Salman Rushdie: Luka and the Fire of Life

The worst, or maybe the best, thing about Nobodaddy was that he always behaved exactly like Rashid Khalifa. He had Rashid’s facial movements and hand gestures and laugh, and he even acted innocent when he knew perfectly well he wasn’t, just the way Rashid did when he was clumsy or wrong or planning a special surprise. His voice was Rashid’s voice and his wobbly tummy was Rashid’s stomach and he was even beginning to treat Luka with a spoiling affection that was totally Rashid-like. All his life Luka had known that his mother was the one who laid down the law and had to be handled with care, while Rashid was, quite frankly, a bit soft. Was it possible that Rashid’s character had crept into his would-be nemesis, Nobodaddy? Was that why this scary anti-Rashid seemed actually to be trying to help Luka out?

‘Okay, stop the world,’ Luka commanded Nobodaddy. ‘There are some things we need to get absolutely clear before anyone goes anywhere with you.’

He thought he heard, high up and far away, the noise of machinery grinding to a halt with a distant screeching noise, and his feet stopped being tickled, and Dog and Bear stopped sliding about. They had gone quite some distance from home already, and were standing, by chance (or not by chance), on more or less the exact spot where Luka had been on the day he shouted at Captain Aag while he and Rashid were watching the sad parade of the circus animals in their cages. The city was waking up. Smoke rose from roadside canteens where strong, sweet milky tea was being brewed. A few early-rising shopkeepers were taking down their shutters and revealing long narrow caverns filled with fabrics, foodstuffs and pills. A policeman with a long stick yawned as he walked by in dark blue shorts. Cows were still sleeping on the pavement, and so were people, but bicycles and motor scooters were already busying the street. A jam-packed bus went past taking people to the industrial zone, where the sadness factories used to stand. Things had changed in Kahani, and sadness was no longer the city’s principal export, as it had been when Luka’s brother Haroun was young. The demand for glumfish had fallen away, and people preferred to eat better-tasting produce from further away, the grinning eels of the south, the meat of the northern hope-deer, and, more and more, the vegetarian and non-vegetarian foods available from the Cheery Orchard stores that were opening everywhere you looked. People wanted to feel good even when there wasn’t that much to feel good about, and so the sadness factories had been shut down and turned into Obliviums, giant malls where everyone went to dance, shop, pretend and forget. Luka, however, was not in the mood for self-deception. He wanted answers.

‘No more mystification,’ he said firmly. ‘Straight answers to straight questions, please.’ Now he had to fight to control his voice, but he succeeded, and fought down the dreadful feelings that were filling his whole body. ‘Number one,’ he cried, ‘who sent you? Where do you come from? Where -’ and here Luka paused, because the question was a terrifying one – ‘… when your… work… is done… if it’s done, that is… which it won’t be… but if it was done… where do you plan to go?’

‘That is numbers one, two and three, to be exact,’ said Nobodaddy, as, to the watching Luka’s horrified astonishment, a strolling cow walked right through him and went on about its business, ‘but let’s not quibble.’ Then he thought deeply for a long, silent moment. ‘Are you familiar,’ he said finally, ‘with the Bang?’

‘The Big Bang?’ Luka asked. ‘Or some other Bang I don’t know about?’

‘There was only one Bang,’ said Nobodaddy, ‘so the adjective Big is redundant and meaningless. The Bang would only be Big if there was at least one other Little or Medium-Sized or even Bigger Bang to compare it with, and to differentiate it from.’

Luka didn’t want to waste time arguing. ‘Yes, I’ve heard of it,’ he said.

‘Then tell me,’ said Nobodaddy, ‘what was there before the Bang?’

Now this was one of those Enormous Questions that Luka had often tried to answer, without having any real success. ‘What was it that had gone Bang anyway?’ he asked himself. ‘And how could everything go off with a Bang if there was nothing there to begin with?’ It made his head hurt to think about the Bang and so, of course, he didn’t think about it very much.

‘I know what the answer is supposed to be,’ he said. ‘It’s supposed to be “Nothing”, but I don’t really get that, to be honest with you. And anyway,’ he added as sternly as he could manage, ‘that has nothing to do with the subject under discussion.’

Nobodaddy wagged a finger under his nose. ‘On the contrary, young would-be assassin,’ he said, ‘it has everything to do with it. Because if the whole universe could just explode out of Nothing and then just Be, don’t you see that the opposite could also be true? That it’s possible to im plode and Un -Be as well as to ex plode and Be? That all human beings, Napoleon Bonaparte, for example, or the Emperor Akbar, or Angelina Jolie, or your father, could simply return to Nothing once they’re… done? In a sort of Little, by which I mean personal, Un-Bang?’

‘Un-Bang?’ Luka repeated, in some confusion.

‘Exactly,’ said Nobodaddy. ‘Not a spreading out but a closing in.’

‘Are you telling me,’ Luka said, feeling an anger rise in him, ‘that my father is about to implode into Nothing? Is that what you’re trying to say?’

Nobodaddy did not answer.

‘Then what about life after dea-’ Luka began, then stopped himself, slapped himself on the head and rephrased the question. ‘What about Paradise?’

Nobodaddy said nothing.

‘Are you trying to say that it doesn’t exist?’ Luka demanded. ‘Because if that’s what you are trying to say, I know a lot of people in this town who will give you a pretty heated argument.’

Not a word from Nobodaddy.

‘You’re suddenly very silent,’ Luka said crossly. ‘Maybe you don’t know as many answers as you pretend you do either. Maybe you’re not as big a deal as you think.’

‘Ignore him,’ said Dog the bear in an oddly big-brotherly way. ‘You really should go home now.’

‘Your mother will be worrying,’ said Bear the dog.

Luka was still not used to the animals’ new powers of speech. ‘I want an answer before I go,’ he said stubbornly.

Nobodaddy nodded, slowly, as if a conversation he had been having with someone invisible had just come to an end. ‘I can tell you this,’ he said. ‘That when my work is done, when I have absorbed your father’s… well, never mind what I will have absorbed,’ he added hastily, seeing the look on Luka’s face, ‘then I – yes, I, myself! – will implode. I will collapse into myself, and simply cease to Be.’

Luka was astounded. ‘You? You’re the one who’s going to die?’

‘Un-Be,’ Nobodaddy corrected him. ‘That’s the technical term. And as I have answered your third question first, I should add that, one, nobody sent me, but somebody did send for me, and, two, I don’t exactly come from somewhere, but I do come from some one . And if you think about it for a moment, you will know who that somebody and that someone are, especially as they are one and the same, and I am the spitting image of them Both, who are only One.’

The silver sun brightened in the east. Dog and Bear looked agitated. It was definitely time for Luka to be at home getting ready for the school day. Soraya would be beside herself with worry. Maybe she had sent Haroun out to search the neighbourhood streets. When Luka got home for breakfast he was going to be in nineteen different kinds of trouble. But Luka wasn’t thinking about breakfast, or about school. This was not the time for cereal, Ratshit or geography. He was thinking about things he had hardly ever thought about in his life. He was thinking about Life and Dea- well, Un-Life. He still couldn’t bear that other, incomplete word.