Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

A broad smile broke out across Quichotte’s long face. It was as if his miraculous son, born out of his father’s dream like Athena bursting fully formed from the head of Zeus, was singing a song of arrival, a love song to his father. The traveler joyously raised his own voice and sang along with his boy.

“Sancho,” Quichotte cried, full of a happiness he didn’t know how to express. “My silly little Sancho, my big tall Sancho, my son, my sidekick, my squire! Hutch to my Starsky, Spock to my Kirk, Scully to my Mulder, BJ to my Hawkeye, Robin to my Batman! Peele to my Key, Stimpy to my Ren, Niles to my Frazier, Arya to my Hound! Peggy to my Don, Jesse to my Walter, Tubbs to my Crockett, I love you! O my warrior Sancho sent by Perseus to help me slay my Medusas and win my Salma’s heart, here you are at last.”

“Cut it out, ‘Dad,’ ” the imaginary young man rejoined. “What’s in all this for me?”

AFTER THE NIGHT of the Perseid miracle Quichotte spent days lost in a haze of joy because of the arrival of the mysterious black-and-white youngster he had named Sancho. He sent a text message to R. K. Smile, M.D., telling him the good news. Dr. Smile did not reply.

Sancho was darker skinned than his father, that was plain even in black-and-white, and in the end it was this that enabled Quichotte to solve—at least to his own satisfaction—the mystery of the boy’s arrival. It seemed that Sancho was of approximately the same hue as the Beloved, Miss Salma R. So perhaps he was a visitor from the future, the child of Quichotte’s forthcoming marriage to the great lady, and had traveled back through time and space to answer his father’s need for a son’s companionship, and end his long solitude. To a person who had gained a deep understanding of time travel from television, this was entirely possible. He remembered the Doctor, the British Time Lord, and guessed that Sancho might have arrived in some sort of TARDIS-like vehicle hidden in the dark sky behind the brilliance of the meteors. And perhaps this color drainage, this black-and-white effect, was nothing but a temporary side effect of time travel. “Welcome, my future son!” he enthused. “Welcome to the present. We will woo your mother together. How can she resist being wooed not only by the future father of her children, but by one of those children too? Our success is certain….What’s in it for you? Young man, if we fail, then you will cease to exist. If she does not consent to becoming your mother, then you will never be born, and so it follows that you wouldn’t be here now. Does that focus your mind?”

“I’m hungry,” Sancho muttered mutinously. “Can we stop talking and eat?”

Quichotte noted his son’s untamed, rebellious, outlawlike character. It pleased him. Heroes, superheroes, and antiheroes, too, were not made of complaisant stock. They were out-of-step, against-the-grain, different-drummer types. He thought of Sherlock Holmes, of Green Arrow, of Negan. He understood, too, that he had missed the boy’s childhood, had not been there for him, wherever there might have been. The lad would very likely be full of resentments and even delinquencies. It would take time to persuade him to open up, to stop scowling, to accept parental love and give filial love in return. The road was the place for that. Men on the road together have three choices. They separate, they kill one another, or they work things out.

“Yes,” Quichotte replied to his son, with his heart full of hope. “By all means, let’s eat.”

* But Dr. Smile was by no means kindly in all matters. As we shall see. As we shall presently see.

The Author of the preceding narrative—we will call him Brother *—was a New York–based writer of Indian origin who had previously written eight modestly (un)successful spy fictions under the pen name of Sam DuChamp. Then in a surprising change of direction he conceived the idea of telling the story of the lunatic Quichotte and his doomed pursuit of the gorgeous Miss Salma R, in a book radically unlike any other he had ever attempted. No sooner had he conceived this idea than he became afraid of it. He could not at first fathom how such an eccentric notion had lodged in his brain, and why it insisted so vehemently on being written that he had no choice but to start work. Then as he thought about it further, he began to understand that in some fashion that he did not as yet fully grasp, Quichotte—the loner in search of love, the loser-nobody who believed himself capable of winning the heart of a queen—had been with him all his life, a shadow-self he had glimpsed from time to time in the corner of his eye, but had not had the courage to confront. Instead he had written his commonplace fictions of the secret world, disguised as someone else. He now saw that this had been a way of avoiding the story that revealed itself to him in the mirror every day, even if only in the corner of his eye.

His next thought was even more alarming: To make sense of the life of the strange man whose latter days he was setting out to chronicle, he would have to reveal himself alongside his subject, for the tale and the teller were yoked together by race, place, generation, and circumstance. Perhaps this bizarre story was a metamorphosed version of his own. Quichotte himself might say, if he were aware of Brother (which was impossible, naturally), that in fact the writer’s tale was the altered version of his history, rather than the other way around, and might have argued that his “imaginary” life added up to the more authentic narrative of the two.

So, in brief: They were both Indian-American men, one real, one fictional, both born long ago in what was then Bombay, in neighboring apartment blocks, both real. Their parents would have known each other (except that one set of parents was imaginary), and would perhaps have played golf and badminton together at the Willingdon Club and sipped sunset cocktails at the Bombay Gym (both real-world locations). They were about the same age, at which almost everyone is an orphan, and their generation, having made a royal mess of the planet, was on its way out. They both suffered from physical complaints: Brother’s aching back, Quichotte’s dragging leg. They met friends (real, fictional) and acquaintances (fictional, real) in the obituary columns with increasing frequency. There would not be less of all this in the days to come. And there were deeper echoes. If Quichotte had been driven mad by his desire for the people behind the TV screen, then he, Brother, had perhaps also been deranged by proximity to another veiled reality, in which nothing was reliable, treachery was everywhere, identities were slippery and mutable, democracy was corruptible, the two-faced double agent and the three-faced triple agent were everyday monsters, love placed the loved one in danger, allies could not be trusted, information was as often fool’s gold as golden, and patriotism was a virtue for which there would never be any recognition or reward.

Brother was agitated about many things. Like Quichotte, he was alone and childless, except that he had once had a son. This child had vanished long ago like a ghost, and must be a young man by now, and Brother thought about him every day and was dismayed by his absence. His wife was also long gone, and his financial situation bordered on the precarious. And—beyond these private matters—he had begun to have a sense of something coming after him, of dark-windowed cars parked on the corner of his block with their motors running, footsteps that stopped when he stopped, then started up again when he walked on, clicking noises on the phone, strange problems with his laptop, telemarketing messages with, he thought, a menace behind the banal words, threats on his Twitter feed, murmurs from his publishing company that mid-list Authors like himself might have difficulty being published in the future. There were issues with his credit cards, and his social media had been hacked too often for it to be a random thing. On one occasion he came home at night and was sure his apartment had been entered even though nothing had been disturbed. If the two guiding principles of the universe were paranoia (the belief that the world had meaning, but that meaning was located at a concealed level, which was very possibly hostile to the overt, absurd level, which meant, in brief, you) and entropy (the belief that life was meaningless, that things fell apart and the heat-death of the universe was inevitable), then he was definitely in the paranoid camp.