Joseph Anton: A Memoir Read online

  Over dinner Safwan, Guljum’s husband and a successful electronic engineer, told a strange story. He claimed to have personally smuggled into Pakistan the world’s fastest computer, the so-called FPS or Floating Point System, which boasted something called VAX “accessing equipment.” This computer could make seventy-six million calculations a second. The human brain could make just eighteen. “Even top ordinary computers,” he said, “can only make one million calculations.” Then he explained that the FPS was essential for the building of the Islamic nuclear bomb. Even in the United States there were only about twenty such computers. “If it was known that we have one sitting in our Lahore warehouse,” he said, smiling happily, “all international aid to Pakistan would be canceled.”

  This was Pakistan. When he visited Pakistan he lived in the bubble of his family, and a few friends who were really Sameen’s old friends, not his. Outside the bubble was a country from which he had always felt profoundly alien. Every so often news like Safwan’s, from outside the bubble, would make him want to catch the first plane out and never return. Such news was invariably delivered by sweet-natured, smiling people, and in the contradiction between their nature and their deeds lay the schizophrenia that was tearing the country apart.

  In the end Safwan and Guljum separated and that beautiful girl began a long slide toward immense, shocking obesity, mental problems, and drug abuse. One day, in her midforties, she would be found dead in her bed, the youngest child of four and the first to depart. Because he was banned from the country he was unable to attend her funeral, just as he had been unable to bury his mother. When Negin Rushdie died a Pakistani newspaper ran an article saying that all those who had been at her funeral should beg forgiveness of God because she was the mother of the apostate author. These were additional reasons for disliking Pakistan.

  Anis’s moment came in the middle of the night on November 11, 1987, less than two days after his return home from hospital. Salman had to take him to the toilet and clean him after the black diarrhea leaked out of him. Then he vomited immensely into a bucket and they put him in the car and Sameen drove like the wind to the Aga Khan hospital. Afterward he thought they should have kept him at home and let him slip quietly away, but at the time they all deluded themselves that the hospital could save his life, so that they could keep him for a while longer. It would have been better to spare him the useless violence of the electricity in his last moments. But he was not spared, and it did not work, and then he was gone, and Negin, in spite of her long difficult marriage, sank to the ground and wailed, “He swore he would never leave me and now he has gone and what will I do?”

  He put his arm around his mother. He would look after her now.

  The Aga Khan hospital, the best facility in Karachi, was free to all Ismailis but extremely expensive for non-Ismailis, which was fair enough, he thought. They would not release his father’s body until the bill was paid. Fortunately he had an American Express card in his pocket and used it to buy his father back from the hospital where he had died. When they brought him home, the impression of his body was still visible in his bedsheets and his old slippers sat on the floor. The men came, family and friends, because this was a hot country and the burial would take place in a few hours. He should have been the one making the arrangements but he was helpless in this alien land and didn’t know who to call and so Sameen’s friends found the graveyard and arranged for a bier and even—this was compulsory—summoned a mullah from the local mosque, a modern building that looked like a poured-concrete version of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome.

  They washed Anis—it was the first time he had ever seen his father’s naked body—and the shroud tailor sewed him into his winding sheet. The cemetery was nearby and when the bier arrived, fragrant with flowers and sandalwood shavings, the grave yawned ready. The grave digger stood at the foot end while he climbed down at the head end and they lowered Anis into the hole. To stand in his father’s grave and place his hand under the dead man’s shrouded head, to lay that head upon its last resting place, was a thing of immense power. He felt sad that his father, a man of great culture and learning, born in Ghalib’s Old Delhi muhallah of Ballimaran and afterward for decades a happy Bombayite, should have come to so poor an end in a place that had not proved to be good for him and had never felt like his. Anis Ahmed Rushdie was a disappointed man but at least he had ended his days knowing that he was loved. As he climbed out of the grave he tore the nail on the big toe of his left foot and had to go to the local Jinnah hospital for a tetanus shot.

  In the years that followed Anis visited his son’s dreams perhaps once a month. In those dreams he was invariably affectionate, witty, wise, understanding and supportive: the best of fathers. It struck him that their relationship after Anis’s death was a big improvement on the way things had been when his father was still alive.

  Saladin Chamcha in The Satanic Verses had a difficult relationship with his father, Changez Chamchawala, as well. In the original plan for the novel Changez died, too, but his son didn’t get back to Bombay in time to see him before the end, and as a result was left carrying the burden of the unresolved conflict between them. But the happiness and deep feeling of those six days with his own father was the most important thing he brought back to London from Karachi. He made a big decision: He would allow Saladin and Changez to have the experience he had had with Anis. His father had only just died but he would write about his death. He was worried about the morality of doing this. Was it wrong, ghoulish, vampiric? He didn’t know the answer. He told himself that if, in the doing of it, he felt that it was a sleazy thing to do, then he would destroy those pages and return to the original plan.

  He used much that was true, even the details of the medication he had had to give Anis in those last days. “Apart from the daily Melphalan tablet, [Changez] had been prescribed a whole battery of drugs in an attempt to combat the cancer’s pernicious side-effects: anaemia, the strain on the heart, and so on. Isosorbide dinitrate, two tablets, four times a day; Furosemide, one tablet, three times; Prednisolone, six tablets, twice daily.” And so on. Agarol, Spironolactone, Allopurinol. An army of wonder drugs marched from reality into fiction.

  He wrote about shaving his father’s face—about Saladin shaving Changez’s face—and about the dying man’s uncomplaining courage in the face of death. “First one falls in love with one’s father all over again, and then one learns to look up to him, too.” He wrote about the black diarrhea and the vomiting and the voltage and the bedsheets and the slippers and the washing of the body and the burial. And he wrote this: “He is teaching me how to die, Salahuddin thought. He does not avert his eyes, but looks death right in the face. At no point in his dying did Changez Chamchawala speak the name of God.”

  That was how Anis Ahmed Rushdie died as well.

  As he wrote this ending, it did not feel exploitative. It felt respectful. When it was complete, he knew it would remain in the book.

  The day he left London to be with his father, Marianne found a scrap of paper in one of his trouser pockets. On it, in his handwriting, was Robyn’s name and a line from a Beatles song, excites me like no other lover. He didn’t recall writing it, or know how long the paper had been in his pocket—he hadn’t seen Robyn in well over a year, and the note had probably been sitting in the pocket for longer than that—but it made Marianne jealous, and their parting was harsh. They had planned to celebrate her fortieth birthday in Paris. That would not happen now, because of Anis’s illness.

  He was still full of the emotion engendered by Anis’s death when—in a long-distance telephone call—he asked Marianne to marry him. She accepted his proposal. On January 23, 1988, they were married at Finsbury Town Hall, had a wedding lunch with friends at Frederick’s restaurant in Islington, and then spent the night at the Ritz. He only learned years afterward that his sister Sameen and his closest friends had been full of foreboding about the match but had not known how to tell him not to do it.

  Four days lat
er he wrote in his diary: “How easy it is to destroy a man! Your invented foe: how easily you can crush him; how fast he crumbles! Evil: ease is its seduction.” Afterward he could not remember why he had written this. No doubt it was a thought for some aspect of his work in progress, though it did not make it into the finished book. But a year later it felt like—well, like a prophecy.

  He also wrote this: “If I ever finish The Satanic Verses, in spite of emotional upheavals, divorce, house move, Nicaragua book, India film, et al., I will, I feel, have completed my ‘first business,’ that of naming the parts of myself. Then there will be nothing left to write about; except, of course, the whole of human life.”

  At 4:10 P.M. on Tuesday, February 16, 1988, he wrote in his diary in capital letters, “I REACHED THE END.” On Wednesday, February 17, he made minor revisions and “declared the book finished.” On Thursday he made photocopies and delivered the book to his agents. That weekend Sameen and Pauline began to read The Satanic Verses. Sameen finished reading it by Monday and was for the most part delighted by it. But the description of Changez’s death left her feeling very disturbed. “I kept wanting to say, ‘I was there, too. He didn’t say that to you, he said it to me. You didn’t do that for him, I did it.’ But you have left me out of the story, and now everyone will always think that this is the way it was.” He had no defenses against her accusations. “It’s okay,” she told him. “I’ve said my piece now. I’ll get over it.”

  When a book leaves its author’s desk it changes. Even before anyone has read it, before eyes other than its creator’s have looked upon a single phrase, it is irretrievably altered. It has become a book that can be read, that no longer belongs to its maker. It has acquired, in a sense, free will. It will make its journey through the world and there is no longer anything the author can do about it. Even he, as he looks at its sentences, reads them differently now that they can be read by others. They look like different sentences. The book has gone out into the world and the world has remade it.

  The Satanic Verses had left home. Its metamorphosis, its transformation by its engagement with the world beyond the author’s desk, would be unusually extreme.

  Throughout the writing of the book he had kept a note to himself pinned to the wall above his desk. “To write a book is to make a Faustian contract in reverse,” it said. “To gain immortality, or at least posterity, you lose, or at least ruin, your actual daily life.”

  II

  “Manuscripts Don’t Burn”

  “Tell me, why does Margarita call you the master?” enquired Woland.

  The man laughed and said:

  “An understandable weakness of hers. She has too high an opinion of a novel that I’ve written.”

  “Which novel?”

  “A novel about Pontius Pilate.” …

  “About what? About whom?” said Woland, ceasing to laugh.

  “But that’s extraordinary! In this day and age? Couldn’t you have chosen another subject? Let me have a look.” Woland stretched out his hand palm uppermost.

  “Unfortunately I cannot show it to you,” replied the master, “because I burned it in my stove.”

  “I’m sorry but I don’t believe you,” said Woland. “You can’t have done. Manuscripts don’t burn.” He turned to Behemoth and said: “Come on, Behemoth, give me the novel.”

  The cat jumped down from its chair and where he had been sitting was a pile of manuscripts. With a bow the cat handed the top copy to Woland. Margarita shuddered and cried out, moved to tears: “There’s the manuscript! There it is!”

  —The Devil, Woland, gives the master back his destroyed novel in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita

  IN THE SMALL HOURS OF FEBRUARY 15, 1989, HE LAY UNQUIET IN BED beside his sleeping wife. In the morning he would be visited by a senior officer from “A” Squad of the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police, which was in charge of all personal protection in the United Kingdom (except for the protection of the royal family, which was the job of the Royal Protection Squad). The Special Branch had originally been the Special Irish Branch, created, in 1883, to combat the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and until recently the main threats against which it protected individuals—the prime minister, the defense secretary, the foreign secretary, the Northern Ireland secretary, and various outspoken members of Parliament—came from the Brotherhood’s descendants, the Provisional IRA. But terrorism had diversified and its opponents had to take on new enemies. Jewish community leaders required protection from time to time after receiving credible Islamist threats. And now there was this novelist, too, lying insomniac in the dark in Lonsdale Square. A mullah with a long arm was reaching out across the world to squeeze the life out of him. That was a police matter.

  The man from the Branch would be accompanied by an intelligence officer and they would tell him what security decisions had been made concerning the threat. Threat was a technical term, and it was not the same as risk. The threat level was general, but risk levels were specific. The level of threat against an individual might be high—and it was for the intelligence services to determine this—but the level of risk attached to a particular action by that individual might be much lower, for example if nobody knew what he was planning to do, or when. Risk assessment was the job of the police protection team. These were concepts he would have to master, because threat and risk assessments would, from now on, shape his daily life. In the meanwhile he was thinking about the island of Mauritius.

  Ten days after he delivered The Satanic Verses, Marianne finished her new novel, John Dollar, a novel involving cannibalism among characters marooned on a desert island that she insisted—unwisely, to his mind—on calling “a feminist Lord of the Flies.” On the night of the 1988 Booker Prize dinner, when The Satanic Verses finished runner-up to Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda, she even described it in these words to William Golding himself. This was most definitely unwise. Two days after she delivered her book they flew, along with Marianne’s daughter Lara Porzak, a junior at Dartmouth and a budding photographer, to Mauritius on vacation. It was not a desert island, fortunately, so there was no “long pork” on the menu. It was his first ever experience of an “island paradise” holiday, and he was ready for a little lazy hedonism; the novel had drained him more completely than anything he had written before. While they were on the beach, Andrew Wylie in New York and Gillon Aitken in London sent out copies of The Satanic Verses and the wheels of the publishing business began to turn. He swam in water so warm that when you walked into it there was no alteration in temperature, and watched tropical sunsets, and drank drinks with fruit and umbrellas in them, and dined on the delicious local fish called sacréchien, and thought about Sonny Mehta at Knopf, Peter Mayer at Viking, and editors at Doubleday, Collins and elsewhere reading his big, strange book. He had brought a sack of books to read or re-read to take his mind off the forthcoming auction. He was considerably anxious to know its outcome, but during those idyllic days lapped by the Indian Ocean it was impossible to believe that anything might go wrong.

  He should have paid attention to the birds. The dead flightless birds who had been unable to soar away from their predators, who tore them apart. Mauritius was the world capital, the extermination camp and mass graveyard, of extinct flightless birds.

  “L’île Maurice,” unusually for an island of its size, until the seventeenth century had no human population at all. However, forty-five species of bird had lived there, many of them unable to leave the ground, including the red rail, the solitaire, and the dodo. Then came the Dutch, who stayed there only from 1638 to 1710, but by the time they left all the dodoes were dead, slaughtered, for the most part, by the settlers’ dogs. In all, twenty-four of the island’s forty-five bird species were driven into extinction, as well as the previously plentiful tortoises and other creatures. There was a skeleton of a dodo in the museum in Port Louis. Its flesh had been revolting to human beings, but the dogs had been less picky. The dogs saw a helpless creature and ripped i
t to bits. They were trained hunting dogs, after all. They were unfamiliar with mercy.

  The Dutch, and the French colonists who followed them, both imported African slaves to cultivate sugarcane. These slaves were not treated kindly. Punishments included amputations and executions. The British conquered Mauritius in 1810 and in 1835 slavery was abolished. Almost all the slaves immediately fled the island on which they had been so cruelly used. To replace them the British shipped in a new population of indentured laborers from India. Most of the Indians living in Mauritius in 1988 had never seen India, but many still spoke an Indian dialect, Bhojpuri, which in a century and a half had undergone some local creolization but was still recognizable, and they were still Hindus and Muslims. To meet an Indian from India, an Indian who had walked real Indian streets and eaten real Indian pomfret instead of Mauritian sacréchien, who had been warmed by the Indian sun and drenched by the monsoon rains and who had gone swimming off the Indian coast in the actual Arabian Sea, was a kind of miracle. He was a visitor from an antique and mythic land, and they opened their homes to him. One of Mauritius’s leading Hindi-language poets, who had in fact recently been to India for the first time in his life to attend a poetry congress, told him that his reading had mystified Indian audiences, because he read to convey meaning, in the manner that was “normal” to him, instead of declaiming his lines rhythmically, in the habitual fashion of Indian Hindi poets. It was a small cultural shift in “normality,” a minor side effect of the migration of his indentured forebears, but it had had a profound impact on the distinguished poet, showing him that for all his mastery of India’s largest language, he could not truly belong. The émigré Indian author to whom this story was told understood that belonging was a big, uneasy subject for them both. They had to answer questions that immobile one-place one-language one-culture writers did not, and they had to satisfy themselves that their answers were true. Who were they, and to what and whom did they belong? Or was the idea of belonging itself a trap, a cage from which they had been lucky enough to escape? He had concluded that the questions needed to be rephrased. The questions he knew how to answer were not about place or roots, but about love. Who do you love? What can you leave behind, and what do you need to hold on to? Where does your heart feel full?