Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

Miss Salma R, by this time a nineteen-year-old who had just starred in her first film, did not cry out. She turned and left the room, leaving the lights on, carefully made the phone calls that needed to be made, went to her own room and packed a bag, drove away, and never set foot in that house of death again, leaving to others the task of cataloguing and selling the furniture, the furnishings, the movie memorabilia, and the personal effects—the gowns, the love letters, the photograph albums in which her mother’s life lay embalmed. She wanted none of it, and listened to nobody who told her that she was in the grip of traumatic grief and would regret her decisions later. She turned away from the past with all the steely resolve which would take her to the very top of her profession in two continents. Among the elements of the past which she rejected was her aging grandfather. “He’s a ghost,” she told people. “I won’t let any ghosts haunt me now. He needs to find himself alternative accommodation. The house must be sold at once.”

In one of those extraordinary coincidences that enliven real life but are considered suspect in fiction, she moved into a smart apartment on the very same low hill in Breach Candy where Quichotte had previously been a child, though she was around thirty years younger than her future admirer.

Westfield Estate, as this little group of villas and apartment blocks was known—this microscopic urban speck from which the entire universe was born!—was the creation of an Anglophile developer called Suleman Oomer, also the builder of the somewhat similar Oomer Park properties down the road. He gave many of the buildings majestic-sounding English names: Windsor Villa, Glamis Villa, Sandringham Villa, Bal Moral, Devonshire House, and even Christmas Eve. It was in Christmas Eve, the place where Christmas was eternally promised for the next day but never arrived, that Miss Salma R came to roost. And it was there, three days after her mother’s death, that she agreed to receive an unexpected guest, her mother’s friend-turned-enemy, Nargis Kumari, whose presence allowed Salma finally to grieve for her mother. The veteran actress entered the apartment howling with pain and her voluble sadness overwhelmed the daughter’s grim-faced stoicism. “What a fool I have been,” Nargis Kumari cried, in full tragic actress mode, “to allow a mere man to destroy my closest friendship. What is a man compared to the love between soul sisters? He is a passing shadow. He is a random sneeze. He is a short rain shower on a sunny day. I should have been beside her every minute, sunshine or rain. Now I am as empty as a bottle from which all the wine has been poured. I am a word in a dictionary whose meaning has been erased. I am as hollow as a rotten tree.” Miss Salma R’s tears began to flow. “I will do everything for you,” Nargis Kumari vowed. “You just sit on here and mourn. All requisite duties and disposals will be handled by myself.” A few days later word reached Miss Salma R that Nargis Kumari had been at the Juhu house trying on the dead woman’s most expensive garments and taking many of them away with her, plus matching jewelry. Miss Salma R called her to discuss this. “You didn’t want anything, isn’t it,” Nargis Kumari replied without any shame. “So these few souvenirs of my darling I can keep close to my heart?” Miss Salma R hung up without replying.

After she wept for her dead mother the mood swings began, as if they had been transferred by the magic of grieving from that dead mind to this living one. From that moment onward she found herself on the emotional roller coaster on which her mother and grandmother had spent their lives. There was no escape from dynastic biochemistry. In Miss Salma R’s family the darkness was always there, sitting like a panther in the corner of the room, waiting for its time.

SOME TIME LATER THE AMERICAN TV producer came to call, to tempt her with a California dream. She did not, at first, fall under his spell. “In the industry in this town,” she told the American as they sipped cocktails on her balcony at Christmas Eve, “there are six boys and four girls, and for a picture to be big it must have at least one and one, preferably two and one. The whole annual box office depends on what we choose. So it is a burden, and we must be responsible. The livelihoods of thousands of people are affected by our decisions. This is why it is not easy for me to accept your TV series.” The American had come a long way to do what all the Bollywood ultrastars required: to “narrate” the series idea to them personally. Miss Salma R offered him samosas, gulab jamun, and dirty martinis (up, with olives) and listened with great, wide-eyed seriousness, using the great, wide-eyed, serious look that had served her so well in so many close-ups. This look was as good as the best card player’s poker face. The American could not tell if she was extremely interested, slightly interested, or not at all interested in his pitch. He tried again. “I know you are anxious to expand your range as an actress,” he said. She nodded fervently but her eyes very, very slightly glazed over. “Both creatively and in terms of your reach and penetration.”

Here her mask slipped slightly. Penetration, reach: These were fascinating words. He had her attention now. “I know that your films are huge in the Arab world and the Far East as well as here,” the American said, “and your stage performances command top dollar.” Huge, top, dollar, she thought. These words are so precise, so true. This is a smart man. “Our show will be streamed to every country in the world,” the American said. “You will be the beloved, the obsession, of gauchos on the Argentinian pampa, of cowpokes in Wyoming, of Puerto Rican reggaeton singers, of boxing champions in Las Vegas. Teenage boys in colleges will desire you, grandfathers will wish you were their granddaughter in big cities and small country towns from Johannesburg to Vancouver. There will be hundreds of millions of ordinary men, humble men with blue collars, men of low net worth, maybe unemployed men, for whom you will be their greatest treasure, and whose paltry, empty-pocketed lives you will enrich as they binge-watch you in the dark.”

“Girls too,” she murmured.

“Of course girls too,” the American agreed. “To girls everywhere you will be their role model and powerful representative. You will kick ass, if I may say that, on their behalf.”

She wanted to kick ass on their behalf. “So there are some things that worry me, and I should say so now, isn’t it, because when we are on set we should be totally on the same page.”

The American sat up very straight. “Yes, of course,” he said.

“On page thirty, here”—she pointed—“my character is in the bathroom and it seems she is, excuse me, masturbating.”

“That can be fixed,” the American said.

“My character does not masturbate,” said Miss Salma R. “My character kicks ass.”

“Totally,” the American said.

MISS SALMA R CHOSE NEVER to explain the forces that drove her to leave home in her mid-twenties and at the height of her popularity in the Indian cinema (and she was popular, though not as deeply loved as her mother and grandmother), and to seek a new fortune halfway across the world. She loved her hometown and her life in it. And yet she left. There were those who said that her relationship with home had soured after her mother’s death. There were voices that blamed her “unfettered ambition and greed” and even more spiteful voices that called her “a deracinated, self-hating, Westoxicated no-talent” and called for her Indian films to be banned. These voices suggested that if she had a husband he could have knocked some sense into her. The generation of Netflix-and-chill was less judgmental and looked forward to seeing her on their laptops. In their opinion her real migration had been from silver screen to computer screen, not from Bombay/Mumbai to L.A., a migration that made her even more fashionable than before in their eyes. She herself was unclear about her motives. She had begun her meeting with the American determined to refuse his advances, but by the end of it she had accepted his offer. Maybe the unending Hindu-Muslim tension in the city had activated a Muslim-Hindu tension within her own mixed self and she needed to get away from that old quarrel, change that narrative, not be in that story anymore. Maybe it wasn’t about religion. Maybe her spirit was more adventurous than she knew. Maybe there was something in her that wanted to test itself against the challenges of a wider world. Maybe she doubted her own worth and would not be able to think of herself as valuable if she did not pick up this gauntlet. Maybe she really was a gambler at heart and this was her spinning wheel.