Late that evening the sirens sang and the guests ran for cover, hiding under beds, in cupboards, anywhere. Nasreen Chamchawala found herself alone by a food-laden table, and attempted to reassure the company by standing there in her newsprint sari, munching a piece of fish as if nothing were the matter. So it was that when she started choking on the fishbone of her death there was nobody to help her, they were all crouching in corners with their eyes shut; even Saladin, conqueror of kippers, Saladin of the England-returned upper lip, had lost his nerve. Nasreen Chamchawala fell, twitched, gasped, died, and when the all-clear sounded the guests emerged sheepishly to find their hostess extinct in the middle of the dining-room, stolen away by the exterminating angel, khali-pili khalaas, as Bombay-talk has it, finished off for no reason, gone for good.
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 dandles 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 socio-politically: 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 ha
d 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.’
He, for his part, was required to handle with care. The first time he touched her breasts she spouted hot astounding tears the colour and consistency of buffalo milk. She had watched her mother die like a bird being carved for dinner, first the left breast then the right, and still the cancer had spread. Her fear of repeating her mother’s death placed her chest off limits. Fearless Zeeny’s secret terror. She had never had a child but her eyes wept milk.
After their first lovemaking she started right in on him, the tears forgotten now. ‘You know what you are, I’ll tell you. A deserter is what, more English than, your Angrez accent wrapped around you like a flag, and don’t think it’s so perfect, it slips, baba, like a false moustache.’
‘There’s something strange going on,’ he wanted to say, ‘my voice,’ but he didn’t know how to put it, and held his tongue.
‘People like you,’ she snorted, kissing his shoulder. ‘You come back after so long and think godknowswhat of yourselves. Well, baby, we got a lower opinion of you.’ Her smile was brighter than Pamela’s. ‘I see,’ he said to her, ‘Zeeny, you didn’t lose your Binaca smile.’
Binaca. Where had that come from, the long forgotten toothpaste advertisement? And the vowel sounds, distinctly unreliable. Watch out, Chamcha, look out for your shadow. That black fellow creeping up behind.
On the second night she arrived at the theatre with two friends in tow, a young Marxist film-maker called George Miranda, a shambling whale of a man with rolled-up kurta sleeves, a flapping waistcoat bearing ancient stains, and a surprisingly military moustache with waxed points; and Bhupen Gandhi, poet and journalist, who had gone prematurely grey but whose face was baby-innocent until he unleashed his sly, giggling laugh. ‘Come on, Salad baba,’ Zeeny announced. ‘We’re going to show you the town.’ She turned to her companions. ‘These Asians from foreign got no shame,’ she declared. ‘Saladin, like a bloody lettuce, I ask you.’
‘There was a TV reporter here some days back,’ George Miranda said. ‘Pink hair. She said her name was Kerleeda. I couldn’t work it out.’
‘Listen, George is too unworldly,’ Zeeny interrupted. ‘He doesn’t know what freaks you guys turn into. That Miss Singh, outrageous. I told her, the name’s Khalida, dearie, rhymes with Dalda, that’s a cooking medium. But she couldn’t say it. Her own name. Take me to your kerleader. You types got no culture. Just wogs now. Ain’t it the truth?’ she added, suddenly gay and round-eyed, afraid she’d gone too far. ‘Stop bullying him, Zeenat,’ Bhupen Gandhi said in his quiet voice. And George, awkwardly, mumbled: ‘No offence, man. Joke-shoke.’
Chamcha decided to grin and then fight back. ‘Zeeny,’ he said, ‘the earth is full of Indians, you know that, we get everywhere, we become tinkers in Australia and our heads end up in Idi Amin’s fridge. Columbus was
right, maybe; the world’s made up of Indies, East, West, North. Damn it, you should be proud of us, our enterprise, the way we push against frontiers. Only thing is, we’re not Indian like you. You better get used to us. What was the name of that book you wrote?’
‘Listen,’ Zeeny put her arm through his. ‘Listen to my Salad. Suddenly he wants to be Indian after spending his life trying to turn white. All is not lost, you see. Something in there still alive.’ And Chamcha felt himself flushing, felt the confusion mounting. India; it jumbled things up.
‘For Pete’s sake,’ she added, knifing him with a kiss. ‘Chamcha. I mean, fuck it. You name yourself Mister Toady and you expect us not to laugh.’
In Zeeny’s beaten-up Hindustan, a car built for a servant culture, the back seat better upholstered than the front, he felt the night closing in on him like a crowd. India, measuring him against her forgotten immensity, her sheer presence, the old despised disorder. An Amazonic hijra got up like an Indian Wonder Woman, complete with silver trident, held up the traffic with one imperious arm, sauntered in front of them. Chamcha stared into herhis glaring eyes. Gibreel Farishta, the movie star who had unaccountably vanished from view, rotted on the hoardings. Rubble, litter, noise. Cigarette advertisements smoking past: SCISSORS – FOR THE MAN OF ACTION, SATISFACTION. And, more improbably: PANAMA – PART OF THE GREAT INDIAN SCENE.
The Satanic Verses: A Novel Page 6
