Joseph Anton: A Memoir (92 page)

Rumors of his presence in India were rife. A couple of Islamic organizations had vowed to make trouble. At dinner in Solan’s Himani restaurant, he was tucking into the spicy Indian version of Chinese food when he was spotted by a Doordarshan reporter called Agnihotri who was on vacation with his family. Within moments a local press reporter arrived and asked a few friendly questions. None of this was very unexpected, but as a result of these chance encounters the jitteriness of the police reached new heights, and boiled over into a full-scale row. Back at Anis Villa, Vijay received a call on his cellphone from a police officer named Kulbir Krishan in Delhi. This call made Vijay lose his composure for the first time in all the years of their friendship. He was almost trembling as he said, “We are accused of having called those journalists to the restaurant. This man says we have not been gentlemen, we have not kept our word, and we have, if you can believe the phrase, ‘talked out of turn.’ Finally the fellow says, ‘There will be riots in Delhi tomorrow, and if we fire on the crowds and there are deaths, the blood will be on your heads.’ ”

He was horrified. This was becoming a matter of life and death. If the Delhi police had become so trigger-happy that they were preparing to kill people, they had to be stopped before it was too late. No time now for niceties. Zafar looked on, dazed, while he deliberately blew his stack at poor, decent Akshey Kumar (who was not at all to blame) and told him that unless Kulbir Krishan got back on the phone at once, apologized to Vijay personally, and gave an assurance that there were no plans to murder anybody tomorrow, he would insist on driving through the night back to New Delhi so that he could be waiting at Prime Minister Vajpayee’s office door at dawn to ask him to deal with the problem personally. After a certain amount of this kind of raging Kulbir did call back to speak of “misunderstandings” and promised that there would be no shootings or deaths. “If I spoke out of context,” he memorably concluded, “then I am very sorry indeed.”

He burst out laughing at the sheer absurdity of this formulation and put down the phone. But he did not sleep well. The meaning of his Indian journey would be defined by what happened in the next two days, and even though he hoped and believed that the police were
being unnecessarily nervous, he couldn’t be sure. Delhi was their town, and he was Rip van Winkle.

At half past twelve the next day they were back in Delhi and he was closeted in a meeting with R. S. Gupta, the special assistant commissioner in charge of security for the whole city, a calm, forceful man. He painted a dark picture. A Muslim politician, Shoaib Iqbal, planned to go to Friday midday prayers at Juma Masjid and seek Imam Bukhari’s help to start a demonstration against him, and against the Indian government for allowing him to enter the country. The numbers could be huge and bring the city to a standstill. “We are negotiating with them,” Gupta said, “to keep the numbers small, and the event peaceful. Maybe we will succeed.” After a couple of hours of high-tension waiting, during which he was effectively confined to quarters—“Sir, no movements, please”—the news was good. Less than two hundred people marched—and two hundred marchers, in India, was a number smaller than zero—and it had all gone off without a hitch. The nightmare scenario had not come to pass. “Fortunately,” Mr. Gupta said, “we have been able to manage it.”

What really happened? The security worldview was always impressive and often persuasive, but it was just one version of the truth. It was one of the characteristics of security forces everywhere in the world to try and have it both ways. Had there been mass demonstrations, they would have said, “You see, all our nervousness has been amply justified.” But there were no such marches; and so, “We were able to prevent the trouble because of our foresight and skill.” Maybe so, he thought. But it might also be the case that for the vast majority of Indian Muslims, the controversy over
The Satanic Verses
was old hat, and in spite of the efforts of the politician and the imam (both of whom made blood-and-thunder speeches) nobody could really be bothered to march.
Oh, there’s a novelist in town to go to a dinner? What’s his name? Rushdie? So what?
This was the view taken, almost without exception, by the Indian press in its analysis of the day’s events. The small demonstration was noted, but the private political agendas of its organizers were also pointed out. The script in people’s heads was being rewritten. The foretold catastrophe—riots, killings—had not come to pass. What happened instead was extraordinary, and, for Zafar and himself,
an event of immense emotional impact. What burst out in the city was not violence, but joy.

At a quarter to eight in the evening, he and Zafar walked into the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize reception at the Oberoi Hotel and from that moment until they left India the celebrations never stopped. Journalists and photographers surrounded them, their faces wreathed in most unjournalistic smiles. Friends burst through the media wall to embrace them. The actor Roshan Seth, recently recovered from serious heart problems, hugged him and said, “Look at us,
yaar
, we’re both supposed to be dead but still going strong.” The eminent columnist Amita Malik, a friend of his family’s from the old days in Bombay, at first mistook Zafar for his father’s bodyguard (to Zafar’s great delight) but then reminisced wonderfully about the past, praising Anis Rushdie’s wit, his quick gift for repartee, and telling tales of Negin’s beloved brother Hameed, who died too young, too long ago. Gifted young writers—Raj Kamal Jha, Namita Gokhale, Shauna Singh Baldwin—came up to say generous things about the significance of his writing for their own work. One of the great ladies of English-language Indian literature, the novelist Nayantara Sahgal, clasped his hands and whispered, “Welcome home.” And there was Zafar being interviewed for television and speaking touchingly about his own happiness at being there. His heart overflowed. He had not really dared to expect this, had been infected by the fears of the police, and had defended himself against many kinds of disappointment. Now the defenses fell away and happiness rose like a tropical dawn, fast and brilliant and hot. India was his again. It was a rare thing to be granted one’s heart’s desire.

He did not win the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, which went to J. M. Coetzee. But this was a homecoming party more than an awards ceremony.
RUSHDIE IN INDIA: THERE IS ONLY JOY, LOTS OF JOY
. As
The Indian Express
’s hyperbolically affectionate front-page headline demonstrated, the party spirit was spilling into the media, drowning the few, muted negative voices. In all his conversations with the press he tried to avoid reopening old wounds, to tell Indian Muslims that he was not and had never been their enemy, and to stress that he was in India to mend broken links and to begin, so to speak, a new chapter.
The Asian Age
concurred: “Let’s turn a page.”
Elsewhere, in
Outlook
, there was pleasure that India had “made some amends for being the first to ban
The Satanic Verses
and subjecting him to the persecution and agony that followed.”
The Pioneer
expressed its satisfaction that India was, once again, standing up for “democratic values and the individual’s right to express himself.” It also, in a less elevated mood, improbably but delightfully accused him of “turning the city’s sophisticated party women into a bunch of giggling schoolgirls” who told their men, “Dahling, [he] could send Bollywood hunks back to school.” Dilip Padgaonkar of
The Times of India
put it most movingly. “He is reconciled with India and India with him.… Something sublime has happened to him which should enable him to continue to mesmerize us with his yarns. He has returned to where his heart has always been. He has returned home.” In the
Hindustan Times
, there was an editorial headed
RECONSIDER THE BAN
. This sentiment was echoed right across the media. In
The Times of India
an Islamic scholar, among other intellectuals, backed an end to the ban. On the electronic media, opinion polls ran 75 percent to 25 percent in favor of allowing
The Satanic Verses
to be freely published in India at long last.

Vijay threw a farewell party for him. His two actress aunts, Uzra Butt and her sister Zohra Segal, were there, with his cousin Kiran Segal, Zohra’s daughter and one of the country’s foremost exponents and teachers of the Odissi school of Indian classical dancing. This was the zany wing of the family, sharp of tongue and mischievous of eye. Uzra and Zohra were the grand dames of the Indian theater, and everyone had been a little in love with Kiran at one time or another. Zohra and Kiran lived in an apartment in Hampstead in the 1960s, and during his Rugby days he had sometimes spent vacations in their spare bedroom, next to Kiran’s bedroom door, on which there was a large, admonitory skull and crossbones sign. Vijay Shankardass and Roshan Seth both stayed in the same spare room in the same period. All three of them had looked wistfully at the skull and crossbones and none of them ever got past it.

“I haven’t seen you dance for years,” he said to Kiran.

“Come back soon,” she said. “Then I’ll dance.”

Once upon a time a boy named Milan and his father lived together by the shore of a magic river. If you went up the river toward its source you grew younger the farther you went. If you went downriver you got older. If you went sideways down one of the many tributaries of the river, look out! You could turn into someone else entirely. Milan and his father traveled downriver in a small boat and he grew up into a man but when he saw how old his father had become he didn’t want to be a man anymore, he wanted to be a boy again. So they went back home and he grew young again and his father went back to normal too. When Milan told his mother she didn’t believe his story, she thought the magic river was just a river and she didn’t care where it came from or where it went or what happened to those who moved upon its waters. But it was true. He and his father both knew it was true, and that’s what counted. The end
.

“I like you, Daddy. I told you you could put me to sleep.”

He was still living at the Bishop’s Avenue house when he was in London, sleeping in one of the bedrooms vacated by the police, but that had to change. “Let’s get on with this. I’m sick of living with you,” Elizabeth said, but she also said, “You know we could easily make this work if you wanted it to.” They fought and then she wanted to hold his hand and then they fought again. This was a very bad time.
You don’t have the upper hand in this. You have created this situation and now you must face the consequences
. And on another day,
I still love you. I don’t know what to do with all this feeling
. But one day in the future they would walk together on a beach in Goa, and wander down the
route de Cézanne
in France, and she would come to New York and stay in his home and dress up as Morticia Addams (Milan was Michael Jackson and he was Tony Soprano) and they would go to the Village for Halloween.

Carol Knibb died ten days after Milan’s third birthday but he never forgot her. His only “real” grandmother was far away and refusing to fly anymore no matter how often she was asked, and he never met her. Carol was the nearest thing he had and now he had lost her. He was too young to become so closely acquainted with death.

Helen Fielding called. “Hello, Salman. How would you like to make a fool of yourself?” They were making a film of
Bridget Jones’s Diary
and
she wanted him to be in a scene at a book party at which Bridget asked a writer the way to the toilet. “Okay,” he said, “why not?” Acting was his unscratched itch. At school he had played (in hunchbacked, woolen-stockinged drag) the mad doctor Fräulein Mathilde von Zahnd in Dürrenmatt’s
The Physicists
. At Cambridge he had been cast in a few modest roles in undergraduate productions, a frightened judge in Bertolt Brecht’s
Private Life of the Master Race
, a statue that came to life in Eugène Ionesco’s
The Future Is in Eggs
, and Pertinax Surly, the skeptical sidekick of the easily duped Sir Epicure Mammon, in Ben Jonson’s
The Alchemist
. Then after Cambridge there had been the Oval House. He had sometimes dreamed with Bill Buford of running away one year and signing up with an obscure summer stock company in the Midwest and performing happily in absurd comedies and dreadful melodramas, but that was out of the question now. A couple of days making a fool of himself on
Bridget
would have to do.