Everything about her new incarnation was exactly as Miss Salma R ordained, except for one thing. She had wanted to call the show Changing the American Story, or maybe, more concisely, Changing America. But the one American she trusted, the one who came to see her in Mumbai/Bombay and persuaded her to move halfway across the world, to step off the edge of the cliff into the unknown, and who was now her company’s president, told her that those were dreadful, smart-ass, liberal-elite, forgettable titles. She deferred to the American on this one point, and so the show was named more simply: after her. Salma.
* * *
—
THE HIT SHOW’S OFFICES, in a converted warehouse space in lower Manhattan, were bulging at the seams, because the number of persons needed to open, read, categorize, and evaluate the mail that poured in every day had risen to over three hundred and sixty-five, their attention divided between the messages arriving on the website and through social media and the hard-copy correspondence, which still made up the largest part of the incoming material, and which required a fleet of forklift vehicles to carry them from the delivery vans to the mail readers’ floor, three hundred and sixty-five mail sacks a day, one year of mail sacks arriving on each and every morning of the year. It became plain that no single human being could maintain control over such an uproar of correspondence, and Miss Salma R was told by her executives that they would sift and select a manageable quantity of letters for her personal scrutiny, because for her to sit with each one of the three hundred and sixty-five first readers to judge which letters, emails, texts, and tweets warranted a response, an invitation, or even a special show built around them would require more hours than the clocks allowed for, it would be necessary to bend the laws of time itself, to which she replied, “Then that’s what’s going to happen, because that’s what I need to do.” Monday was the only weekday on which the show did not air and so, on account of the force of Miss Salma R’s will, the laws of the universe were indeed suspended at the Salma offices building each Monday, so that in addition to all the week’s pre-production work, she had plenty of time to visit all three hundred and sixty-five mail desks and to make decisions about every single letter that came in. Unnerved by Miss Salma R’s temporal absolutism, the clocks gave up arguing and stopped trying to run the hours in the normal fashion, so that when people looked in their direction to see what the time was, the clocks showed them whatever time they wanted it to be, and in spite of the chronometric havoc that was created by this abdication they still permitted everyone to get home on time.
Miss Salma R loved the letters of America. In most of the letters women confessed their secrets to her, their worries about their weight, their husbands, their lecherous bosses, their illnesses, their children, and their loss of faith in a future in which things would be better than they were; and men, too, whispered to her in their emotionally uneducated manner about their inadequacies, both sexual and professional, their fears for themselves and their families, their hostility toward other Americans who did not share their views, and their dreams of glamorous women and new cars. It fell to her to comfort America’s anguish, to calm its rages, to celebrate its loves. She had a special soft spot for the stories of recent immigrants and showcased them, from time to time, in a special feature called “Immigreat!”
Her audiences were the letters made flesh. She caressed their pets, ate their cuisine, congratulated them on their successful gender reassignments and exam results, praised their gods with them, and introduced them to the celebrities who came smiling and telling funny stories through all her studio days. The letters showed her that the material success of America had impoverished the spiritual lives of Americans, but she also saw that that success was by no means evenly distributed across the broad populous nation, and the absence of material well-being was spiritually impoverishing also. She was a hugger and a kisser and in spite of her youth she quickly came to be thought of as wise, and the America of the letters was a place in constant search of a wise woman to listen to, always looking for the new voice that would make its lives feel rich once again. Times were hard all over, and she was the bringer of joy. The avalanche of the letters gave her a belief in her own bounty. There was enough love and care in her to encompass them all. Her arms would reach out to soothe the totality of America’s pain. Her bosom would be America’s pillow. The letters allowed her to become the most that she had it in her to be. (She had her own demons to deal with, of course, but when she was preoccupied with the demons of America, her own seemed to recede, at least for a while. About her demons there will be more to say presently.)
The two categories of letters which were unlike all the others were the love letters and the letters of hate. Of these, the poison-pen letters were more straightforward and bothered her less. Crazy people, religious nuts, envious people, people who made her the incarnation of their discontents, racists, misogynists, the usual crew. She passed them on to her security team and put them out of her mind. Her distant lovers were more upsetting. Many of them were actually in love with themselves and gave her to understand that they were doing her a kindness by bestowing their love upon her. Others simply assumed their approach would be met with a favorable response. And then there were those who begged. When photographs were included, it was usually an unwise move. When the pictures were pornographic, it was especially unwise. The cascades of boasts, assumptions, and hopeless pleas depressed her because of the image of herself she saw reflected in these obsessive gazes. Was she so shallow that these nonswimmers thought they could paddle their feet in her waters? Was she so two-dimensional that they thought they could fold her up and put her in their pockets? She wanted to know how she was seen by others, but this aspect of the knowledge she acquired gave her a heavy heart.
Some of the love letters were still addressed to her Five Eyes character, Salma C. These were the letters whose authors seemed to have sunk most deeply into fantasy, identifying themselves as secret, double, or triple agents, or would-be members of the secret world, offering, as their qualifications, details of their patriotism, their skills with guns, and their ability to pass unnoticed in a crowd. She should love them, the Five Eyes guys (and women) said, because who could understand her the way they could? “We are the same,” these lovers declared. “I am just like you.”
The messages arriving via her Twitter feed were mostly pseudonymous, the work of pimply fifteen- or forty-five-year-old male virgins living with their parents in Woop Woop, Arkansas, or Podunk, Illinois. All of them were on or over the edge of illiteracy. America no longer taught its lovers how to spell. Nor did it teach joined-up writing. Cursive script was becoming obsolete, like typewriters and carbon paper. These lovers who wrote in block capitals would not be able to read the love letters of earlier generations. Cursive might as well be Martian, or Greek. For such correspondents Miss Salma R, whose stock-in-trade was empathy, was guilty of feeling just a scintilla of contempt.
Very, very occasionally, a letter arrived which was not like the others, like an odd-one-out category on Sesame Street. When this happened, Miss Salma R (perhaps only for a moment) gave the thing her full attention. The first letter from the person signing himself “Quichotte” was one such missive. The thing that leapt out at Miss Salma R immediately was the beautiful penmanship. The pen that wrote these words was a thick-nibbed instrument, a pen to respect, which allowed the author to create perfect copperplate lettering, as if he were making a wedding announcement or inviting her to a debutante ball. The text, too, was unusual. It was one of the rare love letters that were neither bombastic nor wheedling, and it made no assumptions about her.
My dear Miss Salma R,
With this note I introduce myself to you. With this hand I declare my love. In time to come as I move ever closer you will come to see that I am true and that you must be mine. You are my Grail and this is my quest. I bow my head before your beauty. I am and will ever remain your knight.
Sent by a smile,
Quichotte
The paper on which this message was written in such a fine hand was the vulgar antithesis of the writing, a cheap motel-room scrap with the address torn off. From these few clues Miss Salma R deduced that this was an older man, a man from the age of handwriting, the owner of a good fountain pen, who had fallen upon hard times and, being lonely, watched too much TV. From his choice of alias she further deduced an education, which in all probability, judging by the phrasing, had not been an American schooling. She even went so far as to surmise that the writer had this in common with herself: that English had not been his mother tongue, not something heard in the cradle but something learned afterwards. This was suggested by both the syntax (American English was far more informal in its construction) and the spelling (which was improbably perfect). The only puzzlement was the sign-off, sent by a smile, with its imperfect command of English grammar. It would have both gratified and shocked our fool of a protagonist to know that these seventy-two words, seventy-three including his pseudonymous signature, which he believed preserved around him the cloak of invisibility within which, for the moment, he preferred to remain concealed, had revealed so much about him. She had noticed him and was focused on his letter: that was good. But it was as if she saw him standing naked and scrawny before her: not so good. At any rate, he had no knowledge of any of this, and so we may leave him for now in his state of innocence, hoping for favor and believing himself unknown. We can also protect him from the knowledge of what Miss Salma R said next.
“Keep this where we can get at it,” she said to the intern on whose desk the Quichotte letter had landed. “I’ve got a bad feeling about it. Let me know if he writes again.”
Then Monday was over, and she walked out of the building into the waiting Maybach, sank down into the back seat, raised to her lips the dirty martini (up, with olives) waiting for her on the armrest, and forgot Quichotte completely.
“Evenin’, Miss Daisy,” her driver greeted her.
“Stop saying that, Hoke,” she replied. “You’re making me mad.”
England is another country. They do things differently there.
Yes: we must sojourn for a time among the English, for so long thought to be the most pragmatic and commonsensical of peoples, but presently torn asunder by a wild, nostalgic decision about their future; and in particular, in London, once the most pleasing of cities, now much disfigured by the empty apartment blocks of the international rich, the Chinese, Russians, and Arabs who stationed their money in such buildings as if they were parking lots and money an armada of invisible automobiles; and in London, on a street in the west of the city, in a neighborhood once known for its longhair bohemians, West Indians, and quirky local stores, but rapidly becoming too expensive except for the comfortably short-haired, its quirkiness replaced by the bland façades of frock shops and chic eateries, and as for the West Indians, they were pushed to the margins long ago and now, because of that wild, nostalgic decision about the country’s future, faced uncertainty and renewed hostility. Once a year in this neighborhood a carnival filled the streets, modeled on the customs of faraway Jamaica and Trinidad, but the intermingled culture the carnival celebrated had changed now, and felt, to some saddened people at least, like a painful reminder of the time before the country broke in half. And yes, let us admit it, our story’s other two countries were badly broken, too, and equally disputatious, and more violent. Black citizens were regularly killed by white policemen in one of these other countries, or arrested in hotel lobbies for the crime of making a phone call to their mothers, and children were murdered in schools because of a constitutional amendment that made it easy to murder children in schools; and in the other country, a man was lynched by sacred-cow fanatics for the crime of having what they thought was beef in his kitchen, and an eight-year-old girl from a Muslim family was raped and killed in a Hindu temple to teach the Muslim population a lesson. So perhaps this England was not the worst place, after all, and perhaps this London was not the worst city in spite of its rising knife crime, and perhaps this West London neighborhood was still a nice neighborhood to live in, and perhaps things would get better in time.
An interjection, kind reader, if you’ll allow one: It may be argued that stories should not sprawl in this way, that they should be grounded in one place or the other, put down roots in the other or the one and flower in that singular soil; yet so many of today’s stories are and must be of this plural, sprawling kind, because a kind of nuclear fission has taken place in human lives and relations, families have been divided, millions upon millions of us have traveled to the four corners of the (admittedly spherical, and therefore cornerless) globe, whether by necessity or choice. Such broken families may be our best available lenses through which to view this broken world. And inside the broken families are broken people, broken by loss, poverty, maltreatment, failure, age, sickness, pain, and hatred, yet trying in spite of it all to cling to hope and love, and these broken people—we, the broken people!—may be the best mirrors of our times, shining shards that reflect the truth, wherever we travel, wherever we land, wherever we remain. For we migrants have become like seed-spores, carried through the air, and lo, the breeze blows us where it will, until we lodge in alien soil, where very often—as for example now in this England with its wild nostalgia for an imaginary golden age when all attitudes were Anglo-Saxon and all English skins were white—we are made to feel unwelcome, no matter how beautiful the fruit hanging from the branches of the orchards of fruit trees that we grow into and become.
To resume: Here in this West London neighborhood we may intrude upon a spacious apartment above a restaurant—the very restaurant space, as it happens, from which, for many years, the carnival was organized! The apartment boasts two floors and a large roof terrace, a lateral conversion across the width of two row houses. The lower floor has been opened out to form a single, light-filled, high-ceilinged room, and in the open-plan kitchen and bar in the large room’s northeast corner, mixing herself a dirty martini (up, with olives), we may now see Sister—yes, the Author’s sibling, Brother’s Sister—an immigrant, plainly, South Asian, obviously, and also a successful lawyer with a strong interest in civil and human rights issues, a stalwart fighter on behalf of minorities and the urban poor, who has devoted a good proportion of her time to pro bono work; and it would not be stretching things to say that she might be thinking, as she has often thought, such thoughts as the ones we have outlined above. Of her appearance perhaps the only thing that needs to be said is that her decision to stop coloring her hair was made quite recently, and she has had to get used to the white-haired stranger in the mirror—to her mother, we might say, looking back at her across time and through the looking glass. And now that we have introduced her and set her in some sort of context, let us leave her to sip her evening drink and await her dinner guests, while we retreat into the privacy of these pages to tell her tale.
* * *
—
SISTER DID SOMETIMES THINK about her Brother, but usually with a kind of dismissive exasperation. She had boxed him away in the attic of her memories, along with the rest of her early years: their Bombay world, the radiogram, the dancing. The feeling of coming second to her brother, who received privileges not offered to her. She had clawed her way out of that trap, making choices her parents didn’t want her to make (more will be said about these choices in due course), winning major scholarships to pay for the British law school education they didn’t want her to have. Now, after a long and distinguished career, her roots were here, in this apartment, on this street, in this neighborhood, in this city, in this country, for all its faults. That old world had vanished, and her parents and Brother along with it. Childhood was just a story she could tell at dinner parties: a story about the hypocrisies and double standards of the supposedly free-thinking Indian intelligentsia. She had decisively moved on and made her own life. Or so, most of the time, she told herself. But the trut
h was that she still felt the past moving like a thrombosis in the blood. It might reach her heart and kill her one of these days.
After their parents’ death it had fallen to her, as the “efficient” sibling, to deal with everything that had to be dealt with—a second-rate spy novelist was clearly too much of an Artist to be involved—and when she had done it all, when she had buried her mother and burned her father, disposed of the family property, found suitable new owners for Zayvar Brother and Cake & Antiques, and organized a memorial event at which the city’s best and brightest had turned out to tell funny stories about Pa and Ma and mourn them as they would have wished, with dances; and after that, when all was done, when she had arranged for what Brother in his crass way called the “division of the spoils,” her sibling had called her for that last phone call and said the unforgivable thing.
“So what’s this?”
“What’s what?”
“This wire transfer that just landed in my bank account.”
“It’s your share.”
“My share of what?”
“You know of what. Of everything.”
“My share of the cloakroom tips? My share of the piggy bank? My share of the loose change in their pockets? My half of the value of the radiogram? My—”
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