The Satanic Verses (80 page)

           
He fell asleep, but by one o'clock had been up and down three times. "For
God's sake," Salahuddin shouted down the telephone, "give me
Panikkar's home number." But that was against hospital procedure.
"You must judge," said the duty doctor, "if the time has come to
bring him down." Bitch, Salahuddin Chamchawala mouthed. "Thanks a
lot."

           
At three o'clock Changez was so weak that Salahuddin more or less carried him
to the toilet. "Get the car out," he shouted at Nasreen and Kasturba.
"We're going to the hospital. Now." The proof of Changez's decline
was that, this last time, he permitted his son to help him out. "Black
shit is bad," he said, panting for breath. His lungs had filled up
alarmingly; the breath was like bubbles pushing through glue. "Some
cancers are slow, but I think this is very fast. Deterioration is very
rapid." And Salahuddin, the apostle of truth, told comforting lies:
Abba,
don't worry. You'll be fine
. Changez Chamchawala shook his head. "I'm
going, son," he said. His chest heaved; Salahuddin grabbed a large plastic
mug and held it under Changez's mouth. The dying man vomited up more than a
pint of phlegm mixed up with blood: and after that was too weak to talk. This
time Salahuddin did have to carry him, to the back seat of the Mercedes, where
he sat between Nasreen and Kasturba while Salahuddin drove at top speed to
Breach Candy Hospital, half a mile down the road. "Shall I open the
window, Abba?" he asked at one point, and Changez shook his head and
bubbled: "No." Much later, Salahuddin realized this had been his
father's last word.

           
The emergency ward. Running feet, orderlies, wheelchair, Changez being heaved
on to a bed, curtains. A young doctor, doing what had to be done, very quickly
but without the appearance of speed.
I like him
, Salahuddin thought.
Then the doctor looked him in the eye and said: "I don't think he's going
to make it." It felt like being punched in the stomach. Salahuddin
realized he'd been clinging on to a futile hope,
they'll fix him and we'll
take him home; this isn't "it"
, and his instant reaction to the
doctor's words was rage.
You're the mechanic. Don't tell me the car won't
start; mend the damn thing
. Changez was flat out, drowning in his lungs.
"We can't get at his chest in this kurta; may we . . ."
Cut it off
Do what you have to do
. Drips, the blip of a weakening heartbeat on a
screen, helplessness. The young doctor murmuring: "It won't be long now,
so . . ." At which, Salahuddin Chamchawala did a crass thing. He turned to
Nasreen and Kasturba and said: "Come quickly now. Come and say
goodbye." "For God's sake!" the doctor exploded . . . the women
did not weep, but came up to Changez and took a hand each. Salahuddin blushed
for shame. He would never know if his father heard the death-sentence dripping
from the lips of his son.

           
Now Salahuddin found better words, his Urdu returning to him after a long
absence.
We're all beside you, Abba. We all love you very much
. Changez
could not speak, but that was,―was it not?―yes, it must have
been―a little nod of recognition.
He heard me
. Then all of a
sudden Changez Chamchawala left his face; he was still alive, but he had gone
somewhere else, had turned inwards to look at whatever there was to see.
He
is teaching me how to die
, Salahuddin thought.
He does not avert his
eyes, but looks death right in the face
. At no point in his dying did
Changez Chamchawala speak the name of God.

           
"Please," the doctor said, "go outside the curtain now and let
us make our effort." Salahuddin took the two women a few steps away; and
now, when a curtain hid Changez from their sight, they wept. "He swore he
would never leave me," Nasreen sobbed, her iron control broken at last,
"and he has gone away." Salahuddin went to watch through a crack in
the curtain;―and saw the voltage being pumped into his father's body, the
sudden green jaggedness of the pulse on the monitor screen; saw doctor and
nurses pounding his father's chest; saw defeat.

           
The last thing he had seen in his father's face, just before the medical staff's
final, useless effort, was the dawning of a terror so profound that it chilled
Salahuddin to the bone. What had he seen? What was it that waited for him, for
all of us, that brought such fear to a brave man's eyes?―Now, when it was
over, he returned to Changez's bedside; and saw his father's mouth curved
upwards, in a smile.

           
He caressed those sweet cheeks.
I didn't shave him today. He died with
stubble on his chin
. How cold his face was already; but the brain, the
brain retained a little warmth. They had stuffed cottonwool into his nostrils.
But
suppose there's been a mistake? What if he wants to breathe?
 Nasreen
Chamchawala was beside him. "Let's take your father home," she said.

           
* * * * *

           
Changez Chamchawala returned home in an ambulance, lying in an aluminium tray
on the floor between the two women who had loved him, while Salahuddin followed
in the car. Ambulance men laid him to rest in his study; Nasreen turned the
air-conditioner up high. This was, after all, a tropical death, and the sun
would be up soon.

           
What did he see?
 Salahuddin kept thinking.
Why the horror? And,
whence that final smile?

           
People came again. Uncles, cousins, friends took charge, arranging everything.
Nasreen and Kasturba sat on white sheets on the floor of the room in which,
once upon a time, Saladin and Zeeny had visited the ogre, Changez; women sat
with them to mourn, many of them reciting the qalmah over and over, with the
help of counting beads. Salahuddin was irritated by this; but lacked the will
to tell them to stop.―Then the mullah came, and sewed Changez's
winding-sheet, and it was time to wash the body; and even though there were
many men present, and there was no need for him to help, Salahuddin insisted.
If
he could look his death in the eye, then I can do it, too
.―And when
his father was being washed, his body rolled this way and that at the mullah's
command, the flesh bruised and slabby, the appendix scar long and brown,
Salahuddin recalled the only other time in his life when he'd seen his
physically demure father naked: he'd been nine years old, blundering into a
bathroom where Changez was taking a shower, and the sight of his father's penis
was a shock he'd never forgotten. That thick squat organ, like a club. O the
power of it; and the insignificance of his own. . . "His eyes won't
close," the mullah complained. "You should have done it before."
He was a stocky, pragmatic fellow, this mullah with his moustacheless beard. He
treated the dead body as a commonplace thing, needing washing the way a car
does, or a window, or a dish. "You are from London? Proper London?―I
was there many years. I was doorman at Claridge's Hotel."
Oh? Really?
How interesting
. The man wanted to make small-talk! Salahuddin was
appalled.
That's my father, don't you understand?
"These
garments," the mullah asked, indicating Changez's last kurta- pajama
outfit, the one which the hospital staff had cut open to get at his chest.
"You have need of them?"
No, no. Take them. Please
. "You
are very kind." Small pieces of black cloth were being stuffed into
Changez's mouth and under his eyelids. "This cloth has been to
Mecca," the mullah said.
Get it out!
"I don't understand. It
is holy fabric."
You heard me: out, out
. "May God have mercy
on your soul."

           
And:

           
The bier, strewn with flowers, like an outsize baby's cot.

           
The body, wrapped in white, with sandalwood shavings, for fragrance, scattered
all about it.

           
More flowers, and a green silken covering with Quranic verses embroidered upon
it in gold.

           
The ambulance, with the bier resting in it, awaiting the widows' permission to
depart.

           
The last farewells of women.

           
The graveyard. Male mourners rushing to lift the bier on their shoulders
trample Salahuddin's foot, ripping off a segment of the nail on his big toe.

           
Among the mourners, an estranged old friend of Changez's, here in spite of
double pneumonia;―and another old gentleman, weeping copiously, who will
die himself the very next day;―and all sorts, the walking records of a
dead man's life.

           
The grave. Salahuddin climbs down into it, stands at the head end, the
gravedigger at the foot. Changez Chamchawala is lowered down.
The weight of
my father's head, lying in my hand. I laid it down; to rest
.

           
The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.

           
* * * * *

           
Waiting for him when he returned from the graveyard: a copper-and-brass lamp,
his renewed inheritance. He went into Changez's study and closed the door.
There were his old slippers by the bed: he had become, as he'd foretold,
"a pair of emptied shoes". The bedclothes still bore the imprint of
his father's body; the room was full of sickly perfume: sandalwood, camphor,
cloves. He took the lamp from its shelf and sat at Changez's desk. Taking a
handkerchief from his pocket, he rubbed briskly: once, twice, thrice.

           
The lights all went on at once.

           
Zeenat Vakil entered the room.

           
"O God, I'm sorry, maybe you wanted them off, but with the blinds closed
it was just so sad." Waving her arms, speaking loudly in her beautiful
croak of a voice, her hair woven, for once, into a waist-length ponytail, here
she was, his very own djinn. "I feel so bad I didn't come before, I was
just trying to hurt you, what a time to choose, so bloody self-indulgent, yaar,
it's good to see you, you poor orphaned goose."

           
She was the same as ever, immersed in life up to her neck, combining occasional
art lectures at the university with her medical practice and her political
activities. "I was at the goddamn hospital when you came, you know? I was
right there, but I didn't know about your dad until it was over, and even then
I didn't come to give you a hug, what a bitch, if you want to throw me out I
will have no complaints." This was a generous woman, the most generous
he'd known.
When you see her, you'll know,
he had promised himself, and
it turned out to be true. "I love you," he heard himself saying,
stopping her in her tracks. "Okay, I won't hold you to that," she
finally said, looking hugely pleased. "Balance of your mind is obviously
disturbed. Lucky for you you aren't in one of our great public hospitals; they
put the loonies next to the heroin addicts, and there's so much drug traffic in
the wards that the poor schizos end up with bad habits.―Anyway, if you
say it again after forty days, watch out, because maybe then I'll take it
seriously. Just now it could be a disease."

           
Undefeated (and, it appeared, unattached), Zeeny's reentry into his life
completed the process of renewal, of regeneration, that had been the most
surprising and paradoxical product of his father's terminal illness. His old
English life, its bizarreries, its evils, now seemed very remote, even
irrelevant, like his truncated stage-name. "About time," Zeeny
approved when he told her of his return to
Salahuddin
. "Now you can
stop acting at last." Yes, this looked like the start of a new phase, in
which the world would be solid and real, and in which there was no longer the
broad figure of a parent standing between himself and the inevitability of the
grave. An orphaned life, like Muhammad's; like everyone's. A life illuminated
by a strangely radiant death, which continued to glow, in his mind's eye, like
a sort of magic lamp.

           
I must think of myself, from now on, as living perpetually in the first
instant of the future
, he resolved a few days later, in Zeeny's apartment
on Sophia College Lane, while recovering in her bed from the toothy enthusiasms
of her lovemaking. (She had invited him home shyly, as if she were removing a
veil after long concealment.) But a history is not so easily shaken off; he was
also living, after all, in the
present moment of the past
, and his old
life was about to surge around him once again, to complete its final act.

           
* * * * *

           
He became aware that he was a rich man. Under the terms of Changez's will, the
dead tycoon's vast fortune and myriad business interests were to be supervised
by a group of distinguished trustees, the income being divided equally between
three parties: Changez's second wife Nasreen, Kasturba, whom he referred to in
the document as "in every true sense, my third", and his son,
Salahuddin. After the deaths of the two women, however, the trust could be
dissolved whenever Salahuddin chose: he inherited, in short, the lot. "On
the condition," Changez Chamchawala had mischievously stipulated,
"that the scoundrel accepts the gift he previously spurned, viz., the
requisitioned schoolhouse situated at Solan, Himachal Pradesh." Changez
might have chopped down a walnut-tree, but he had never attempted to cut Salahuddin
out of his will.―The houses at Pali Hill and Scandal Point were excluded
from these provisions, however. The former passed to Nasreen Chamchawala
outright; the latter became, with immediate effect, the sole property of
Kasturbabai, who quickly announced her intention of selling the old house to
property developers. The site was worth crores, and Kasturba was wholly
unsentimental about real estate. Salahuddin protested vehemently, and was
slapped down hard. "I have lived my whole life here," she informed
him. "It is therefore for me only to say." Nasreen Chamchawala was
entirely indifferent to the fate of the old place. "One more high-rise,
one less piece of old Bombay," she shrugged. "What's the difference?
Cities change." She was already preparing to move back to Pali Hill,
taking the cases of butterflies off the walls, assembling her stuffed birds in
the ball. "Let it go," Zeenat Vakil said. "You couldn't live in
that museum, anyway."