The Satanic Verses (11 page)

           
He let out a loud cry and Zeeny whirled on her heel. "There," he
pointed towards the far, darkened end of the hallway, "no question, that
blasted newsprint sari, the big headlines, the one she wore the day she,
she," but now Vallabh had begun to flap his arms like a weak, flightless
bird, you see, baba, it was only Kasturba, you have not forgotten, my wife,
only my wife.
My ayah Kasturba with whom I played in rock-pools. Until I
grew up and went without her and in a hollow a man with ivory glasses
.
"Please, baba, nothing to be cross, only when the Begum died Changez Sahib
donated to my wife some few garments, you do not object? Your mother was a
so-generous woman, when alive she always gave with an open hand." Chamcha,
recovering his equilibrium, was feeling foolish. "For God's sake,
Vallabh," he muttered. "For God's sake. Obviously I don't
object." An old stiffness re-entered Vallabh; the right to free speech of
the old retainer permitted him to reprove, "Excuse, baba, but you should
not blaspheme."

           
"See how he's sweating," Zeeny stage-whispered. "He looks scared
stiff." Kasturba entered the room, and although her reunion with Chamcha
was warm enough there was still a wrongness in the air. Vallabh left to bring
beer and Thums Up, and when Kasturba also excused herself, Zeeny at once said:
"Something fishy. She walks like she owns the dump. The way she holds
herself. And the old man was afraid. Those two are up to something, I
bet." Chamcha tried to be reasonable. "They stay here alone most of
the time, probably sleep in the master bedroom and eat off the good plates, it
must get to feeling like their place." But he was thinking how strikingly,
in that old sari, his ayah Kasturba had come to resemble his mother.

           
"Stayed away so long," his father's voice spoke behind him,
"that now you can't tell a living ayah from your departed ma."

           
Saladin turned around to take in the melancholy sight of a father who had
shrivelled like an old apple, but who insisted nevertheless on wearing the
expensive Italian suits of his opulently fleshy years. Now that he had lost
both Popeye-forearms and Bluto-belly, he seemed to be roaming about inside his
clothes like a man in search of something he had not quite managed to identify.
He stood in the doorway looking at his son, his nose and lips curled, by the withering
sorcery of the years, into a feeble simulacrum of his former ogre-face. Chamcha
had barely begun to understand that his father was no longer capable of
frightening anybody, that his spell had been broken and he was just an old
geezer heading for the grave; while Zeeny had noted with some disappointment
that Changez Chamchawala's hair was conservatively short, and since he was
wearing highly polished Oxford lace-ups it didn't seem likely that the
eleven-inch toenail story was true either; when the ayah Kasturba returned,
smoking a cigarette, and strolled past the three of them, father son mistress,
towards a blue velour-covered button-backed Chesterfield sofa, upon which she
arranged her body as sensually as any movie starlet, even though she was a woman
well advanced in years.

           
No sooner had Kasturba completed her shocking entrance than Changez skipped
past his son and planted himself beside the erstwhile ayah. Zeeny Vakil, her
eyes sparkling with scandalpoints of light, hissed at Chamcha: "Close your
mouth, dear. It looks bad." And in the doorway, the bearer Vallabh,
pushing a drinks trolley, watched unemotionally while his employer of many long
years placed an arm around his uncomplaining wife.

           
When the progenitor, the creator is revealed as satanic, the child will
frequently grow prim. Chamcha heard himself inquire: "And my stepmother,
father dear? She is keeping well?"

           
The old man addressed Zeeny. "He is not such a goody with you, I hope so.
Or what a sad time you must have." Then to his son in harsher tones.
"You have an interest in my wife these days? But she has none in you. She
won't meet you now. Why should she forgive? You are no son to her. Or, maybe,
by now, to me."

           
I did not come to fight him. Look, the old goat. I mustn't fight. But this,
this is intolerable
. "In my mother's house," Chamcha cried
melodramatically, losing his battle with himself. "The state thinks your
business is corrupt, and here is the corruption of your soul. Look what you've
done to them. Vallabh and Kasturba. With your money. How much did it take? To
poison their lives. You're a sick man." He stood before his father,
blazing with righteous rage.

           
Vallabh the bearer, unexpectedly, intervened. "Baba, with respect, excuse
me but what do you know? You have left and gone and now you come to judge
us." Saladin felt the floor giving way beneath his feet; he was staring
into the inferno. "It is true he pays us," Vallabh went on. "For
our work, and also for what you see. For this." Changez Chamchawala
tightened his grip on the ayah's unresisting shoulders.

           
"How much?" Chamcha shouted. "Vallabh, how much did you two men
decide upon? How much to prostitute your wife?"

           
"What a fool," Kasturba said contemptuously. "England-educated
and what-all, but still with a head full of hay. You come talking so big-big,
in
your mother's house
etcetera, but maybe you didn't love her so much. But we
loved her, we all. We three. And in this manner we may keep her spirit
alive."

           
"It is pooja, you could say," came Vallabh's quiet voice. "An
act of worship."

           
"And you," Changez Chamchawala spoke as softly as his servant,
"you come here to this temple. With your unbelief. Mister, you've got a
nerve."

           
And finally, the treason of Zeenat Vakil. "Come off it, Salad," she
said, moving to sit on the arm of the Chesterfield next to the old man.
"Why be such a sourpuss? You're no angel, baby, and these people seem to
have worked things out okay."

           
Saladin's mouth opened and shut. Changez patted Zeeny on the knee. "He
came to accuse, dear. He came to avenge his youth, but we have turned the
tables and he is confused. Now we must let him have his chance, and you must
referee. I will not be sentenced by him, but I will accept the worst from
you."

           
The bastard. Old bastard. He wanted me off-balance, and here l am, knocked
sideways. I won't speak, why should I, not like this, the humiliation
.
"There was," said Saladin Chamcha, "a wallet of pounds, and
there was a roasted chicken."

           
* * * * *

           
Of what did the son accuse the father? Of everything: espionage on child-self,
rainbow-pot-stealing, exile. Of turning him into what he might not have become.
Of making-a-man of. Of what-will-I-tell-my-friends. Of irreparable sunderings
and offensive forgiveness. Of succumbing to Allah-worship with new wife and
also to blasphemous worship of late spouse. Above all, of magic-lampism, of
being an open-sesamist. Everything had come easily to him, charm, women,
wealth, power, position. Rub, poof, genie, wish, at once master, hey presto. He
was a father who had promised, and then withheld, a magic lamp.

           
* * * * *

           
Changez, Zeeny, Vallabh, Kasturba remained motionless and silent until Saladin
Chamcha came to a flushed, embarrassed halt. "Such violence of the spirit
after so long," Changez said after a silence. "So sad. A quarter of a
century and still the son begrudges the peccadilloes of the past. O my son. You
must stop carrying me around like a parrot on your shoulder. What am I?
Finished. I'm not your Old Man of the Sea. Face it, mister: I don't explain you
any more."

           
Through a window Saladin Chamcha caught sight of a forty-year-old walnut-tree.
"Cut it down," he said to his father. "Cut it, sell it, send me
the cash."

           
Chamchawala rose to his feet, and extended his right hand. Zeeny, also rising,
took it like a dancer accepting a bouquet; at once, Vallabh and Kasturba
diminished into servants, as if a clock had silently chimed pumpkin-time.
"Your book," he said to Zeeny. "I have something you'd like to
see."

           
The two of them left the room; impotent Saladin, after a moment's floundering,
stamped petulantly in their wake. "Sourpuss," Zeeny called gaily over
her shoulder. "Come on, snap out of it, grow up."

           
The Chamchawala art collection, housed here at Scandal Point, included a large
group of the legendary
Hamza-nama
cloths, members of that
sixteenth-century sequence depicting scenes from the life of a hero who may or
may not have been the same Hamza as the famous one, Muhammad's uncle whose
liver was eaten by the Meccan woman Hind as he lay dead on the battlefield of
Uhud. "I like these pictures," Changez Chamchawala told Zeeny,
"because the hero is permitted to fail. See how often he has to be rescued
from his troubles." The pictures also provided eloquent proof of Zeeny
Vakil's thesis about the eclectic, hybridized nature of the Indian artistic
tradition. The Mughals had brought artists from every part of India to work on
the paintings; individual identity was submerged to create a many-headed,
many-brushed Over-artist who, literally,
was
Indian painting. One hand
would draw the mosaic floors, a second the figures, a third would paint the
Chinese-looking cloudy skies. On the backs of the cloths were the stories that
accompanied the scenes. The pictures would be shown like a movie: held up while
someone read out the hero's tale. In the
Hamza-nama
you could see the
Persian miniature fusing with Kannada and Keralan painting styles, you could
see Hindu and Muslim philosophy forming their characteristically late-Mughal
synthesis.

           
A giant was trapped in a pit and his human tormentors were spearing him in the
forehead. A man sliced vertically from the top of his head to his groin still
held his sword as he fell. Everywhere, bubbling spillages of blood. Saladin
Chamcha took a grip on himself. "The savagery," he said loudly in his
English voice. "The sheer barbaric love of pain."

           
Changez Chamchawala ignored his son, had eyes only for Zeeny; who gazed
straight back into his own. "Ours is a government of philistines, young
lady, don't you agree? I have offered this whole collection free gratis, did
you know? Let them only house it properly, let them build a place. Condition of
cloths is not A-1, you see . . . they won't do it. No interest. Meanwhile I get
offers every month from Amrika. Offers of what-what size! You wouldn't believe.
I don't sell. Our heritage, my dear, every day the U S A is taking it away.
Ravi Varma paintings, Chandela bronzes, Jaisalmer lattices. We sell ourselves,
isn't it? They drop their wallets on the ground and we kneel at their feet. Our
Nandi bulls end up in some gazebo in Texas. But you know all this. You know
India is a free country today." He stopped, but Zeeny waited; there was
more to come. It came: "One day I will also take the dollars. Not for the
money. For the pleasure of being a whore. Of becoming nothing. Less than
nothing." And now, at last, the real storm, the words behind the words,
less
than nothing
. "When I die," Changez Chamchawala said to Zeeny,
"what will I be? A pair of emptied shoes. That is my fate, that he has
made for me. This actor. This pretender. He has made himself into an imitator
of non-existing men. I have nobody to follow me, to give what I have made. This
is his revenge: he steals from me my posterity." He smiled, patted her
hand, released her into the care of his son. "I have told her," he
said to Saladin. "You are still carrying your take-away chicken. I have
told her my complaint. Now she must judge. That was the arrangement."

           
Zeenat Vakil walked up to the old man in his outsize suit, put her hands on his
cheeks, and kissed him on the lips.

           
* * * * *

           
After Zeenat betrayed him in the house of his father's perversions, Saladin
Chamcha refused to see her or answer the messages she left at the hotel desk.
The
Millionairess
came to the end of its run; the tour was over. Time to go
home. After the closing-night party Chamcha headed for bed. In the elevator a
young and clearly honeymooning couple were listening to music on headphones.
The young man murmured to his wife: "Listen, tell me. Do I still seem a
stranger to you sometimes?" The girl, smiling fondly, shook her head,
can't
hear
, removed the headphones. He repeated, gravely: "A stranger, to
you, don't I still sometimes seem?" She, with unfaltering smile, laid her
cheek for an instant on his high scrawny shoulder. "Yes, once or
twice," she said, and put the headphones on again. He did the same,
seeming fully satisfied by her answer. Their bodies took on, once again, the
rhythms of the playback music. Chamcha got out of the lift. Zeeny was sitting
on the floor with her back against his door.

           
* * * * *

           
Inside the room, she poured herself a large whisky and soda. "Behaving
like a baby," she said. "You should be ashamed."

           
That afternoon he had received a package from his father. Inside it was a small
piece of wood and a large number of notes, not rupees but sterling pounds: the
ashes, so to speak, of a walnut-tree. He was full of inchoate feeling and
because Zeenat had turned up she became the target. "You think I love
you?" he said, speaking with deliberate viciousness. "You think I'll
stay with you? I'm a married man."