Joseph Anton: A Memoir (4 page)

Anis was a godless man—still a shocking statement to make in the United States, though an unexceptional one in Europe, and an incomprehensible idea in much of the rest of the world, where the thought of
not believing
is hard even to formulate. But that was what he was, a godless man who knew and thought a great deal about God. The birth of Islam fascinated him because it was the only one of the great world religions to be born within recorded history, whose prophet was not a legend described and glorified by “evangelists” writing a hundred years or more after the real man lived and died, or a dish recooked for
easy global consumption by the brilliant proselytizer Saint Paul, but rather a man whose life was largely on the record, whose social and economic circumstances were well known, a man living in a time of profound social change, an orphan who grew up to become a successful merchant with mystical tendencies, and who saw, one day on Mount Hira near Mecca, the Archangel Gabriel standing upon the horizon and filling the sky and instructing him to “recite” and thus, slowly, to create the book known as the Recitation:
al-Qur’an
.

This passed from the father to the son: the belief that the story of the birth of Islam was fascinating because it was an event
inside history
, and that, as such, it was obviously influenced by the events and pressures and ideas of the time of its creation; that to historicize the story, to try to understand how a great idea was shaped by those forces, was the only possible approach to the subject; and that one could accept Muhammad as a genuine mystic—just as one could accept Joan of Arc’s voices as having genuinely been heard by her, or the revelations of Saint John the Divine as being that troubled soul’s “real” experiences—without needing also to accept that, had one been standing next to the Prophet of Islam on Mount Hira that day, one would also have seen the Archangel. Revelation was to be understood as an interior, subjective event, not an objective reality, and a revealed text was to be scrutinized like any other text, using all the tools of the critic, literary, historical, psychological, linguistic, and sociological. In short, the text was to be regarded as a human artifact and thus, like all such artifacts, prey to human fallibility and imperfection. The American critic Randall Jarrell famously defined the novel as “a long piece of writing that has something wrong with it.” Anis Rushdie thought he knew what was wrong with the Qur’an; it had become, in places, jumbled up.

According to tradition, when Muhammad came down from the mountain he began to recite—he himself was perhaps illiterate—and whichever of his close companions was nearest would write down what he said on whatever came to hand (parchment, stone, leather, leaves, and sometimes, it’s said, even bones). These passages were stored in a chest in his home until after his death, when the Companions gathered to determine the correct sequence of the revelation; and
that determination had given us the now canonical text of the Qur’an. For that text to be “perfect” required the reader to believe (a) that the Archangel, in conveying the Word of God, did so without slipups—which may be an acceptable proposition, since Archangels are presumed to be immune from errata; (b) that the Prophet, or, as he called himself, the Messenger, remembered the Archangel’s words with perfect accuracy; (c) that the Companions’ hasty transcriptions, written down over the course of the twenty-three-year-long revelation, were likewise error-free; and finally (d) that when they got together to arrange the text into its final form, their collective memory of the correct sequence was also perfect.

Anis Rushdie was disinclined to contest propositions (a), (b) and (c). Proposition (d), however, was harder for him to swallow, because as anyone who read the Qur’an could easily see, several
suras
, or chapters, contained radical discontinuities, changing subject without warning, and the abandoned subject sometimes cropped up unannounced in a later
sura
that had been, up to that point, about something else entirely. It was Anis’s long-nurtured desire to unscramble these discontinuities and so arrive at a text that was clearer and easier to read. It should be said that this was not a secret or furtive plan; he would discuss it openly with friends over dinner. There was no sense that the undertaking might create risks for the revisionist scholar, no
frisson
of danger. Perhaps the times were different, and such ideas could be entertained without fear of reprisals; or else the company was trustworthy; or maybe Anis was an innocent fool. But this was the atmosphere of open inquiry in which he raised his children. Nothing was off-limits. There were no taboos. Everything, even holy writ, could be investigated and, just possibly, improved.

He never did it. When he died no text was found among his papers. His last years were dominated by alcohol and business failures and he had little time or inclination for the hard grind of deep Qur’anic scholarship. Maybe it had always been a pipe dream, or empty, whiskey-fueled big talk. But it left its mark on his son. This was Anis’s second great gift to his children: that of an apparently fearless skepticism, accompanied by an almost total freedom from religion. There was a certain amount of tokenism, however. The “flesh of the swine”
was not eaten in the Rushdie household, nor would you find on their dinner table the similarly proscribed “scavengers of the earth and the sea”; no Goan prawn curry on this dining table. There were those very occasional visits to the Idgah for the ritual up-and-down of the prayers. There was, once or twice a year, fasting during what Indian Muslims, Urdu—rather than Arabic—speaking, called Ramzán rather than Ramadan. And once, briefly, there was a
maulvi
, a religious scholar, hired by Negin to teach her heathen son and daughters the rudiments of faith. But when the heathen children revolted against the
maulvi
, a pint-sized Ho Chi Minh look-alike, teasing him so mercilessly that he complained bitterly to their parents about their disrespect for the great sanctities, Anis and Negin just laughed and took their children’s side. The
maulvi
flounced off, never to return, muttering imprecations against the unbelievers as he went, and after that there were no further attempts at religious instruction. The heathen grew up heathenish and, in Windsor Villa at least, that was just fine.

When he turned away from his father, wearing the blue-and-white-striped cap of Bradley House and the serge mackintosh, and plunged into his English life, the sin of
foreignness
was the first thing that was made plain to him. Until that point he had not thought of himself as anyone’s Other. After Rugby School he never forgot the lesson he learned there: that there would always be people who just didn’t like you, to whom you seemed as alien as little green men or the Slime from Outer Space, and there was no point trying to change their minds. Alienation: It was a lesson he relearned in more dramatic circumstances later on.

At an English boarding school in the early 1960s, he quickly discovered, there were three bad mistakes you could make, but if you made only two of the three you could be forgiven. The mistakes were: to be foreign; to be clever; and to be bad at games. At Rugby the foreign, clever boys who had a good time were also elegant cricketers or, in the case of one of his contemporaries, the Pakistani Zia Mahmood, so good at cards that he grew up to become one of the world’s finest bridge players. The boys who had no sporting ability had to be careful
not to be too clever and, if possible, not too foreign, which was the worst of the three mistakes.

He made all three mistakes. He was foreign, clever, non
-sportif
. And as a result his years were, for the most part, unhappy, though he did well academically and left Rugby with the abiding feeling of having been wonderfully well taught—with that nourishing memory of great teachers that, if we are lucky, we can carry with us for the rest of our lives. There was P. G. Lewis, known, inevitably, as “Pig,” who so inspired him with the love of French that he rose in the course of one term from the bottom to the top of the class, and there were his history teachers J. B. Hope-Simpson, a.k.a. “Hope Stimulus,” and J. W. “Gut” Hele, thanks to whose skilled tutelage he was able to go on to win an exhibition, a minor scholarship, to read history at his father’s old alma mater of King’s College, Cambridge, where he would meet E. M. Forster and discover sex, though not at the same time. (Less valuably, perhaps, “Hope Stimulus” was also the person who introduced him to Tolkien’s
The Lord of the Rings
, which entered his consciousness like a disease, an infection he never managed to shake off.) His old English teacher Geoffrey Helliwell would be seen on British television on the day after the
fatwa
, ruefully shaking his head and asking, in sweet, vague, daffy tones, “Who’d have thought such a nice, quiet boy could get into so much trouble?”

Nobody had forced him to go to boarding school in England. Negin had been against the idea of sending her only son away across oceans and continents. Anis had offered him the opportunity and encouraged him to take the Common Entrance exam, but, even after he came through that with some distinction and the place at Rugby was his, the final decision to go or stay was left entirely to him. In later life he would wonder at the choice made by this thirteen-year-old self, a boy rooted in his city, happy in his friends, having a good time at school (apart from a little local difficulty with the Marathi language), the apple of his parents’ eye. Why did that boy decide to leave it all behind and travel halfway across the world into the unknown, far from everyone who loved him and everything he knew? Was it the fault, perhaps, of literature (for he was certainly a bookworm)? In which case the guilty parties might have been his beloved Jeeves and Bertie,
or possibly the Earl of Emsworth and his mighty sow, the Empress of Blandings. Or might it have been the dubious attractions of the world of Agatha Christie that persuaded him, even if Christie’s Miss Marple made her home in the most murderous village in England, the lethal St. Mary Mead? Then there was Arthur Ransome’s
Swallows and Amazons
series telling of children messing about in boats in the Lake District, and, much, much worse, the terrible literary escapades of Billy Bunter, the “Owl of the Remove,” the fat boy at Frank Richards’s ridiculous Grayfriars School, where, among Bunter’s classmates, there was at least one Indian, Hurree Jamset Ram Singh, the “dusky nabob of Bhanipur,” who spoke a bizarre, grand, syntactically contorted English (“the contortfulness,” as the dusky nabob might well have put it, “was terrific”). Was it, in other words, a
childish
decision, to venture forth into an imaginary England that only existed in books? Or was it, alternatively, an indication that beneath the surface of the “nice, quiet boy” there lurked a stranger being, a fellow with an unusually adventurous heart, possessed of enough gumption to take a leap in the dark exactly
because
it was a step into the unknown—a youth who intuited his future adult self’s ability to survive, even to thrive, wherever in the world his wanderings might take him, and who was able, too easily, even a little ruthlessly, to follow the dream of “away,” breaking away from the lure, which was also, of course, the tedium, of “home,” leaving his sorrowing mother and sisters behind without too much regret? Perhaps a little of each. At any rate, he took the leap, and the forking paths of time bifurcated at his feet. He took the westward road and ceased to be who he might have been if he had stayed at home.

A pink stone set into the Doctor’s Wall, named for the legendary headmaster Dr. Arnold and overlooking the storied playing fields of the Close, bore an inscription that purported to celebrate an act of revolutionary iconoclasm. “This is to commemorate the exploit of William Webb Ellis,” it read, “who, with a fine disregard for the rules of football as played in his time, first picked up the ball and ran with it, thus originating the distinctive feature of the rugby game.” But the Webb Ellis story was apocryphal, and the school was anything but iconoclastic. The sons of stockbrokers and solicitors were being educated here and “a fine disregard for the rules” was not on the curriculum.
Putting both your hands in your pockets was against the rules. So was “running in the corridors.” However, fagging—acting as an older boy’s unpaid servant—and beating were still permitted. Corporal punishment could be administered by the housemaster or even by the boy named as Head of House. In his first term the Head of House was a certain R.A.C. Williamson who kept his cane hanging in full view over the door of his study. There were notches in it, one for each thrashing Williamson had handed out.

He was never beaten. He was a “nice, quiet boy.” He learned the rules and observed them scrupulously. He learned the school slang,
dics
for bedtime prayers in the dormitories (from the Latin
dicere
, to speak),
topos
for the toilets (from the Greek word for “place”), and, rudely,
oiks
for non–Rugby School inhabitants of the town, a place best known for the manufacture of cement. Though the Three Mistakes were never forgiven, he did his best to fit in. In the sixth form he won the Queen’s Medal for a history essay about Napoléon’s foreign minister, the clubfooted, cynical, amoral libertine Talleyrand, whom he vigorously defended. He became secretary of the school’s debating society and spoke eloquently in favor of fagging, which was abolished not long after his school days ended. He came from a conservative Indian family and was in no sense a radical. But racism was something he quickly understood. When he returned to his little study, he more than once found an essay he had written torn to pieces, which were scattered on the seat of his red armchair. Once somebody wrote the words
WOGS GO HOME
on his wall. He gritted his teeth, swallowed the insults, and did his work. He did not tell his parents what school had been like until after he left it (and when he did tell them they were horrified that he had kept so much pain to himself). His mother was suffering because of his absence, his father was paying a fortune for him to be there, and it would not be right, he told himself, to complain. So in his letters home he created his first fictions, about idyllic school days of sunshine and cricket. In fact he was no good at cricket and Rugby in winter was bitterly cold, doubly so for a boy from the tropics who had never slept under heavy blankets and found it hard to go to sleep when so weighed down. But if he cast them off, then he shivered. He had to get used to this weight also, and he did. At night in the dormitories,
after lights-out, the metal-frame beds began to shake as the boys relieved their adolescent urges, and the banging of the beds against the heating pipes running around the walls filled the large dark rooms with the night music of inexpressible desire. In this matter, as in all else, he strove to be like the others, and join in. Again: He was not, by nature, rebellious. In those early days, he preferred the Rolling Stones to the Beatles, and, after one of his friendlier housemates, a serious, cherubic boy named Richard Shearer, made him sit down and listen to
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
, he became an enthusiastic Dylan worshipper; but he was, at heart, a conformist.