SHAME
By: Salman Rushdie
Chapter 1: The Dumb Waiter
Similarly to other novel, the first chapter is very important because it sets the stage for the whole book.
In this chapter, we learn that the novel takes place in a town called Q. This town is described as a remote border town that is shaped like an ill-proportioned dumbbell and a “hell hole”.
We are also introduced to the three characters displayed on the front cover of the novel; the three sisters Chhunni, Munnee, and Bunny, who were understood to be in their twenties. Their father, Mr. Shakil, died right at the beginning of this chapter. The author explains Mr. Shakil’s hatred for his home town as British colonizers lived there. Mr. Shakil lived in a giant mansion located in an open area near a marketplace in Q. He was a widow for 18 years and raised his daughters with the help of a Parsee* wet nurse*, a Christian ayah* and following the Muslim culture.
We are also introduced to the three characters displayed on the front cover of the novel; the three sisters Chhunni, Munnee, and Bunny, who were understood to be in their twenties. Their father, Mr. Shakil, died right at the beginning of this chapter. The author explains Mr. Shakil’s hatred for his home town as British colonizers lived there. Mr. Shakil lived in a giant mansion located in an open area near a marketplace in Q. He was a widow for 18 years and raised his daughters with the help of a Parsee* wet nurse*, a Christian ayah* and following the Muslim culture.
* Parsee - a descendant of those Zoroastrians who fled to India from Muslim persecution in Persia during the 7th–8th centuries
* wet- nurse - a woman employed to feed another woman's child.
* ayah - a native maid or nursemaid employed by Europeans in India.
The three sisters were referred to as “whores” by their father prior to his death who kept them imprisoned in his mansion and uneducated. They grew up locked inside Mr. Shakil’s mansion and were “virtually uneducated” meaning they had some education but only to the extent of what they were able to teach themselves. They were also very close to one another and in fact, explored each other’s bodies harmlessly and innocently. The three sisters did spells in the evenings for their father to die.
The three sisters mixed their menstrual blood and burned it to ashes as they made an oath to remain united and share everything they ever had, will have or experienced. The girls had strong negative feelings towards their father for having raised them locked in his mansion. They were relieved when he died and had a party celebrating his death. The wealth that their father appeared to have was all a scam to conceal his reality of not owning anything but his mansion and being in huge debt as well as keeping his status within the elites of Q. Needless to say, the sisters were left with nothing but the mansion after his death. In addition, they were left paying off all their father’s debts.
Following the party, the sisters sent of long term servants, Hashmat Bibi, into town to hire a handyman and buy an iron pad lock for their mansion. Hashmat Bibi had the handyman build a dumb-waiter large enough to hold three adults. This lifting device would use a wheel and a motor from the upper storeys of the house to the outside of the mansion and vice versa. This device will also include a spring with sharp blades that can be flanged from the inside of the mansion to protect the sisters from intruders. This dumb-waiter had many hidden secrets build into in. A few weeks after it was completed, the handyman who build it died of peritonitis. However, there is an insinuation made that he was poisoned by the three sisters so that the secrets of the dumb-waiter he build would be kept secret forever.
*dumb-waiter – an external elevator
When the servant, Hashmat Bibi, went into Q to hire the handyman, she dropped off letters to the best vendors in town of all items the sister will need and want brought to them to the mansion. The letter explained they should go to the dumbwaiter and it would make coded whistles and then descend to street level to pick up the items.
The three sisters were so close and were so alike as they got older that even the servants couldn’t tell them apart, “Although some five years separated Chhunni from Bunny, it was at this time that the sisters by virtue of dressing identically and through the incomprehensible effects of their unusual chose life, began resembled each other that even the servants made mistakes.” The girls had all their servants make an oath to keep all that happened in their mansion a secret. One of the sisters was pregnant and the two other sisters pretended to be pregnant as well. They used cushions, padding, and even faint-inducing vapors. The sisters slept in the same room, had the same cravings at the same time, weighted the same, were tired at the same time, woke up and went to sleep at the same time, etc. No one saw when one of the sister’s water broke and when she gave birth, it was in their bed room along with the two other sisters. One of them locked their room door from the inside. The baby was born on the same bed where his grandfather died. Their so was named Omar Khayyam Shakil.
It was implied that all three sisters were able to breast feed him.
Omar’s 7th birthday- Omar’s mother, Chhunni told him to whisper the named of God.
Omar-s 8th birthday – Omar’s mother, Munnee, told him he would never get his head shaved. He was also uncircumsized.
Omar suffered of Insomnia. He roamed around the mansion at nights.
“His wife, the elder daughter of General Raza Hyder, was an insomniac too; but Omar Khayyam’s sleeplessness is not to be compared with hers, for a while his was willed, she foolish Sufiya Zinobia, would lie in bed squeezing her eyelids shut between her thumbs and forefingers as if she could extrude consciousness though her eye lashes, like motes of dust, or tears. And she burned, she fried, in that very room of her husband’s birth and his grandfather’s death, beside that bed of snaked and Paradise….a plague on this disobedient time! I command this death scene back into the wings at once: shazam!”
* General Raza Hyder - Historically references Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq (6th president of Pakistan) https://www.pakistanarmy.gov.pk/AWPReview/TextContent.aspx?pId=150
* Shazam – This tells us that the passage quoted above, introduces the story of Omar Khayyam.
http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Khayyam.html
http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Khayyam.html
When Omar was twelve, his birthday wish was to leave the mansion and go into town. His mothers, painfully granted him his wish. As he got older, he was physically described to be a, “fat fellow with a button missing at naval height”. He got together with a man who became his professor, mentor and perhaps the only manly figure he had in his life. At the age of 20, Omar learns about his younger brother, Babar Shakil, who just like him was claimed to be the son of all three sisters.
At the end of this chapter, there is a reference to a “hero”. Nevertheless, the qualities of this hero describe Omar based on what is learned about him in chapter one. “Dizzy, peripheral, inverted, infatuated, insomniac, stargazing, fat: what manner of hero is this?”
