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

so much disease you can’t even drink water from the tap, my god, he really got an education, husband, our little Sallu, England-returned, and talking so fine and all.’
    They were walking on the lawn in the evening, watching the sun dive into the sea, wandering in the shade of those great spreading trees, some snaky some bearded, which Salahuddin (who now called himself Saladin after the fashion of the English school, but would remain Chamchawala for a while yet, until a theatrical agent shortened his name for commercial reasons) had begun to be able to name, jackfruit, banyan, jacaranda, flame of the forest, plane. Small chhooi-mooi touch-me-not plants grew at the foot of the tree of his own life, the walnut-tree that Changez had planted with his own hands on the day of the coming of the son. Father and son at the birth-tree were both awkward, unable to respond properly to Nasreen’s gentle fun. Saladin had been seized by the melancholy notion that the garden had been a better place before he knew its names, that something had been lost which he would never be able to regain. And Changez Chamchawala found that he could no longer look his son in the eye, because the bitterness he saw came close to 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 canfeel 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 theEngland-returned upper lip, had lost his nerve. Nasreen Chamchawala fell, twitched, gasped, died, and when the all-clear sounded the guests