She encounters the ayah clucking ruefully in the wreckage of
the dining hall. 'Went too far,' the ayah says. 'My Isky, such a
naughty boy. Always always he got his cousin's goat. Went too
far. The little hooligan.'
Wherever she looks are peering faces; wherever she listens,
voices. She is watched as, blushing with the humiliation of it, she
calls Iskander to give him the news. (It has taken her five days to
build up her courage.) Iskander Harappa says just three words.
'Life is long.'
Raza Hyder led his gas soldiers out to Needle Valley after a week
in which their activities had so alarmed the town that State Chief
Shame ? 98
Minister Gichki had ordered Raza to get moving double-
quick before the stock of virgins available to the bachelors of Q.
dwindled to a point at which the moral stability of the region
would be jeopardized. Accompanying the soldiers were numerous
architects, engineers and construction workers, all of whom were
in a condition of moist-trousered panic, because for security rea-
sons none of them had been informed of the fate of the advance
party until they arrived in Q., where they were immediately given
magnificently elaborated versions of the tale by every street-
corner paan-wallah. The construction personnel sobbed inside
locked vans; soldiers, on guard, jeered: 'Cowards! Babies! Women!'
Raza in his flagbearing jeep heard none of this. He was unable to
turn his thoughts away from the events of the preceding day,
when he had visited at the hotel by an obsequious gnome whose
loose garments smelled powerfully of motor-scooter exhaust
fumes: Maulana Dawood, the ancient divine, around whose
chicken-thin neck had once hung a necklace of shoes.
'Sir, great sir, I look upon your hero's brow and am inspired.'
The gatta, the bruise of devotion on Raza's forehead, did not go
unremarked.
'No, O most wise, it is I who am at once humbled and exalted
by your visit.' Raza Hyder would have been prepared to continue
in this vein for at least eleven minutes, and felt a little disappointed
when the holy man nodded and said briskly, 'So then, to business.
You know about this Gichki of course. Not to be trusted.'
'Not?'
'Completely not. Most corrupt individual. But your files will
show this.'
'Allow me to benefit from the knowledge of the man on
the spot . . .'
'Like all our politicos these days. No fear of God and big smug-
gling rackets. This is boring for you; the Army is well up in such
matters.'
'Please proceed.'
'Foreign devilments, sir. Nothing less. Devil things from
abroad.'
The Duellists ? 99
What Gichki was accused of bringing illicitly into God's pure
land: iceboxes, foot-operated sewing machines, American popular
music recorded at 78 revolutions per minute, love-story picture
books that inflamed the passions of the local virgins, domestic air-
conditioning units, coffee percolators, bone china, skirts, German
sunglasses, cola concentrates, plastic toys, French cigarettes, con-
traceptive devices, untaxed motor vehicles, big ends, Axminster
carpets, repeating rifles, sinful fragrances, brassieres, rayon pants,
farm machinery, books, eraser-tipped pencils and tubeless bicycle
tyres. The customs officer at the border post was mad and his
shameless daughter was willing to turn a blind eye in return for
regular gratuities. As a result all these items from hell could arrive
in broad daylight, on the public highway, and find their way into
the gypsy markets, even in the capital itself. 'Army,' Dawood said
in a voice that had dropped to a whisper, 'must not stop at
stamping out tribal wild men. In God's name, sir.'
'Sir, put your point'
'Sir, it is this. Prayer is the sword of the faith. By the same
token, is not the faithful sword, wielded for God, a form of holy
prayer?'
Colonel Hyder's eyes became opaque. He turned away to look
out of the window towards an enormous silent house. From an
upper window of the house a young boy was training field-glasses
on the hotel. Raza turned back towards the Maulana. 'Gichki,
you say.'
'Here it is Gichki. But everywhere things are the same. Mini-
sters!'
'Yes,' Hyder said absently, 'they are ministers, that's true.'
'Then I have said my piece and take my leave, abasing myself
before you for the privilege of this encounter. God is great.'
'Be in the hands of God.'
Raza headed for the threatened gas fields with the above con-
versation in his mind's ear; and in his mind's eye the picture of a
small boy with binoculars, alone at an upstairs window. A boy
who was someone's son: a drop appeared on Old Razor Guts's
cheek and was blown off by the wind.
Shame ? 100
'Gone for three months minimum,' Bilquis sighed into her tele-
phone. 'What to do? I am young, I can't sit all day like a water-
buffalo in mud. Thank God I can go to the movies.' Every night,
leaving her child in the care of a locally hired ayah, Bilquis sat in
the brand-new cinema called Mengal Mahal. But Q. was a small
town; eyes saw things, even in the dark . . . but I shall return to
this theme at a later point, because I can no longer avoid the story
of my poor heroine:
Two months after Raza Hyder departed into the wilderness to
do battle with the gas-field dacoits, his only child Sufiya Zinobia
contracted a case of brain fever that turned her into an idiot.
Bilquis, rending hair and sari with equal passion, was heard to
utter a mysterious sentence: 'It is a judgment,' she cried beside her
daughter's bed. Despairing of military and civilian doctors she
turned to a local Hakim who prepared an expensive liquid dis-
tilled from cactus roots, ivory dust and parrot feathers, which
saved the girl's life but which (as the medicine man had warned)
had the effect of slowing her down for the rest of her years,
because the unfortunate side-effect of a potion so filled with ele-
ments of longevity was to retard the progress of time inside the
body of anyone to whom it was given. By the day of Raza's
return on furlough Sufiya Zinobia had shaken off the fever, but
Bilquis was convinced she could already discern in her not-yet-
two-year-old-child the effects of that inner deceleration which
could never be reversed. 'And if there is this effect,' she feared,
'who knows what else? Who can say?'
In the clutches of a guilt so extreme that even the affliction of
her only child seemed insufficient to explain it, a guilt in which,
were I possessed of a scandalously wagging tongue, I would say
that something Mengalian, something to do with visits to the
cinema and fat-mouthed youths, was also present, Bilquis Hyder
spent the night before Raza's return pacing sleeplessly around the
honeymoon suite of Flashman's Hotel, and it should perhaps be
noted that one of her hands, acting, apparently, of its own voli-
tion, continually caressed the region around her navel. At four
The Duellists ? 101
a.m. she obtained a long-distance line to Rani Harappa in
Mohenjo and made the following injudicious remarks:
'Rani, a judgment, what else? He wanted a hero of a son; I
gave him an idiot female instead. That's the truth, excuse me, I
can't help it. Rani, a simpleton, a goof! Nothing upstairs. Straw
instead of cabbage between the ears. Empty in the breadbin. To
be done? But darling, there is nothing. That birdbrain, that
mouse! I must accept it: she is my shame.'
When Raza Hyder returned to Q. the boy was standing at the
window of the great solitary house once again. One of the local
guides, in answer to the Colonel's inquiry, told Raza that the
house was owned by three crazy sinful witches who never came
outside but who managed to produce children nevertheless. The
boy at the window was their second son: witch-fashion, they
claimed to share their offspring. 'But the story is, sir, that in that
house is more wealth than in the treasury of Alexander the Great.'
Hyder replied with what sounded like contempt: 'So. But if a pea-
cock dances in the jungle, who will see its tail?' Still, his eyes
never left the boy at the window until the jeep arrived at the
hotel, where he found his wife awaiting him with her hair loose
and her face washed clean of eyebrows, so that she was the very
incarnation of tragedy, and he heard what she had been too
ashamed to send word of. The illness of his daughter and the
vision of the fieldglass-eyed young boy combined in Hyder's
spirits with the bitterness of his ninety days in the desert and sent
him storming out of the honeymoon suite bursting with a rage so
terrible that for the sake of his personal safety it was necessary to
find a release for it as soon as possible. He ordered a staff car to
drive him to the residence of Chief Minister Gichki in the Can-
tonment, and, without waiting on ceremony, he informed the
Minister that although construction work at Needle was well
advanced the threat from the tribals could never be eliminated
unless he, Hyder, were empowered to take draconian punitive
measures. 'With God's help we are defending the site, but now
we must stop this pussyfooting. Sir, you must place the law in my
Shame � 102
hands. Carte blanche. At certain moments civil law must bend
before military necessity. Violence is the language of these savages;
but the law obliges us to speak in the discredited womanly tongue
of minimum-force. No good, sir. I cannot guarantee results.' And
when Gichki responded that on no account were the laws of the
State to be flouted by the armed forces - 'We'll have no bar-
barisms in those hills, sir! No tortures, no stringings-up by toes,
not while I am Chief Minister here!' � then Raza, in discourte-
ously loud tones that escaped through the doors and windows of
Gichki's office and terrified the peons outside because they had
issued from the lips of one so habitually polite, gave the Chief
Minister a warning. 'Army is watching these days, Gichki Sahib.
All over the country the eyes of honest soldiers see what they see,
and we are not pleased, no sir. The people stir, sir. And if they
look away from politicians, where will they turn for purity?'
Raza Hyder in his wrath left Gichki - small, bullet-cropped
hair, flat Chinese face � formulating his never-to-be-delivered
reply; and found Maulana Dawood awaiting him by the staff car.
Soldier and divine rode on the back seat, their words shielded
from the driver by a sheet of glass. But it seems probable that
behind this screen a name passed from divine tongue into martial
ear: a name, carrying with it intimations of scandal. Did Maulana
Dawood tell Hyder about the meetings of Bilquis and her
Sindbad? I say only that it seems probable. Innocent until proven
guilty is an excellent rule.
That night the cinema executive Sindbad Mengal left his office
at Mengal Mahal by the back door as usual, emerging into a dark
gully behind the cinema screen. He was whistling a sad tune, the
melody of a man who cannot meet his beloved even though the
moon is full. In spite of the loneliness of the tune he had dressed
up to the nines, as was his custom: his bright European garb,
bush-shirt and duck pants, was radiant in the gully, and the melan-
choly moonlight bounced off the oil in his hair. It is likely that he
never even noticed that the shadows in the gully had begun to
close in on him; the knife, which the moon would have illumi-
nated, was clearly kept sheathed until the last instant. We know
The Duellists ? 103
this because Sindbad Mengal did not stop whistling until the knife
entered his guts, whereupon someone else began to whistle the
same tune, just in case anybody was passing by and got curious. A
hand covered Sindbad's mouth as the knife went to work. In the
next few days Mengal's absence from his office inevitably attracted
attention, but it was not until several moviegoers had complained
about the deterioration in the cinema's stereophonic sound quality
that an engineer inspected the loudspeakers behind the screen and
discovered segments of Sindbad Mengal's white shirt and duck
pants concealed within them, as well as black Oxford shoes. The
knife-sliced garments still contained the appropriate pieces of the
cinema manager's body. The genitals had been severed and
inserted into the rectum. The head was never found, nor was
the murderer brought to justice.
Life is not always long.
That night Raza made love to Bilquis with a coarseness which she
was willing to put down to his months in the wilderness. The
name of Mengal was never mentioned between them, not even
when the town was buzzing with the murder story, and soon
afterwards Raza returned to Needle Valley. Bilquis stopped going
to the cinema, and although in this period she retained her
queenly composure it seemed as though she were standing on a
crumbling outcrop over an abyss, because she became prone to
dizzy spells. Once, when she picked up her damaged daughter to
play the traditional game of water-carrier, slinging Sufiya Zinobia
on her back and pretending she was a water-skin, she collapsed to
the floor beneath the delighted child before she had finished
pouring her out. Soon afterwards she called Rani Harappa to
announce that she was pregnant. While she was imparting this
information, the lid of her left eye began, inexplicably, to nictate.
An itchy palm means money in the offing. Shoes crossed on the
floor mean a journey; shoes turned upside-down warn of tragedy.
Scissors cutting empty air mean a quarrel in the family. And a
winking left eye means there will be bad news soon.
Shame ? 104
'On my next leave,' Raza wrote to Bilquis, 'I shall be going to
Karachi. There are family duties, and also Marshal Aurangzeb is
giving a reception. One does not refuse one's Commander-in-
Chief s invitation. If your condition, however, you will do better
to rest. It would be thoughtless of me to ask you to accompany
me on this non-compulsory and arduous trip.'