So ended the story of the Golden house. They thought they were Romans but that was just a fantasy. Their Roman games which begat their Roman names: just games. They thought of themselves as a king and his princes but they were no Caesars. A Caesar had indeed risen in America, his reign was under way, beware, Caesar, I thought, the people raise you up and carry your throne through the ecstatic glorifying streets and then they turn on you and rend your garment and push you down upon your sword. Hail Caesar. Beware the Ides of March. Hail Caesar. Beware SPQR, senatus populusque Romanus, the Senate and the people of Rome. Hail Caesar. Remember Nero the last of his line fleeing at the end to Phaon’s villa outside the city and ordering a grave to be dug for him, Nero then too cowardly to drive the sword into his own body and forcing his private secretary to do it at the last. Epaphroditos, slayer of the king. There were indeed once Caesars in the world and now in America a new incarnation on the throne. But Nero Golden was no king nor did he have a fallen Caesar’s end. Just a fire, just some random meaningless flame. What was it his underworld pals had called him in Bombay? The laundryman, yes. The dhobi. Here’s the dirty laundry, dhobi. Clean it up. No king on a throne. He was just the laundryman.
The laundryman.
The dirty laundry on the doorstep. The gunnysack full of Indian clothes.
I began feverishly to search the media for photographs of the fire scene, iPhone videos, everything, wherever I could find them, whatever had been shot professionally or posted by the public at large. The rubbernecking crowd behind the safety barriers. Faces seen through smoke and water. Nothing. Nothing again. And then something.
Two South Asian men in a photograph, watching the fire burn, one of them a dwarf. It was impossible to see the feet of his companion but I guessed that they would be unusually big.
Time passes. Big men dwindle, small men grow. This man shrinks into old age, those men’s reach grows longer. They can stretch out their arms and touch places and people they couldn’t reach before. There are companies here to lend assistance to companies there, to facilitate journeys, to execute strategies. Clowns become kings, old crowns lie in the gutter. Things change. It is the way of the world.
The news reports the next day were unanimous. The crooked landlord charged with manslaughter in the second degree. A tragedy. And a wonder that the young boy survived. Case closed.
And another story, not of interest to the American media, which I found by chance on my computer. The death in a distant country of a once-feared South Asian mafia don. Mr. Zamzama Alankar, formerly the godfather of the powerful Z-Company crime family, had gone to stand before the last judgment seat. An unconfirmed report.
There is a dawn mist on the river and crossing the harbor a Chinese junk with her brown sails set fair and the sun low and silver and the sunlight skipping over the water like a stone. At the glass-topped table in the glass corner where two windows met we sit with glass tears in our eyes not knowing where to look or how to see. Below us running through the whiteness a woman with wild red hair and a tiara on her head like a queen escaping a kidnap and running for her life. Suchitra and I sit facing each other and the steam rising from the coffee cups and the smoke from her cigarette make three wandering columns in the air.
Imagine a cube of air, maybe twelve inches by twelve inches by twelve, moving through the vast open spaces of the world. This or something like it I once heard the Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg say. The cube is what the camera sees and the way the cube moves is the meaning of it. That is what it is to make a film, to move that cube through the world and see what it captures, what it makes beautiful, and what it makes sense of. That is the art of the cinema.
See us facing each other, both in profile, in wide-screen format and desaturated color. See the camera move between us, to the midpoint between us, and then turn on its axis, in full circles, slowly, many times, so that our faces slide by one by one and in between our faces the river of the city and the fog slowly lifting and the light rising on the day. In her hand a sheet of paper. This is the subject. This is the meaning of the scene.
Scenes that did not make the final cut of this text: me at the police station trying to find out what happened to Little Vespa, who is he with, where was he taken, who is caring for him. Me wandering disconsolately down Fourth Street, kicking at a pebble, my hands jammed deep into my pockets, my head down. And finally, me in a lawyer’s office in Midtown while he reads me a document, then hands the document to me, and I nod, I’ll let you know, and leave. Too much exposition. The scene that matters is this one, the two of us and the piece of paper in the day’s first light.
I never thought he’d do it, I say. And if he did, she would have challenged it, saying he was no longer of sound mind.
The mother.
Yes. The mother, his wife. But now there are no next of kin. There’s just this document. If some harm should befall us both, I appoint as the boy’s guardian Mr. René Unterlinden.
You know what you are asking, she says.
Yes.
First she persuaded him to accept another man’s child as his own. Now you want me to accept the same child, another woman’s child, as mine. And you know that children were not a part of my plan.
Down below us the runner with the red hair and the tiara has paused. She stands, hands on hips, breathing deeply, her head tilted up. As if she too is waiting for an answer. But of course she doesn’t see Suchitra and me and knows nothing. We’re up on the twenty-first floor.
Will you think about it, I say as the camera moves past my face.
She closes her eyes and the camera stops, and waits, and goes in closer. Then she opens her eyes and there are only her eyes, filling the screen.
I think we can do this, she says.
Then a jump-cut. Now a different pair of eyes fills the screen. Very slowly the camera pulls back to reveal that they are the eyes of Little Vespa. He stares at the camera without any expression at all. On the soundtrack we hear the lawyer’s voice-over. The estate is being examined by lawyers from both countries and there are many irregularities. But in the end it is a very large estate and there are no other heirs and he is only four years old.
Now there are the three of us, Little Vespa, Suchitra and myself, in an unspecified room, a room in the Brooklyn home of the foster family to whom he was brought for temporary safekeeping. The camera moves to the midpoint of the triangle and begins, very slowly, to rotate upon its axis, so that each of our faces passes by in turn. All our faces are expressionless. The camera begins to turn faster, then faster still. Our faces blur into one another and then the camera is spinning so fast that all the faces disappear and there is only the blur, the speed lines, the motion. The people—the man, the woman, the child—are secondary. There is only the whirling movement of life.
To Alba and Francesco Clemente
through whose friendship and hospitality
I came to know the Gardens
BY SALMAN RUSHDIE
FICTION
Grimus
Midnight’s Children
Shame
The Satanic Verses
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
East, West
The Moor’s Last Sigh
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
Fury
Shalimar the Clown
The Enchantress of Florence
Luka and the Fire of Life
Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
The Golden House
NONFICTION
Joseph Anton: A Memoir
The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey
Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991
Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992–2002
PLAYS
Haroun and the Sea of Stories (with Tim Supple and David Tushingham)
Midnight’s Children (with Tim Supple and Simon Reade)
SCREENPLAY
Midnight’s Children
ANTHOLOGIES
Mir
rorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing, 1947–1997 (co-editor)
Best American Short Stories 2008 (co-editor)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SALMAN RUSHDIE is the author of twelve novels: Grimus, Midnight’s Children (which was awarded the Booker Prize in 1981), Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, Shalimar the Clown and The Enchantress of Florence, Luka and the Fire of Life, and most recently Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights.
Rushdie is also the author of a book of stories, East, West, and four works of nonfiction: Joseph Anton: A Memoir, Imaginary Homelands, The Jaguar Smile, and Step Across This Line. He is the co-editor of Mirrorwork, an anthology of contemporary Indian writing, and of the 2008 Best American Short Stories anthology.
A fellow of the British Royal Society of Literature, Salman Rushdie has received, among other honours, the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel (twice), the Writers’ Guild Award, the James Tait Black Prize, the European Union’s Aristeion Prize for Literature, Author of the Year prizes in both Britain and Germany, the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, the Budapest Grand Prize for Literature, the Premio Grinzane Cavour in Italy, the Crossword Book Award in India, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, the London International Writers’ Award, the James Joyce Award of University College Dublin, the St Louis Literary Prize, the Carl Sandburg Prize of the Chicago Public Library, and a U.S. National Arts Award. He holds honorary doctorates and fellowships at six European and six American universities, is an Honorary Professor in the Humanities at M.I.T, and University Distinguished Professor at Emory University. Currently, Rushdie is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.
He has received the Freedom of the City in Mexico City, Strasbourg and El Paso, and the Edgerton Prize of the American Civil Liberties Union. He holds the rank of Commandeur in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres—France’s highest artistic honor. Between 2004 and 2006 he served as President of PEN American Center and for ten years served as the Chairman of the PEN World Voices International Literary Festival, which he helped to create. In June 2007 he received a knighthood in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. In 2008 he became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was named a Library Lion of the New York Public Library. In addition, Midnight’s Children was named the Best of the Booker—the best winner in the award’s forty-year history—by a public vote. His books have been translated into over forty languages.
He has adapted Midnight’s Children for the stage. It was performed in London and New York by the Royal Shakespeare Company. In 2004, an opera based upon Haroun and the Sea of Stories was premiered by the New York City Opera at Lincoln Center.
A film of Midnight’s Children, directed by Deepa Mehta, was released in 2012.
The Ground Beneath Her Feet, in which the Orpheus myth winds through a story set in the world of rock music, was turned into a song by U2 with lyrics by Salman Rushdie.
salmanrushdie.com
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Salman Rushdie, The Golden House
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