Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses

‘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 bell-jars, 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.

Early in life Changez Chamchawala had acquired the disconcerting knack of sleeping with his eyes wide open, ‘staying on guard', as he liked to say. Now, as Saladin quietly entered the room, the effect of those open grey eyes staring blindly at the ceiling was positively unnerving. For a moment Saladin thought he was too late; that Changez had died while he'd been chatting in the garden. Then the man on the bed emitted a series of small coughs, turned his head, and extended an uncertain arm. Saladin Chamcha went towards his father and bowed his head beneath the old man's caressing palm.

To fall in love with one's father after the long angry decades was a serene and beautiful feeling; a renewing, life-giving thing, Saladin wanted to say, but did not, because it sounded vampirish; as if by sucking this new life out of his father he was making room, in Changez's body, for death. Although he kept it quiet, however, Saladin felt hourly closer to many old, rejected selves, many alternative Saladins – or rather Salahuddins – which had split off from himself as he made his various life choices, but which had apparently continued to exist, perhaps in the parallel universes of quantum theory. Cancer had stripped Changez Chamchawala literally to the bone; his cheeks had collapsed into the hollows of the skull, and he had to place a foam-rubber pillow under his buttocks because of the atrophying of his flesh. But it had also stripped him of his faults, of all that had been domineering, tyrannical and cruel in him, so that the mischievous, loving and brilliant man beneath lay exposed, once again, for all to see. If only he could have been this person all his life , Saladin (who had begun to find the sound of his full, un-Englished name pleasing for the first time in twenty years) found himself wishing. How hard it was to find one's father just when one had no choice but to say goodbye.

On the morning of his return Salahuddin Chamchawala was asked by his father to give him a shave. ‘These old women of mine don't know which side of a Philishave is the business end.’ Changez's skin hung off his face in soft, leathery jowls, and his hair (when Salahuddin emptied the machine) looked like ashes. Salahuddin could not remember when he had last touched his father's face this way, gently drawing the skin tight as the cordless shaver moved across it, and then stroking it to make sure it felt smooth. When he had finished he continued for a moment to run his fingers along Changez's cheeks. ‘Look at the old man,’ Nasreen said to Kasturba as they entered the room, ‘he can't take his eyes off his boy.’ Changez Chamchawala grinned an exhausted grin, revealing a mouth full of shattered teeth, flecked with spittle and crumbs.

When his father fell asleep again, after being forced by Kasturba and Nasreen to drink a small quantity of water, and gazed up at – what? – with his open, dreaming eyes, which could see into three worlds at once, the actual world of his study, the visionary world of dreams, and the approaching after-life as well (or so Salahuddin, in a fanciful moment, found himself imagining); – then the son went to Changez's old bedroom for a rest. Grotesque heads in painted terracotta glowered down at him from the walls: a horned demon; a leering Arab with a falcon on his shoulder; a bald man rolling his eyes upwards and putting his tongue out in panic as a huge black fly settled on his eyebrow. Unable to sleep beneath these figures, which he had known all his life and also hated, because he had come to see them as portraits of Changez, he moved finally to a different, neutral room.

Waking up in the early evening, he went downstairs to find the two old women outside Changez's room, trying to work out the details of his medication. Apart from the daily Melphalan tablet, he had been prescribed a whole battery of drugs in an attempt to combat the cancer's pernicious side-effects: anaemia, the strain on the heart, and so on. Isosorbide dimtrate, two tablets, four times a day; Furosemide, one tablet, three times; Pred-nisolone, six tablets, twice daily... ‘I'll do this,’ he told the relieved old women. ‘At least it is one thing I can do.’ Agarol for his constipation, Spironolactone for goodness knew what, and a zyloric, Allopurinol: he suddenly remembered, crazily, an antique theatre review in which the English critic, Kenneth Tynan, had imagined the polysyllabic characters in Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great as ‘a horde of pills and wonder drugs bent on decimating one another’: