The Satanic Verses (10 page)

           
My wife, Pamela Lovelace, frail as porcelain, graceful as gazelles
, he
remembered.
I put down roots in the women I love
. The banalities of
infidelity. He put them away and talked about his work.

           
When Zeeny Vakil found out how Saladin Chamcha made his money, she let fly a
series of shrieks that made one of the medallioned Arabs knock at the door to
make sure everything was all right. He saw a beautiful woman sitting up in bed
with what looked like buffalo milk running down her face and dripping off the
point of her chin, and, apologizing to Chamcha for the intrusion, he withdrew
hastily,
sorry, sport, hey, you're some lucky guy
.

           
"You poor potato," Zeeny gasped between peals of laughter.
"Those Angrez bastards. They really screwed you up."

           
So now his work was funny. "I have a gift for accents," he said
haughtily. "Why I shouldn't employ?"

           
"'
Why I should not employ?
'" she mimicked him, kicking her
legs in the air. "Mister actor, your moustache just slipped again."

           
Oh my God.

           
What's happening to me?

           
What the devil?

           
Help.

           
Because he did have that gift, truly he did, he was the Man of a Thousand
Voices and a Voice. If you wanted to know how your ketchup bottle should talk
in its television commercial, if you were unsure as to the ideal voice for your
packet of garlicflavoured crisps, he was your very man. He made carpets speak
in warehouse advertisements, he did celebrity impersonations, baked beans,
frozen peas. On the radio he could convince an audience that he was Russian,
Chinese, Sicilian, the President of the United States. Once, in a radio play
for thirty-seven voices, he interpreted every single part under a variety of
pseudonyms and nobody ever worked it out. With his female equivalent, Mimi
Mamoulian, he ruled the airwaves of Britain. They had such a large slice of the
voiceover racket that, as Mimi said, "People better not mention the
Monopolies Commission around us, not even in fun." Her range was
astonishing; she could do any age, anywhere in the world, any point on the
vocal register, angelic Juliet to fiendish Mae West. "We should get
married sometime, when you're free," Mimi once suggested to him. "You
and me, we could be the United Nations."

           
"You're Jewish," he pointed out. "I was brought up to have views
on Jews."

           
"So I'm Jewish," she shrugged. "You're the one who's
circumcised. Nobody's perfect."

           
Mimi was tiny with tight dark curls and looked like a Michelin poster. In
Bombay, Zeenat Vakil stretched and yawned and drove other women from his
thoughts. "Too much," she laughed at him. "They pay you to
imitate them, as long as they don't have to look at you. Your voice becomes
famous but they hide your face. Got any ideas why? Warts on your nose,
cross-eyes, what? Anything come to mind, baby? You goddamn lettuce brain, I
swear."

           
It was true, he thought. Saladin and Mimi were legends of a sort, but crippled
legends, dark stars. The gravitational field of their abilities drew work
towards them, but they remained invisible, shedding bodies to put on voices. On
the radio, Mimi could become the Botticelli Venus, she could be Olympia,
Monroe, any damn woman she pleased. She didn't give a damn about the way she
looked; she had become her voice, she was worth a mint, and three young women
were hopelessly in love with her. Also, she bought property. "Neurotic
behaviour," she would confess unashamedly. "Excessive need for
rooting owing to upheavals of Armenian-Jewish history. Some desperation owing
to advancing years and small polyps detected in the throat. Property is so
soothing, I do recommend it." She owned a Norfolk vicarage, a farmhouse in
Normandy, a Tuscan belltower, a sea-coast in Bohemia. "All haunted,"
she explained. "Clanks, howls, blood on the rugs, women in nighties, the
works. Nobody gives up land without a fight."

           
Nobody except me, Chamcha thought, a melancholy clutching at him as he lay
beside Zeenat Vakil. Maybe I'm a ghost already. But at least a ghost with an
airline ticket, success, money, wife. A shade, but living in the tangible,
material world. With
assets
. Yes, sir.

           
Zeeny stroked the hairs curling over his ears. "Sometimes, when you're
quiet," she murmured, "when you aren't doing funny voices or acting
grand, and when you forget people are watching, you look just like a blank. You
know? An empty slate, nobody home. It makes me mad, sometimes, I want to slap
you. To sting you back into life. But I also get sad about it. Such a fool,
you, the big star whose face is the wrong colour for their colour T Vs, who has
to travel to wogland with some two-bit company, playing the babu part on top of
it, just to get into a play. They kick you around and still you stay, you love
them, bloody slave mentality, I swear. Chamcha," she grabbed his shoulders
and shook him, sitting astride him with her forbidden breasts a few inches from
his face, "Salad baba, whatever you call yourself, for Pete's sake
come
home
."

           
His big break, the one that could soon make money lose its meaning, had started
small: children's television, a thing called
The Aliens Show
, by
The
Munsters
out of
Star Wars
by way of
Sesame Street
. It was a
situation comedy about a group of extraterrestrials ranging from cute to
psycho, from animal to vegetable, and also mineral, because it featured an
artistic space- rock that could quarry itself for its raw material, and then
regenerate itself in time for the next week's episode; this rock was named
Pygmalien, and owing to the stunted sense of humour of the show's producers
there was also a coarse, belching creature like a puking cactus that came from
a desert planet at the end of time: this was Matilda, the Australien, and there
were the three grotesquely pneumatic, singing space sirens known as the Alien
Korns, maybe because you could lie down among them, and there was a team of
Venusian hip-hoppers and subway spraypainters and soul-brothers who called themselves
the Alien Nation, and under a bed in the spaceship that was the programme's
main location there lived Bugsy the giant dung-beetle from the Crab Nebula who
had run away from his father, and in a fish-tank you could find Brains the
super-intelligent giant abalone who liked eating Chinese, and then there was
Ridley, the most terrifying of the regular cast, who looked like a Francis
Bacon painting" of a mouthful of teeth waving at the end of a sightless
pod, and who had an obsession with the actress Sigourney Weaver. The stars of
the show, its Kermit and Miss Piggy, were the very fashionable, slinkily
attired, stunningly hairstyled duo, Maxim and Mamma Alien, who yearned to
be―what else?―television personalities. They were played by Saladin
Chamcha and Mimi Mamoulian, and they changed their voices along with their
clothes, to say nothing of their hair, which could go from purple to vermilion
between shots, which could stand diagonally three feet up from their heads or
vanish altogether; or their features and limbs, because they were capable of
changing all of them, switching legs, arms, noses, ears, eyes, and every switch
conjured up a different accent from their legendary, protean gullets. What made
the show a hit was its use of the latest computer-generated imagery. The
backgrounds were all simulated: spaceship, other-world landscapes,
intergalactic game-show studios; and the actors, too, were processed through
machines, obliged to spend four hours every day being buried under the latest
in prosthetic make-up which―once the videocomputers had gone to
work―made them look just like simulations, too. Maxim Alien, space
playboy, and Mamma, undefeated galactic wrestling champion and universal
all-corners pasta queen, were overnight sensations. Prime-time beckoned;
America, Eurovision, the world.

           
As
The Aliens Show
got bigger it began to attract political criticism.
Conservatives attacked it for being too frightening, too sexually explicit
(Ridley could become positively erect when he thought too hard about Miss
Weaver), too
weird
. Radical commentators began to attack its
stereotyping, its reinforcement of the idea of aliens-as-freaks, its lack of
positive images. Chamcha came under pressure to quit the show; refused; became
a target. "Trouble waiting when I go home," he told Zeeny. "The
damn show isn't an allegory. It's an entertainment. It aims to please."

           
"To please whom?" she wanted to know. "Besides, even now they
only let you on the air after they cover your face with rubber and give you a
red wig. Big deal deluxe, say I."

           
"The point is," she said when they awoke the next morning,
"Salad darling, you really are good looking, no quesch. Skin like milk,
England returned. Now that Gibreel has done a bunk, you could be next in line.
I'm serious, yaar. They need a new face. Come home and you could be the next,
bigger than Bachchan was, bigger than Farishta. Your face isn't as funny as
theirs."

           
When he was young, he told her, each phase of his life, each self he tried on,
had seemed reassuringly temporary. Its imperfections didn't matter, because he
could easily replace one moment by the next, one Saladin by another. Now,
however, change had begun to feel painful; the arteries of the possible had
begun to harden. "It isn't easy to tell you this, but I'm married now, and
not just to wife but life. "
The accent slippage again
. "I
really came to Bombay for one reason, and it wasn't the play. He's in his late
seventies now, and I won't have many more chances. He hasn't been to the show;
Muhammad must go to the mountain."

           
My father, Changez Chamchawala, owner of a magic lamp
. "Changez
Chamchawala, are you kidding, don't think you can leave me behind," she
clapped her hands. "I want to check out the hair and toenails." His
father, the famous recluse. Bombay was a culture of re-makes. Its architecture
mimicked the skyscraper, its cinema endlessly re-invented
The Magnificent
Seven
and
Love Story
, obliging all its heroes to save at least one
village from murderous dacoits and all its heroines to die of leukaemia at
least once in their careers, preferably at the start. Its millionaires, too,
had taken to importing their lives. Changez's invisibility was an Indian dream
of the crorepati penthoused wretch of Las Vegas; but a dream was not a
photograph, after all, and Zeeny wanted to see with her own eyes. "He
makes faces at people if he's in a bad mood," Saladin warned her.
"Nobody believes it till it happens, but it's true. Such faces! Gargoyles.
Also, he's a prude and he'll call you a tart and anyway I'll probably have a
fight with him, it's on the cards."

           
What Saladin Chamcha had come to India for: forgiveness. That was his business
in his old home town. But whether to give or to receive, he was not able to
say.

           
* * * * *

           
Bizarre aspects of the present circumstances of Mr. Changez Chamchawala: with
his new wife, Nasreen the Second, he lived for five days every week in a
high-walled compound nicknamed the Red Fort in the Pali Hill district beloved
of movie stars; but every weekend he returned without his wife to the old house
at Scandal Point, to spend his days of rest in the lost world of the past, in
the company of the first, and dead, Nasreen. Furthermore: it was said that his
second wife refused to set foot in the old place. "Or isn't allowed
to," Zeeny hypothesized in the back of the black-glass-windowed Mercedes
limousine which Changez had sent to collect his son. As Saladin finished
filling in the background, Zeenat Vakil whistled appreciatively.
"Crazee."

           
The Chamchawala fertilizer business, Changez's empire of dung, was to be
investigated for tax fraud and import duty evasion by a Government commission,
but Zeeny wasn't interested in that. "Now," she said, "I'll get
to find out what you're really like."

           
Scandal Point unfurled before them. Saladin felt the past rush in like a tide,
drowning him, filling his lungs with its revenant saltiness.
I'm not myself
today
, he thought. The heart flutters. Life damages the living. None of us
are ourselves. None of us are
like this
.

           
These days there were steel gates, operated by remote control from within,
sealing the crumbling triumphal arch. They opened with a slow whirring sound to
admit Saladin into that place of lost time. When he saw the walnut-tree in
which his father had claimed that his soul was kept, his hands began to shake.
He hid behind the neutrality of facts. "In Kashmir," he told Zeeny,
"your birth-tree is a financial investment of a sort. When a child comes
of age, the grown walnut is comparable to a matured insurance policy; it's a
valuable tree, it can be sold, to pay for weddings, or a start in life. The
adult chops down his childhood to help his grown-up self. The unsentimentality
is appealing, don't you think?"

           
The car had stopped under the entrance porch. Zeeny fell silent as the two of
them climbed the six stairs to the front door, where they were greeted by a
composed and ancient bearer in white, brass-buttoned livery, whose shock of
white hair Chamcha suddenly recognized, by translating it back into black, as
the mane of that same Vallabh who had presided over the house as its major-domo
in the Olden Days. "My God, Vallabhbhai," he managed, and embraced
the old man. The servant smiled a difficult smile. "I grow so old, baba, I
was thinking you would not recognize." He led them down the crystal-heavy
corridors of the mansion and Saladin realized that the lack of change was
excessive, and plainly deliberate. It was true, Vallabh explained to him, that
when the Begum died Changez Sahib had sworn that the house would be her
memorial. As a result nothing had changed since the day she died, paintings,
furniture, soap-dishes, the red-glass figures of fighting bulls and china
ballerinas from Dresden, all left in their exact positions, the same magazines
on the same tables, the same crumpled balls of paper in the wastebaskets, as
though the house had died, too, and been embalmed. "Mummified," Zeeny
said, voicing the unspeakable as usual. "God, but it's spooky, no?"
It was at this point, while Vallabh the bearer was opening the double doors
leading into the blue drawing room, that Saladin Chamcha saw his mother's
ghost.