Shame

Omar Khayyam Shakil is a shameless man who spends most of his life ignoring or evading the sense of shame that society would place upon him. Having grown up in the confines of an isolated home, seeing only his three mothers and their servants, he emerges into the world as someone who has been taught the nature of shame but not its ramifications. His mothers take care to teach him about shame but only allow him outside on the condition that he never feel ashamed of himself, and he takes this lesson to heart to a degree that inflicts great harm upon others. Whether he is hypnotizing, raping, and impregnating Farah or building a debauched reputation alongside Iskander, Omar never comes close to feeling any shame for his actions. He recognizes that shame exists and knows when others are feeling it, such as when Farah is driven out of the town with Eduardo because Omar has ruined her reputation. However, he feels so little shame for his own actions that he nearly convinces himself that the town’s rumors are right and that Farah’s baby belongs to Eduardo. As noted by the narrator, Omar feels “the opposite of shame” (39): shamelessness. He embodies shamelessness in the same way that Sufiya embodies shame. They are diametrically opposed; two sides of the same shameful coin, one beholden to shame and one unable to feel it at all.

Omar’s actions are also driven by cycles of trauma. While he may not be able to feel shame for his own actions, he can recognize the pain of others and can see how this informs his own actions. The defining relationship of his childhood—other than his relationship with his three mothers—is between himself, Farah, and Eduardo. In reality, Eduardo is a pedophile who preys upon Farah. Omar understands this but does not care, for he harbors his own paradoxically malicious yet loving feelings toward Farah. After Omar hypnotizes and rapes Farah, Eduardo accepts responsibility for the child and then leaves with Farah. Omar rarely thinks about this incident until he also falls in love with a child: Sufiya. Sufiya is a teenager, and he is middle-aged when they first meet. Furthermore, she has the mental age of a six-year-old. Omar acknowledges this difficulty but cannot deny his love for her. Thus, he is able to empathize with Eduardo’s similarly abusive desires, but not so much that he alters his behavior. Omar marries Sufiya and, again, feels no shame. He never consummates the marriage, as he is able to satisfy his sexual desires with a servant instead, but he never feels guilty or ashamed of his love for a child. The traumatic experiences of his past are used to justify his behavior in his present, allowing him to inflict pain and abuse on others because he has witnessed similar pain and abuse elsewhere.

Eventually, Omar is driven into hiding in Nishapur. However, it is not his own shame that compels him to flee, but rather the anger of others who chase him, Raza, and Bilquis out of the capital. Arriving full circle at his family home, Omar finds a dubious resolution as the house in which he spent the first 12 years of his life—the home from which he was so desperate to escape—becomes his final battleground. By leading Raza, his brother’s murderer, to the doorstep of Nishapur, he unwittingly brings his mothers an irresistible opportunity for revenge. As they destroy Raza for the crime of killing Babar, Omar finally comes to realize what a lifetime of shamelessness can do to a man. At the novel’s conclusion, he is completely abandoned by his friends, his allies, and his family. He has no one left but the angry mob outside the walls. Eventually, Sufiya tracks him down and kills him, bringing together their shame and shamelessness in one explosive consummation of the abusive relationship. The couple may never have had sex, but this explosive ending is the true product of their marriage. Ultimately, they achieve unity on a symbolic level, blending together the novel’s interpretation of the titular shame and its opposite.

Raza Hyder is a military man who ascends to the position of total authority in Pakistan. He is an allegorical figure, someone who embodies the history of the real Pakistan while also being presented in a fictional manner. This fictitious character retains the brutality of the real world, as evidenced not only in his aggressive and violent policy decisions, but also in his callous behavior toward his own family. He is cold and distant toward his wife, Bilquis, and he even threatens to kill Good News for the embarrassment she causes him at her wedding. He barely has a relationship with Sufiya until he fears that she will come to murder him. The violence of Raza’s character reflects a similar violence that is deeply imbued in the society he inhabits. He therefore represents many of humanity’s worst impulses, illustrating the extreme measures that seemingly mild-mannered and average people are willing to take in order to seize and maintain power. At the beginning of the novel, he is not necessarily an ambitious man, but he treats the birth of Pakistan and the political chaos that follows as an opportunity to take power for himself and to settle petty grievances against people like Iskander. Raza is an all-powerful and petty man, someone who allows his life to be defined by violence because he is greedy enough to abandon any morals he once had.

Raza’s turn to violence changes him utterly. By the time he becomes the dictator of the country, he has already shed a great deal of blood, and it is significant that his thoughts are haunted by the voices of two men: the holy man Maulana Dawood and Iskander, whose botched execution was orchestrated by Raza. The spirits of the two men operate as the closest thing Raza has to a conscience. They advise him, guiding him on how to run the country. Dawood always advises for brutal religious laws, while Iskander advocates for a form of pragmatic violence based on the theories of Niccolò Machiavelli. Neither of these guiding spirits is much like their living personalities, a dynamic that soon becomes clear when they advocate for ideas that are already swirling around in Raza’s mind. They are therefore manifestations of the division within him, and the author uses their voices to personify the broken pieces of his fractured mind as he confronts his political failures. He is no longer an individual, operating alone, for the power he has seized consumes him and divides him, breaking apart his mind until he falls from power in a hastily organized coup. In a final ignominious moment of defeat, Raza—the same man who rose to power in such a coup—recognizes his imminent defeat and slips away in a burqa, forced to adopt the dress he imposed upon those he once oppressed in his role as dictator. Donning the raiment of the very people whose lives he destroyed, he flees the capital like a “coward,” rather than the soldier he claimed to be. His guilt, his fear, and his bitterness remain apparent, even as he stops hearing the voices in his head.

Even if Iskander’s voice stops speaking to Raza after the former dictator’s flight from the capital, Raza is never able to truly escape his political forebear. He flees with Omar to Nishapur, where he discovers three women who are waiting to take revenge against him for killing their son. Thus, the consequences of his actions are lurking in the one place in which he expected to find refuge from his many sins. After surviving a fever, Raza wakes up to find the women waiting for him with an assortment of weapons. They tell him that “there is no shame in killing [him] now, because [he is] a dead man anyway” (281). He is stuffed in the dumbwaiter and killed. In this sense, Raza’s death is a darkly comedic retelling of Iskander’s fate. Iskander was sentenced to death, and then shot by his guard. His dead body was hanged as a matter of official protocol. Likewise, Raza is already doomed when he arrives at the house, and his actual death is merely a perfunctory act. He is killed without ceremony, a dead man put to death in much the same fashion that he deposed of his forebear. Thus, in the most ironic sense, Raza and Iskander remain united, even in death.