Dreams put things in their own way; but Chamcha, coming briefly awake as his heartbeat skipped into a new burst of syncopations, was bitterly aware that the nightmare had not been so very far from the truth; the spirit, at least, was right. – That was the last of Hyacinth, he thought, and faded away again. – To find himself shivering in the hall of his own home while, on a higher plane, Jumpy Joshi argued fiercely with Pamela. With my wife.
And when dream-Pamela, echoing the real one word for word, had rejected her husband a hundred and one times, he doesn’t exist, it, such things are not so, it was Jamshed the virtuous who, setting aside love and desire, helped. Leaving behind a weeping Pamela – Don’t you dare bring that back here, she shouted from the top floor – from Saladin’s den – Jumpy, wrapping Chamcha in sheepskin and blanket, led enfeebled through the shadows to the Shaandaar Café, promising with empty kindness: ‘It’ll be all right. You’ll see. It’ll all be fine.’
When Saladin Chamcha awoke, the memory of these words filled him with a bitter anger. Where’s Farishta, he found himself thinking. That bastard: I bet he’s doing okay. – It was a thought to which he would return, with extraordinary results; for the moment, however, he had other fish to fry.
I am the incarnation of evil, he thought. He had to face it. However it had happened, it could not be denied. I am no longer myself, or not only. I am the embodiment of wrong, of what-we-hate, of sin.
Why? Why me?
What evil had he done – what vile thing could he, would he do?
For what was he – he couldn’t avoid the notion – being punished? And, come to that, by whom? (I held my tongue.)
Had he not pursued his own idea of the good, sought to become that which he most admired, dedicated himself with a will bordering on obsession to the conquest of Englishness? Had he not worked hard, avoided trouble, striven to become new? Assiduity, fastidiousness, moderation, restraint, self-reliance, probity, family life: what did these add up to if not a moral code? Was it his fault that Pamela and he were childless? Were genetics his responsibility? Could it be, in this inverted age, that he was being victimized by – the fates, he agreed with himself to call the persecuting agency – precisely because of his pursuit of ‘the good’? – That nowadays such a pursuit was considered wrong-headed, even evil? – Then how cruel these fates were, to instigate his rejection by the very world he had so determinedly courted; how desolating, to be cast from the gates of the city one believed oneself to have taken long ago! – What mean small-mindedness was this, to cast him back into the bosom of his people, from whom he’d felt so distant for so long! – Here thoughts of Zeeny Vakil welled up, and guiltily, nervously, he forced them down again.
His heart kicked him violently, and he sat up, doubled over, gasped for breath. Calm down, or it’s curtains. No place for such stressful cogitations: not any more. He took deep breaths; lay back; emptied his mind. The traitor in his chest resumed normal service.
No more of that, Saladin Chamcha told himself firmly. No more of thinking myself evil. Appearances deceive; the cover is not the best guide to the book. Devil, Goat, Shaitan? Not I.
Not I: another.
Who?
Mishal and Anahita arrived with breakfast on a tray and excitement all over their faces. Chamcha devoured cornflakes and Nescafé while the girls, after a few moments of shyness, gabbled at him, simultaneously, non-stop. ‘Well, you’ve set the place buzzing and no mistake.’ – ‘You haven’t gone and changed back in the night or anything?’ – ‘Listen, it’s not a trick, is it? I mean, it’s not make-up or something theatrical? – I mean, Jumpy says you’re an actor, and I only thought, – I mean,’ and here young Anahita dried up, because Chamcha, spewing cornflakes, howled angrily: ‘Make-up? Theatrical? Trick?’
‘No offence,’ Mishal said anxiously on her sister’s behalf. ‘It’s just we’ve been thinking, know what I mean, and well it’d just be awful if you weren’t, but you are, ’course you are, so that’s all right,’ she finished hastily as Chamcha glared at her again. – ‘Thing is,’ Anahita resumed, and then, faltering, ‘Mean to say, well, we just think it’s great.’ – ‘You, she means,’ Mishal corrected. ‘We think you’re, you know.’ – ‘Brilliant,’ Anahita said and dazzled the bewildered Chamcha with a smile. ‘Magic. You know. Extreme.’
‘We didn’t sleep all night,’ Mishal said. ‘We’ve got ideas.’
‘What we reckoned,’ Anahita trembled with the thrill of it, ‘as you’ve turned into, – what you are, – then maybe, well, probably, actually, even if you haven’t tried it out, it could be, you could …’ And the older girl finished the thought: ‘You could’ve developed – you know – powers.’
‘We thought, anyway,’ Anahita added, weakly, seeing the clouds gathering on Chamcha’s brow. And, backing towards the door, added: ‘But we’re probably wrong. – Yeh. We’re wrong all right. Enjoy your meal.’ – Mishal, before she fled, took a small bottle full of green fluid out of a pocket of her red-and-black-check donkey jacket, put it on the floor by the door, and delivered the following parting shot. ‘O, excuse me, but Mum says, can you use this, it’s mouthwash, for your breath.’
That Mishal and Anahita should adore the disfiguration which he loathed with all his heart convinced him that ‘his people’ were as crazily wrong-headed as he’d long suspected. That the two of them should respond to his bitterness – when, on his second attic morning, they brought him a masala dosa instead of packet cereal complete with toy silver spacemen, and he cried out, ungratefully: ‘Now I’m supposed to eat this filthy foreign food?’ – with expressions of sympathy, made matters even worse. ‘Sawful muck,’ Mishal agreed with him. ‘No bangers in here, worse luck.’ Conscious of having insulted their hospitality, he tried to explain that he thought of himself, nowadays, as, well, British … ‘What about us?’ Anahita wanted to know. ‘What do you think we are?’ – And Mishal confided: ‘Bangladesh in’t nothing to me. Just some place Dad and Mum keep banging on about.’ – And Anahita, conclusively: ‘Bungleditch.’ – With a satisfied nod. – ‘What I call it, anyhow.’
But they weren’t British, he wanted to tell them: not really, not in any way he could recognize. And yet his old certainties were slipping away by the moment, along with his old life … ‘Where’s the telephone?’ he demanded. ‘I’ve got to make some calls.’
It was in the hall; Anahita, raiding her savings, lent him the coins. His head wrapped in a borrowed turban, his body concealed in borrowed trousers (Jumpy’s) and Mishal’s shoes, Chamcha dialled the past.
‘Chamcha,’ said the voice of Mimi Mamoulian. ‘You’re dead.’
This happened while he was away: Mimi blacked out and lost her teeth. ‘A whiteout is what it was,’ she told him, speaking more harshly than usual because of difficulty with her jaw. ‘A reason why? Don’t ask. Who can ask for reason in these times? What’s your number?’ she added as the pips went. ‘I’ll call you right back.’ But it was a full five minutes before she did. ‘I took a leak. You have a reason why you’re alive? Why the waters parted for you and the other guy but closed over the rest? Don’t tell me you were worthier. People don’t buy that nowadays, not even you, Chamcha. I was walking down Oxford Street looking for crocodile shoes when it happened: out cold in mid-stride and I fell forward like a tree, landed on the point of my chin and all the teeth fell out on the sidewalk in front of the man doing find-the-lady. People can be thoughtful, Chamcha. When I came to I found my teeth in a little pile next to my face. I opened my eyes and saw the little bastards staring at me, wasn’t that nice? First thing I thought, thank God, I’ve got the money. I had them stitched back in, privately of course, great job, better than before. So I’ve been taking a break for a while. The voiceover business is in bad shape, let me tell you, what with you dying and my teeth, we just have no sense of responsibility. Standards have been lowered, Chamcha. Turn on the TV, listen to radio, you should hear how corny the pizza commercials, the beer ads with the Cherman accents from Central Casting, t
he Martians eating potato powder and sounding like they came from the Moon. They fired us from The Aliens Show. Get well soon. Incidentally, you might say the same for me.’
So he had lost work as well as wife, home, a grip on life. ‘It’s not just the dentals that go wrong,’ Mimi powered on. ‘The fucking plosives scare me stupid. I keep thinking I’ll spray the old bones on the street again. Age, Chamcha: it’s all humiliations. You get born, you get beaten up and bruised all over and finally you break and they shovel you into an urn. Anyway, if I never work again I’ll die comfortable. Did you know I’m with Billy Battuta now? That’s right, how could you, you’ve been swimming. Yeah, I gave up waiting for you so I cradlesnatched one of your ethnic co-persons. You can take it as a compliment. Now I gots to run. Nice talking to the dead, Chamcha. Next time dive from the low board. Toodle oo.’
I am by nature an inward man, he said silently into the disconnected phone. I have struggled, in my fashion, to find my way towards an appreciation of the high things, towards a small measure of fineness. On good days I felt it was within my grasp, somewhere within me, somewhere within. But it eluded me. I have become embroiled, in things, in the world and its messes, and I cannot resist. The grotesque has me, as before the quotidian had me, in its thrall. The sea gave me up; the land drags me down.
He was sliding down a grey slope, the black water lapping at his heart. Why did rebirth, the second chance granted to Gibreel Farishta and himself, feel so much, in his case, like a perpetual ending? He had been reborn into the knowledge of death; and the inescapability of change, of things-never-the-same, of no-way-back, made him afraid. When you lose the past you’re naked in front of contemptuous Azraeel, the death-angel. Hold on if you can, he told himself. Cling to yesterdays. Leave your nail-marks in the grey slope as you slide.
Billy Battuta: that worthless piece of shit. Playboy Pakistani, turned an unremarkable holiday business – Battuta’s Travels – into a fleet of supertankers. A con-man, basically, famous for his romances with leading ladies of the Hindi screen and, according to gossip, for his predilection for white women with enormous breasts and plenty of rump, whom he ‘treated badly’, as the euphemism had it, and ‘rewarded handsomely’. What did Mimi want with bad Billy, his sexual instruments and his Maserati Biturbo? For boys like Battuta, white women – never mind fat, Jewish, non-deferential white women – were for fucking and throwing over. What one hates in whites – love of brown sugar – one must also hate when it turns up, inverted, in black. Bigotry is not only a function of power.
Mimi telephoned the next evening from New York. Anahita called him to the phone in her best damnyankee tones, and he struggled into his disguise. When he got there she had rung off, but she rang back. ‘Nobody pays transatlantic prices for hanging on.’ ‘Mimi,’ he said, with desperation patent in his voice, ‘you didn’t say you were leaving.’ ‘You didn’t even tell me your damn address,’ she responded. ‘So we both have secrets.’ He wanted to say, Mimi, come home, you’re going to get kicked. ‘I introduced him to the family,’ she said, too jokily. ‘You can imagine. Yassir Arafat meets the Begins. Never mind. We’ll all live.’ He wanted to say, Mimi, you’re all I’ve got. He managed, however, only to piss her off. ‘I wanted to warn you about Billy,’ was what he said.
She went icy. ‘Chamcha, listen up. I’ll discuss this with you one time because behind all your bullshit you do maybe care for me a little. So comprehend, please, that I am an intelligent female. I have read Finnegans Wake and am conversant with postmodernist critiques of the West, e.g. that we have here a society capable only of pastiche: a “flattened” world. When I become the voice of a bottle of bubble bath, I am entering Flatland knowingly, understanding what I’m doing and why. Viz., I am earning cash. And as an intelligent woman, able to do fifteen minutes on Stoicism and more on Japanese cinema, I say to you, Chamcha, that I am fully aware of Billy boy’s rep. Don’t teach me about exploitation. We had exploitation when you-plural were running round in skins. Try being Jewish, female and ugly sometime. You’ll beg to be black. Excuse my French: brown.’
‘You concede, then, that he’s exploiting you,’ Chamcha interposed, but the torrent swept him away. ‘What’s the fuckin’ diff?’ she trilled in her Tweetie Pie voice. ‘Billy’s a funny boy, a natural scam artist, one of the greats. Who knows for how long this is? I’ll tell you some notions I do not require: patriotism, God and love. Definitely not wanted on the voyage. I like Billy because he knows the score.’
‘Mimi,’ he said, ‘something’s happened to me,’ but she was still protesting too much and missed it. He put the receiver down without giving her his address.
She rang him once more, a few weeks later, and by now the unspoken precedents had been set; she didn’t ask for, he didn’t give his whereabouts, and it was plain to them both that an age had ended, they had drifted apart, it was time to wave goodbye. It was still all Billy with Mimi: his plans to make Hindi movies in England and America, importing the top stars, Vinod Khanna, Sridevi, to cavort in front of Bradford Town Hall and the Golden Gate Bridge – ‘it’s some sort of tax dodge, obviously,’ Mimi carolled gaily. In fact, things were heating up for Billy; Chamcha had seen his name in the papers, coupled with the terms fraud squad and tax evasion, but once a scam man, always a ditto, Mimi said. ‘So he says to me, do you want a mink? I say, Billy, don’t buy me things, but he says, who’s talking about buying? Have a mink. It’s business.’ They had been in New York again, and Billy had hired a stretched Mercedes limousine ‘and a stretched chauffeur also’. Arriving at the furriers, they looked like an oil sheikh and his moll. Mimi tried on the five figure numbers, waiting for Billy’s lead. At length he said, You like that one? It’s nice. Billy, she whispered, it’s forty thousand, but he was already smooth-talking the assistant: it was Friday afternoon, the banks were closed, would the store take a cheque. ‘Well, by now they know he’s an oil sheikh, so they say yes, we leave with the coat, and he takes me into another store right around the block, points to the coat, and says, I just bought this for forty thousand dollars, here’s the receipt, will you give me thirty for it, I need the cash, big weekend ahead.’ – Mimi and Billy had been kept waiting while the second store rang the first, where all the alarm bells went off in the manager’s brain, and five minutes later the police arrived, arrested Billy for passing a dud cheque, and he and Mimi spent the weekend in jail. On Monday morning the banks opened and it turned out that Billy’s account was in credit to the tune of forty-two thousand, one hundred and seventeen dollars, so the cheque had been good all the time. He informed the furriers of his intention to sue them for two million dollars damages, defamation of character, open and shut case, and within forty-eight hours they settled out of court for $250,000 on the nail. ‘Don’t you love him?’ Mimi asked Chamcha. ‘The boy’s a genius. I mean, this was class.’
I am a man, Chamcha realized, who does not know the score, living in an amoral, survivalist, get-away-with-it-world. Mishal and Anahita Sufyan, who still accountably treated him like a kind of soul-mate, in spite of all his attempts to dissuade them, were beings who plainly admired such creatures as moonlighters, shop-lifters, filchers: scam artists in general. He corrected himself: not admired, that wasn’t it. Neither girl would ever steal a pin. But they saw such persons as representatives of the gestalt, of how-it-was. As an experiment he told them the story of Billy Battuta and the mink coat. Their eyes shone, and at the end they applauded and giggled with delight: wickedness unpunished made them laugh. Thus, Chamcha realized, people must once have applauded and giggled at the deeds of earlier outlaws, Dick Turpin, Ned Kelly, Phoolan Devi, and of course that other Billy: William Bonney, also a Kid.
‘Scrapheap Youths’ Criminal Idols,’ Mishal read his mind and then, laughing at his disapproval, translated it into yellowpress headlines, while arranging her long, and, Chamcha realized, astonishing body into similarly exaggerated cheesecake postures. Pouting outrageously, fully aware of having stirred him, she prettily added: ‘Kissy kis
sy?’
Her younger sister, not to be outdone, attempted to copy Mishal’s pose, with less effective results. Abandoning the attempt with some annoyance, she spoke sulkily. ‘Trouble is, we’ve got good prospects, us. Family business, no brothers, bob’s your uncle. This place makes a packet, dunnit? Well then.’ The Shaandaar rooming-house was categorized as a Bed and Breakfast establishment, of the type that borough councils were using more and more owing to the crisis in public housing, lodging five-person families in single rooms, turning blind eyes to health and safety regulations, and claiming ‘temporary accommodation’ allowances from the central government. ‘Ten quid per night per person,’ Anahita informed Chamcha in his attic. ‘Three hundred and fifty nicker per room per week, it comes to, as often as not. Six occupied rooms: you work it out. Right now, we’re losing three hundred pounds a month on this attic, so I hope you feel really bad.’ For that kind of money, it struck Chamcha, you could rent pretty reasonable family-sized apartments in the private sector. But that wouldn’t be classified as temporary accommodation; no central funding for such solutions. Which would also be opposed by local politicians committed to fighting the ‘cuts’. La lutte continue; meanwhile, Hind and her daughters raked in the cash, unworldly Sufyan went to Mecca and came home to dispense homely wisdom, kindliness and smiles. And behind six doors that opened a crack every time Chamcha went to make a phone call or use the toilet, maybe thirty temporary human beings, with little hope of being declared permanent.