Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

Here is a young girl running toward her mother, crying. Before she reaches her mother’s arms, some more must be said about life in that large unhappy home. It should be plain to us, as we look in on these events, that neither Salma’s mother Anisa nor her grandmother Dina could have been unaware of Babajan’s proclivities. If Anisa as a child had been his victim, too, the mother before the daughter, she never explicitly revealed it to anyone, except possibly to her mother, whose lips remained sealed. But both Dina and Anisa had warned little Salma, more than once, “Don’t sit alone in a room with Babajan. Make sure your ayah at least is present. Otherwise it would be improper. You understand.” Little Salma knew, had known all her life, that her grandparents were estranged, that there was a negative electricity in the Juhu house which was upsetting, and which, consequently, she tried her best to ignore. She assumed that the instruction regarding her own behavior was born of that same electricity, that she was being told to choose sides, that friendship with her grandfather would be seen as disloyalty to her grandmother. However, fear, at her tender age, had not yet entered her life, and because she possessed the same fierce independence of spirit which drove both her mother and grandmother, she sometimes disregarded their orders and formed a personal opinion of Babajan which was, to be frank, fond. In spite of the frowns and admonitions of the older women of the family, she liked sitting beside him in the garden and listening to his deliciously frightening fairy tales about bhoots and jinn, beasts made of smoke and fire who had a fondness for devouring young girls. She liked it that he encouraged her to ask him questions, even dangerous questions. “Babajan,” she once said, alarming herself at her boldness, “what if I told you there is no God?” He roared with laughter. “Who put such a damn fool idea in your head?” he answered without a trace of the anger she feared might be his response. “You should be at least fifteen years old before you take up such a position. Come to me then and I’ll reply.”

This picture of a kindly, giggling, tolerant, broad-minded grandfather became important to her. She hid it away in her head because she knew her grandmother and mother would disapprove, but it was an important secret, and she often thought she might try to bring about a reconciliation between her elders, and made grand plans to that effect, as children will. But the ferocity with which her grandmother reacted to all her attempts to discuss Babajan dissuaded her from putting any of her schemes into operation. And now, twelve years old, running, and afraid, she understood that ferocity, she understood everything, as if she had never known anything before.

As she ran, her whole world fell apart around her, its entire architecture of love, trust, and believed comprehension. The whole story of her family, what she thought she knew about it, who and how they had been in the world, had to be torn up and rewritten. To lose one’s picture of the world, to feel its gilded frame snap and crumble, to see the museum glass beneath which you kept it safe crack from side to side and fall in jagged peaks to earth, and the images themselves slide and dissolve and explode: another term for this experience is going insane. To have this happen when you are twelve years old and utterly devoid of the psychological equipment you need to handle it is even worse. Salma running saw her vision fragment, saw the whole house slip and slide and the sky break over her head and fall like blue missiles bombing the earth, and the sea ahead of her tear off its mask of calm and rise up to engulf the universe. Then her mother was holding her and she was trying to tell her what had happened and her grandmother stood behind them, awful in her rage. A light came into the eyes of the two older women which could have burned a hole in the fabric of time. The ayah came into the room. “Stay with her,” Anisa commanded and then she and Dina left and walked toward the street house like an army going to war.

What they said to Babajan is not recorded but all the staff in the house and even some passersby in the street outside felt the foundations shake and by the time they were done all the artwork was hanging crooked on the walls. After that he was rarely seen by anyone. His food was sent up to him and he lived out his remaining days and said his prayers—perhaps hoping for redemption—in private. When the two women emerged from his suite they had the air of swords unsheathed, of bloody swords after a killing, whose blades they chose not to cleanse, to allow all to see the work that had been done.

When they came back into the place where they had left Salma and the ayah, the twelve-year-old girl was dry eyed and alone. “You both knew,” she said to them. “You always knew.”

“We hide these things,” Dr. R. K. Smile told his audience in Atlanta. “There is grave danger to family member or members, but we hide them. We think of them as our shame, and we conceal.”

Very few of the ills that befall us can be said to have one single cause, and so it would be oversimplifying things to ascribe Dina R’s mental instability, or Anisa’s drinking and depression, or their deaths by suicide, to the hidden shame of Babajan’s fondness for young girls. How much did they know? How many did he molest? What was the scale of his evil? These things can’t be known for sure. A movie star’s fortune and publicists are capable of silencing many tongues and suppressing many truths. How much of such dirty work did they do or cause to have done, and how deep was their guilt at becoming complicit in his crimes by cleaning up after him? Was this the narrative underlying Miss Salma R’s decision to leave a successful career in Bollywood and seek her fortune on the other side of the world? Did it lie at the root of her own travails and addictions? The answer is: probably. But human biochemistry, as also human willfulness, has its own aberrations, and these, too, no doubt were part of the story.

“AFTER THAT FOR A TIME I became a prude. Miss Goody Two-Shoes, that was me. I locked my feelings away, worked hard, stood up straight, did nothing naughty, teacher’s pet. If I was correct enough, punctual enough, did my homework well enough, obeyed instructions, behaved, then maybe the world wouldn’t explode again the way it did that day. And then my mother died and I thought, enough. But I carried one memory with me: of the day I learned that the world was not a safe place. That was the lesson my grandfather taught me. It’s a lesson worth learning.”

Anderson Thayer was back from Atlanta, listening without interruption while she talked it all out. She had had a copy of Quichotte’s photograph made and stuck it on her refrigerator. “Now that I’ve had time to look at it,” she said, “he really isn’t like my grandfather at all. He actually has a nicer smile. Babajan had that evil little heh-heh-heh. ”

“Be careful,” Anderson said. “I know you. I know what you’re thinking. Everything is material, am I right? You want this nutcase on your show.”

“No I don’t.”

He looked at her.

“Okay. Maybe. But I know it’s stupid. He’s completely bananas, of course. But bananas can be good TV.”

“He’s a stalker. You can’t put your stalker on TV.”

“Spoilsport.”

“Did you send the photo to the cops?”

“Not yet.”

“You should do that. I should do that. I’ll get it done.”

“You really think so?”

“Obviously. You know nothing about this individual.”

“Okay, fine, send it. But he’s probably just some sweet crazy fan.”

He took a bottle of white wine out of the refrigerator.