Read Online The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie - Free Book Online Page A

freezing his heart. When he spoke,
turning roughly away from the eighteen-year-old walnut in which, at times
during their long separations, he had imagined his only son's soul to reside,
the words came out incorrectly and made him sound like the rigid, cold figure
he had hoped he would never become, and feared he could not avoid.
               
"Tell your son," Changez boomed at Nasreen, "that if he went
abroad to learn contempt for his own kind, then his own kind can feel nothing
but scorn for him. What is he? A fauntleroy, a grand panjandrum? Is this my
fate: to lose a son and find a freak?"
               
"Whatever I am, father dear," Saladin told the older man, "I owe
it all to you."
               
It was their last family chat. All that summer feelings continued to run high,
for all Nasreen's attempts at mediation, you must apologize to your father,
darling, poor man is suffering like the devil but his pride won't let him hug
you . Even the ayah Kasturba and the old bearer Vallabh, her husband,
attempted to mediate but neither father nor son would bend. "Same material
is the problem," Kasturba told Nasreen. "Daddy and sonny, same
material, same to same."
               
When the war with Pakistan began that September Nasreen decided, with a kind of
defiance, that she would not cancel her Friday parties, "to show that
Hindus-Muslims can love as well as hate," she pointed out. Changez saw a
look in her eyes and did not attempt to argue, but set the servants to putting
blackout curtains over all the windows instead. That night, for the last time,
Saladin Chamchawala played his old role of doorman, dressed up in an English
dinner-jacket, and when the guests came―the same old guests, dusted with
the grey powders of age but otherwise the same―they bestowed upon him the
same old pats and kisses, the nostalgic benedictions of his youth. "Look
how grown," they were saying. "Just a darling, what to say."
They were all trying to hide their fear of the war, danger of air-raids ,
the radio said, and when they ruffled Saladin's hair their hands were a little
too shaky, or alternatively a little too rough.
               
Late that evening the sirens sang and the guests ran for cover, hiding under
beds, in cupboards, anywhere. Nasreen Chamchawala found herself alone by a
food-laden table, and attempted to reassure the company by standing there in
her newsprint sari, munching a piece of fish as if nothing were the matter. So
it was that when she started choking on the fishbone of her death there was
nobody to help her, they were all crouching in corners with their eyes shut;
even Saladin, conqueror of kippers, Saladin of the England-returned upper lip,
had lost his nerve. Nasreen Chamchawala fell, twitched, gasped, died, and when
the all-clear sounded the guests emerged sheepishly to find their hostess
extinct in the middle of the dining-room, stolen away by the exterminating
angel, khali-pili khalaas, as Bombay-talk has it, finished off for no reason,
gone for good.
               
* * * * *
               
Less than a year after the death of Nasreen Chamchawala from her inability to
triumph over fishbones in the manner of her foreign-educated son, Changez married
again without a word of warning to anyone. Saladin in his English college
received a letter from his father commanding him, in the irritatingly orotund
and obsolescent phraseology that Changez always used in correspondence, to be
happy. "Rejoice," the letter said, "for what is lost is
reborn." The explanation for this somewhat cryptic sentence came lower
down in the aerogramme, and when Saladin learned that his new stepmother was
also called Nasreen, something went wrong in his head, and he wrote his father
a letter full of cruelty and anger, whose violence was of the type that exists
only between fathers and sons, and which differs from that between daughters
and mothers in that there lurks behind it the