Joseph Anton: A Memoir (11 page)

Robyn, blond, blue-eyed, anguished, not at all his type, invited him to dinner in her tiny house in Annandale and the thunderbolt hit them both hard. When she went to get the roast chicken she found it was still cold. She had been so distracted that she had forgotten to turn the oven on. Their three-year affair began the next morning and was the polar opposite of his long, calm, mostly happy relationship with Clarissa. They were strongly attracted to each other but in every other way incompatible. They yelled at each other almost every day.

She took him out into the Australian outback and he, the city mouse, was awed by her ability to survive in the wilderness. They slept under the stars and were not murdered by scorpions or eaten by kangaroos or stomped flat by the giant Old Woman Dreamtime Ancestor, Dancing. It was an extraordinary gift to be given. They transported her camels from a “station” or ranch in the Australian northwest, near Shark Bay (where he swam with dolphins and saw a house built entirely out of shells), down to new accommodations on a friend’s property to the south of Perth. He learned two new things about camels. The first thing was that camels are happily incestuous; the baby of this group was the result of an uncomplicated union between a male camel and his mother. (This incest camel was given his name, or an Australianized version of it. It became “Selman the Camel.”) And the second thing was that when a camel is upset its shit changes from dry innocuous pellets to a liquid spray that blasts out a considerable distance behind
the aggrieved dromedary. You should never stray behind a grumpy camel. These were both important lessons.

She moved to England but it proved impossible for them to live together and in their final year they broke up more than a dozen times. Two months after their last separation he awoke in the middle of the night in his new home, the house on St. Peter’s Street, and there was someone in his bedroom. He leaped naked to his feet. She had used her key to get in—he had not changed the locks—and she insisted that they “had to talk.” When he refused and tried to leave the room she grabbed him and, at one point, stamped hard with her heel on his foot. After that one of his toes lost all feeling. “If I were a woman and you were a man,” he asked her, “what would you call this?” That got through to her and she left. When she published her first and only novel,
Ancestors
, it featured a highly unpleasant American character who became the sadistic lover of the main female character. In an interview she gave to
The Guardian
she was asked, “Was he based on Salman Rushdie?” and she replied, “Not as much as in the first draft.”

There was a novel growing in him but its exact nature eluded him. He had fragments of narratives and characters, and an obstinate instinct that in spite of the enormous differences between these fragments, they all belonged in the same book. The precise shape and nature of the book remained obscure. It would be a big book, he knew that much, ranging widely over space and time. A book of journeys. That felt right. After he finished
Shame
the first part of his plan had been completed. He had dealt, as well as he knew how to deal, with the worlds from which he had come. Now he needed to connect those worlds to the very different world in which he had made his life. He was beginning to see that this, rather than India or Pakistan or politics or magic realism, would be his real subject, the one he would worry away at for the rest of his life, the great matter of
how the world joined up
, not only how the East flowed into the West and the West into the East, but how the past shaped the present while the present changed our understanding of the past, and how the imagined world, the location of dreams, art, invention and, yes, belief, leaked across the frontier
that separated it from the everyday, “real” place in which human beings mistakenly believed they lived.

This was what had happened to the shrinking planet: People—communities, cultures—no longer lived in little boxes, sealed away from one another. Now all the little boxes opened up into all the other little boxes, a man’s job in one country could be lost because of the machinations of a currency speculator from a faraway land whose name he didn’t know and whose face he would never see, and, as the theorists of the new science of chaos told us, when a butterfly flapped its wings in Brazil it could cause a hurricane in Texas. The original opening sentence of
Midnight’s Children
had been “Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence,” and even though in the end he had buried it elsewhere in the text, thinking it too Tolstoyan an opening—if there was one thing
Midnight’s Children
was not, it was not
Anna Karenina
—the idea continued to nag at him. How to tell the stories of such a world, a world in which character was no longer always destiny, in which your fate could be determined not by your own choices but by those of strangers, in which economics could be destiny, or a bomb?

He was on a plane home from Sydney, with his emotions running high after his first few overwhelming days with Robyn. He took out a little black notebook and, to control himself, made himself think about his half-formed book. This was what he had: a bunch of migrants, or, to use the British term, “immigrants,” from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, through whose personal journeys he could explore the joinings-up and also disjointednesses of
here
and
there, then
and
now
, reality and dreams. He had the beginnings of a character named Salahuddin Chamchawala, Anglicized to Saladin Chamcha, who had a difficult relationship with his father and had retreated into Englishness. He liked the name “Chamcha” for its echoes of Kafka’s poor metamorphosed dung beetle, Gregor Samsa, and of Gogol’s scavenger of dead souls, Chichikov. Also for the meaning of the name in Hindustani, literally “spoon,” but colloquially “toady” or “sycophant.” Chamcha would be a portrait of a deracinated man, fleeing from his father and country, from Indianness itself, toward an Englishness that wasn’t really letting him in, an actor with many voices who did well as
long as he remained unseen, on radio and doing TV voiceovers; whose face was, in spite of all his Anglophilia, still “the wrong colour for their colour TVs.”

And opposite Chamcha … well, a fallen angel, perhaps.

In 1982 the actor Amitabh Bachchan, the biggest star of the Bombay cinema, had suffered a near-fatal injury to his spleen while doing his own movie stunts in Bangalore. In the months that followed, his hospitalization was daily front-page news. Crowds waited outside the hospital for news, and politicians rushed to his bedside. As he lay close to death the nation held its breath; when he rose again the effect was almost Christlike. There were actors in south India who had attained almost godlike status by portraying the gods in movies called “mythologicals.” Bachchan had become semidivine even without the benefit of such a career. But what if a god-actor, afflicted by a terrible injury, had called out to his god in his hour of need and heard no reply? What if, as a result of that appalling divine silence, such a man were to begin to question, or even to lose, the faith that had sustained him? Might he, in such a crisis of the soul, begin to lose his mind? And might he in his dementia flee halfway across the world, forgetting that when you run away you can’t leave yourself behind?

What would such a falling star be called? The name came to him at once, as if it had been floating thirty-five thousand feet above sea level all this time, waiting for him to capture it.
Gibreel
. The Angel Gabriel, “Gibreel Farishta.” Gibreel and Chamcha: the angel who had been abandoned by God and the faux-Englishman who had been estranged from his father. Two lost souls in the roofless continuum of the unhoused. They would be his protagonists. This much he knew.

If Gibreel was an angel, was Chamcha a devil? Or might an angel become demonic and could a devil wear a halo too?

The journeys multiplied. Here was a fragment from somewhere else entirely. In February 1983 thirty-eight Shia Muslims, followers of a man named Sayyad Willayat Hussain Shah, were convinced by him that God would part the waters of the Arabian Sea at his request, so that they could make a pilgrimage across the ocean floor to the holy city of Karbala in Iraq. They followed him into the waters and many of them were drowned. The most extraordinary part of the incident
was that some of those who survived claimed, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, to have witnessed the miracle. He had been thinking about this story for over a year now. He didn’t want to write about Pakistan, or Shias, so in his imagination the believers became Sunni, and Indian, and their leader became female. He remembered a giant banyan tree he had once seen in south India near Mysore, a tree so large that there were huts and wells inside it, and clouds of butterflies. A village began to take shape in his mind, Titlipur, Butterfly Town, and the mystic girl moved in a butterfly cloud. As Sunnis they wanted to go to Mecca, not Karbala, but the idea of the parting of the sea was still at the heart of this tale.

And other fragments crowded in, many of them about the “city visible but unseen,” immigrant London in the Age of Thatcher. The actually-existing London neighborhoods of Southall in west London and Brick Lane to the east, where Asian immigrants lived, merged with Brixton, south of the river, to form the imaginary central London borough of Brickhall, in which a Muslim family of orthodox parents and rebellious teenage daughters ran the Shaandaar Café, its name a thinly disguised Urdu-ing of the real Brilliant Café in Southall. In this borough, interracial trouble was brewing, and perhaps, soon, the streets would burn.

And here, reinvented, was Clarissa, given the Richardsonian name of “Pamela Lovelace,” and here, transformed from desert walker into mountaineer and from Christian into Jew, was an avatar of Robyn named Alleluia Cohen, or Cone. And here, for some reason, was Clarissa’s grandmother, May Jewell, a grand old lady living by the beach in Pevensey Bay, Sussex. The Norman ships of 1066, she would tell anyone who listened, would have sailed through her living room; the coastline was a mile farther out to sea now than it had been nine centuries ago. Granny May had many tales to tell—and told them many times, always in the same, ritual phrases—of her Anglo-Argentine past on an
estancia
called Las Petacas in the company of a vague, philatelic husband, Charles “Don Carlos” Jewell, several hundred gauchos,
very fierce and proud
, and a herd of prime Argentine cattle.

When the British ruled a quarter of the world they went forth from their cold little northern island and became, on the great plains
and beneath the immense skies of India and Africa, more glamorous, extroverted, operatic personalities—bigger characters—than there was room for back home. But then the age of empires ended and they had to diminish back into their smaller, colder, grayer island selves. Granny May in her little turret house, dreaming of the infinite pampas and the prize bulls who came like unicorns to lay their heads in her lap, seemed like such a figure, and all the more interesting, less clichéd, because her story had happened not in the territories of the British Empire, but in Argentina. He wrote down a name for her in his notebook. “Rosa Diamond.”

He was flying over India now, still making notes. He remembered hearing an Indian politician on TV talking about the British prime minister and being unable to pronounce her name properly. “Mrs. Torture,” he kept saying. “Mrs. Margaret Torture.” This was unaccountably funny even though—perhaps
because
—Margaret Thatcher was obviously not a torturer. If this was to be a novel about Mrs. T.’s London, maybe there was room
—comic
room—for this variant of her name.

“The act of migration,” he wrote, “puts into crisis everything about the migrating individual or group, everything about identity and selfhood and culture and belief. So if this is a novel about migration it must be that act of putting in question. It must perform the crisis it describes.”

He wrote: “How does newness enter the world?”

And he wrote: “The Satanic verses.”

Maybe there were three books here, or seven. Or none. He had actually tried to write the “Rosa Diamond” story once already, as a screenplay for Walter Donohue at the fledgling Channel Four, but after he had finished and delivered a first draft he asked Walter if he could withdraw it, because instinct told him he needed it for the novel, though he had no idea of how or where it would fit in. Maybe the “parting of the Arabian Sea” story was best treated as a separate book, and the Satanic verses material would be strongest by itself as well.

Why was he trying to force all his eggs into this one basket? Afterward
he liked to think that the answer to these questions had come into his head when he was flying over Bombay.
These are scenes
, he found himself thinking as he flew over the city of his birth,
from the life of the Archangel Gabriel
. His conscious mind was, as usual, at odds with his unconscious, which kept throwing angels and miracles at his rationality and insisting that he find ways to incorporate them into his way of seeing. So, a book about angels and devils, but perhaps it would be difficult to know which was which. Angels could do terrible deeds in the service of allegedly holy principles, and it was possible to have much compassion for Lucifer, the rebel angel whose punishment for rising up against the stultifying absolutist harp music of God’s will was, as Daniel Defoe put it, to be “confined to a vagabond, wandering, unsettled condition … without any certain abode … without any fixed place, or space, allowed him to rest the sole of his foot upon.” This unhoused, exiled Satan was perhaps the heavenly patron of all exiles, all unhoused people, all those who were torn from their place and left floating, half-this, half-that, denied the rooted person’s comforting, defining sense of having solid ground beneath their feet. So, scenes from the life of the Archangel and the Archdevil, in which his own sympathy lay more on the Devil’s side, because, as Blake said of Milton, a true poet was of the Devil’s party.