KNOWN HISTORY SHEETERS RESPONSIBLE FOR KILLINGS, a government spokesman alleged, but ‘progressive elements’ rejected this analysis. CITY CONSTABULARY CONTAMINATED BY COMMUNAL AGITATORS, the counter-argument suggested. HINDU NATIONALISTS RUN AMUCK. A political fortnightly contained a photograph of signboards that had been mounted outside the Juma Masjid in Old Delhi. The Imam, a loose-bellied man with cynical eyes, who could be found most mornings in his ‘garden’ – a red-earth-and-rubble waste land in the shadow of the mosque – counting rupees donated by the faithful and rolling up each note individually, so that he seemed to be holding a handful of thin beedi-like cigarettes – and who was no stranger to communalist politics himself, was apparently determined that the Meerut horror should be turned to good account. Quench the Fire under our Breast, the signboards cried. Salute with Reverence those who met Martyrdom from the Bullets of the Polis. Also: Alas! Alas! Alas! Awak the Prime Minister! And finally, the call to action: Bandh will be observed, and the date of the strike.
‘Bad days,’ Sisodia went on. “For the moomoo movies also TV and economics have Delhi Delhi deleterious effects.’ Then he cheered up as stewardesses approached. ‘I will confess to being a mem member of the mile high cluck cluck club,” he said gaily within the attendants’ hearing. ‘And you? Should I see what I can ficfic fix?’
O, the dissociations of which the human mind is capable, marvelled Saladin gloomily. O, the conflicting selves jostling and joggling within these bags of skin. No wonder we are unable to remain focused on anything for very long; no wonder we invent remote-control channel-hopping devices. If we turned these instruments upon ourselves we’d discover more channels than a cable or satellite mogul ever dreamed of … He himself had found his thoughts straying, no matter how hard he tried to fix them on his father, towards the question of Miss Zeenat Vakil. He had wired ahead, informing her of his arrival; would she meet the flight? What might or might not happen between them? Had he, by leaving her, by not returning, by losing touch for a time, done the Unforgivable Thing? Was she – he thought, and was shocked by the realization that it had simply not occurred to him earlier – married? In love? Involved? And as for himself: what did he really want? I’ll know when I see her, he thought. The future, even when it was only a question-shrouded glimmer, would not be eclipsed by the past; even when death moved towards the centre of the stage, life went on fighting for equal rights.
The flight passed without incident.
Zeenat Vakil was not waiting at the airport.
‘Come along,’ Sisodia waved. ‘My car has come to pipi pick, so please to lelet me drop.’
Thirty-five minutes later Saladin Chamcha was at Scandal Point, standing at the gates of childhood with holdall and suit-bags, looking at the imported video-controlled entry system. Anti-narcotics slogans had been painted on the perimeter wall: DREAMS ALL DROWN/WHEN SUGAR IS BROWN. And: FUTURE IS BLACK/WHEN SUGAR IS BROWN. Courage, my old, he braced himself; and rang as directed, once, firmly, for attention.
In the luxuriant garden the stump of the felled walnut-tree caught his unquiet eye. They probably used it as a picnic table now, he mused bitterly. His father had always had a gift for the melodramatic, self-pitying gesture, and to eat his lunch off a surface which packed such an emotional wallop – with, no doubt, many profound sighs between the large mouthfuls – would be right in character. Was he going to camp up his death, too, Saladin wondered. What a grandstand play for sympathy the old bastard could make now! Anyone in the vicinity of a dying man was utterly at his mercy. Punches delivered from a deathbed left bruises that never faded.
His stepmother emerged from the dying man’s marbled mansion to greet Chamcha without a hint of rancour. ‘Salahuddin. Good you came. It will lift his spirit, and now it is his spirit that he must fight with, because his body is more or less kaput.’ She was perhaps six or seven years younger than Saladin’s mother would have been, but out of the same birdlike mould. His large, expansive father had been remarkably consistent in these matters at least. ‘How long does he have?’ Saladin asked. Nasreen was as undeceived as her telegram had suggested. ‘It could be any day.’ The myeloma was present throughout Changez’s ‘long bones’ – the cancer had brought its own vocabulary to the house; one no longer spoke of arms and legs – and in his skull. Cancerous cells had even been detected in the blood around the bones. ‘We should have spotted it,’ Nasreen said, and Saladin began to feel the old lady’s power, the force of will with which she was reining in her feelings. ‘His pronounced weight-loss these past two years. Also he has complained of aches and pains, for instance in the knees. You know how it is. With an old man, you blame his age, you don’t imagine that a vile, hideous disease.’ She stopped, needing to control her voice. Kasturba, the ex-ayah, had come out to join them in the garden. It turned out that her husband Vallabh had died almost a year earlier, of old age, in his sleep: a kinder death than the one now eating its way out of the body of his employer, the seducer of his wife. Kasturba was still dressing in Nasreen I’s old, loud saris: today she had chosen one of the dizziest of the Op-Art black-and-white prints. She, too, greeted Saladin warmly: hugs kisses tears. ‘As for me,’ she sobbed, ‘I will never stop praying for a miracle while there is one breath left in his poor lungs.’
Nasreen II embraced Kasturba; each woman rested her head on the other’s shoulder. The intimacy between the two women was spontaneous and untarnished by resentments; as if the proximity of death had washed away the quarrels and jealousies of life. The two old ladies comforted one another in the garden, each consoling the other for the imminent loss of the most precious of things: love. Or, rather: the beloved. ‘Come on,’ Nasreen finally said to Saladin. ‘He should see you, pronto.’
‘Does he know?’ Saladin asked. Nasreen answered evasively. ‘He is an intelligent man. He keeps asking, where has all the blood gone? He says, there are only two illnesses in which the blood vanishes like this. One is tuberculosis.’ But, Saladin pressed, he never actually speaks the word? Nasreen lowered her head. The word had not been spoken, either by Changez or in his presence. ‘Shouldn’t he know?’ Chamcha asked. ‘Doesn’t a man have the right to prepare for his death?’ He saw Nasreen’s eyes blaze for an instant. Who do you think you are to tell us our duty. You have sacrificed all rights. Then they faded, and when she spoke her voice was level, unemotional, low. ‘Maybe you’re correct.’ But Kasturba wailed: ‘No! How to tell him, poor man? It will break his heart.’
The cancer had thickened Changez’s blood to the point at which his heart was having the greatest difficulty pumping it round his body. It had also polluted the bloodstream with alien bodies, platelets, that would attack any blood with which he was transfused, even blood of his own type. So, even in this small way, I can’t help him, Saladin understood. Changez could easily die of these side-effects before the cancer did for him. If he did die from the cancer, the end would take the form either of pneumonia or of kidney failure; the doctors, knowing they could do nothing for him, had sent him home to wait for it. ‘Because myeloma is systemic, chemotherapy and radiation treatment are not used,’ Nasreen explained. ‘Only medicament is the drug Melphalan, which can in some cases prolong life, even for years. However, we are informed he is in the category which will not respond to Melphalan tablets.’ But he has not been told, Saladin’s inner voices insisted. And that’s wrong, wrong, wrong. ‘Still, a miracle has happened,’ Kasturba cried. ‘The doctors told that normally this is one of the most painful cancers; but your father is in no pain. If one prays, then sometimes a kindness is granted.’ It was on account of the freak absence of pain that the cancer had taken so long to diagnose; it had been spreading in Changez’s body for at least two years. ‘I must see him now,’ Saladin gently asked. A bearer had taken his holdall and suit-bags indoors while they spoke; now, at last, he followed his garments indoors.
The interior of the house was unchanged – the generosity of the second Nasreen towards the memory of the first seemed boundless, at least du
ring these days, the last on earth of their mutual spouse – except that Nasreen II had moved in her collection of stuffed birds (hoopoes and rare parrots under glass bell-jars, a full-grown King Penguin in the marble-and-mosaic hall, its beak swarming with tiny red ants) and her cases of impaled butterflies. Saladin moved past this colorful gallery of dead wings towards his father’s study – Changez had insisted on vacating his bedroom and having a bed moved downstairs into that wood-panelled retreat full of rotting books, so that people didn’t have to run up and down all day to look after him – and came, at last, to death’s door.
Early in life Changez Chamchawala had acquired the disconcerting knack of sleeping with his eyes wide open, ‘staying on guard’, as he liked to say. Now, as Saladin quietly entered the room, the effect of those open grey eyes staring blindly at the ceiling was positively unnerving. For a moment Saladin thought he was too late; that Changez had died while he’d been chatting in the garden. Then the man on the bed emitted a series of small coughs, turned his head, and extended an uncertain arm. Saladin Chamcha went towards his father and bowed his head beneath the old man’s caressing palm.
To fall in love with one’s father after the long angry decades was a serene and beautiful feeling; a renewing, life-giving thing, Saladin wanted to say, but did not, because it sounded vampirish; as if by sucking this new life out of his father he was making room, in Changez’s body, for death. Although he kept it quiet, however, Saladin felt hourly closer to many old, rejected selves, many alternative Saladins – or rather Salahuddins – which had split off from himself as he made his various life choices, but which had apparently continued to exist, perhaps in the parallel universes of quantum theory. Cancer had stripped Changez Chamchawala literally to the bone; his cheeks had collapsed into the hollows of the skull, and he had to place a foam-rubber pillow under his buttocks because of the atrophying of his flesh. But it had also stripped him of his faults, of all that had been domineering, tyrannical and cruel in him, so that the mischievous, loving and brilliant man beneath lay exposed, once again, for all to see. If only he could have been this person all his life, Saladin (who had begun to find the sound of his full, un-Englished name pleasing for the first time in twenty years) found himself wishing. How hard it was to find one’s father just when one had no choice but to say goodbye.
On the morning of his return Salahuddin Chamchawala was asked by his father to give him a shave. ‘These old women of mine don’t know which side of a Philishave is the business end.’ Changez’s skin hung off his face in soft, leathery jowls, and his hair (when Salahuddin emptied the machine) looked like ashes. Salahuddin could not remember when he had last touched his father’s face this way, gently drawing the skin tight as the cordless shaver moved across it, and then stroking it to make sure it felt smooth. When he had finished he continued for a moment to run his fingers along Changez’s cheeks. ‘Look at the old man,’ Nasreen said to Kasturba as they entered the room, ‘he can’t take his eyes off his boy.’ Changez Chamchawala grinned an exhausted grin, revealing a mouth full of shattered teeth, flecked with spittle and crumbs.
When his father fell asleep again, after being forced by Kasturba and Nasreen to drink a small quantity of water, and gazed up at – what? – with his open, dreaming eyes, which could see into three worlds at once, the actual world of his study, the visionary world of dreams, and the approaching after-life as well (or so Salahuddin, in a fanciful moment, found himself imagining); – then the son went to Changez’s old bedroom for a rest. Grotesque heads in painted terracotta glowered down at him from the walls: a horned demon; a leering Arab with a falcon on his shoulder; a bald man rolling his eyes upwards and putting his tongue out in panic as a huge black fly settled on his eyebrow. Unable to sleep beneath these figures, which he had known all his life and also hated, because he had come to see them as portraits of Changez, he moved finally to a different, neutral room.
Waking up in the early evening, he went downstairs to find the two old women outside Changez’s room, trying to work out the details of his medication. Apart from the daily Melphalan tablet, he had been prescribed a whole battery of drugs in an attempt to combat the cancer’s pernicious side-effects: anaemia, the strain on the heart, and so on. Isosorbide dinitrate, two tablets, four times a day; Furosemide, one tablet, three times; Prednisolone, six tablets, twice daily … ‘I’ll do this,’ he told the relieved old women. ‘At least it is one thing I can do.’ Agarol for his constipation, Spironolactone for goodness knew what, and a zyloric, Allopurinol: he suddenly remembered, crazily, an antique theatre review in which the English critic, Kenneth Tynan, had imagined the polysyllabic characters in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great as ‘a horde of pills and wonder drugs bent on decimating one another’:
Beard’st thou me here, thou bold Barbiturate?
Sirrah, thy grandam’s dead – old Nembutal.
The spangled stars shall weep for Nembutal …
Is it not passing brave to be a king,
Aureomycin and Formaldehyde,
Is it not passing brave to be a king
And ride in triumph through Amphetamine?
The things one’s memory threw up! But perhaps this pharmaceutical Tamburlaine was not such a bad eulogy for the fallen monarch lying here in his bookwormed study, staring into three worlds, waiting for the end. ‘Come on, Abba,’ he marched cheerily into the presence. ‘Time to save your life.’
Still in its place, on a shelf in Changez’s study: a certain copper-and-brass lamp, reputed to have the power of wish fulfilment, but as yet (because never rubbed) untested. Somewhat tarnished now, it looked down upon its dying owner; and was observed, in its turn, by his only son. Who was sorely tempted, for an instant, to get it down, rub three times, and ask the turbanned djinni for a magic sped … however, Salahuddin left the lamp where it was. There was no place for djinns or ghouls or afreets here; no spooks or fancies could be permitted. No magic formulae; just the impotence of the pills. ‘Here’s the medicine man,’ Salahuddin sang out, rattling the little bottles, rousing his father from sleep. ‘Medicine,’ Changez grimaced childishly. ‘Eek, bhaak, thoo.’
That night, Salahuddin forced Nasreen and Kasturba to sleep comfortably in their own beds while he kept watch over Changez from a mattress on the floor. After his midnight dose of Isosorbide, the dying man slept for three hours, and then needed to go to the toilet. Salahuddin virtually lifted him to his feet, and was astonished at Changez’s lightness. This had always been a weighty man, but now he was a living lunch for the advancing cancer cells … in the toilet, Changez refused all help. ‘He won’t let you do one thing,’ Kasturba had complained lovingly. ‘Such a shy fellow that he is.’ On his way back to bed he leaned lightly on Salahuddin’s arm, and shuffled along flat-footed in old, worn bedroom slippers, his remaining hairs sticking out at comical angles, his head stuck beakily forward on its scrawny, fragile neck. Salahuddin suddenly longed to pick the old man up, to cradle him in his arms and sing soft, comforting songs. Instead, he blurted out, at this least appropriate of moments, an appeal for reconciliation. ‘Abba, I came because I didn’t want there to be trouble between us any more …’ Fucking idiot. The Devil damn thee black, thou cream-fac’d loon. In the middle of the bloody night! And if he hasn’t guessed he’s dying, that little deathbed speech will certainly have let him know. Changez continued to shuffle along; his grip on his son’s arm tightened very slightly. ‘That doesn’t matter any more,’ he said. ‘It’s forgotten, whatever it was.’
In the morning, Nasreen and Kasturba arrived in clean saris, looking rested and complaining, ‘It was so terrible sleeping away from him that we didn’t sleep one wink.’ They fell upon Changez, and so tender were their caresses that Salahuddin had the same sense of spying on a private moment that he’d had at the wedding of Mishal Sufyan. He left the room quietly while the three lovers embraced, kissed and wept.
Death, the great fact, wove its spell around the house on Scandal Point. Salahuddin surrendered to it like e
veryone else, even Changez, who, on that second day, often smiled his old crooked smile, the one that said I know what’s up, I’ll go along with it, just don’t think I’m fooled. Kasturba and Nasreen fussed over him constantly, brushing his hair, coaxing him to eat and drink. His tongue had grown fat in his mouth, slurring his speech slightly, making it hard to swallow; he refused anything at all fibrous or stringy, even the chicken breasts he had loved all his life. A mouthful of soup, puréed potatoes, a taste of custard. Baby food. When he sat up in bed Salahuddin sat behind him; Changez leaned against his son’s body while he ate.
‘Open the house,’ Changez commanded that morning. ‘I want to see some smiling faces here, instead of your three glum mugs.’ So, after a long time, people came: young and old, half-forgotten cousins, uncles, aunts; a few comrades from the old days of the nationalist movement, poker-backed gentlemen with silver hair, achkan jackets and monocles; employees of the various foundations and philanthropical enterprises set up by Changez years ago; rival manufacturers of agricultural sprays and artificial dung. A real bag of allsorts, Salahuddin thought; but marvelled, also, at how beautifully everyone behaved in the presence of the dying man: the young spoke to him intimately about their lives, as if reassuring him that life itself was invincible, offering him the rich consolation of being a member of the great procession of the human race, – while the old evoked the past, so that he knew nothing was forgotten, nothing lost; that in spite of the years of self-imposed sequestration he remained joined to the world. Death brought out the best in people; it was good to be shown – Salahuddin realized – that this, too, was what human beings were like: considerate, loving, even noble. We are still capable of exaltation, he thought in celebratory mood; in spite of everything, we can still transcend. A pretty young woman – it occurred to Salahuddin that she was probably his niece, and he felt ashamed that he didn’t know her name – was taking Polaroid snapshots of Changez with his visitors, and the sick man was enjoying himself hugely, pulling faces, then kissing the many proffered cheeks with a light in his eyes that Salahuddin identified as nostalgia. ‘It’s like a birthday party,’ he thought. Or: like Finnegan’s wake. The dead man refusing to lie down and let the living have all the fun.