Books: A Passage to Pakistan

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.