Shame - pg. 32

'Sometimes I found skeletons,' he swore to disbelieving Farah, 'humans as well as animal.' And even where bones were absent, the house's long-dead occupants dogged his steps. Not in the way you think! -- No howls, no clanking chains! -- But disembodied feelings, the choking fumes of ancient hopes, fears, loves; and finally, made wild by the ancestor-heavy, phantom oppressions of these far recesses of the run-down building, Omar Khayyam took his revenge (not long after the episode of the broken wall) on his unnatural surroundings. I wince as I record his vandalism: armed with broomstick and misappropriated hatchet, he rampaged through dusty passages and maggoty bedrooms, smashing glass cabinets, felling oblivion-sprinkled divans, pulverizing wormy libraries; crystal, paintings, rusty helmets, the paper-thin remnants of priceless silken carpets were destroyed beyond all possibility of repair. 'Take that,' he screeched amidst the corpses of his useless, massacred history, 'take that, old stuff!' -- and then burst (dropping guilty hatchet and clean-sweeping broom) into illogical tears.

Shame - pg. 28

Wherever I turn, there is something of which to be ashamed. But shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture. In 'Defence', you can find shame in every house, burning in an ashtray, hanging framed upon a wall, covering a bed. But nobody notices it any more. And everyone is civilized.

Shame - pg. 28

You can get anywhere in Pakistan if you know people, even into jail.

Shame - pg. 21

Omar Khayyam Shakil entered life without benefit of mutilation, barbery or divine approval. There are many who would consider this a handicap.

Shame - pg. 12

'Come quickly,' Hashmat Bibi ran from the room yelling for the old man's daughters, 'your fatherji is sending himself to the devil.' Mr Shakil, having dismissed the outside world, had turned the rage of his dying monologue against himself, calling eternal damnation down upon his soul. 'God knows what got his goat,' Hashmat despaired, 'but he is going in an incorrect way.'

Shame - pg. 11

Old Mr Shakil, at the time of his death a widower for eighteen years, had developed the habit of referring to the town in which he lived as 'a hell hole'. During his last delirium he embarked on a ceaseless and largely incomprehensible monologue amidst whose turbid peregrination the household servants could make out long passages of obscenity, oaths and curses of a ferocity that made the air boil violently around his bed. In this peroration the embittered old recluse rehearsed his lifelong hatred for his home town, now calling down demons to destroy the clutter of low, dun-coloured, 'higgling and piggling' edifices around the bazaar, now annihilating with his death-encrusted words the cool whitewashed smugness of the Cantonment district. These were the two orbs of the town's dumb-bell shape: old town and Cantt, the former inhabited by the indigenous, colonized population and the latter by the alien colonizers, the Angrez, or British sahibs.

Shame - Opening

I
Escapes from the
Mother Country
CHAPTER ONE

The Dumb-waiter

In the remote border town of Q., which when seen from the air resembles nothing so much as an ill-proportioned dumb-bell, there once lived three lovely, and loving, sisters.

FOR SAMEEN

First published 1983
Copyright Salman Rushdie 1983

Jonathan Cape Ltd, 30 Bedford Square, London WCI

Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd, Frome and London

Salman Rushdie's new book..

The Emperor Abul-Fath Jalaluddin Muhammad, King of Kings, known since his childhood as Akbar, meaning “the great,” and latterly, in spite of the tautology of it, as Akbar the Great, the great great one, great in his greatness, doubly great, so great that the repetition in his title was not only appropriate but necessary in order to express the gloriousness of his glory—the Grand Mughal, the dusty, battle-weary, victorious, pensive, incipiently overweight, disenchanted, mustachioed, poetic, over-sexed, and absolute emperor, who seemed altogether too magnificent, too world-encompassing, and, in sum, too much to be a single human personage—this all-engulfing flood of a ruler, this swallower of worlds, this many-headed monster who referred to himself in the first-person plural—had begun to meditate, during his long, tedious journey home, on which he was accompanied by the heads of his defeated enemies bobbing in their sealed earthen pickle jars, about the disturbing possibilities of the first-person singular—the “I.”

James Wood

It's true. "Remember, I grew up with Bellow," Wood says. "If you love Bellow, you love exuberance and stylistic showing off. That is exactly my complaint against someone like Rushdie. It's not style, it's all noise. He doesn't hit the drums like Moon hits them."