Salman Rushdie: Luka and the Fire of Life

‘Go away,’ Luka said. ‘You’re not wanted around here, Mr… what is your name, anyway?’

The see-through Rashid smiled a friendly smile that somehow wasn’t entirely friendly. ‘I,’ he began to explain, in a kindly voice that somehow didn’t feel completely kind, ‘I am your father’s dea-’

‘Don’t say that word!’ Luka shouted.

‘The point I’m trying to make, if I may be allowed to continue,’ the phantom insisted, ‘is that everyone’s dea-’

‘Don’t say it!’ Luka yelled.

‘-is different,’ the phantom said. ‘No two are alike. Each living being is an individual unlike all others; their lives have unique and personal beginnings, personal and unique middles, and consequently, at the end, it follows that everyone has their own unique and personal dea-’

‘Don’t!’ Luka screamed.

‘-and I am your father’s, or I will be soon enough, and at that time you will no longer be able to see through me, because then I will be the real thing and he, I’m sorry to say, will no longer be at all.’

‘Nobody is going to take my father away,’ Luka cried. ‘Not even you, Mr – whatever your name is – with your scary tales.’

‘Nobody,’ said the see-through Rashid. ‘Yes, you can call me that. That’s who I am. Nobody is going to take your father away: that is exactly right, and I am the Nobody in question. I am your, you might say, Nobodaddy.’

‘That’s nonsense,’ said Luka.

‘No, no,’ the see-through Rashid corrected him. ‘I’m afraid that Nonsense is not involved. You will discover that I am a no-Nonsense kind of guy.’

Luka sat down on the front step of the house and put his head in his hands. Nobodaddy . He understood what the see-through Rashid was telling him. As his father faded away, the phantom Rashid would grow stronger, and in the end there would be only this Nobodaddy and no father at all. But he was very sure of one thing: he was not ready to do without a father. He would never be ready for that. The certainty of this knowledge grew in him and gave him strength. There was only one thing for it, he told himself. This, this Nobodaddy had to be stopped, and he had to think of a way to stop him.

‘To be fair,’ said Nobodaddy, ‘and in a spirit of full disclosure, I should repeat that you have already achieved something extraordinary – by crossing the line, I mean – so perhaps you are capable of further extraordinary things. Maybe you are even capable of bringing about the thing you are even now dreaming up; maybe – ha ha! – you will succeed in bringing about my destruction. An adversary! How enjoyable! How positively… darling . I’m so excited.’

Luka looked up. ‘What do you mean exactly, “crossing the line”?’ he asked.

‘Here, where you are, is not there, where you were,’ explained Nobodaddy, helpfully. ‘This, all of this that you see, is not that which you saw before. This lane is not that lane, this house is not that house, and this daddy, as I have explained, is not that one. If the whole of your world took half a step to the right, then it would bump into this world. If it took half a step to the left… well, let’s not go into that just now. Don’t you see how much more brightly coloured everything is here than it is back home? This, you see… I shouldn’t even tell you, really… this is the World of Magic.’

Luka remembered his stumble in the doorway, and his brief but intense feeling of giddiness. Was that when he crossed the line? And had he stumbled to the right or the left? It must have been the right, mustn’t it? So this must be the Right-Hand Path, must it not? But was that the best Path for him? Shouldn’t he, as a left-handed person, have stumbled to the left?… He realised that he had no idea what he meant. Why was he on any sort of Path at all, and not just in the lane outside his house? Where might such a Path lead, and should he even think of going down it? Should he be thinking about just getting away from this alarming Nobodaddy and finding his way back to the safety of his bedroom? All this talk of Magic was much too much for him.

Of course Luka knew all about the World of Magic. He had grown up hearing about it from his father every day, and he had believed in it, he had even drawn maps and painted pictures of it – the Torrent of Words flowing into the Lake of Wisdom, the Mountain of Knowledge and the Fire of Life, all that stuff; but he hadn’t believed in it in the way that he believed in dining tables, or streets, or stomach upsets. It hadn’t been real in the way that love was real, or unhappiness, or fear. It was only real in the way that stories were real while you were reading them, or heat mirages before you got too close to them, or dreams while you were dreaming.

‘Is this a dream, then?’ he wondered, and the see-through Rashid who called himself Nobodaddy nodded slowly in a thoughtful way. ‘That would certainly explain the situation,’ he replied agreeably. ‘Why not put it to the test? If this is indeed a dream, then maybe your dog and your bear would no longer be dumb animals. I know your secret fantasy, you see. You’d like them to be able to talk, wouldn’t you? – to speak to you in your own language and tell you their stories. I’m sure they have extremely interesting stories to tell.’

‘How do you know that?’ asked Luka, shocked, and again the answer arrived in his head as soon as the question was out. ‘Oh. You know because my father knows. I talked to my father about it once, and he said he would make up a story about a talking dog and bear.’

‘Quite so,’ said Nobodaddy calmly. ‘Everything that your father has been, and known, and said and done, is slowly crossing over into me. But I mustn’t hog the conversation,’ he went on. ‘I do believe your friends are trying to get your attention.‘

Luka looked round and saw to his astonishment that Bear the dog had risen up on his hind legs and was clearing his throat like a tenor at the opera. Then he began to sing – not in barks, howls or dog-yaps this time, but in plain, understandable words. He sang with a slight foreign accent, Luka noticed, as if he were a visitor from another country, but the words were clear enough, although the tale they told was bewildering.

Then it was the turn of Dog the bear, who also rose up on his hind legs, and folded his paws in front of him like a schoolboy at a public-speaking contest. Then he spoke in clear, human language, and his voice sounded remarkably like Luka’s brother Haroun’s, and Luka almost fell over when he heard it. Nobodaddy saved him by stretching out a protective arm, exactly as if he were the real Rashid Khalifa. ‘O mighty pintsized liberator,’ the bear began grandly, but also, it seemed to Luka, a little uncertainly, ‘O incomparably cursing child, know that I was not always as you see me now, but the monarch of, um, a northern land of deep woods and shining snow, hidden behind a circular mountain range. My name was not “Dog” then, but, er… Artha-Shastra, Prince of Qâf. In that cold, lovely place we danced to keep ourselves warm, and our dances became the stuff of legend, for as we stamped and leapt the brilliance of our spinning wove the air around us into strands of silver and gold, and this became both our treasure and our glory. Yes! To twirl and to whirl was all our delight, and by whirling and twirling we came round right, and our golden land was a place of wonder and our clothes shone like the sun.’