The Satanic Verses (40 page)

‘Wicked,’ Anahita agreed. ‘Welcome aboard.’

This Hind, now so firmly entrenched in exclamatory mode, had once been – strangebuttrue! – the most blushing of brides, the soul of gentleness, the very incarnation of tolerant good humour. As the wife of the erudite schoolteacher of Dhaka, she had entered into her duties with a will, the perfect helpmeet, bringing her husband cardamom-scented tea when he stayed up late marking
examination papers, ingratiating herself with the school principal at the termly Staff Families Outing, struggling with the novels of Bibhutibhushan Banerji and the metaphysics of Tagore in an attempt to be more worthy of a spouse who could quote effortlessly from Rig-Veda as well as Quran-Sharif, from the military accounts of Julius Caesar as well as the Revelations of St John the Divine. In those days she had admired his pluralistic openness of mind, and struggled, in her kitchen, towards a parallel eclecticism, learning to cook the dosas and uttapams of South India as well as the soft meatballs of Kashmir. Gradually her espousal of the cause of gastronomic pluralism grew into a grand passion, and while secularist Sufyan swallowed the multiple cultures of the subcontinent – ‘and let us not pretend that Western culture is not present; after these centuries, how could it not also be part of our heritage?’ – his wife cooked, and ate in increasing quantities, its food. As she devoured the highly spiced dishes of Hyderabad and the high-faluting yoghurt sauces of Lucknow her body began to alter, because all that food had to find a home somewhere, and she began to resemble the wide rolling land mass itself, the subcontinent without frontiers, because food passes across any boundary you care to mention.

Mr Muhammad Sufyan, however, gained no weight: not a
tola
, not an
ounce
.

His refusal to fatten was the beginning of the trouble. When she reproached him – “You don’t like my cooking? For whom I’m doing it all and blowing up like a balloon?’ – he answered, mildly, looking up at her (she was the taller of the two) over the top of half-rimmed specs: ‘Restraint is also part of our traditions, Begum. Eating two mouthfuls less than one’s hunger: self-denial, the ascetic path.’ What a man: all the answers, but you couldn’t get him to give you a decent fight.

Restraint was not for Hind. Maybe, if Sufyan had ever complained; if just once he’d said,
I thought I was marrying one woman but these days you’re big enough for two;
if he’d ever given her the incentive! – then maybe she’d have desisted, why not, of course she would; so it was his fault, for having no aggression, what kind
of a male was it who didn’t know how to insult his fat lady wife? – In truth, it was entirely possible that Hind would have failed to control her eating binges even if Sufyan had come up with the required imprecations and entreaties; but, since he did not, she munched on, content to dump the whole blame for her figure on him.

As a matter of fact, once she had started blaming him for things, she found that there were a number of other matters she could hold against him; and found, too, her tongue, so that the schoolteacher’s humble apartment resounded regularly to the kinds of tickings-off he was too much of a mouse to hand out to his pupils. Above all, he was berated for his excessively high principles, thanks to which, Hind told him, she knew he would never permit her to become a rich man’s wife; – for what could one say about a man who, finding that his bank had inadvertently credited his salary to his account twice in the same month, promptly
drew the institution’s notice
to the error and handed back the cash?; – what hope was there for a teacher who, when approached by the wealthiest of the schoolchildren’s parents, flatly refused to contemplate accepting the usual remunerations in return for services rendered when marking the little fellows’ examination papers?

‘But all of that I could forgive,’ she would mutter darkly at him, leaving unspoken the rest of the sentence, which was
if it hadn’t been for your two real offences: your sexual, and political, crimes
.

Ever since their marriage, the two of them had performed the sexual act infrequently, in total darkness, pin-drop silence and almost complete immobility. It would not have occurred to Hind to wiggle or wobble, and since Sufyan appeared to get through it all with an absolute minimum of motion, she took it – had always taken it – that the two of them were of the same mind on this matter, viz., that it was a dirty business, not to be discussed before or after, and not to be drawn attention to during, either. That the children took their time in coming she took as God’s punishment for He only knew what misdeeds of her earlier life; that they both turned out to be girls she refused to blame on Allah, preferring, instead, to blame the weakling seed implanted in her by her
unmanly spouse, an attitude she did not refrain from expressing, with great emphasis, and to the horror of the midwife, at the very moment of little Anahita’s birth. ‘Another girl,’ she gasped in disgust. ‘Well, considering who made the baby, I should think myself lucky it’s not a cockroach, or a mouse.’ After this second daughter she told Sufyan that enough was enough, and ordered him to move his bed into the hall. He accepted without any argument her refusal to have more children; but then she discovered that the lecher thought he could still, from time to time, enter her darkened room and enact that strange rite of silence and near-motionlessness to which she had only submitted in the name of reproduction. ‘What do you think,’ she shouted at him the first time he tried it, ‘I do this thing for
fun
?’

Once he had got it through his thick skull that she meant business, no more hanky-panky, no sir, she was a decent woman, not a lust-crazed libertine, he began to stay out late at night. It was during this period – she had thought, mistakenly, that he was visiting prostitutes – that he became involved with politics, and not just any old politics, either, oh no, Mister Brainbox had to go and join the devils themselves, the Communist Party, no less, so much for those principles of his; demons, that’s what they were, worse by far than whores. It was because of this dabbling in the occult that she had to pack up her bags at such short notice and leave for England with two small babies in tow; because of this ideological witchcraft that she had had to endure all the privations and humiliations of the process of immigration; and on account of this diabolism of his that she was stuck forever in this England and would never see her village again. ‘England,’ she once said to him, ‘is your revenge upon me for preventing you from performing your obscene acts upon my body.’ He had not given an answer; and silence denotes assent.

And what was it that made them a living in this Vilayet of her exile, this Yuké of her sex-obsessed husband’s vindictiveness? What? His book learning? His
Gitanjali, Eclogues
, or that play
Othello
that he explained was really Attallah or Attaullah except the writer couldn’t spell, what sort of writer was that, anyway?

It was: her cooking. ‘Shaandaar,’ it was praised. ‘Outstanding, brilliant, delicious.’ People came from all over London to eat her samosas, her Bombay chaat, her gulab jamans straight from Paradise. What was there for Sufyan to do? Take the money, serve the tea, run from here to there, behave like a servant for all his education. O, yes, of course, the customers liked his personality, he always had an appealing character, but when you’re running an eatery it isn’t the conversation they pay for on the bill. Jalebis, barfi, Special of the Day. How life had turned out! She was the mistress now.

Victory!

And yet it was also a fact that she, cook and breadwinner, chiefest architect of the success of the Shaandaar Café, which had finally enabled them to buy the whole four-storey building and start renting out its rooms, –
she
was the one around whom there hung, like bad breath, the miasma of defeat. While Sufyan twinkled on, she looked extinguished, like a lightbulb with a broken filament, like a fizzled star, like a flame. – Why? – Why, when Sufyan, who had been deprived of vocation, pupils and respect, bounded about like a young lamb, and even began to put on weight, fattening up in Proper London as he had never done back home; why, when power had been removed from his hands and delivered into hers, did she act – as her husband put it – the ‘sad sack’, the ‘glum chum’ and the ‘moochy pooch’? Simple: not in spite of, but on account of. Everything she valued had been upset by the change; had in this process of translation, been lost.

Her language: obliged, now, to emit these alien sounds that made her tongue feel tired, was she not entitled to moan? Her familiar place: what matter that they had lived, in Dhaka, in a teacher’s humble flat, and now, owing to entrepreneurial good sense, savings and skill with spices, occupied this four-storey terraced house? Where now was the city she knew? Where the village of her youth and the green waterways of home? The customs around which she had built her life were lost, too, or at least were hard to find. Nobody in this Vilayet had time for the slow courtesies of life back home, or for the many observances of faith.
Furthermore: was she not forced to put up with a husband of no account, whereas before she could bask in his dignified position? Where was the pride in being made to work for her living, for his living, whereas before she could sit at home in much-befitting pomp? – And she knew, how could she not, the sadness beneath his bonhomie, and that, too, was a defeat; never before had she felt so inadequate as a wife, for what kind of a Mrs is it that cannot cheer up her man, but must observe the counterfeit of happiness and make do, as if it were the genuine McCoy? – Plus also: they had come into a demon city in which anything could happen, your windows shattered in the middle of the night without any cause, you were knocked over in the street by invisible hands, in the shops you heard such abuse you felt like your ears would drop off but when you turned in the direction of the words you saw only empty air and smiling faces, and every day you heard about this boy, that girl, beaten up by ghosts. – Yes, a land of phantom imps, how to explain; best thing was to stay home, not go out for so much as to post a letter, stay in, lock the door, say your prayers, and the goblins would (maybe) stay away. – Reasons for defeat? Baba, who could count them? Not only was she a shopkeeper’s wife and a kitchen slave, but even her own people could not be relied on; – there were men she thought of as respectable types, sharif, giving telephone divorces to wives back home and running off with some haramzadi female, and girls killed for dowry (some things could be brought through the foreign customs without duty); – and worst of all, the poison of this devil-island had infected her baby girls, who were growing up refusing to speak their mother-tongue, even though they understood every word, they did it just to hurt; and why else had Mishal cut off all her hair and put rainbows into it; and every day it was fight, quarrel, disobey, – and worst of all, there was not one new thing about her complaints, this is how it was for women like her, so now she was no longer just one, just herself, just Hind wife of teacher Sufyan; she had sunk into the anonymity, the characterless plurality, of being merely one-of-the-women-like-her. This was history’s
lesson: nothing for women-like-her to do but suffer, remember, and die.

What she did: to deny her husband’s weakness, she treated him, for the most part, like a lord, like a monarch, for in her lost world her glory had lain in his; to deny the ghosts outside the café, she stayed indoors, sending others out for kitchen provisions and household necessities, and also for the endless supply of Bengali and Hindi movies on VCR through which (along with her ever-increasing hoard of Indian movie magazines) she could stay in touch with events in the ‘real world’, such as the bizarre disappearance of the incomparable Gibreel Farishta and the subsequent tragic announcement of his death in an airline accident; and to give her feelings of defeated, exhausted despair some outlet, she shouted at her daughters. The elder of whom, to get her own back, hacked off her hair and permitted her nipples to poke through shirts worn provocatively tight.

The arrival of a fully developed devil, a horned goat-man, was, in the light of the foregoing, something very like the last, or at any rate the penultimate, straw.