Quichotte

by Salman Rushdie

  If he dies or something you’ll be sorry, Daughter had said. But there were things Daughter didn’t yet know because she hadn’t been told.

  It might not be Brother who died first.

  “Good night, Jack,” the judge called from his bedroom. They had separate bedrooms now.

  “I love you,” she called back. But that wasn’t what he was expecting her to say, and so, being a creature of habit, he didn’t reply. That was all right. She did not doubt his love.

  In the large and prosperous Indian community of Atlanta (pop. 472,522), Dr. R. K. Smile was known as “the Little King.” A few of the oldsters remembered Otto Soglow’s fun-loving cartoon character by that name, a small hemispherical monarch dressed in a fur-collared red garment with a pointy golden crown and a flamboyant black handlebar mustache. He liked innocent pleasures and pretty women. If you took off the yellow crown, that was a good description of the Smile Pharma billionaire too. He loved to play the games of Indian childhoods, was a whiz on the carrom board at his Colonial Revival home on Peachtree Battle Avenue, sponsored a team in the “hard tennis ball” Atlanta Cricket League (“We play casual cricket but we wear professional outfit!”), and from time to time organized informal kabaddi competitions in Centennial Park. He was happily married to his wife, Happy, the biryani expert, but could not resist flirting with every attractive woman who crossed his path, so his other nickname, used only behind his back and primarily by the younger women of the community, was Little Big Hands.

  In spite of these grabby tendencies, he was highly regarded, a benefactor of the best Atlanta Indian newspaper and website, named Rajdhani, “Capital,” as if to assert that Atlanta was the capital of Indian America, and a donor to most of the proliferating community associations in the city, groupings of people by their state of origin back home, but also by language (Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu), caste, subcaste, religion, and preferred house deities (Devi, Mahadeo, Narayan, and even small groups dedicated to Lohasur the iron god, Khodiyal the horse god, and Hardul the god of cholera). He gave as generously to Hindu groups as to Muslim ones, even though he disapproved of the widespread local admiration for the Indian leader Narendra Modi, his Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, and its ideological parent body, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS. The only community gatherings in which he politely declined to participate were those at which money was raised to send back to India to support those organizations. In spite of this he was popular across the whole spectrum of Atlanta Indians, and even spoke of himself as a unifying force, able to bring the seventy-five thousand South Asian Muslims in the area closer to their one hundred thousand Hindu brothers and sisters. He was not a deeply religious man himself, and had never set foot in any of the three dozen mosques in the city, not even the large Al-Farooq Masjid on Fourteenth Street. “To tell the truth,” he confided to his closest friends, “I (a) am not the praying type and I (b) in fact like the look of the Swaminarayan temple better.” This was the large Krishna temple in the suburb of Lilburn. “But don’t tangle me up in any of that, yaar,” he added. “I’m a pharmacist. I make pills.”

  On the subject of prescription medication he was outspoken, severe, and, as events would reveal, utterly dishonest. “Back home in the old days,” he said when he spoke at one of the community’s many gala evenings, “there was always a street corner dispensary that would hand out drugs without a doctor’s chit. Cross-legged in his raised booth, the vendor would wave a forgiving hand. ‘Come back and give me later,’ he might say, but when you came back for more he never asked where the last chit was. And if you asked for twenty painkillers he would say, ‘Why so few? Take the box only. Save yourself trouble. Why come back every week?’ It was bad for his customers’ health, but good for health of business.” There was nostalgic laughter when he said this, but he wagged a finger at the assembled worthies and went tsk-tsk-tsk. “Ladies and gents, it is not a laughing matter.”

  Afterwards, when his house came tumbling down, people would say, “It’s like he was confessing to us openly. Standing there in front of us and challenging us. Putting on a straight face even while he was telling us he was crooked, and where he got the idea.”

  “Many of us have done well in America,” he went on. “I, also, by the grace of God. Our life here today is a good life. But so many of us still believe our roots are in the past. This is not true. Our old places are gone, our old customs are not the American ways, our old languages are not spoken. Only we carry these things within us. Our roots are in ourselves and in each other. In our bodies and minds we preserve our identity. Because of this we can move, we can go out and conquer the world.”

  Afterwards, when his enterprises lay in ruins, people would say, “He was too greedy. He wanted to conquer the world. He told us this also, standing right in front of us, he confessed everything. But we were too stupid to see.”

  * * *

  —

  BEFORE WE GO ANY further we must take issue with the good—or, as it turned out, not so good—Dr. Smile, and insist on the significance of his historical roots, or at least, the roots he claimed on those occasions when he wanted to claim roots. We have previously mentioned (see this page) his supposed ancestor who was denied American citizenship at the dawn of the twentieth century on the grounds that he was not a free white man. We now whisk the veil of anonymity off this individual, as if removing the cover from a gilded birdcage, and the caged bird begins to sing. His name, as far as we can establish, was Duleep Smile, and he first bubbled up into history as a chef in London, first at the Savoy, then at the Cecil, which back in 1896 was the largest hotel in Europe. The owner of Sherry’s, then one of the best restaurants in New York, brought this proto-Smile and his English wife to Forty-Fourth Street and Fifth Avenue to introduce the American palate to Indian flavors. (An English wife, by the by! An unforeseen element to hurl into the racial mix! But we proceed.) It’s a strange name, Duleep Smile, for if, as Dr. Smile insisted, the “Smile” derived from Ismail, then “Duleep” might perhaps be an abbreviation of Duleepsinhji (like the great cricketer), and that was a Hindu Rajput name; whereas this Original Smile came, in all probability, from Karachi. When asked about the curious contradictions of his putative ancestor’s name, Dr. R. K. Smile would shrug. “Go back a few generations in any Indian Muslim family,” he would say, “and you’ll find a convert.” Beyond that he did not care to explain or discuss.

  What was important to him was that Duleep Smile became a star, a celebrity chef avant la lettre, beloved by women in particular, especially as he stated publicly that his food improved the looks and attractiveness of the women who ate it, even suggesting that curries had aphrodisiac qualities. The opinion of the English wife regarding his womanizing ways is not recorded. However, at an unspecified date, she decamped, which may serve as the clearest expression of her feelings; whereupon Chef Smile married and left a succession of ever more youthful American ladies. He also began to call himself a prince. Prince Duleep Smile, the Emir of Balochistan’s fourth son. (He wasn’t.) He claimed to have a degree from Cambridge University (he didn’t), and said he was a friend of King Edward VII. (Amazingly, this part of his fantasy of himself had some truth to it; the king agreed to be his patron for a brief time, at least until he discovered that Duleep Smile’s other claims were phony.) But the chef’s golden era—only a few years long—was ending. His troubles with the law were just getting started.

  After his citizenship application was rejected he returned to England and then came back to America accompanied by a mysteriously large entourage. There was a law in America making it a crime carrying a thousand-dollar penalty to give anyone a pretext for immigrating by offering them a job. Duleep Smile had made such offers to twenty-six people. He claimed he hadn’t. His large entourage was composed of mere tourists, he said; tourists and friends. The authorities didn’t buy it. Sherry’s restaurant, facing a fine of twenty-six thousand dollars (seven hundred thousand dol
lars in today’s money), ended its association with Chef Smile, who entered a long decline and eventually left for India with his last American wife and disappeared from history. If he left children behind in America, their names are not recorded.

  This story was not known to the Indians of Atlanta for a long time. The version they were given by Dr. Smile, and which everyone accepted unquestioningly, was heavily doctored. The culinary triumphs were described; the lies, deceptions, and hustles were left undescribed. Only after everything that happened had happened did an enterprising researcher exhume the true story of Duleep Smile, and establish that no line of descent from the famous chef to the pharma billionaire could satisfactorily be established. Once again, his fellow Atlantan Indians were left to shake their heads at their own willingness to be deceived. “Not only did he choose to claim descent from a con man, but that claim itself was a con,” the Indian newspaper wrote. “This was the level of the man’s audacity: he showed himself to us openly, but blinded us with his charm. So he rose high high. But he has fallen now.”

  * * *

  —

  IN RECENT TIMES HIS WIFE had raised his profile higher than ever. His sons had left home and gone to college to study useful things, money and machines, but their mother, Mrs. Happy Smile, was a lover of the arts, and now that she had an empty nest she insisted to her husband that they should become involved in that world, even though he thought of the arts as useless and the people involved in the arts as useless people. At first he rebuffed her desire to set up a family arts sponsorship foundation, but she persisted, and when she found out about the extensive involvement of the OxyContin family in this kind of work she saw her opening, correctly guessing that her husband’s competitive spirit would be aroused. In the garden of the Peachtree Battle Avenue house, by the rhododendron bush, and over a mint julep at the end of the working day, she confronted him. “We must give back, isn’t it,” she began. “That is the right thing to do.” He frowned, which showed her this was not going to be easy. But she set her jaw firmly and frowned back.

  “Give back what?” he asked. “What have we taken that we must return?”

  “Not that way,” she said, in her most cajoling voice. “I mean only, give back out of our generosity to society in thanks for the so so many blessings we have received.”

  “Society gave me no blessings,” he said. “What I have received, I have earned by the sweat of my brow.”

  “OxyContin khandaan, they give back plenty,” she said, playing her ace. “Their family name is so so respected. You don’t want your name to be so so respected also?”

  “What are you talking about?” he said, sounding interested now.

  “So so many wings they have,” she said. “Metropolitan Museum wing named after them, Louvre wing also, London Royal Academy wing also. A bird with so so many wings can fly so so high.”

  “But we are not birds. We have no need of wings.”

  “At the Tate Modern they have an escalator with their name. At the Jewish Museum in Berlin they have a staircase. They have a rose also, pink, bearing their name. They have a star in the sky. So so many things they have.”

  “Why must I care about asteroids and escalators?”

  She knew what to say. “Branding,” she cried. “You buy naming rights, your name becomes loved. It will be so so loved. And love is good for business, no? So so good.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Love is good for business.”

  “So then. We must give back, isn’t it.”

  “You’ve been looking into this,” he guessed, correctly. She blushed and beamed.

  “Opera, art gallery, university, hospital,” she said, clapping her hands. “All will be so so happy and your name will be so so big. Collecting art also is good. Indian art is hot just now, like Chinese, but we must support our own people, isn’t it. Prices are rocketing, so investment potential is good. We have so much wall space. Also we can put pictures on permanent loan in best museums, and your name will be so so loved. Let me do this for you. Also,” she said, clinching the argument, “art world ladies are so so beautiful. This is all I’m saying.”

  He loved his wife. “Okay,” he said. “Smile wing, Smile extension, Smile gallery, Smile balcony, Smile ward, Smile elevator, Smile toilet, Smile star in the sky.”

  She broke into song. “When you’re smiling,” she sang. It was their song. “When you’re smiling.”

  “The whole world smiles with you,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  VERY WELL. IT IS TIME to reveal certain secrets closely guarded by Dr. R. K. Smile and the upper-echelon executives of Smile Pharmaceuticals Inc. (SPI, everyone pronounced it “Spy”). These secrets have to do primarily with the hidden life of the enterprise’s premier product, InSmile™, the sublingual fentanyl spray that made the company’s fortune; although they also involve the rest of the opioid products manufactured at the main SPI facility in Alpharetta, Georgia (pop. 63,038). It will not be a pretty story. After all, here was a man at the very peak of his career, a generous man, widely respected and even beginning to be loved. It is never pleasant to tear down such a personage, to reveal the feet of clay. Such exposés tarnish the whole community, and are regarded by many as washing the community’s dirty linen in public. But when a façade begins to crumble, it is only a matter of time before the unwashed linens tumble into public view anyway. By the time Dr. R. K. Smile visited his relative Quichotte to terminate their official relationship, SPI had already begun to attract the curiosity of the authorities, even though Dr. Smile was dismissive of their suspicions. Meanwhile, Mrs. Happy Smile had entered the arts donor sphere with high energy, and her donation offers had initiated positive discussions regarding naming rights to a potential new Smile Wing of the High Museum and a much-anticipated second-stage Smile Extension of the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Center; and it even, for a time, seemed possible that the city might agree to the renaming of Pemberton Place, the urban hub where the World of Coca-Cola and the Georgia Aquarium were located. “Give me five years,” she told her husband, “and I’ll make our name bigger in Atlanta than Coke.” And yet, and yet. Lightning can strike out of a clear sky. Dr. R. K. Smile would not have five years to give.

  But to begin at the beginning: a long time ago, when he was just starting out in the pharma business, he had gone to India to visit family and friends and in a Bombay street an urchin was distributing business cards. He took one. “Are you alcoholic?” it read. “We can help. Call this number for liquor home delivery.”

  Excellent business model, he thought.

  He had kept that card with him ever since. SPI had followed the excellent business model with great success, sending its products in impressively large quantities even to very small towns. When the indictments were handed down, some startling facts would emerge. For example, in the years 2013–18, SPI shipped five million highly addictive opioid doses every twelve months to a pharmacy in Kermit, West Virginia (pop. 400). Six million opioid doses were sent to a pharmacy in Mount Gay, West Virginia (pop. 1,800.) Call this number for liquor home delivery, indeed. A great many doctors and pharmacists made the call.

  It was a unique characteristic of SPI’s sales force—a characteristic that set it apart from the rest of the pharmaceutical industry—that you could join it even if you didn’t have a background in pharma sales or even a college diploma or degree in science. Only two qualities were required. You had to be the driven and aggressive type, and you had to be extremely beautiful.

  SPI boasted the most supremely attractive sales force in America. (One of their major competitors, Merck, went down a similar route, but SPI did so with much greater commitment and enthusiasm.) As was later revealed, SPI’s Eastern Region sales chief, based in Atlanta itself, was a certain Dawn Ho, previously a dancer at Jennifer’s, a strip club in West Palm Beach, Florida (pop. 108,161). At SPI she was in charge of selling InSmile™ to
the whole highly populous Eastern Seaboard, a drug so dangerous that it required its own special prescription protocol. Dr. R. K. Smile’s national sales chief expressed one hundred percent confidence in her abilities. The national sales chief was called Ivan Jewel and had a background in aquarium sales, sleep apnea testing devices, and an online ticket-resale agency in New Jersey, whose company registration was revoked after it failed to file an annual report for two consecutive years. He was also quite a looker himself, the Clint Eastwood type, as he liked to say. “Anything for a few dollars more.” He agreed with Dr. Smile that a Florida strip club was not the kind of place where Big Pharma traditionally recruited staff, but insisted that Dawn Ho was a major asset. “She’s the warm, sympathetic, good-listener type,” he said. “You gots to picture these pain management physicians. All day, all night, they live around extreme agony and cancer. Then comes this beautiful woman, it’s a pleasant distraction, one, and then she wants to listen to all your sadness, she wants you to let out all your stress, maybe a little shoulder rub, whatever, that’s more than pleasant, two, and so she wants to sell you something, you buy it, boom, three, deal closed. To me she’s a closer. I use her (a) after a first contact by another salesperson and (b) when there’s a client who’s undecided, who says yes yesterday, no today, we need him to say yes tomorrow. A beautiful lady who cares for you is the best thing in such cases. She’s like a super gorgeous no-commitment version of their wives.”

  The Little King, a.k.a. Little Big Hands, liked this explanation. “If there are more like her out there,” he told his sales chief, “just get them all.”

  But the beauty of the sales force—gorgeous women sent to visit male pain management physicians, Clint Eastwood hunks of men sent to visit the female ones—wasn’t enough, by itself, to explain the huge numbers of the sales. Beauty allied to drive and aggression: still not enough. When you wanted to pitch a restricted drug to board-certified oncologists, you needed to add a raft of additional techniques. Incentives: that was a better word than techniques. A group of additional incentives.