The Satanic Verses (37 page)

           
"
Once I'm an owl, what is the spell or antidote for turning me back
into myself?
" Mr. Muhammad Sufyan, prop. Shaandaar Cafe and landlord
of the rooming-house above, mentor to the variegated, transient and
particoloured inhabitants of both, seen-it-all type, least doctrinaire of hajis
and most unashamed of V C R addicts, ex-schoolteacher, self-taught in classical
texts of many cultures, dismissed from post in Dhaka owing to cultural
differences with certain generals in the old days when Bangladesh was merely an
East Wing, and therefore, in his own words, "not so much an immig as an
emig runt"―this last a good-natured allusion to his lack of inches,
for though he was a wide man, thick of arm and waist, he stood no more than
sixty-one inches off the ground, blinked in his bedroom doorway, awakened by
Jumpy Joshi's urgent midnight knock, polished his half-rimmed spectacles on the
edge of Bengali-style kurta (drawstrings tied at the neck in a neat bow),
squeezed lids tightly shut open shut over myopic eyes, replaced glasses, opened
eyes, stroked moustacheless hennaed beard, sucked teeth, and responded to the
now-indisputable horns on the brow of the shivering fellow whom Jumpy, like the
cat, appeared to have dragged in, with the above impromptu quip, stolen, with
commendable mental alacrity for one aroused from his slumbers, from Lucius
Apuleius of Madaura, Moroccan priest, AD 120-180 approx., colonial of an
earlier Empire, a person who denied the accusation of having bewitched a rich
widow yet confessed, somewhat perversely, that at an early stage in his career
he had been transformed, by witchcraft, into (not an owl, but) an ass.
"Yes, yes," Sufyan continued, stepping out into the passage and
blowing a white mist of winter breath into his cupped hands, "Poor
misfortunate, but no point wallowing. Constructive attitude must be adopted. I
will wake my wife."

           
Chamcha was beard-fuzz and grime. He wore a blanket like a toga below which
there protruded the comic deformity of goats' hoofs, while above it could be
seen the sad comedy of a sheepskin jacket borrowed from Jumpy, its collar
turned up, so that sheepish curls nestled only inches from pointy billy-goat
horns. He seemed incapable of speech, sluggish of body, dull of eye; even
though Jumpy attempted to encourage him―"There, you see, we'll have
this well sorted in a flash"―he, Saladin, remained the most limp and
passive of―what?―let us say: satyrs. Sufyan, meanwhile, offered
further Apuleian sympathy. "In the case of the ass, reverse metamorphosis
required personal intervention of goddess Isis," he beamed. "But old
times are for old fogies. In your instance, young mister, first step would
possibly be a bowl of good hot soup."

           
At this point his kindly tones were quite drowned by the intervention of a
second voice, raised high in operatic terror; moments after which, his small
form was being jostled and shoved by the mountainous, fleshy figure of a woman,
who seemed unable to decide whether to push him out of her way or keep him
before her as a protective shield. Crouching behind Sufyan, this new being
extended a trembling arm at whose end was a quivering, pudgy, scarlet-nailed
index finger. "That over there," she howled. "What thing is come
upon us?"

           
"It is a friend of Joshi's," Sufyan said mildly, and continued,
turning to Chamcha, "Please forgive,―the unexpectedness et cet,
isn't it?―Anyhow, may I present my Mrs;―my Begum Sahiba,―Hind."

           
"What friend? How friend?" the croucher cried. "Ya Allah, eyes
aren't next to your nose?"

           
The passageway,―bare-board floor, torn floral paper on the
walls,―was starting to fill up with sleepy residents. Prominent among whom
were two teenage girls, one spike-haired, the other pony-tailed, and both
relishing the opportunity to demonstrate their skills (learned from Jumpy) in
the martial arts of karate and Wing Chun: Sufyan's daughters, Mishal
(seventeen) and fifteen-year-old Anahita, leapt from their bedroom in fighting
gear, Bruce Lee pajamas worn loosely over T-shirts bearing the image of the new
Madonna;―caught sight of unhappy Saladin;―and shook their heads in
wide-eyed delight.

           
"Radical," said Mishal, approvingly. And her sister nodded assent:
"Crucial. Fucking A." Her mother did not, however, reproach her for
her language; Hind's mind was elsewhere, and she wailed louder than ever:
"Look at this husband of mine. What sort of haji is this? Here is Shaitan
himself walking in through our door, and I am made to offer him hot chicken
yakhni, cooked by my own right hand."

           
Useless, now, for Jumpy Joshi to plead with Hind for tolerance, to attempt
explanations and demand solidarity. "If he's not the devil on earth,"
the heaving-chested lady pointed out unanswerably, "from where that
plague-breath comes that he's breathing? From, maybe, the Perfumed
Garden?"

           
"Not Gulistan, but Bostan," said Chamcha, suddenly. "AI Flight
420." On hearing his voice, however, Hind squealed frightfully, and
plunged past him, heading for the kitchen.

           
"Mister," Mishal said to Saladin as her mother fled downstairs,
"anyone who scares her that way has got to be seriously
bad
."

           
"Wicked," Anahita agreed. "Welcome aboard."

           
* * * * *

           
This Hind, now so firmly entrenched in exclamatory mode, had once
been―strangebuttrue!―the most blushing of brides, the soul of
gentleness, the very incarnation of tolerant good humour. As the wife of the
erudite schoolteacher of Dhaka, she had entered into her duties with a will,
the perfect helpmeet, bringing her husband cardamom-scented tea when he stayed
up late marking examination papers, ingratiating herself with the school
principal at the termly Staff Families Outing, struggling with the novels of
Bibhutibhushan Banerji and the metaphysics of Tagore in an attempt to be more
worthy of a spouse who could quote effortlessly from Rig-Veda as well as
Quran-Sharif, from the military accounts of Julius Caesar as well as the
Revelations of St John the Divine. In those days she had admired his
pluralistic openness of mind, and struggled, in her kitchen, towards a parallel
eclecticism, learning to cook the dosas and uttapams of South India as well as
the soft meatballs of Kashmir. Gradually her espousal of the cause of
gastronomic pluralism grew into a grand passion, and while secularist Sufyan
swallowed the multiple cultures of the subcontinent―"and let us not
pretend that Western culture is not present; after these centuries, how could
it not also be part of our heritage?"―his wife cooked, and ate in
increasing quantities, its food. As she devoured the highly spiced dishes of
Hyderabad and the high-faluting yoghurt sauces of Lucknow her body began to
alter, because all that food had to find a home somewhere, and she began to
resemble the wide rolling land mass itself, the subcontinent without frontiers,
because food passes across any boundary you care to mention.

           
Mr. Muhammad Sufyan, however, gained no weight: not a
tola
, not an
ounce
.

           
His refusal to fatten was the beginning of the trouble. When she reproached
him―"You don't like my cooking? For whom I'm doing it all and
blowing up like a balloon?"―he answered, mildly, looking up at her
(she was the taller of the two) over the top of half-rimmed specs:
"Restraint is also part of our traditions, Begum. Eating two mouthfuls
less than one's hunger: self-denial, the ascetic path." What a man: all
the answers, but you couldn't get him to give you a decent fight.

           
Restraint was not for Hind. Maybe, if Sufyan had ever complained; if just once
he'd said,
I thought I was marrying one woman but these days you're big
enough for two
; if he'd ever given her the incentive!―then maybe
she'd have desisted, why not, of course she would; so it was his fault, for
having no aggression, what kind of a male was it who didn't know how to insult
his fat lady wife?―In truth, it was entirely possible that Hind would
have failed to control her eating binges even if Sufyan had come up with the
required imprecations and entreaties; but, since he did not, she munched on,
content to dump the whole blame for her figure on him.

           
As a matter of fact, once she had started blaming him for things, she found
that there were a number of other matters she could hold against him; and
found, too, her tongue, so that the schoolteacher's humble apartment resounded
regularly to the kinds of tickings-off he was too much of a mouse to hand out
to his pupils. Above all, he was berated for his excessively high principles,
thanks to which, Hind told him, she knew he would never permit her to become a
rich man's wife;―for what could one say about a man who, finding that his
bank had inadvertently credited his salary to his account twice in the same
month, promptly
drew the institution's notice
to the error and handed
back the cash?;―what hope was there for a teacher who, when approached by
the wealthiest of the schoolchildren's parents, flatly refused to contemplate
accepting the usual remunerations in return for services rendered when marking
the little fellows' examination papers?

           
"But all of that I could forgive," she would mutter darkly at him,
leaving unspoken the rest of the sentence, which was
if it hadn't been for
your two real offences: your sexual, and political, crimes
.

           
Ever since their marriage, the two of them had performed the sexual act
infrequently, in total darkness, pin-drop silence and almost complete
immobility. It would not have occurred to Hind to wiggle or wobble, and since
Sufyan appeared to get through it all with an absolute minimum of motion, she
took it―had always taken it―that the two of them were of the same
mind on this matter, viz., that it was a dirty business, not to be discussed
before or after, and not to be drawn attention to during, either. That the
children took their time in coming she took as God's punishment for He only
knew what misdeeds of her earlier life; that they both turned out to be girls
she refused to blame on Allah, preferring, instead, to blame the weakling seed
implanted in her by her unmanly spouse, an attitude she did not refrain from
expressing, with great emphasis, and to the horror of the midwife, at the very moment
of little Anahita's birth. "Another girl," she gasped in disgust.
"Well, considering who made the baby, I should think myself lucky it's not
a cockroach, or a mouse." After this second daughter she told Sufyan that
enough was enough, and ordered him to move his bed into the hail. He accepted
without any argument her refusal to have more children; but then she discovered
that the lecher thought he could still, from time to time, enter her darkened
room and enact that strange rite of silence and near-motionlessness to which
she had only submitted in the name of reproduction. "What do you
think," she shouted at him the first time he tried it, "I do this
thing for fun?"

           
Once he had got it through his thick skull that she meant business, no more hanky-panky,
no sir, she was a decent woman, not a lust-crazed libertine, he began to stay
out late at night. It was during this period―she had thought, mistakenly,
that he was visiting prostitutes―that he became involved with politics,
and not just any old politics, either, oh no, Mister Brainbox had to go and
join the devils themselves, the Communist Party, no less, so much for those
principles of his; demons, that's what they were, worse by far than whores. It
was because of this dabbling in the occult that she had to pack up her bags at
such short notice and leave for England with two small babies in tow; because
of this ideological witchcraft that she had had to endure all the privations
and humiliations of the process of immigration; and on account of this
diabolism of his that she was stuck forever in this England and would never see
her village again. "England," she once said to him, "is your
revenge upon me for preventing you from performing your obscene acts upon my
body." He had not given an answer; and silence denotes assent.

           
And what was it that made them a living in this Vilayet of her exile, this Yuke
of her sex-obsessed husband's vindictiveness? What? His book learning? His
Gitanjali
,
Eclogues
, or that play
Othello
that he explained was really
Attallah or Attaullah except the writer couldn't spell, what sort of writer was
that, anyway?

           
It was: her cooking. "Shaandaar," it was praised. "Outstanding,
brilliant, delicious." People came from all over London to eat her samosas,
her Bombay chaat, her gulab jamans straight from Paradise. What was there for
Sufyan to do? Take the money, serve the tea, run from here to there, behave
like a servant for all his education. O, yes, of course the customers liked his
personality, he always had an appealing character, but when you're running an
eatery it isn't the conversation they pay for on the bill. Jalebis, barfi,
Special of the Day. How life had turned out! She was the mistress now.

           
Victory!

           
And yet it was also a fact that she, cook and breadwinner, chiefest architect
of the success of the Shaandaar Cafe, which had finally enabled them to buy the
whole four-storey building and start renting out its rooms,―
she
was the one around whom there hung, like bad breath, the miasma of defeat.
While Sufyan twinkled on, she looked extinguished, like a lightbulb with a
broken filament, like a fizzled star, like a flame.―Why?―Why, when
Sufyan, who had been deprived of vocation, pupils and respect, bounded about
like a young lamb, and even began to put on weight, fattening up in Proper
London as he had never done back home; why, when power had been removed from
his hands and delivered into hers, did she act―as her husband put
it―the "sad sack", the "glum chum" and the "moochy
pooch"? Simple: not in spite of, but on account of. Everything she valued
had been upset by the change; had in this process of translation, been lost.