Shame (1985) is Rushdie’s third book, noted for its magical realism.
The Indian author is also the narrator, saying that the novel is and isn’t about Pakistan, never living there for longer than six months at a time: “I learned Pakistan in slices.”
It is of the birth of Omar Khayyam Shakil on his grandfather’s deathbed to three mothers – all sisters, one with the real pregnancy and two who experience phantom pregnancies with “perfectly synchronized sympathy” to conceal the shame of the unmarried mother, “with not a solitary father in sight.” Named after the famous Persian poet, Omar feels like a “creature on the edge: a peripheral man.” Living with the shame of being born out of wedlock, Omar says shame is like everything else; “live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture” – to the extent that he lives a shameless life, the opposite of ashamed.
Coddled by his three mothers, Chhunni, Munnee, and Bunny, he puts on weight and is teased. For his twelfth birthday he asks to be released from “this horrible house” and to know the name of his father. This causes dissent amongst his three mothers and Omar leaves home. At eighteen and “fatter than fifty melons” he returns home with the news that he has a scholarship to the best medical college in Karachi. Two years later, his three mothers inform him that he now has a brother, Babar – again with not a father in sight.
At thirty, Omar developed “a high reputation as a doctor and a low reputation as a human being” – by now, he is totally without shame. His mothers are not the only ones shamed, for the marriage of other characters are not what they seem. “Shameful things are done: lies, loose living, disrespect for one’s elders, failure to love one’s national flag, incorrect voting at elections, over-eating, extramarital sex, autobiographical novels, cheating at cards, maltreatment of womenfolk, examination failures, smuggling, throwing one’s wicket away at a crucial part of a Test Match: and they are all done shamelessly.”
His brother, Babar, dies a rebel before his twenty-third birthday, with eighteen bullets in his body. Omar falls in love with Sufiya Zinobia Hyder, the twelve year old daughter of the man who ordered the killing of Babar, and asks for her hand in marriage. Her relatives know he is thirty-one years older than her, and that he is a fat, ugly, debauched man, but wonder “where we are going to find the girl a better match?” Their daughter is known as Shame, The Beast, and often the she-devil. The marriage goes ahead and when her character is revealed, her relatives give him the chance to renege on the marriage, but Omar persists with the union. He equates the situation with migration, one of the perspectives of the narrator: “When individuals come unstuck from their native land, they are called migrants. When nations do the same thing (Bangladesh), the act is called secession. What is the best thing about migrant peoples and seceded nations? I think it is their hopefulness."
In his sixties, sick with malaria, his oldest mother, Chhunni, tells him his family history.
Having read seven of Rushdie’s novels, this is one of my favourites. It's intense, macabre, dark, and gruesome, but the writing styles is exquisite, evocative, rich, and imaginative.
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