Joseph Anton: A Memoir (3 page)

W
HEN HE WAS A SMALL BOY HIS FATHER AT BEDTIME TOLD HIM THE GREAT
wonder tales of the East, told them and re-told them and re-made them and re-invented them in his own way—the stories of Scheherazade from the
Thousand and One Nights
, stories told against death to prove the ability of stories to civilize and overcome even the most murderous of tyrants; and the animal fables of the
Panchatantra;
and the marvels that poured like a waterfall from the
Kathasaritsagara
, the “Ocean of the Streams of Story,” the immense story-lake created in Kashmir where his ancestors had been born; and the tales of mighty heroes collected in the
Hamzanama
and the
Adventures of Hatim Tai
(this was also a movie, whose many embellishments of the original tales were added to and augmented in the bedtime re-tellings). To grow up steeped in these tellings was to learn two unforgettable lessons: first, that stories were not true (there were no “real” genies in bottles or flying carpets or wonderful lamps), but by being untrue they could make him feel and know truths that the truth could not tell him, and second, that they all belonged to him, just as they belonged to his father, Anis, and to everyone else, they were all his, as they were his father’s, bright stories and dark stories, sacred stories and profane, his to alter and renew and discard and pick up again as and when he pleased, his to laugh at and rejoice in and live in and with and by, to give the stories life by loving them and to be given life by them in return. Man was the storytelling animal, the only creature on earth that told itself stories to understand what kind of creature it was. The story was his birthright, and nobody could take it away.

His mother, Negin, had stories for him too. Negin Rushdie had been born Zohra Butt. When she married Anis she changed not just her surname but her given name as well, reinventing herself for him, leaving behind the Zohra he didn’t want to think about, who had once been deeply in love with another man. Whether she was Zohra
or Negin in her heart of hearts her son never knew, for she never spoke to him about the man she left behind, choosing, instead, to spill everyone’s secrets except her own. She was a gossip of world class, and sitting on her bed pressing her feet the way she liked him to, he, her eldest child and only son, drank in the delicious and sometimes salacious local news she carried in her head, the gigantic branching interwoven forests of whispering family trees she bore within her, hung with the juicy forbidden fruit of scandal. And these secrets too, he came to feel, belonged to him, for once a secret had been told it no longer belonged to her who told it but to him who received it. If you did not want a secret to get out there was only one rule:
Tell it to nobody
. This rule, too, would be useful to him in later life. In that later life, when he had become a writer, his mother said to him, “I’m going to stop telling you these things, because you put them in your books and then I get into trouble.” Which was true, and perhaps she would have been well advised to stop, but gossip was her addiction, and she could not, any more than her husband, his father, could give up drink.

Windsor Villa, Warden Road, Bombay-26. It was a house on a hill and it overlooked the sea and the city flowing between the hill and the sea; and yes, his father was rich, though he spent his life losing all that money and died broke, unable to pay off his debts, with a stash of rupee notes in the top left drawer of his desk that was all the cash he had left in the world. Anis Ahmed Rushdie (“B.A. Cantab., Bar-at-Law” it proudly said on the brass nameplate screwed into the wall by the front door of Windsor Villa) inherited a fortune from the textile magnate father whose only son he was, spent it, lost it, and then died, which could be the story of a happy life, but was not. His children knew certain things about him: that in the mornings he was cheerful until he shaved, and then, after the Philishave had done its work, he grew irritable and they were careful to keep out of his way; that when he took them to the beach on the weekend he would be lively and funny on the way there but angry on the way home; that when he played golf with their mother at the Willingdon Club she had to be careful to lose, though she was a stronger player than he, because it was not worth her while to win; and that when he was drunk he grimaced hideously at them, pulling his features into bizarre and terrifying positions,
which frightened them horribly, and which no outsider ever saw, so that nobody understood what they meant when they said that their father “made faces.” But when they were little there were the stories and then sleep, and if they heard raised voices in another room, if they heard their mother crying, there was nothing they could do about it. They pulled their sheets over their heads and dreamed.

Anis took his thirteen-year-old son to England in January 1961 and for a week or so, before he began his education at Rugby School, they shared a room in the Cumberland Hotel near the Marble Arch in London. By day they went shopping for the school’s prescribed items, tweed jackets, gray flannel trousers, Van Heusen shirts with detached semistiff collars that necessitated the use of collar studs that pressed into the boy’s neck and made it hard to breathe. They drank chocolate milk shakes at the Lyons Corner House on Coventry Street and they went to the Odeon Marble Arch to watch
The Pure Hell of St. Trinian’s
and he wished there were going to be girls at his boarding school. In the evening his father bought grilled chicken from the Kardomah takeout on Edgware Road and made him smuggle it into the hotel room inside his new double-breasted blue serge mackintosh. At night Anis got drunk and in the small hours would shake his horrified son awake to shout at him in language so filthy that it didn’t seem possible to the boy that his father could even know such words. Then they went to Rugby and bought a red armchair and said their goodbyes. Anis took a photograph of his son outside his boarding house in his blue-and-white-striped house cap and his chicken-scented mackintosh, and if you looked at the sadness in the boy’s eyes you would think he was sad to be going to school so far from home. But in fact the son couldn’t wait for the father to leave so that he could start trying to forget the nights of foul language and unprovoked, red-eyed rage. He wanted to put the sadness in the past and begin his future, and after that it was perhaps inevitable that he would make his life as far away from his father as he could, that he would put oceans between them and keep them there. When he graduated from Cambridge University and told his father he wanted to be a writer a pained yelp burst uncontrollably out of Anis’s mouth. “What,” he cried, “am I going to tell my friends?”

But nineteen years later, on his son’s fortieth birthday, Anis Rushdie
sent him a letter written in his own hand that became the most precious communication that writer had ever received or would receive. This was just five months before Anis’s death at seventy-seven of rapidly advancing multiple myeloma—cancer of the bone marrow. In that letter Anis showed how carefully and deeply he had read and understood his son’s books, how eagerly he looked forward to reading more of them, and how profoundly he felt the fatherly love he had spent half a lifetime failing to express. He lived long enough to be happy at the success of
Midnight’s Children
and
Shame
, but by the time the book that owed the greatest debt to him was published he was no longer there to read it. Perhaps that was a good thing, because he also missed the furor that followed; although one of the few things of which his son was utterly certain was that in the battle over
The Satanic Verses
he would have had his father’s unqualified, unyielding support. Without his father’s ideas and example to inspire him, in fact, that novel would never have been written.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad?
No, that wasn’t it at all. Well, they did do that, perhaps, but they also allowed you to become the person, and the writer, that you had it in you to be.

The first gift he received from his father, a gift like a message in a time capsule, which he didn’t understand until he was an adult, was the family name. “Rushdie” was Anis’s invention;
his
father’s name had been quite a mouthful, Khwaja Muhammad Din Khaliqi Dehlavi, a fine Old Delhi name that sat well on that old-school gentleman glaring fiercely out of his only surviving photograph, that successful industrialist and part-time essayist who lived in a crumbling
haveli
in the famous old
muhallah
or neighborhood of Ballimaran, a warren of small winding lanes off Chandni Chowk that had been the home of the great Farsi and Urdu poet Ghalib. Muhammad Din Khaliqi died young, leaving his son a fortune (which he would squander) and a name that was too heavy to carry around in the modern world. Anis renamed himself “Rushdie” because of his admiration for Ibn Rushd, “Averroës” to the West, the twelfth-century Spanish-Arab philosopher of Córdoba who rose to become the
qadi
or judge of Seville, the translator of and acclaimed commentator upon the works of Aristotle. His son bore the name for two decades before he understood that his father,
a true scholar of Islam who was also entirely lacking in religious belief, had chosen it because he respected Ibn Rushd for being at the forefront of the rationalist argument against Islamic literalism in his time; and twenty more years elapsed before the battle over
The Satanic Verses
provided a twentieth-century echo of that eight-hundred-year-old argument.

“At least,” he told himself when the storm broke over his head, “I’m going into this battle bearing the right name.” From beyond the grave his father had given him the flag under which he was ready to fight, the flag of Ibn Rushd, which stood for intellect, argument, analysis and progress, for the freedom of philosophy and learning from the shackles of theology, for human reason and against blind faith, submission, acceptance and stagnation. Nobody ever wanted to go to war, but if a war came your way, it might as well be the right war, about the most important things in the world, and you might as well, if you were going to fight it, be called “Rushdie,” and stand where your father had placed you, in the tradition of the grand Aristotelian, Averroës, Abul Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd.

They had the same voice, his father and he. When he answered the telephone at home Anis’s friends would begin to talk to him as if he were his father and he would have to stop them before they said anything embarrassing. They looked like each other, and when, during the smoother passages of their bumpy journey as father and son, they sat on a veranda in a warm evening with the scent of bougainvillea in their nostrils and argued passionately about the world, they both knew that although they disagreed on many topics they had the same cast of mind. And what they shared above all else was unbelief.