The Satanic Verses (86 page)

In the morning, Nasreen and Kasturba arrived in clean saris, looking rested and complaining, ‘It was so terrible sleeping away from him that we didn’t sleep one wink.’ They fell upon Changez, and so tender were their caresses that Salahuddin had the same sense of spying on a private moment that he’d had at the wedding of Mishal Sufyan. He left the room quietly while the three lovers embraced, kissed and wept.

Death, the great fact, wove its spell around the house on Scandal Point. Salahuddin surrendered to it like everyone else, even Changez, who, on that second day, often smiled his old crooked smile, the one that said I know what’s up, I’ll go along with it, just don’t think I’m fooled. Kasturba and Nasreen fussed over him constantly, brushing his hair, coaxing him to eat and drink. His tongue had grown fat in his mouth, slurring his speech slightly, making it hard to swallow; he refused anything at all fibrous or stringy, even the chicken breasts he had loved all his life. A mouthful of soup, puréed potatoes, a taste of custard. Baby food. When he sat up in bed Salahuddin sat behind him; Changez leaned against his son’s body while he ate.

‘Open the house,’ Changez commanded that morning. ‘I want to see some smiling faces here, instead of your three glum mugs.’ So, after a long time, people came: young and old, half-forgotten cousins, uncles, aunts; a few comrades from the old days of the nationalist movement, poker-backed gentlemen with silver hair, achkan jackets and monocles; employees of the various foundations and philanthropical enterprises set up by Changez years ago; rival manufacturers of agricultural sprays and artificial dung. A real bag of allsorts, Salahuddin thought; but marvelled, also, at how beautifully everyone behaved in the presence of the dying man: the young spoke to him intimately about their lives, as if reassuring him that life itself was invincible, offering him the rich consolation of being a member of the great procession of the human
race, – while the old evoked the past, so that he knew nothing was forgotten, nothing lost; that in spite of the years of self-imposed sequestration he remained joined to the world. Death brought out the best in people; it was good to be shown – Salahuddin realized – that this, too, was what human beings were like: considerate, loving, even noble. We are still capable of exaltation, he thought in celebratory mood; in spite of everything, we can still transcend. A pretty young woman – it occurred to Salahuddin that she was probably his niece, and he felt ashamed that he didn’t know her name – was taking Polaroid snapshots of Changez with his visitors, and the sick man was enjoying himself hugely, pulling faces, then kissing the many proffered cheeks with a light in his eyes that Salahuddin identified as nostalgia. ‘It’s like a birthday party,’ he thought. Or: like Finnegan’s wake. The dead man refusing to lie down and let the living have all the fun.

‘We have to tell him,’ Salahuddin insisted when the visitors had left. Nasreen bowed her head; and nodded. Kasturba burst into tears.

They told him the next morning, having asked the specialist to attend to answer any questions Changez might have. The specialist, Panikkar (a name the English would mispronounce and giggle over, Salahuddin thought, like the Muslim ‘Fakhar’), arrived at ten, shining with self-esteem. ‘I should tell him,’ he said, taking control. ‘Most patients feel ashamed to let their loved ones see their fear.’ ‘The hell you will,’ Salahuddin said with a vehemence that took him by surprise. ‘Well, in that case,’ Panikkar shrugged, making as if to leave; which won the argument, because now Nasreen and Kasturba pleaded with Salahuddin: ‘Please, let’s not fight.’ Salahuddin, defeated, ushered the doctor into his father’s presence; and shut the study door.

‘I have a cancer,’ Changez Chamchawala said to Nasreen, Kasturba and Salahuddin after Panikkar’s departure. He spoke clearly, enunciating the word with defiant, exaggerated care. ‘It is very far advanced. I am not surprised. I said to Panikkar: “This is what I told you the very first day. Where else could all the blood
have gone?” ’ – Outside the study, Kasturba said to Salahuddin: ‘Since you came, there was a light in his eye. Yesterday, with all the people, how happy he was! But now his eye is dim. Now he won’t fight.’

That afternoon Salahuddin found himself alone with his father while the two women napped. He discovered that he, who had been so determined to have everything out in the open, to say the word, was now awkward and inarticulate, not knowing how to speak. But Changez had something to say.

‘I want you to know,’ he said to his son, ‘that I have no problem about this thing at all. A man must die of something, and it is not as though I were dying young. I have no illusions; I know I am not going anywhere after this. It’s the end. That’s okay. The only thing I’m afraid of is pain, because when there is pain a man loses his dignity. I don’t want that to happen.’ Salahuddin was awestruck.
First one falls in love with one’s father all over again, and then one learns to look up to him, too
. ‘The doctors say you’re a case in a million,’ he replied truthfully. ‘It looks like you have been spared the pain.’ Something in Changez relaxed at that, and Salahuddin realized how afraid the old man had been, how much he’d needed to be told … ‘Bas,’ Changez Chamchawala said gruffly. ‘Then I’m ready. And by the way: you get the lamp, after all.’

An hour later the diarrhoea began: a thin black trickle. Nasreen’s anguished phone calls to the emergency room of the Breach Candy Hospital established that Panikkar was unavailable. ‘Take him off the Agarol at once,’ the duty doctor ordered, and prescribed Imodium instead. It didn’t help. At seven pm the risk of dehydration was growing, and Changez was too weak to sit up for his food. He had virtually no appetite, but Kasturba managed to spoon-feed him a few drops of semolina with skinned apricots. ‘Yum, yum,’ he said ironically, smiling his crooked smile.

He fell asleep, but by one o’clock had been up and down three times. ‘For God’s sake,’ Salahuddin shouted down the telephone, ‘give me Panikkar’s home number.’ But that was against hospital procedure. ‘You must judge,’ said the duty doctor, ‘if the time has
come to bring him down.’ Bitch, Salahuddin Chamchawala mouthed. ‘Thanks a lot.’

At three o’clock Changez was so weak that Salahuddin more or less carried him to the toilet. ‘Get the car out,’ he shouted at Nasreen and Kasturba. ‘We’re going to the hospital. Now.’ The proof of Changez’s decline was that, this last time, he permitted his son to help him out. ‘Black shit is bad,’ he said, panting for breath. His lungs had filled up alarmingly; the breath was like bubbles pushing through glue. ‘Some cancers are slow, but I think this is very fast. Deterioration is very rapid.’ And Salahuddin, the apostle of truth, told comforting lies:
Abba, don’t worry. You’ll be fine
. Changez Chamchawala shook his head. ‘I’m going, son,’ he said. His chest heaved; Salahuddin grabbed a large plastic mug and held it under Changez’s mouth. The dying man vomited up more than a pint of phlegm mixed up with blood: and after that was too weak to talk. This time Salahuddin did have to carry him, to the back seat of the Mercedes, where he sat between Nasreen and Kasturba while Salahuddin drove at top speed to Breach Candy Hospital, half a mile down the road. ‘Shall I open the window, Abba?’ he asked at one point, and Changez shook his head and bubbled: ‘No.’ Much later, Salahuddin realized this had been his father’s last word.

The emergency ward. Running feet, orderlies, wheelchair, Changez being heaved on to a bed, curtains. A young doctor, doing what had to be done, very quickly but without the appearance of speed.
I like him
, Salahuddin thought. Then the doctor looked him in the eye and said: ‘I don’t think he’s going to make it.’ It felt like being punched in the stomach. Salahuddin realized he’d been clinging on to a futile hope,
they’ll fix him and we’ll take him home; this isn’t ‘it’
, and his instant reaction to the doctor’s words was rage.
You’re the mechanic. Don’t tell me the car won’t start; mend the damn thing
. Changez was flat out, drowning in his lungs. ‘We can’t get at his chest in this kurta; may we …’
Cut it off. Do what you have to do
. Drips, the blip of a weakening heartbeat on a screen, helplessness. The young doctor murmuring: ‘It won’t be long now, so …’ At which, Salahuddin Chamchawala did a crass
thing. He turned to Nasreen and Kasturba and said: ‘Come quickly now. Come and say goodbye.’ ‘For God’s sake!’ the doctor exploded … the women did not weep, but came up to Changez and took a hand each. Salahuddin blushed for shame. He would never know if his father heard the death-sentence dripping from the lips of his son.

Now Salahuddin found better words, his Urdu returning to him after a long absence.
We’re all beside you, Abba. We all love you very much
. Changez could not speak, but that was, – was it not? – yes, it must have been – a little nod of recognition.
He heard me
. Then all of a sudden Changez Chamchawala left his face; he was still alive, but he had gone somewhere else, had turned inwards to look at whatever there was to see.
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.

‘Please,’ the doctor said, ‘go outside the curtain now and let us make our effort.’ Salahuddin took the two women a few steps away; and now, when a curtain hid Changez from their sight, they wept. ‘He swore he would never leave me,’ Nasreen sobbed, her iron control broken at last, ‘and he has gone away.’ Salahuddin went to watch through a crack in the curtain; – and saw the voltage being pumped into his father’s body, the sudden green jaggedness of the pulse on the monitor screen; saw doctor and nurses pounding his father’s chest; saw defeat.

The last thing he had seen in his father’s face, just before the medical staff’s final, useless effort, was the dawning of a terror so profound that it chilled Salahuddin to the bone. What had he seen? What was it that waited for him, for all of us, that brought such fear to a brave man’s eyes? – Now, when it was over, he returned to Changez’s bedside; and saw his father’s mouth curved upwards, in a smile.

He caressed those sweet cheeks.
I didn’t shave him today. He died with stubble on his chin
. How cold his face was already; but the brain, the brain retained a little warmth. They had stuffed cotton-wool into his nostrils.
But suppose there’s been a mistake? What if he
wants to breathe
? Nasreen Chamchawala was beside him. ‘Let’s take your father home,’ she said.

Changez Chamchawala returned home in an ambulance, lying in an aluminum tray on the floor between the two women who had loved him, while Salahuddin followed in the car. Ambulance men laid him to rest in his study; Nasreen turned the air-conditioner up high. This was, after all, a tropical death, and the sun would be up soon.

What did he see
? Salahuddin kept thinking.
Why the horror? And, whence that final smile
?

People came again. Uncles, cousins, friends took charge, arranging everything. Nasreen and Kasturba sat on white sheets on the floor of the room in which, once upon a time, Saladin and Zeeny had visited the ogre, Changez; women sat with them to mourn, many of them reciting the qalmah over and over, with the help of counting beads. Salahuddin was irritated by this; but lacked the will to tell them to stop. – Then the mullah came, and sewed Changez’s winding-sheet, and it was time to wash the body; and even though there were many men present, and there was no need for him to help, Salahuddin insisted.
If he could look his death in the eye, then I can do it, too. –
And when his father was being washed, his body rolled this way and that at the mullah’s command, the flesh bruised and slabby, the appendix scar long and brown, Salahuddin recalled the only other time in his life when he’d seen his physically demure father naked: he’d been nine years old, blundering into a bathroom where Changez was taking a shower, and the sight of his father’s penis was a shock he’d never forgotten. That thick squat organ, like a club. O the power of it; and the insignificance of his own … ‘His eyes won’t close,’ the mullah complained. ‘You should have done it before.’ He was a stocky, pragmatic fellow, this mullah with his moustacheless beard. He treated the dead body as a commonplace thing, needing washing the way a car does, or a window, or a dish. ‘You are from London? Proper London? – I was there many years. I was
doorman at Claridge’s Hotel.’
Oh? Really? How interesting
. The man wanted to make small-talk! Salahuddin was appalled.
That’s my father, don’t you understand
? ‘These garments,’ the mullah asked, indicating Changez’s last kurta-pajama outfit, the one which the hospital staff had cut open to get at his chest. ‘You have need of them?’
No, no. Take them. Please
. ‘You are very kind.’ Small pieces of black cloth were being stuffed into Changez’s mouth and under his eyelids. ‘This cloth has been to Mecca,’ the mullah said.
Get it out
! ‘I don’t understand. It is holy fabric.’
You heard me: out, out
. ‘May God have mercy on your soul.’