Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses

‘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-I 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 P o l i s . 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. Anti-narcotics 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.’