Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

“You can go now,” he said, and let her pass.

SHE LAY IN BED at the end of her big night, looking up at the ceiling light fixture with its gilded cherubs and frosted-glass flowers. He had hit her, yes. She had a blood clot removed from her ear two weeks later and there was some permanent damage to her hearing. But it had not been her finest hour either, even though it had given her the life she wanted. She hadn’t treated Sad-Faced Older Painter particularly well once she had her scholarship and entered Middle Temple. She was immersed in new things and he felt like an old used thing, a thing to discard. He understood, asked her for nothing, and didn’t last long. He died in his sleep four years later and left her enough in his will to look after her for the rest of her life. And she became a lawyer and created the character she wanted to inhabit and inhabited it, and met the judge and married for a second time and had a child. And Brother’s raising of his hand against her was unforgivable. Or was it? As she slipped toward sleep she found herself thinking, in the old voice of childhood, Maybe I deserved to be hit.

And immediately her adult voice replied. No, you didn’t.

SHE AND THE JUDGE had this in common: that they saw the law as an instance of the sublime, inspiring love and awe but also dread, and being, in the end, akin to that mood (Wordsworth) In which the heavy and the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world / Is lightened. The law guided her in most things, but it was unable to help her in this.

If he dies or something you’ll be sorry, Daughter had said. But there were things Daughter didn’t yet know because she hadn’t been told.

It might not be Brother who died first.

“Good night, Jack,” the judge called from his bedroom. They had separate bedrooms now.

“I love you,” she called back. But that wasn’t what he was expecting her to say, and so, being a creature of habit, he didn’t reply. That was all right. She did not doubt his love.

In the large and prosperous Indian community of Atlanta (pop. 472,522), Dr. R. K. Smile was known as “the Little King.” A few of the oldsters remembered Otto Soglow’s fun-loving cartoon character by that name, a small hemispherical monarch dressed in a fur-collared red garment with a pointy golden crown and a flamboyant black handlebar mustache. He liked innocent pleasures and pretty women. If you took off the yellow crown, that was a good description of the Smile Pharma billionaire too. He loved to play the games of Indian childhoods, was a whiz on the carrom board at his Colonial Revival home on Peachtree Battle Avenue, sponsored a team in the “hard tennis ball” Atlanta Cricket League (“We play casual cricket but we wear professional outfit!”), and from time to time organized informal kabaddi competitions in Centennial Park. He was happily married to his wife, Happy, the biryani expert, but could not resist flirting with every attractive woman who crossed his path, so his other nickname, used only behind his back and primarily by the younger women of the community, was Little Big Hands.

In spite of these grabby tendencies, he was highly regarded, a benefactor of the best Atlanta Indian newspaper and website, named Rajdhani, “Capital,” as if to assert that Atlanta was the capital of Indian America, and a donor to most of the proliferating community associations in the city, groupings of people by their state of origin back home, but also by language (Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu), caste, subcaste, religion, and preferred house deities (Devi, Mahadeo, Narayan, and even small groups dedicated to Lohasur the iron god, Khodiyal the horse god, and Hardul the god of cholera). He gave as generously to Hindu groups as to Muslim ones, even though he disapproved of the widespread local admiration for the Indian leader Narendra Modi, his Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, and its ideological parent body, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS. The only community gatherings in which he politely declined to participate were those at which money was raised to send back to India to support those organizations. In spite of this he was popular across the whole spectrum of Atlanta Indians, and even spoke of himself as a unifying force, able to bring the seventy-five thousand South Asian Muslims in the area closer to their one hundred thousand Hindu brothers and sisters. He was not a deeply religious man himself, and had never set foot in any of the three dozen mosques in the city, not even the large Al-Farooq Masjid on Fourteenth Street. “To tell the truth,” he confided to his closest friends, “I (a) am not the praying type and I (b) in fact like the look of the Swaminarayan temple better.” This was the large Krishna temple in the suburb of Lilburn. “But don’t tangle me up in any of that, yaar, ” he added. “I’m a pharmacist. I make pills.”

On the subject of prescription medication he was outspoken, severe, and, as events would reveal, utterly dishonest. “Back home in the old days,” he said when he spoke at one of the community’s many gala evenings, “there was always a street corner dispensary that would hand out drugs without a doctor’s chit. Cross-legged in his raised booth, the vendor would wave a forgiving hand. ‘Come back and give me later,’ he might say, but when you came back for more he never asked where the last chit was. And if you asked for twenty painkillers he would say, ‘Why so few? Take the box only. Save yourself trouble. Why come back every week?’ It was bad for his customers’ health, but good for health of business.” There was nostalgic laughter when he said this, but he wagged a finger at the assembled worthies and went tsk-tsk-tsk. “Ladies and gents, it is not a laughing matter.”

Afterwards, when his house came tumbling down, people would say, “It’s like he was confessing to us openly. Standing there in front of us and challenging us. Putting on a straight face even while he was telling us he was crooked, and where he got the idea.”

“Many of us have done well in America,” he went on. “I, also, by the grace of God. Our life here today is a good life. But so many of us still believe our roots are in the past. This is not true. Our old places are gone, our old customs are not the American ways, our old languages are not spoken. Only we carry these things within us. Our roots are in ourselves and in each other. In our bodies and minds we preserve our identity. Because of this we can move, we can go out and conquer the world.”

Afterwards, when his enterprises lay in ruins, people would say, “He was too greedy. He wanted to conquer the world. He told us this also, standing right in front of us, he confessed everything. But we were too stupid to see.”

BEFORE WE GO ANY further we must take issue with the good—or, as it turned out, not so good—Dr. Smile, and insist on the significance of his historical roots, or at least, the roots he claimed on those occasions when he wanted to claim roots. We have previously mentioned (see this page) his supposed ancestor who was denied American citizenship at the dawn of the twentieth century on the grounds that he was not a free white man. We now whisk the veil of anonymity off this individual, as if removing the cover from a gilded birdcage, and the caged bird begins to sing. His name, as far as we can establish, was Duleep Smile, and he first bubbled up into history as a chef in London, first at the Savoy, then at the Cecil, which back in 1896 was the largest hotel in Europe. The owner of Sherry’s, then one of the best restaurants in New York, brought this proto-Smile and his English wife to Forty-Fourth Street and Fifth Avenue to introduce the American palate to Indian flavors. (An English wife, by the by! An unforeseen element to hurl into the racial mix! But we proceed.) It’s a strange name, Duleep Smile, for if, as Dr. Smile insisted, the “Smile” derived from Ismail, then “Duleep” might perhaps be an abbreviation of Duleepsinhji (like the great cricketer), and that was a Hindu Rajput name; whereas this Original Smile came, in all probability, from Karachi. When asked about the curious contradictions of his putative ancestor’s name, Dr. R. K. Smile would shrug. “Go back a few generations in any Indian Muslim family,” he would say, “and you’ll find a convert.” Beyond that he did not care to explain or discuss.