Shame Read Free Page A

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dalous ladies and their servants too.
    It turned out that on her last trip into town Hashmat Bibi had
left a number of sealed envelopes containing detailed instructions
at the establishments of the community's leading suppliers of
goods and services; so that afterwards, on the appointed days
and at the hours specified, the chosen washerwoman, the tailor,
the cobbler, as well as the selected vendors of meats, fruits,
haberdashery, flowers, stationery, vegetables, pulses, books, flat
drinks, fizzy drinks, foreign magazines, newspapers, unguents,
perfumes, antimony, strips of eucalyptus bark for tooth-cleaning,
spices, starch, soaps, kitchen utensils, picture frames, playing cards
and strings for musical instruments, would present themselves at
the foot of Mistri Yakoob's last construction. They would emit
coded whistles, and the dumb-waiter would descend, humming,
to street level bearing written instructions. In this way the Shakil
ladies managed to recede entirely and for all time from the world,
returning of their own volition into that anchoritic existence
whose end they had been so briefly able to celebrate after their
father's death; and such was the hauteur of their arrangements that
their withdrawal seemed like an act not of contrition but of pride.
    There arises a delicate question: how did they pay for it all?
    With some embarrassment on their behalf, and purely to show
that the present author, who has already been obliged to leave
many questions in a state of unanswered ambiguity, is capable of
giving clear replies when absolutely necessary, I reveal that
Hashmat Bibi had delivered a last sealed envelope to the door of
the town's least savoury establishment, wherein the Quranic stric-
tures against usury counted for nothing, whose shelves and storage
chests groaned under the weight of the accumulated debris of
innumerable decayed histories. . . damn and blast it. To be frank �
she went to the pawnshop. And he, the pawnbroker, the ageless,
pencil-thin, innocently wide-eyed Chalaak Sahib, would also pre-
sent himself thereafter at the dumb-waiter (under cover of night,
as instructed), to assess the worth of the items he found therein,
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    and to send up into the heart of the silent house cash monies on
the nail to a total of eighteen point five per cent approx. of the
market value of the irredeemably pawned treasures. The three
mothers of the imminent Omar Khayyam Shakil were using the
past, their only remaining capital, as a means of purchasing the
future.
    But who was pregnant?
    Chhunni, the eldest, or Munnee-in-the-middle, or 'little'
Bunny, the baby of the three? � Nobody ever discovered, not
even the child that was born. Their closing of ranks was absolute,
and effected with the most meticulous attention to detail. Just
imagine: they made the servants swear loyalty oaths on the Book.
The servants joined them in their self-imposed captivity, and only
left the house feet first, wrapped in white sheets, and via, of
course, the route constructed by Yakoob Balloch. During the
entire term of that pregnancy, no doctor was summoned to the
house. And as it proceeded, the sisters, understanding that unkept
secrets always manage to escape, under a door, through a keyhole
or an open window, until everyone knows everything and
nobody knows how . . . the sisters, I repeat, displayed the
uniquely passionate solidarity that was their most remarkable char-
acteristic by feigning � in the case of two of them � the entire
range of symptoms that the third was obliged to display.
    Although some five years separated Chhunni from Bunny, it
was at this time that the sisters, by virtue of dressing identically
and through the incomprehensible effects of their unusual, chosen
life, began to resemble each other so closely that even the servants
made mistakes. I have described them as beauties; but they were
not the moon-faced almond-eyed types so beloved of poets in