Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

“Evenin’, Miss Daisy,” her driver greeted her.

“Stop saying that, Hoke,” she replied. “You’re making me mad.”

England is another country. They do things differently there.

Yes: we must sojourn for a time among the English, for so long thought to be the most pragmatic and commonsensical of peoples, but presently torn asunder by a wild, nostalgic decision about their future; and in particular, in London, once the most pleasing of cities, now much disfigured by the empty apartment blocks of the international rich, the Chinese, Russians, and Arabs who stationed their money in such buildings as if they were parking lots and money an armada of invisible automobiles; and in London, on a street in the west of the city, in a neighborhood once known for its longhair bohemians, West Indians, and quirky local stores, but rapidly becoming too expensive except for the comfortably short-haired, its quirkiness replaced by the bland façades of frock shops and chic eateries, and as for the West Indians, they were pushed to the margins long ago and now, because of that wild, nostalgic decision about the country’s future, faced uncertainty and renewed hostility. Once a year in this neighborhood a carnival filled the streets, modeled on the customs of faraway Jamaica and Trinidad, but the intermingled culture the carnival celebrated had changed now, and felt, to some saddened people at least, like a painful reminder of the time before the country broke in half. And yes, let us admit it, our story’s other two countries were badly broken, too, and equally disputatious, and more violent. Black citizens were regularly killed by white policemen in one of these other countries, or arrested in hotel lobbies for the crime of making a phone call to their mothers, and children were murdered in schools because of a constitutional amendment that made it easy to murder children in schools; and in the other country, a man was lynched by sacred-cow fanatics for the crime of having what they thought was beef in his kitchen, and an eight-year-old girl from a Muslim family was raped and killed in a Hindu temple to teach the Muslim population a lesson. So perhaps this England was not the worst place, after all, and perhaps this London was not the worst city in spite of its rising knife crime, and perhaps this West London neighborhood was still a nice neighborhood to live in, and perhaps things would get better in time.

An interjection, kind reader, if you’ll allow one: It may be argued that stories should not sprawl in this way, that they should be grounded in one place or the other, put down roots in the other or the one and flower in that singular soil; yet so many of today’s stories are and must be of this plural, sprawling kind, because a kind of nuclear fission has taken place in human lives and relations, families have been divided, millions upon millions of us have traveled to the four corners of the (admittedly spherical, and therefore cornerless) globe, whether by necessity or choice. Such broken families may be our best available lenses through which to view this broken world. And inside the broken families are broken people, broken by loss, poverty, maltreatment, failure, age, sickness, pain, and hatred, yet trying in spite of it all to cling to hope and love, and these broken people—we, the broken people!—may be the best mirrors of our times, shining shards that reflect the truth, wherever we travel, wherever we land, wherever we remain. For we migrants have become like seed-spores, carried through the air, and lo, the breeze blows us where it will, until we lodge in alien soil, where very often—as for example now in this England with its wild nostalgia for an imaginary golden age when all attitudes were Anglo-Saxon and all English skins were white—we are made to feel unwelcome, no matter how beautiful the fruit hanging from the branches of the orchards of fruit trees that we grow into and become.

To resume: Here in this West London neighborhood we may intrude upon a spacious apartment above a restaurant—the very restaurant space, as it happens, from which, for many years, the carnival was organized! The apartment boasts two floors and a large roof terrace, a lateral conversion across the width of two row houses. The lower floor has been opened out to form a single, light-filled, high-ceilinged room, and in the open-plan kitchen and bar in the large room’s northeast corner, mixing herself a dirty martini (up, with olives), we may now see Sister—yes, the Author’s sibling, Brother’s Sister—an immigrant, plainly, South Asian, obviously, and also a successful lawyer with a strong interest in civil and human rights issues, a stalwart fighter on behalf of minorities and the urban poor, who has devoted a good proportion of her time to pro bono work; and it would not be stretching things to say that she might be thinking, as she has often thought, such thoughts as the ones we have outlined above. Of her appearance perhaps the only thing that needs to be said is that her decision to stop coloring her hair was made quite recently, and she has had to get used to the white-haired stranger in the mirror—to her mother, we might say, looking back at her across time and through the looking glass. And now that we have introduced her and set her in some sort of context, let us leave her to sip her evening drink and await her dinner guests, while we retreat into the privacy of these pages to tell her tale.

SISTER DID SOMETIMES THINK about her Brother, but usually with a kind of dismissive exasperation. She had boxed him away in the attic of her memories, along with the rest of her early years: their Bombay world, the radiogram, the dancing. The feeling of coming second to her brother, who received privileges not offered to her. She had clawed her way out of that trap, making choices her parents didn’t want her to make (more will be said about these choices in due course), winning major scholarships to pay for the British law school education they didn’t want her to have. Now, after a long and distinguished career, her roots were here, in this apartment, on this street, in this neighborhood, in this city, in this country, for all its faults. That old world had vanished, and her parents and Brother along with it. Childhood was just a story she could tell at dinner parties: a story about the hypocrisies and double standards of the supposedly free-thinking Indian intelligentsia. She had decisively moved on and made her own life. Or so, most of the time, she told herself. But the truth was that she still felt the past moving like a thrombosis in the blood. It might reach her heart and kill her one of these days.

After their parents’ death it had fallen to her, as the “efficient” sibling, to deal with everything that had to be dealt with—a second-rate spy novelist was clearly too much of an Artist to be involved—and when she had done it all, when she had buried her mother and burned her father, disposed of the family property, found suitable new owners for Zayvar Brother and Cake & Antiques, and organized a memorial event at which the city’s best and brightest had turned out to tell funny stories about Pa and Ma and mourn them as they would have wished, with dances; and after that, when all was done, when she had arranged for what Brother in his crass way called the “division of the spoils,” her sibling had called her for that last phone call and said the unforgivable thing.

“So what’s this?”

“What’s what?”

“This wire transfer that just landed in my bank account.”