As a matter of fact, once she had started blaming him for things, she found that there were a number of other matters she could hold against him; and found, too, her tongue, so that the schoolteacher’s humble apartment resounded regularly to the kinds of tickings-off he was too much of a mouse to hand out to his pupils. Above all, he was berated for his excessively high principles, thanks to which, Hind told him, she knew he would never permit her to become a rich man’s wife; – for what could one say about a man who, finding that his bank had inadvertently credited his salary to his account twice in the same month, promptly drew the institution’s notice to the error and handed back the cash?; – what hope was there for a teacher who, when approached by the wealthiest of the schoolchildren’s parents, flatly refused to contemplate accepting the usual remunerations in return for services rendered when marking the little fellows’ examination papers?
‘But all of that I could forgive,’ she would mutter darkly at him, leaving unspoken the rest of the sentence, which was if it hadn’t been for your two real offences: your sexual, and political, crimes.
Ever since their marriage, the two of them had performed the sexual act infrequently, in total darkness, pin-drop silence and almost complete immobility. It would not have occurred to Hind to wiggle or wobble, and since Sufyan appeared to get through it all with an absolute minimum of motion, she took it – had always taken it – that the two of them were of the same mind on this matter, viz., that it was a dirty business, not to be discussed before or after, and not to be drawn attention to during, either. That the children took their time in coming she took as God’s punishment for He only knew what misdeeds of her earlier life; that they both turned out to be girls she refused to blame on Allah, preferring, instead, to blame the weakling seed implanted in her by her unmanly spouse, an attitude she did not refrain from expressing, with great emphasis, and to the horror of the midwife, at the very moment of little Anahita’s birth. ‘Another girl,’ she gasped in disgust. ‘Well, considering who made the baby, I should think myself lucky it’s not a cockroach, or a mouse.’ After this second daughter she told Sufyan that enough was enough, and ordered him to move his bed into the hall. He accepted without any argument her refusal to have more children; but then she discovered that the lecher thought he could still, from time to time, enter her darkened room and enact that strange rite of silence and near-motionlessness to which she had only submitted in the name of reproduction. ‘What do you think,’ she shouted at him the first time he tried it, ‘I do this thing for fun?’
Once he had got it through his thick skull that she meant business, no more hanky-panky, no sir, she was a decent woman, not a lust-crazed libertine, he began to stay out late at night. It was during this period – she had thought, mistakenly, that he was visiting prostitutes – that he became involved with politics, and not just any old politics, either, oh no, Mister Brainbox had to go and join the devils themselves, the Communist Party, no less, so much for those principles of his; demons, that’s what they were, worse by far than whores. It was because of this dabbling in the occult that she had to pack up her bags at such short notice and leave for England with two small babies in tow; because of this ideological witchcraft that she had had to endure all the privations and humiliations of the process of immigration; and on account of this diabolism of his that she was stuck forever in this England and would never see her village again. ‘England,’ she once said to him, ‘is your revenge upon me for preventing you from performing your obscene acts upon my body.’ He had not given an answer; and silence denotes assent.
And what was it that made them a living in this Vilayet of her exile, this Yuké of her sex-obsessed husband’s vindictiveness? What? His book learning? His Gitanjali, Eclogues, or that play Othello that he explained was really Attallah or Attaullah except the writer couldn’t spell, what sort of writer was that, anyway?
It was: her cooking. ‘Shaandaar,’ it was praised. ‘Outstanding, brilliant, delicious.’ People came from all over London to eat her samosas, her Bombay chaat, her gulab jamans straight from Paradise. What was there for Sufyan to do? Take the money, serve the tea, run from here to there, behave like a servant for all his education. O, yes, of course, the customers liked his personality, he always had an appealing character, but when you’re running an eatery it isn’t the conversation they pay for on the bill. Jalebis, barfi, Special of the Day. How life had turned out! She was the mistress now.
Victory!
And yet it was also a fact that she, cook and breadwinner, chiefest architect of the success of the Shaandaar Café, which had finally enabled them to buy the whole four-storey building and start renting out its rooms, – she was the one around whom there hung, like bad breath, the miasma of defeat. While Sufyan twinkled on, she looked extinguished, like a lightbulb with a broken filament, like a fizzled star, like a flame. – Why? – Why, when Sufyan, who had been deprived of vocation, pupils and respect, bounded about like a young lamb, and even began to put on weight, fattening up in Proper London as he had never done back home; why, when power had been removed from his hands and delivered into hers, did she act – as her husband put it – the ‘sad sack’, the ‘glum chum’ and the ‘moochy pooch’? Simple: not in spite of, but on account of. Everything she valued had been upset by the change; had in this process of translation, been lost.
Her language: obliged, now, to emit these alien sounds that made her tongue feel tired, was she not entitled to moan? Her familiar place: what matter that they had lived, in Dhaka, in a teacher’s humble flat, and now, owing to entrepreneurial good sense, savings and skill with spices, occupied this four-storey terraced house? Where now was the city she knew? Where the village of her youth and the green waterways of home? The customs around which she had built her life were lost, too, or at least were hard to find. Nobody in this Vilayet had time for the slow courtesies of life back home, or for the many observances of faith. Furthermore: was she not forced to put up with a husband of no account, whereas before she could bask in his dignified position? Where was the pride in being made to work for her living, for his living, whereas before she could sit at home in much-befitting pomp? – And she knew, how could she not, the sadness beneath his bonhomie, and that, too, was a defeat; never before had she felt so inadequate as a wife, for what kind of a Mrs is it that cannot cheer up her man, but must observe the counterfeit of happiness and make do, as if it were the genuine McCoy? – Plus also: they had come into a demon city in which anything could happen, your windows shattered in the middle of the night without any cause, you were knocked over in the street by invisible hands, in the shops you heard such abuse you felt like your ears would drop off but when you turned in the direction of the words you saw only empty air and smiling faces, and every day you heard about this boy, that girl, beaten up by ghosts. – Yes, a land of phantom imps, how to explain; best thing was to stay home, not go out for so much as to post a letter, stay in, lock the door, say your prayers, and the goblins would (maybe) stay away. – Reasons for defeat? Baba, who could count them? Not only was she a shopkeeper’s wife and a kitchen slave, but even her own people could not be relied on; – there were men she thought of as respectable types, sharif, giving telephone divorces to wives back home and running off with some haramzadi female, and girls killed for dowry (some things could be brought through the foreign customs without duty); – and worst of all, the poison of this devil-island had infected her baby girls, who were growing up refusing to speak their mother-tongue, even though they understood every word, they did it just to hurt; and why else had Mishal cut off all her hair and put rainbows into it; and every day it was fight, quarrel, disobey, – and worst of all, there was not one new thing about her complaints, this is how it was for women like her, so now she was no longer just one, just herself, just Hind wife of teacher Sufyan; she had sunk into the anonymity, the characterless plurality, of being merely one-of-the-women-like-her. This was history’s lesson: nothing for women-like-her to do but suffer, remember,
and die.
What she did: to deny her husband’s weakness, she treated him, for the most part, like a lord, like a monarch, for in her lost world her glory had lain in his; to deny the ghosts outside the café, she stayed indoors, sending others out for kitchen provisions and household necessities, and also for the endless supply of Bengali and Hindi movies on VCR through which (along with her ever-increasing hoard of Indian movie magazines) she could stay in touch with events in the ‘real world’, such as the bizarre disappearance of the incomparable Gibreel Farishta and the subsequent tragic announcement of his death in an airline accident; and to give her feelings of defeated, exhausted despair some outlet, she shouted at her daughters. The elder of whom, to get her own back, hacked off her hair and permitted her nipples to poke through shirts worn provocatively tight.
The arrival of a fully developed devil, a horned goat-man, was, in the light of the foregoing, something very like the last, or at any rate the penultimate, straw.
Shaandaar residents gathered in the night-kitchen for an impromptu crisis summit. While Hind hurled imprecations into chicken soup, Sufyan placed Chamcha at a table, drawing up, for the poor fellow’s use, an aluminium chair with a blue plastic seat, and initiated the night’s proceedings. The theories of Lamarck, I am pleased to report, were quoted by the exiled schoolteacher, who spoke in his best didactic voice. When Jumpy had recounted the unlikely story of Chamcha’s fall from the sky – the protagonist himself being too immersed in chicken soup and misery to speak for himself – Sufyan, sucking teeth, made reference to the last edition of The Origin of Species. ‘In which even great Charles accepted the notion of mutation in extremis, to ensure survival of species; so what if his followers – always more Darwinian than man himself! – repudiated, posthumously, such Lamarckian heresy, insisting on natural selection and nothing but, – however, I am bound to admit, such theory is not extended to survival of individual specimen but only to species as a whole; – in addition, regarding nature of mutation, problem is to comprehend actual utility of the change.’
‘Da-ad,’ Anahita Sufyan, eyes lifting to heaven, cheek lying ho-hum against palm, interrupted these cogitations. ‘Give over. Point is, how’d he turn into such a, such a,’ – admiringly – ‘freak?’
Upon which, the devil himself, looking up from chicken soup, cried out, ‘No, I’m not. I’m not a freak, O no, certainly I am not.’ His voice, seeming to rise from an unfathomable abyss of grief, touched and alarmed the younger girl, who rushed over to where he sat, and, impetuously caressing a shoulder of the unhappy beast, said, in an attempt to make amends: ‘Of course you aren’t, I’m sorry, of course I don’t think you’re a freak; it’s just that you look like one.’
Saladin Chamcha burst into tears.
Mrs Sufyan, meanwhile, had been horrified by the sight of her younger daughter actually laying hands on the creature, and turning to the gallery of nightgowned residents she waved a soup-ladle at them and pleaded for support. ‘How to tolerate? – Honour, safety of young girls cannot be assured. – That in my own house, such a thing …!’
Mishal Sufyan lost patience. ‘Jesus, Mum.’
‘Jesus?’
‘Dju think it’s temporary?’ Mishal, turning her back on scandalized Hind, inquired of Sufyan and Jumpy. ‘Some sort of possession thing – could we maybe get it you know exorcized?’ Omens, shinings, ghoulies, nightmares on Elm Street, stood excitedly in her eyes, and her father, as much the VCR aficionado as any teenager, appeared to consider the possibility seriously. ‘In Der Steppenwolf,’ he began, but Jumpy wasn’t having any more of that. ‘The central requirement,’ he announced, ‘is to take an ideological view of the situation.’
That silenced everyone.
‘Objectively,’ he said, with a small self-deprecating smile, ‘what has happened here? A: Wrongful arrest, intimidation, violence. Two: Illegal detention, unknown medical experimentation in hospital,’ – murmurs of assent here, as memories of intra-vaginal inspections, Depo-Provera scandals, unauthorized post-partum sterilizations, and, further back, the knowledge of Third World drug-dumping arose in every person present to give substance to the speaker’s insinuations, – because what you believe depends on what you’ve seen, – not only what is visible, but what you are prepared to look in the face, – and anyhow, something had to explain horns and hoofs; in those policed medical wards, anything could happen – ‘And thirdly,’ Jumpy continued, ‘psychological breakdown, loss of sense of self, inability to cope. We’ve seen it all before.’
Nobody argued, not even Hind; there were some truths from which it was impossible to dissent. ‘Ideologically,’ Jumpy said, ‘I refuse to accept the position of victim. Certainly, he has been victimized, but we know that all abuse of power is in part the responsibility of the abused; our passiveness colludes with, permits such crimes.’ Whereupon, having scolded the gathering into shamefaced submission, he requested Sufyan to make available the small attic room that was presently unoccupied, and Sufyan, in his turn, was rendered entirely unable, by feelings of solidarity and guilt, to ask for a single p in rent. Hind did, it is true, mumble: ‘Now I know the world is mad, when a devil becomes my house guest,’ but she did so under her breath, and nobody except her elder daughter Mishal heard what she said.
Sufyan, taking his cue from his younger daughter, went up to where Chamcha, huddled in his blanket, was drinking enormous quantities of Hind’s unrivalled chicken yakhni, squatted down, and placed an arm around the still-shivering unfortunate. ‘Best place for you is here,’ he said, speaking as if to a simpleton or small child. ‘Where else would you go to heal your disfigurements and recover your normal health? Where else but here, with us, among your own people, your own kind?’
Only when Saladin Chamcha was alone in the attic room at the very end of his strength did he answer Sufyan’s rhetorical question. ‘I’m not your kind,’ he said distinctly into the night. ‘You’re not my people. I’ve spent half my life trying to get away from you.’
His heart began to misbehave, to kick and stumble as if it, too, wanted to metamorphose into some new, diabolic form, to substitute the complex unpredictability of tabla improvisations for its old metronomic beat. Lying sleepless in a narrow bed, snagging his horns in bedsheets and pillowcases as he tossed and turned, he suffered the renewal of coronary eccentricity with a kind of fatalistic acceptance: if everything else, then why not this, too? Badoomboom, went the heart, and his torso jerked. Watch it or I’ll really let you have it. Doomboombadoom. Yet: this was Hell, all right. The city of London, transformed into Jahannum, Gehenna, Muspellheim.
Do devils suffer in Hell? Aren’t they the ones with the pitchforks?
Water began to drip steadily through the dormer window. Outside, in the treacherous city, a thaw had come, giving the streets the unreliable consistency of wet cardboard. Slow masses of whiteness slid from sloping, grey-slate roofs. The footprints of delivery vans corrugated the slush. First light; and the dawn chorus began, chattering of road-drills, chirrup of burglar alarms, trumpeting of wheeled creatures clashing at corners, the deep whirr of a large olive-green garbage eater, screaming radio-voices from a wooden painter’s cradle clinging to the upper storey of a Free House, roar of the great wakening juggernauts rushing awesomely down this long but narrow pathway. From beneath the earth came tremors denoting the passage of huge subterranean worms that devoured and regurgitated human beings, and from the skies the thrum of choppers and the screech of higher, gleaming birds.
The sun rose, unwrapping the misty city like a gift. Saladin Chamcha slept.
Which afforded him no respite: but returned him, rather, to that other night-street down which, in the company of the physiotherapist Hyacinth Phillips, he had fled towards his destiny, clip-clop, on unsteady hoofs; and reminded him that, as captivity receded and the city drew nearer, Hyacinth’s face and body had seemed to change. He saw the gap opening and widening between her central upper incisors, and the way her hair knotted and plaited itself into medusas, and the
strange triangularity of her profile, which sloped outwards from her hairline to the tip of her nose, swung about and headed in an unbroken line inwards to her neck. He saw in the yellow light that her skin was growing darker by the minute, and her teeth more prominent, and her body as long as a child’s stick-figure drawing. At the same time she was casting him glances of an ever more explicit lechery, and grasping his hand in fingers so bony and inescapable that it was as though a skeleton had seized him and was trying to drag him down into a grave; he could smell the freshly dug earth, the cloying scent of it, on her breath, on her lips … revulsion seized him. How could he ever have thought her attractive, even desired her, even gone so far as to fantasize, while she straddled him and pummelled fluid from his lungs, that they were lovers in the violent throes of sexual congress? … The city thickened around them like a forest; the buildings twined together and grew as matted as her hair. ‘No light can get in here,’ she whispered to him. ‘It’s black; all black.’ She made as if to lie down and pull him towards her, towards the earth, but he shouted, ‘Quick, the church,’ and plunged into an unprepossessing box-like building, seeking more than one kind of sanctuary. Inside, however, the pews were full of Hyacinths, young and old, Hyacinths wearing shapeless blue two-piece suits, false pearls, and little pill-box hats decked out with bits of gauze, Hyacinths wearing virginal white nightgowns, every imaginable form of Hyacinth, all singing loudly, Fix me, Jesus; until they saw Chamcha, quit their spiritualling, and commenced to bawl in a most unspiritual manner, Satan, the Goat, the Goat, and suchlike stuff. Now it became clear that the Hyacinth with whom he’d entered was looking at him with new eyes, just the way he’d looked at her in the street; that she, too, had started seeing something that made her feel pretty sick; and when he saw the disgust on that hideously pointy and clouded face he just let rip. ‘Hubshees,’ he cursed them in, for some reason, his discarded mother-tongue. Troublemakers and savages, he called them. ‘I feel sorry for you,’ he pronounced. ‘Every morning you have to look at yourself in the mirror and see, staring back; the darkness: the stain, the proof that you’re the lowest of the low.’ They rounded upon him then, that congregation of Hyacinths, his own Hyacinth now lost among them, indistinguishable, no longer an individual but a woman-like-them, and he was being beaten frightfully, emitting a piteous bleating noise, running in circles, looking for a way out; until he realized that his assailants’ fear was greater than their wrath, and he rose up to his full height, spread his arms, and screamed devil-sounds at them, sending them scurrying for cover, cowering behind pews, as he strode bloody but unbowed from the battlefield.