Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses

As The Aliens Show got bigger it began to attract political criticism. Conservatives attacked it for being too frightening, too sexually explicit (Ridley could become positively erect when he thought too hard about Miss Weaver), too weird. Radical commentators began to attack its stereotyping, its reinforcement of the idea of aliens-as-freaks, its lack of positive images. Chamcha came under pressure to quit the show; refused; became a target. ‘Trouble waiting when I go home,’ he told Zeeny. ‘The damn show isn't an allegory. It's an entertainment. It aims to please.’

‘To please whom?’ she wanted to know. ‘Besides, even now they only let you on the air after they cover your face with rubber and give you a red wig. Big deal deluxe, say I.’

‘The point is,’ she said when they awoke the next morning, ‘Salad darling, you really are good looking, no quesch. Skin like milk, England returned. Now that Gibreel has done a bunk, you could be next in line. I'm serious, yaar. They need a new face. Come home and you could be the next, bigger than Bachchan was, bigger than Farishta. Your face isn't as funny as theirs.’

When he was young, he told her, each phase of his life, each self he tried on, had seemed reassuringly temporary. Its imperfections didn't matter, because he could easily replace one moment by the next, one Saladin by another. Now, however, change had begun to feel painful; the arteries of the possible had begun to harden. ‘It isn't easy to tell you this, but I'm married now, and not just to wife but life.’ The accent slippage again. ‘I really came to Bombay for one reason, and it wasn't the play. He's in his late seventies now, and I won't have many more chances. He hasn't been to the show; Muhammad must go to the mountain.’

My father, Changez Chamchawala, owner of a magic lamp. ‘Changez Chamchawala, are you kidding, don't think you can leave me behind,’ she clapped her hands. ‘I want to check out the hair and toenails.’ His father, the famous recluse. Bombay was a culture of re-makes. Its architecture mimicked the skyscraper, its cinema endlessly re-invented The Magnificent Seven and Love Story, obliging all its heroes to save at least one village from murderous dacoits and all its heroines to die of leukaemia at least once in their careers, preferably at the start. Its millionaires, too, had taken to importing their lives. Changez's invisibility was an Indian dream of the crorepati penthoused wretch of Las Vegas; but a dream was not a photograph, after all, and Zeeny wanted to see with her own eyes. ‘He makes faces at people if he's in a bad mood,’ Saladin warned her. ‘Nobody believes it till it happens, but it's true. Such faces! Gargoyles. Also, he's a prude and he'll call you a tart and anyway I'll probably have a fight with him, it's on the cards.’

What Saladin Chamcha had come to India for: forgiveness. That was his business in his old home town. But whether to give or to receive, he was not able to say.

Bizarre aspects of the present circumstances of Mr. Changez Chamchawala: with his new wife, Nasreen the Second, he lived for five days every week in a high-walled compound nicknamed the Red Fort in the Pali Hill district beloved of movie stars; but every weekend he returned without his wife to the old house at Scandal Point, to spend his days of rest in the lost world of the past, in the company of the first, and dead, Nasreen. Furthermore: it was said that his second wife refused to set foot in the old place. ‘Or isn't allowed to,’ Zeeny hypothesized in the back of the black-glass-windowed Mercedes limousine which Changez had sent to collect his son. As Saladin finished filling in the background, Zeenat Vakil whistled appreciatively. ‘Crazee.’

The Chamchawala fertilizer business, Changez's empire of dung, was to be investigated for tax fraud and import duty evasion by a Government commission, but Zeeny wasn't interested in that. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘I’il get to find out what you're really like.’

Scandal Point unfurled before them. Saladin felt the past rush in like a tide, drowning him, filling his lungs with its revenant saltiness. I'm not myself today, he thought. The heart flutters. Life damages the living. None of us are ourselves. None of us are like this.

These days there were steel gates, operated by remote control from within, sealing the crumbling triumphal arch. They opened with a slow whirring sound to admit Saladin into that place of lost time. When he saw the walnut-tree in which his father had claimed that his soul was kept, his hands began to shake. He hid behind the neutrality of facts. ‘In Kashmir,’ he told Zeeny, ‘your birth-tree is a financial investment of a sort. When a child comes of age, the grown walnut is comparable to a matured insurance policy; it's a valuable tree, it can be sold, to pay for weddings, or a start in life. The adult chops down his childhood to help his grown-up self. The unsentimentality is appealing, don't you think?’

The car had stopped under the entrance porch. Zeeny fell silent as the two of them climbed the six stairs to the front door, where they were greeted by a composed and ancient bearer in white, brass-buttoned livery, whose shock of white hair Chamcha suddenly recognized, by translating it back into black, as the mane of that same Vallabh who had presided over the house as its major-domo in the Olden Days. ‘My God, Vallabhbhai,’ he managed, and embraced the old man. The servant smiled a difficult smile. ‘I grow so old, baba, I was thinking you would not recognize.’ He led them down the crystal-heavy corridors of the mansion and Saladin realized that the lack of change was excessive, and plainly deliberate. It was true, Vallabh explained to him, that when the Begum died Changez Sahib had sworn that the house would be her memorial. As a result nothing had changed since the day she died, paintings, furniture, soap-dishes, the red-glass figures of fighting bulls and china ballerinas from Dresden, all left in their exact positions, the same magazines on the same tables, the same crumpled balls of paper in the waste-baskets, as though the house had died, too, and been embalmed. ‘Mummified,’ Zeeny said, voicing the unspeakable as usual. ‘God, but it's spooky, no?’ It was at this point, while Vallabh the bearer was opening the double doors leading into the blue drawing-room, that Saladin Chamcha saw his mother's ghost.

He let out a loud cry and Zeeny whirled on her heel. There,’ he pointed towards the far, darkened end of the hallway, ‘no question, that blasted newsprint sari, the big headlines, the one she wore the day she, she,’ but now Vallabh had begun to flap his arms like a weak, flightless bird, you see, baba, it was only Kasturba, you have not forgotten, my wife, only my wife. My ayah Kasturba with whom I played in rock-pools. Until I grew up and went without her and in a hollow a man with ivory glasses. ‘Please, baba, nothing to be cross, only when the Begum died Changez Sahib donated to my wife some few garments, you do not object? Your mother was a so-generous woman, when alive she always gave with an open hand.’ Chamcha, recovering his equilibrium, was feeling foolish. ‘For God's sake, Vallabh,’ he muttered. ‘For God's sake. Obviously I don't object.’ An old stiffness re-entered Vallabh; the right to free speech of the old retainer permitted him to reprove, ‘Excuse, baba, but you should not blaspheme.’

‘See how he's sweating,’ Zeeny stage-whispered. ‘He looks scared stiff.’ Kasturba entered the room, and although her reunion with Chamcha was warm enough there was still a wrongness in the air. Vallabh left to bring beer and Thums Up, and when Kasturba also excused herself, Zeeny at once said: ‘Something fishy. She walks like she owns the dump. The way she holds herself. And the old man was afraid. Those two are up to something, I bet.’ Chamcha tried to be reasonable. They stay here alone most of the time, probably sleep in the master bedroom and eat off the good plates, it must get to feeling like their place.’ But he was thinking how strikingly, in that old sari, his ayah Kasturba had come to resemble his mother.