Luka and the Fire of Life

by Salman Rushdie

  He needed to think. He remembered the golden rule that one of his schoolteachers, the science master Mr. Sherlock, a man with a pipe and a magnifying glass who always dressed too warmly for the climate, had taught him: eliminate the impossible, and what remains, however improbable, is the truth. “But,” thought Luka, “what do I do when it’s the impossible that remains, when the impossible is the only explanation?” He answered his own question according to Mr. Sherlock’s golden rule. “Then the impossible must be the truth.” And the impossible explanation, in this case, was that if he wasn’t moving through the world, then the world must be moving past him. He looked down at his ticklish feet. It was true! The ground was slipping along beneath his bare feet, tickling him gently as it went by. Already he had left the street vendor far behind.

  He looked at Dog and Bear, who had started behaving as if they were on an ice rink without skates on, slipping and sliding on the moving roadway and making loud, surprised protesting noises. Luka turned to Nobodaddy. “You’re doing this, aren’t you?” he accused him, and Nobodaddy widened his eyes, spread his arms, and replied innocently, “What? Excuse me? Is there a difficulty? I thought we were in a hurry.”

  The worst, or maybe the best, thing about Nobodaddy was that he always behaved exactly like Rashid Khalifa. He had Rashid’s facial movements and hand gestures and laugh, and he even acted innocent when he knew perfectly well he wasn’t, just the way Rashid did when he was clumsy or wrong or planning a special surprise. His voice was Rashid’s voice and his wobbly tummy was Rashid’s stomach and he was even beginning to treat Luka with a spoiling affection that was totally Rashid-like. All his life Luka had known that his mother was the one who laid down the law and had to be handled with care, while Rashid was, quite frankly, a bit soft. Was it possible that Rashid’s character had crept into his would-be nemesis, Nobodaddy? Was that why this scary anti-Rashid seemed actually to be trying to help Luka out?

  “Okay, stop the world,” Luka commanded Nobodaddy. “There are some things we need to get absolutely clear before anyone goes anywhere with you.”

  He thought he heard, high up and far away, the noise of machinery grinding to a halt with a distant screeching noise, and his feet stopped being tickled, and Dog and Bear stopped sliding about. They had gone quite some distance from home already, and were standing, by chance (or not by chance), on more or less the exact spot where Luka had been on the day he shouted at Captain Aag while he and Rashid were watching the sad parade of the circus animals in their cages. The city was waking up. Smoke rose from roadside canteens where strong, sweet milky tea was being brewed. A few early-rising shopkeepers were taking down their shutters and revealing long narrow caverns filled with fabrics, foodstuffs, and pills. A policeman with a long stick yawned as he walked by in dark blue shorts. Cows were still sleeping on the sidewalk, and so were people, but bicycles and motor scooters were already busying the street. A jam-packed bus went past taking people to the industrial zone, where the sadness factories used to stand. Things had changed in Kahani, and sadness was no longer the city’s principal export, as it had been when Luka’s brother, Haroun, was young. The demand for glumfish had fallen away, and people preferred to eat better-tasting produce from farther away, the grinning eels of the south, the meat of the northern hope-deer, and, more and more, the vegetarian and nonvegetarian foods available from the Cheery Orchard stores that were opening everywhere you looked. People wanted to feel good even when there wasn’t that much to feel good about, and so the sadness factories had been shut down and turned into Obliviums, giant malls where everyone went to dance, shop, pretend, and forget. Luka, however, was not in the mood for self-deception. He wanted answers.

  “No more mystification,” he said firmly. “Straight answers to straight questions, please.” Now he had to fight to control his voice, but he succeeded, and fought down the dreadful feelings that were filling his whole body. “Number one,” he cried. “Who sent you? Where do you come from? Where”—and here Luka paused, because the question was a terrifying one—“when your … work … is done … if it’s done, that is … which it won’t be … but if it was done … where do you plan to go?”

  “That is numbers one, two, and three, to be exact,” said Nobodaddy, as, to the watching Luka’s horrified astonishment, a strolling cow walked right through him and went on about its business, “but let’s not quibble.” Then he thought deeply for a long, silent moment. “Are you familiar,” he said finally, “with the Bang?”

  “The Big Bang?” Luka asked. “Or some other Bang I don’t know about?”

  “There was only one Bang,” said Nobodaddy, “so the adjective Big is redundant and meaningless. The Bang would only be Big if there was at least one other Little or Medium-Sized or even Bigger Bang to compare it with, and to differentiate it from.”

  Luka didn’t want to waste time arguing. “Yes, I’ve heard of it,” he said.

  “Then tell me,” said Nobodaddy, “what was there before the Bang?”

  Now this was one of those Enormous Questions that Luka had often tried to answer, without having any real success. “What was it that had gone Bang anyway?” he asked himself. “And how could everything go off with a Bang if there was nothing there to begin with?” It made his head hurt to think about the Bang and so, of course, he didn’t think about it very much.

  “I know what the answer is supposed to be,” he said. “It’s supposed to be ‘Nothing,’ but I don’t really get that, to be honest with you. And anyway,” he added as sternly as he could manage, “that has nothing to do with the subject under discussion.”

  Nobodaddy wagged a finger under his nose. “On the contrary, young would-be assassin,” he said, “it has everything to do with it. Because if the whole universe could just explode out of Nothing and then just Be, don’t you see that the opposite could also be true? That it’s possible to implode and Un-Be as well as to explode and Be? That all human beings, Napoleon Bonaparte, for example, or the Emperor Akbar, or Angelina Jolie, or your father, could simply return to Nothing once they’re … done? In a sort of Little, by which I mean ‘personal,’ Un-Bang?”

  “Un-Bang?” Luka repeated, in some confusion.

  “Exactly,” said Nobodaddy. “Not a spreading out but a closing in.”

  “Are you telling me,” Luka said, feeling an anger rise in him, “that my father is about to implode into Nothing? Is that what you’re trying to say?”

  Nobodaddy did not answer.

  “Then what about life after dea—,” Luka began, then stopped himself, slapped himself on the head, and rephrased the question. “What about Paradise?”

  Nobodaddy said nothing.

  “Are you trying to say that it doesn’t exist?” Luka demanded. “Because if that’s what you are trying to say, I know a lot of people in this town who will give you a pretty heated argument.”

  Not a word from Nobodaddy.

  “You’re suddenly very silent,” Luka said crossly. “Maybe you don’t know as many answers as you pretend you do either. Maybe you’re not as big a deal as you think.”

  “Ignore him,” said Dog, the bear, in an oddly big-brotherly way. “You really should go home now.”

  “Your mother will be worrying,” said Bear, the dog.

  Luka was still not used to the animals’ new powers of speech. “I want an answer before I go,” he said stubbornly.

  Nobodaddy nodded, slowly, as if a conversation he had been having with someone invisible had just come to an end. “I can tell you this,” he said. “That when my work is done, when I have absorbed your father’s … well, never mind what I will have absorbed,” he added hastily, seeing the look on Luka’s face, “then I—yes, I, myself!—will implode. I will collapse into myself, and simply cease to Be.”

  Luka was astounded. “You? You’re the one who’s going to die?”

  “Un-Be,” Nobodaddy corrected him. “That’s the technical term. And as I have answered your third question first, I should add that, one, nobod
y sent me, but somebody did send for me; and, two, I don’t exactly come from somewhere, but I do come from someone. And if you think about it for a moment, you will know who that somebody and that someone are, especially as they are one and the same, and I am the spitting image of them Both, who are only One.”

  The silver sun brightened in the east. Dog and Bear looked agitated. It was definitely time for Luka to be at home getting ready for the school day. Soraya would be beside herself with worry. Maybe she had sent Haroun out to search the neighborhood streets. When Luka got home for breakfast he was going to be in nineteen different kinds of trouble. But Luka wasn’t thinking about breakfast, or about school. This was not the time for cereal, Ratshit, or geography. He was thinking about things he had hardly ever thought about in his life. He was thinking about Life and Dea—, well, Un-Life. He still couldn’t bear that other, incomplete word.

  “And the Fire of Life can save my father,” he said.

  “If you can steal it for him,” said Nobodaddy, “then, yes, without a doubt.”

  “And it will give Dog and Bear back their real lives as well.”

  “It will.”

  “And what will happen to you then? If we succeed?”

  Nobodaddy did not reply.

  “You won’t have to implode, will you? You won’t Un-Be?”

  “That is so,” Nobodaddy said. “It won’t be my time.”

  “So you’ll go away.”

  “Yes,” said Nobodaddy.

  “You’ll go away and never come back.”

  “Never is a long word,” said Nobodaddy.

  “Okay … but you won’t come back for a long time.”

  Nobodaddy inclined his head in agreement.

  “A long, long time,” Luka insisted.

  Nobodaddy pursed his lips and spread out his arms in a kind of surrender.

  “A long, long, long—”

  “Don’t push your luck,” Nobodaddy said sharply.

  “And that’s why you’re trying to help us, isn’t it?” Luka concluded. “You don’t want to implode. You’re trying to save your own skin.”

  “I don’t have skin,” said Nobodaddy.

  “I don’t trust him,” said Bear, the dog.

  “I don’t like him,” said Dog, the bear.

  “I don’t believe a word he says,” said Bear, the dog.

  “I don’t think for one moment that he’ll just go away,” said Dog, the bear.

  “It’s a trick,” said Bear, the dog.

  “It’s a trap,” said Dog, the bear.

  “There’s a catch,” said Bear, the dog.

  “There must be a catch,” said Dog, the bear.

  “Ask him,” said Bear, the dog.

  Nobodaddy took off his Panama hat, scratched his bald head, lowered his eyes, and sighed.

  “Yes,” he said. “There’s a catch.”

  Actually, there were two catches. The first, according to Nobodaddy, was that nobody in the entire recorded history of the World of Magic had ever successfully stolen the Fire of Life, which was protected in so many ways that, according to Nobodaddy, there wasn’t enough time to list one-tenth of them. The dangers were almost infinite, the risks dizzying, and only the most foolhardy adventurer would even think of attempting such a feat.

  “It’s never been done?” Luka asked.

  “Never successfully,” Nobodaddy replied.

  “What happened to the people who tried?” Luka demanded.

  Nobodaddy looked grim. “You don’t want to know,” he said.

  “Okay,” said Luka, “so what’s the second catch?”

  Darkness fell—not everywhere, but just around Luka, Dog, Bear, and their strange companion. It was as if a cloud had covered the sun, except that the sun could still be seen shining in the eastern sky. Nobodaddy seemed to darken, too. The temperature dropped. The noises of the day faded away. Finally Nobodaddy spoke in a low, heavy voice.

  “Somebody has to die,” he said.

  Luka was angry, confused, and frightened all at the same time. “What do you mean?” he shouted. “What sort of a catch is that?”

  “Once someone like me has been summoned,” said Nobodaddy, “someone alive must pay for that summons with a life. I’m sorry, but that’s the rule.”

  “That’s a stupid rule, to be honest with you,” said Luka as powerfully as he could, even though his stomach was churning. “Who made a stupid rule like that?”

  “Who made the Laws of Gravity, or Motion, or Thermodynamics?” Nobodaddy asked. “Maybe you know who discovered them, but that’s not the same thing, is it? Who invented Time or Love or Music? Some things just Are, according to their own Principles, and you can’t do a thing about it, and neither can I.”

  Slowly, slowly, the darkness that had encircled the four of them faded away, and the silver sunlight touched their faces. Luka realized with horror that Nobodaddy wasn’t as see-through as he had been before: which could only mean that Rashid Khalifa had grown weaker in his Sleep. That settled it. They didn’t have time to waste on chitchat. “Will you show me the way to the Mountain?” Luka asked Nobodaddy, who grinned a grin that wasn’t at all humorous, and then nodded his head. “Okay,” said Luka. “Then let’s go.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Left Bank of

  the River of Time

  THE RIVER SILSILA was not a beautiful river, in Luka’s opinion. Maybe it started out prettily enough up in the mountains somewhere, as a shining, skipping stream rushing over smooth stones, but down here in the coastal plains it had grown fat, lazy, and dirty. It slopped from side to side in wide, snaky curves, and it was mostly a pale brown color, except that in places it looked green and slimy, and then there were purple oil slicks on the surface here and there, and the occasional dead cows floating sadly out to sea. It was a dangerous river, too, because it ran at different speeds; it could accelerate without warning and sweep your boat away, or it could bog you down in a slowly swirling eddy and you would be stuck there for hours, calling uselessly for help. There were treacherous shallows that could maroon you on a sandbank, or sink a large vessel, a ferryboat, or a barge if it hit an underwater rock. There were murky depths in which Luka imagined that almost anything ugly, unclean, and glutinous might be living, and certainly there was not, anywhere in all the filthy flow, anything worth catching to eat. If you fell into the Silsila you were supposed to go to the hospital to be cleaned up, and you were given tetanus shots as well.

  The only good thing about the river was that over the course of thousands of years it had pushed up high embankments of earth, called Bunds, on both banks, so that it was hidden from view unless you actually climbed up on top of those dikes and looked down at the liquid serpent as it flowed along, and smelled its horrid smell. And thanks to the Bunds the river never flooded, not even in the rainy season when its level rose and rose, so the city was spared the nightmare of that brown, green, and purple water full of nameless slimy monsters and dead cattle pouring down into its streets.

  The Silsila was a working river; it transported grain and cotton and wood and fuel from the countryside through the city to the sea, but the bargees handling the freight on the long, flat lighters were renowned for their foul tempers; they spoke to you rudely, they shouldered you out of their way on the sidewalk, and Rashid Khalifa liked to say that the Old Man of the River had cursed them and made them dangerous and bad, like the river itself. The citizens of Kahani tried to ignore the river as much as possible, but now Luka found himself standing right beside its left, that was to say its southern, Bund, wondering how he had arrived there without moving a muscle. Dog, the bear, and Bear, the dog, were right beside him, looking as puzzled as he was, and of course Nobodaddy was there, too, grinning his mysterious grin, which looked exactly like Rashid Khalifa’s grin, but wasn’t.

  “What are we doing here?” Luka demanded.

  “Your wish was my command,” said Nobodaddy, folding his arms across his chest. “ ‘Let’s go,’ you said, so we went. Shazam!
”

  “As if he’s some sort of genie from some kind of lamp,” snorted Dog, the bear, in Haroun’s loud voice. “As if we don’t know that the true Wonderful Lamp belongs to Prince Aladdin and his princess, Badr al-Budur, and is therefore not in this place.”

  “Um,” said Bear, the dog, who was the soft-spoken, practical type, “how many wishes exactly is he offering? And can anyone wish?”

  “He’s no genie,” Dog, the bear, said bearishly. “Nobody rubbed anything.”

  Luka was still puzzled. “What’s the point of coming to the River Stinky, anyway?” he asked. “It just goes out into the sea, so, to be honest with you, it wouldn’t be any use to us even if it wasn’t the Stinky, which it is.”

  “Are you sure about that?” Nobodaddy asked. “Don’t you want to climb up to the top of the Bund and have a look?”

  So Luka climbed, and Dog and Bear climbed with him, and Nobodaddy was somehow waiting at the top when they got there, looking cool as cola on the rocks. But right then Luka wasn’t interested in how Nobodaddy got to the top of the Bund because he was looking at something that was literally out of this world. The river flowing where the stinky Silsila should have been was a completely different river.