Joseph Anton: A Memoir (14 page)

Anis was weak, and after a few days he wanted to go home. The house in Karachi was the opposite of Windsor Villa in Bombay, a modern split-level building rather than an old villa. There were frogs croaking in the empty swimming pool, sitting in the small puddle of green stagnant water in the deep end and singing through the night. Once when Anis was healthy he had been driven mad by the racket and had run downstairs from his bedroom in the middle of the night and swatted many of the frogs with a rubber swimming flipper. He knocked out several of them but did not kill them. By the morning they had all
regained consciousness and had hopped away, out of sight. Clearly frogs were made of rubber too.

Now Anis could not go upstairs to his bedroom. A bed was made for him in his study on the ground floor and he lay there surrounded by books. It turned out he was flat broke. In the top left-hand desk drawer there were blocks of five-hundred-rupee notes, and that was all the money he had left. His bank accounts were in the red. There were some small debts against the house. He had reached the end of the line.

Over dinner Safwan, Guljum’s husband and a successful electronic engineer, told a strange story. He claimed to have personally smuggled into Pakistan the world’s fastest computer, the so-called FPS or Floating Point System, which boasted something called VAX “accessing equipment.” This computer could make seventy-six million calculations a second. The human brain could make just eighteen. “Even top ordinary computers,” he said, “can only make one million calculations.” Then he explained that the FPS was essential for the building of the Islamic nuclear bomb. Even in the United States there were only about twenty such computers. “If it was known that we have one sitting in our Lahore warehouse,” he said, smiling happily, “all international aid to Pakistan would be canceled.”

This was Pakistan. When he visited Pakistan he lived in the bubble of his family, and a few friends who were really Sameen’s old friends, not his. Outside the bubble was a country from which he had always felt profoundly alien. Every so often news like Safwan’s, from outside the bubble, would make him want to catch the first plane out and never return. Such news was invariably delivered by sweet-natured, smiling people, and in the contradiction between their nature and their deeds lay the schizophrenia that was tearing the country apart.

In the end Safwan and Guljum separated and that beautiful girl began a long slide toward immense, shocking obesity, mental problems, and drug abuse. One day, in her midforties, she would be found dead in her bed, the youngest child of four and the first to depart. Because he was banned from the country he was unable to attend her funeral, just as he had been unable to bury his mother. When Negin Rushdie died a Pakistani newspaper ran an article saying that all those who had been at her funeral should beg forgiveness of God because
she was the mother of the apostate author. These were additional reasons for disliking Pakistan.

Anis’s moment came in the middle of the night on November 11, 1987, less than two days after his return home from hospital. Salman had to take him to the toilet and clean him after the black diarrhea leaked out of him. Then he vomited immensely into a bucket and they put him in the car and Sameen drove like the wind to the Aga Khan hospital. Afterward he thought they should have kept him at home and let him slip quietly away, but at the time they all deluded themselves that the hospital could save his life, so that they could keep him for a while longer. It would have been better to spare him the useless violence of the electricity in his last moments. But he was not spared, and it did not work, and then he was gone, and Negin, in spite of her long difficult marriage, sank to the ground and wailed, “He swore he would never leave me and now he has gone and what will I do?”

He put his arm around his mother. He would look after her now.

The Aga Khan hospital, the best facility in Karachi, was free to all Ismailis but extremely expensive for non-Ismailis, which was fair enough, he thought. They would not release his father’s body until the bill was paid. Fortunately he had an American Express card in his pocket and used it to buy his father back from the hospital where he had died. When they brought him home, the impression of his body was still visible in his bedsheets and his old slippers sat on the floor. The men came, family and friends, because this was a hot country and the burial would take place in a few hours. He should have been the one making the arrangements but he was helpless in this alien land and didn’t know who to call and so Sameen’s friends found the graveyard and arranged for a bier and even—this was compulsory—summoned a mullah from the local mosque, a modern building that looked like a poured-concrete version of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome.

They washed Anis—it was the first time he had ever seen his father’s naked body—and the shroud tailor sewed him into his winding sheet. The cemetery was nearby and when the bier arrived, fragrant with flowers and sandalwood shavings, the grave yawned ready. The grave digger stood at the foot end while he climbed down at the head end and they lowered Anis into the hole. To stand in his father’s grave
and place his hand under the dead man’s shrouded head, to lay that head upon its last resting place, was a thing of immense power. He felt sad that his father, a man of great culture and learning, born in Ghalib’s Old Delhi
muhallah
of Ballimaran and afterward for decades a happy Bombayite, should have come to so poor an end in a place that had not proved to be good for him and had never felt like his. Anis Ahmed Rushdie was a disappointed man but at least he had ended his days knowing that he was loved. As he climbed out of the grave he tore the nail on the big toe of his left foot and had to go to the local Jinnah hospital for a tetanus shot.

In the years that followed Anis visited his son’s dreams perhaps once a month. In those dreams he was invariably affectionate, witty, wise, understanding and supportive: the best of fathers. It struck him that their relationship after Anis’s death was a big improvement on the way things had been when his father was still alive.

Saladin Chamcha in
The Satanic Verses
had a difficult relationship with his father, Changez Chamchawala, as well. In the original plan for the novel Changez died, too, but his son didn’t get back to Bombay in time to see him before the end, and as a result was left carrying the burden of the unresolved conflict between them. But the happiness and deep feeling of those six days with his own father was the most important thing he brought back to London from Karachi. He made a big decision: He would allow Saladin and Changez to have the experience he had had with Anis. His father had only just died but he would write about his death. He was worried about the morality of doing this. Was it wrong, ghoulish, vampiric? He didn’t know the answer. He told himself that if, in the doing of it, he felt that it was a sleazy thing to do, then he would destroy those pages and return to the original plan.

He used much that was true, even the details of the medication he had had to give Anis in those last days. “Apart from the daily Melphalan tablet, [Changez] had been prescribed a whole battery of drugs in
an attempt to combat the cancer’s pernicious side-effects: anaemia, the strain on the heart, and so on. Isosorbide dinitrate, two tablets, four times a day; Furosemide, one tablet, three times; Prednisolone, six tablets, twice daily.” And so on. Agarol, Spironolactone, Allopurinol. An army of wonder drugs marched from reality into fiction.

He wrote about shaving his father’s face—about Saladin shaving Changez’s face—and about the dying man’s uncomplaining courage in the face of death.
“First one falls in love with one’s father all over again, and then one learns to look up to him, too.”
He wrote about the black diarrhea and the vomiting and the voltage and the bedsheets and the slippers and the washing of the body and the burial. And he wrote this: “
He is teaching me how to die
, Salahuddin thought.
He does not avert his eyes, but looks death right in the face
. At no point in his dying did Changez Chamchawala speak the name of God.”

That was how Anis Ahmed Rushdie died as well.

As he wrote this ending, it did not feel exploitative. It felt respectful. When it was complete, he knew it would remain in the book.

The day he left London to be with his father, Marianne found a scrap of paper in one of his trouser pockets. On it, in his handwriting, was Robyn’s name and a line from a Beatles song,
excites me like no other lover
. He didn’t recall writing it, or know how long the paper had been in his pocket—he hadn’t seen Robyn in well over a year, and the note had probably been sitting in the pocket for longer than that—but it made Marianne jealous, and their parting was harsh. They had planned to celebrate her fortieth birthday in Paris. That would not happen now, because of Anis’s illness.

He was still full of the emotion engendered by Anis’s death when—in a long-distance telephone call—he asked Marianne to marry him. She accepted his proposal. On January 23, 1988, they were married at Finsbury Town Hall, had a wedding lunch with friends at Frederick’s restaurant in Islington, and then spent the night at the Ritz. He only learned years afterward that his sister Sameen and his closest friends had been full of foreboding about the match but had not known how to tell him not to do it.

Four days later he wrote in his diary: “How easy it is to destroy a man! Your invented foe: how easily you can crush him; how fast he crumbles! Evil: ease is its seduction.” Afterward he could not remember why he had written this. No doubt it was a thought for some aspect of his work in progress, though it did not make it into the finished book. But a year later it felt like—well, like a prophecy.

He also wrote this: “If I ever finish
The Satanic Verses
, in spite of emotional upheavals, divorce, house move, Nicaragua book, India film, et al., I will, I feel, have completed my ‘first business,’ that of naming the parts of myself. Then there will be nothing left to write about; except, of course, the whole of human life.”

At 4:10
P.M.
on Tuesday, February 16, 1988, he wrote in his diary in capital letters, “I REACHED THE END.” On Wednesday, February 17, he made minor revisions and “declared the book finished.” On Thursday he made photocopies and delivered the book to his agents. That weekend Sameen and Pauline began to read
The Satanic Verses
. Sameen finished reading it by Monday and was for the most part delighted by it. But the description of Changez’s death left her feeling very disturbed. “I kept wanting to say, ‘I was there, too. He didn’t say that to you, he said it to me. You didn’t do that for him, I did it.’ But you have left me out of the story, and now everyone will always think that this is the way it was.” He had no defenses against her accusations. “It’s okay,” she told him. “I’ve said my piece now. I’ll get over it.”

When a book leaves its author’s desk it changes. Even before anyone has read it, before eyes other than its creator’s have looked upon a single phrase, it is irretrievably altered. It has become
a book that can be read
, that no longer belongs to its maker. It has acquired, in a sense, free will. It will make its journey through the world and there is no longer anything the author can do about it. Even he, as he looks at its sentences, reads them differently now that they can be read by others. They look like different sentences. The book has gone out into the world and the world has remade it.

The Satanic Verses
had left home. Its metamorphosis, its transformation
by its engagement with the world beyond the author’s desk, would be unusually extreme.

Throughout the writing of the book he had kept a note to himself pinned to the wall above his desk. “To write a book is to make a Faustian contract in reverse,” it said. “To gain immortality, or at least posterity, you lose, or at least ruin, your actual daily life.”

“Tell me, why does Margarita call you the master?” enquired Woland
.

The man laughed and said:

“An understandable weakness of hers. She has too high an opinion of a novel that I’ve written.”

“Which novel?”

“A novel about Pontius Pilate.” …

“About what? About whom?” said Woland, ceasing to laugh
.

“But that’s extraordinary! In this day and age? Couldn’t you have chosen another subject? Let me have a look.” Woland stretched out his hand palm uppermost
.

“Unfortunately I cannot show it to you,” replied the master, “because I burned it in my stove.”

“I’m sorry but I don’t believe you,” said Woland. “You can’t have done. Manuscripts don’t burn.” He turned to Behemoth and said: “Come on, Behemoth, give me the novel.”

The cat jumped down from its chair and where he had been sitting was a pile of manuscripts. With a bow the cat handed the top copy to Woland. Margarita shuddered and cried out, moved to tears: “There’s the manuscript! There it is!”