Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

To attract such unwelcome attention from the Phantoms just as he was averting his gaze from Spookworld was an irony he could do without. He was old, and truth had become far stranger than his fictions, and he no longer had the energy to try to outstrip the news. Hence Quichotte, picaresque and crazy and dangerous, a knight’s move out of a deteriorating position on the board. Hence, also, his newly inward gaze, his returned yearning for his lost home in the East. He had stepped away from the past long ago and later it stepped away from him. For a long time he pretended, even to himself, that he had accepted his fate. He was a man of the West now, he was Sam DuChamp, and that was fine. This is what he said when he was questioned: that he was not rootless, not uprooted but transplanted. Or, even better, multiply rooted, like an old banyan tree putting down “prop roots” as it spread, which thickened and in time became indistinguishable from the original trunk. Too many roots! It meant his stories had a broader canopy beneath which to shelter from the scorching, hostile sun. It meant they could be planted in many different locations, in different kinds of soil. This is a gift, he said, but he knew that such optimism was a lie. Now, well past the Psalmist’s days of our years, trying by reason of strength to move past threescore and ten toward fourscore, his was often the sad heart of Keats’s Ruth, when, sick for home, she stood in tears amid the alien corn.

He was coming to the end of the line, and had moved into the general vicinity of the cowled reaper. The borough, the neighborhood, maybe even the zip code. He wasn’t quite foot-in-the-ground yet. But it was sobering that the road ahead was so much shorter than the road already traveled. Before Quichotte drove up in his Chevy Cruze with his imaginary son by his side, Brother had almost come to believe that the work had left him, even if life, for the moment, went on. Here was this thing, however mediocre, to which he had given his life, his best self, his optimism; but even the richest seam in the end runs out of gold. When you were your own quarry, when the material you were dredging up lay buried in the caverns of the self, a time came when there was only an emptiness left.

So, then, quit! said the wicked angel on his left shoulder. Nobody cares but you.

The wicked angel on his left shoulder was the shadow. But on his right shoulder sat the cherub of the light, cheering him, urging him on, refusing self-pity. The sun still rose every day. He still had determination, energy, and the habit of work. He took heart from the great Muhammad Ali regaining his crown after the long wilderness years, defeating George Foreman in Zaire. He, too, could hope for a rumble in some welcoming jungle. Sam DuChamp, bomaye. Kill him, Sam the Sham.

And so to Quichotte’s birthplace, which was also his own, to examine certain intimate matters which were at once extremely close and impossibly distant. The technical term for such matters was family. A good enough starting point for a tale about obsessional love.

MANY, MANY YEARS AGO, when the sea was clean and the night was safe, there was a road called Warden Road (not called that anymore) in a neighborhood called Breach Candy (still called that, more or less) in a city called Bombay (not called that now). Everything started there and even though his story and Quichotte’s were both travelers’ tales, journeying through many places and arriving in this strange and fantastic land, America, all their roads led back to Bombay if you ran the movie backwards. The origin point of Brother’s whole world was a little group of maybe a dozen houses on a low hill served by a nameless dead-end lane (nameless no longer; Shakari Bhandari Lane, the maps now called it, even though nobody knew where that was), dwarfed by the megacity that now surrounded them. He closed his eyes and walked backwards across continents and years, twirling his cane like Raj Kapoor’s imitation-Chaplin tramp, only in reverse. Backwards up the nameless-but-now-named lane he went, past the (real) apartment building where the (fictional) Smile family once lived, called Dil Pazir, which is to say, acceptable to the heart…and arrived at a similar building (also real) named Noor Ville, the city of light, and inside it on an upper floor a long-balconied apartment filled with soft cushions, sharp cactus plants, and the unmistakable yodelings of the famous golden-voiced sisters Lata and Asha singing the latest hit songs from the movies on the Binaca Geetmala , the weekend chart show sponsored by a toothpaste brand, emanating every Sunday from the walnut-marquetry Art Deco Telefunken radiogram in the living room. And in the middle of the living room’s large Persian rug, martini glasses in their hands, here were his Ma and Pa, in backwards slow motion, dancing.

(That Breach Candy was a tiny, lost world, long gone, preserved in the amber of memory like a prehistoric insect. Or: a miniature universe, the past captured under a glass dome, like a tropical snow globe without snow, and in it the tiny people of the past leading their microscopic lives. If the glass broke and they escaped into the great world beyond their boundary, how terrified they would be of the giants all around them, as terrified as he had been when he encountered the titans of his adult world! Yet, minute as they were, the whole future flowed from them. The little tropical snow globe without snow was the birthplace of everything Brother had been and done.)

His parents’ favorite LP was Sinatra’s Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! Ma, always more up-to-the-minute than her husband, liked some of the quiffed Americans. Ricky Nelson. Bobby Darin. But not only the white boys. Also Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters singing “Money Honey.” Not Elvis! She was scornful about the truck driver from Tupelo. Who cared about his pelvis or his curling upper lip? Who wanted to step on his blue suede shoes, which were Carl Perkins’s footwear first, anyway?

He let the film behind his closed eyes run forward now. His father owned and ran a celebrated jewelry store called Zayvar Brother on Warden Road, at the foot of the hill where they lived. Brother’s grandfather, his father’s father, had opened it long ago, and Pa had proved to be an even finer designer and maker of beautiful things than his dad. Zévar meant “ornamentation” in Urdu and Zayvar was the Anglophile patriarch’s Englishing of the word. He had been an only child, the old man, but he thought Brothers was a businesslike name, and if he couldn’t use the plural, the singular would do just as well. Thus, Zayvar Brother, a brother without a brother. People had started calling the whiskered old gentleman Brother Sahib, Mr. Brother, and the name stuck. After grandfather had taken his leave, Pa became Mr. Brother Junior, and so, in time, Brother would be Mr. Brother too. Mr. Brother the Third.

A few doors down from the jewelers was Ma’s own little enterprise, the idiosyncratic Cakes & Antiques, a front room boasting the best patisserie in the city and a back room in which treasures from all over South Asia could be found: Chola bronzes in perfect condition, lively Company School paintings, enigmatic seals from Mohenjo-daro, nineteenth-century embroidered shawls from Kashmir. When she was asked, as she often was, why she sold this improbable combination of products, she would answer simply, “Because these are the things I love.”

The quality and originality of the two establishments, combined with Pa’s and Ma’s inescapable charisma, turned both Zayvar Brother and Cakes & Antiques into Places Where Everybody Went. Amitabh Bachchan bought emerald necklaces for his wife, Jaya, at Zayvar, Mario Miranda and R. K. Laxman offered Ma their original cartoons in return for her chocolate cakes, and “Busybee,” Behram Contractor, the chronicler of everyday life for le tout Bombay, loitered around both stores watching the cream of the city come and go, listening for the latest gossip.