74 SOCIAL SCIENTIST "Shame, dear reader, is not the exclusive property of the East." (Shame, p29). Above all, there is Rani Harappa, the neglected wife of Iskander, a latter-day »Pcnelope and Madame Defarge in one, who insiststs on' preparing in exquisitely embroidered shawls a record of her husband's life and crimes a warning to her daughter, the Virgin Iron-Pants, intent on making a hero and martyr of him. The lyricism in the description of the shawls and their nimble-fingered creator, inured to life-long house-arrest mitigates the insistence of obvious parallels but leaves one in no doubt about the warning: make Bhutto a martyr and you only have yourself to blame. The authorial persona is aware of this strength and it goads him into making a comment on his erstwhile country which in its anger belies much of his normal suavity: "Once upon a time there were two families, their destinies inseparable even by death. I had thought, before I began, that what I had on my hands was an exclusively masculine talc, a saga of sexual rivalry, ambition, power, patronage, betrayal, death, revenge. But the women seem to have taken over, they marched in from the peripheries of the story to demand the inclusion of their own tragedies, histories and comedies, obliging me to couch my narrative in all manner of sinuous complexities, to see my 'male' plot refracted, so to speak, through the prisms of its reverse and 'female9 side. It occurs to me that the women knew precisely what thay were up to—that their stories explain and even subsume the men's. Repression is a seamless garment; a society which is authoritarian in its social and sexual codes, which crushes its women beneath the intolerable burdens of honour and propriety, breeds repressions of other kinds as well. Contrariwise: dictators arc always—or at least in public, on other people's behalf—puritanical. So it turns out that my 'male' and 'female9 plots are the same story, after all. "I hope it goes without saying that not all women are crushed by any system, no matter how oppressive. It is commonly and, I believe, accurately said of Pakistan that her women are much more impressive than her men—their chains, nevertheless, are no fiction. They exist. And they are getting heavier. "If you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining. "In the end, though, it all blows up in your face.99 The glib Angrezi also allows bubbles of understanding to surface about other events on the sub-continent: "It is well known that the term 'Pakistan9, an acronym, was originally thought up in England by a group of Muslim intellectuals. P for the Punjabis, A for the Afghans, K for the Kashmiris, S for Sind and the 'tan', they say, for Baluchistan. (No mention of the East Wing, you notice, Bangladesh never got its name in the title, and so, eventually it took the hint and seceded from the secessionists. Imagine what such a double secession does to people!).9'