A Passage to Pakistan

By Paul Gray

SHAME by Salman Rushdie; Knopf; 319 pages; $13.95 "After Sufiya Zinobia recovered from the immunological catastrophe that followed the turkey massacre ..." Coming upon a sentence that opens like this can make readers of the novel in which it appears begin to wonder what is on the tube tonight. They might also find themselves talking back to the novelist.

Turkey massacre? Literary zaniness is line as far as it goes (which should not be in excess of 20 pages), but it had better serve some purpose more substantial than showing off or goofing around. In short, put up or be shut.

Indian-born Author Salman Rushdie, 36, puts up. Those unfortunate gobblers are not the only fanciful creatures in Shame, his third novel. The book is crammed with the grotesque and improbable. Many pages are devoted to introducing the hero, Omar Khayyam Shakil, and the three sisters who all claim to be his mother. Then he grows fat and disappears from the scene for long stretches. "I am a peripheral man," he announces near the end. "Other persons have been the principal actors in my life story."

Yet method runs through all the novel's madness. The author talks openly of his design: "The country in this story is not 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." The personal reference needs an explanation, and Rushdie later offers one: "I am an emigrant from one country (India) and a newcomer in two (England, where I live, and Pakistan, to which my family moved against my will)." Shame is a looking-glass fable about a country that was actually made up, arbitrarily sundered from India in 1947, written by a native son who has never called the place his home.

Small wonder, then, that the viewpoint presented in the novel is phantasmagoric.

Much more notable is Rushdie's skill at making historical facts and sheer inventiveness seem equally true and equally preposterous. On the eve of India's independence, the owner of a moviehouse in Delhi tries to appease both Hindus and Muslims by showing a double feature. One is a vegetarian epic "about a lone, masked hero who roamed the Indo-Gangetic plain liberating herds of beef cattle from their keepers," the other a Randolph Scott western of the genre "in which cows got massacred and the good guys feasted on steaks." Nobody comes, and then the theater is bombed; the blast kills the owner and blows all the clothes off his daughter. Her rescuer appears in the person of Raza Hyder, a Muslim captain in the Indian army. After the partition of the subcontinent, Hyder marries the young woman and takes her "west to the new, moth-nibbled land of God," to Pakistan.

As the nation struggles through its infancy, Hyder meets Iskander Harappa, a millionaire playboy. The death struggle that ensues between these two characters is shimmeringly based on recent Pakistani history. Iskander resembles Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the charismatic civilian leader who was deposed in 1977 and later executed by General Ziaul-Haq, Pakistan's current President and a fraternal twin of the fictional Raza Hyder. Similarly, the bloody civil war that led to the transformation of East Pakistan into independent Bangladesh in 1971 is mirrored here: "The final defeat of the western forces, which led to the reconstitution of the East Wing nation as and an international autonomous basket (that's a case ..." laugh) But Shame is not a point-for-point alle gory of reasonably recent events.

Rushdie introduces true occurrences with the bemused air of someone who finds them much stranger than fiction. Perhaps the only way to understand bizarre reali ties is to make up stories about them. The fact of brutal crackdowns on dissent in Pakistan gives rise to a tale. During his years in power, Iskander creates a Federal Security Force and appoints as its head a man with appropriate powers: "The clairvoyancy of Talvar Ulhaq enabled him to compile exhaustive dossiers on who-was-bribing-whom, on conspiracies, tax evasion, dangerous talk at dinner par ties, student sects, homosexuality, the roots of treason. Clairvoyancy made it possible for him to arrest a future traitor before he committed his act of treason, and thus save the fellow's life."

Other characters display unusual gifts. One woman bears a mathematical progression of children on the same date of each succeeding year (first twins, then triplets, etc.). There is a brain-damaged girl who psychically absorbs the shame that others should but do not feel until she becomes a ravening albino panther, be heading animals and humans alike. These surreal people do not simply stand for such concepts as overpopulation or guilt; they also take their places in what the au thor calls "the infinitely rich and cryptic texture of human life."

Rushdie has clearly read Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Milan Kundera. Extravagant mythmaking alternates with passages of first-person political candor ("May I interpose a few words here on the subject of the Islamic revival?"). But his literary accomplishments are uniquely his own. A Westerner by adoption and choice, looking back on a country where he would assuredly be silenced if he tried to write a book like Shame, Rushdie has produced an imaginative tour of obliquities and iniquities. -- By Paul Gray

Excerpt

"Ambassadors: he got through nine of them in his six years. Also five English and three Russian heads of mission. Arjumand and Iskander would place bets on how long each new arrival would survive; then, happy as a boy with a new stick and hoop, he would set about giving them hell. He made them wait weeks for audiences ... He invited them to banquets at which the Russian Ambassador was served bird's-nest soup and Peking duck, while the Americans got borsch and blinis. He refused to flirt with their wives. With the British Ambassador he would pretend to be a hick just down from the villages, and speak only in an obscure regional dialect; in the case of the United States, however, he took the opposite tack and addressed their legate in incomprehensibly florid French. Embassies would constantly be subjected to power cuts. Isky would open their diplomatic bags and personally add outrageous remarks to the Ambassadors' reports ..." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.