Joseph Anton: A Memoir: A Memoir

by Salman Rushdie

  The U2 song—“his” song—was being played on the radio and DJs seemed to like it. “In the film,” Padma said to him, “I have to play Vina Apsara. I’m perfect casting for her. Obviously.” How she made me feel, how she made me real. “But you’re not a singer,” he said, and she lost her temper. “I’m taking singing lessons,” she said. “My coach says I have real potential.” The film rights to the novel had recently been acquired by the piratically dashing Portuguese producer Paulo Branco and the film was to be directed by Raúl Ruiz. He met Branco and proposed Padma for the female lead. “Of course,” said Branco. “That will be perfect.” In those days he had not learned how to translate producer-speak into English. He did not realize that Branco was really saying, “Of course not.”

  He had lunch in London with Lee Hall, the acclaimed, Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Billy Elliot, who loved The Ground Beneath Her Feet and was eager to work on the screenplay. When Ruiz refused even to meet Hall the project began to go rapidly downhill. Ruiz hired an Argentinian screenwriter, Santiago Amigorena, a Spanish speaker who would write the screenplay in French, after which it would be translated into English. The first draft of this Chimera, this Pushmi-Pullyu of a screenplay, was predictably appalling. “Life is a carpet,” one of the characters was asked to say, “and we can only see the full design in our dreams.” That was one of the better lines of dialogue. He protested to Branco and was asked if he would be prepared to work with Amigorena on a revised version. He agreed and flew to Paris and met Santiago, a nice man and no doubt an excellent writer in his own language. After their discussions, however, Amigorena sent him a second draft that was as opaquely mystical as the first. He took a deep breath and told Branco he would like to write a draft himself. When he sent this screenplay to Branco, he was told that Raúl Ruiz had refused to read it. “He won’t even read it? Why?” he called Branco to ask. “You have to understand,” Branco replied, “that we are here in the Universe of Raúl Ruiz.” “Oh,” he said, “I thought we were in the universe of my novel.” The project broke down irretrievably within a few days, and Padma’s dream of playing Vina Apsara came to an early end.

  “New York is a tough town, Mr. Rushdie.” He woke up one morning to find a full-length photograph of Padma on page one of the Post, and beside her, below a small inset picture of himself, was the headline, in letters two inches high, TO DIE FOR.

  And the next day in the same newspaper there was a cartoon in which his face was seen through the crosshairs of a sniper’s rifle. The caption read, DON’T BE SILLY, PADMA, THOSE KOOKY IRANIANS WOULD NEVER COME AFTER ME IN NEW YORK. And again a few weeks later, in the Post again, there was a photograph of the two of them together walking down a Manhattan street, and the headline WORTH DYING FOR. The story was out everywhere, and in London one newspaper editor claimed his office was being “flooded” with letters demanding that Rushdie’s royalties be seized because he was “laughing at Britain” by living openly in New York.

  Now she was scared. Her picture had been in all the papers in the world and she felt vulnerable, she said. He met, in Andrew Wylie’s office, with officers from the intelligence division of the NYPD, who were surprisingly reassuring. In a way the Post had done him a favor, they said. They had announced his arrival in the city so loudly that if any of the “bad guys” they were monitoring had been interested there would have been an immediate response. But there had been no disturbance in the Force. Everything was calm. “We don’t think anyone is interested in you at this point,” they told him. “So we have no problem with your plans.”

  Those plans included a deliberate policy of being seen in public. There would be no more “hiding.” He would eat at Balthazar, Da Silvano and Nobu, he would go to movie screenings and book launches and be seen enjoying himself at late-night hot spots such as Moomba, at which Padma was well known. He would inevitably be jeered at in some quarters for turning into some sort of party monster but it was the only way he could think of to demonstrate to people that they didn’t have to be afraid, that things were going to be different now, that it was okay. Only by living openly, visibly and fearlessly, and being written about for doing so, could he reduce the climate of fear around him, which was now, in his opinion, a bigger obstacle than whatever Iranian threat still remained. And in spite of her frequent moodiness, her capacity for brattish “model behavior,” and her not infrequent coldness toward him, Padma, to her great credit, agreed that this was how he should live, and was prepared to stand next to him while he did so, even if, in Besant Nagar, Madras, her grandfather K. C. Krishnamurti—“K.C.K.”—was giving interviews to the press saying he was “horrified” by this Rushdie’s presence in his granddaughter’s life.

  (In their years together he visited Padma’s Madras relatives several times. K.C.K. soon gave up his opposition to the relationship, being unable, he said, to deny his beloved granddaughter whatever she said was making her happy. “This Rushdie,” in turn, came to think of Padma’s family as the best part of her, the Indian part in which he wanted so much to believe. He became especially close to her mother’s much younger sister Neela, who was more like a big sister to Padma than an aunt, and that was almost like having a new sister himself. When Padma was with her Madras family, who were good-humored, no-nonsense people, she became a different person, simpler, less affected, and the combination of that Madrasi simplicity with her astonishing beauty was utterly irresistible. Sometimes he thought that if she and he could build a family life that made her feel as safe as this little Besant Nagar world, she might feel able to be her unassuming best self always, and if she could do that then they could certainly be happy. But that was not what life had in store.)

  The Oresteia was playing at the National Theatre in London and as the media unpleasantness went on and on (and there had been the usual we’re-going-to-kill-you fatwa-anniversary noises out of Iran, making him wonder for the thousandth time about the wisdom of what he was doing) he wondered if he too would be pursued by the Furies all his days, the three Furies of Islamic fanaticism, press criticism and an angry abandoned wife; or might he, like Orestes, one day break the curse upon his house, be acquitted by some modern Athena’s justice, and be allowed to live out his days in peace?

  He was writing a novel called Fury. He had been invited to write it for the Dutch Book Week “gift,” the first non-Dutch author to be so honored. Every year during Dutch Book Week the “gift” was given away to everyone who bought a book in a bookstore. Hundreds of thousands of copies were distributed. Mostly these were short books, but Fury was growing into a full-length novel. In spite of everything that was happening in his life it was pouring out of him, insisting on being written, demanding to exist with an urgency that almost scared him. He had actually been working on another novel—the book that would eventually become Shalimar the Clown—but Fury had barged in and pushed Shalimar temporarily off his desk.

  At the heart of the book was the idea that he had arrived in Manhattan when it believed itself to be experiencing a golden age—“the city boiled with money,” he wrote—and he knew that such “pinnacle moments” were always of brief duration. He decided he wanted to take the creative risk of capturing the moment while he was living through it, to abandon the perspective of history and push his nose right up against the present, to set it down on paper while it was still happening. If he got it right, he thought, then the book’s contemporary readers, especially in New York City, would experience recognition pleasure, the satisfaction of saying to themselves Yes, that’s the way it is, and in the future the book would bring the moment back to life for readers who were too young to have lived through it, and they would say Yes, that’s the way it must have been, the way it was. If he got it wrong … well, where there was no risk of failure there was also no possibility of success. Art was always a risk, always made at the edge of possibility, and it always put the artist in question, and that was the way he liked it.

  Moving through the city was a man he created to be both like him and unl
ike; like him in that he was of the same age, of Indian origin, with a British history and a broken marriage; a newcomer to New York. He wanted to make it clear that he could not and would not try to write about the city as a born-and-bred New Yorker might. He would write another kind of characteristic New York story, a tale of arrival. But his Malik Solanka’s anomie and grouchiness was intentionally developed to separate him from his creator. Solanka’s somewhat sour and disenchanted take on the city to which he had come to save himself was deliberately, comically contradictory; he was against what he was for, he grumbled about the very things that had drawn him to this town. And the Fury was not a creature pursuing Malik Solanka, clawing at his head, but the thing he feared most within himself.

  Saladin Chamcha in The Satanic Verses had been another attempt to create an anti- or opposite-self, and it was puzzling that in both cases these characters whom he had written to be other than himself were read by many people as simple self-portraits. But Stephen Dedalus was not Joyce, and Herzog was not Bellow, and Zuckerman was not Roth, and Marcel was not Proust; writers had always worked close to the bull, like matadors, had played complex games with autobiography, and yet their creations were more interesting than themselves. Surely this was known. But what was known could also be forgotten. He had to rely on the passage of the years to clear things up.

  The Ground Beneath Her Feet had been declared the winner of the “Eurasian region” of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book. The overall winner would be declared at a ceremony in New Delhi in April. He decided he would go. He would take Zafar with him and go. He would reclaim India after all the lost and sometimes angry years. (The Indian ban on The Satanic Verses was, of course, still in place.)

  Vijay Shankardass called him before he left London. The Delhi police were extremely nervous about his impending arrival. Could he please avoid being spotted on the plane? His bald head was very recognizable; would he please wear a hat? His eyes were also easily identified; would he please wear sunglasses? His beard, too, should be concealed. He should wear a scarf around it. Too hot? Oh, but there were cotton scarves.… “Salman,” Vijay said, carefully, “there’s a lot of tension out here. I’m feeling fairly anxious myself.”

  He didn’t know what to expect. Would he be welcomed or spurned? There was only one way to find out.

  When he got off the plane in Delhi he felt an urge to kiss the ground, or, rather, the blue rug in the airport jetway, but was too embarrassed to do it beneath the watchful eyes of a small army of security guards. The hot day enfolded him and Zafar like an embrace. They climbed into a cramped, white Hindustan Ambassador. Its air-conditioning system wasn’t working. He was back.

  India rushed in from every direction. BUY CHILLY COCKROACH TRAPS! DRINK HELLO MINERAL WATER! SPEED THRILLS BUT KILLS! shouted the hoardings. There were new kinds of message, too. ENROLL FOR ORACLE 81. GRADUATE WITH JAVA AS WELL. And, as proof that the long protectionist years were over, Coca-Cola was back with a vengeance. When he was last in India Coke was banned, leaving the field clear for the disgusting local imitations, Campa-Cola and Thums Up. Now there was a red Coke ad every hundred yards or so. Coke’s slogan of the moment was written in Hindi transliterated into Roman script: Jo Chaho Ho Jaaye. Which could be translated, literally, as “Whatever you desire, let it come to pass.” He chose to think of this as a blessing.

  HORN PLEASE, demanded the signs on the backs of the one million trucks blocking the road. All the other trucks, cars, bikes, motor scooters, taxis and auto rickshaws enthusiastically responded, welcoming them to town with an energetic rendition of the symphony of the Indian street. Wait for Side! Sorry-Bye-Bye! Fatta Boy!

  It was impossible to tempt Zafar into Indian national dress. He himself put on a cool, loose kurta-pajama outfit the moment he arrived, but Zafar insisted, “It’s just not my style,” preferring to stay in his young Londoner’s uniform of T-shirt, cargo pants and sneakers. (By the end of the trip he was wearing the white pajamas, but not the kurtas; still, progress of a kind had been made.)

  There were signs at the Red Fort advertising an evening son et lumière show. “If Mum was here,” Zafar said suddenly, “she’d insist on coming to that.” Yes, he thought, she would. “Well,” he answered his son, “she was here, you know.” He began to tell Zafar about their trip in 1974, and what his mother thought of this or that—how much she liked the serenity of this spot, or the hubbub over there. The journey acquired a new dimension.

  He had known that the first visit would be the trickiest. If it went well, things would ease. The second visit? “Rushdie returns again” wasn’t much of a news story. And the third—“Oh, here he is once more”—barely sounded like news at all. In the long slog back to “normality,” habituation, even boredom, was a useful weapon. He planned to bore India into submission.

  His protectors had a nightmare scenario in their heads, involving rioting mobs. In Old Delhi, where many Muslims lived, they were especially on edge, particularly whenever a member of the public committed the faux pas of recognizing him. “Sir, there has been exposure! Exposure has occurred! Sir, they have said the name, sir! The name has been spoken! Sir, please, the hat!”

  The Official Brits kept their distance from him. The head of the British Council in India, Colin Perchard, refused him permission to use the council’s auditorium for a press conference. The British high commissioner, Sir Rob Young, had been instructed by the Foreign Office to stay away from him. He tried not to care, reminding himself why he was really there. The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize was only a pretext. This trip with Zafar was the real victory. India itself was the prize.

  They went on a road trip: Jaipur, Fatehpur Sikri, Agra, Solan. There were more trucks than he remembered, many more, blaring and lethal, often driving straight at them down the wrong side of the carriageway. There were wrecks from head-on smashes every few miles.

  Look, Zafar, that is the shrine of a prominent Muslim saint; all the truckers stop there and pray for luck, even the Hindus. Then they get back into their cabs and take hideous risks with their lives and ours as well. Look, Zafar, that is a tractor-trolley loaded with men. At election time the sarpanch, or headman, of every village is ordered to provide such trolleyloads for politicians’ rallies. For Sonia Gandhi, ten tractor-trolleys per village is the requirement. People are so disillusioned with politicians these days that nobody would actually go to the rallies of their own free will. Look, those are the polluting chimneys of brick kilns smoking in the fields.

  Outside the city the air is less filthy, but it still isn’t clean. But in Bombay between December and February, think of this, aircraft can’t land or take off before 11 A.M. because of the smog.

  Every hundred yards or so they saw a sign reading STD-ISD-PCO. PCO was personal call office, and now anyone could pop into one of these little booths, make calls to anywhere in India or, indeed, the world, and pay on the way out. This was the first communications revolution of India. A few years later there would be a second, and hundreds of millions of cellphones would put Indians in touch with one another and with the world as never before.

  Zafar was almost twenty-one. Going with him to Solan, to their reclaimed villa, was an emotional moment. One day it would belong to Zafar and little Milan. They would be the fourth generation of the family to come here. Theirs was a far-flung family and this little acre of continuity stood for a lot.

  The air freshened, tall conifers leaned from steep slopes. As the sun set the lights of the first hill stations glowed above them in the twilight. They passed a narrow-gauge railway train on its slow, picturesque way up to Shimla. They stopped at a dhaba near Solan for dinner and the owner was happy he was there. Someone else ran up for an autograph. He ignored the worried frown on the police team chief Akshey Kumar’s face. He hadn’t been to Solan since he was twelve years old, but it felt like home.

  It was dark when they reached Anis Villa. From the road they had to climb down 122 steps to reach it. At the bottom there was a little gate and Vij
ay formally welcomed him to the home he had won back for the family. The chowkidar Govind Ram ran up and astonished Zafar by stooping down to touch their feet. The sky was on fire with stars. He went into the back garden by himself. He needed to be alone.

  He was woken at 5 A.M. by amplified music and chanting from a Hindu temple across the valley. He got dressed and walked around the house in the dawn light. With its high-pitched pink roofs and little corner turrets it was more beautiful than he remembered, more beautiful than it looked in Vijay’s photographs of it, and the view of the hills was stunning. It was a very strange feeling to walk around a house he didn’t know that somehow belonged to him.

  They spent most of the day mooching around the premises, sitting in the garden under the shade of big old conifers, eating Vijay’s special scrambled eggs. The trip had been worthwhile: He knew it from the expression on Zafar’s face.

  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.’ ”