Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

I see him. He’s a boy on a hill in Bombay. What do I know about this city? Less than nothing except what he sees. His mother’s death, his father the painter weeping, himself stunned into dry-eyed silence. And then he loses his home as well as his mother, there’s no more Bombay, the painter father can’t bear to be home anymore, he goes west, so now there’s Paris. The boy is homesick. He’s literally sick. He has heart palpitations, arrhythmia. He doesn’t want Paris. He wants his mother. He wants, what’s the word. Kulfi. From a stall near where is it. Chowpatty. He wants to play in the Old Woman’s Shoe in, what’s its name, Kamala Nehru Park. Those places are gone. He’s what now, French? In an apartment near the Luxembourg Gardens listening to Don Quichotte on his father’s record player? He doesn’t feel French. His father can’t handle the sadness—can’t handle his son’s sadness or his own—and sends him to boarding school in England. I see him. He’s a boy from the tropics trapped in the cold Midlands. He’s looking at racist words scrawled on the wall of his little study room, wogs go home. He’s looking at the perpetrator who’s standing there with the crayon in his hand, caught in the act. Then an act of violence. He grabs the little perp, grabs him by the collar of his shirt and the waistband of his pants, swings him off his feet, and battering-rams him headfirst into his racist words. K.O. He thinks he’s killed the little shit but he hasn’t, no such luck. He wakes up and skulks off, he won’t do that again in a hurry. But there are others to take the little perp’s place.

So: he’s capable of sudden violence. Or he was, once.

I see him. He’s looking at his carefully written history essay. Somebody came in when he wasn’t here and ripped it into tiny pieces and left them neatly piled up on his prep board. I see him writing letters to his father, letters filled with fictions. I scored thirty-seven runs today and took three catches in the slips. He can’t play cricket but in his letters he’s a star. Here’s what he never tells his father: There are three crimes you can commit at an English boarding school. If you’re foreign, that’s one. Being clever is two. And being bad at sports, that’s three strikes, you’re out. You can get away with two of the three but not all three. If you’re foreign and clever but you’re a fine cricketer, if you can score thirty-seven runs and take three catches in the slips, you’re okay. If you’re bad at sports and clever but you’re not foreign, you’re forgiven. If you’re foreign and bad at sports but you’re not that smart, you’re excused, you’ll do. But he had the full trifecta. I see him listening through the paper-thin walls of his study at white boys maligning him in the room next door. At this school there’s no TV for the boys to watch. TV came later for him. At school he went alone to the library and afterwards sat alone in his room and plunged into the yellow-jacketed Gollancz editions and flew away into fantasy worlds and alternative universes, away, away across the galaxies, into interstellar space.

I see him. He’s the first and last man. He’s an explorer standing on a mountaintop glacier in Iceland, Snæfellsjökull, watching the shadow of the peak move until it points to the hole which leads to the center of the Earth. He’s in a submarine called Nautilus traveling twenty thousand leagues under the sea with a captain whose name means Nobody. He’s a warlord on a mountain on Mars, watching a hostile army advance across a red desert. He’s a rebel in a forest memorizing Crime and Punishment because all the great texts have to be memorized to survive because all the actual books have been burned; the temperature at which paper catches fire is two hundred and thirty-two point seven eight degrees Celsius, better known as Fahrenheit 451. He’s a man with a disc embedded in his forehead that glows brightly when he’s sexually attracted to a woman, which is okay because everyone has one, so everyone knows who turns them on, and they can cut right to the chase without wasting time on flirtation and seduction. He’s a man with a dog stepping by accident into a freak phenomenon called a chrono-synclastic infundibulum and being stretched out forever across space and time. He’s a NASA controller in a state of high excitement because an alien flying saucer is in touch and contains people who look just like earthlings, he’s guiding it in to land but he’s puzzled because he can’t see them and then they land and they are drowning in a puddle on the landing field because they are tiny, their spacecraft is tiny, and as they drown the controller runs out onto the landing field and his foot splashes in a puddle and crushes them. He’s a computer engineer flying away from a Tibetan monastery after installing the supercomputer that will count the nine billion names of God, after which, they say, the universe will have fulfilled its purpose and will cease to exist. He’s looking out of the window of the plane, knowing that the supercomputer has finished counting, and he sees that one by one, very quietly, the stars are going out.

He mentions these two stories a lot, the tiny drowning aliens and the nine billion names. And when he mentions the second one he also mentions the following, he mentions it every time: that the purpose of the universe might not be the nine billion names. It might be the creation of a single perfect love, or, in plain language, the forthcoming happy union between himself and Miss Salma R.

So what will happen in the unlikely event of his quest ending in success? I asked him this straight out. Does he think the world will come to an end?

Obviously, he says. One by one, very quietly, the stars will start going out.

I see him. Above all he’s Bilbo/Frodo, eleventy-one today, no wonder he’s crazy for journeying. The Road goes ever on and on. I see him invisible, slipping the Ring on his finger. Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, / Ash nazg thrakatulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul. Invisibility is a thing he dearly wishes for. He wants to disappear. Here too is the origin of his desire to follow a wandering star. I will diminish and go into the West and remain Galadriel. This is what he longs for. To diminish and go into the West. To be a person not seen, of no import, going where he will, remaining himself, taking what life gives him, maybe a mendicant, like a monk, or a sannyasi . Maybe even a thief. What has it got in its pocketses? Thief, thief. Baggins…we hates it for ever.

In those days there were T-shirts, FRODO LIVES, GO GO GANDALF, he wore them all. Even then he wanted a quest. There are people who need to impose a shape upon the shapelessness of life. For such people the quest narrative is always attractive. It prevents them from suffering the agony of feeling what’s the word. Incoherent.

This old Chevy is driving through the Ute Mountain reservation. North on 491, Ya-ta-hey (pop. 580) > Tohatchi (pop. 1,037) > Canyon of the Ancients. How did we get here? Who knows? Don’t ask me, I wasn’t paying attention. I was diving into my head which is also his. Here’s what he says to me. He wants to perform a ceremony of personal purification before embarking on this cockeyed pursuit. Indian country, he keeps saying, even though I tell him to stop making that joke, it just doesn’t work. He wants to sit cross-legged in the heart of the heart of the country and call upon the forefathers of the quest. I don’t know who he’s talking about. Yes I do. Here it is. He’s thinking about Jason in the Argo heading for Colchis to find the Golden Fleece, and Sir Galahad, the only one of the knights of the round table pure enough of spirit to be shown the Grail. His head is full of this nonsense. The journey of the Thirty Birds to find Simurgh, the bird-god. The progress of pilgrim Christian to the Celestial City. And searches for women naturally. Rama searching for his kidnapped Sita, Mario the plumber ascending all those levels to rescue Princess Toadstool from the evil Bowser, and the Italian poet, D. Alighieri, traveling through the Inferno and Purgatorio to find his beatific Beatrice in Paradiso.