Joseph Anton: A Memoir

by Salman Rushdie

  He was horrified. This was becoming a matter of life and death. If the Delhi police had become so trigger-happy that they were preparing to kill people, they had to be stopped before it was too late. No time now for niceties. Zafar looked on, dazed, while he deliberately blew his stack at poor, decent Akshey Kumar (who was not at all to blame) and told him that unless Kulbir Krishan got back on the phone at once, apologized to Vijay personally, and gave an assurance that there were no plans to murder anybody tomorrow, he would insist on driving through the night back to New Delhi so that he could be waiting at Prime Minister Vajpayee’s office door at dawn to ask him to deal with the problem personally. After a certain amount of this kind of raging Kulbir did call back to speak of “misunderstandings” and promised that there would be no shootings or deaths. “If I spoke out of context,” he memorably concluded, “then I am very sorry indeed.”

  He burst out laughing at the sheer absurdity of this formulation and put down the phone. But he did not sleep well. The meaning of his Indian journey would be defined by what happened in the next two days, and even though he hoped and believed that the police were being unnecessarily nervous, he couldn’t be sure. Delhi was their town, and he was Rip van Winkle.

  At half past twelve the next day they were back in Delhi and he was closeted in a meeting with R. S. Gupta, the special assistant commissioner in charge of security for the whole city, a calm, forceful man. He painted a dark picture. A Muslim politician, Shoaib Iqbal, planned to go to Friday midday prayers at Juma Masjid and seek Imam Bukhari’s help to start a demonstration against him, and against the Indian government for allowing him to enter the country. The numbers could be huge and bring the city to a standstill. “We are negotiating with them,” Gupta said, “to keep the numbers small, and the event peaceful. Maybe we will succeed.” After a couple of hours of high-tension waiting, during which he was effectively confined to quarters—“Sir, no movements, please”—the news was good. Less than two hundred people marched—and two hundred marchers, in India, was a number smaller than zero—and it had all gone off without a hitch. The nightmare scenario had not come to pass. “Fortunately,” Mr. Gupta said, “we have been able to manage it.”

  What really happened? The security worldview was always impressive and often persuasive, but it was just one version of the truth. It was one of the characteristics of security forces everywhere in the world to try and have it both ways. Had there been mass demonstrations, they would have said, “You see, all our nervousness has been amply justified.” But there were no such marches; and so, “We were able to prevent the trouble because of our foresight and skill.” Maybe so, he thought. But it might also be the case that for the vast majority of Indian Muslims, the controversy over The Satanic Verses was old hat, and in spite of the efforts of the politician and the imam (both of whom made blood-and-thunder speeches) nobody could really be bothered to march. Oh, there’s a novelist in town to go to a dinner? What’s his name? Rushdie? So what? This was the view taken, almost without exception, by the Indian press in its analysis of the day’s events. The small demonstration was noted, but the private political agendas of its organizers were also pointed out. The script in people’s heads was being rewritten. The foretold catastrophe—riots, killings—had not come to pass. What happened instead was extraordinary, and, for Zafar and himself, an event of immense emotional impact. What burst out in the city was not violence, but joy.

  At a quarter to eight in the evening, he and Zafar walked into the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize reception at the Oberoi Hotel and from that moment until they left India the celebrations never stopped. Journalists and photographers surrounded them, their faces wreathed in most unjournalistic smiles. Friends burst through the media wall to embrace them. The actor Roshan Seth, recently recovered from serious heart problems, hugged him and said, “Look at us, yaar, we’re both supposed to be dead but still going strong.” The eminent columnist Amita Malik, a friend of his family’s from the old days in Bombay, at first mistook Zafar for his father’s bodyguard (to Zafar’s great delight) but then reminisced wonderfully about the past, praising Anis Rushdie’s wit, his quick gift for repartee, and telling tales of Negin’s beloved brother Hameed, who died too young, too long ago. Gifted young writers—Raj Kamal Jha, Namita Gokhale, Shauna Singh Baldwin—came up to say generous things about the significance of his writing for their own work. One of the great ladies of English-language Indian literature, the novelist Nayantara Sahgal, clasped his hands and whispered, “Welcome home.” And there was Zafar being interviewed for television and speaking touchingly about his own happiness at being there. His heart overflowed. He had not really dared to expect this, had been infected by the fears of the police, and had defended himself against many kinds of disappointment. Now the defenses fell away and happiness rose like a tropical dawn, fast and brilliant and hot. India was his again. It was a rare thing to be granted one’s heart’s desire.

  He did not win the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, which went to J. M. Coetzee. But this was a homecoming party more than an awards ceremony. RUSHDIE IN INDIA: THERE IS ONLY JOY, LOTS OF JOY. As The Indian Express’s hyperbolically affectionate front-page headline demonstrated, the party spirit was spilling into the media, drowning the few, muted negative voices. In all his conversations with the press he tried to avoid reopening old wounds, to tell Indian Muslims that he was not and had never been their enemy, and to stress that he was in India to mend broken links and to begin, so to speak, a new chapter. The Asian Age concurred: “Let’s turn a page.” Elsewhere, in Outlook, there was pleasure that India had “made some amends for being the first to ban The Satanic Verses and subjecting him to the persecution and agony that followed.” The Pioneer expressed its satisfaction that India was, once again, standing up for “democratic values and the individual’s right to express himself.” It also, in a less elevated mood, improbably but delightfully accused him of “turning the city’s sophisticated party women into a bunch of giggling schoolgirls” who told their men, “Dahling, [he] could send Bollywood hunks back to school.” Dilip Padgaonkar of The Times of India put it most movingly. “He is reconciled with India and India with him.… Something sublime has happened to him which should enable him to continue to mesmerize us with his yarns. He has returned to where his heart has always been. He has returned home.” In the Hindustan Times, there was an editorial headed RECONSIDER THE BAN. This sentiment was echoed right across the media. In The Times of India an Islamic scholar, among other intellectuals, backed an end to the ban. On the electronic media, opinion polls ran 75 percent to 25 percent in favor of allowing The Satanic Verses to be freely published in India at long last.

  Vijay threw a farewell party for him. His two actress aunts, Uzra Butt and her sister Zohra Segal, were there, with his cousin Kiran Segal, Zohra’s daughter and one of the country’s foremost exponents and teachers of the Odissi school of Indian classical dancing. This was the zany wing of the family, sharp of tongue and mischievous of eye. Uzra and Zohra were the grand dames of the Indian theater, and everyone had been a little in love with Kiran at one time or another. Zohra and Kiran lived in an apartment in Hampstead in the 1960s, and during his Rugby days he had sometimes spent vacations in their spare bedroom, next to Kiran’s bedroom door, on which there was a large, admonitory skull and crossbones sign. Vijay Shankardass and Roshan Seth both stayed in the same spare room in the same period. All three of them had looked wistfully at the skull and crossbones and none of them ever got past it.

  “I haven’t seen you dance for years,” he said to Kiran.

  “Come back soon,” she said. “Then I’ll dance.”

  Once upon a time a boy named Milan and his father lived together by the shore of a magic river. If you went up the river toward its source you grew younger the farther you went. If you went downriver you got older. If you went sideways down one of the many tributaries of the river, look out! You could turn into someone else entirely. Milan and his father traveled downriver in a small boat
and he grew up into a man but when he saw how old his father had become he didn’t want to be a man anymore, he wanted to be a boy again. So they went back home and he grew young again and his father went back to normal too. When Milan told his mother she didn’t believe his story, she thought the magic river was just a river and she didn’t care where it came from or where it went or what happened to those who moved upon its waters. But it was true. He and his father both knew it was true, and that’s what counted. The end.

  “I like you, Daddy. I told you you could put me to sleep.”

  He was still living at the Bishop’s Avenue house when he was in London, sleeping in one of the bedrooms vacated by the police, but that had to change. “Let’s get on with this. I’m sick of living with you,” Elizabeth said, but she also said, “You know we could easily make this work if you wanted it to.” They fought and then she wanted to hold his hand and then they fought again. This was a very bad time. You don’t have the upper hand in this. You have created this situation and now you must face the consequences. And on another day, I still love you. I don’t know what to do with all this feeling. But one day in the future they would walk together on a beach in Goa, and wander down the route de Cézanne in France, and she would come to New York and stay in his home and dress up as Morticia Addams (Milan was Michael Jackson and he was Tony Soprano) and they would go to the Village for Halloween.

  Carol Knibb died ten days after Milan’s third birthday but he never forgot her. His only “real” grandmother was far away and refusing to fly anymore no matter how often she was asked, and he never met her. Carol was the nearest thing he had and now he had lost her. He was too young to become so closely acquainted with death.

  Helen Fielding called. “Hello, Salman. How would you like to make a fool of yourself?” They were making a film of Bridget Jones’s Diary and she wanted him to be in a scene at a book party at which Bridget asked a writer the way to the toilet. “Okay,” he said, “why not?” Acting was his unscratched itch. At school he had played (in hunchbacked, woolen-stockinged drag) the mad doctor Fräulein Mathilde von Zahnd in Dürrenmatt’s The Physicists. At Cambridge he had been cast in a few modest roles in undergraduate productions, a frightened judge in Bertolt Brecht’s Private Life of the Master Race, a statue that came to life in Eugène Ionesco’s The Future Is in Eggs, and Pertinax Surly, the skeptical sidekick of the easily duped Sir Epicure Mammon, in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist. Then after Cambridge there had been the Oval House. He had sometimes dreamed with Bill Buford of running away one year and signing up with an obscure summer stock company in the Midwest and performing happily in absurd comedies and dreadful melodramas, but that was out of the question now. A couple of days making a fool of himself on Bridget would have to do.

  The party scene took two days to film. Renée Zellweger stuck to her English accent all the time, even off-camera, so that he had the odd feeling of meeting Bridget Jones, not the actress playing her. Colin Firth was funny and welcoming. “I secretly hope you’re going to be lousy at this, because I can’t write books.” And Hugh Grant kissed him. There was a scene in which he and Hugh were supposed to greet each other as long-lost friends, and before one of the takes Hugh asked, “Do you mind if I kiss you in this one?” and then planted a major smacker right on his amazed mouth. The scene didn’t make it into the final cut of the movie. His first screen kiss, he thought, and it was with Hugh Grant!, and it ended up on the cutting-room floor. (The only other man who ever kissed him was the film director Abel Ferrara, who once embraced him in a New York nightclub and used his gristly tongue. On that occasion, fortunately, there were no cameras rolling.)

  It was harder than he expected to play a character called Salman Rushdie whose dialogue was written by someone else. If he had been at a book party when an inexperienced PR girl was being clumsy and foolish his instinct would have been to be nice to her, and he tried to play it that way, but it wasn’t funny. The snootier he acted the more comic Bridget’s confusion became. Jeffrey Archer was in the party scene too, and was very annoyed that he didn’t have anything to say. “I’ve taken the trouble to turn up,” he kept telling the producers. “The least you could do is write me a line or two.” They didn’t. Richard Curtis’s script was the script and that was that. He himself tried to write a bit of extra dialogue for “Salman Rushdie”—obviously—but it was all cut out of the finished film, except for one exchange that could be heard in the background, faintly. Somebody asked him how autobiographical his books were and he replied, “You know, nobody’s ever asked me that before.”

  Now they had a place to live in New York and at close quarters the Illusion was becoming real. She was capable of saying things of such majestic narcissism that he didn’t know whether to bury his head in his hands or applaud. When the Indian movie star Aishwarya Rai was named the most beautiful Indian woman in the world in some glossy magazine or other, for example, Padma announced, in a room full of people, that she had “serious issues with that.” Her moodiness was unpredictable and extreme. About him, she was guarded. “I’m just giving it the summer and then we’ll see.” She blew cold and hot and he was beginning to be unsure if the hot made the cold worthwhile. She was dark and closed off for days at a time and then one morning the sunlight streamed out of her face. His journal was full of his own doubts. “How long can I stay with this woman whose selfishness is her most prominent characteristic?” One night they sat in Washington Square Park after a quarrelsome dinner and he told her, “This isn’t working for me.” After that for several days she was her sweetest self and he forgot why he had said what he said. She met some of his women friends and most of them approved. When he told her what they had said the positive remarks about her character mattered less to her than the comment about her perfect breasts. French Playboy found nude photographs of her and ran one on the cover, calling her his “fiancée.” She didn’t care about the words and she didn’t mind the picture being there, but she wanted to be paid for it, and he had to hire a French lawyer to work for her. This is what I’m doing now, he thought, bewildered. My girlfriend is on the cover of Playboy in the nude and I’m negotiating the fee.

  Her mother called, weeping, in a marital crisis. She wanted to get away from her husband, Padma’s stepfather. “Of course,” he said at once, “she must come and stay with us.” “That was the day I knew I loved you,” Padma told him afterward. “When you immediately agreed to look after my mom.” And yes, they loved each other. There were many years when he thought of it as a great love affair, a grand passion, and so, he believed, did she. Yes, it was unstable, and yes, perhaps it was doomed; but while it was happening he did not think of it as illusory. He thought of it as the real thing.

  Zafar came to New York and met her. He liked her, he said, but found it odd that she was closer to his own generation than his father’s, and said it was an “odd fit, the intellectual and the model.” But he thought she was “very nice” and “if that’s what you want, I support it.” He certainly saw, as everyone saw, the importance to his father of his new undefended life in New York, and that there could be no going back from that.

  That summer he didn’t want to return to Little Noyac Path, but Joseph Heller’s widow, Valerie, offered him their house on Skimhampton Road on the East Hampton–Amagansett border. She had been invited to Italy and needed the break. “I haven’t packed it up, Joe’s clothes are still in the closets, so I want somebody I know to look after it.” The idea of writing at Joseph Heller’s desk was at once exciting and disorientingly strange. “His shirts would fit you,” Valerie added. “Feel free to wear anything you like.” No, he thought. That would be going too far. No, thank you.

  He was by himself a lot because Padma was acting in a Mariah Carey movie that was shooting in Toronto, and by summer’s end he had completed a draft of Fury. When he came back to the city and gave it to the woman with whom he was trying to make a new life she had almost nothing to say about it, except about the character who looked like her. All right,
he told himself, nobody gives you everything. He set the typescript aside and they went out for the evening. In the small hours of the morning a thought occurred to him. “I am actually enjoying myself.” “Which, folks,” he wrote in his journal, “I am allowed to do.”

  There was extraordinary news. The British intelligence services had at long last downgraded the threat assessment. He was no longer at level two. He was now merely at level three, which was a big step toward normality, and if things continued to go well, they said, then in six months or so he might well be down at level four. Nobody at level four received Special Branch protection, so when that happened they could call it a day. He said, “Isn’t it already a little overcautious? When I’m in America I hail cabs, take the subway, go to the ball game, picnic in the park. Then I come back to London and I have to be in the bulletproof car again.” This is how we’d like to do it, they said. Slow and steady. We’ve been doing this too long to want to make a mistake with you now.

  Level three! It made him feel that his instincts had been justified. He had been trying to show everyone that he could take back his life, and there were friends who thought he was being a fool; Isabel Fonseca had written him long, worried emails telling him that if he didn’t “come to his senses” and hire bodyguards, “the obvious” was “inevitable.” But now, very slowly, too slowly for his liking, the safety net of the security world was beginning to release him. He had to go on proving he was right and the doom-mongers were wrong. He would regain his freedom. Level four couldn’t come soon enough.