Shame - Salman Rushdie by Salman Rushdie

Author:Salman Rushdie
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-09-18T10:32:52.832000+00:00

without worrying about a few dead paupers.

The four bodies were all adolescent, male, pungent. The heads

had been wrenched off their necks by some colossal force: literally

torn from their shoulders. Traces of semen were detected on their

tattered pants. They were found in a rubbish dump near a slum. It

seemed that the four of them had died more or less simultane-

ously. The heads were never found.

The election campaign was at fever-pitch. The murders barely

made the newspapers; they were not reported on the radio. There

were rumours, some gossip, but people were quickly bored. All

kinds of God knows what-all could happen in those slums.

This is what happened.

The woman in the veil: a horror story.

Talvar Ulhaq was flying back to the capital from Q. when he

had the vision. In those days the chief of the Federal Security

Force was a busy man, hardly sleeping, racing around the country.

It was election time, and Talvar was a member of Iskander

Harappa's trusted inner circle, his act of betrayal was still in the

future. So he was fully occupied, because Isky relied on the FSF to

keep him one jump ahead of his opponents, to discover their

plans, to infiltrate fifth-columnists into their headquarters and sub-

vert their arrangements, to find grounds for arresting their leaders.

He was busy with such matters in that aeroplane, so that when the

damaged ligaments in his neck began to play up like the very

devil, he gritted his teeth and ignored them, because he was run-

ning his eyes carefully over certain photographs of separatist Fron-

tier politicos in bed with attractive young men who were, in fact,

loyal employees of the FSF, working courageously and selflessly

for their country. But then the vision came, and Talvar had to

In the Fifteenth Century ? 229

look up from his work, because it seemed to him that the cabin

shimmered and dissolved, and then he was standing like a shadow

on the wall of the Hyder residence, at night, watching the figure

of Bilquis Hyder, veiled as usual in a head-to-toe black burqa,

moving towards him down a darkened corridor. As she passed

him without glancing in his direction he was appalled to see that

her burqa was sodden and dripping with something too thick to

be water. The blood, black in the unlit corridor, left a trail down

the passage behind her.

The vision faded. When Talvar got home he checked things

out and discovered that nothing seemed amiss at the Hyder house,

Bilquis had not left the premises and everyone was fine, so he put

the matter out of his mind and got on with his job. Later he con-

fessed to General Raza Hyder, 'It's my mistake. I should have seen

at once what was going on; but my thoughts were on other

things.'

The day after his return from Q. Talvar Ulhaq heard about the

four headless bodies, by the purest chance: two of his men were

joking about the murders in the FSF canteen, wondering if they

could pin the killings on well-known homosexual opposition

bosses. Talvar went cold and cursed himself. 'You idiot,' he

thought, 'no wonder your neck was hurting.'

He drove immediately to the Army GHQ, and asked Raza to

accompany him into the gardens, to make sure they were not

overheard.

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