The Satanic Verses (87 page)

And:

The bier, strewn with flowers, like an outsize baby’s cot.

The body, wrapped in white, with sandalwood shavings, for fragrance, scattered all about it.

More flowers, and a green silken covering with Quranic verses embroidered upon it in gold.

The ambulance, with the bier resting in it, awaiting the widows’ permission to depart.

The last farewells of women.

The graveyard. Male mourners rushing to lift the bier on their shoulders trample Salahuddin’s foot, ripping off a segment of the nail on his big toe.

Among the mourners, an estranged old friend of Changez’s, here in spite of double pneumonia; – and another old gentleman, weeping copiously, who will die himself the very next day; – and all sorts, the walking records of a dead man’s life.

The grave. Salahuddin climbs down into it, stands at the head end, the gravedigger at the foot. Changez Chamchawala is lowered down.
The weight of my father’s head, lying in my hand. I laid it down; to rest
.

The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.

Waiting for him when he returned from the graveyard: a copper-and-brass lamp, his renewed inheritance. He went into Changez’s
study and closed the door. There were his old slippers by the bed: he had become, as he’d foretold, ‘a pair of emptied shoes’. The bedclothes still bore the imprint of his father’s body; the room was full of sickly perfume: sandalwood, camphor, cloves. He took the lamp from its shelf and sat at Changez’s desk. Taking a handkerchief from his pocket, he rubbed briskly: once, twice, thrice.

The lights all went on at once.

Zeenat Vakil entered the room.

‘O God, I’m sorry, maybe you wanted them off, but with the blinds closed it was just so sad.’ Waving her arms, speaking loudly in her beautiful croak of a voice, her hair woven, for once, into a waist-length ponytail, here she was, his very own djinn. ‘I feel so bad I didn’t come before, I was just trying to hurt you, what a time to choose, so bloody self-indulgent, yaar, it’s good to see you, you poor orphaned goose.’

She was the same as ever, immersed in life up to her neck, combining occasional art lectures at the university with her medical practice and her political activities. ‘I was at the goddamn hospital when you came, you know? I was right there, but I didn’t know about your dad until it was over, and even then I didn’t come to give you a hug, what a bitch, if you want to throw me out I will have no complaints.’ This was a generous woman, the most generous he’d known.
When you see her, you’ll know
, he had promised himself, and it turned out to be true. ‘I love you,’ he heard himself saying, stopping her in her tracks. ‘Okay, I won’t hold you to that,’ she finally said, looking hugely pleased. ‘Balance of your mind is obviously disturbed. Lucky for you you aren’t in one of our great public hospitals; they put the loonies next to the heroin addicts, and there’s so much drug traffic in the wards that the poor schizos end up with bad habits. – Anyway, if you say it again after forty days, watch out, because maybe then I’ll take it seriously. Just now it could be a disease.’

Undefeated (and, it appeared, unattached), Zeeny’s re-entry into his life completed the process of renewal, of regeneration, that had been the most surprising and paradoxical product of his father’s terminal illness. His old English life, its bizarreries, its evils,
now seemed very remote, even irrelevant, like his truncated stage-name. ‘About time,’ Zeeny approved when he told her of his return to
Salahuddin
. ‘Now you can stop acting at last.’ Yes, this looked like the start of a new phase, in which the world would be solid and real, and in which there was no longer the broad figure of a parent standing between himself and the inevitability of the grave. An orphaned life, like Muhammad’s; like everyone’s. A life illuminated by a strangely radiant death, which continued to glow, in his mind’s eye, like a sort of magic lamp.

I must think of myself, from now on, as living perpetually in the first instant of the future
, he resolved a few days later, in Zeeny’s apartment on Sophia College Lane, while recovering in her bed from the toothy enthusiasms of her lovemaking. (She had invited him home shyly, as if she were removing a veil after long concealment.) But a history is not so easily shaken off; he was also living, after all, in the
present moment of the past
, and his old life was about to surge around him once again, to complete its final act.

He became aware that he was a rich man. Under the terms of Changez’s will, the dead tycoon’s vast fortune and myriad business interests were to be supervised by a group of distinguished trustees, the income being divided equally between three parties: Changez’s second wife Nasreen, Kasturba, whom he referred to in the document as ‘in every true sense, my third’, and his son, Salahuddin. After the deaths of the two women, however, the trust could be dissolved whenever Salahuddin chose: he inherited, in short, the lot. ‘On the condition,’ Changez Chamchawala had mischievously stipulated, ‘that the scoundrel accepts the gift he previously spurned, viz., the requisitioned schoolhouse situated at Solan, Himachal Pradesh.’ Changez might have chopped down a walnut-tree, but he had never attempted to cut Salahuddin out of his will. – The houses at Pali Hill and Scandal Point were excluded from these provisions, however. The former passed to Nasreen Chamchawala outright; the latter became, with immediate effect, the sole property of Kasturbabai, who quickly
announced her intention of selling the old house to property developers. The site was worth crores, and Kasturba was wholly unsentimental about real estate. Salahuddin protested vehemently, and was slapped down hard. ‘I have lived my whole life here,’ she informed him. ‘It is therefore for me only to say.’ Nasreen Chamchawala was entirely indifferent to the fate of the old place. ‘One more high-rise, one less piece of old Bombay,’ she shrugged. ‘What’s the difference? Cities change.’ She was already preparing to move back to Pali Hill, taking the cases of butterflies off the walls, assembling her stuffed birds in the hall. ‘Let it go,’ Zeenat Vakil said. ‘You couldn’t live in that museum, anyway.’

She was right, of course; no sooner had he resolved to set his face towards the future than he started mooning around and regretting childhood’s end. ‘I’m off to meet George and Bhupen, you remember,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you come along? You need to start plugging into the town.’ George Miranda had just completed a documentary film about communalism, interviewing Hindus and Muslims of all shades of opinion. Fundamentalists of both religions had instantly sought injunctions banning the film from being shown, and, although the Bombay courts had rejected this request, the case had gone up to the Supreme Court. George, even more stubbly of chin, lank of hair and sprawling of stomach than Salahuddin remembered, drank rum in a Dhobi Talao boozer and thumped the table with pessimistic fists. ‘This is the Supreme Court of Shah Bano fame,’ he cried, referring to the notorious case in which, under pressure from Islamic extremists, the Court had ruled that alimony payments were contrary to the will of Allah, thus making India’s laws even more reactionary than, for example, Pakistan’s. ‘So I don’t have much hope.’ He twisted, disconsolately, the waxy points of his moustache. His new girlfriend, a tall, thin Bengali woman with cropped hair that reminded Salahuddin a little of Mishal Sufyan, chose this moment to attack Bhupen Gandhi for having published a volume of poems about his visit to the ‘little temple town’ of Gagari in the Western Ghats. The poems had been criticized by the Hindu right; one eminent South Indian professor had announced that Bhupen had ‘forfeited
his right to be called an Indian poet’, but in the opinion of the young woman, Swatilekha, Bhupen had been seduced by religion into a dangerous ambiguity. Grey hair flopping earnestly, moon-face shining, Bhupen defended himself. ‘I have said that the only crop of Gagari is the stone gods being quarried from the hills. I have spoken of herds of legends, with sacred cowbells tinkling, grazing on the hillsides. These are not ambiguous images.’ Swatilekha wasn’t convinced. ‘These days,’ she insisted, ‘our positions must be stated with crystal clarity. All metaphors are capable of misinterpretation.’ She offered her theory. Society was orchestrated by what she called
grand narratives
: history, economics, ethics. In India, the development of a corrupt and closed state apparatus had ‘excluded the masses of the people from the ethical project’. As a result, they sought ethical satisfactions in the oldest of the grand narratives, that is, religious faith. ‘But these narratives are being manipulated by the theocracy and various political elements in an entirely retrogressive way.’ Bhupen said: ‘We can’t deny the ubiquity of faith. If we write in such a way as to prejudge such belief as in some way deluded or false, then are we not guilty of elitism, of imposing our world-view on the masses?’ Swatilekha was scornful. ‘Battle lines are being drawn up in India today,’ she cried. ‘Secular versus religious, the light versus the dark. Better you choose which side you are on.’

Bhupen got up, angrily, to go. Zeeny pacified him: ‘We can’t afford schisms. There’s planning to be done.’ He sat down again, and Swatilekha kissed him on the cheek. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Too much college education, George always says. In fact, I loved the poems. I was only arguing a case.’ Bhupen, mollified, pretended to punch her on the nose; the crisis passed.

They had met, Salahuddin now gathered, to discuss their part in a remarkable political demonstration: the formation of a human chain, stretching from the Gateway of India to the outermost northern suburbs of the city, in support of ‘national integration’. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) had recently organized just such a human chain in Kerala, with great success. ‘But,’ George Miranda argued, ‘here in Bombay it will be totally
another matter. In Kerala the CP(M) is in power. Here, with these Shiv Sena bastards in control, we can expect every type of harassment, from police obstructionism to out-and-out assaults by mobs on segments of the chain – especially when it passes, as it will have to, through the Sena’s fortresses, in Mazagaon, etc.’ In spite of these dangers, Zeeny explained to Salahuddin, such public demonstrations were essential. As communal violence escalated – and Meerut was only the latest in a long line of murderous incidents – it was imperative that the forces of disintegration weren’t permitted to have things all their own way. ‘We must show that there are also counterforces at work.’ Salahuddin was somewhat bemused at the rapidity with which, once again, his life had begun to change.
Me, taking part in a CP(M) event. Wonders will never cease; I really must be in love
.

Once they had settled matters – how many friends each of them might manage to bring along, where to assemble, what to carry in the way of food, drink and first-aid equipment – they relaxed, drank down the cheap, dark rum, and chattered inconsequentially, and that was when Salahuddin heard, for the first time, the rumours about the odd behaviour of the film star Gibreel Farishta that had started circulating in the city, and felt his old life prick him like a hidden thorn; – heard the past, like a distant trumpet, ringing in his ears.