The Satanic Verses (7 page)

           
By then five and a half years had passed since young Salahuddin, garlanded and
warned, boarded a Douglas D C-8 and journeyed into the west. Ahead of him,
England; beside him, his father, Changez Chamchawala; below him, home and beauty.
Like Nasreen, the future Saladin had never found it easy to cry.

           
On that first aeroplane he read science fiction tales of interplanetary
migration: Asimov's
Foundation
, Ray Bradbury's
Martian Chronicles
.
He imagined the DC-8 was the mother ship, bearing the Chosen, the Elect of God
and man, across unthinkable distances, travelling for generations, breeding
eugenically, that their seed might one day take root somewhere in a brave new
world beneath a yellow sun. He corrected himself: not the mother but the father
ship, because there he was, after all, the great man, Abbu, Dad.
Thirteen-year-old Salahuddin, setting aside recent doubts and grievances,
entered once again his childish adoration of his father, because he had, had,
had worshipped him, he was a great father until you started growing a mind of
your own, and then to argue with him was called a betrayal of his love, but
never mind that now,
I accuse him of becoming my supreme being, so that what
happened was like a loss of faith
. . . yes, the father ship, an aircraft
was not a flying womb but a metal phallus, and the passengers were spermatozoa
waiting to be spilt.

           
Five and a half hours of time zones; turn your watch upside down in Bombay and
you see the time in London.
My father
, Chamcha would think, years later,
in the midst of his bitterness.
I accuse him of inverting Time
.

           
How far did they fly? Five and a half thousand as the crow. Or: from Indianness
to Englishness, an immeasurable distance. Or, not very far at all, because they
rose from one great city, fell to another. The distance between cities is
always small; a villager, travelling a hundred miles to town, traverses
emptier, darker, more terrifying space.

           
What Changez Chamchawala did when the aeroplane took off: trying not to let his
son see him doing it, he crossed two pairs of fingers on each hand, and rotated
both his thumbs.

           
And when they were installed in a hotel within a few feet of the ancient
location of the Tyburn tree, Changez said to his son: "Take. This belongs
to you." And held out, at arm's length, a black billfold about whose
identity there could be no mistake. "You are a man now. Take."

           
The return of the confiscated wallet, complete with all its currency, proved to
be one of Changez Chamchawala's little traps. Salahuddin had been deceived by
these all his life. Whenever his father wanted to punish him, he would offer
him a present, a bar of imported chocolate or a tin of Kraft cheese, and would
then grab him when he came to get it. "Donkey," Changez scorned his
infant son. "Always, always, the carrot leads you to my stick."

           
Salahuddin in London took the proffered wallet, accepting the gift of manhood;
whereupon his father said: "Now that you are a man, it is for you to look
after your old father while we are in London town. You pay all the bills."

           
January, 1961. A year you could turn upside down and it would still, unlike
your watch, tell the same time. It was winter; but when Salahuddin Chamchawala
began to shiver in his hotel room, it was because he was scared halfway out of
his wits; his crock of gold had turned, suddenly, into a sorcerer's curse.

           
Those two weeks in London before he went to his boarding school turned into a
nightmare of cash-tills and calculations, because Changez had meant exactly
what he said and never put his hand into his own pocket once. Salahuddin had to
buy his own clothes, such as a double-breasted blue serge mackintosh and seven
blue-and-white striped Van Heusen shirts with detachable semi-stiff collars
which Changez made him wear every day, to get used to the studs, and Salahuddin
felt as if a blunt knife were being pushed in just beneath his newly broken
Adam's-apple; and he had to make sure there would be enough for the hotel room,
and everything, so that he was too nervous to ask his father if they could go
to a movie, not even one, not even
The Pure Hell of St Trinians,
or to
eat out, not a single Chinese meal, and in later years he would remember
nothing of his first fortnight in his beloved Ellowen Deeowen except pounds
shillings pence, like the disciple of the philosopher-king Chanakya who asked
the great man what he meant by saying one could live in the world and also not
live in it, and who was told to carry a brim-full pitcher of water through a
holiday crowd without spilling a drop, on pain of death, so that when he
returned he was unable to describe the day's festivities, having been like a
blind man, seeing only the jug on his head.

           
Changez Chamchawala became very still in those days, seeming not to care if he
ate or drank or did any damn thing, he was happy sitting in the hotel room
watching television, especially when the Flintstones were on, because, he told
his son, that Wilma bibi reminded him of Nasreen. Salahuddin tried to prove he
was a man by fasting right along with his father, trying to outlast him, but he
never managed it, and when the pangs got too strong he went out of the hotel to
the cheap joint nearby where you could buy take-away roast chickens that hung
greasily in the window, turning slowly on their spits. When he brought the
chicken into the hotel lobby he became embarrassed, not wanting the staff to
see, so he stuffed it inside double-breasted serge and went up in the lift
reeking of spit-roast, his mackintosh bulging, his face turning red.
Chicken-breasted beneath the gaze of dowagers and liftwallahs he felt the birth
of that implacable rage which would burn within him, undiminished, for over a
quarter of a century; which would boil away his childhood father-worship and
make him a secular man, who would do his best, thereafter, to live without a
god of any type; which would fuel, perhaps, his determination to become the
thing his father was-not-could-never-be, that is, a goodandproper Englishman.
Yes, an English, even if his mother had been right all along, even if there was
only paper in the toilets and tepid, used water full of mud and soap to step
into after taking exercise, even if it meant a lifetime spent amongst
winter-naked trees whose fingers clutched despairingly at the few, pale hours
of watery, filtered light. On winter nights he, who had never slept beneath
more than a sheet, lay beneath mountains of wool and felt like a figure in an
ancient myth, condemned by the gods to have a boulder pressing down upon his
chest; but never mind, he would be English, even if his classmates giggled at
his voice and excluded him from their secrets, because these exclusions only
increased his determination, and that was when he began to act, to find masks
that these fellows would recognize, paleface masks, clown-masks, until he
fooled them into thinking he was
okay
, he was
people-like-us
. He
fooled them the way a sensitive human being can persuade gorillas to accept him
into their family, to fondle and caress and stuff bananas in his mouth.

           
(After he had settled up the last bill, and the wallet he had once found at a
rainbow's end was empty, his father said to him: "See now. You pay your
way. I've made a man of you." But what man? That's what fathers never
know. Not in advance; not until it's too late.)

           
One day soon after he started at the school he came down to breakfast to find a
kipper on his plate. He sat there staring at it, not knowing where to begin.
Then he cut into it, and got a mouthful of tiny bones. And after extracting
them all, another mouthful, more bones. His fellow-pupils watched him suffer in
silence; not one of them said, here, let me show you, you eat it in this way. It
took him ninety minutes to eat the fish and he was not permitted to rise from
the table until it was done. By that time he was shaking, and if he had been
able to cry he would have done so. Then the thought occurred to him that he had
been taught an important lesson. England was a peculiar-tasting smoked fish
full of spikes and bones, and nobody would ever tell him how to eat it. He
discovered that he was a bloody-minded person. "I'll show them all,"
he swore. "You see if I don't." The eaten kipper was his first
victory, the first step in his conquest of England.

           
William the Conqueror, it is said, began by eating a mouthful of English sand.

           
* * * * *

           
Five years later he was back home after leaving school, waiting until the
English university term began, and his transmutation into a Vilayeti was well
advanced. "See how well he complains," Nasreen teased him in front of
his father. "About everything he has such big-big criticisms, the fans are
fixed too. loosely to the roof and will fall to slice our heads off in our
sleep, he says, and the food is too fattening, why we don't cook some things
without frying, he wants to know, the top-floor balconies are unsafe and the
paint is peeled, why can't we take pride in our surroundings, isn't it, and the
garden is overgrown, we are just jungle people, he thinks so, and look how
coarse our movies are, now he doesn't enjoy, and so much disease you can't even
drink water from the tap, my god, he really got an education, husband, our little
Sallu, England-returned, and talking so fine and all."

           
They were walking on the lawn in the evening, watching the sun dive into the
sea, wandering in the shade of those great spreading trees, some snaky some
bearded, which Salahuddin (who now called himself Saladin after the fashion of
the English school, but would remain Chamchawala for a while yet, until a
theatrical agent shortened his name for commercial reasons) had begun to be
able to name, jackfruit, banyan, jacaranda, flame of the forest, plane. Small
chhooi-mooi touch-me-not plants grew at the foot of the tree of his own life,
the walnut-tree that Changez had planted with his own hands on the day of the
coming of the son. Father and son at the birth-tree were both awkward, unable to
respond properly to Nasreen's gentle fun. Saladin had been seized by the
melancholy notion that the garden had been a better place before he knew its
names, that something had been lost which he would never be able to regain. And
Changez Chamchawala found that he could no longer look his son in the eye,
because the bitterness he saw came close to freezing his heart. When he spoke,
turning roughly away from the eighteen-year-old walnut in which, at times
during their long separations, he had imagined his only son's soul to reside,
the words came out incorrectly and made him sound like the rigid, cold figure
he had hoped he would never become, and feared he could not avoid.

           
"Tell your son," Changez boomed at Nasreen, "that if he went
abroad to learn contempt for his own kind, then his own kind can feel nothing
but scorn for him. What is he? A fauntleroy, a grand panjandrum? Is this my
fate: to lose a son and find a freak?"

           
"Whatever I am, father dear," Saladin told the older man, "I owe
it all to you."

           
It was their last family chat. All that summer feelings continued to run high,
for all Nasreen's attempts at mediation,
you must apologize to your father,
darling, poor man is suffering like the devil but his pride won't let him hug
you
. Even the ayah Kasturba and the old bearer Vallabh, her husband,
attempted to mediate but neither father nor son would bend. "Same material
is the problem," Kasturba told Nasreen. "Daddy and sonny, same
material, same to same."

           
When the war with Pakistan began that September Nasreen decided, with a kind of
defiance, that she would not cancel her Friday parties, "to show that
Hindus-Muslims can love as well as hate," she pointed out. Changez saw a
look in her eyes and did not attempt to argue, but set the servants to putting
blackout curtains over all the windows instead. That night, for the last time,
Saladin Chamchawala played his old role of doorman, dressed up in an English
dinner-jacket, and when the guests came―the same old guests, dusted with
the grey powders of age but otherwise the same―they bestowed upon him the
same old pats and kisses, the nostalgic benedictions of his youth. "Look
how grown," they were saying. "Just a darling, what to say."
They were all trying to hide their fear of the war,
danger of air-raids
,
the radio said, and when they ruffled Saladin's hair their hands were a little
too shaky, or alternatively a little too rough.

           
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.

           
* * * * *