The Satanic Verses (12 page)

Of what did the son accuse the father? Of everything: espionage on child-self, rainbow-pot-stealing, exile. Of turning him into what he might not have become. Of making-a-man of. Of what-will-I-tell-my-friends. Of irreparable sunderings and offensive forgiveness. Of succumbing to Allah-worship with new wife and also to blasphemous worship of late spouse. Above all, of magiclampism,
of being an open-sesamist. Everything had come easily to him, charm, women, wealth, power, position. Rub, poof, genie, wish, at once master, hey presto. He was a father who had promised, and then withheld, a magic lamp.

Changez, Zeeny, Vallabh, Kasturba remained motionless and silent until Saladin Chamcha came to a flushed, embarrassed halt. ‘Such violence of the spirit after so long,’ Changez said after a silence. ‘So sad. A quarter of a century and still the son begrudges the peccadilloes of the past. O my son. You must stop carrying me around like a parrot on your shoulder. What am I? Finished. I’m not your Old Man of the Sea. Face it, mister: I don’t explain you any more.’

Through a window Saladin Chamcha caught sight of a forty-year-old walnut-tree. ‘Cut it down,’ he said to his father. ‘Cut it, sell it, send me the cash.’

Chamchawala rose to his feet, and extended his right hand. Zeeny, also rising, took it like a dancer accepting a bouquet; at once, Vallabh and Kasturba diminished into servants, as if a clock had silently chimed pumpkin-time. ‘Your book,’ he said to Zeeny. ‘I have something you’d like to see.’

The two of them left the room; impotent Saladin, after a moment’s floundering, stamped petulantly in their wake. ‘Sour-puss,’ Zeeny called gaily over her shoulder. ‘Come on, snap out of it, grow up.’

The Chamchawala art collection, housed here at Scandal Point, included a large group of the legendary
Hamza-nama
cloths, members of that sixteenth-century sequence depicting scenes from the life of a hero who may or may not have been the same Hamza as the famous one, Muhammad’s uncle whose liver was eaten by the Meccan woman Hind as he lay dead on the battlefield of Uhud. ‘I like these pictures,’ Changez Chamchawala told Zeeny, ‘because the hero is permitted to fail. See how often he has to be rescued from his troubles.’ The pictures also provided eloquent proof of Zeeny Vakil’s thesis about the eclectic, hybridized nature of the
Indian artistic tradition. The Mughals had brought artists from every part of India to work on the paintings; individual identity was submerged to create a many-headed, many-brushed Over-artist who, literally,
was
Indian painting. One hand would draw the mosaic floors, a second the figures, a third would paint the Chinese-looking cloudy skies. On the backs of the cloths were the stories that accompanied the scenes. The pictures would be shown like a movie: held up while someone read out the hero’s tale. In the
Hamza-nama
you could see the Persian miniature fusing with Kannada and Keralan painting styles, you could see Hindu and Muslim philosophy forming their characteristically late-Mughal synthesis.

A giant was trapped in a pit and his human tormentors were spearing him in the forehead. A man sliced vertically from the top of his head to his groin still held his sword as he fell. Everywhere, bubbling spillages of blood. Saladin Chamcha took a grip on himself. ‘The savagery,’ he said loudly in his English voice. ‘The sheer barbaric love of pain.’

Changez Chamchawala ignored his son, had eyes only for Zeeny; who gazed straight back into his own. ‘Ours is a government of philistines, young lady, don’t you agree? I have offered this whole collection free gratis, did you know? Let them only house it properly, let them build a place. Condition of cloths is not A-1, you see … they won’t do it. No interest. Meanwhile I get offers every month from Amrika. Offers of what-what size! You wouldn’t believe. I don’t sell. Our heritage, my dear, every day the USA is taking it away. Ravi Varma paintings, Chandela bronzes, Jaisalmer lattices. We sell ourselves, isn’t it? They drop their wallets on the ground and we kneel at their feet. Our Nandi bulls end up in some gazebo in Texas. But you know all this. You know India is a free country today.’ He stopped, but Zeeny waited; there was more to come. It came: ‘One day I will also take the dollars. Not for the money. For the pleasure of being a whore. Of becoming nothing. Less than nothing.’ And now, at last, the real storm, the words behind the words,
less than nothing
. ‘When I die,’ Changez Chamchawala said to Zeeny, ‘what will I be? A pair
of emptied shoes. That is my fate, that he has made for me. This actor. This pretender. He has made himself into an imitator of non-existing men. I have nobody to follow me, to give what I have made. This is his revenge: he steals from me my posterity.’ He smiled, patted her hand, released her into the care of his son. ‘I have told her,’ he said to Saladin. ‘You are still carrying your takeaway chicken. I have told her my complaint. Now she must judge. That was the arrangement.’

Zeenat Vakil walked up to the old man in his outsize suit, put her hands on his cheeks, and kissed him on the lips.

After Zeenat betrayed him in the house of his father’s perversions, Saladin Chamcha refused to see her or answer the messages she left at the hotel desk.
The Millionairess
came to the end of its run; the tour was over. Time to go home. After the closing-night party Chamcha headed for bed. In the elevator a young and clearly honeymooning couple were listening to music on headphones. The young man murmured to his wife: ‘Listen, tell me. Do I still seem a stranger to you sometimes?’ The girl, smiling fondly, shook her head,
can’t hear
, removed the headphones. He repeated, gravely: ‘A stranger, to you, don’t I still sometimes seem?’ She, with unfaltering smile, laid her cheek for an instant on his high scrawny shoulder. ‘Yes, once or twice,’ she said, and put the headphones on again. He did the same, seeming fully satisfied by her answer. Their bodies took on, once again, the rhythms of the playback music. Chamcha got out of the lift. Zeeny was sitting on the floor with her back against his door.

Inside the room, she poured herself a large whisky and soda. ‘Behaving like a baby,’ she said. ‘You should be ashamed.’

That afternoon he had received a package from his father. Inside it was a small piece of wood and a large number of notes, not rupees but sterling pounds: the ashes, so to speak, of a walnut-tree. He was full of inchoate feeling and because Zeenat had
turned up she became the target. ‘You think I love you?’ he said, speaking with deliberate viciousness. ‘You think I’ll stay with you? I’m a married man.’

‘I didn’t want you to stay for me,’ she said. ‘For some reason, I wanted it for you.’

A few days earlier, he had been to see an Indian dramatization of a story by Sartre on the subject of shame. In the original, a husband suspects his wife of infidelity and sets a trap to catch her out. He pretends to leave on a business trip, but returns a few hours later to spy on her. He is kneeling to look through the keyhole of their front door. Then he feels a presence behind him, turns without rising, and there she is, looking down at him with revulsion and disgust. This tableau, he kneeling, she looking down, is the Sartrean archetype. But in the Indian version the kneeling husband felt no presence behind him; was surprised by the wife; stood to face her on equal terms; blustered and shouted; until she wept, he embraced her, and they were reconciled.

‘You say I should be ashamed,’ Chamcha said bitterly to Zeenat. ‘You, who are without shame. As a matter of fact, this may be a national characteristic. I begin to suspect that Indians lack the necessary moral refinement for a true sense of tragedy, and therefore cannot really understand the idea of shame.’

Zeenat Vakil finished her whisky. ‘Okay, you don’t have to say any more.’ She held up her hands. ‘I surrender. I’m going. Mr Saladin Chamcha. I thought you were still alive, only just, but still breathing, but I was wrong. Turns out you were dead all the time.’

And one more thing before going milk-eyed through the door. ‘Don’t let people get too close to you, Mr Saladin. Let people through your defences and the bastards go and knife you in the heart.’

After that there had been nothing to stay for. The aeroplane lifted and banked over the city. Somewhere below him, his father was dressing up a servant as his dead wife. The new traffic scheme had jammed the city centre solid. Politicians were trying to build
careers by going on padyatras, pilgrimages on foot across the country. There were graffiti that read:
Advice to políticos. Only step to take: padyatra to hell
. Or, sometimes:
to Assam
.

Actors were getting mixed up in politics: MGR, N. T. Rama Rao, Bachchan. Durga Khote complained that an actors’ association was a ‘red front’. Saladin Chamcha, on Flight 420, closed his eyes; and felt, with deep relief, the tell-tale shiftings and settlings in his throat which indicated that his voice had begun of its own accord to revert to its reliable, English self.

The first disturbing thing that happened to Mr Chamcha on that flight was that he recognized, among his fellow-passengers, the woman of his dreams.

T
he dream-woman had been shorter and less graceful than the real one, but the instant Chamcha saw her walking calmly up and down the aisles of
Bostan
he remembered the nightmare. After Zeenat Vakil’s departure he had fallen into a troubled sleep, and the premonition had come to him: the vision of a woman bomber with an almost inaudibly soft, Canadian-accented voice whose depth and melody made it sound like an ocean heard from a long way away. The dream-woman had been so loaded down with explosives that she was not so much the bomber as the bomb; the woman walking the aisles held a baby that seemed to be sleeping noiselessly, a baby so skilfully swaddled and held so close to the breast that Chamcha could not see so much as a lock of new-born hair. Under the influence of the remembered dream he conceived the notion that the baby was in fact a bundle of dynamite sticks, or some sort of ticking device, and he was on the verge of crying out when he came to his senses and admonished himself severely. This was precisely the type of superstitious flummery he was leaving behind. He was a neat man in a buttoned suit heading for London and an ordered, contented life. He was a member of the real world.

He travelled alone, shunning the company of the other
members of the Prospero Players troupe, who had scattered around the economy class cabin wearing Fancy-a-Donald T-shirts and trying to wiggle their necks in the manner of natyam dancers and looking absurd in Benarsi saris and drinking too much cheap airline champagne and importuning the scorn-laden stewardesses who, being Indian, understood that actors were cheap-type persons; and behaving, in short, with normal thespian impropriety. The woman holding the baby had a way of looking through the paleface players, of turning them into wisps of smoke, heat-mirages, ghosts. For a man like Saladin Chamcha the debasing of Englishness by the English was a thing too painful to contemplate. He turned to his newspaper in which a Bombay ‘rail roko’ demonstration was being broken up by police lathi-charges. The newspaper’s reporter suffered a broken arm; his camera, too, was smashed. The police had issued a ‘note’.
Neither the reporter nor any other person was assaulted intentionally
. Chamcha drifted into airline sleep. The city of lost histories, felled trees and unintentional assaults faded from his thoughts. When he opened his eyes a little later he had his second surprise of that macabre journey. A man was passing him on the way to the toilet. He was bearded and wore cheap tinted spectacles, but Chamcha recognized him anyway: here, travelling incognito in the economy class of Flight AI-420, was the vanished superstar, the living legend, Gibreel Farishta himself.