Free Shame by Salman Rushdie Page B

the town that she regretted nothing. So even
when it got about that she had come back to look after her crazy
father and to run the customs post, to prevent his dismissal by his
Angrez bosses, even then the town's attitude did not soften; who
knows what they get up to out there, people said, naked father
and whore-child, best place for them is out there in the desert
where nobody has to look except God and the Devil, and they
know it all already.
    And on his train, his feet once more resting on a block of
melting ice, Omar Khayyam Shakil was borne away into the
future, convinced that he had finally managed to escape, and the
cool pleasure of that notion and also of the ice brought a smile to
his lips, even while the hot wind blew.
    Two years later, his mothers wrote to tell him that he had a
brother, whom they had named Babar after the first Emperor of
the Mughals who had marched over the Impossible Mountains
and conquered wherever he went. After that the three sisters, uni-
fied once again by motherhood, were happy and indistinguishable
for many years within the walls of'Nishapur'.
    When Omar Khayyam read the letter, his first reaction was to
whistle softly with something very like admiration.
    'The old witches,' he said aloud, 'they managed to do it again.'
    II
    The Duellists
    4
    Behind the Screen
    This is a novel about Sufiya Zinobia, elder daughter of General
Raza Hyder and his wife Bilquis, about what happened
between her father and Chairman Iskander Harappa, formerly
Prime Minister, now defunct, and about her surprising marriage
to a certain Omar Khayyam Shakil, physician, fat man, and for a
time the intimate crony of that same Isky Harappa, whose neck
had the miraculous power of remaining unbruised, even by a
hangman's rope. Or perhaps it would be more accurate, if also
more opaque, to say that Sufiya Zinobia is about this novel.
    At any rate, it is not possible even to begin to know a person
without first gaining some knowledge of her family background;
so I must proceed in this way, by explaining how it was that
Bilquis grew frightened of the hot afternoon wind called the Loo:
    On the last morning of his life, her father Mahmoud Kemal,
known as Mahmoud the Woman, dressed as usual in a shiny blue
two-piece suit shot with brilliant streaks of red, looked approv-
ingly at himself in the ornate mirror which he had removed from
the foyer of his theatre on account of its irresistible frame of naked
cherubs shooting arrows and blowing golden horns, hugged his
eighteen-year-old daughter, and announced: 'So you see, girl,
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    Shame ? 56
    your father dresses finely, as befits the chief administrative officer
of a glorious Empire.' And at breakfast, when she began dutifully
to spoon khichri on to his plate, he roared in good-natured fury,
'Why do you lift your hand, daughter? A princess does not serve.'
Bilquis bowed her head and stared out of the bottom left-hand
corner of her eyes, whereupon her father applauded loudly. 'O,
too good, Billoo! What elite acting, I swear!'
    It's a fact, strange-but-true, that the city of idolaters in which
this scene took place - call it Indraprastha, Puranaqila, even Delhi -
had often been ruled by men who believed (like Mahmoud) in
Al-Lah, The God. Their artifacts litter the city to this day, ancient
observatories and victory towers and of course that great red
fortress, Al-Hambra, the red one, which will play an important
part in our story. And, what is more, many of these godly rulers
had come up from the humblest of origins; every schoolchild
knows about the Slave Kings . . . but anyway, the point is that
this whole business of ruling-an-Empire was just a family joke,
because of course Mahmoud's domain was only the Empire
Talkies, a fleapit of a picture theatre in the old quarter of
the town.
    'The greatness of a picture house,' Mahmoud liked to say, 'can
be deduced from the noisiness of its customers. Go to those
deelux palaces in the