Step Across This Line

by Salman Rushdie

  Years ago, the climactic scenes of Midnight’s Children were also set in a Benares widows’ hostel. This, of course, is pure coincidence, but another writer, Sunil Gangopadhyay of Bengal, is making serious allegations against Deepa Mehta. He accuses her of plagiarism, claiming that substantial passages of his novel Those Days have been “lifted” and incorporated in Ms. Mehta’s screenplay. She accepts that she was “inspired” by Gangopadhyay’s book but denies the charge of plagiarism. The author’s translator, Aruna Chakravati, retorts that Mehta’s screenplay is far inferior to Gangopadhyay’s epic historical novel: not “enlightened” but “stagnant.”

  The plagiarism charge is one reason why much of the Indian cultural elite has given Deepa Mehta only halfhearted support against her bully-boy opponents. People say she shouldn’t have sought to ingratiate herself with the BJP’s information minister, Arun Jaitley, who, like the BJP in general, is abhorred by much of the arts community. Also that she did herself and her movie no favors by making so many outspoken public statements, which hardened her opponents’ attitudes and made it less likely that the film would ever be completed. She should have got her film made first and screamed later, people say.

  The painter Vivan Sundaram argues that the episode shows us with great clarity the two faces of the BJP: the “moderate” stance of Atul Behari Vajpayee’s government, which initially gave the filmmaker permission to film, and the “hard-line” position of the party’s rank and file, whose gangs threw part of the film set into the Ganges and threatened Mehta’s life, until the BJP leadership was forced to stop the filming.

  Congress has strange bedfellows these days. Its decay can perhaps best be measured by the poor quality of its allies. In the state of Bihar, the bizarre political double-act of Laloo Prasad Yadav and his wife, Rabri Devi—on whom the wholly fictitious, and wildly corrupt, Bombay politicians Piloo and Golmatol Doodhwala in The Ground Beneath Her Feet were very loosely modeled—is once again taking center stage. Some years ago, Laloo, then Bihar’s chief minister, was implicated in the Fodder Scam, a swindle in which large amounts of public livestock subsidies were claimed for the maintenance of cows that didn’t actually exist. (In my novel, Piloo, India’s “Scambaba Deluxe,” runs a similar scheme involving non-existent goats.) Laloo was jailed but managed to secure the chief ministership for Rabri, and blithely went on running the state, by proxy, from his prison cell.

  Since then he has been in and out of the clink. At present he’s inside, and Rabri is at least technically in the driving seat, and another juicy corruption scandal is emerging. The tax authorities want to know how Laloo and Rabri manage to live in such high style (they have a particularly grand house) on the relatively humble salaries that even senior ministers in India pull down. Rabri has been “chargesheeted”—indicted—but refuses to resign; or rather, Laloo, from jail, announces that there is no question of his wife the chief minister vacating her post.

  As a writer with satirical inclinations, I’m delighted by the Yadav saga, the barefaced skulduggery of it, the shameless wholeheartedness, the glee with which Laloo and Rabri just go on being their appalling selves. But their survival is also a sign of the growing corruption of Indian political culture. This is a country in which known gangsters have been elected to the national parliament, and where a man who runs a state from his prison cell can receive the vocal support of no less a figure than the Congress Party leader, Sonia Gandhi herself.

  SUNDAY, APRIL 9

  Zafar at twenty is a big, gentle young man who, unlike his father, keeps his emotions concealed. But he is a deeply feeling fellow and is engaging with India seriously, attentively, beginning the process of making his own portrait of it, which may unlock in him an as yet unknown other self.

  At first he notices what first-time visitors notice: the terrible poverty of the families living by the railway tracks in what look like trash cans and bin liners, the men holding hands in the street, the “terrible” quality of Indian MTV and the “awful” Bollywood movies. We pass through the sprawling Army cantonment and he asks if the armed forces are as much of a political factor here as they are in neighboring Pakistan, and looks impressed when I tell him that soldiers in India have never sought political power.

  I can’t tempt him into Indian national dress. I myself put on a cool, loose kurta-pajama outfit the moment I arrive, but Zafar is mutinous. “It’s just not my style,” he insists, preferring to stay in his young Londoner’s uniform of T-shirt, cargo pants, and sneakers. (By the end of the trip he is wearing the white pajamas, but not the kurtas; still, progress of a kind has been made.)

  Zafar has never read more than the first three chapters of Midnight’s Children in spite of its dedication (“For Zafar Rushdie who, contrary to all expectations, was born in the afternoon”). In fact, apart from Haroun and the Sea of Stories and East, West, he hasn’t finished any of my books. The children of writers are often this way. They need their parents to be parents, not novelists. Zafar has always had a complete set of my books proudly on display in his room, but he reads Alex Garland and Bill Bryson and I pretend not to care.

  Now, poor fellow, he’s getting a crash course in my work as well as my life. In the Red Fort after Partition, my aunt and uncle, like many Muslims, had to be protected by the Army from the violence raging outside; a version of this appears in my novel Shame. And here, off Chandni Chowk, the bustling main street of Old Delhi, are the lanes winding into the old Muslim mohallas or neighborhoods in one of which, Ballimaran, my parents lived before they moved to Bombay; and it’s also where Ahmed and Amina Sinai, the parents of the narrator of Midnight’s Children, faced the gathering pre-Independence storm.

  Zafar takes all this literary tourism in good part. Look, here at Purana Qila, the Old Fort supposedly built on the site of the legendary city of Indraprastha, is where Ahmed Sinai left a sack of money to appease a gang of arsonist blackmailers. Look, there are the monkeys who ripped up the sack and threw the money away. Look, here at the National Gallery of Modern Art are the paintings of Amrita Sher-Gil, the half-Indian, half-Hungarian artist who inspired the character of Aurora Zogoiby in The Moor’s Last Sigh . . . Okay, enough, Dad, he plainly thinks but is too nice to say. Okay, I’ll read them, this time I really will. (He probably won’t.)

  There are signs at the Red Fort advertising an evening son et lumière show. “If Mum was here,” he says suddenly, “she’d insist on coming to that.” Zafar’s bright, beautiful mother, my first wife, Clarissa Luard, the British Arts Council’s highly esteemed literature officer, guardian angel of young writers and little magazines, died of a recurrence of breast cancer last November, aged just fifty. Zafar and I had spent most of her final hours by her bedside. He was her only child.

  “Well,” I say, “she was here, you know.” In 1974, Clarissa and I spent more than four months traveling around India, roughing it in cheap hotels and long-distance buses, using the advance I’d received for my first novel, Grimus, to finance the trip, and trying to stretch the money as far as it would go. Now, I begin to make a point of telling Zafar what his mother thought of this or that—how much she liked the serenity of this spot, or the hubbub over there. What began as a little father-and-son expedition acquires an extra dimension.

  I’ve always known that, after everything that has happened, this first visit would be the trickiest. Don’t overreach yourself, I thought. If it goes well, things should ease. The second visit? “Rushdie returns again” isn’t much of a news story. And the third—“Oh, here he is once more”—barely sounds like news at all. In the long slog back to “normality,” habituation, even boredom, has been a useful weapon. “I intend,” I start telling people in India, “to bore India into submission.”

  I should have worked out that if I myself was a little uncertain of how things would go, everyone around me would be in a blue funk. Things have improved in England and America, and normal service has very largely been resumed. I have grown unaccustomed to the problems of a maximum-security protection ope
ration. What’s happening in India feels, in this regard, like entering a time warp and being taken back to the bad old early days of the Iranian attack.

  My protection team couldn’t be nicer or more efficient, but gosh, there are a lot of them, and they are jumpy. In Old Delhi, where many Muslims live, they are especially on edge, particularly whenever, in spite of my cloak of invisibility, a member of the public commits the faux pas of recognizing me.

  “Sir, there has been exposure! Exposure has occurred!” my protectors mourn. “Sir, they have said the name, sir! The name has been spoken!” “Sir, please, the hat!”

  It’s useless to point out that I do tend to get recognized a fair bit because, well, I look like this and other people don’t; or that, on every single “exposure,” the reaction of the persons concerned has been friendly, even delighted. My protectors have a nightmare scenario in their heads—rioting mobs, et cetera—and mere real life isn’t enough to wipe it away.

  This has been one of the most frustrating aspects of the last few years. People—journalists, policemen, friends, strangers—all write scripts for me, and I get trapped inside those fantasies. What none of the scenarists ever seems to come up with is the possibility of a happy ending—one in which the problems I’ve faced are gradually overcome, and I resume the ordinary literary life that is all I’ve ever wanted. Yet this, the wholly unanticipated story line, is what has actually transpired.

  My biggest problem these days is waiting for everyone to let go of their nightmares and catch up with the facts.

  I dine with Vivan Sundaram and Geeta Kapur, at their home in the Shanti Niketan district of South Delhi. Before I go, I am required by the police to ask Vivan and Geeta not to tell anyone I’m coming. During our meal, they are telephoned by a senior police officer who asks them not to tell anyone I’ve been there. The next day, they receive another follow-up phone call urging discretion. They are amused, but I am irritated. This is getting ridiculous.

  Vivan is Amrita Sher-Gil’s nephew, and some of her best canvases are on the walls of his home, as is his own luminous family portrait of Amrita’s world. This is a big picture set in the Sher-Gil drawing room, and it’s a work that endlessly draws you in yet remains beautifully mysterious. The directness of Amrita’s gaze—she alone looks straight out of the picture at us—is balanced by the dreamlike inwardness of the other family members. A lost-world atmosphere pervades the room, at once golden and stifling; and there is the gun. I have a passion for contemporary Indian art, and just to see this great painting again feels like a homecoming.

  “So, do things feel different?” Vivan asks, and I say, not as much as I thought they would. People don’t change, the heart of the place is the same. But of course there are changes. One friend has been gravely ill but is recovering. Another dear friend is still seriously unwell. And of course the obvious changes. The BJP in power. The new technology boom that has given even more impetus and affluence to the Indian bourgeoisie.

  I mention Clinton’s visit, which Geeta and Vivan portray as a defining moment for the rich India that has grown exponentially since my last visit, fueled by new technology. In America, 40 percent of the people working in Silicon Valley are now of Indian origin, and in India itself the new electronic age has made many fortunes. Clinton lavished praise on these new techno-boomers, making a point of visiting Hyderabad, one of the new boomtowns. For the Indian rich, his coming was both a validation and an apotheosis.

  “You can’t believe how they loved it,” Geeta says. “So many people longing to bow down and say, sir, sir, we just love America.”

  “India and the U.S. as the two great democracies,” Vivan adds. “India and America as partners and equals. That was the idea, and it was said without any sense of irony at all.”

  The India that remains in thrall to religious-communalist sectarians of the most extreme and medievalist type; the India that’s fighting something like a civil war in Kashmir; the India that cannot feed or educate or give proper medical care to its people; the India that can’t provide its citizens with drinkable water; the India in which the absence of simple toilet facilities obliges millions of women to control their natural functions so that they can relieve themselves under cover of darkness; these Indias were not paraded before the president of the United States. Instead, gung-ho nuclear India, fat-cat entrepreneurial India, super-nerd computer-India, glam-rock high-life India all pirouetted and twirled in the international media spotlight that accompanies the Leader of the Free World wherever he goes.

  MONDAY, APRIL 10

  A somewhat paranoid start to my day. I learn that the head of the British Council in India, Colin Perchard, has refused me permission to use the council’s auditorium for a press conference at the end of the week. In addition, the British high commissioner, Sir Rob Young, has been instructed by the Foreign Office to stay away from me—he is “not to come out of the stables,” he tells Vijay.

  Robin Cook, the British foreign secretary, is arriving in India the day I am due to leave and, it would appear, is anxious not to be too closely associated with me. He is scheduled to travel to Iran soon, and naturally that trip must not be compromised. (Later: Cook’s trip is canceled anyway, because of the closed-court “spy trials” of Jews in Iran. So it goes.)

  Better news comes from the Commonwealth Foundation’s Colin Ball, who has moderated his stance and is no longer threatening to withdraw my invitation to his awards dinner. Like Cinderella, it would appear, I shall go to the Ball. But in my paranoid mood I think that if the foundation is so nervous about my mere presence, they are unlikely to want the closer association with me that giving me the prize would inevitably create.

  I remind myself why I’m really here. The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize is only a pretext. To have made this trip with Zafar is the real victory. For both of us, India is the prize.

  The Hansie Cronje cricket scandal pushes politics off the front pages and my own little grumbles out of my head. Cronje, the captain of the South African cricket team and poster boy for the new South Africa, is being accused by the Indian police of having been involved, along with three of his teammates, Herschelle Gibbs, Nicky Boje, and Pieter Strydom, of taking money from the Indian bookies Sanjiv Chawla and Rajesh Kalra to fix the results of one-day international games.

  It’s sensational news. The Indian police claim to have transcripts of telephone conversations that leave no room for doubt. There are hints of a link to underworld crime-syndicate bosses like the notorious Dawood Ibrahim. People start speculating about this being the tip of an enormous iceberg. Can cricket itself survive if spectators don’t know if they’re watching a fair contest or a sort of pro-wrestling bout in white flannels? “We treated them like gods,” a fan says, “and they turned out to be crooks.”

  Rumors of match-fixing have been flying around for years, clouding the reputations of some of the game’s leading players: Pakistan’s Salim Malik, Australia’s Shane Warne, and India’s own former captain, Mohammed Azharuddin, who was accused of corruption by a teammate, Manoj Prabhakar. A former England international star, Chris Lewis, has given the British cricket authorities the names of three allegedly corrupt England stars. (These names have not been made public.) But, so far, none of the charges have been proven, and not much of the mud has stuck.

  It’s no secret that as the one-day version of the game has become a big money-spinner, and as the numbers of such matches have proliferated, the interest of Far Eastern betting syndicates and bookmakers with underworld links has grown. But no cricket-lover wants to believe that his heroes are jerks. Such chosen blindness is a form of corruption, too.

  Within moments, the denials begin. Hansie is a gent, clean as a whistle, honest as the day is long. And why were Indian policemen bugging South African players’ phones in the first place? And the voices on the tapes don’t even sound South African.

  Cronje himself gives a press conference denying the charges, insisting that his teammates and his bank accounts will confirm that he ne
ver tried to throw a match or received any cash for doing so. And behind all the backlash is what sounds, to Indian ears, suspiciously like racism. Commentators from the white cricket-playing countries have been the fastest out of the blocks, rubbishing the allegations, casting doubt on the professionalism and even the integrity of the Indian policemen investigating the case.

  The officer in charge of my protection team is the kindly-natured Akshey Kumar, who loves literature, can speak with knowledge about the work of Vikram Seth and Vikram Chandra, Rohinton Mistry and Arundhati Roy, and is proud of having two daughters at college in Boston, at Tufts. K. K. Paul, who has been running the Cronje investigation, is a friend of his, a superb detective, says Kumar, and a man of great probity. What’s more, South Africa being a friendly nation, the Indian authorities would never allow these accusations to be made public unless they’re 110 percent convinced of the strength of the case that Paul and his team have built. Therefore, Kumar advises with great prescience, just wait on and see.

  We’re off on a road trip to show the boy the sights: Jaipur, Fatehpur Sikri, Agra. For me, the road itself has always been the main attraction.

  There are more trucks than I remembered, many more, blaring and lethal, often driving straight at us down the wrong side of the carriageway. There are 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.