‘Where are we going?’ The night had acquired the quality of green neon strip-lighting. Zeeny parked the car. ‘You’re lost,’ she accused him. ‘What do you know about Bombay? Your own city, only it never was. To you, it’s a dream of childhood. Growing up on Scandal Point is like living on the moon. No bustees there, no sirree, only servants’ quarters. Did Shiv Sena elements come there to make communal trouble? Were your neighbours starving in the textile strike? Did Datta Samant stage a rally in front of your bungalows? How old were you when you met a trade unionist? How old the first time you got on a local train instead of a car with driver? That wasn’t Bombay, darling, excuse me. That was Wonderland, Peristan, Never-Never, Oz.’
‘And you?’ Saladin reminded her. ‘Where were you back then?’
‘Same place,’ she said fiercely. ‘With all the other bloody Munchkins.’
Back streets. A Jain temple was being re-painted and all the saints were in plastic bags to protect them from the drips. A pavement magazine vendor displayed newspapers full of horror: a railway disaster. Bhupen Gandhi began to speak in his mild whisper. After the accident, he said, the surviving passengers swam to the shore (the train had plunged off a bridge) and were met by local villagers, who pushed them under the water until they drowned and then looted their bodies.
‘Shut your face,’ Zeeny shouted at him. ‘Why are you telling him such things? Already he thinks we’re savages, a lower form.’
A shop was selling sandalwood to burn in a nearby Krishna temple and sets of enamelled pink-and-white Krishna-eyes that saw everything. ‘Too damn much to see,’ Bhupen said. ‘That is fact of matter.’
In a crowded dhaba that George had started frequenting when he was making contact, for movie purposes, with the dadas or bosses who ran the city’s flesh trade, dark rum was consumed at aluminium tables and George and Bhupen started, a little boozily, to quarrel. Zeeny drank Thums Up Cola and denounced her friends to Chamcha. ‘Drinking problems, both of them, broke as old pots, they both mistreat their wives, sit in dives, waste their stinking lives. No wonder I fell for you, sugar, when the local product is so low grade you get to like goods from foreign.’
George had gone with Zeeny to Bhopal and was becoming noisy on the subject of the catastrophe, interpreting it ideologically. ‘What is Amrika for us?’ he demanded. ‘It’s not a real place. Power in its purest form, disembodied, invisible. We can’t see it but it screws us totally, no escape.’ He compared the Union Carbide company to the Trojan Horse. ‘We invited the bastards in.’ It was like the story of the forty thieves, he said. Hiding in their amphoras and waiting for the night. ‘We had no Ali Baba, misfortunately,’ he cried. ‘Who did we have? Mr Rajiv G.’
At this point Bhupen Gandhi stood up abruptly, unsteadily, and began, as though possessed, as though a spirit were upon him, to testify. ‘For me,’ he said, ‘the issue cannot be foreign intervention. We always forgive ourselves by blaming outsiders, America, Pakistan, any damn place. Excuse me, George, but for me it all goes back to Assam, we have to start with that.’ The massacre of the innocents. Photographs of children’s corpses, arranged neatly in lines like soldiers on parade. They had been clubbed to death, pelted with stones, their necks cut in half by knives. Those neat ranks of death, Chamcha remembered. As if only horror could sting India into orderliness.
Bhupen spoke for twenty-nine minutes without hesitations or pauses. ‘We are all guilty of Assam,’ he said. ‘Each person of us. Unless and until we face it, that the children’s deaths were our fault, we cannot call ourselves a civilized people.’ He drank rum quickly as he spoke, and his voice got louder, and his body began to lean dangerously, but although the room fell silent nobody moved towards him, nobody tried to stop him talking, nobody called him a drunk. In the middle of a sentence, everyday blindings, or shootings, or corruptions, who do we think we, he sat down heavily and stared into his glass.
Now a young man stood up in a far corner of the joint and argued back. Assam had to be understood politically, he cried, there were economic reasons, and yet another fellow came to his feet to reply, cash matters do not explain why a grown man clubs a little girl to death, and then another fellow said, if you think that, you have never been hungry, salah, how bloody romantic to suppose economics cannot make men into beasts. Chamcha clutched at his glass as the noise level rose, and the air seemed to thicken, gold teeth flashed in his face, shoulders rubbed against his, elbows nudged, the air was turning into soup, and in his chest the irregular palpitations had begun. George grabbed him by the wrist and dragged him out into the street. ‘You okay, man? You were turning green.’ Saladin nodded his thanks, gasped in lungfuls of the night, calmed down. ‘Rum and exhaustion,’ he said. ‘I have the peculiar habit of getting my nerves after the show. Quite often I get wobbly. Should have known.’ Zeeny was looking at him, and there was more in her eyes than sympathy. A glittering look, triumphant, hard. Something got through to you, her expression gloated. About bloody time.
After you recover from typhoid, Chamcha reflected, you remain immune to the disease for ten years or so. But nothing is forever; eventually the antibodies vanish from your blood. He had to accept the fact that his blood no longer contained the immunizing agents that would have enabled him to suffer India’s reality. Rum, heart palpitations, a sickness of the spirit. Time for bed.
She wouldn’t take him to her place. Always and only the hotel, with the gold-medallioned young Arabs strutting in the midnight corridors holding bottles of contraband whisky. He lay on the bed with his shoes on, his collar and tie loose, his right arm flung across his eyes; she, in the hotel’s white bathrobe, bent over him and kissed his chin. ‘I’ll tell you what happened to you tonight,’ she said. ‘You could say we cracked your shell.’
He sat up, angry. ‘Well, this is what’s inside,’ he blazed at her. ‘An Indian translated into English-medium. When I attempt Hindustani these days, people look polite. This is me.’ Caught in the aspic of his adopted language, he had begun to hear, in India’s Babel, an ominous warning: don’t come back again. When you have stepped through the looking-glass you step back at your peril. The mirror may cut you to shreds.
‘I was so proud of Bhupen tonight,’ Zeeny said, getting into bed. ‘In how many countries could you go into some bar and start up a debate like that? The passion, the seriousness, the respect. You keep your civilization, Toadji; I like this one plenty fine.’
‘Give up on me,’ he begged her. ‘I don’t like people dropping in to see me without warning, I have forgotten the rules of seven-tiles and kabaddi, I can’t recite my prayers, I don’t know what should happen at a nikah ceremony, and in this city where I grew up I get lost if I’m on my own. This isn’t home. It makes me giddy because it feels like home and is not. It makes my heart tremble and my head spin.’
‘You’re a stupid,’ she shouted at him. ‘A stupid. Change back! Damn fool! Of course you can.’ She was a vortex, a siren, tempting him back to his old self. But it was a dead self, a shadow, a ghost, and he would not become a phantom. There was a return ticket to London in his wallet, and he was going to use it.
‘You never married,’ he said when they both lay sleepless in the small hours. Zeeny snorted. ‘You’ve really been gone too long. Can’t you see me? I’m a blackie.’ Arching her back and throwing off the sheet to show off her lavishness. When the bandit queen Phoolan Devi came out of the ravines to surrender and be photographed, the newspapers at once uncreated their own myth of her legendary beauty. She became plain, a common creature, unappetizing where she had been toothsome. Dark skin in north India. ‘I don’t buy it,’ Saladin said. ‘You don’t expect me to believe that.’
She laughed. ‘Good, you’re not a complete idiot yet. Who needs to marry? I had work to do.’
And after a pause, she threw his question back at him. So, then. And you?
Not only married, but rich. ‘So tell, na. How you live, you and the mame.’ In a five-storey mansion in Notting Hill. He had started feeling insec
ure there of late, because the most recent batch of burglars had taken not only the usual video and stereo but also the wolfhound guard dog. It was not possible, he had begun to feel, to live in a place where the criminal elements kidnapped the animals. Pamela told him it was an old local custom. In the Olden Days, she said (history, for Pamela, was divided into the Ancient Era, the Dark Ages, the Olden Days, the British Empire, the Modern Age and the Present), petnapping was good business. The poor would steal the canines of the rich, train them to forget their names, and sell them back to their grieving, helpless owners in shops on Portobello Road. Pamela’s local history was always detailed and frequently unreliable. ‘But, my God,’ Zeeny Vakil said, ‘you must sell up pronto and move. I know those English, all the same, riff-raff and nawabs. You can’t fight their bloody traditions.’
My wife, Pamela Lovelace, frail as porcelain, graceful as gazelles, he remembered. I put down roots in the women I love. The banalities of infidelity. He put them away and talked about his work.
When Zeeny Vakil found out how Saladin Chamcha made his money, she let fly a series of shrieks that made one of the medallioned Arabs knock at the door to make sure everything was all right. He saw a beautiful woman sitting up in bed with what looked like buffalo milk running down her face and dripping off the point of her chin, and, apologizing to Chamcha for the intrusion, he withdrew hastily, sorry, sport, hey, you’re some lucky guy.
‘You poor potato,’ Zeeny gasped between peals of laughter. ‘Those Angrez bastards. They really screwed you up.’
So now his work was funny. ‘I have a gift for accents,’ he said haughtily. ‘Why I shouldn’t employ?’
‘ “Why I should not employ?” ’ she mimicked him, kicking her legs in the air. ‘Mister actor, your moustache just slipped again.’
Oh my God.
What’s happening to me?
What the devil?
Help.
Because he did have that gift, truly he did, he was the Man of a Thousand Voices and a Voice. If you wanted to know how your ketchup bottle should talk in its television commercial, if you were unsure as to the ideal voice for your packet of garlicflavoured crisps, he was your very man. He made carpets speak in warehouse advertisements, he did celebrity impersonations, baked beans, frozen peas. On the radio he could convince an audience that he was Russian, Chinese, Sicilian, the President of the United States. Once, in a radio play for thirty-seven voices, he interpreted every single part under a variety of pseudonyms and nobody ever worked it out. With his female equivalent, Mimi Mamoulian, he ruled the airwaves of Britain. They had such a large slice of the voiceover racket that, as Mimi said, ‘People better not mention the Monopolies Commission around us, not even in fun.’ Her range was astonishing; she could do any age, anywhere in the world, any point on the vocal register, angelic Juliet to fiendish Mae West. ‘We should get married sometime, when you’re free,’ Mimi once suggested to him. ‘You and me, we could be the United Nations.’
‘You’re Jewish,’ he pointed out. ‘I was brought up to have views on Jews.’
‘So I’m Jewish,’ she shrugged. ‘You’re the one who’s circumcised. Nobody’s perfect.’
Mimi was tiny with tight dark curls and looked like a Michelin poster. In Bombay, Zeenat Vakil stretched and yawned and drove other women from his thoughts. ‘Too much,’ she laughed at him. ‘They pay you to imitate them, as long as they don’t have to look at you. Your voice becomes famous but they hide your face. Got any ideas why? Warts on your nose, cross-eyes, what? Anything come to mind, baby? You goddamn lettuce brain, I swear.’
It was true, he thought. Saladin and Mimi were legends of a sort, but crippled legends, dark stars. The gravitational field of their abilities drew work towards them, but they remained invisible, shedding bodies to put on voices. On the radio, Mimi could become the Botticelli Venus, she could be Olympia, Monroe, any damn woman she pleased. She didn’t give a damn about the way she looked; she had become her voice, she was worth a mint, and three young women were hopelessly in love with her. Also, she bought property. ‘Neurotic behaviour,’ she would confess unashamedly. ‘Excessive need for rooting owing to upheavals of Armenian-Jewish history. Some desperation owing to advancing years and small polyps detected in the throat. Property is so soothing, I do recommend it.’ She owned a Norfolk vicarage, a farmhouse in Normandy, a Tuscan bell-tower, a sea-coast in Bohemia. ‘All haunted,’ she explained. ‘Clanks, howls, blood on the rugs, women in nighties, the works. Nobody gives up land without a fight.’
Nobody except me, Chamcha thought, a melancholy clutching at him as he lay beside Zeenat Vakil. Maybe I’m a ghost already. But at least a ghost with an airline ticket, success, money, wife. A shade, but living in the tangible, material world. With assets. Yes, sir.
Zeeny stroked the hairs curling over his ears. ‘Sometimes, when you’re quiet,’ she murmured, ‘when you aren’t doing funny voices or acting grand, and when you forget people are watching, you look just like a blank. You know? An empty slate, nobody home. It makes me mad, sometimes, I want to slap you. To sting you back into life. But I also get sad about it. Such a fool, you, the big star whose face is the wrong colour for their colour TVs, who has to travel to wogland with some two-bit company, playing the babu part on top of it, just to get into a play. They kick you around and still you stay, you love them, bloody slave mentality, I swear. Chamcha,’ she grabbed his shoulders and shook him, sitting astride him with her forbidden breasts a few inches from his face, ‘Salad baba, whatever you call yourself, for Pete’s sake come home.’
His big break, the one that could soon make money lose its meaning, had started small: children’s television, a thing called The Aliens Show, by The Munsters out of Star Wars by way of Sesame Street. It was a situation comedy about a group of extraterrestrials ranging from cute to psycho, from animal to vegetable, and also mineral, because it featured an artistic space-rock that could quarry itself for its raw material, and then regenerate itself in time for the next week’s episode; this rock was named Pygmalien, and owing to the stunted sense of humour of the show’s producers there was also a coarse, belching creature like a puking cactus that came from a desert planet at the end of time: this was Matilda, the Australien, and there were the three grotesquely pneumatic, singing space sirens known as the Alien Korns, maybe because you could lie down among them, and there was a team of Venusian hip-hoppers and subway spray-painters and soul-brothers who called themselves the Alien Nation, and under a bed in the spaceship that was the programme’s main location there lived Bugsy the giant dung-beetle from the Crab Nebula who had run away from his father, and in a fish-tank you could find Brains the super-intelligent giant abalone who liked eating Chinese, and then there was Ridley, the most terrifying of the regular cast, who looked like a Francis Bacon painting of a mouthful of teeth waving at the end of a sightless pod, and who had an obsession with the actress Sigourney Weaver. The stars of the show, its Kermit and Miss Piggy, were the very fashionable, slinkily attired, stunningly hair-styled duo, Maxim and Mamma Alien, who yearned to be – what else? – television personalities. They were played by Saladin Chamcha and Mimi Mamoulian, and they changed their voices along with their clothes, to say nothing of their hair, which could go from purple to vermilion between shots, which could stand diagonally three feet up from their heads or vanish altogether; or their features and limbs, because they were capable of changing all of them, switching legs, arms, noses, ears, eyes, and every switch conjured up a different accent from their legendary, protean gullets. What made the show a hit was its use of the latest computer-generated imagery. The backgrounds were all simulated: spaceship, other-world landscapes, intergalactic game-show studios; and the actors, too, were processed through machines, obliged to spend four hours every day being buried under the latest in prosthetic make-up which – once the video-computers had gone to work – made them look just like simulations, too. Maxim Alien, space playboy, and Mamma, undefeated galactic wrestling champion and universal all-comer
s pasta queen, were overnight sensations. Prime-time beckoned; America, Eurovision, the world.
As The Aliens Show got bigger it began to attract political criticism. Conservatives attacked it for being too frightening, too sexually explicit (Ridley could become positively erect when he thought too hard about Miss Weaver), too weird. Radical commentators began to attack its stereotyping, its reinforcement of the idea of aliens-as-freaks, its lack of positive images. Chamcha came under pressure to quit the show; refused; became a target. ‘Trouble waiting when I go home,’ he told Zeeny. ‘The damn show isn’t an allegory. It’s an entertainment. It aims to please.’
‘To please whom?’ she wanted to know. ‘Besides, even now they only let you on the air after they cover your face with rubber and give you a red wig. Big deal deluxe, say I.’
‘The point is,’ she said when they awoke the next morning, ‘Salad darling, you really are good looking, no quesch. Skin like milk, England returned. Now that Gibreel has done a bunk, you could be next in line. I’m serious, yaar. They need a new face. Come home and you could be the next, bigger than Bachchan was, bigger than Farishta. Your face isn’t as funny as theirs.’
When he was young, he told her, each phase of his life, each self he tried on, had seemed reassuringly temporary. Its imperfections didn’t matter, because he could easily replace one ‘moment by the next, one Saladin by another. Now, however, change had begun to feel painful; the arteries of the possible had begun to harden. ‘It isn’t easy to tell you this, but I’m married now, and not just to wife but life.’ The accent slippage again. ‘I really came to Bombay for one reason, and it wasn’t the play. He’s in his late seventies now, and I won’t have many more chances. He hasn’t been to the show; Muhammad must go to the mountain.’