“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.”
In his follow-up work to Midnight’s Children, ‘Shame’, Salman Rushdie renders a magical realist saga reflecting the cultural and political history of post-colonial Pakistan narrated through the fictionalized private and public lives of two of its most powerful families engaged in a duel because of their respective patriarchs - Raza Hyder and Iskander Harappa. The supposed protagonist, Omar Khayyam Shakil, though remains on the fringes, circling around the periphery by virtue of his relationships with these two distinguished men, a shared love for debauchery with one and auxiliary marital ties with the other, is the one who binds the plot together with the tale ending where it all began – the lavish ancestral home of ‘Nishapur’, closed to the outer world, cavernous and convoluted (perhaps symbolizing the repressive and secretive nature associated with the land that is ‘not quite Pakistan’) where his three mothers reign.
The novel begins with this boy Omar who was asked to never feel shame, ironically born under pretty shameful conditions himself, who goes and breaks the shackles his three mothers have built around him except for that one promise of never experiencing shame. And thus our hero becomes what is left after shame has been eliminated: shameless. Through his extravagant-bordering-on-the-improbable birth and childhood, a hypnotic escapade resulting in the impregnation of his first love, and subsequent leaving town, the concept of mind-over-matter is impressed upon the reader and the scene is set for a story where three women will lactate when one gets pregnant, children will be produced annually in arithmetic progression, a good-hearted philosopher will die and become an angel and shame will physically materialize as ‘the root of violence’. On the other side of the border, Bilquis, who dreams of becoming queen, runs into Raza Hyder, unclothed and frenzied, in the aftermath of a blast that killed her father and gave her a lifelong fear of the afternoon wind so much so that the author identifies her as the woman who was afraid of the Loo, and gives birth to ‘the wrong miracle’- the girl who should have been a boy, the girl who blushed at birth, who absorbed all the ‘unfelt shame’- Sufiya Zinobia Hyder, future wife of Omar Khayyam. The beauty and the beast; the beauty in the beast, or vice versa. Even though the author claims it to be a ‘modern fairy tale’, the links with the actual happenings in the political scene of the aforementioned country (among others - demagogical reign, rigged elections, military coups) are indisputable. Raza Hyder (reference to Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq) becomes a dictatorial president of the country by overthrowing the man who made him Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Iskandar Harappa (reference to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto), once a debased and hedonistic playboy who goes on to become the prime minister until he is overthrown in a military coup led by his protégé and eventually hanged for the murder of a relative (on a jury split 4-3, a factual detail). Hyder, later, attempts to impose Islamic fundamentalism upon his country after seizing power and is subsequently, ousted by a coup similar to the one he had staged. The women in this story, ‘demanding their own tragedies’, move in sparingly identical circles of strength, rejection and senility. Rani Harappa, having accepted her husband’s lifestyle and destiny, spends her months underground embroidering eighteen shawls narrating the shamelessness of ‘Isky’, while her daughter Arjumand Harappa (virgin ironpants – Benazir Bhutto), driven and ambitious seeks revenge in her own way. On the other hand, Bilquis seems to have completely lost her senses at the terrible fate of her two daughters, Naveed – who can’t take bearing children anymore, and Sufiya – who is the ugliest realization of shame itself.
‘Shame’ is an admirable tongue-in-cheek political satire on post-1947 Pakistan told in a personal and at times, comical manner (“You can get anywhere in Pakistan if you know people, even into jail.”). The suppression of the people and their fear to speak openly in an autocratic setup is portrayed and criticized (‘How would you refute the argument, have you a point of view about the allegation that your institution of such Islamic punishments…might be in seen in certain quarters as being, arguably, according to certain definitions, so to speak, barbaric?’ The response to which shows the irreverence and smugness of the people in power – ‘We will not simply order people to stick out their hands, like this, and go fataakh! with a butcher's knife. No sir. All will be done under the most hygienic conditions, with proper medical supervision, use of anaesthetic etcetera.'). The attitude of the politicos towards their people is lampooned, for instance, Hyder is upset by the news of the arrest of Haroun Harappa as he will have no one to blame Sufiya’s misdeeds on. While shame and honor remain the threads that hold the fabric of this narrative together, revenge, not entirely unrelated, forms an underlying theme. Rushdie interrupts his tale several times, to comment on the intentions of the character being spoken about, its deficiencies and character flaws, its beliefs and its long-winding thought processes, sometimes even to tell us about how that character was born in his head in the first place. His tone is playful yet firm, with all the enthusiasm of a whimsical storyteller who has too much to tell, and not enough words. Like he mentions himself, the ghosts of ‘the stories that could have been’ haunt him, and make their way in and out of the novel. The general opulence and scale of this novel, and the recurrent references to Shame and its manifestation, seem to get a little over-the-top at times, but what he does manage to do in this work, is show his brilliance in expression. The style overpowers the story, as what remains with you after you have read the book, more than the sordid, macabre tale itself is the way it was told. The language is his weapon, and he exploits it in the way only he can, borrowing generously from the native tongue, giving his characters atypical quirks in dialogue and musings (the obscenities hurled by the men and the euphemistic metaphors employed by the women, for instance) inherited from the land they share: Khansi-ki-Rani and Generals Raddi, Bekar and Phisaddi are examples of how astutely he uses the Hindustani vocabulary to create these windows of wordplay to create one of his finest literary pieces yet.
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