Shame Read Free

night, they say, the dancing continued. The scandal of such
an event would have placed the newly orphaned girls beyond
the pale in any case, but there was worse to come. Shortly after
the party ended, after the infuriated geniuses has departed and the
mountains of uneaten food had been thrown to the pie-dogs � for
the sisters in their grandeur would not permit food intended
for their peers to be distributed among the poor - it began to be
bruited about the bazaars of Q. that one of the three nose-in-air
girls had been put, on that wild night, into the family way.
    O shame, shame, poppy-shame!
    But if the sisters Shakil were overwhelmed by any feelings of
dishonour, they gave no sign of it. Instead, they dispatched
Hashmat Bibi, one of the servants who had refused to leave, into
Q., where she commissioned the services of the town's finest
handyman, a certain Mistri Yakoob Balloch, and also purchased
the largest imported padlock to be found in the God-Willing
Ironmongery Store. This padlock was so large and heavy that
Hashmat Bibi was obliged to have it carried home on the back
of a rented mule, whose owner inquired of the servant woman:
'For what your begums want this lock-shock now? Invasion
has already occurred.' Hashmat replied, crossing her eyes for
emphasis: 'May your grandsons urinate upon your pauper's grave.'
    The hired handyman, Mistri Yakoob, was so impressed by the
ferocious calm of the antediluvian crone that he worked willingly
    Shame ? 10
    under her supervision without daring to pass a comment. She had
him construct a strange external elevator, or dumb-waiter, large
enough to hold three grown adults, by means of which items
could be winched by a system of motorized pulleys from the street
into the upper storeys of the house, or vice versa. Hashmat Bibi
stressed the importance of constructing the whole contraption in
such a way that it could be operated without requiring the man-
sion's inhabitants to show themselves an any window � not so
much as a little finger must be capable of being glimpsed. Then
she listed the unusual security features which she wished him to
install in the bizarre mechanism. 'Put here,' she ordered him, 'a
spring release which can be worked from inside the house. When
triggered, it should make the whole bottom of the lift fall offjust-
likethat. Put there, and there, and there, some secret panels which
can shoot out eighteen-inch stiletto blades, sharp sharp. My ladies
must be defended against intruders.'
    The dumb-waiter contained, then, many terrible secrets. The
Mistri completed his work without once laying eyes on any of the
three sisters Shakil, but when he died a few weeks later, clutching
his stomach and rolling about in a gully, spitting blood on to the
dirt, it got about that those shameless women had had him poi-
soned to ensure his silence on the subject of his last and most mys-
terious commission. It is only fair to state, however, that the
medical evidence in the case runs strongly against this version of
events. Yakoob Balloch, who had been suffering for some time
from sporadic pains in the region of the appendix, almost certainly
died of natural causes, his death-throes caused not by the spectral
poisons of the putatively murderous sisters, but by the genuinely
fatal banality of peritonitis. Or some such thing.
    The day came when the three remaining male employees of the
Shakil sisters were seen pushing shut the enormous front doors of
solid teak and brass. Just before those gates of solitude closed upon
the sisters, to remain unopened for more than half a century, the
little crowd of curious townsfolk outside caught sight of a wheel-
barrow on which there gleamed, dully, the outsize lock of their
withdrawal. And when the doors were shut, the sounds of the
    Escapes from the Mother Country ? 11
    great lock being hauled into place, and of the key being turned,
heralded the beginning of the strange confinement of the