The Satanic Verses (78 page)

           
Nothing is forever, he thought beyond closed eyelids somewhere over Asia Minor.
Maybe unhappiness is the continuum through which a human life moves, and joy
just a series of blips, of islands in the stream. Or if not unhappiness, then
at least melancholy ... These broodings were interrupted by a lusty snore from
the seat beside him. Mr. Sisodia, whisky-glass in hand, was asleep.

           
The producer was evidently a hit with the stewardesses. They fussed around his
sleeping person, detaching the glass from his fingers and removing it to a
place of safety, spreading a blanket over his lower half, and trilling
admiringly over his snoring head: "Doesn't he look poochie? Just a little
cuteso, I swear!" Chamcha was reminded unexpectedly of the society ladies
of Bombay patting him on the head during his mother's little soirees, and
fought back tears of surprise. Sisodia actually looked faintly obscene; he had
removed his spectacles before falling asleep, and their absence gave him an
oddly naked appearance. To Chamcha's eyes he resembled nothing so much as an
outsize Shiva lingam. Maybe that accounted for his popularity with the ladies.

           
Flicking through the magazines and newspapers he was offered by the
stewardesses, Saladin chanced upon an old acquaintance in trouble. Hal
Valance's sanitized
Aliens Show
had flopped badly in the United States
and was being taken off the air. Worse still, his advertising agency and its
subsidiaries had been swallowed by an American leviathan, and it was probable
that Hal was on the way out, conquered by the transatlantic dragon he had set
out to tame. It was hard to feel sorry for Valance, unemployed and down to his
last few millions, abandoned by his beloved Mrs. Torture and her pals,
relegated to the limbo reserved for fallen favourites, along with busted
entrepreneur-boffins and insiderdealing financiers and renegade ex-ministers;
but Chamcha, flying to his father's deathbed, was in so heightened an emotional
condition that he managed a valedictory lump in the throat even for wicked Hal.
At whose pool table
, he wondered vaguely,
is Baby playing now?

           
In India, the war between men and women showed no sign of abating. In the
Indian
Express
he read an account of the latest "bride suicide".
The
husband, Prajapati, is absconding
. On the next page, in the weekly small-ad
marriage market, the parents of young men still demanded, and the parents of
young women proudly offered, brides of "wheatish" complexions.
Chamcha remembered Zeeny's friend, the poet Bhupen Gandhi, speaking of such
things with passionate bitterness. "How to accuse others of being
prejudiced when our own hands are so dirty?" he had declaimed. "Many
of you in Britain speak of victimization. Well. I have not been there, I don't
know your situation, but in my personal experience I have never been able to
feel comfortable about being described as a victim. In class terms, obviously,
I am not. Even speaking culturally, you find here all the bigotries, all the
procedures associated with oppressor groups. So while many Indians are
undoubtedly oppressed, I don't think any of us are entitled to lay claim to
such a glamorous position."

           
"Trouble with Bhupen's radical critiques," Zeeny had remarked,
"is that reactionaries like Salad baba here just love to lap them
up."

           
An armaments scandal was raging; had the Indian government paid kickbacks to
middlemen, and then gone in for a cover-up? Vast sums of money were involved,
the Prime Minister's credibility had been weakened, but Chamcha couldn't be
bothered with any of it. He was staring at the fuzzy photograph, on an inside
page, of indistinct, bloated shapes floating down-river in large numbers. In a
north Indian town there had been a massacre of Muslims, and their corpses had
been dumped in the water, where they awaited the ministrations of some
twentieth-century Gaffer Hexam. There were hundreds of bodies, swollen and
rancid; the stench seemed to rise off the page. And in Kashmir a once-popular
Chief Minister who had "made an accommodation" with the
Congress―had shoes hurled at him during the Eid prayers by irate groups
of Islamic fundamentalists. Communalism, sectarian tension, was omnipresent: as
if the gods were going to war. In the eternal struggle between the world's
beauty and its cruelty, cruelty was gaining ground by the day. Sisodia's voice
intruded on these morose thoughts. The producer had woken up to see the
photograph from Meerut staring up from Chamcha's fold-out table. "Fact
is," he said without any of his usual bonhomie, "religious fafaith,
which encodes the highest ass ass aspirations of human race, is now, in our
cocountry, the servant of lowest instincts, and gogo God is the creature of
evil."

           
KNOWN HISTORY SHEETERS RESPONSIBLE FOR KILLINGS, a government spokesman
alleged, but "progressive elements" rejected this analysis. CITY
CONSTABULARY CONTAMINATED BY COMMUNAL AGITATORS, the counter-argument
suggested. HINDU NATIONALISTS RUN AMUCK. A political fortnightly contained a
photograph of signboards that had been mounted outside the Juma Masjid in Old
Delhi. The Imam, a loose-bellied man with cynical eyes, who could be found most
mornings in his "garden"―a red-earth-and-rubble waste land in
the shadow of the mosque―counting rupees donated by the faithful and
rolling up each note individually, so that he seemed to be holding a handful of
thin beedi-like cigarettes―and who was no stranger to communalist politics
himself, was apparently determined that the Meerut horror should be turned to
good account.
Quench the Fire under our Breast
, the signboards cried.
Salute
with Reverence those who met Martyrdom from the Bullets of the Polis
. Also:
Alas! Alas! Alas! Awak the Prime Minister!
And finally, the call to
action:
Bandh will be observed
, and the date of the strike.

           
"Bad days," Sisodia went on. "For the moomoo movies also TV and
economics have Delhi Delhi deleterious effects." Then he cheered up as
stewardesses approached. "I will confess to being a mem member of the mile
high cluck cluck club," he said gaily within the attendants' hearing.
"And you? Should I see what I can ficfic fix?"

           
O, the dissociations of which the human mind is capable, marvelled Saladin
gloomily. O, the conflicting selves jostling and joggling within these bags of
skin. No wonder we are unable to remain focused on anything for very long; no
wonder we invent remote-control channel-hopping devices. If we turned these
instruments upon ourselves we'd discover more channels than a cable or
satellite mogul ever dreamed of. . . He himself had found his thoughts
straying, no matter how hard he tried to fix them on his father, towards the
question of Miss Zeenat Vakil. He had wired ahead, informing her of his
arrival; would she meet the flight? What might or might not happen between
them? Had he, by leaving her, by not returning, by losing touch for a time,
done the Unforgivable Thing? Was she―he thought, and was shocked by the realization
that it had simply not occurred to him earlier―married? In love?
Involved? And as for himself: what did he really want?
I'll know when I see
her
, he thought. The future, even when it was only a question-shrouded
glimmer, would not be eclipsed by the past; even when death moved towards the
centre of the stage, life went on fighting for equal rights.

           
The flight passed without incident.

           
Zeenat Vakil was not waiting at the airport.

           
"Come along," Sisodia waved. "My car has come to pipi pick, so
please to lelet me drop."

           
* * * * *

           
Thirty-five minutes later Saladin Chamcha was at Scandal Point, standing at the
gates of childhood with holdall and suit-bags, looking at the imported
video-controlled entry system. Antinarcotics slogans had been painted on the
perimeter wall: DREAMS ALL DROWN/WHEN SUGAR IS BROWN. And: FUTURE IS BLACK/WHEN
SUGAR IS BROWN. Courage, my old, he braced himself; and rang as directed, once,
firmly, for attention.

           
* * * * *

           
In the luxuriant garden the stump of the felled walnut-tree caught his unquiet
eye. They probably used it as a picnic table now, he mused bitterly. His father
had always had a gift for the melodramatic, self-pitying gesture, and to eat
his lunch off a surface which packed such an emotional wallop―with, no
doubt, many profound sighs between the large mouthfuls―would be right in
character. Was he going to camp up his death, too, Saladin wondered. What a
grandstand play for sympathy the old bastard could make now! Anyone in the
vicinity of a dying man was utterly at his mercy. Punches delivered from a
deathbed left bruises that never faded.

           
His stepmother emerged from the dying man's marbled mansion to greet Chamcha
without a hint of rancour. "Salahuddin. Good you came. It will lift his
spirit, and now it is his spirit that he must fight with, because his body is
more or less kaput." She was perhaps six or seven years younger than
Saladin's mother would have been, but out of the same birdlike mould. His
large, expansive father had been remarkably consistent in these matters at
least. "How long does he have?" Saladin asked. Nasreen was as
undeceived as her telegram had suggested. "It could be any day." The
myeloma was present throughout Changez's "long bones"―the
cancer had brought its own vocabulary to the house; one no longer spoke of
arms
and legs
―and in his skull. Cancerous cells had even been detected in
the blood around the bones. "We should have spotted it," Nasreen
said, and Saladin began to feel the old lady's power, the force of will with
which she was reining in her feelings. "His pronounced weight-loss these
past two years. Also he has complained of aches and pains, for instance in the
knees. You know how it is. With an old man, you blame his age, you don't
imagine that a vile, hideous disease." She stopped, needing to control her
voice. Kasturba, the ex-ayah, had come out to join them in the garden. It
turned out that her husband Vallabh had died almost a year earlier, of old age,
in his sleep: a kinder death than the one now eating its way out of the body of
his employer, the seducer of his wife. Kasturba was still dressing in Nasreen
I's old, loud saris: today she had chosen one of the dizziest of the Op-Art
black-and-white prints. She, too, greeted Saladin warmly: hugs kisses tears.
"As for me," she sobbed, "I will never stop praying for a
miracle while there is one breath left in his poor lungs."

           
Nasreen II embraced Kasturba; each woman rested her head on the other's
shoulder. The intimacy between the two women was spontaneous and untarnished by
resentments; as if the proximity of death had washed away the quarrels and
jealousies of life. The two old ladies comforted one another in the garden,
each consoling the other for the imminent loss of the most precious of things:
love. Or, rather: the beloved. "Come on," Nasreen finally said to
Saladin. "He should see you, pronto."

           
"Does he know?" Saladin asked. Nasreen answered evasively. "He
is an intelligent man. He keeps asking, where has all the blood gone? He says,
there are only two illnesses in which the blood vanishes like this. One is
tuberculosis." But, Saladin pressed, he never actually speaks the word?
Nasreen lowered her head. The word had not been spoken, either by Changez or in
his presence. "Shouldn't he know?" Chamcha asked. "Doesn't a man
have the right to prepare for his death?" He saw Nasreen's eyes blaze for
an instant.
Who do you think you are to tell us our duty. You have sacrificed
all rights
. Then they faded, and when she spoke her voice was level,
unemotional, low. "Maybe you're correct." But Kasturba wailed:
"No! How to tell him, poor man? It will break his heart."

           
The cancer had thickened Changez's blood to the point at which his heart was
having the greatest difficulty pumping it round his body. It had also polluted
the bloodstream with alien bodies, platelets, that would attack any blood with
which he was transfused, even blood of his own type.
So, even in this small
way, I can't help him
, Saladin understood. Changez could easily die of
these side-effects before the cancer did for him. If he did die from the
cancer, the end would take the form either of pneumonia or of kidney failure;
the doctors, knowing they could do nothing for him, had sent him home to wait
for it. "Because myeloma is systemic, chemotherapy and radiation treatment
are not used," Nasreen explained. "Only medicament is the drug
Melphalan, which can in some cases prolong life, even for years. However, we
are informed he is in the category which will not respond to Melphalan
tablets."
But he has not been told
, Saladin's inner voices
insisted.
And that's wrong, wrong, wrong
. "Still, a miracle has
happened," Kasturba cried. "The doctors told that normally this is
one of the most painful cancers; but your father is in no pain. If one prays,
then sometimes a kindness is granted." It was on account of the freak
absence of pain that the cancer had taken so long to diagnose; it had been
spreading in Changez's body for at least two years. "I must see him
now," Saladin gently asked. A bearer had taken his holdall and suit-bags
indoors while they spoke; now, at last, he followed his garments indoors.

           
The interior of the house was unchanged―the generosity of the second
Nasreen towards the memory of the first seemed boundless, at least during these
days, the last on earth of their mutual spouse―except that Nasreen II had
moved in her collection of stuffed birds (hoopoes and rare parrots under glass
belljars, a full-grown King Penguin in the marble-and-mosaic hall, its beak
swarming with tiny red ants) and her cases of impaled butterflies. Saladin
moved past this colourful gallery of dead wings towards his father's
study―Changez had insisted on vacating his bedroom and having a bed moved
downstairs into that wood-panelled retreat full of rotting books, so that
people didn't have to run up and down all day to look after him―and came,
at last, to death's door.