November 13, 1983
Not Quite Pakistan
By ROBERT TOWERS
wo years ago a 34-year-old Indian Moslem named Salman Rushdie published ''Midnight's
Children,'' an astonishing novel that attempted nothing less than to create a fantastic fictional
counterpart to the convulsive, often tragic events that have rocked the Indian subcontinent during the
past 60 years. It was highly praised, both here and in England. In its fecundity, extravagance and
scope, ''Midnight's Children'' reminded me of some vast Hindu temple, a multilayered structure
intricately embellished with carvings of gods, demons, heroes, lovers and beasts.
Such an achievement casts a long shadow from which its successor must struggle to escape if it is to
find light and space for its own development. Aware of this, Mr. Rushdie has moved the setting of his
new novel from India proper to the somewhat thinner soil of a country that is ''not quite Pakistan'' and
has erected a less imposing, though equally fantastic, edifice. ''Shame'' is a lively, amusing and
exasperating work that will present certain problems for an American reader.
In the second chapter of ''Shame,'' Mr. Rushdie's narrator, who, like Mr. Rushdie, now lives in
England, breaks into the story to tell of a recent visit to Pakistan during which he tried, at a party, to
raise a question about the execution of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who, until 1977, had been Prime Minister
of the country. Before it could be completed, the question was interrupted by a painful under-table
kick on the narrator's shins, following which the topic of conversation was switched to sports and the
incipient video boom. The deliverer of the kick was a friend, a poet who had spent many months in jail
for ''social reasons.'' ''That is to say,'' writes Mr. Rushdie, ''he knew somebody who knew somebody
who knew somebody who was the wife of the second cousin . . . of the step-uncle of somebody who
might or might not have shared a flat with someone who was running guns to the guerrillas of
Baluchistan. You can get anywhere in Pakistan if you know people, even into jail.'' It turns out that a
suspected Government informer was present at the party.
The national disgrace reflected in this anecdote serves to introduce the theme, which is also the title, of
the book. ''Wherever I turn,'' Mr. Rushdie continues, ''there is something of which to be ashamed. But
shame is like everything else; live with it long enough and it becomes part of the furniture.'' Nor, he is
quick to add, is shame the exclusive prop Robert Towers's new novel is ''The Summoning.'' He teaches
at Queens College. erty of the East. Perhaps it is Mr. Rushdie's friend who should be telling a story
about shame - and its counterpart, shamelessness - in the national life; but he, after the horrors of his
imprisonment, ''doesn't write poetry any more. So here am I instead,'' concludes the novelist,
''inventing what never happened to me.''
What he invents, with enormous gusto, is ''a sort of modern fairy tale,'' which the author says nobody
need take seriously and which, since it is set in ''not quite Pakistan,'' need not provoke the authorities
to ban the book or have it burned. But the link between certain bizarre happenings in the fairy tale and
other equally bizarre political events in a certain nation is inescapable. The political allegory may
prove a stumbling block to those readers who prefer, more or less, to take their fiction pure, without
recourse to recent history. My own feeling is that the material of ''Shame'' is sufficiently entertaining
to stand pretty much on its own - though whether one can usefully re gard it as a novel is another
matter.
It is probably easier to play croquet (as in ''Alice in Wonderland'') with flamingos as mallets and
hedgehogs as balls than to give a coherent plot summary of ''Shame.'' Here are some of the elements:
Shortly after the story opens, its nominal (and marginal) hero, Omar Khayyam Shakil, is born
collectively to three unmarried sisters and suckled at six flowing breasts. The sisters inhabit their dead
father's huge and labyrinthine mansion in the town of Q. (Quetta), a house that can be entered only by
means of an ingenious dumbwaiter that ascends and descends an outside wall.
Immured in the house until he is 12, Omar, a fat boy, surveys the outside world (and the
''incomprehensibly appealing figure'' of 14-year-old Farah Zoroaster) through a brass telescope.
Eventually he descends by the dumbwaiter, goes to school, endures various humiliations, impregnates
Farah after hypnotizing her, only to be dropped for long stretches of the story while the narrator
concentrates on what interests him most - the personal and political destiny of two archrivals for power
in their nation. One is a famous warrior, Gen. Raza Hyder (read: Gen. Mohammed Zia ul-Haq), who
ultimately becomes president-dictator of his country; the other is a rich landlord and playboy, Iskander
Harappa (read: Zulfikar Ali Bhutto) who enjoys a successfully demagogic reign as Prime Minister until
he is overthrown by Raza Hyder and eventually hanged (when already a corpse) after a rigged trial for
the murder of a relative.
The families of these two men play an equally large part in the fairy tale, for the position of wives and
daughters in ''not quite Pakistan'' is central to Mr. Rushdie's development of his theme in its myriad
aspects. When Raza Hyder marries the modest Bilquis, he brings her temporarily to his grandmother's
house in Karachi, where she must sleep in a cavernous chamber with all the other women of the huge
family; there the married ladies are visited surreptitiously by their husbands (''the forty thieves'') who
tiptoe ''along the midnight avenues of the dormitory'' past the snoring figure of the grandmother.
'' 'They still live in the old village way,' Raza warned Bilquis before depositing her in that house in
which it was believed that the mere fact of being married did not absolve a woman of the shame and
dishonor that results from the knowledge that she sleeps regularly with a man.'' To which Bilquis
''thought but did not say: 'O God. Ignoramuses from somewhere. Backward types, village idiots,
unsophisticated completely, and I am stuck with them.' Aloud, she told Raza meekly: 'Much to be said
for the old traditions.' Raza nodded seriously in simple agreement; her heart sank further after that.''
Rani, the wife of Iskander Harappa, is exiled to her husband's country estate while he sports with his
mistress, Pinkie Aurangzeb, and the film starlets who form part of his entourage. There, submissive
but unresigned, Rani spends her time embroidering a series of magically wrought shawls on which are
depicted all of the shameful events in the life of the family. Their daughter Arjumand (the ''virgin
Ironpants'') finds her fulfillment in her father's career.
THE men, meanwhile, are extremely touchy on the subject of honor, any breach of which can result in
shame. Referring to the murder (in London) of a Pakistani girl by her father, a murder perpetrated to
wipe away with blood the dishonor she had brought upon her family by sleeping with an English boy,
Mr. Rushdie's narrator states that the news, while horrifying, did not seem alien to him. ''We who
have grown up on a diet of honor and shame can still grasp what must seem unthinkable in the
aftermath of the death of God and of tragedy: that men will sacrifice their dearest love on the
implacable altars of their pride.''
Shame reaches its ultimate embodiment in the person of Sufiya Zinobia, the idiot daughter born to
Raza Hyder and Bilquis. Hyder so desperately wanted a son that he refuses to accept the anatomical
evidence of his daughter's sex, shrieking at the doctor: '' 'There! I ask you, sir, what is that? . . . A
bump! . . . Is it not, doctor, an absolute and unquestionable bump?' '' Whereupon the baby blushes - a
sign of her shame. Later, the utterly rejected Sufiya Zinobia's blushes become so incandescent that they
burn the lips of an old lady who kisses her, necessitating ''twice daily applications of lip salve for a
week.''
Shame turned inward breeds monsters, and that is what happens to Sufiya Zinobia; she becomes a
hideous monster strong enough to wrench the heads off men and animals with her bare hands before
disemboweling them. ''I had thought,'' writes the narrator in one of his typical intrusions, ''that what I
had on my hands was an almost excessively masculine tale, a saga of sexual rivalry, ambition, power,
patronage, betrayal, death, revenge. But the women seem to have taken over.'' Even the final act of
revenge that concludes a tale full of such acts is performed by women - the three sisters, now aged
crones, who had given birth to the peripheral hero of ''Shame.''
Cruel and ugly incidents and repulsive physical details throng the pages of the book. At times the
author's unconcealed anger burns as fiercely as Sufiya Zinobia's blushes. Yet the prevailing narrative
mode is as gleeful as it is ironic or indignant. There are some wonderfully comic episodes. Mr.
Rushdie particularly delights in palpable absurdities such as those resulting from Raza Hyder's attempt
to impose Islamic fundamentalism upon his country after seizing power. When asked by a fatuously
deferential British television interviewer if the reinstitution of such Islamic punishments as flogging
and the cutting off of hands might not be seen ''in certain quarters'' as barbaric, Hyder smiles into the
camera and counts off three reasons why such practices are not barbaric. ''Number two . . . 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.' ''
SOME of Mr. Rushdie's devices misfire; others are so exaggerated that the reader simply backs away,
untouched and unamused. The false starts, loose ends and general extravagance of the tale can become
irritating. The theme of ubiquitous shame is driven home at times with all the subtlety of a street-drill.
Many of the allusions to recent Pakistani history will be lost upon the average Westerner. And yet the
book in its own peculiar fashion works.
''Shame'' can, I think, be best enjoyed if we see it not as a novel but as one of those unclassifiable
works in which certain writers of the 18th century excelled - Swift in ''Gulliver's Travels,'' Voltaire in
''Candide,'' Sterne in ''Tristram Shandy.'' The genius of these not-quite novelists expresses itself in a
taste for absurd juxtapositions, for fantastic happenings, for the physically grotesque, for mockery and
parody, for sexual innuendo and, on occasion, scatology. Often their talents are put to the service of
satire. Salman Rushdie, it seems to me, is very much a latter-day member of their company.
The affinity with Sterne is especially striking in the voice he assumes - a voice at once whimsical, sly
and exclamatory, full of apostrophes and asides, flexible enough to incorporate the up-to-date slang and
obscenities of the warring men and the peculiar speech rhythms (often reminiscent of Yiddish-English)
of the Pakistani ladies in a state of excitement. I found Mr. Rushdie's style a source of delight, a bright
stream of words that lifted me happily past the most threatening snags and whirlpools of this
impossible tale.
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