Ахмед Рушди - Quichotte - A Novel

* This is partly because his relationship with his estranged sibling, Sister, will be central to his story; but also for another reason, which will be given on this page.

Miss Salma R, the exceptional woman (and total stranger) to whom Quichotte had declared his undying devotion, came from a dynasty of adored ladies. Think of her family this way: Granny R was Greta Garbo, a great actress who for unexplained reasons abruptly retreated from the world, declaring that she disliked people and open spaces and wanted to be alone. Mummy R was Marilyn Monroe, very sexy and very fragile, and she stole the sportsman prince (a real honest-to-goodness prince) whom Grace Kelly wanted to marry and that became Daddy, who left Mummy for an English photographer smack in the middle of her last movie shoot, and after that Mummy entered a long decline and was eventually found dead in her bedroom, fatally echoing Marilyn’s destiny with bottles of pills lying open and empty on her nightstand. And Miss Salma R? She did not inherit Granny’s acting genius or Mummy’s super sexiness, everyone agreed on that, but her genes did grant her considerable beauty, ease in front of the cameras, as well as violent mood swings and a fondness for recreational and mind-soothing painkillers. As a result, unsurprisingly, she ended up in Hollywood.

That was her Bombay history briefly translated into American. The official version could be summarized in the following few words: “She had led a charmed life. She came from fame and money and made even more money and achieved even greater fame on her own, becoming the first Indian actress to make it big (very big) in America, to cross what might be called the -wood bridge from Bolly- to Holly-, and then transcended even Hollywood to become a brand, a television talk-show superstar and titanic cultural influencer, in America and India too.” The truth was more complex. So then, a longer version: Yes, she was Indian movie royalty, a third-generation member of a family of female legends. Her grandmother, Miss Dina R, had starred in half a dozen of the grand classic neorealist films made in the decade after independence. However, the great star mysteriously fell prey to a whole wolf pack of phobias and dark mental troubles, succumbing to long, silent bouts of the deep blues (which Winston Churchill called the black dog and Miss Holly Golightly would later rename the mean reds) and alternating spells of loud babbling hysteria. She retreated into her beachfront Juhu mansion, remaining behind a veil of secrecy for the rest of her life, never responding to the salacious speculation about her madness that bounced harmlessly off her property’s high walls, and until her dying day kept the lights on in her bedroom at night because she was afraid of cockroaches and lizards in the dark. She also broke off all contact with her husband, a well-known Bombay physician whom everyone called Babajan— Baba being an honorific title of respect and jan meaning “darling”—but they never divorced. They lived in separate suites of the Juhu mansion and went about their separate lives. When she ran into him in a corridor by chance, she recoiled as if he were a dangerous intruder, and often actually ran away. After her death by suicide (an overdose of sleeping pills) Babajan told his few remaining friends mournfully that the balance of her mind had been long disturbed and the end was “inevitable.”

Her daughter, Miss Salma R’s mother, the renowned sexpot star Miss Anisa R, remained close to her father for a while, but even before her mother’s death Anisa and her father, too, were estranged. Not long after she stopped talking to Babajan she seduced the national cricket captain away from her best friend, Nargis Kumari, also an iconic movie actress. The cricketer was the dashing young raja of Bakwas Senior, popularly known as “the Raj,” the prince of a tiny central Indian state (on no account to be confused with the distinctly tinier and obviously much less important state of Bakwas Junior), whose ancestor had once considered employing as private secretary a homosexual Englishman named Forster who was thinking of writing a novel about a passage to India, and looking for a job. (He didn’t hire him. Another trivial princeling did.) Yes! A blueblood! But the Raj’s true aristocracy was to be seen not in his family tree but in the grace and power of his shot-making on the cricket field, his imperious square cuts, his graceful leg glances, his powerful cover drives and autocratic hook shots. He married Miss Salma R’s mother in a glamorous three-day wedding at the Taj Palace Hotel in Bombay (a daring, avant-garde affair, because Hindu-Muslim marriages were rare, then as now, even among the elite). Soon afterwards, in an accident described by his jilted ex-fiancée Nargis Kumari as “God’s will,” he lost the lower half of his right leg in a car crash on Marine Drive. However, defying divine judgment, he regained his place in the team, wooden leg and all, and became one of the sport’s true immortals. They had one daughter, whom he professed to love more than life, but that was before he was overwhelmed by the difficulty of dealing with his wife’s Technicolor depressions, the blues, blacks, and reds, and the intervening manias which came in different colors, most often green because during these upswings she went on insane spending sprees, acquiring precious antiquities on the black market at absurdly inflated prices. In the end he retired from cricket and abandoned Miss Anisa R, their daughter Miss Salma R, and his royal inheritance, and ran off to the UK—once again, the peg leg did not prove to be a hindrance—to set up house in a suite at Claridge’s hotel which he shared with the previously mentioned English photographer, Margaret Ellen Arnold, who had been sent to do a location story about the film-star wife and left with the husband instead.

It occurred to nobody to attach any blame to the prince, who had deserted two women and who, in time, would desert the photographer as well and return to his deeply cushioned and intricately brocaded princely seat to pass the remainder of his days in a happy opium haze. The closest he came to being criticized was when Filmfare magazine ran a photo-story about him titled “Someday My Prince Will Run.” But even in this story the (female) writer took the attitude that boys would be boys, and what man would not follow in the Raj’s wood-leg-real-leg footsteps if he only could? However, Miss Anisa R was devastated by her very public humiliation. In the words of Nargis Kumari, who was happy to gloat publicly over her former friend’s distress, Anisa had “been shown the power of Muslim kismet and of Hindu karma, both of which exact bitter poetic justice upon traitors and wrongdoers.” The words hit their mark. Miss Anisa R gave up her acting career and focused on doing charity work with impoverished widows and deserted women as an act of atonement for the crime of stealing a man from a woman who loved him and for the even more shameful error of being incapable of holding on to her husband. She let herself go physically: That has to be said. She became—there is not a polite way of putting this—blowsy. She sagged; for all her good works, her body became the emblem and manifestation of her grief.

She wasn’t a good mother—too self-absorbed for that—but Miss Salma R grew up perfectly anyway. She was a studious, upright, composed, idealistic, blameless young girl, and as her mother entered her last decline toward second childhood, it was the daughter who played the adult. More than one person reported seeing Salma following her drunk mother around at glitzy fundraising events for her women’s charities, literally taking glasses of Scotch whisky out of Anisa’s hands and pouring the contents into plant pots. “Without the daughter’s care,” people noted, “the mother would never have lasted as long as she did.” Even that daughterly protectiveness proved not to be enough. They had moved into the Juhu mansion after Dina’s death and maybe that was a bad move. Babajan still haunted the house, and now it was Anisa who ignored him as her mother had done before her. Miss Salma R had been fond of her grandfather as a child, and at first she tried to mend fences between her mother and Babajan, but it was too late. The darkness that had swallowed Dina R came for Anisa as well. She saved countless women from the gutter but the lower depths claimed her in the end. Miss Salma R was the one who found her mother in what had formerly been Dina’s bedroom, cold and overdosed with the lights on in the same bed in which her mother had died, similarly illuminated. There was a cockroach crawling up her dangling arm.