Joseph Anton: A Memoir (73 page)

Snapshot of the day when
. They had decided to stay on after the working part of the trip was completed and have Christmas in the sun, and the police had agreed that they could do without protection as nobody would know they were still in the country. The novelist Rodney Hall, who lived in a beautiful, secluded seaside property at Bermagui, New South Wales, four hours’ drive south of Sydney, had invited them to come and stay. Christmas in Bermagui, Rodney assured them, would be totally private, and idyllic too. Zafar flew out from London and joined them in Sydney after his school broke up. Zafar at sixteen and a half was a tall, broad-shouldered young man with remarkable physical confidence. On the morning when the police backed off and left them alone they had a celebratory coffee in a place near Bondi Beach, and an Arab-looking man shot odd looks at them and then went to stand on the sidewalk and made urgent, gesticulating phone calls. Zafar got up and said, “Maybe I’ll just go and have a word,” and his father had the strange and likable feeling of being protected by his son, but asked him not to bother. The man making phone calls turned out to be unimportant and they headed to where their rented Holden saloon car was parked to begin the long drive south.

Elizabeth had brought along a multi-cassette audiobook of Homer’s
Iliad
and put it into the car’s cassette player and as they drifted through southern New South Wales on the Princes Highway, past Thirroul, the suburb of Wollongong where D. H. Lawrence wrote
Kangaroo
, and on down the coast, the didgeridoo music of Australian place-names counterpointed the martial, tragic proper nouns of ancient Greece and Troy, Gerringong, Agamemnon, Nowra, Priam, Iphigenia, Tomerong, Clytemnestra, Wandandian, Jerrawangala, Hector, Yatte Yattah, Mondayong, Andromache, Achilles; and Zafar, lulled
by the ancient tale of the wine-dark, fish-rich sea, stretched out on the backseat and fell deeply asleep.

At just about the halfway point of their journey they came to the little town of Milton, and he had been driving for two hours by then, and he should probably have stopped and handed over the wheel to Elizabeth, but no, he insisted, he was fine, he was happy to drive on. The tape ended and for an instant—for a fraction of an instant—his eyes flicked down to the
eject
button and then a number of things happened very quickly, though at the time, Time, which had felt unreliable ever since the date line crossing, seemed to slow and almost come to a halt. An enormous, articulated container truck swung out of a side road and made a wide left turn, and he would always say that the driver’s cab crossed the white line, though Elizabeth remembered that he himself had veered slightly to his right, but for whatever reason all of a sudden there was a gigantic, tearing noise, the horrible death-noise of metal on metal, as the cab hit the Holden smack on the driver’s door, crumpling it inward, and the slow-motion time got even slower, he seemed to be dragging against the truck for an eternity, twenty seconds maybe, or an hour perhaps, and when the truck finally let them go the Holden slid sideways across the blacktop, heading for the grassy verge, and just beyond the verge, coming toward them, was a substantial, spreading tree, and at a certain moment, as he wrestled with the steering, the thought slowly formed in his slow-motion mind,
I’m not going to be able to avoid that tree, we’re going to hit that tree, oh, here it is, we’re hitting the tree, we’re hitting it … now
, and he looked at Elizabeth as she jerked forward against her seat belt, her eyes wide, her mouth open, and a white puff of vapor came out of her mouth like a little speech-bubble, and at that moment he feared that he might be seeing her life leave her body and he shouted in a voice that wasn’t his own voice
are you all right
, and he wondered what he would do with the rest of his life if he didn’t hear a reply.

Zafar woke up. “Did something happen?” he asked sleepily. “What’s going on?” Well, yes, Zafar, you see that tree that’s now in the middle of the car, that’s what would appear to be going on.

They were all alive. It was an accident that, nine times out of ten, would have killed everyone in the car, but this was the tenth time and
nobody had even broken a bone. The car could have been dragged under the truck, in which case they would all have been decapitated, but instead it had bounced off a wheel. And on the floor in the back, next to his sleeping son, there had been an open case of wine that they were taking to Rodney as a gift. When the car hit the tree the bottles were launched forward like missiles and smashed into the windshield. If those bottles had hit Elizabeth or himself their skulls would have been broken. But the missiles flew over their shoulders and missed. Elizabeth and Zafar got out of the car unaided, without a scratch on their bodies. He was a little less lucky. The driver’s door had been crushed and needed to be opened from the outside, and he had heavy bruising and several deep cuts on his bare right forearm and sandaled right foot. Standing up from the forearm was an egg-shaped swelling, which he took to be a sign of a fracture. The good people of Milton came out to help and he was guided to a patch of grass where he sat down, unable to speak, lost in relief and shock.

Another lucky chance: There was a small medical facility nearby, the Milton-Ulladulla Hospital, so an ambulance was quickly with them. The men in white, running up, stopped and stared. “Excuse me, mate, but are you Salman Rushdie?” At that moment he really didn’t want to be. He wanted to be an anonymous person receiving medical treatment. But yes, he was. “Oh, okay, mate, now this is probably a terrible time to ask you this, but could I get an autograph?”
Give the man an autograph
, he thought.
He’s the one with the ambulance
.

The police arrived and went to question the driver of the truck, who was still sitting in his cab, scratching his head. The truck looked as if nothing had happened to it. The Holden had been swatted away by this behemoth and the monster didn’t have a visible scratch. The police were giving the driver a hard time, though. They too had worked out that the man sitting dazed and wounded on the grass was Salman Rushdie, and so they wanted to know, what was the driver’s religion? The driver was bewildered. “What’s my religion got to do with anything?” Well, was he a
Muzlim
? An
Islammic
? Was he
Eye-ray-nian
? Is that why he had tried to kill Mr. Rushdie? Maybe one of the Ayatoller’s fellers? Was he carrying out the whatever it was called, the
fatso
? The poor driver shook his confused head. He didn’t know who the guy was he had hit. He had just been driving this truck
and didn’t know about any
fatso
. In the end the police believed him and sent him on his way.

The truck’s container had been full of fresh fertilizer. “You mean,” he said to Zafar and Elizabeth, a little hysterically, “we were almost killed by a truckload of
shit
? We almost died under a mountain of
manure
?” Yes, that was the case. Having eluded professional assassins for almost seven years, he and his loved ones had almost met their end under a mighty avalanche of dung.

In the hospital a series of careful tests established that everyone was fine. His arm wasn’t broken, just heavily bruised. He called Rodney Hall, who said he would drive up to fetch them right away, but that meant he wouldn’t be there for two hours. In the meanwhile, the media arrived in numbers. The hospital staff did a magnificent job of keeping the journalists at bay, refusing to comment on who might or might not be receiving treatment on the premises. But the media knew what they knew and hung around. “You can stay here until your friend arrives if you like,” the doctors and nurses told them. So they stayed in the emergency ward and waited, looking at one another carefully as if to reassure themselves that the others were really still there.

Rodney arrived, urgent and full of solicitude. The press were still outside, he said, so how should we do this? Just march past them, let them snap away, and leave? “No,” he told Rodney. “In the first place, I don’t want a picture of me looking beaten up with my arm in a sling all over the papers tomorrow. And in the second place if I leave in your car it won’t take them long to work out where I’m staying, and that would ruin Christmas.”

“I could take Elizabeth and Zafar,” Rodney suggested, “and meet you a couple of miles south of here. Nobody knows what Zafar and Elizabeth look like so we should be able to stroll out without attracting attention.”

Dr. Johnson, the kindly young physician who had been taking care of them, had a suggestion. “My car is in the staff car park,” he said. “The press won’t be there. I could drive you down the road to join your friends.”

“That’s incredibly nice of you,” he said. “Are you sure?”

“Are you kidding?” Dr. Johnson said. “This is the most exciting thing that’s happened in Milton ever, probably.”

Rodney’s home was on a small headland next to an almost deserted stretch of beach surrounded by eucalyptus forest, and it was as secluded and as idyllic as he had promised. They were made welcome, cared for, wined and dined; they read books aloud and walked and slept, and slowly the shock of the accident receded. On Christmas Day they swam in the Tasman Sea in the morning and then ate Christmas dinner al fresco on the lawn. He sat silent, staring at Elizabeth and Zafar, and thought,
We’re still here. Look at us. We’re all still alive
.

T
HE SUBJECT ALWAYS CHANGES
,
HE HAD TOLD HIMSELF MANY TIMES.
W
E
live in accelerating times, and the subject changes faster than ever
. But seven years of life were gone, seven years of his forties, the prime of a man’s life, seven years of his son’s childhood that he could never have back, and the subject hadn’t changed. He was having to face the possibility that this might not just be a phase of his life—that the rest of his life might be like this. That was a hard lump to swallow.

They were all feeling the strain. Zafar was frustrated by the secrecy—
Can’t I bring a couple of friends home
?—and was doing badly at school. Clarissa was making a name for herself at the Arts Council, becoming one of its most loved figures, a sort of patron saint of little magazines around the country, and he was happy to see her find her place in the world; but ever since the money squabble their relationship had soured. It wasn’t hostile, but it wasn’t friendly anymore either, and that was a bad, sad thing. Elizabeth wasn’t pregnant and that often affected her mood. She went to see a gynecologist and discovered that for various internal reasons she might find it hard to conceive. So there was this problem to overcome as well the simple chromosome translocation, and if and when a baby was conceived there would be security problems. These she closed her mind to and ignored.

A new year began. Caroline Michel called to say that UK hardcover sales of
The Moor’s Last Sigh
were already at almost two hundred thousand copies. However, there was trouble in India. In Bombay the Shiv Sena had taken exception to its portrayal in the novel as “Mumbai’s Axis.” A few other people hadn’t thought it funny that one of the characters in the novel had a stuffed pet dog on wheels called Jawaharlal after the country’s first prime minister. The sixty-eight-year-old Urdu novelist Qurratulain Hyder, author of the celebrated novel of partition
Aag ka Darya
(
River of Fire
), announced that this piece of fictional taxidermy proved that the author should “never be forgiven.”

As a result of the “controversy” the Indian government, with its traditional commitment to freedom of expression, halted the book’s import in customs on some flimsy pretext. He called his Indian attorney Vijay Shankardass, a soft-spoken, high-principled man and one of the most able lawyers in India, and Vijay said that if they could get India’s book trade organizations to join with the book’s Indian publishers, Rupa, they could get into court quickly with a “show cause injunction” and force the government’s hand. There was a wobble from Rupa’s boss, Rajan Mehra, who at first timidly feared that taking on the government could have unpleasant repercussions for his business, but Vijay helped him stiffen his resolve and in the end Mehra “did the needful.” On the day the case was lodged the government backed down, the blockade was lifted, and
The Moor’s Last Sigh
entered India and was freely published without any trouble whatsoever. At the Delhi Book Fair the unbanning of the novel was a huge event, “a great victory,” he thanked Vijay. But
The Satanic Verses
remained banned in India, and so did its author.

The other bit of Indian trouble concerned his little house in Solan up in the Shimla Hills. His paternal grandfather, Mohammed Din Khaliqi Dehlavi, whom he had never known, had long ago bought the place as a summer retreat from the Delhi heat, a six-room stone cottage on a small plot of land, but with a sweeping view of the mountains. He had left it to his only son, Anis, and Anis Rushdie before his death had gifted it to
his
only son. It had been requisitioned by the state government of Himachal Pradesh under the Evacuee Property Act, which allowed India to seize the property of anyone who had gone to settle in Pakistan. But he had never done that, so the house had been taken illegally. Vijay Shankardass was fighting this case for him too, but even though Vijay had managed to establish Anis’s title to the property his own inheritance of it had not yet been accepted, and the Himachal government had said, curtly, that it “didn’t want to be seen to be doing favors for Salman Rushdie.”