Shame

Sufiya is the daughter of Bilquis and Raza Hyder. The narrator provides details of Bilquis’s childhood, particularly during the era when Pakistan was being partitioned from India by the British Empire. When she is very young, Bilquis convinces herself that she would be treated like an empress. One day, at the theater of her father, Mahmoud, she sees a group of people protesting the screening of a film they deem blasphemous. Despite their anger, Mahmoud refuses to cancel the screenings because of “this partition foolishness” (62). Someone bombs the cinema, killing Bilquis’s father. Traumatized, Bilquis wanders through the streets. The clothes have burned away from her body, and her eyebrows are permanently burned away. She wanders into a fortress where many of the local Muslim population had gathered ahead of the partition. A young military officer named Raza approaches her and wraps his officer’s coat around her. Raza is an ambitious and religious young man. He and Bilquis become betrothed, and over the course of her life, Bilquis associates the hot wind that was blowing on the day of the bombing with bad fortune. This wind is called the Loo, and she becomes intensely scared whenever she feels it blow, as it reminds her of the bomb that killed her father.