Shame Read Free Page B

that
neck of the woods, but rather strong-chinned, powerfully built,
purposefully striding women of an almost oppressively charismatic
force. Now the three of them began, simultaneously, to thicken at
the waist and in the breast; when one was sick in the morning, the
other two began to puke in such perfectly synchronized sympathy
that it was impossible to tell which stomach had heaved first.
Identically, their wombs ballooned towards the pregnancy's full
    Escapes from the Mother Country ? 13
    term. It is naturally possible that all this was achieved with the help
of physical contrivances, cushions and padding and even faint-
inducing vapours; but it is my unshakeable opinion that such an
analysis grossly demeans the love that existed between the sisters.
In spite of biological improbability, I am prepared to swear that so
wholeheartedly did they wish to share the motherhood of their
sibling � to transform the public shame of unwedlocked concep-
tion into the private triumph of the longed-for group baby � that,
in short, twin phantom pregnancies accompanied the real one;
while the simultaneity of their behavior suggests the operation of
some form of communal mind.
    They slept in the same room. They endured the same crav-
ings - marzipan, jasmine-petals, pine-kernels, mud - at the same
times; their metabolic rates altered in parallel. They began to
weigh the same, to feel exhausted at the same moment, and to
awake together, each morning, as if somebody had rung a bell.
They felt identical pains; in three wombs, a single baby and its two
ghostly mirror-images kicked and turned with the precision of a
well-drilled dance troupe . . . suffering identically, the three of
them - I will go so far as to say - fully earned the right to be con-
sidered joint mothers of the forthcoming child. And when one � I
will not even guess at the name � came to her time, nobody else
saw whose waters broke; nor whose hand locked a bedroom door
from the inside. No outside eyes witnessed the passage of the
three labours, two phantom one genuine; or the moment when
empty balloons subsided, while between a third pair of thighs, as if
in an alleyway, there appeared the illegitimate child; or when
hands lifted Omar Khayyam Shakil by the ankles, held him
upside-down, and thumped him on the back.
    Our hero, Omar Khayyam, first drew breath in that improbable
mansion which was too large for its rooms to be counted; opened
his eyes; and saw, upside-down through an open window, the
macabre peaks of the Impossible Mountains on the horizon.
One � but which? � of his three mothers had picked him up by
the ankles, had pummelled the first breath into his lungs . . . until,
still staring at the inverted summits, the baby began to scream.
    Shame ? 14
    When Hashmat Bibi heard a key turning in the door and came
timidly into the room with food and drink and fresh sheets and
sponges and soap and towels, she found the three sisters sitting up
together in the capacious bed, the same bed in which their father
had died, a huge mahogany four-poster around whose columns
carved serpents coiled upwards to the brocade Eden of the
canopy. They were all wearing the flushed expression of dilated
joy that is the mother's true prerogative; and the baby was passed
from breast to breast, and none of the six was dry.
    Young Omar Khayyam was gradually made aware that certain
irregularities had both preceded and succeeded his birth. We have
dealt with the pre-; and as for the sue-:
    'I refused completely,' his eldest mother Chhunni told him on
his seventh birthday, 'to whisper the name of God into your ear.'
    On his eighth birthday, middle-Munnee confided: 'There was
no question of shaving your head. Such beautiful black-black hair
you came with, nobody was cutting it off under my nose, no sir!'
    Exactly one year later, his youngest mother adopted a stern
expression. 'Under no circs,' Bunny announced, 'would I have
permitted