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Pakistan, or not quite. There are
two countries, real and fictional, occupying the same space, or
almost the same space. My story, my fictional country exist, like
myself, at a slight angle to reality. I have found this ofF-centring to
be necessary; but its value is, of course, open to debate. My view
is that I am not writing only about Pakistan.
    I have not given the country a name. And Q. is not really
Quetta at all. But I don't want to be precious about this: when I
arrive at the big city, I shall call it Karachi. And it will contain a
'Defence'.
    Omar Khayyam's position as a poet is curious. He was never very
popular in his native Persia; and he exists in the West in a transla-
    Escapes from the Mother Country ? 23
    tion that is really a complete reworking of his verses, in many cases
very different from the spirit (to say nothing of the content) of the
original. I, too, am a translated man. I have been borne across. It
is generally believed that something is always lost in translation;
I cling to the notion - and use, in evidence, the success of
Fitzgerald-Khayyam � that something can also be gained.
    'The sight of you through my beloved telescope,' Omar Khayyam
Shakil told Farah Zoroaster the day he declared his love, 'gave me
the strength to break my mothers' power.'
    'Voyeur,' she replied, 'I shit on your words. Your balls dropped
too soon and you got the hots, no more to it than that. Don't load
your family problems on to me.' She was two years his senior, but
Omar Khayyam was nevertheless forced to concede that his dar-
ling had a dirty mouth . . .
    ... As well as the name of a great poet, the child had been
given his mothers' family name. And as if to underline what they
meant by calling him after the immortal Khayyam the three sisters
gave a name, too, to that underlit corridory edifice that was now
all the country they possessed: the house was named 'Nishapur'.
Thus a second Omar grew up in a second place of that name, and
every so often, as he grew, would catch a strange look in his three
mothers' six eyes, a look that seemed to say Hurry up, we are
waiting for your poems. But (I repeat) no rubaiyat ever issued
from his pen.
    His childhood had been exceptional by any standards, because
what applied to mothers and servants wentwithoutsaying for our
peripheral hero as well. Omar Khayyam passed twelve long years,
the most crucial years of his development, trapped inside that
reclusive mansion, that third world that was neither material nor
spiritual, but a sort of concentrated decrepitude made up of the
decomposing remnants of those two more familiar types of
cosmos, a world in which he would constantly run into � as well
as the mothballed, spider-webbed, dust-shrouded profusion of
crumbling objects - the lingering, fading miasmas of discarded
ideas and forgotten dreams. The finely-calculated gesture with
    Shame ? 24
    which his three mothers had sealed themselves off from the world
had created a sweltering, entropical zone in which, despite all the
rotting-down of the past, nothing new seemed capable of growth,
and from which it became Omar Khayyam's most cherished
youthful ambition quickly to escape. Unaware, in that hideously
indeterminate frontier universe, of the curvature of space and
time, thanks to which he who runs longest and hardest inevitably
ends up, gaspingpanting, with wrenched and screaming tendons,
at the starting line, he dreamed of exits, feeling that in the claus-
trophobis of 'Nishapur' his very life was at stake. He was, after
all, something new in that infertile and time-eroded labyrinth.
    Have you heard of those wolf-children, suckled � we must sup-
pose - on the feral multiple breasts of a hairy moon-howling dam?
Rescued from the Pack, they bit their saviours vilely in the arm;
netted and caged, they are brought stinking of raw meat and faecal
matter into the emancipated light of the world, their brains too
imperfectly formed to be