Haroun and the Sea of Stories

by Salman Rushdie

  Haroun was filled with the shame of it, and hung his head.

  ‘But but but this is disgraceful, Iff,’ said Butt the Hoopoe without moving its beak. ‘Wishes are not such easy things, as you know well. You, mister Water Genie, are upset because of your own error, because now we must go to Gup City after all, and there will be harsh words and hot water for you, and you are taking it out on the boy. Stop it! Stop it or I’ll be annoyed.’

  (Truly this was a most passionate, even excitable sort of machine, Haroun thought in spite of his unhappiness. Machines were supposed to be ultra-rational, but this bird could be genuinely temperamental.)

  Iff looked at the red blush of humiliation that was all over Haroun’s face and softened somewhat. ‘Gup City it is,’ he agreed. ‘Unless, of course, you’d like to hand over the Disconnecting Tool and just call the whole thing off?’

  Haroun shook his head, miserably.

  ‘But but but you are still bullying the boy,’ Butt the Hoopoe expostulated furiously without moving its beak. ‘Change of plan, please, right away! Cheering-up procedures to be instituted at once. Give the lad a happy story to drink.’

  ‘Not another drink,’ said Haroun in a low, small voice. ‘What are you going to make me fail at now?’

  ~ ~ ~

  So Iff the Water Genie told Haroun about the Ocean of the Streams of Story, and even though he was full of a sense of hopelessness and failure the magic of the Ocean began to have an effect on Haroun. He looked into the water and saw that it was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different colour, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity; and Iff explained that these were the Streams of Story, that each coloured strand represented and contained a single tale. Different parts of the Ocean contained different sorts of stories, and as all the stories that had ever been told and many that were still in the process of being invented could be found here, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was in fact the biggest library in the universe. And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories; so that unlike a library of books, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead but alive.

  ‘And if you are very, very careful, or very, very highly skilled, you can dip a cup into the Ocean,’ Iff told Haroun, ‘like so’, and here he produced a little golden cup from another of his waistcoat pockets, ‘and you can fill it with water from a single, pure Stream of Story, like so’, as he did precisely that, ‘and then you can offer it to a young fellow who’s feeling blue, so that the magic of the story can restore his spirits. Go on now; knock it back, have a swig, do yourself a favour,’ Iff concluded. ‘Guaranteed to make you feel A-number-one.’

  Haroun, without saying a word, took the golden cup and drank.

  ~ ~ ~

  He found himself standing in a landscape that looked exactly like a giant chessboard. On every black square there was a monster: there were two-tongued snakes and lions with three rows of teeth, and four-headed dogs and five-headed demon kings and so on. He was, so to speak, looking out through the eyes of the young hero of the story. It was like being in the passenger seat of an automobile; all he had to do was watch, while the hero dispatched one monster after another and advanced up the chessboard towards the white stone tower at the end. At the top of the tower was (what else but) a single window, out of which there gazed (who else but) a captive princess. What Haroun was experiencing, though he didn’t know it, was Princess Rescue Story Number S/1001/ZHT/420/41(r)xi; and because the princess in this particular story had recently had a haircut and therefore had no long tresses to let down (unlike the heroine of Princess Rescue Story G/1001/RIM/777/M(w)i, better known as ‘Rapunzel’), Haroun as the hero was required to climb up the outside of the tower by clinging to the cracks between the stones with his bare hands and feet.

  He was halfway up the tower when he noticed one of his hands beginning to change, becoming hairy, losing its human shape. Then his arms burst out of his shirt, and they too had grown hairy, and impossibly long, and had joints in the wrong places. He looked down and saw the same thing happening to his legs. When new limbs began to push themselves out from his sides, he understood that he was somehow turning into a monster just like those he had been killing; and above him the princess caught at her throat and cried out in a faint voice:

  ‘Eek, my dearest, you have into a large spider turned.’

  As a spider he was able to make rapid progress to the top of the tower; but when he reached the window the princess produced a large kitchen knife and began to hack and saw at his limbs, crying rhythmically, ‘Get away spider, go back home’; and he felt his grip on the stones of the tower grow looser; and then she managed to chop right through the arm nearest her, and he fell.

  ~ ~ ~

  ‘Wake up, snap out of it, let’s have you,’ he heard Iff anxiously calling. He opened his eyes to find himself lying full-length on the back of Butt the Hoopoe. Iff was sitting beside him, looking extremely worried and more than a little disappointed that Haroun had somehow managed to keep a firm grip on the Disconnecting Tool.

  ‘What happened?’ Iff asked. ‘You saved the princess and walked off into the sunset as specified, I presume? But then why all this moaning and groaning and turning and churning? Don’t you like Princess Rescue Stories?’

  Haroun recounted what had happened to him in the story, and both Iff and Butt became very serious indeed. ‘I can’t believe it,’ Iff finally said. ‘It’s a definite first, without parallel, never in all my born days.’

  ‘I’m almost glad to hear it,’ said Haroun. ‘Because I was thinking, that wasn’t the most brilliant way to cheer me up.’

  ‘It’s pollution,’ said the Water Genie gravely. ‘Don’t you understand? Something, or somebody, has been putting filth into the Ocean. And obviously if filth gets into the stories, they go wrong. —Hoopoe, I’ve been away on my rounds too long. If there are traces of this pollution right up here in the Deep North, things at Gup City must be close to crisis. Quick, quick! Top speed ahead! This could mean war.’

  ‘War with whom?’ Haroun wanted to know.

  Iff and Butt shivered with something very like fear.

  ‘With the Land of Chup, on the Dark Side of Kahani,’ Butt the Hoopoe answered without moving its beak. ‘This looks like the doing of the leader of the Chupwalas, the Cultmaster of Bezaban.’

  ‘And who’s that?’ Haroun persevered, beginning to wish he’d stayed in his peacock bed instead of getting muddled up with Water Genies and Disconnecting Tools and talking mechanical Hoopoes and story-oceans in the sky.

  ‘His name,’ whispered the Water Genie, and the sky darkened for an instant as he spoke it, ‘is Khattam-Shud.’

  Far away on the horizon, forked lightning glittered, once. Haroun felt his blood run cold.

  Chapter 5

  About Guppees and Chupwalas

  Haroun had not forgotten what his father had said about Khattam-Shud. ‘Too many fancy notions are turning out to be true,’ he thought. At once Butt the Hoopoe answered, without moving its beak: ‘A strange sort of Story Moon our Kahani would be, if storybook things weren’t everywhere to be found.’ And Haroun had to admit that that was a reasonable remark.

  They were speeding south to Gup City. The Hoopoe had chosen to remain on the water, zooming along like a speedboat, spraying Story Streams in every direction. ‘Doesn’t it muddle up the stories?’ Haroun inquired. ‘All this turbulence. It must mix things up dreadfully.’

  ‘No problem!’ cried Butt the Hoopoe. ‘Any story worth its salt can handle a little shaking up! Va-voom!’

  Abandoning what was clearly not a profitable line of conversation, Haroun returned to more important matters. ‘Tell me more about this Khattam-Shud,’ he requested, and was utterly amazed when Iff replied in almost the very same words that Rashid K
halifa had used. ‘He is the Arch-Enemy of all Stories, even of Language itself. He is the Prince of Silence and the Foe of Speech. At least’, and here the Water Genie abandoned the somewhat too sonorous tone of the preceding sentences, ‘that’s what they say. When it comes to the Land of Chup and its people the Chupwalas, it’s all mostly gossip and flim-flam, because it’s generations since any of us went across the Twilight Strip into the Perpetual Night.’

  ‘You’ll have to forgive me,’ Haroun broke in, ‘but I’m going to need a little help with the geography.’

  ‘Hmf,’ sniffed Butt the Hoopoe. ‘Poorly educated, I see.’

  ‘That’s totally illogical,’ Haroun retorted. ‘You’re the one who’s been boasting about how Speed has hidden this Moon from people on Earth. So it’s unreasonable to expect us to know about its topographical features, principal exports and the like.’

  But Butt’s eye was twinkling. Really, there were major difficulties involved in talking to machines, Haroun thought. With their deadpan expressions, it was impossible to know when they were pulling your leg.

  ‘Thanks to the genius of the Eggheads at P2C2E House,’ Butt began, taking pity on Haroun, ‘the rotation of Kahani has been brought under control. As a result the Land of Gup is bathed in Endless Sunshine, while over in Chup it’s always the middle of the night. In between the two lies the Twilight Strip, in which, at the Grand Comptroller’s command, Guppees long ago constructed an unbreakable (and also invisible) Wall of Force. Its goodname is Chattergy’s Wall, named after our King, who of course had absolutely nothing to do with building it.’

  ‘Hold on a minute,’ Haroun frowned. ‘If Kahani goes round the Earth, even if it goes very fast indeed, there must be moments when the Earth is between it and the sun. So it can’t be true that one half is always in the daylight; you’re telling stories again.’

  ‘Naturally I’m telling stories,’ Butt the Hoopoe replied. ‘And if you have any arguments, please to take them up with the Walrus. Now excuse, please, while I pay attention ahead. Volume of traffic has dramatically increased.’

  ~ ~ ~

  Haroun had plenty more questions to ask—why did the Chupwalas live in Permanent Night? Must it not be very cold indeed if the sun never shone at all? And what was Bezaban, or a Cultmaster, come to that?—but they were evidently nearing Gup City, because the waters around them and the skies above were filling up with mechanical birds every bit as fanciful as Butt the Hoopoe: birds with snake-heads and peacock-tails, flying fishes, dogbirds. And on the backs of the birds were Water Genies with whiskers of every possible hue, all wearing turbans and embroidered waistcoats and aubergine-shaped pajamas, and all looking so much like Iff that it was a good thing, in Haroun’s opinion, that the colours of their whiskers were different enough to make it possible to tell them apart.

  ‘Something most serious has occurred,’ Iff commented. ‘All units have been ordered back to base. Now if I had my Disconnecting Tool,’ he added sharply, ‘I would have received the order myself, because, as of course Thieflets do not know, there is a highly advanced transceiver built into the handle.’

  ‘Luckily, however,’ Haroun came back, just as sharply, ‘since you half-poisoned me with that dirty story, you worked things out; so there’s no harm done, except, perhaps, to me.’

  Iff ignored this. And Haroun’s attention was distracted as well, because he noticed that a large patch of what looked like a particularly thick and tough type of weed or vegetable of some sort was actually racing along right beside them, keeping pace with Butt the Hoopoe without apparent effort, while it waved vegetable-tentacles in the air in a most disturbing fashion. At the centre of the mobile vegetable patch was a single lilac flower with thick, fleshy leaves, of a type that Haroun had never seen before. ‘What’s that?’ he inquired, pointing, even though he knew it was impolite to do so.

  ‘A Floating Gardener, naturally,’ said Butt the Hoopoe without moving its beak. That made no sense. ‘You mean a Floating Garden,’ Haroun corrected the bird, which gave a little snort. ‘That’s all you know,’ it harrumphed. At that moment the high-speed vegetation actually reared up out of the water and proceeded to wind and knot itself around and about, until it had taken something like the shape of a man, with the lilac-coloured flower positioned in its ‘head’ where a mouth should be, and a cluster of weeds forming a rustic-looking hat. ‘So it is a Floating Gardener after all,’ Haroun realized.

  The Floating Gardener was now running lightly over the surface of the water, showing no sign of sinking. ‘How could he sink?’ Butt the Hoopoe interjected. ‘Would he not be a Sinking Gardener in that case? Whereas, as you observe, he floats; he runs, he walks, he hops. No problem.’

  Iff called across to the Gardener, who at once nodded a brief greeting. ‘Got a stranger with you. Very odd. Still. Your own business,’ he said. His voice was as soft as flower petals (after all, he was actually speaking through those lilac lips), but his manner was somewhat abrupt. ‘I thought all you Guppees were chatterboxes,’ Haroun whispered to Iff. ‘But this Gardener doesn’t say much.’

  ‘He is talkative,’ Iff rejoined. ‘For a Gardener, anyhow.’

  ‘How do you do,’ Haroun called across to the Gardener, thinking that, as he was the stranger, it was his business to introduce himself. ‘Who are you?’ the Gardener asked in his soft but abrupt way, without breaking his stride. Haroun told him his name and the Gardener gave another curt nod.

  ‘Mali,’ he said. ‘Floating Gardener First Class.’

  ‘Please,’ Haroun said in his nicest voice, ‘what does a Floating Gardener do?’

  ‘Maintenance,’ answered Mali. ‘Untwisting twisted Story Streams. Also unlooping same. Weeding. In short: Gardening.’

  ‘Think of the Ocean as a head of hair,’ said Butt the Hoopoe, helpfully. ‘Imagine it’s as full of Story Streams as a thick mane is full of soft, flowing strands. The longer and thicker a head of hair, the knottier and more tangled it gets. Floating Gardeners, you can say, are like the hairdressers of the Sea of Stories. Brush, clean, wash, condition. So now you know.’

  Iff asked Mali, ‘What’s this pollution? When did it start? How bad is it?’

  Mali answered the questions in sequence. ‘Lethal. But nature as yet unknown. Started only recently, but spread is very rapid. How bad? Very bad. Certain types of story may take years to clean up.’

  ‘For example?’ Haroun piped up.

  ‘Certain popular romances have become just long lists of shopping expeditions. Children’s stories also. For instance, there is an outbreak of talking helicopter anecdotes.’

  With that, Mali fell silent, and the rush to Gup City continued. A few minutes later, however, Haroun heard more new voices. They were like choruses, many voices at a time speaking in perfect unison, and they were full of froth and bubbles. Finally Haroun worked out that they were actually coming up from beneath the surface of the Ocean. He looked down into the waters and saw two fearsome sea-monsters right beside the racing Hoopoe, swimming so close to the surface that they were almost surfing on the spray thrown up by Butt as it sped along.

  From their roughly triangular shape and their iridescent colouring, Haroun deduced that they were Angel Fish of some variety, though they were as big as giant sharks and had literally dozens of mouths, all over their bodies. These mouths were constantly at work, sucking in Story Streams and blowing them out again, pausing only to speak. When they did so, Haroun noted, each mouth spoke with its own voice, but all the mouths on each individual fish spoke perfectly synchronized words.

  ‘Hurry! Hurry! Don’t be late!’ bubbled the first fish.

  ‘Ocean’s ailing! Cure can’t wait!’ the second went on.

  Butt the Hoopoe was once again kind enough to enlighten Haroun. ‘These are Plentimaw Fishes,’ it said. ‘They acquire their goodname from the fact that you have no doubt registered, viz., that they have plenty of maws, i.e., mouths.’

  ‘So,’ thought Haroun, filled with wonder, ‘there really are Plen
timaw Fish in the Sea, just as old Snooty Buttoo said; and I have travelled a long way, just as my father said, and I’ve learned that a Plentimaw Fish can be an Angel Fish as well.’

  ‘Plentimaw Fishes always go in two’s,’ Butt added without moving its beak. ‘They are faithful to partners for life. To express this perfect union they speak, only and always, in rhyme.’

  These particular Plentimaw Fishes seemed unhealthy to Haroun. Their multiple mouths frequently spluttered and coughed, and their eyes looked inflamed and pink. ‘I’m no expert,’ Haroun called to them, ‘but are you both quite well?’

  The replies came swiftly, punctuated by bubbling coughs:

  ‘All this bad taste! Too much dirt!’

  ‘Swimming in the Ocean starts to hurt!’

  ‘Call me Bagha! This is Goopy!’

  ‘Excuse our rudeness! We feel droopy!’

  ‘Eyes feel rheumy! Throat feels sore!’

  ‘When we’re better, we’ll talk more.’

  ‘As you correctly guessed, all Guppees love to talk,’ Iff said in an aside. ‘Silence is often considered rude. Hence the Plentimaws’ apology.’ —‘They seem to be talking okay to me,’ Haroun replied. —‘Normally, each mouth says something different,’ Iff explained. ‘That makes plenty more talk. For them, this is like silence.’

  ‘Whereas for a Floating Gardener a few short sentences are called talkativeness,’ Haroun sighed. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever get the hang of this place. What do the fish do, anyway?’

  Iff replied that the Plentimaw Fishes were what he called ‘hunger artists’—‘Because when they are hungry they swallow stories through every mouth, and in their innards miracles occur; a little bit of one story joins on to an idea from another, and hey presto, when they spew the stories out they are not old tales but new ones. Nothing comes from nothing, Thieflet; no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old—it is the new combinations that make them new. So you see, our artistic Plentimaw Fishes really create new stories in their digestive systems—so just think how sick they must be feeling now! All these filthied-up sagas passing through their insides, front to back, top to bottom, side to side—no wonder they look green about the gills!’