Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

“And oh, yes, there’s one more sign. More pain.”

“Is that a morphine drip?” Brother asked, and she nodded.

“I have grown to love morphine,” she said. “But I’m hoping you have something even better for me. Did you bring it?”

“I brought a supply,” he said, “but I don’t want to just leave it by your bedside, because the risks of overdosing yourself are considerable. One ten-microgram dose will buy you about an hour’s relief, and it’s only to be used when the morphine won’t cover the pain, and there are strict limits on how much you can use in a day.”

“What, and if I don’t obey, it might kill me?” She laughed hard, and the laugh became a cough, and that took a while to subside, and there was expectoration, and there was blood mixed up in the mucus.

“I remind you of what you just said to me,” Brother told her. “Don’t yield up your flower too easily.”

“Give the sprays to Jack,” she said, very tired now. “Jack’s in charge.”

LONDON THAT NIGHT WAS full of noises, cries borne upon the dark air revealing distant anguish, shouts of anger, drunken glee like the cackling of broomstick witches. Brother lay awake in the small spare bedroom—Sister’s office, Brother on the fold-out couch—listening to nearer noises, Daughter and the judge waking and resting, going to Sister’s bedside to do what needed to be done. The air was clear but he had the feeling of being lost in a fog and not knowing his way home. Was his own work here already completed? Should he leave? What, if he did not leave, might he usefully do for her in these last days? The fog thickened around him, and he slept.

“Tell me a story,” she said in the morning. “Tell me about playing hide-and-seek around and inside the Old Woman’s Shoe in Kamala Nehru Park on Malabar Hill. Tell me about the Sunday morning jazz jam sessions in Colaba and how we listened to Chris Perry’s saxophone and Lorna Cordeiro’s voice and then we were taken to Churchgate and ate chicken Kiev at the Gaylord. Tell me how we went to Goa for Christmas and Saint Francis Xavier rose up out of his casket in the Basilica of Bom Jesus and gave us his blessing. Tell me about the Spice Mountains of Kerala and the elephants of Periyar. Tell me about when we built our first and last snowman in the Kashmiri mountain meadow of Baisaran. Tell me how we stood at the tip of Kanyakumari and the waves came from left and right and straight ahead and all crashed together at our feet and soaked us and we were happy. Tell me about going to visit the home of Satyajit Ray in Calcutta and his family showing us the notebooks in which he prepared his movies, pictures on the left side, words on the right. Tell me about the night I got an ax and smashed the Telefunken radiogram to pieces so that Pa and Ma could never dance together again. Tell about how we, you and I, went on a killing spree across India for years until they caught us in an old Cadillac and filled us full of holes which was exactly how we would have chosen to die, because it’s important how one chooses to die. Tell me anything. Tell me everything. There isn’t very much time.”

He understood that she was asking him to describe her dreams, rather than anything that had really happened, and so instead he told her about his own imaginings, or, in other words, about his book. At first she interrupted him constantly, saying, “This isn’t nearly as good as the story I want you to tell me, about when we ran away from the flat in Soona Mahal and robbed a bank,” or, “I think you should stop and talk instead about the night we flew out of our bedroom window and floated in the air of Westfield Estate and looked in at all the grown-ups’ bedroom windows and watched them making love, or snoring, or fighting, or all three, not in that order.” But when he began to talk about the younger days of “Miss Salma R,” and the day when her grandfather grabbed her by the wrists and kissed her on the mouth, she became very attentive. Near the end of the story she stopped him.

“This isn’t possible,” she said.

“It’s fiction,” he replied, confused.

“We never told you about this. Don’t tell him, we agreed, it will upset him.”

“Who are ‘we’?”

“Ma and me.”

“What is ‘this’?”

“Did someone else tell you? Otherwise how could you know? Did he tell you?”

“Who is ‘he’?”

“You really don’t know.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You don’t know and you made it up without knowing.”

“I think you have to tell me a story now. Something happened between you and our grandfather? Is that even possible?”

“Not our grandfather.”

“Then who.”

“Why do you think Ma left Pa and moved into Soona Mahal. When I was five years old.”

“Oh,” he said, and felt the ground fall away beneath his feet.

“DID YOU AND MA think about telling me at any point?”

“Yes. No. Maybe when you were older, we thought.”

“But you were much younger than me. I was the older brother.”

“You were the beloved son. Firstborn and only. You had to be shielded.”

“You didn’t trust me even when you were five years old.”

“I’m sorry. But this isn’t about you.”

“YOUR WHOLE PICTURE OF the world broke,” he said, “and you felt like you had gone mad.”

“Yes.”

“And I didn’t even notice.”

“Boys. They notice nothing.”

“And then five years later they made up and we had to go back and live with him. You had to go back and live with him.”

“Imagine how I felt about that.”

“What was Ma thinking? How could she do that?”

“Maybe she thought, we have punished him enough. Maybe she thought, I was older now and he had learned his lesson. Maybe she thought, a family should always try to be together, and children need a father. Maybe she was concerned that rumors would circulate and put us to shame. Maybe rumors were circulating and she already felt ashamed. Maybe she thought, I love him. Maybe she wanted to dance.”

“And had he learned his lesson?”

“He never touched me again. He never looked me in the eye. He hardly ever spoke directly to me. He resented me. And he wouldn’t pay for my college education abroad.”

“So it wasn’t just because you were a girl and therefore inferior.”

“That also. But I didn’t want his money anyway. I worked, I won my scholarships, I hauled myself out of there by my own bootstraps, I never went back, and I never asked either of them for anything ever again.”

IT WAS BEWILDERING AT such an advanced age to understand that the narrative of your family which you had carried within you—within which, in a way, you had lived—was false, or, at the very least, that you had been ignorant of its most essential truth, which had been kept from you. Not to be told the whole truth, as Sister with her legal expertise would know perfectly well, was to be told a lie. That lie had been his truth. Maybe this was the human condition, to live inside fictions created by untruths or the withholding of actual truths. Maybe human life was truly fictional in this sense, that those who lived it didn’t understand it wasn’t real.

And then he had been writing about an imaginary girl in an imaginary family and he had given her something close to Sister’s fate, without knowing how close to the truth he had come. Had he, as a child, intuited something and then, afraid of what he had guessed, buried the intuition so deep that he retained no memory of it? And could books, some books, gain access to those hidden chambers and use what they found there? He sat at Sister’s bedside, deafened by the echo between the fiction which he had made and the fiction in which he had been made to live.