Shame
Shame, novel by Indian-born British-American writer Salman Rushdie that was published in 1983. Following the discussion of India’s partition in Midnight’s Children (1981), Shame focuses on the country that emerged from that partition, Pakistan.
Shame is written in the first person, narrated by a nameless person who lives in London and sometimes visits the country that is the setting of the novel. It has a “peripheral” protagonist who watches from the wings, the disreputable Omar Shakil. He is the child of three sequestered sisters who all consider themselves the boy’s mother. The novel is set in the remote border town of Q in a country that is not quite Pakistan but a place “at a slight angle to reality.” The narrative is frequently disrupted with asides and newspaper reports, blurring the division between fiction and history, and creating a satire of the Pakistan of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq, in their fictional equivalents, Iskander Harappa and Raza Hyder. Much of the story takes place during the time that a civil war resulted in East Pakistan seceding to become the independent country of Bangladesh.
The novel opens with the story of Omar’s background and childhood. When he at last persuades his mothers to allow him to go to school, they tell him not to let anyone cause him to feel shame when he goes out into the world. He grows up to be shameless but also becomes an immunologist. The story then introduces Bilquis, the wife of Raza Hyder, and Rani, who becomes Iskander Harappa’s wife. Bilquis gives birth to two daughters, Sufiya and Naveed, but a fever leaves Sufiya with intellectual disabilities.
The narrative follows the feud between Iskander Harappa, a gambler and womanizer who eventually becomes prime minister, and Raza Hyder, who later usurps Harappa’s power in a coup. Set against this political struggle, the Hyder and Harappa families are inextricably bound up in a series of sexual and marital intrigues, which largely center on the female characters. Omar is called to treat Sufiya, and he falls in love with and eventually marries her. Sufiya is the embodiment of the barely translatable Urdu word sharam, rendered in English as “shame.” As the brainsick daughter who should have been a son, she also symbolizes Pakistan, the miracle that went wrong. The beast of shame hidden deep inside Sufiya surfaces one day, and she kills several young men. Omar begins keeping her locked up and sedated, but she escapes shortly before Harappa is killed.
Over the next four years, Hyder, now ruler of the country, turns it into a theocracy, as Sufiya roams the countryside, brutally killing both animals and people. Eventually, the people turn against Hyder, and Omar takes Hyder and Bilquis to his childhood home to protect them. In that home, Bilquis dies of malaria, Omar’s mothers kill Hyder, Sufiya arrives and kills Omar, and the story ends with explosion of the house.
A daring blend of historical commentary, political allegory, and a fantastical fictional style that owes a stylistic debt to Gabriel García Márquez, Shame is a fitting successor to Midnight’s Children, displaying the same capacity for comic excess, complex narrative, and biting political critique.