Then he was unconscious again. When he surfaced there was no swing-seat, there were no mothers, he was alone in that four-poster bed with serpents coiled round the columns and Paradise embroidered on the canopy. His grandfather’s deathbed. He realized that he felt as strong as a horse. Time to get up. He jumped out of bed and had wandered barefoot and pajama-clad out of the room before it occurred to him that this was only another illusion, but by then he couldn’t stop himself, his feet, which had stopped hurting, walked him along the cluttered passages full of hatracks and stuffed fishes in glass cases and broken ormolu clocks, and he saw that far from having shrunk, the house had actually expanded, it had grown so vast that it held within its walls every place in which he had ever been. The sum of all his possibilities: he opened one cobwebbed door and shrank back from the little, brightly-lit group of white-masked figures stooping over a body. It was an operating room at the Mount Hira Hospital. The figures were beckoning to him in a friendly way, they wanted him to help with the operation but he was afraid to see the patient’s face. He turned abruptly and felt pine-kernel shells crunching beneath his heels as the rooms of the Commander-in-Chief’s official residence began to form around him. At some point he began to run, trying to find his way back to bed, but the corridors kept turning corners without warning, and he arrived panting at a mirrorworked marquee in which a wedding banquet was being held, he saw the bride’s face in a fragment of mirror, she wore a noose around her neck, and he shouted out, ‘You should have stayed dead,’ making all the guests stare at him. They were all dressed in rags because of the dangers of going well-dressed into the turbulence of the streets and they were chanting in unison, shame, shame, poppy-shame, all the girls, know your name. Then he was running again, but slowing down, he was getting heavier, his chins flopped sweatily down from his jaw until they touched his nipples, the rolls of his obesity hung over his knees, until he could not move, no matter how hard he tried, he was sweating like a pig, the heat the cold, no escape, he thought, and tumbled backwards as a shroud fell softly over him, white, soaking wet, and he realized that he was in bed.
He heard a voice, which he identified, after a struggle, as Hashmat Bibi’s. She spoke from within a cloud: ‘Only child. Always they live too much in their poor head.’ But he had not remained an only child.
Burning, burning in that cold fire. Brain-fever. Bilquìs Hyder at his bedside pointed angrily to the Peek Frean tin. ‘Poison,’ she accused, ‘germ poison in the cake. But we were hungry, we could not resist and so we ate.’ Upset by this slur on his family name, he began to defend his mothers’ hospitality, no, not the cake, it was stale but don’t be ridiculous, think of the bus-journey, look what we drank, green pink yellow, our defences were low. Bilquìs shrugged and went over to a cupboard and pulled out every piece of the Gardner china collection, one by one, and smashed them all into pink-and-blue dust on the floor. He shut his eyes, but eyelids were no defence any more, they were just doors into other places, and there was Raza Hyder in uniform with a monkey on each shoulder. The monkey on the right had the face of Maulana Dawood and its hands were clasped over its mouth; on the left shoulder sat Iskander Harappa scratching his langoor’s armpit. Hyder’s hands went to his ears, Isky’s, after scratching, covered his eyes, but he was peeping through the fingers. ‘Stories end, worlds end’, Isky the monkey said, ‘and then it’s judgment day.’ Fire, and the dead, rising up, dancing in the flames.
During recessions in the fever he remembered dreaming things that he could not have known were true, visions of the future, of what would happen after the end. Quarrels between three Generals. Continued public disturbances. Great powers shifting their ground, deciding the Army had become unstable. And at last Arjumand and Haroun set free, reborn into power, the virgin Ironpants and her only love taking charge. The fall of God, and in his place the myth of the Martyr Iskander. And after that arrests, retribution, trials, hangings, blood, a new cycle of shamelessness and shame. While at Mohenjo cracks appear in the earth.
A dream of Rani Harappa: who chooses to remain at Mohenjo, and sends Arjumand, one day, a gift of eighteen exquisite shawls. These shawls ensure that she will never leave the estate again: Arjumand has her own mother placed under guard. People engaged in building new myths have no time for embroidered criticisms. Rani remains in that heavy-eaved house where the water flows blood-red; she inclines her head in the direction of Omar Khayyam Shakil. ‘Seems the world can’t be a safe place,’ she pronounces her epitaph, ‘if Rani Harappa’s on the loose.’
Stories end, worlds end; and then it’s judgment day.
His mother Chhunni says: ‘There is something you should know.’
He lies helpless between wooden serpents, burning, freezing, red eyes wandering in his head. He gulps air; it feels somehow fuzzy, as if he has been buried by divine justice beneath a gigantic woollen mountain. He is beached, gasping, a whale pecked at by birds. But this time the three of them are really there, no hallucination, he is sure of it, they sit on his bed with a secret to reveal. His head swims; he closes his eyes.
And hears, for the first time in his life, the last family secret, the worst tale in history. The story of his great-grandfather and his brother, Hafeezullah and Rumi Shakil. Each married a woman the other found unsuitable, and when Hafeez spread it around town that his sister-in-law was a female as loose as a baggy pajama whom Rumi had plucked out of the notorious Heeramandi red-light district, the break between the brothers was complete. Then Rumi’s wife took her revenge. She convinced her husband that the cause of Hafeez’s sanctimonious disapproval was that he had wanted to sleep with her, after her marriage, and she had turned him down flat. Rumi Shakil became as cold as ice and went at once to his writing-desk, where he composed an anonymous, poison-pen letter to his brother, in which he accused Hafeez’s wife of having extramarital relations with a famous sitarist of the time, an accusation which was lethal because it was true. Hafeez Shakil had always trusted his wife blindly, so he turned pale when he read the letter, which he recognized instantly as having been written in his brother’s hand. When he questioned his wife she confessed at once. She said she had always loved the sitarist and would have run away with him if her parents hadn’t married her off to Hafeez. Omar Khayyam’s great-grandfather took to his bed and when his wife came to see him, holding their son in her arms, he put his right hand on his chest and addressed his last words to the baby boy.
‘This motor,’ he said sadly, ‘will not run any more.’
He died that night.
‘You said the same thing,’ Munnee Shakil tells Omar Khayyam, ‘in your fever, when you didn’t know what you were talking about. The same thing in the same words. Now you know why we told you the story.’
‘You know everything now,’ Chhunni-ma continues. ‘You know this is a family in which brothers have done the worst of things to brothers, and maybe you even know that you are just the same.’
‘You also had a brother,’ Bunny says, ‘and you have treated his memory like mud.’
Once, before he went out into the world, they had forbidden him to feel shame; now they were turning that emotion upon him, slashing him with that sword. ‘Your brother’s father was an anarchangel,’ Chhunni Shakil whispered at his bedside, ‘so the boy was too good for this world. But you, your maker was a devil out of hell.’ He was sinking back into the swamps of the fever, but this remark hit home, because none of his mothers had ever spontaneously raised the subject of fathers before. It became obvious to him that his mothers hated him, and to his surprise he found the idea of that hatred too terrible to be borne.
The illness was lapping at his eyelashes now, offering oblivion. He fought against it, a man of sixty-five overwhelmed by motherly disgust. He saw it as a living thing, huge and greasy. They had been feeding it for years, handing it morsels of themselves, holding out pieces of their memories of dead Babar to their hateful pet. Who gobbled them up, snatching them greedily from the sisters’ long bony fingers.
The
ir dead Babar, who, during his short life, had never been permitted to forget his inferiority to his elder brother, the great man, the success, the man who enabled them to shoo away the pawnbroker, to save their past from ending up on the shelves of Chalaak Sahib. The brother whom he, Omar Khayyam, had never known. Mothers use their children as sticks – each brother a rod with which to chastise the other. Asphyxiated by the hot wind of his mothers’ worship of Omar Khayyam, Babar fled into the mountains; now the mothers had changed sides, and the dead boy was their weapon against the living. You married into the murderer’s family. You licked the shoes of the great. Behind his eyelids Omar Khayyam saw his mothers placing, around his neck, the garland of their hatred. This time there was no mistake; his sweat-drenched beard rubbed against the frayed laces, the tattered leathery tongues, the laughing mouths of the necklace of discarded shoes.
The Beast has many faces. It takes any shape it chooses. He felt it crawl into his belly and begin to feed.
General Raza Hyder awoke one morning at dawn with his ears full of a tinkling, splintering sound like the breaking of a thousand windows, and realized that it was the noise of the sickness breaking. He took a deep breath and sat upright in bed. ‘Fever,’ he said happily, ‘I beat you. Old Razor Guts isn’t finished yet.’ The noise ended and he had the feeling of floating across a lake of silence, because the voice of Iskander Harappa had fallen silent for the first time in four long years. He heard birds outside; they were only crows, but they sounded as sweet as bulbuls. ‘Things are on the mend,’ Raza Hyder thought. Then he noticed the state he was in. They had left him to rot in the bog of his own juices. It was obvious that nobody had been to see him for days. He was lying in the pestilential squashiness of his own excrement, in sheets turned yellow by perspiration and urine. Mould had begun to form on the bedclothes, and there was green fungus on his body as well. ‘So this is what they think of me,’ he exclaimed to the empty room, ‘those witches, I’ll give them what for.’ But in spite of the hideous condition of the sick-bed his new mood of optimism refused to be punctured. He stood up on legs which were only slightly wobbly and threw off the stinking garments of his illness; then, with great delicacy and distaste, he gathered together a bundle of suppurating linen and dropped it out of a window. ‘Hags,’ he chuckled to himself, ‘let them get their own dirty laundry from the street, it serves them right.’ Naked now, he went into the bathroom and showered. As he soaped away the fever-stink a daydream of a return to power flitted across his mind. ‘Sure,’ he told himself, ‘we’ll do it, why not? Before anyone knows what’s what.’ He felt a great surge of fondness for the wife who had rescued him from the jaws of his enemies, and was filled with the desire to make things right between the two of them. ‘I treated her badly,’ he accused himself guiltily, ‘but she came up trumps all right.’ The memory of Sufiya Zinobia had become little more than a bad dream; he was not even sure of its basis in fact, half-believing it was just one of the many hallucinations which the disease had sent to torment him. He stepped out of the shower, wrapped a towel around himself and went in search of clothes. ‘If Bilquìs hasn’t recovered yet,’ he vowed, ‘I’ll nurse her night and day. I’m not leaving her to the mercy of those three crazy vultures.’
There were no clothes anywhere. ‘God damn it,’ Raza blasphemed, ‘couldn’t they have left me a shalwar and a shirt?’
He opened the door of his room and called out, ‘Anyone there?’ But there was no reply. The lake of silence filled the house. ‘O.K.,’ thought Raza Hyder, ‘then they’ll just have to take me as they find me.’ Wrapping his towel firmly around his waist, he set off in search of his wife.
Three empty, darkened rooms and then a fourth which he knew was the right place by the smell. ‘Bitches!’ he yelled savagely to the echoing house. ‘Have you no shame?’ Then he went inside.
The stench was even worse than it had been in his own room, and Bilquìs Hyder lay still in the obscenity of her shit. ‘Don’t worry, Billoo,’ he whispered to her, ‘Raz is here. I’ll clean you up good and proper and then you’ll see. Those animal women, I’ll make them pick up turds with their eyelashes and stuff them up their nostrils.’
Bilquìs did not reply, and it took Raza a few moments to sniff out the reason for her silence. Then he smelt the other smell beneath the putrid odours of waste matter, and he felt as if a hangman’s knot had smashed him in the back of the neck. He sat down on the floor and began drumming his fingers on the stone. When he spoke it came out all wrong, he hadn’t meant to sound bad-tempered, but what came out was this: ‘For God’s sake, Billoo, what are you up to? I hope you are not acting or something. What’s the meaning of this, you’re not supposed to die?’ But Bilquìs had crossed her frontier.
After his querulous words had come out to embarrass him he looked up to find the three Shakil sisters standing in front of him with scented handkerchiefs over their noses. Chhunni-ma also held, in her other hand, an antique blunderbuss which had once belonged to her grandfather Hafeezullah Shakil. She was pointing it at Raza’s chest, but it was waggling about so much that her chances of hitting him were remote, and anyway the piece was so impossibly old that it would probably blow up in her face if she pulled the trigger. Unfortunately for Raza’s chances, however, her sisters were also armed. Handkerchiefs were in their left hands, but in Munnee’s right was a fierce-looking scimitar with a jewelled haft, while Bunny’s fist was closed around the shaft of a spear with a badly rusted, but undeniably pointy, head. Optimism left Raza Hyder without bothering to say good-bye.
‘You should be dead instead of her,’ Chhunni Shakil declared.
The anger had gone out with the optimism. ‘Go ahead,’ he encouraged the sisters. ‘God will judge us all.’
‘He did well to bring you here,’ Bunny reflected, ‘our son. He did well to wait for your fall. There is no shame in killing you now, because you are a dead man anyway. It is only the execution of a corpse.’
‘Also,’ Munnee Shakil said, ‘there is no God.’
Chhunni waved the blunderbuss in the direction of Bilquìs. ‘Pick her up,’ she ordered. ‘Just as she is. Pick her and bring her quick.’ He rose to his feet; the towel slipped; he made a grab for it, missed, and stood naked before the old women, who had the grace to gasp … freshly showered, and wholly undressed, General Raza Hyder carried the stinking, mould-encrusted body of his wife through the corridors of ‘Nishapur’, while three sisters hovered around him like carrion crows. ‘You must go in here,’ Chhunni stated, pushing the barrel of the blunderbuss into his back, and he entered the last room of all the rooms in his life, and recognized the dark bulk of the dumb-waiter hanging outside the window and blocking most of the light. He had resolved to remain silent whatever happened, but his surprise made him speak: ‘What’s this?’ he asked. ‘Are you sending us outside?’
‘How well known the General must be in our town,’ Munnee mused. ‘So many friends eager to meet you again, don’t you think? What a reception they will make when they find out who is here.’
Raza Hyder naked in the dumb-waiter beside Bilquìs’s corpse. The three sisters moved to a panel on the wall: buttons switches levers. ‘This machine was built by a master craftsman,’ Chhunni explained, ‘in the old days, when nothing was beyond doing. A certain Mistri Balloch; and at our request, which we conveyed to him through our dear departed Hashmat Bibi, he included in the contrivance some extra fitments, which we now propose to use for the first and last time.’
‘Let me go,’ Raza Hyder cried, understanding nothing. ‘What are you wasting time for?’
They were his last words. ‘We asked for these arrangements,’ Munnee Shakil said as the three sisters each placed a hand upon one of the levers, ‘thinking self-defence is no offence. But also, you must agree, revenge is sweet.’ The image of Sindbad Mengal flashed into Raza’s mind as the three sisters pulled down the lever, acting in perfect unison, so that it was impossible to say who pulled first or hardest, and the ancient spring-releases of Yakoob Ball
och worked like a treat, the secret panels sprang back and the eighteen-inch stiletto blades of death drove into Raza’s body, cutting him to pieces, their reddened points emerging, among other places, through his eyeballs, adam’s-apple, navel, groin and mouth. His tongue, severed cleanly by a laterally spearing knife, fell out on to his lap. He made strange clicking noises; shivered; froze.
‘Leave them in there,’ Chhunni instructed her sisters. ‘We will not be needing this contraption any more.’
The contractions were coming regularly, squeezing his temples, as if something were trying to be born. The cell was swarming with malaria-bearing anopheles mosquitoes, but for some reason they did not seem to be biting the stiff-necked figure of the interrogator, who wore a white helmet and carried a riding whip. ‘Pen and paper is before you,’ the interrogator said. ‘No pardon can be considered until a full confession has been made.’
‘Where are my mothers?’ Omar Khayyam asked piteously, in a voice that was in the process of breaking. It soared-high-plunged-low; he was embarrassed by its antics.