Free Shame by Salman Rushdie

said that
Eduardo Rodrigues had finally caught two birds instead of one);
when they had gone and the town had settled back into ashen
nothingness, after the brief blaze of the wicked drama that had
been played out in its streets . . . then Omar Khayyam tried,
futilely, to find consolation in the fact that, as every hypnotist
knows, one of the first reassurances in the hypnotic process, a for-
mula which is repeated many times, runs as follows:
    'You will do anything that I ask you to do, but I will ask you to
do nothing that you will be unwilling to do.'
    'She was willing,' he told himself. 'Then where's the blame?
She must have been willing, and everybody knows the risk.'
    But in spite of nothing-that-you-will-be-unwilling-to-do; in
spite, too, of the actions of Eduardo Rodrigues, which had been
at once so resolute and so resigned that Omar Khayyam had
almost been convinced that the teacher really was the father-why
not, after all? A woman who is willing with one will be willing
    Escapes from the Mother Country ? 49
    with two! - in spite of everything, I say, Omar Khayyam Shakil
was possessed by a demon which made him shake in the middle of
breakfast and go hot in the night and cold in the day and some-
times cry out for no reason in the street or while ascending in the
dumb-waiter. Its fingers reached outwards from his stomach to
clutch, without warning, various interior parts of himself, from
adam's-apple to large (and also small) intestine, so that he suffered
from moments of near-strangulation and spent long unproductive
hours on the pot. It made his limbs mysteriously heavy in the
mornings so that sometimes he was unable to get out of bed. It
made his tongue dry and his knees knock. It led his teenage feet
into cheap brandy shops. Tottering drunkenly home to the rage of
his three mothers, he would be heard telling a swaying group of
fellow-sufferers: 'The only thing about this business is that it has
made me understand my mothers at last. This must be what they
locked themselves up to avoid, and baba, who would not?' Vom-
iting out the thin yellow fluid of his shame while the dumb-waiter
descended, he swore to his companions, who were falling asleep
in the dirt: 'Me, too, man. I've got to escape this also.'
    On the evening when Omar Khayyam, eighteen years old and
already fatter than fifty melons, came home to inform Chhunni,
Munnee and Bunny that he had won a scholarship at the best
medical college in Karachi, the three sisters were only able to hide
their grief at his imminent departure by erecting around it a great
barrier of objects, the most valuable jewels and paintings in the
house, which they scurried to collect from room to room until a
pile of ancient beauty stood in front of their old, favourite swing-
seat. 'Scholarship is all very well,' his youngest mother told him,
'but we also can give money to our boy when he goes into the
world.' 'What do these doctors think?' Chhunni demanded in a
king of fury. 'We are too poor to pay for your education? Let
them take charity to the devil, your family has money in abun-
dance.' 'Old money,' Munnee concurred. Unable to persuade
them that the award was an honour he did not wish to refuse,
Omar Khayyam was obliged to leave for the railway station with
    ll
    Shame � 50
    his pockets bulging with the pawnbroker's banknotes. Around his
neck was a garland whose one-hundred and one fresh-cut flowers
gave off an aroma which quite obliterated the memory-stink of
the necklace of shoes which had once so narrowly missed his
neck. The perfume of this garland was so intense that he forgot to
tell his mothers a last bit of gossip, which was that Zoroaster the
customs officer had fallen sick under the spell of the bribeless
desert and had taken to standing stark naked on top of concrete
bollards while mirror-fragments ripped his feet. Arms outstretched
and daughterless, Zoroaster addressed the sun, begging it to come
down to earth