Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

There was one character, one story, missing from all the explanations. That was the man whom three generations of women had first loved and then rejected. He never told his story. Neither he nor Miss Salma R ever addressed the question of why he was ejected from the Juhu mansion as soon as Anisa died and never had any more contact with his granddaughter as long as he lived. He gave up his medical practice, went on the pilgrimage to Mecca, and returned to live out his days in silence, an ascetic in a much humbler home than the film star’s residence he had occupied most of his life.

AT FIRST SHE COMMUTED between the two -woods, from Bolly- to Holly-, but as her star rose in the West her trips East became fewer and then stopped altogether. The American showrunner had kept his promise. Her spy drama Five Eyes turned out to be the biggest thing since the last biggest thing, even bigger than that, in fact, and bigger also than the big thing that followed it. Her character’s name was deliberately written to echo her own, deliberately chosen to blur the distinction between the actress and her screen persona. In the show she was Salma C. The C was a private joke, an homage to the initial by which the head of British intelligence was known. The joke was left unexplained because in Five Eyes her character worked for American intelligence and any association with MI6 would have misled the audience, whom the show wanted to perplex and confuse, but not in that way.

Spies were becoming news again. At the end of the Cold War, without the Soviet Union as an enemy, they felt for a time like old hat, and after 9/11 they looked foolish and unprepared. The expansion of the Five Eyes system of cooperation between the English-speaking nations was Western intelligence’s bid to remain relevant, and in Five Eyes “Salma C,” with her expertise in cyber-warfare, rose rapidly through the veiled echelons of the hidden world. In the first season she played the invisible woman, the U.S. chief of counter-terrorism, holding the rank of ambassador. Her work was so secret that her existence could not be publicly confirmed, nor could her name be printed or her movements made public. She wore power suits and trademark aviator shades and spoke Arabic and Farsi as well as the new vocabularies of the cyberworld and had a dreadful relationship with the old white man at the head of the CIA who lusted after her in the most unpleasantly old-fashioned way and simultaneously pooh-poohed her professional concern that cyber-terrorists could be the most significant new foes that America had to face, and when he was murdered in the season finale she stepped over his fallen body and took his job. In the seasons that followed she managed to create a screen persona that was simultaneously patriotic, ruthless, and adorably nerdy, so that half the country fell in love with her and the other half delighted in her scariness.

The intelligence world, inside Five Eyes and outside it, returned to the front pages when it found itself in conflict not only with its usual enemies but with a willful American president as well. In response to real events the series introduced a wholly imaginary chief executive who was obsessed by cable news, who pandered to a white supremacist base, and who had played golf with Salma C’s predecessor and talked locker-room shit to him about girls. This entirely fabulist president was dismayed at Salma C’s accession to the Langley throne. His fictional dislike of immigrants led him to think of his brown, female CIA chief as untrustworthy and probably un-American, and his fictitious inability to focus on complex details meant he was bewildered by her fluency in the new argots of cyberspeak, hacking, and AI, and translated that bewilderment into anger, so that her job was perpetually at risk. In one episode she told the TV president that the new cyber-invasive processes that threatened the Internet’s security procedures, as well as American voting systems, and therefore democracy, could be compared to certain cephalopods like the mimic octopus which could disguise itself so effectively as coral that human beings could not tell the difference. The imaginary president boomed at her in the voice he habitually used to disguise his incomprehension: “Octopuses? I have to talk about octopuses now? We have hostile fucking octopuses infiltrating our systems?”

“Octopi,” said “Salma C,” quietly, and the actor playing the president turned so red that it seemed possible to viewers that he might actually explode. After this episode images of Salma C’s face with a speech bubble saying “Octopi” went viral on the Internet and OCTOPI T-shirts sold very well. Women across and beyond America began saying “octopi” to one another as shorthand for men’s stupidity, and liberals of both genders and all the genders in between used the word to stand for the stupidity of the right. A cartoon of Miss Salma C astride a giant octopus which was crushing the White House in its tentacles became the most popular New Yorker cover image of the year. She was depicted in Time as a multi-limbed Indian goddess with tentacles for arms, the Octopus Woman whose kiss was irresistible even though it killed the men upon whom it was bestowed.

The show ran for five seasons and at the end of it Miss Salma R shed the skin of her alter ego Salma C and emerged as a fully fledged superstar. It was at this moment that she chose, against all advice, to set aside her career as an actor, abandon Los Angeles and the movie industry and move to New York City, and host a daytime talk show on network television, four days a week: a show she would personally own, so that she would never work for anyone else again. It was also at this moment that she revealed her absolute independence and personal power to the people who believed themselves to be responsible for her success, who were convinced that she owed them everything and that therefore they owned her, the men who knew they would never fuck her and therefore sought to possess her in other ways, the agents, managers, lawyers, showrunners, and production executives, the personal publicists, the show publicists, the publicists for the streaming network, as well as the exalted individuals who were never named but were at the foundation of everything, who gnawed like the Nidhogg at the roots of the World-Tree—that is to say, the rich people, the super-rich and the ultra-rich, who owned the people who owned the people who owned the network that owned the show that had made her what she was. Ignoring all these people, she launched her show, and within three years was the most influential woman in America, with the exception, of course, of Oprah, who quickly anointed Miss Salma R as her only possible inheritor, and by doing so kept her firmly in second place.

Everything about her new incarnation was exactly as Miss Salma R ordained, except for one thing. She had wanted to call the show Changing the American Story, or maybe, more concisely, Changing America. But the one American she trusted, the one who came to see her in Mumbai/Bombay and persuaded her to move halfway across the world, to step off the edge of the cliff into the unknown, and who was now her company’s president, told her that those were dreadful, smart-ass, liberal-elite, forgettable titles. She deferred to the American on this one point, and so the show was named more simply: after her. Salma.

THE HIT SHOW’S OFFICES, in a converted warehouse space in lower Manhattan, were bulging at the seams, because the number of persons needed to open, read, categorize, and evaluate the mail that poured in every day had risen to over three hundred and sixty-five, their attention divided between the messages arriving on the website and through social media and the hard-copy correspondence, which still made up the largest part of the incoming material, and which required a fleet of forklift vehicles to carry them from the delivery vans to the mail readers’ floor, three hundred and sixty-five mail sacks a day, one year of mail sacks arriving on each and every morning of the year. It became plain that no single human being could maintain control over such an uproar of correspondence, and Miss Salma R was told by her executives that they would sift and select a manageable quantity of letters for her personal scrutiny, because for her to sit with each one of the three hundred and sixty-five first readers to judge which letters, emails, texts, and tweets warranted a response, an invitation, or even a special show built around them would require more hours than the clocks allowed for, it would be necessary to bend the laws of time itself, to which she replied, “Then that’s what’s going to happen, because that’s what I need to do.” Monday was the only weekday on which the show did not air and so, on account of the force of Miss Salma R’s will, the laws of the universe were indeed suspended at the Salma offices building each Monday, so that in addition to all the week’s pre-production work, she had plenty of time to visit all three hundred and sixty-five mail desks and to make decisions about every single letter that came in. Unnerved by Miss Salma R’s temporal absolutism, the clocks gave up arguing and stopped trying to run the hours in the normal fashion, so that when people looked in their direction to see what the time was, the clocks showed them whatever time they wanted it to be, and in spite of the chronometric havoc that was created by this abdication they still permitted everyone to get home on time.