The Satanic Verses (6 page)

           
What a nasty surprise! He had come awake with a jolt, and sat stiffly in his
chair, ignoring alcohol and peanuts. How had the past bubbled up, in
transmogrified vowels and vocab? What next? Would he take to putting
coconut-oil in his hair? Would he take to squeezing his nostrils between thumb
and forefinger, blowing noisily and drawing forth a glutinous silver arc of
muck? Would he become a devotee of professional wrestling? What further,
diabolic humiliations were in store? He should have known it was a mistake to
go
home
, after so long, how could it be other than a regression; it was an
unnatural journey; a denial of time; a revolt against history; the whole thing
was bound to be a disaster.

           
I'm not myself
, he thought as a faint fluttering feeling began in the
vicinity of his heart. But what does that mean, anyway, he added bitterly.
After all, "les acteurs ne sont pas des gens", as the great ham
Frederick had explained in
Les Enfants du Paradis
. Masks beneath masks
until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.

           
The seatbelt light came on, the captain's voice warned of air turbulence, they
dropped in and out of air pockets. The desert lurched about beneath them and
the migrant labourer who had boarded at Qatar clutched at his giant transistor
radio and began to retch. Chamcha noticed that the man had not fastened his
belt, and pulled himself together, bringing his voice back to its haughtiest
English pitch. "Look here, why don't you. . ." he indicated, but the
sick man, between bursts of heaving into the paper bag which Saladin had handed
him just in time, shook his head, shrugged, replied: "Sahib, for what? If
Allah wishes me to die, I shall die. If he does not, I shall not. Then of what
use is the safety?"

           
Damn you, India, Saladin Chamcha cursed silently, sinking back into his seat.
To hell with you, I escaped your clutches long ago, you won't get your hooks into
me again, you cannot drag me back.

           
Once upon a time―
it was and it was not so
, as the old stories used
to say,
it happened and it never did
―maybe, then, or maybe not, a
ten-year-old boy from Scandal Point in Bombay found a wallet lying in the
Street outside his home. He was on the way home from school, having just
descended from the school bus on which he had been obliged to sit squashed
between the adhesive sweatiness of boys in shorts and be deafened by their
noise, and because even in those days he was a person who recoiled from
raucousness, jostling and the perspiration of strangers he was feeling faintly
nauseated by the long, bumpy ride home. However, when he saw the black leather
billfold lying at his feet, the nausea vanished, and he bent down excitedly and
grabbed,―opened,―and found, to his delight, that it was full of
cash,―and not merely rupees, but real money, negotiable on black markets
and international exchanges,―pounds! Pounds sterling, from Proper London
in the fabled country of Vilayet across the black water and far away. Dazzled
by the thick wad of foreign currency, the boy raised his eyes to make sure he
had not been observed, and for a moment it seemed to him that a rainbow had
arched down to him from the heavens, a rainbow like an angel's breath, like an
answered prayer, coming to an end in the very spot on which he stood. His
fingers trembled as they reached into the wallet, towards the fabulous hoard.

           
"Give it." It seemed to him in later life that his father had been
spying on him throughout his childhood, and even though Changez Chamchawala was
a big man, a giant even, to say nothing of his wealth and public standing, he
still always had the lightness of foot and also the inclination to sneak up
behind his son and spoil whatever he was doing, whipping the young Salahuddin's
bedsheet off at night to reveal the shameful penis in the clutching, red hand.
And he could smell money from a hundred and one miles away, even through the
stink of chemicals and fertilizer that always hung around him owing to his
being the country's largest manufacturer of agricultural sprays and fluids and
artificial dung. Changez Chamchawala, philanthropist, philanderer, living
legend, leading light of the nationalist movement, sprang from the gateway of
his home to pluck a bulging wallet from his son's frustrated hand. "Tch
tch," he admonished, pocketing the pounds sterling, "you should not
pick things up from the street. The ground is dirty, and money is dirtier,
anyway."

           
On a shelf of Changez Chamchawala's teak-lined study, beside a ten-volume set
of the Richard Burton translation of the Arabian Nights, which was being slowly
devoured by mildew and bookworm owing to the deep-seated prejudice against
books which led Changez to own thousands of the pernicious things in order to
humiliate them by leaving them to rot unread, there stood a magic lamp, a
brightly polished copper-and-brass avatar of Aladdin's very own
genie-container: a lamp begging to be rubbed. But Changez neither rubbed it nor
permitted it to be rubbed by, for example, his son. "One day," he
assured the boy, "you'll have it for yourself. Then rub and rub as much as
you like and see what doesn't come to you. Just now, but, it is mine." The
promise of the magic lamp infected Master Salahuddin with the notion that one
day his troubles would end and his innermost desires would be gratified, and
all he had to do was wait it out; but then there was the incident of the
wallet, when the magic of a rainbow had worked for him, not for his father but
for him, and Changez Chamchawala had stolen the crock of gold. After that the
son became convinced that his father would smother all his hopes unless he got
away, and from that moment he became desperate to leave, to escape, to place
oceans between the great man and himself.

           
Salahuddin Chamchawala had understood by his thirteenth year that he was
destined for that cool Vilayet full of the crisp promises of pounds sterling at
which the magic billfold had hinted, and he grew increasingly impatient of that
Bombay of dust, vulgarity, policemen in shorts, transvestites, movie fanzines,
pavement sleepers and the rumoured singing whores of Grant Road who had begun
as devotees of the Yellamma cult in Karnataka but ended up here as dancers in
the more prosaic temples of the flesh. He was fed up of textile factories and
local trains and all the confusion and superabundance of the place, and longed
for that dream-Vilayet of poise and moderation that had come to obsess him by
night and day. His favourite playground rhymes were those that yearned for
foreign cities: kitchy-con kitchy-ki kitchy-con stanty-eye kitchy-ople
kitchy-cople kitchyCon-stanti-nople. And his favourite game was the version of
grandmother's footsteps in which, when he was it, he would turn his back on
upcreeping playmates to gabble out, like a mantra, like a spell, the six
letters of his dream-city,
ellowen deeowen
. In his secret heart, he
crept silently up on London, letter by letter, just as his friends crept up to him.
Ellowen deeowen London
.

           
The mutation of Salahuddin Chamchawala into Saladin Chamcha began, it will be
seen, in old Bombay, long before he got close enough to hear the lions of
Trafalgar roar. When the England cricket team played India at the Brabourne
Stadium, he prayed for an England victory, for the game's creators to defeat
the local upstarts, for the proper order of things to be maintained. (But the
games were invariably drawn, owing to the featherbed somnolence of the
Brabourne Stadium wicket; the great issue, creator versus imitator, colonizer
against colonized, had perforce to remain unresolved.)

           
In his thirteenth year he was old enough to play on the rocks at Scandal Point
without having to be watched over by his ayah, Kasturba. And one day (it was
so, it was not so), he strolled out of the house, that ample, crumbling,
salt-caked building in the Parsi style, all columns and shutters and little
balconies, and through the garden that was his father's pride and joy and which
in a certain evening light could give the impression of being infinite (and
which was also enigmatic, an unsolved riddle, because nobody, not his father,
not the gardener, could tell him the names of most of the plants and trees),
and out through the main gateway, a grandiose folly, a reproduction of the
Roman triumphal arch of Septimius Severus, and across the wild insanity of the
street, and over the sea wall, and so at last on to the broad expanse of shiny
black rocks with their little shrimpy pools. Christian girls giggled in frocks,
men with furled umbrellas stood silent and fixed upon the blue horizon. In a
hollow of black stone Salahuddin saw a man in a dhoti bending over a pool.
Their eyes met, and the man beckoned him with a single finger which he then
laid across his lips.
Shh
, and the mystery of rock-pools drew the boy
towards the stranger. He was a creature of bone. Spectacles framed in what
might have been ivory. His finger curling, curling, like a baited hook, come. When
Salahuddin came down the other grasped him, put a hand around his mouth and
forced his young hand between old and fleshless legs, to feel the fleshbone
there. The dhoti open to the winds. Salahuddin had never known how to fight; he
did what he was forced to do, and then the other simply turned away from him
and let him go.

           
After that Salahuddin never went to the rocks at Scandal Point; nor did he tell
anyone what had happened, knowing the neurasthenic crises it would unleash in
his mother and suspecting that his father would say it was his own fault. It
seemed to him that everything loathsome, everything he had come to revile about
his home town, had come together in the stranger's bony embrace, and now that
he had escaped that evil skeleton he must also escape Bombay, or die. He began
to concentrate fiercely upon this idea, to fix his will upon it at all times,
eating shitting sleeping, convincing himself that he could make the miracle
happen even without his father's lamp to help him out. He dreamed of flying out
of his bedroom window to discover that there, below him, was―not
Bombay―but Proper London itself, Bigben Nelsonscolumn Lordstavern
Bloodytower Queen. But as he floated out over the great metropolis he felt
himself beginning to lose height, and no matter how hard he struggled kicked
swam-in-air he continued to spiral slowly downwards to earth, then faster, then
faster still, until he was screaming headfirst down towards the city,
Saintpauls, Puddinglane, Threadneedlestreet, zeroing in on London like a bomb.

           
* * * * *

           
When the impossible happened, and his father, out of the blue, offered him an
English education,
to get me out of the way
, he thought,
otherwise
why, it's obvious, but don't look a gift horse andsoforth
, his mother
Nasreen Chamchawala refused to cry, and volunteered, instead, the benefit of
her advice. "Don't go dirty like those English," she warned him.
"They wipe their bee tee ems with paper only. Also, they get into each
other's dirty bathwater." These vile slanders proved to Salahuddin that
his mother was doing her damnedest to prevent him from leaving, and in spite of
their mutual love he replied, "It is inconceivable, Ammi, what you say.
England is a great civilization, what are you talking, bunk."

           
She smiled her little nervy smile and did not argue. And, later, stood dry-eyed
beneath the triumphal arch of a gateway and would not go to Santacruz airport
to see him off. Her only child. She heaped garlands around his neck until he
grew dizzy with the cloying perfumes of mother-love.

           
Nasreen Chamchawala was the slightest, most fragile of women, her bones like
tinkas, like minute slivers of wood. To make up for her physical insignificance
she took at an early age to dressing with a certain outrageous, excessive
verve. Her sari- patterns were dazzling, even garish: lemon silk adorned with
huge brocade diamonds, dizzy black-and-white Op Art swirls, gigantic lipstick
kisses on a bright white ground. People forgave her her lurid taste because she
wore the blinding garments with such innocence; because the voice emanating
from that textile cacophony was so tiny and hesitant and proper. And because of
her soirees.

           
Each Friday of her married life, Nasreen would fill the halls of the
Chamchawala residence, those usually tenebrous chambers like great hollow
burial vaults, with bright light and brittle friends. When Salahuddin was a
little boy he had insisted on playing doorman, and would greet the jewelled and
lacquered guests with great gravity, permitting them to pat him on the head and
call him
cuteso
and
chweetie-pie
. On Fridays the house was full
of noise; there were musicians, singers, dancers, the latest Western hits as
heard on Radio Ceylon, raucous puppet-shows in which painted clay rajahs rode
puppet-stallions, decapitating enemy marionettes with imprecations and wooden
swords. During the rest of the week, however, Nasreen would stalk the house
warily, a pigeon of a woman walking on tiptoed feet through the gloom, as if
she were afraid to disturb the shadowed silence; and her son, walking in her
footsteps, also learned to lighten his footfall lest he rouse whatever goblin
or afreet might be lying in wait.

           
But: Nasreen Chamchawala's caution failed to save her life. The horror seized
and murdered her when she believed herself most safe, clad in a sari covered in
cheap newspaper photos and headlines, bathed in chandelier-light, surrounded by
her friends.

           
* * * * *