired collie puppy who emerged from the package, and thanked his father with a perfunctory surliness that irritated Little Mir intensely. In the next few days it became obvious that Haroun intended to leave the dog to be cared for by the servants; whereupon Mir with the foolhardy stubbornness of his irritation issued orders that nobody was to lay a finger on the animal. ‘The damn hound is yours,’ Mir told the boy, ‘so you look after it.’ But Haroun was as obstinate as his father, and did not so much as give the puppy a name, so that in the bitter heat of the Daro sunshine the puppy had to forage for its own food and drink, contracted mange, distemper and curious green spots on the tongue, was driven mad by its long hair and finally died in front of the main door to the house, emitting piteous yelps and leaking a thick yellow porridge from its behind. ‘Bury it,’ Mir told Haroun, but the boy set his jaw and walked away, and the slowly decomposing corpse of the unnamed pooch mirrored the growth of the boy’s loathing for his father, who was thereafter forever associated in his mind with the
stench of the rotting dog.
After that Mir Harappa understood his mistake and went to great lengths to regain his son’s affection. He was a widower (Haroun’s mother had died in childbirth) and the boy was genuinely important to him. Haroun was outrageously spoiled, because although he refused to ask his father for so much as a new vest Mir was always trying to guess what was in the boy’s heart, so that Haroun was showered with gifts, including a complete set of cricket equipment comprising six stumps, four bails, twelve sets of pads, twenty-two white flannel shirts and trousers, eleven bats of varying weight and enough red balls to last a lifetime. There were even umpires’ white coats and score-books, but Haroun was uninterested in cricket and the lavish present languished, unused, in a forgotten corner of Daro, along with the polo gear, the tent pegs, the imported gramophones and the home-movie camera, projector and screen. When he was twelve the boy learned to ride and after that was to be found gazing longingly at the horizon beyond which lay the Mohenjo estate of his uncle Iskander. Whenever he heard that Isky was visiting his ancestral home Haroun would ride without stopping to sit at the feet of the man who ought by rights, he believed, to have been his father. Mir Harappa did not protest when Haroun expressed a wish to move to Karachi; and as he grew up in that mushrooming city Haroun’s infatuation with his uncle mushroomed too, so that he began to affect the same dandyism and bad language and admiration for European culture that were Isky’s trademarks before his great conversion. This was why the young man insisted on being sent to study abroad, and why he passed his time in London engaged in whoring and gambling. After his return he went on in the same way; it had become a habit by then and he was unable to give it up even when his idolized uncle renounced such unstates-manlike activities, so that the gossip in the town was that a little Isky had taken over where the big one left off. Mir Harappa continued to foot the bill for his son’s outrageous behaviour, still hoping to win back the love of his only progeny; to no avail. Haroun in his habitually intoxicated state began to talk too much, and in loose-mouthed company. He spouted, drunkenly, the revolutionary political notions that had been current among European students during his year abroad. He castigated Army rule and the power of oligarchies with all the enthusiastic garrulity of one who despises every word he is saying, but hopes that it will wound his even more detested parent. When he went so far as to mention the possibility of mass-producing Molotov cocktails, none of his cronies took him seriously, because he said it at a beach party while astride the shell of a weeping Galapagos turtle which was dragging itself up to the sand to lay its infertile eggs; but the state informant in the gathering made his or her report, and President A., whose administration had become somewhat rocky, flew into a rage so terrible that Little Mir had to prostrate himself on the floor and beg for mercy for his wayward son. This incident would have forced Mir into a confrontation with Haroun, which he greatly feared, but he was spared the trouble by his cousin Iskander, who had also heard about Haroun’s latest outrage. Haroun, summoned to Isky’s split-level radiogram of a house, shifted from foot to foot under the brilliantly scornful eyes of Arjumand Harappa while her father spoke in gentle, implacable tones. Iskander Harappa had taken to dressing in green outfits styled by Pierre Cardin to resemble the uniforms of the Chinese Red Guards, because as the Foreign Minister in the government of President A. he had become famous as the architect of a friendship treaty with Chairman Mao. A photograph of Isky embracing the great Zedong hung on the wall of the room in which the uncle informed his nephew: ‘Your activities are becoming an embarrassment to me. Time you settled down. Take a wife.’ Arjumand Harappa stared furiously at Haroun and obliged him to do as Iskander asked. ‘But who?’ he inquired lamely, and Isky waved a dismissive hand. ‘Some decent girl,’ he said, ‘plenty to choose from.’