He had locked the front door after that; but much later, well after midnight, there was a hammering. Mixed-Up called out, ‘Who?’
‘We are close friends of the Maharaja of B—’ said a voice. ‘No, I tell a lie. Acquaintances.’
‘He calls upon a lady of our acquaintance,’ said a second voice. ‘To be precise.’
‘It is in that connection that we crave audience,’ said the first voice.
‘Gone,’ said Mecir. ‘Jet plane. Gone.’
There was a silence. Then the second voice said, ‘Can’t be in the jet set if you never jump on a jet, eh? Biarritz, Monte, all of that.’
‘Be sure and let His Highness know’, said the first voice, ‘that we eagerly await his return.’
‘With regard to our mutual friend,’ said the second voice. ‘Eagerly.’
What does the poor bewildered opponent do? The words from the chess book popped unbidden into my head. How can he defend everything at once? Where will the blow fall? Watch Mecir keep Najdorf on the run, as he shifts the attack from side to side!
Mixed-Up returned to his lounge and on this occasion, even though there had been no use of force, he began to weep. After a time he took the elevator up to the fourth floor and whispered through our letterbox to Certainly-Mary sleeping on her mat.
‘I didn’t want to wake Sahib,’ Mary said. ‘You know his trouble, na? And Begum Sahiba is so tired at end of the day. So now you tell, baba, what to do?’
What did she expect me to come up with? I was sixteen years old. ‘Mixed-Up must call the police,’ I unoriginally offered.
‘No, no, baba,’ said Certainly-Mary emphatically. ‘If the courter makes a scandal for Maharaja-log, then in the end it is the courter only who will be out on his ear.’
I had no other ideas. I stood before them feeling like a fool, while they both turned upon me their frightened, supplicant eyes.
‘Go to sleep,’ I said. ‘We’ll think about it in the morning.’ The first pair of thugs were tacticians, I was thinking. They were troublesome to meet. But the second pair were scarier; they were strategists. They threatened to threaten.
Nothing happened in the morning, and the sky was clear. It was almost impossible to believe in fists, and menacing voices at the door. During the course of the day both Maharajas visited the porter’s lounge and stuck five-pound notes in Mixed-Up’s waistcoat pocket. ‘Held the fort, good man,’ said Prince P—, and the Maharaja of B— echoed those sentiments: ‘Spot on. All handled now, achha? Problem over.’
The three of us – Aya Mary, her courter, and me – held a council of war that afternoon and decided that no further action was necessary. The hall porter was the front line in any such situation, I argued, and the front line had held. And now the risks were past. Assurances had been given. End of story.
‘End of story,’ repeated Certainly-Mary doubtfully, but then, seeking to reassure Mecir, she brightened. ‘Correct,’ she said. ‘Most certainly! All-done, finis.’ She slapped her hands against each other for emphasis. She asked Mixed-Up if he wanted a game of chess; but for once the courter didn’t want to play.
10
After that I was distracted, for a time, from the story of Mixed-Up and Certainly-Mary by violence nearer home.
My middle sister Muneeza, now eleven, was entering her delinquent phase a little early. She was the true inheritor of my father’s black rage, and when she lost control it was terrible to behold. That summer she seemed to pick fights with my father on purpose; seemed prepared, at her young age, to test her strength against his. (I intervened in her rows with Abba only once, in the kitchen. She grabbed the kitchen scissors and flung them at me. They cut me on the thigh. After that I kept my distance.)
As I witnessed their wars I felt myself coming unstuck from the idea of family itself. I looked at my screaming sister and thought how brilliantly self-destructive she was, how triumphantly she was ruining her relations with the people she needed most.
And I looked at my choleric, face-pulling father and thought about British citizenship. My existing Indian passport permitted me to travel only to a very few countries, which were carefully listed on the second right-hand page. But I might soon have a British passport and then, by hook or by crook, I would get away from him. I would not have this face-pulling in my life.
At sixteen, you still think you can escape from your father. You aren’t listening to his voice speaking through your mouth, you don’t see how your gestures already mirror his; you don’t see him in the way you hold your body, in the way you sign your name. You don’t hear his whisper in your blood.
On the day I have to tell you about, my two-year-old sister Chhoti Scheherazade, Little Scare-zade, started crying as she often did during one of our family rows. Amma and Aya Mary loaded her into her push-chair and made a rapid getaway. They pushed her to Kensington Square and then sat on the grass, turned Scheherazade loose and made philosophical remarks while she tired herself out. Finally, she fell asleep, and they made their way home in the fading light of the evening. Outside Waverley House they were approached by two well-turned-out young men with Beatle haircuts and the buttoned-up, collarless jackets made popular by the band. The first of these young men asked my mother, very politely, if she might be the Maharani of B—.
‘No,’ my mother answered, flattered.
‘Oh, but you are, madam,’ said the second Beatle, equally politely. ‘For you are heading for Waverley House and that is the Maharaja’s place of residence.’
‘No, no,’ my mother said, still blushing with pleasure. ‘We are a different Indian family.’
‘Quite so,’ the first Beatle nodded understandingly, and then, to my mother’s great surprise, placed a finger alongside his nose, and winked. ‘Incognito, eh. Mum’s the word.’
‘Now excuse us,’ my mother said, losing patience. ‘We are not the ladies you seek.’
The second Beatle tapped a foot lightly against a wheel of the push-chair. ‘Your husband seeks ladies, madam, were you aware of that fact? Yes, he does. Most assiduously, may I add.’
‘Too assiduously,’ said the first Beatle, his face darkening.
‘I tell you I am not the Maharani Begum,’ my mother said, growing suddenly alarmed. ‘Her business is not my business. Kindly let me pass.’
The second Beatle stepped closer to her. She could feel his breath, which was minty. ‘One of the ladies he sought out was our ward, as you might say,’ he explained. ‘That would be the term. Under our protection, you follow. Us, therefore, being responsible for her welfare.’
‘Your husband’, said the first Beatle, showing his teeth in a frightening way, and raising his voice one notch, ‘damaged the goods. Do you hear me, Queenie? He damaged the fucking goods.’
‘Mistaken identity, fleas,’ said Certainly-Mary. ‘Many Indian residents in Waverley House. We are decent ladies; fleas.’
The second Beatle had taken out something from an inside pocket. A blade caught the light. ‘Fucking wogs,’ he said. ‘You fucking come over here, you don’t fucking know how to fucking behave. Why don’t you fucking fuck off to fucking Wogistan? Fuck your fucking wog arses. Now then,’ he added in a quiet voice, holding up the knife, ‘unbutton your blouses.’
Just then a loud noise emanated from the doorway of Waverley House. The two women and the two men turned to look, and out came Mixed-Up, yelling at the top of his voice and windmilling his arms like a mad old loon.
‘Hullo,’ said the Beatle with the knife, looking amused. ‘Who’s this, then? Oh oh fucking seven?’
Mixed-Up was trying to speak, he was in a mighty agony of effort, but all that was coming out of his mouth was raw, unshaped noise. Scheherazade woke up and joined in. The two Beatles looked displeased. But then something happened inside old Mixed-Up; something popped, and in a great rush he gabbled, ‘Sirs sirs no sirs these not B— women sirs B— women upstairs on floor three sirs Maharaja of B— also sirs God’s truth mother’s grave swear.’
It was the
longest sentence he had spoken since the stroke that had broken his tongue long ago.
And what with his torrent and Scheherazade’s squalls there were suddenly heads poking out from doorways, attention was being paid, and the two Beatles nodded gravely. ‘Honest mistake,’ the first of them said apologetically to my mother, and actually bowed from the waist. ‘Could happen to anyone,’ the knife-man added, ruefully. They turned and began to walk quickly away. As they passed Mecir, however, they paused. ‘I know you, though,’ said the knife-man. ‘ “Jet plane. Gone.” ’ He made a short movement of the arm, and then Mixed-Up the courter was lying on the pavement with blood leaking from a wound in his stomach. ‘All okay now,’ he gasped, and passed out.
11
He was on the road to recovery by Christmas; my mother’s letter to the landlords, in which she called him a ‘knight in shining armour’, ensured that he was well looked after, and his job was kept open for him. He continued to live in his little ground-floor cubby-hole, while the hall porter’s duties were carried out by shift-duty staff. ‘Nothing but the best for our very own hero,’ the landlords assured my mother in their reply.
The two Maharajas and their retinues had moved out before I came home for the Christmas holidays, so we had no further visits from the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. Certainly-Mary spent as much time as she could with Mecir; but it was the look of my old Aya that worried me more than poor Mixed-Up. She looked older, and powdery, as if she might crumble away at any moment into dust.
‘We didn’t want to worry you at school,’ my mother said. ‘She has been having heart trouble. Palpitations. Not all the time, but.’
Mary’s health problems had sobered up the whole family. Muneeza’s tantrums had stopped, and even my father was making an effort. They had put up a Christmas tree in the sitting-room and decorated it with all sorts of baubles. It was so odd to see a Christmas tree at our place that I realised things must be fairly serious.
On Christmas Eve my mother suggested that Mary might like it if we all sang some carols. Amma had made song-sheets, six copies, by hand. When we did O come, all ye faithful I showed off by singing from memory in Latin. Everybody behaved perfectly. When Muneeza suggested that we should try Swinging on a Star or I Wanna Hold Your Hand instead of this boring stuff, she wasn’t really being serious. So this is family life, I thought. This is it.
But we were only play-acting.
A few weeks earlier, at school, I’d come across an American boy, the star of the school’s Rugby football team, crying in the Chapel cloisters. I asked him what the matter was and he told me that President Kennedy had been assassinated. ‘I don’t believe you,’ I said, but I could see that it was true. The football star sobbed and sobbed. I took his hand.
‘When the President dies, the nation is orphaned,’ he eventually said, broken-heartedly parroting a piece of cracker-barrel wisdom he’d probably heard on Voice of America.
‘I know how you feel,’ I lied. ‘My father just died, too.’
Mary’s heart trouble turned out to be a mystery; unpredictably, it came and went. She was subjected to all sorts of tests during the next six months, but each time the doctors ended up by shaking their heads: they couldn’t find anything wrong with her. Physically, she was right as rain; except that there were these periods when her heart kicked and bucked in her chest like the wild horses in The Misfits, the ones whose roping and tying made Marilyn Monroe so mad.
Mecir went back to work in the spring, but his experience had knocked the stuffing out of him. He was slower to smile, duller of eye, more inward. Mary, too, had turned in upon herself. They still met for tea, crumpets and The Flintstones, but something was no longer quite right.
At the beginning of the summer Mary made an announcement.
‘I know what is wrong with me,’ she told my parents, out of the blue. ‘I need to go home.’
‘But, Aya,’ my mother argued, ‘homesickness is not a real disease.’
‘God knows for what-all we came over to this country,’ Mary said. ‘But I can no longer stay. No. Certainly not.’ Her determination was absolute.
So it was England that was breaking her heart, breaking it by not being India. London was killing her, by not being Bombay. And Mixed-Up? I wondered. Was the courter killing her, too, because he was no longer himself? Or was it that her heart, roped by two different loves, was being pulled both East and West, whinnying and rearing, like those movie horses being yanked this way by Clark Gable and that way by Montgomery Cift, and she knew that to live she would have to choose?
‘I must go,’ said Certainly-Mary. ‘Yes, certainly. Bas. Enough.’
That summer, the summer of ’64, I turned seventeen. Chandni went back to India. Durré’s Polish friend Rozalia informed me over a sandwich in Oxford Street that she was getting engaged to a ‘real man’, so I could forget about seeing her again, because this Zbigniew was the jealous type. Roy Orbison sang It’s Over in my ears as I walked away to the Tube, but the truth was that nothing had really begun.
Certainly-Mary left us in mid-July. My father bought her a one-way ticket to Bombay, and that last morning was heavy with the pain of ending. When we took her bags down to the car, Mecir the hall porter was nowhere to be seen. Mary did not knock on the door of his lounge, but walked straight out through the freshly polished oak-panelled lobby, whose mirrors and brasses were sparkling brightly; she climbed into the back seat of our Ford Zodiac and sat there stiffly with her carry-on grip on her lap, staring straight ahead. I had known and loved her all my life. Never mind your damned courter, I wanted to shout at her, what about me?
As it happened, she was right about the homesickness. After her return to Bombay, she never had a day’s heart trouble again; and, as the letter from her niece Stella confirmed, at ninety-one she was still going strong.
Soon after she left, my father told us he had decided to ‘shift location’ to Pakistan. As usual, there were no discussions, no explanations, just the simple fiat. He gave up the lease on the flat in Waverley House at the end of the summer holidays, and they all went off to Karachi, while I went back to school.
I became a British citizen that year. I was one of the lucky ones, I guess, because in spite of that chess game I had the Dodo on my side. And the passport did, in many ways, set me free. It allowed me to come and go, to make choices that were not the ones my father would have wished. But I, too, have ropes around my neck, I have them to this day, pulling me this way and that, East and West, the nooses tightening, commanding, choose, choose.
I buck, I snort, I whinny, I rear, I kick. Ropes, I do not choose between you. Lassoes, lariats, I choose neither of you, and both. Do you hear? I refuse to choose.
A year or so after we moved out I was in the area and dropped in at Waverley House to see how the old courter was doing. Maybe, I thought, we could have a game of chess, and he could beat me to a pulp. The lobby was empty, so I knocked on the door of his little lounge. A stranger answered.
‘Where’s Mixed-Up?’ I cried, taken by surprise. I apologised at once, embarrassed. ‘Mr Mecir, I meant, the porter.’
‘I’m the porter, sir,’ the man said. ‘I don’t know anything about any mix-up.’
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Six of these stories have been published previously, although in somewhat different form. They first appeared in the following places:
‘Good Advice Is Rarer Than Rubies’ in the New Yorker; ‘The Free Radio’ in Atlantic Monthly; ‘The Prophet’s Hair’ in London Review of Books; ‘Yorick’ in Encounter; ‘At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers’ in Granta; and ‘Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella of Spain’ in the New Yorker.
‘The Harmony of the Spheres’, ‘Chekov and Zulu’ and ‘The Courter’ have not been published before.
‘The Harmony of the Spheres’ relies, for some of its occultist material, on the writings of James Webb, especially The Occult Underground (Open Court, Illinois, 1974) and The Harmonious Circle (Putnam, 1980).
In ‘The Courter’, the author wishes to thank Hal Leonard Music Corporation for permission to reproduce ‘Sherry’, words and music by Bob Gaudio, copyright © 1962, 1963 (renewed) by the Claridge Music Company, a division of MPL Communications, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Music Corporation.
The passage quoted on this page is in fact an account of a game between S. Reshevsky and M. Najdorf, played in 1957 and described in The Most Instructive Games of Chess Ever Played, by Irving Chernev (Faber and Faber, 1966).
Finally, thanks to Bill Buford, Susannah Clapp and Bob Gottlieb; Sonny Mehta and Erroll McDonald; and Frances Coady and Caroline Michel.
Also by
SALMAN RUSHDIE
THE MOOR’S LAST SIGH
A Novel
With The Moor’s Last Sigh, Salman Rushdie gives the reader a masterpiece of breathtaking scope and ambition, surpassing even the spectacular imaginative brilliance of his now-classic Midnight’s Children. The Moor’s story evokes his family’s often grotesque but compulsively moving fortunes and the lost world of possibilities embodied by India in this century. His is a tale of premature deaths and family rifts; of thwarted loves and money; and the even more morally dubious seductions and mysteries of art. By turns compassionate, wicked, poignant, and funny, this brilliant work is a stunningly conceived and gracefully realized treasure by one of the masters of modern fiction.
Available in paperback by Vintage Books,
or call toll-free to order: 1–800–793–2665 (credit cards only).
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