Shame

Although Part 5 of Shame is the shortest section of the novel, it brings much-needed resolution to the various interwoven storylines. The author achieves this resolution by bringing all the disparate threads of the narrative back to the place where everything started: Nishapur. Omar, Raza, and Bilquis flee the capital and arrive at the large house. As they ascend in the dumbwaiter and meet Omar’s three mothers, the air is thick with dramatic irony, for thanks to his lifelong aversion to acknowledging shame, Omar has forgotten that his mothers consider Raza to be responsible for the death of the brother whom he never met. Additionally, in Omar’s long absence, they have come to favor the mere memory of Babar over Omar himself. In this moment, the three sisters also function as judges for the three new arrivals, for they kill Raza, disown Omar, and neglect the sickened Bilquis, who dies from the malaria that affects all three. Confronted by nightmarish fever dreams, the characters must confront contorted aspects of their own tortured psyches. Trapped by their illness within the house, judged by three women who have isolated themselves from the society that men like Raza and Omar have corrupted, the three characters face their ultimate fates. Bilquis dies while Raza is trapped in a fever, an occurrence that emphasizes that even in death, he was not present enough to give her the care and attention she needed. Meanwhile, when Raza wakes up and finds his dead wife, he stands naked, stripped of his power and his rank, and faces down the three women without shame. Despite his defiance, they kill him, forcing him to deal with the consequences of his actions in the most final way possible, and in this moment, the author presents yet another angle of the theme of Shame Versus Shamelessness.

The three sisters allow Omar to live but they vanish from his life. He only wakes up when a mob storms the recently-opened gates. Omar is abandoned by the only family he ever had, just as he abandoned them in earlier life. His abandonment is a mirror of the eagerness he showed to escape from Nishapur at a young age. Just as he abandoned his mothers, they abandon him; They do not care for him, nor do they condemn him. They simply leave him behind, as he once left them. Abandoned by his family, having just lost his final friend and supporter, Omar finds himself alone and vulnerable, and it is appropriate that Sufiya, portrayed as the embodiment of shame itself, chooses this moment to hold him to account and claim his life. As she approaches, Omar cowers “like a bridegroom on his wedding night” (286) in a final ironic confrontation. Omar shamelessly married Sufiya despite her mental age. He never consummated the marriage, but he was always the partner in a position of power, willing to sedate and suppress the shameful aspects of his life rather than dealing with the psychological damage he has done to a young girl. Thus, Sufiya appears as a final reckoning, a way of confronting Omar with the consequences of his actions. She kills him in an act of judgment, the likes of which Omar has spent his whole life avoiding.

The final confrontation between Sufiya and Omar is also a conflagration between the apparent opposites: Shame Versus Shamelessness. Whereas Sufiya has spent her life as a living repository for the shame of others, Omar has been detached from any such concerns. He refuses to feel shame at all, right up until the moment when his wife chases him down in his dead grandfather’s bedchamber. The subsequent explosion that destroys Nishapur and everyone inside it stands as a resolution of the tension between shame and shamelessness. The two may function as opposites, but they cannot coexist. Instead, they meet and destroy one another, unable to find common ground. When the author conveys how Sufiya kills her husband and destroys herself in the process, he wordlessly implies that shame is, by its very nature, all-consuming.