Joseph Anton: A Memoir Read online

  Back in London he remembered the invitation to Nicaragua. Maybe, he thought, it would do him good to get away from his small literary difficulties and go and report on people with real problems. He flew to Managua in July. When he returned several weeks later he had been so affected by what he saw that he could not stop thinking or talking about it and became a Nicaragua bore. The only way forward was to write his feelings down. He sat at his desk in a sort of frenzy and wrote a ninety-page text in three weeks. That was neither one thing nor another, too short to be a book, too long to be an article. In the end, revised and expanded, it did grow into a short book, The Jaguar Smile. The day he finished it, he dedicated it to Robyn Davidson (they were still just about together then) and gave it to her to read. When she saw the dedication she said, “I suppose this means I won’t get the novel,” and the conversation spiraled downward from there.

  His agent Deborah Rogers didn’t much care for The Jaguar Smile, but it was rush-published by Sonny Mehta at Picador UK and, soon afterward, by Elisabeth Sifton at Viking USA. On his U.S. book tour a radio talk-show host in San Francisco, displeased by the book’s opposition to the American economic blockade of Nicaragua and the Reagan administration’s support of the contra forces fighting to topple the Sandinista government, asked him, “Mr. Rushdie, to what extent are you a Communist stooge?” His surprised laughter—this was on live radio—annoyed his host more than any answer he might have given.

  His favorite moments came when he was being interviewed by Bianca Jagger, herself a Nicaraguan, for Interview magazine. Whenever he mentioned a prominent Nicaraguan, whether left- or right-wing, Bianca would reply, vaguely, neutrally, “Oh, yes, I used to date him once.” This was the truth about Nicaragua. It was a small country with a very small elite class. The warring combatants had all gone to school together, were all members of that elite and knew one another’s families, or even, in the case of the divided Chamorro dynasty, came from the same family; and they had all dated one another. Bianca’s (unwritten) version of events would be more interesting—certainly more intimate—than his own.

  Once The Jaguar Smile had been published he returned to his troublesome novel, and discovered that the problems had largely disappeared. Unusually for him, he had not written the book in narrative sequence. The interpolated passages—the story of the village that walked into the sea, the account of an imam who first led and then ate a revolution, and the subsequently contentious dream sequences set in a city of sand named Jahilia (a name taken from the Arabic term for the period of “ignorance” that preceded the coming of Islam)—had been written first, and for a long time he hadn’t understood exactly how he should stitch them into the book’s main, framing narrative, the story of Saladin and Gibreel. But the break had done him good, and he began to write.

  Forty had weight. At forty a man came into his manhood and felt substantial, grounded, strong. On his thirtieth birthday he had thought himself a failure, and had been wretchedly unhappy. On his fortieth, on a golden June afternoon at Bruce Chatwin’s home, in a sylvan setting near Oxford, he was surrounded by literary friends—Angela Carter; Nuruddin Farah; Bill Buford, the editor of Granta; his own editor Liz Calder of Jonathan Cape (still an independent publishing company then, before it was gobbled up by Random House); and Bruce himself—and he was happy. Life seemed to have worked out as he had dreamed it might, and he was working on what felt like his most formally and intellectually ambitious book, whose obstacles had finally been overcome. The future was bright.

  It would soon be the fortieth anniversary of India’s independence—“Saleem’s fortieth birthday”—and he was persuaded by his friend Jane Wellesley, a television producer, another guest at his birthday party, to write and present a feature-length “state of the nation” documentary for Channel Four. His idea was to avoid public and political figures entirely, or almost entirely, and make a portrait of India at forty, a consideration of the “idea of India,” through the eyes and in the voices of forty-year-old Indians; not quite midnight’s children, but children of the year of freedom, at least. He embarked on his longest Indian journey since he and Clarissa had crisscrossed the country more than a decade earlier. This second journey was just as gluttonous. The Indian horn of plenty poured its excess of stories into him once again. Give me excess of it, he thought, that I may surfeit, and so die.

  On one of the first days of the shoot the project was almost derailed by a moment of cultural insensitivity. They were filming in the home of a Delhi tailor, in one of the poorer parts of the city. It was a very hot day and after a couple of hours the crew took a break. Crates of ice-cold fizzy drinks were brought from the back of a production van and distributed to everyone except the tailor and his family. He asked the director, Geoff Dunlop, for a private word and they went up to the flat roof of the tailor’s home and he told Geoff that if the situation wasn’t rectified at once he would walk off the film, and if anything like it ever happened again that would be the end of it for sure. Then it occurred to him to ask what sort of location fee was being paid. Geoff named a sum of rupees that converted to a very low sterling amount. “That isn’t what you’d pay in England,” he said. “You should give them your normal location fee.” “But,” Geoff said, “in India that would be a fortune.” “That isn’t your business,” he replied. “You have to treat people here with the same respect you’d show back home.” For a few beats there was a standoff between them. Then Geoff said, “Okay,” and they went back downstairs. The tailor and his family were offered cold Cokes. The rest of the shoot went smoothly.

  In Kerala he watched a famous oral storyteller work his magic. The interesting thing about this performance was that it broke all the rules. “Begin at the beginning,” the King of Hearts had instructed the flustered White Rabbit in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, “and go on until you come to the end; then stop.” This was how stories were meant to be told, according to whichever king of hearts had made up the rules, but this was not what happened in that open-air Keralan theater. The storyteller stirred stories into one another, digressed frequently from the main narrative, told jokes, sang songs, connected his political story to the ancient tales, made personal asides, and generally misbehaved. And yet the audience did not get up and walk out in disgust. It did not hiss or boo or throw vegetables or benches at the performer. Instead, it roared with laughter, wept in despair, and remained on the edge of its seat until he was done. Did it do so in spite of the storyteller’s complicated story-juggling act, or because of it? Might it be that this pyrotechnic way of telling might in fact be more engrossing than the King of Hearts’ preferred version—that the oral story, the most ancient of narrative forms, had survived because of its adoption of complexity and playfulness and its rejection of start-to-finish linearity? If so, then here in this warm Keralan night all his own thoughts about writing were being amply confirmed.

  If you gave ordinary people a voice, and enough time to use it, an everyday poetry flowed movingly from them. A Muslim woman sleeping in a jhopadpatti, a Bombay sidewalk shack, spoke of her suspicions about her children’s willingness to care for her in later life. “When I am old, when I must walk with a stick, then we’ll see what they will do.” He asked her what it meant to her to be an Indian and she answered that she had lived all her life in India and “when I die and am put in my grave, then I will go into India.” A sweetly smiling Communist lady in Kerala worked hard in the rice fields all day and then came home to her much older husband, who sat on their veranda rolling beedis for money. “Since I got married,” she said, still smiling, and well within her husband’s earshot, “I have never had one day of joy.”

  There was some black comedy. The only politician he interviewed was Chaggan Bhujbal, the first mayor of Bombay to be a member of the Shiv Sena, the thuggish Marathi-nationalist and Hindu communalist party headed by a former political cartoonist, Bal Thackeray. Chaggan Bhujbal was a walking political cartoon. He allowed the TV crew to accompany him to the annual Ganpati celebrati
ons and film how that festival in honor of elephant-headed Ganesh, which was once a day of celebration for members of all religious backgrounds, had been reduced to a fist-pumping, neo-Nazi assertion of Hindu power. “You can call us fascist,” he said. “We are fascist. And you can call us racist. We are racist.” On his desk, in his office, was a telephone in the shape of a green plastic frog. The brilliant cameraman, Mike Fox, unobtrusively filmed it. But when they saw the rushes they decided to leave the frog out. It was impossible not to feel a little rush of love for a man who spoke vehemently to a green frog. They did not want the film’s viewers to feel that affection, and so the frog was left on the cutting-room floor. But nothing is ever lost. The frog, and the name Mainduck (frog), would eventually make their way into The Moor’s Last Sigh.

  The great mosque of Old Delhi, the Juma Masjid, was flying black flags to mark the killings of Muslims in the town of Meerut. He wanted to film at the mosque and old Imam Bukhari, a firebrand and an ultraconservative, agreed to meet him because “Salman Rushdie” was a Muslim name. He met the imam in his “garden,” a heavily cordoned-off area of earth and stone and not a single blade of grass. The imam, gap-toothed, ample, fierce, his beard tinged with henna, sat in an armchair with his legs spread wide and an enormous number of crumpled currency notes in his lap. Aides stood all around, guarding him. Next to him there was an empty chair with a woven cane seat. As he spoke he smoothed and rolled the rupee notes one by one until they looked like the beedis another old man had been rolling on a veranda in Kerala. When he was satisfied with his work on a banknote he stuck it into one of the holes in the cane seat bottom, which quickly filled up with these rupee-beedis, the largest notes nearest the imam, the lower denominations farthest away. “Yes,” he said. “You can film.” After the Khomeini fatwa this same Imam Bukhari denounced the author of The Satanic Verses from the pulpit of the Juma Masjid without knowing that they had once had a more or less cordial encounter. But he made a mistake. He failed to remember the author’s name correctly and denounced “Salman Khurshid” instead. Salman Khurshid was a prominent Muslim politician. This was embarrassing, both for the imam and for the “wrong Salman.”

  In Kashmir he spent several days with a group of traveling players who performed bhand pather or, literally, “clown stories,” of Kashmiri history and legend, one of the last such troupes, driven to near penury by the harshness and violence of the political situation in Kashmir, but also by movies and TV. They were eloquent about their lives and ferocious in their criticisms of the authoritarian Indian military and security forces; but whenever the camera was turned on they lied. Too afraid of the consequences to be honest on the record, they said, “Oh, we love the Indian Army.” Because he could not get their story on film he had to cut them out of the final version of the documentary, but he never forgot their unfilmed stories, never forgot the woodland glade full of tumbling and tightrope-walking children where a next generation of “clowns” was being trained, clowns who might no longer have an audience to perform to, who might even, when they were grown, relinquish the fake swords of actors and pick up the real guns of the Islamic jihad. Many years later they became the heart of his “Kashmir novel” Shalimar the Clown.

  Most eloquent of all his witnesses was R., a Sikh woman living in a Delhi tenement whose husband and children had been murdered before her eyes by the mobs, incited and perhaps even directed by Congress Party leaders, who had “taken revenge” against the entire Sikh community for the assassination of Indira Gandhi on October 31, 1984, by two Sikh bodyguards, Beant Singh and Satwant Singh, who were loyal to the separatist Khalistan movement and killed her to avenge the attack on the Sikh holy of holies, the Golden Temple, where the leader of the movement, Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, had holed up with many of his gunmen. Three years later the widow, R., had the grace and strength to say, “I don’t want revenge, or violence, or Khalistan. I just want justice. That is all I want.”

  To his amazement the Indian authorities had refused him permission to film her, or any material related to the Sikh killings. But he managed to get her testimony on audiotape and in the finished film her photograph was one of many such widows used in a photo montage that was if anything even more powerful than her moving image would have been. The Indian High Commission in London reacted by trying to force Channel Four to cancel the screening of the documentary. But the screening went ahead as scheduled. It was astonishing that—as an aspect of the cover-up of the ruling party’s involvement in the atrocities, during which many thousands of Sikhs died—the Indian government had tried to suppress the testimony, not of a terrorist, but of a victim of terrorism; and laudable that the television network had had the courage and principle to reject their appeal.

  To leave India was to feel replete: full of ideas, arguments, images, sounds, smells, faces, stories, sensuality, intensity, and love. He did not know it then, but this was the beginning of a long exile. After India became the first country in the world to ban The Satanic Verses it would also refuse to give him a travel visa. (UK citizens needed visas to visit India.) He would not be allowed to come back, to come home, for twelve and a half years.

  He heard about his father’s cancer while they were editing the film, which was now called The Riddle of Midnight. His brother-in-law Safwan, married to his youngest sister, Nabeelah (known in the family as “Guljum,” sweetheart), called from Karachi to say that Anis had multiple myeloma, cancer of the bone marrow. He was receiving treatment, but there wasn’t much that could be done. There was one drug, Melphalan, that could give him some months, maybe even a couple of years, if he responded to it well. It wasn’t clear yet how he was responding, so it was hard to say how long he had. “What should I do?” he wondered. “Maybe Sameen and I should come one after the other, because then Amma would always have one of us there at least.” (Sameen had returned to live in London, working in community relations.) There was a pause and then Safwan gravely said, “Salman bhai, just come. Just get on a plane and come.” He spoke to Jane Wellesley and Geoff Dunlop and they both agreed at once. “Just go.” Two days later he arrived in Pakistan, and was there in time for the last six days of his father’s life.

  They were loving days, a kind of return to innocence. He had agreed with himself to un-know all the bad things, the overheard parental quarrels of his childhood, the drunken abuse to which he had been subjected in the Cumberland Hotel in London in January 1961, and the day he punched his father on the jaw. He had been twenty years old and suddenly Anis’s alcoholic rages were too much to take, especially because on this occasion his mother had been the target. He hit his father and then thought, Oh, god, now he’s going to hit me back. Anis was short but very strong, with butcher’s forearms, and a blow from him would have been devastating. But Anis did not hit his son—he just walked silently away, feeling ashamed. None of that mattered now. Anis in the Aga Khan hospital in Karachi was no longer strong. His face was drawn and his body emaciated. He looked gentle, and ready. “I told them from the beginning it was a cancer,” he said. “I asked them, where has all the blood gone?” Long ago, when he read Midnight’s Children, Anis had been incensed by the character of “Ahmed Sinai,” also a father with a drinking problem. He had refused to speak to his son and had threatened to divorce his wife for “putting the boy up to it.” He had calmed down when the book became a success and his friends called to congratulate him. He told Salman, “When you have a baby on your lap, sometimes it wets you, but you forgive it.” After which the son felt insulted by the father, and the strain between them remained. All that was gone now. Anis held his son’s hand and whispered to him, “I was angry because every word you wrote was true.”

  In the next days they re-created their love until it was there, theirs again, as if it had never been lost. In Proust’s great novel-sequence the aim is to recapture the past not through the distorting prism of memory but as it was. This was what they were able to do with love. L’amour retrouvé. Tenderly, one afternoon, he picked up an electric s
haver and shaved his father’s face.

  Anis was weak, and after a few days he wanted to go home. The house in Karachi was the opposite of Windsor Villa in Bombay, a modern split-level building rather than an old villa. There were frogs croaking in the empty swimming pool, sitting in the small puddle of green stagnant water in the deep end and singing through the night. Once when Anis was healthy he had been driven mad by the racket and had run downstairs from his bedroom in the middle of the night and swatted many of the frogs with a rubber swimming flipper. He knocked out several of them but did not kill them. By the morning they had all regained consciousness and had hopped away, out of sight. Clearly frogs were made of rubber too.

  Now Anis could not go upstairs to his bedroom. A bed was made for him in his study on the ground floor and he lay there surrounded by books. It turned out he was flat broke. In the top left-hand desk drawer there were blocks of five-hundred-rupee notes, and that was all the money he had left. His bank accounts were in the red. There were some small debts against the house. He had reached the end of the line.