‘We have to tell him,’ Salahuddin insisted when the visitors had left. Nasreen bowed her head; and nodded. Kasturba burst into tears.
They told him the next morning, having asked the specialist to attend to answer any questions Changez might have. The specialist, Panikkar (a name the English would mispronounce and giggle over, Salahuddin thought, like the Muslim ‘Fakhar’), arrived at ten, shining with self-esteem. ‘I should tell him,’ he said, taking control. ‘Most patients feel ashamed to let their loved ones see their fear.’ ‘The hell you will,’ Salahuddin said with a vehemence that took him by surprise. ‘Well, in that case,’ Panikkar shrugged, making as if to leave; which won the argument, because now Nasreen and Kasturba pleaded with Salahuddin: ‘Please, let’s not fight.’ Salahuddin, defeated, ushered the doctor into his father’s presence; and shut the study door.
‘I have a cancer,’ Changez Chamchawala said to Nasreen, Kasturba and Salahuddin after Panikkar’s departure. He spoke clearly, enunciating the word with defiant, exaggerated care. ‘It is very far advanced. I am not surprised. I said to Panikkar: “This is what I told you the very first day. Where else could all the blood have gone?” ’ – Outside the study, Kasturba said to Salahuddin: ‘Since you came, there was a light in his eye. Yesterday, with all the people, how happy he was! But now his eye is dim. Now he won’t fight.’
That afternoon Salahuddin found himself alone with his father while the two women napped. He discovered that he, who had been so determined to have everything out in the open, to say the word, was now awkward and inarticulate, not knowing how to speak. But Changez had something to say.
‘I want you to know,’ he said to his son, ‘that I have no problem about this thing at all. A man must die of something, and it is not as though I were dying young. I have no illusions; I know I am not going anywhere after this. It’s the end. That’s okay. The only thing I’m afraid of is pain, because when there is pain a man loses his dignity. I don’t want that to happen.’ Salahuddin was awestruck. First one falls in love with one’s father all over again, and then one learns to look up to him, too. ‘The doctors say you’re a case in a million,’ he replied truthfully. ‘It looks like you have been spared the pain.’ Something in Changez relaxed at that, and Salahuddin realized how afraid the old man had been, how much he’d needed to be told … ‘Bas,’ Changez Chamchawala said gruffly. ‘Then I’m ready. And by the way: you get the lamp, after all.’
An hour later the diarrhoea began: a thin black trickle. Nasreen’s anguished phone calls to the emergency room of the Breach Candy Hospital established that Panikkar was unavailable. ‘Take him off the Agarol at once,’ the duty doctor ordered, and prescribed Imodium instead. It didn’t help. At seven pm the risk of dehydration was growing, and Changez was too weak to sit up for his food. He had virtually no appetite, but Kasturba managed to spoon-feed him a few drops of semolina with skinned apricots. ‘Yum, yum,’ he said ironically, smiling his crooked smile.
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 cotton-wool 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 aluminum 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 re-entry 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 hall. ‘Let it go,’ Zeenat Vakil said. ‘You couldn’t live in that museum, anyway.’
She was right, of course; no sooner had he resolved to set his face towards the future than he started mooning around and regretting childhood’s en
d. ‘I’m off to meet George and Bhupen, you remember,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you come along? You need to start plugging into the town.’ George Miranda had just completed a documentary film about communalism, interviewing Hindus and Muslims of all shades of opinion. Fundamentalists of both religions had instantly sought injunctions banning the film from being shown, and, although the Bombay courts had rejected this request, the case had gone up to the Supreme Court. George, even more stubbly of chin, lank of hair and sprawling of stomach than Salahuddin remembered, drank rum in a Dhobi Talao boozer and thumped the table with pessimistic fists. ‘This is the Supreme Court of Shah Bano fame,’ he cried, referring to the notorious case in which, under pressure from Islamic extremists, the Court had ruled that alimony payments were contrary to the will of Allah, thus making India’s laws even more reactionary than, for example, Pakistan’s. ‘So I don’t have much hope.’ He twisted, disconsolately, the waxy points of his moustache. His new girlfriend, a tall, thin Bengali woman with cropped hair that reminded Salahuddin a little of Mishal Sufyan, chose this moment to attack Bhupen Gandhi for having published a volume of poems about his visit to the ‘little temple town’ of Gagari in the Western Ghats. The poems had been criticized by the Hindu right; one eminent South Indian professor had announced that Bhupen had ‘forfeited his right to be called an Indian poet’, but in the opinion of the young woman, Swatilekha, Bhupen had been seduced by religion into a dangerous ambiguity. Grey hair flopping earnestly, moon-face shining, Bhupen defended himself. ‘I have said that the only crop of Gagari is the stone gods being quarried from the hills. I have spoken of herds of legends, with sacred cowbells tinkling, grazing on the hillsides. These are not ambiguous images.’ Swatilekha wasn’t convinced. ‘These days,’ she insisted, ‘our positions must be stated with crystal clarity. All metaphors are capable of misinterpretation.’ She offered her theory. Society was orchestrated by what she called grand narratives: history, economics, ethics. In India, the development of a corrupt and closed state apparatus had ‘excluded the masses of the people from the ethical project’. As a result, they sought ethical satisfactions in the oldest of the grand narratives, that is, religious faith. ‘But these narratives are being manipulated by the theocracy and various political elements in an entirely retrogressive way.’ Bhupen said: ‘We can’t deny the ubiquity of faith. If we write in such a way as to prejudge such belief as in some way deluded or false, then are we not guilty of elitism, of imposing our world-view on the masses?’ Swatilekha was scornful. ‘Battle lines are being drawn up in India today,’ she cried. ‘Secular versus religious, the light versus the dark. Better you choose which side you are on.’
The Satanic Verses: A Novel Page 57