Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

As she emerged from this brief reverie a quarrel broke out among the assembled Lords. The youngest peer, the British-Nigerian baroness Aretta Alagoa, was calling to mind one of the early defining moments of Sister’s career. In the early 1980s a fire had broken out in cheap public housing in North London and seven families had died. After that two hundred or so people had stormed and occupied their local town hall to demand safe, habitable housing for themselves and their children immediately. Sister had gone in there to offer her legal services and had immediately become the spokesperson for the group, whose media appearances were highly effective, and had forced the borough council to act. “You became a star for us youngsters then,” Aretta Alagoa told her, “so for you to become the first POC to be speaker in the Lords would be a big, big thing.”

The assembled peers were a cross-party group, intended to show Sister that her prospective appointment had support all the way across the political spectrum. It was an uneasy coalition, however, and now the oldest member of the group, the septuagenarian Lord Fitch, a former Conservative deputy prime minister, broke ranks.

“It doesn’t matter a toss if she’s a person of color or not,” he declared. “Ridiculous phrase, anyway. Isn’t everyone a person of color? What am I? Colorless?”

“Who could ever say such a thing about you, Hugo?” Baroness Alagoa did not go easy on the sarcasm. “However, the fact is that people of color presently, and with much reason, feel threatened by your party and its followers.”

“I’m not going along with this if it’s some sort of bloody tokenism,” old Hugo Fitch cried. “I’m not lending my support to some sort of reverse discrimination.”

“Affirmative action.”

“Reverse discrimination,” he repeated. “All I care about is getting the best bloody person for the job, brown, yellow, pink, green, black, or blue.”

“And you’re sitting at her dinner table,” the baroness pointed out. “So I’d suggest you’d have done well to have thought this through before you arrived.”

“I’m not here to solve the bloody immigrant problem,” Fitch said too loudly, making a fist by his glass of red wine, which had possibly been refilled too many times. “If you bang on about a person of color getting preferment you’ll play right into the enemy’s hands.”

“And who might that enemy be, would you say?” Aretta Alagoa asked very quietly. “Might it perhaps be you?”

Listening to this petty, bitter spat, beneath which there bubbled the poisonous, xenophobic bitches’ brew of the new England, Sister caught her husband’s amused eye and had to resist a powerful, a positively Ukrainian urge to cry out, “Disappointing!”

A kind of older, don’t-rock-the-boat England reasserted itself then, and her guests smoothed things out and made peace and the evening ended as the celebration it was supposed to be, and then they were gone. But she was still haunted, distracted, her thoughts siphoning away from her imminent political elevation as she fell down a rabbit hole into the past. How angry was she with Brother still? Was the unforgivable thing in fact forgivable, or at least forgettable? Her daughter scolded her for doing nothing to heal the breach. Daughter had read and amazingly liked several of her uncle’s pedestrian spy novels and was regrettably proud of her literary relative. “Whatever happened is like a hundred years ago,” she told her mother. “You’re always pontificating about the Culture of Offendedness, nobody has a right not to be offended blah blah, but here you are hugging your own offendedness like a pet dog. Come on. If he dies or something you’ll be sorry you never put things right.”

Maybe that was true. Or maybe she was more afraid of herself, of his ability to trigger her worst responses. They would meet, they would fall into each other’s arms, they would cry and laugh and say how stupid they had both been, they would mourn the lost and vanished years, they would tell each other the stories of their lives, their children, their loves, their work, they would fall back into the easy big-brother-kid-sister love of childhood, and that would last for what? Maybe twenty-four hours? Maybe forty-eight? And then he would say something that would open the locked door to the dark cellar and the monster would come roaring out and after that happened there wouldn’t be much left of either of them. She was scared of what he could turn her into. That was the truth.

And there was more than one grievance. There was the memory of a slap.

MORE THAN FORTY YEARS AGO, Sad-Faced Older Painter, the grand old man of a generation of Indian artists much influenced by European modernism and abstraction, had been hounded out of the country by religious fanatics whose faces, illuminated by the exhilaration of their bigotry, were bright-eyed and blazing with light. He abandoned his home and caught a night flight to London—and he took Sister along with him in his baggage. It was only then that Pa and Ma found out that Sad-Faced Older Painter had fallen absurdly but irrevocably in love with their daughter several years earlier when she was still illegal, and that she had encouraged him in spite of the sixty-year difference in their ages, because she saw him as her ticket to ride, her way out of the cage of her parents’ limited ambitions for her, her freedom from a desi Jane Austen future of husband hunting and babies. He seemed to her the noble gatekeeper to a greater world of wide horizons and big skies, in which she could allow her self to expand and her wings to unfurl, and then she would be able to fly. She saw him secretly until she was of age and remained a virgin after that until he told her he might have to go abroad to get away from the madmen, whereupon she took the initiative and told him she didn’t want to go halfway around the world with an older man if the sex was going to be no good. So she auditioned Sad-Faced Older Painter and declared that he had passed, not cum laude, but well enough, all things considered, and so, fine, she would go with him and the devil take everything else. After that there was a secret marriage, and a passport, and the night flight that broke her parents’ heart. At the time, full of the excitement of the big adventure, and full of youthful resentment, she was pleased to have hit back and hurt them, seeing it as payback for their unwillingness to invest in her dreams.

The only person who got to know about her love affair was Brother. Home from college for the long summer vacation, he worked out what was going on and confronted her, wide-eyed with stupid, conservative horror, and she took him on, didn’t give him a chance, released the Hulk within, and terrified him into silence. “If you say one word,” she hissed, “make no mistake, I will kill you. You’ll be sleeping in your bed and I’ll come in with a kitchen knife and you’ll wake up dead. Make no mistake.” Just as years later after another accusation she told him, Be in no doubt that I will do whatever it takes. He did not doubt her on either occasion. He kept his mouth shut, both times. And no doubt hated her for it.

Two months later, on the night she left her parents’ home for the last time, they were out at a party as usual, and she hoped to depart without a big scene. As she reached the front door of the apartment, however, Brother came in. He had guessed what might be happening and stood in the doorway, blocking her exit, bloated with righteousness.

“Move out of my way,” she said.

“You’re a traitor,” he said. “You’re betraying us all. You’re a disgusting person and a traitor.”

“Move out of the way,” she said.

Then he did something that took her by surprise, something that must have taken all his courage. He stepped toward her, very quickly, before she could get out of the way, and hit her once, very hard, with an open hand, on the right side of her head. The blow almost knocked her out and she felt a thin trickle of blood seeping out of her ringing ear.