The Satanic Verses (8 page)

           
Less than a year after the death of Nasreen Chamchawala from her inability to
triumph over fishbones in the manner of her foreign-educated son, Changez married
again without a word of warning to anyone. Saladin in his English college
received a letter from his father commanding him, in the irritatingly orotund
and obsolescent phraseology that Changez always used in correspondence, to be
happy. "Rejoice," the letter said, "for what is lost is
reborn." The explanation for this somewhat cryptic sentence came lower
down in the aerogramme, and when Saladin learned that his new stepmother was
also called Nasreen, something went wrong in his head, and he wrote his father
a letter full of cruelty and anger, whose violence was of the type that exists
only between fathers and sons, and which differs from that between daughters
and mothers in that there lurks behind it the possibility of actual,
jaw-breaking fisticuffs. Changez wrote back by return of post; a brief letter,
four lines of archaic abuse, cad rotter bounder scoundrel varlet whoreson
rogue. "Kindly consider all family connections irreparably sundered,"
it concluded. "Consequences your responsibility."

           
After a year of silence, Saladin received a further communication, a letter of
forgiveness that was in all particulars harder to take than the earlier,
excommunicatory thunderbolt. "When you become a father, O my son,"
Changez Chamchawala confided, "then shall you know those moments―ah!
Too sweet!―when, for love, one dandies the bonny babe upon one's knee;
whereupon, without warning or provocation, the blessed creature―may I be
frank?―it
wets
one. Perhaps for a moment one feels the gorge
rising, a tide of anger swells within the blood―but then it dies away, as
quickly as it came. For do we not, as adults, understand that the little one is
not to blame? He knows not what he does."

           
Deeply offended at being compared to a urinating baby, Saladin maintained what
he hoped was a dignified silence. By the time of his graduation he had acquired
a British passport, because he had arrived in the country just before the laws
tightened up, so he was able to inform Changez in a brief note that he intended
to settle down in London and look for work as an actor. Changez Chamchawala's
reply came by express mail. "Might as well be a confounded gigolo. It's my
belief some devil has got into you and turned your wits. You who have been
given so much: do you not feel you owe anything to anyone? To your country? To
the memory of your dear mother? To your own mind? Will you spend your life
jiggling and preening under bright lights, kissing blonde women under the gaze
of strangers who have paid to watch your shame? You are no son of mine, but a
ghoul
,
a
hoosh
, a demon up from hell. An actor! Answer me this: what am I to
tell my friends?"

           
And beneath a signature, the pathetic, petulant postscript. "Now that you
have your own bad djinni, do not think you will inherit the magic lamp."

           
* * * * *

           
After that, Changez Chamchawala wrote to his son at irregular intervals, and in
every letter he returned to the theme of demons and possession: "A man
untrue to himself becomes a two-legged lie, and such beasts are Shaitan's best
work," he wrote, and also, in more sentimental vein: "I have your
soul kept safe, my son, here in this walnut-tree. The devil has only your body.
When you are free of him, return and claim your immortal spirit. It flourishes
in the garden."

           
The handwriting in these letters altered over the years, changing from the
florid confidence that had made it instantly identifiable and becoming
narrower, undecorated, purified. Eventually the letters stopped, but Saladin
heard from other sources that his father's preoccupation with the supernatural
had continued to deepen, until finally he had become a recluse, perhaps in
order to escape this world in which demons could steal his own son's body, a
world unsafe for a man of true religious faith.

           
His father's transformation disconcerted Saladin, even at such a great
distance. His parents had been Muslims in the lackadaisical, light manner of
Bombayites; Changez Chamchawala had seemed far more godlike to his infant son
than any Allah. That this father, this profane deity (albeit now discredited),
had dropped to his knees in his old age and started bowing towards Mecca was
hard for his godless son to accept.

           
"I blame that witch," he told himself, falling for rhetorical
purposes into the same language of spells and goblins that his father had
commenced to employ. "That Nasreen Two. Is it I who have been the subject
of devilment, am I the one possessed? It's not my handwriting that
changed."

           
The letters didn't come any more. Years passed; and then Saladin Chamcha,
actor, self-made man, returned to Bombay with the Prospero Players, to
interpret the role of the Indian doctor in
The Millionairess
by George
Bernard Shaw. On stage, he tailored his voice to the requirements of the part,
but those long-suppressed locutions, those discarded vowels and consonants,
began to leak out of his mouth out of the theatre as well. His voice was
betraying him; and he discovered his component parts to be capable of other
treasons, too.

           
* * * * *

           
A man who sets out to make himself up is taking on the Creator's role,
according to one way of seeing things; he's unnatural, a blasphemer, an
abomination of abominations. From another angle, you could see pathos in him,
heroism in his struggle, in his willingness to risk: not all mutants survive.
Or, consider him sociopolitically: most migrants learn, and can become
disguises. Our own false descriptions to counter the falsehoods invented about us,
concealing for reasons of security our secret selves.

           
A man who Invents himself needs someone to believe in him, to prove he's
managed it. Playing God again, you could say. Or you could come down a few
notches, and think of Tinkerbell; fairies don't exist if children don't clap
their hands. Or you might simply say: it's just like being a man.

           
Not only the need to be believed in, but to believe in another. You've got it:
Love.

           
Saladin Chamcha met Pamela Lovelace five and a half days before the end of the
1960s, when women still wore bandannas in their hair. She stood at the centre
of a room full of Trotskyist actresses and fixed him with eyes so bright, so
bright. He monopolized her all evening and she never stopped smiling and she
left with another man. He went home to dream of her eyes and smile, the
slenderness of her, her skin. He pursued her for two years. England yields her
treasures with reluctance. He was astonished by his own perseverance, and
understood that she had become the custodian of his destiny, that if she did
not relent then his entire attempt at metamorphosis would fail. "Let
me," he begged her, wrestling politely on her white rug that left him, at
his midnight bus stops, covered in guilty fluff. "Believe me. I'm the
one."

           
One night,
out of the blue
, she let him, she said she believed. He
married her before she could change her mind, but never learned to read her
thoughts. When she was unhappy she would lock herself in the bedroom until she felt
better. "It's none of your business," she told him. "I don't
want anybody to see me when I'm like that." He used to call her a clam.
"Open up," he hammered on all the locked doors of their lives
together, basement first, then maisonette, then mansion. "I love you, let
me in." He needed her so badly, to reassure himself of his own existence,
that he never comprehended the desperation in her dazzling, permanent smile,
the terror in the brightness with which she faced the world, or the reasons why
she hid when she couldn't manage to beam. Only when it was too late did she
tell him that her parents had committed suicide together when she had just
begun to menstruate, over their heads in gambling debts, leaving her with the
aristocratic bellow of a voice that marked her out as a golden girl, a woman to
envy, whereas in fact she was abandoned, lost, her parents couldn't even be
bothered to wait and watch her grow up, that's how much
she
was loved,
so of course she had no confidence at all, and every moment she spent in the
world was full of panic, so she smiled and smiled and maybe once a week she
locked the door and shook and felt like a husk, like an empty peanut-shell, a
monkey without a nut.

           
They never managed to have children; she blamed herself. After ten years
Saladin discovered that there was something the matter with some of his own
chromosomes, two sticks too long, or too short, he couldn't remember. His
genetic inheritance; apparently he was lucky to exist, lucky not to be some
sort of deformed freak. Was it his mother or his father from whom? The doctors
couldn't say; he blamed, it's easy to guess which one, after all, it wouldn't
do to think badly of the dead.

           
They hadn't been getting along lately.

           
He told himself that afterwards, but not during.

           
Afterwards, he told himself, we were on the rocks, maybe it was the missing
babies, maybe we just grew away from each other, maybe this, maybe that.

           
During, he looked away from all the strain, all the scratchiness, all the
fights that never got going, he closed his eyes and waited until her smile came
back. He allowed himself to believe in that smile, that brilliant counterfeit
of joy.

           
He tried to invent a happy future for them, to make it come true by making it
up and then believing in it. On his way to India he was thinking how lucky he
was to have her, I'm lucky yes I am don't argue I'm the luckiest bastard in the
world. And: how wonderful it was to have before him the stretching, shady
avenue of years, the prospect of growing old in the presence of her gentleness.

           
He had worked so hard and come so close to convincing himself of the truth of
these paltry fictions that when he went to bed with Zeeny Vakil within
forty-eight hours of arriving in Bombay, the first thing he did, even before
they made love, was to faint, to pass out cold, because the messages reaching
his brain were in such serious disagreement with one another, as if his right
eye saw the world moving to the left while his left eye saw it sliding to the
right.

           
* * * * *

           
Zeeny was the first Indian woman he had ever made love to. She barged into his
dressing-room after the first night of
The Millionairess
, with her
operatic arms and her gravel voice, as if it hadn't been years.
Years
.
"Yaar, what a disappointment, I swear, I sat through the whole thing just
to hear you singing "Goodness Gracious Me" like Peter Sellers or
what, I thought, let's find out if the guy learned to hit a note, you remember
when you did Elvis impersonations with your squash racket, darling, too
hilarious, completely cracked. But what is this? Song is not in drama. The
hell. Listen, can you escape from all these palefaces and come out with us
wogs? Maybe you forgot what that is like."

           
He remembered her as a stick-figure of a teenager in a lopsided Quant hairstyle
and an equal-but-oppositely lopsided smile. A rash, bad girl. Once for the hell
of it she walked into a notorious adda, a dive, on Falkland Road, and sat there
smoking a cigarette and drinking Coke until the pimps who ran the joint
threatened to cut her face, no freelances permitted. She stared them down,
finished her cigarette, left. Fearless. Maybe crazy. Now in her middle thirties
she was a qualified doctor with a consultancy at Breach Candy Hospital, who
worked with the city's homeless, who had gone to Bhopal the moment the news
broke of the invisible American cloud that ate people's eyes and lungs. She was
an art critic whose book on the confining myth of authenticity, that
folkloristic straitjacket which she sought to replace by an ethic of
historically validated eclecticism, for was not the entire national culture
based on the principle of borrowing whatever clothes seemed to fit, Aryan,
Mughal, British, take-the-best-and-leave-the-rest?―had created a
predictable stink, especially because of its title. She had called it
The
Only Good Indian
. "Meaning, is a dead," she told Chamcha when she
gave him a copy. "Why should there be a good, right way of being a wog?
That's Hindu fundamentalism. Actually, we're all bad Indians. Some worse than
others."

           
She had come into the fullness of her beauty, long hair left loose, and she was
no stick-figure these days. Five hours after she entered his dressing-room they
were in bed, and he passed out. When he awoke she explained "I slipped you
a mickey finn." He never worked out whether or not she had been telling
the truth.

           
Zeenat Vakil made Saladin her project. "The reclamation of," she
explained. "Mister, we're going to get you back." At times he thought
she intended to achieve this by eating him alive. She made love like a cannibal
and he was her long pork. "Did you know," he asked her, "of the
well-established connection between vegetarianism and the man-eating
impulse?" Zeeny, lunching on his naked thigh, shook her head. "In
certain extreme cases," he went on, "too much vegetable consumption
can release into the system biochemicals that induce cannibal fantasies."
She looked up and smiled her slanting smile. Zeeny, the beautiful vampire.
"Come off it," she said. "We are a nation of vegetarians, and
ours is a peaceful, mystical culture, everybody knows."