Shame

“Mr. Shakil’s air of great learning had been a sham, just like his supposed business acumen.”

In the novel, a patchwork reality is assembled from various fictions. Many people believed Mr. Shakil to be a great reader and a wise man, but his library was a sham, a pretense that he purchased from another man to bolster his own reputation. The library therefore functions as a metaphor for these interwoven fictions, in which people’s perception of Mr. Shakil is built from a series of carefully cultivated lies.

“What’s the opposite of shame? What’s left when sharam is subtracted? That’s obvious: shamelessness.”

The opposite of shame conveys similar negative implications. To be shameless is a shameful thing in the novel, meaning that there is no literal way in which to escape shame. Those who are shameless are considered to be shameful by others, and this dynamic creates a constant feedback loop of shame that comes to dominate the minds of the characters. 

“You will do anything that I ask you to do, but I will ask you to do nothing that you will be unwilling to do.”

In this quote, Omar offers a flimsy justification for raping Farah. He hypnotizes her and removes her ability to consciously consent to sex but insists that she could never do anything under hypnosis that she was not willing to do anyway. Since no one knows what Omar has done, the lie is exclusively for his own benefit. He feels the need to settle his own guilty conscience, and he returns to the same flimsy excuse later in life. 

“Omar Khayyam had almost been convinced that the teacher really was the father.”

After Farah and Eduardo are chased from the town, Omar shamelessly keeps his shameful secret. He tells no one that he is the father of Farah’s child and goes along with the various rumors that suggest that Eduardo is the father. Omar is almost convinced that these rumors are true, ironically mesmerizing himself with a comfortable fiction rather than confronting the reality of his crimes. 

“The Army was partitioned like everything else.”

The partition is a totalizing moment for the people of what is now Pakistan. Everything is partitioned, from the country and the culture to the institutions such as the Army. The sheer importance and the transformative effects of the partition are illustrated by the extent to which every single person, place, and institution is now considered to be as partitioned as the country itself. 

“Every story one chooses to tell is a kind of censorship, it prevents the telling of other tales.”

The act of telling a story, the narrator suggests, is an editorial act of censorship. Due to the complexity of reality, a true account of history can never be achieved. As such, the narrator accepts the limitations of narration and embraces the fantastical elements of storytelling, leaving aside certain aspects of his story in favor of portraying an idea of Pakistan, rather than a fully accurate reality, which is impossible to attain. 

“A degenerate of whom it is often said that he appears to be entirely without shame, ‘fellow doesn’t know the meaning of the word.’”

The irony of people’s comments about Omar is that he was explicitly taught the meaning of shame by his three mothers. That he should embrace such a debauched lifestyle, even after their warning, illustrates the true depth of the flaws that dominate his character. Although he has learned the meaning of shame, he has chosen to abandon any pretense that he should care about it. Just as he has left behind his mothers and his family home, he has left behind society’s concerns about shame. 

 “It is well known that the term ‘Pakistan’, an acronym, was originally thought up in England by a group of Muslim intellectuals.”

Pakistan’s dual status as a place and an idea is built on a sense of artificiality from which the narrator cannot escape. The physical region of Pakistan is created by the partition, while the culture is created by the movement of people from India, and even the word itself is an artificial creation that was invented externally and then imposed on the nascent country. The idea of Pakistan, right down to the name itself, is an artificial creation that is separate from the lived experiences of the Pakistani people. 

“Army is watching these days.”

The sense of paranoia quickly infects the emerging state of Pakistan. Even though the country has barely been established, the inhabitants warn each other that “Army is watching” (102). As events unfold in the novel, the Army takes an increasingly central place in Pakistani politics, and the resulting fear and paranoia make everyone suspicious of one another and ashamed of their own possible infractions. 

“This woman’s body […] it brings a person nothing but babies, pinches and shame.”

The women in the novel are aware of The Systemic Misogyny of Patriarchal Societies that permeates Pakistani culture. They exist to be targets of sexual interest and a means of producing children. Any other activity is frowned upon, with women made to feel ashamed of any kind of sexual urge or unique expression of their own selves. To be in a female body is to be targeted by the misogynistic society and made to feel a constant sense of shame for the supposed “sin” of being assigned female at birth. 

 “But even more appalling was my realization that, like the interviewed friends etc., I, too, found myself understanding the killer.”

Throughout the novel, the narrator thoroughly explores the various manifestations of shame, and in this quote, he acknowledges that part of this process involves exploring his own sense of shame. By describing an honor killing that took place in the United Kingdom, the narrator confesses that he is ashamed of his ability to empathize with the killer. He finds the killer’s actions abhorrent but understands that the murder is a product of a social sense of shame. In this context, his own shame is inflected by his capacity to recognize shame in others. Shame pervades everything. 

“He finds himself behaving awkwardly in her presence, and in his dreams he pursues her to the ends of the earth, while the mournful remnant of Eduardo Rodrigues looks down pityingly at his obsession from the sky.”

Omar falls in love with a child, just as his teacher Eduardo fell in love with Farah many years before. Omar is ashamed that he is entering into a morally reprehensible relationship, but his childhood experiences demonstrate how the proximity to a certain kind of abuse in childhood can lead to similar actions in adulthood. Shame and shameful behavior are therefore passed along from one generation to the next. 

“Marriage is power.”

Ahead of her marriage to Haroun, Good News dismisses any concerns by announcing that “marriage is power” (155). Her words are filled with foreboding, especially as she will not marry Haroun and her actions will place her life (and potentially her family’s lives) in jeopardy. Her marriage does have power, but in a more destructive sense than she could ever imagine.

“Why is it that fairy-tales always treat marriage as an ending? And always such a perfectly happy one?”

Throughout the novel, the idea of fairy tales recurs as a motif. The novel is retelling the history of Pakistan through the lens of a fairy tale, but the ideas are not always compatible. At times, the reality of Pakistan must cede to the unreality of the fairy tale while, at other times, the archetypes of the fairy tale—such as the happy marriage as a resolution to the story—must conform to the reality of Pakistan. A new blend of reality and fairy tales emerges as a result. 

“A NEW MAN FOR A NEW CENTURY.”

In the novel, Pakistan operates according to different principles than the outside world. The newly created country adheres to a different calendar entirely, so the new century to which Iskander’s political slogan refers is not a new century in the rest of the world. Iskander is ahead of his time in this sense and outside of time in another sense. He is a fine embodiment of Pakistan as a country because he operates according to his own timeline rather than following the expectations of the rest of the world. 

“It was, of course, for his alleged complicity in the murder of Little Mir Harappa that Iskander was put on trial for his life.”

At the time of the murder of Little Mir, Iskander is not in trouble. However, the crime is documented and stored away to be used against him in the future. These changing parameters of legality and culpability illustrate the ways in which justice is meted out according to pragmatic opportunism, rather than any moral standing. Iskander is only punished when the punishment suits those in power. 

“There was once a young woman, Sufiya Zinobia, also known as ‘Shame.’”

The beginning of the chapter returns the story to Sufiya, resurrecting the fairy tale archetypes of the story to emphasize her unreality and her mystical qualities in comparison to those around her. The framing of Sufiya is increasingly in adherence with the style of a fairy tale, reintroducing her with phrases such as “there was once” (197). As these stylistic flourishes increase, Sufiya as a character drifts further from reality and transforms into an allegorical, metaphorical embodiment of shame itself. 

“The new capital was in reality the biggest collection of airport terminals on earth.”

The architecture of Pakistan echoes its new, unreal nature. Pakistan’s capital is described as a “collection of airport terminals” (205), presenting the country as a liminal space between an uncertain past and an unknown future. The Pakistan of the present is an unreal, untenable, artificial space that is not intended to house people for long, just like an airport terminal. It is a space through which people move on their way to somewhere else, even if that destination is not yet known. 

“The edges of Sufiya Zinobia were beginning to become uncertain, as if there were two beings occupying that air-space.”

In Sufiya, the increasingly blurred boundaries between fiction and reality are becoming evident. Sufiya is the novel’s embodiment of the titular shame, and she is struggling to embody this metaphor in a physical sense. The literary device and the violence within her are breaking through into her reality, forcing her subtextual existence into the foreground. She can no longer contain the violent metaphor that she is meant to embody. 

“To administer the drugs that turned her from one fairy-tale into another, into sleeping-beauty instead of beauty-and-beast.”

Just as Sufiya struggles to contain her literary role in the novel, she flits between different female archetypes within the idea of fairy tales. She jumps from one to the other, from Sleeping Beauty to Beauty and the Beast as she searches for a place in the world to inhabit. Rather than functioning as one single reference to one single fairy tale, she embodies the very idea of fairy tales, containing echoes of all the different stories that might be counted in this category.

“On all fours, the calluses thick on her palms and soles.”

The shame and mistreatment of Sufiya’s youth have a devastating effect on her mental state, but this begins to show itself in her physical condition. The calluses on her hands and feet are physical illustrations of the hardening of her spirit. She has become hardened to the violence around her; the roughness of the world has toughened her skin and turned her into something much more formidable. 

“Nobody questions women wearing veils.”

The irony of Raza’s escape is that he is forced to wear a burqa. This demand placed upon the former dictator ironically refers back to his institution of religious laws, when he forced the women of his country to wear the veil in accordance with his interpretation of religious texts. In order to survive, he is forced to wear the same clothes that he once forced all the women in the country to wear. 

“No servants any more.”

Upon returning to Nishapur, Omar is told that the family no longer has servants. This is true in a blunt sense, as the three mothers are all alone. In a figurative sense, however, the three mothers—and the rest of the characters—have become the servants. They are now servants to their past actions, beholden to the feelings of shame and revenge with drive them. They have become servants to their own past.