Rani Humayun, who has landed one of the prize catches of the
marriage season and will shortly leave this dormitory to wed the
fair-skinned, foreign-educated, sensually full-lipped young mil-
lionaire Iskander Harappa, and who is, like Bilquis, eighteen years
old, has befriended her cousin Raza's new bride. Bilquis enjoys
(while pretending to be scandalized) Rani's malicious ruminations
on the subject of the household sleeping arrangements. 'Imagine,
in that darkness,' Rani giggles while the two of them grind the
daily spices, 'who would know if her real husband had come to
her? And who could complain? I tell you, Billoo, these married
men and ladies are having a pretty good time in this joint family
set-up. I swear, maybe uncles with nieces, brothers with their
brothers' wives, we'll never know who the children's daddies
really are!' Bilquis blushes gracefully and covers Rani's mouth
with a coriander-scented hand. 'Stop, darling, what a dirtyfilthy
mind!'
But Rani is inexorable. 'No, Bilquis, I tell you, you are new
here but I have grown up in this place, and by the hairs of our
Bariamma's head I vow that this arrangement which is supposed
The Duellists ? 71
to be made for decency etcetera is just the excuse for the biggest
orgy on earth.'
Bilquis does not point out (how rude it would be to do so) that
the minuscule, almost dwarfish Bariamma is not only toothless and
blind but no longer has a single hair on her ancient head, either.
The matriarch wears a wig.
Where are we, and when? � In a large family house in the old
quarter of the coastal city which, having no option, I must call
Karachi. Raza Hyder, an orphan like his wife, has brought her
(immediately after descending from the Dakota of their flight into
the west) into the bosom of his maternal relations; Bariamma is his
grandmother on his late mother's side. 'You must stay here,' he
told Bilquis, 'until things settle down and we can see what is what
and what is not.' So these days Hyder is in temporary quarters at
the Army base while his bride lies amid sleep-feigning in-laws,
knowing that no man will visit her in the night. � And yes, I see
that I have brought my tale into a second infinite mansion, which
the reader will perhaps already be comparing to a faraway house in
the border town of Q.; but what a complete contrast it affords!
For this is no sealed-off redoubt; it bursts, positively bursts with
family members and related personnel.
'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 dishonour that results from the knowledge that she
sleeps regularly with a man; which was why Bariamma had
devised, without once discussing it, the idea of the forty thieves.
And of course all the women denied that anything of'that nature'
ever took place, so that when pregnancies occurred they did so as
if by magic, as if all conceptions were immaculate and all births
virgin. The idea of parthenogenesis had been accepted in this
house in order to keep out certain other, unpleasantly physical
notions.
Bilquis, the girl with the dream of queenhood, thought but did
not say; 'O God. Ignoramuses from somewhere. Backward types,
Shame ? 72
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.
In the empire of Bariamma, Bilquis, the newest arrival, the
junior member, was of course not treated like a queen.
'See if we don't have sons,' Raza told Bilquis, 'In my mother's
family boys grow on trees.'
Lost in the forest of new relatives, wandering in the blood-
jungle of the matriarchal home, Bilquis consulted the family
Quran in search of these family trees, and found them there, in
their traditional place, monkey-puzzle groves of genealogy
inscribed in the back of the holy book. She discovered that since
the generation of Bariamma, who had two sisters, Raza's maternal
great-aunts, both widowed, as well as three brothers � a landlord,
a wastrel and a mental-case fool - since that sexually-balanced
generation, only two girls had been born in the entire family. One
of these was Raza's deceased mother; the other, Rani Humayun,
who could not wait to escape from that house which was never
left by its sons, who imported their wives to live and breed in bat-
tery conditions, like shaver chickens. On his mother's side, Raza
had a total of eleven legitimate uncles and, it was believed, at least
nine illegitimate ones, the brood of the wastrel, philandering
great-uncle. Besides Rani, he could point to a grand total of
thirty-two male cousins born in wedlock. (The putative offspring
of the bastard uncles did not rate a mention in the Quran.) Of this
enormous stock of relatives, a sizeable percentage was in residence
under Bariamma's short but omnipotent shadow; wastrel and fool
were unmarried, but when the landlord came to stay his wife
occupied one of the beds in Bariamma's zenana wing. At the time
of which I am speaking, landlord and wife were present; also eight
of the eleven legitimate uncles, plus wives; and (Bilquis had diffi-
culty with her counting) around twenty-nine male cousins, and
Rani Humayun. Twenty-six cousinly wives stuffed the wicked
The Duellists � 73
bedchamber, and Bilquis herself made forty, once the three sisters
of the oldest generation were included.
Bilquis Hyder's head whirled. Trapped in a language which
contained a quite specific name for each conceivable relative, so
that the bewildered newcomer was unable to hide behind such
generic appellations as 'uncle', 'cousin', 'aunt', but was continually
caught out in all her insulting ignorance, Bilquis's tongue was
silenced by the in-law mob. She virtually never spoke except
when alone with Rani or Raza; and thus acquired the triple repu-
tation of sweet-innocent-child, doormat and fool. Because Raza
was often away for days at a time, depriving her of the protection
and flattery the other women got from their husbands on a daily
basis, she also attained the status of poor-thing, which her lack of
eyebrows (that no amount of pencilled artistry could disguise) did
nothing to diminish. Thanks to this she was given slightly more
than her fair share of household duties and also slightly more than
her fair share of the rough edge of Bariamma's tongue. But she
was also admired, grudgingly, because the family had a high
opinion of Raza, the women admitted that he was a good man
who did not beat his wife. This definition of goodness alarmed
Bilquis, to whom it had never occurred that she might be beaten,
and she raised the subject with Rani. 'Oh yes,' her cousin-in-law
replied, 'how they all hit! Tharaap! Tharaap! Sometimes it does
your heart good to watch. But one must also watch out. A good
man can go bad, like meat, if you do not keep him cool.'
As the officially designated poor-thing, Bilquis was also obliged
to sit each evening at Bariamma's feet while the blind old lady
recounted the family tales. These were lurid affairs, featuring
divorces, bankruptcies, droughts, cheating friends, child mortality,
diseases of the breast, men cut down in their prime, failed
hopes, lost beauty, women who grew obscenely fat, smuggling
deals, opium-taking poets, pining virgins, curses, typhoid, bandits,
homosexuality, sterility, frigidity, rape, the high price of food,
gamblers, drunks, murders, suicides and God. Bariamma's mildly
droning recital of the catalogue of family horrors had the effect of
Shame ? 74
somehow defusing them, making them safe, embalming them in
the mummifying fluid of her own incontrovertible respectability.
The telling of the tales proved the family's ability to survive them,
to retain, in spite of everything, its grip on its honour and its
unswerving moral code. 'To be of the family,' Bariamma told
Bilquis, 'you must know our things, and tell us yours.' So Bilquis
was forced, one evening (Raza was present but made no attempt
to protect her), to recount the end of Mahmoud the Woman
and her nudity in the Delhi streets. 'Never mind,' Bariamma
pronounced approvingly, when Bilquis was shaking with the
shame of her revelations, 'at least you managed to keep your
dupatta on.'
After that Bilquis often heard her story being retold, wherever
one or two of the family were gathered, in the hot lizardy corners
of the courtyard or on the starlit roofs of the summer nights, in the
nurseries to frighten the children and even in the boudoir of
jewel-heavy, hennaed Rani on the morning of her wedding;
because stories, such stories, were the glue that held the clan
together, binding the generations in webs of whispered secrets.
Her story altered, at first, in the retellings, but finally it settled
down, and after that nobody, neither teller nor listener, would
tolerate any deviation from the hallowed, sacred text. This
was when Bilquis knew that she had become a member of the
family; in the sanctification of her tale lay initiation, kinship,
blood. 'The recounting of histories,' Raza told his wife, 'is for us a
rite of blood.'
But neither Raza nor Bilquis could have known that their
story had scarcely begun, that it would be the juiciest and goriest
of all the juicygory sagas, and that, in time to come, it would
always begin with the following sentence (which, in the family's
opinion, contained all the right resonances for the opening of
such a narrative):
'It was the day on which the only son of the future President
Raza Hyder was going to be reincarnated.'
'Yes, yes,' the audience would cheer, 'tell us that one, that's
the best.'
The Duellists ? 75
In that hot season, the two newly-partitioned nations announced
the commencement of hostilities on the Kashmiri frontier. You
can't beat a northern war in the hot season; officers, foot-soldiers,
cooks all rejoiced as they headed for the coolness of the hills.
'Yara, this is luck, na?' 'Shit, sisterfucker, at least this year I won't
die in that damn heat.' O backslapping camaraderie of the meteo-
rologically fortunate! Jawans went to war with the devil-may-care
abandon of holidaymakers. There were, inevitably, deaths; but the
organizers of the war had catered for these as well. Those who fell
in battle were flown directly, first-class, to the perfumed gardens
of Paradise, to be waited on for all eternity by four gorgeous
Houris, untouched by man or djinn. 'Which of your Lord's bless-
ings,' the Quran inquires, 'would you deny?'
Army morale was high; but Rani Humayun was most put out,
because it would have been unpatriotic to hold a �wedding recep-
tion in wartime. The function had been postponed, and she
stamped her feet. Raza Hyder, however, stepped contentedly into
the camouflaged jeep of his flight from the boiling insanity of the
summer city, and just then his wife whispered into his ear that she
was expecting another sort of happy event. (Taking a leaf out of
Bariamma's book, I have turned a blind eye and snored loudly
while Raza Hyder visited the dormitory of the forty women and
made this miracle possible.)
Raza let fly a yell so swollen by triumph that Bariamma, seated
indoors on her takht, became convinced in the confusion of her
sweating blindness that her grandson had already received news of
some famous victory, so that when such news did in fact come
through, weeks later, she replied simply: 'Did you just find that
out? I knew it one month back.' (This was in the days before the
people learned that their side almost always lost, so that the
national leaders, rising brilliantly to the challenge, perfected no
fewer than one thousand and one ways of salvaging honour from
defeat.)
'He's coming!' Raza deafened his wife, causing earthen pitchers
to topple from the heads of womenservants and frightening the
Shame ? 76
geese. 'What did I tell you, Mrs?' He set his cap more jauntily on
his head, slapped his wife too firmly on the stomach, joined the
palms of his hands together and made diving gestures. 'Whoosh!'
he shouted. 'Voom, wife! Here he comes!' And he roared off into
the north, promising to win a great victory in honour of his forth-
coming son, and leaving behind him a Bilquis who, being washed
for the first time by the solipsistic fluids of motherhood, had
neglected to notice the tears in her husband's eyes, the tears
turning his black eye-pouches into velvet bags, the tears which
were among the earliest pointers that the future strong-man of the
nation was of the type that cried too easily ... in private with the
frustrated Rani Humayun, Bilquis crowed proudly: 'Never mind
this war foolishness; the important news is that I am making a boy
to marry your unborn daughter.'
An extract from the family's saga of Raza and Bilquis, given in the
formulaic words which it would be a gross sacrilege to alter:
'When we heard that our Razzoo had pulled off an attacking
coup so daring that there was no option but to call it a triumph,
we started off by refusing to believe our ears, � for already in those
days even the sharpest ears had developed the fault of becoming
wholly unreliable when they were attuned to the radio news bul-
letins; � on such occasions everybody heard things that could not
possibly have been the case. - But then we nodded our heads,
understanding that a man whose wife is about to bear him a son is
capable of anything. Yes, it was the unborn boy who was respon-
sible for this, the only victory in the history of our armed forces, -
which formed the basis of Raza's reputation for invincibility, a
reputation which quickly became invincible itself, � so that not
even the long humiliating years of his decline proved capable of
destroying it. � He returned a hero, having seized for our holy
new land a mountain valley so high and inaccessible that even
goats had difficulty in breathing up there; so intrepid he was, so
tremendous, that all true patriots had to gasp - and you must not
believe that propaganda which says that the enemy did not bother