My father, Changez Chamchawala, owner of a magic lamp. ‘Changez Chamchawala, are you kidding, don’t think you can leave me behind,’ she clapped her hands. ‘I want to check out the hair and toenails.’ His father, the famous recluse. Bombay was a culture of re-makes. Its architecture mimicked the skyscraper, its cinema endlessly re-invented The Magnificent Seven and Love Story, obliging all its heroes to save at least one village from murderous dacoits and all its heroines to die of leukaemia at least once in their careers, preferably at the start. Its millionaires, too, had taken to importing their lives. Changez’s invisibility was an Indian dream of the crorepati penthoused wretch of Las Vegas; but a dream was not a photograph, after all, and Zeeny wanted to see with her own eyes. ‘He makes faces at people if he’s in a bad mood,’ Saladin warned her. ‘Nobody believes it till it happens, but it’s true. Such faces! Gargoyles. Also, he’s a prude and he’ll call you a tart and anyway I’ll probably have a fight with him, it’s on the cards.’
What Saladin Chamcha had come to India for: forgiveness. That was his business in his old home town. But whether to give or to receive, he was not able to say.
Bizarre aspects of the present circumstances of Mr Changez Chamchawala: with his new wife, Nasreen the Second, he lived for five days every week in a high-walled compound nicknamed the Red Fort in the Pali Hill district beloved of movie stars; but every weekend he returned without his wife to the old house at Scandal Point, to spend his days of rest in the lost world of the past, in the company of the first, and dead, Nasreen. Furthermore: it was said that his second wife refused to set foot in the old place. ‘Or isn’t allowed to,’ Zeeny hypothesized in the back of the black-glass-windowed Mercedes limousine which Changez had sent to collect his son. As Saladin finished filling in the background, Zeenat Vakil whistled appreciatively. ‘Crazee.’
The Chamchawala fertilizer business, Changez’s empire of dung, was to be investigated for tax fraud and import duty evasion by a Government commission, but Zeeny wasn’t interested in that. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘I’ll get to find out what you’re really like.’
Scandal Point unfurled before them. Saladin felt the past rush in like a tide, drowning him, filling his lungs with its revenant saltiness. I’m not myself today, he thought. The heart flutters. Life damages the living. None of us are ourselves. None of us are like this.
These days there were steel gates, operated by remote control from within, sealing the crumbling triumphal arch. They opened with a slow whirring sound to admit Saladin into that place of lost time. When he saw the walnut-tree in which his father had claimed that his soul was kept, his hands began to shake. He hid behind the neutrality of facts. ‘In Kashmir,’ he told Zeeny, ‘your birth-tree is a financial investment of a sort. When a child comes of age, the grown walnut is comparable to a matured insurance policy; it’s a valuable tree, it can be sold, to pay for weddings, or a start in life. The adult chops down his childhood to help his grown-up self. The unsentimentality is appealing, don’t you think?’
The car had stopped under the entrance porch. Zeeny fell silent as the two of them climbed the six stairs to the front door, where they were greeted by a composed and ancient bearer in white, brass-buttoned livery, whose shock of white hair Chamcha suddenly recognized, by translating it back into black, as the mane of that same Vallabh who had presided over the house as its major-domo in the Olden Days. ‘My God, Vallabhbhai,’ he managed, and embraced the old man. The servant smiled a difficult smile. ‘I grow so old, baba, I was thinking you would not recognize.’ He led them down the crystal-heavy corridors of the mansion and Saladin realized that the lack of change was excessive, and plainly deliberate. It was true, Vallabh explained to him, that when the Begum died Changez Sahib had sworn that the house would be her memorial. As a result nothing had changed since the day she died, paintings, furniture, soap-dishes, the red-glass figures of fighting bulls and china ballerinas from Dresden, all left in their exact positions, the same magazines on the same tables, the same crumpled balls of paper in the wastebaskets, as though the house had died, too, and been embalmed. ‘Mummified,’ Zeeny said, voicing the unspeakable as usual. ‘God, but it’s spooky, no?’ It was at this point, while Vallabh the bearer was opening the double doors leading into the blue drawing-room, that Saladin Chamcha saw his mother’s ghost.
He let out a loud cry and Zeeny whirled on her heel. ‘There,’ he pointed towards the far, darkened end of the hallway, ‘no question, that blasted newsprint sari, the big headlines, the one she wore the day she, she,’ but now Vallabh had begun to flap his arms like a weak, flightless bird, you see, baba, it was only Kasturba, you have not forgotten, my wife, only my wife. My ayah Kasturba with whom I played in rock-pools. Until I grew up and went without her and in a hollow a man with ivory glasses. ‘Please, baba, nothing to be cross, only when the Begum died Changez Sahib donated to my wife some few garments, you do not object? Your mother was a so-generous woman, when alive she always gave with an open hand.’ Chamcha, recovering his equilibrium, was feeling foolish. ‘For God’s sake, Vallabh,’ he muttered. ‘For God’s sake. Obviously I don’t object.’ An old stiffness re-entered Vallabh; the right to free speech of the old retainer permitted him to reprove, ‘Excuse, baba, but you should not blaspheme.’
‘See how he’s sweating,’ Zeeny stage-whispered. ‘He looks scared stiff.’ Kasturba entered the room, and although her reunion with Chamcha was warm enough there was still a wrongness in the air. Vallabh left to bring beer and Thums Up, and when Kasturba also excused herself, Zeeny at once said: ‘Something fishy. She walks like she owns the dump. The way she holds herself. And the old man was afraid. Those two are up to something, I bet.’ Chamcha tried to be reasonable. ‘They stay here alone most of the time, probably sleep in the master bedroom and eat off the good plates, it must get to feeling like their place.’ But he was thinking how strikingly, in that old sari, his ayah Kasturba had come to resemble his mother.
‘Stayed away so long,’ his father’s voice spoke behind him, ‘that now you can’t tell a living ayah from your departed ma.’
Saladin turned around to take in the melancholy sight of a father who had shrivelled like an old apple, but who insisted nevertheless on wearing the expensive Italian suits of his opulently fleshy years. Now that he had lost both Popeye-forearms and Blutobelly, he seemed to be roaming about inside his clothes like a man in search of something he had not quite managed to identify. He stood in the doorway looking at his son, his nose and lips curled, by the withering sorcery of the years, into a feeble simulacrum of his former ogre-face. Chamcha had barely begun to understand that his father was no longer capable of frightening anybody, that his spell had been broken and he was just an old geezer heading for the grave; while Zeeny had noted with some disappointment that Changez Chamchawala’s hair was conservatively short, and since he was wearing highly polished Oxford lace-ups it didn’t seem likely that the eleven-inch toenail story was true either; when the ayah Kasturba returned, smoking a cigarette, and strolled past the three of them, father son mistress, towards a blue velour-covered button-backed Chesterfield sofa, upon which she arranged her body as sensually as any movie starlet, even though she was a woman well advanced in years.
No sooner had Kasturba completed her shocking entrance than Changez skipped past his son and planted himself beside the erstwhile ayah. Zeeny Vakil, her eyes sparkling with scandal-points of light, hissed at Chamcha: ‘Close your mouth, dear. It looks bad.’ And in the doorway, the bearer Vallabh, pushing a drinks trolley, watched unemotionally while his employer of many long years placed an arm around his uncomplaining wife.
When the progenitor, the creator is revealed as satanic, the child will frequently grow prim. Chamcha heard himself inquire: ‘And my stepmother, father dear? She is keeping well?’
The old man addressed Zeeny. ‘He is not such a goody with you, I hope so. Or what a sad time you must have.’ Then to his son in harsher tones. ‘You have an interest in my wife these days? But she ha
s none in you. She won’t meet you now. Why should she forgive? You are no son to her. Or, maybe, by now, to me.’
I did not come to fight him. Look, the old goat. I mustn’t fight. But this, this is intolerable. ‘In my mother’s house,’ Chamcha cried melodramatically, losing his battle with himself. ‘The state thinks your business is corrupt, and here is the corruption of your soul. Look what you’ve done to them. Vallabh and Kasturba. With your money. How much did it take? To poison their lives. You’re a sick man.’ He stood before his father, blazing with righteous rage.
Vallabh the bearer, unexpectedly, intervened. ‘Baba, with respect, excuse me but what do you know? You have left and gone and now you come to judge us.’ Saladin felt the floor giving way beneath his feet; he was staring into the inferno. ‘It is true he pays us,’ Vallabh went on. ‘For our work, and also for what you see. For this.’ Changez Chamchawala tightened his grip on the ayah’s unresisting shoulders.
‘How much?’ Chamcha shouted. ‘Vallabh, how much did you two men decide upon? How much to prostitute your wife?’
‘What a fool,’ Kasturba said contemptuously. ‘England-educated and what-all, but still with a head full of hay. You come talking so big-big, in your mother’s house etcetera, but maybe you didn’t love her so much. But we loved her, we all. We three. And in this manner we may keep her spirit alive.’
‘It is pooja, you could say,’ came Vallabh’s quiet voice. ‘An act of worship.’
‘And you,’ Changez Chamchawala spoke as softly as his servant, ‘you come here to this temple. With your unbelief. Mister, you’ve got a nerve.’
And finally, the treason of Zeenat Vakil. ‘Come off it, Salad,’ she said, moving to sit on the arm of the Chesterfield next to the old man. ‘Why be such a sourpuss? You’re no angel, baby, and these people seem to have worked things out okay.’
Saladin’s mouth opened and shut. Changez patted Zeeny on the knee. ‘He came to accuse, dear. He came to avenge his youth, but we have turned the tables and he is confused. Now we must let him have his chance, and you must referee. I will not be sentenced by him, but I will accept the worst from you.’
The bastard. Old bastard. He wanted me off-balance, and here I am, knocked sideways. I won’t speak, why should I, not like this, the humiliation. ‘There was,’ said Saladin Chamcha, ‘a wallet of pounds, and there was a roasted chicken.’
Of what did the son accuse the father? Of everything: espionage on child-self, rainbow-pot-stealing, exile. Of turning him into what he might not have become. Of making-a-man of. Of what-will-I-tell-my-friends. Of irreparable sunderings and offensive forgiveness. Of succumbing to Allah-worship with new wife and also to blasphemous worship of late spouse. Above all, of magiclampism, of being an open-sesamist. Everything had come easily to him, charm, women, wealth, power, position. Rub, poof, genie, wish, at once master, hey presto. He was a father who had promised, and then withheld, a magic lamp.
Changez, Zeeny, Vallabh, Kasturba remained motionless and silent until Saladin Chamcha came to a flushed, embarrassed halt. ‘Such violence of the spirit after so long,’ Changez said after a silence. ‘So sad. A quarter of a century and still the son begrudges the peccadilloes of the past. O my son. You must stop carrying me around like a parrot on your shoulder. What am I? Finished. I’m not your Old Man of the Sea. Face it, mister: I don’t explain you any more.’
Through a window Saladin Chamcha caught sight of a forty-year-old walnut-tree. ‘Cut it down,’ he said to his father. ‘Cut it, sell it, send me the cash.’
Chamchawala rose to his feet, and extended his right hand. Zeeny, also rising, took it like a dancer accepting a bouquet; at once, Vallabh and Kasturba diminished into servants, as if a clock had silently chimed pumpkin-time. ‘Your book,’ he said to Zeeny. ‘I have something you’d like to see.’
The two of them left the room; impotent Saladin, after a moment’s floundering, stamped petulantly in their wake. ‘Sour-puss,’ Zeeny called gaily over her shoulder. ‘Come on, snap out of it, grow up.’
The Chamchawala art collection, housed here at Scandal Point, included a large group of the legendary Hamza-nama cloths, members of that sixteenth-century sequence depicting scenes from the life of a hero who may or may not have been the same Hamza as the famous one, Muhammad’s uncle whose liver was eaten by the Meccan woman Hind as he lay dead on the battlefield of Uhud. ‘I like these pictures,’ Changez Chamchawala told Zeeny, ‘because the hero is permitted to fail. See how often he has to be rescued from his troubles.’ The pictures also provided eloquent proof of Zeeny Vakil’s thesis about the eclectic, hybridized nature of the Indian artistic tradition. The Mughals had brought artists from every part of India to work on the paintings; individual identity was submerged to create a many-headed, many-brushed Over-artist who, literally, was Indian painting. One hand would draw the mosaic floors, a second the figures, a third would paint the Chinese-looking cloudy skies. On the backs of the cloths were the stories that accompanied the scenes. The pictures would be shown like a movie: held up while someone read out the hero’s tale. In the Hamza-nama you could see the Persian miniature fusing with Kannada and Keralan painting styles, you could see Hindu and Muslim philosophy forming their characteristically late-Mughal synthesis.
A giant was trapped in a pit and his human tormentors were spearing him in the forehead. A man sliced vertically from the top of his head to his groin still held his sword as he fell. Everywhere, bubbling spillages of blood. Saladin Chamcha took a grip on himself. ‘The savagery,’ he said loudly in his English voice. ‘The sheer barbaric love of pain.’
Changez Chamchawala ignored his son, had eyes only for Zeeny; who gazed straight back into his own. ‘Ours is a government of philistines, young lady, don’t you agree? I have offered this whole collection free gratis, did you know? Let them only house it properly, let them build a place. Condition of cloths is not A-1, you see … they won’t do it. No interest. Meanwhile I get offers every month from Amrika. Offers of what-what size! You wouldn’t believe. I don’t sell. Our heritage, my dear, every day the USA is taking it away. Ravi Varma paintings, Chandela bronzes, Jaisalmer lattices. We sell ourselves, isn’t it? They drop their wallets on the ground and we kneel at their feet. Our Nandi bulls end up in some gazebo in Texas. But you know all this. You know India is a free country today.’ He stopped, but Zeeny waited; there was more to come. It came: ‘One day I will also take the dollars. Not for the money. For the pleasure of being a whore. Of becoming nothing. Less than nothing.’ And now, at last, the real storm, the words behind the words, less than nothing. ‘When I die,’ Changez Chamchawala said to Zeeny, ‘what will I be? A pair of emptied shoes. That is my fate, that he has made for me. This actor. This pretender. He has made himself into an imitator of non-existing men. I have nobody to follow me, to give what I have made. This is his revenge: he steals from me my posterity.’ He smiled, patted her hand, released her into the care of his son. ‘I have told her,’ he said to Saladin. ‘You are still carrying your takeaway chicken. I have told her my complaint. Now she must judge. That was the arrangement.’
Zeenat Vakil walked up to the old man in his outsize suit, put her hands on his cheeks, and kissed him on the lips.
After Zeenat betrayed him in the house of his father’s perversions, Saladin Chamcha refused to see her or answer the messages she left at the hotel desk. The Millionairess came to the end of its run; the tour was over. Time to go home. After the closing-night party Chamcha headed for bed. In the elevator a young and clearly honeymooning couple were listening to music on headphones. The young man murmured to his wife: ‘Listen, tell me. Do I still seem a stranger to you sometimes?’ The girl, smiling fondly, shook her head, can’t hear, removed the headphones. He repeated, gravely: ‘A stranger, to you, don’t I still sometimes seem?’ She, with unfaltering smile, laid her cheek for an instant on his high scrawny shoulder. ‘Yes, once or twice,’ she said, and put the headphones on again. He did the same, seeming fully satisfied by her answer. Their bo
dies took on, once again, the rhythms of the playback music. Chamcha got out of the lift. Zeeny was sitting on the floor with her back against his door.
Inside the room, she poured herself a large whisky and soda. ‘Behaving like a baby,’ she said. ‘You should be ashamed.’
That afternoon he had received a package from his father. Inside it was a small piece of wood and a large number of notes, not rupees but sterling pounds: the ashes, so to speak, of a walnut-tree. He was full of inchoate feeling and because Zeenat had turned up she became the target. ‘You think I love you?’ he said, speaking with deliberate viciousness. ‘You think I’ll stay with you? I’m a married man.’
‘I didn’t want you to stay for me,’ she said. ‘For some reason, I wanted it for you.’
A few days earlier, he had been to see an Indian dramatization of a story by Sartre on the subject of shame. In the original, a husband suspects his wife of infidelity and sets a trap to catch her out. He pretends to leave on a business trip, but returns a few hours later to spy on her. He is kneeling to look through the keyhole of their front door. Then he feels a presence behind him, turns without rising, and there she is, looking down at him with revulsion and disgust. This tableau, he kneeling, she looking down, is the Sartrean archetype. But in the Indian version the kneeling husband felt no presence behind him; was surprised by the wife; stood to face her on equal terms; blustered and shouted; until she wept, he embraced her, and they were reconciled.
‘You say I should be ashamed,’ Chamcha said bitterly to Zeenat. ‘You, who are without shame. As a matter of fact, this may be a national characteristic. I begin to suspect that Indians lack the necessary moral refinement for a true sense of tragedy, and therefore cannot really understand the idea of shame.’