Joseph Anton: A Memoir Read online

  Windsor Villa, Warden Road, Bombay-26. It was a house on a hill and it overlooked the sea and the city flowing between the hill and the sea; and yes, his father was rich, though he spent his life losing all that money and died broke, unable to pay off his debts, with a stash of rupee notes in the top left drawer of his desk that was all the cash he had left in the world. Anis Ahmed Rushdie (“B.A. Cantab., Bar-at-Law” it proudly said on the brass nameplate screwed into the wall by the front door of Windsor Villa) inherited a fortune from the textile magnate father whose only son he was, spent it, lost it, and then died, which could be the story of a happy life, but was not. His children knew certain things about him: that in the mornings he was cheerful until he shaved, and then, after the Philishave had done its work, he grew irritable and they were careful to keep out of his way; that when he took them to the beach on the weekend he would be lively and funny on the way there but angry on the way home; that when he played golf with their mother at the Willingdon Club she had to be careful to lose, though she was a stronger player than he, because it was not worth her while to win; and that when he was drunk he grimaced hideously at them, pulling his features into bizarre and terrifying positions, which frightened them horribly, and which no outsider ever saw, so that nobody understood what they meant when they said that their father “made faces.” But when they were little there were the stories and then sleep, and if they heard raised voices in another room, if they heard their mother crying, there was nothing they could do about it. They pulled their sheets over their heads and dreamed.

  Anis took his thirteen-year-old son to England in January 1961 and for a week or so, before he began his education at Rugby School, they shared a room in the Cumberland Hotel near the Marble Arch in London. By day they went shopping for the school’s prescribed items, tweed jackets, gray flannel trousers, Van Heusen shirts with detached semistiff collars that necessitated the use of collar studs that pressed into the boy’s neck and made it hard to breathe. They drank chocolate milk shakes at the Lyons Corner House on Coventry Street and they went to the Odeon Marble Arch to watch The Pure Hell of St. Trinian’s and he wished there were going to be girls at his boarding school. In the evening his father bought grilled chicken from the Kardomah takeout on Edgware Road and made him smuggle it into the hotel room inside his new double-breasted blue serge mackintosh. At night Anis got drunk and in the small hours would shake his horrified son awake to shout at him in language so filthy that it didn’t seem possible to the boy that his father could even know such words. Then they went to Rugby and bought a red armchair and said their goodbyes. Anis took a photograph of his son outside his boarding house in his blue-and-white-striped house cap and his chicken-scented mackintosh, and if you looked at the sadness in the boy’s eyes you would think he was sad to be going to school so far from home. But in fact the son couldn’t wait for the father to leave so that he could start trying to forget the nights of foul language and unprovoked, red-eyed rage. He wanted to put the sadness in the past and begin his future, and after that it was perhaps inevitable that he would make his life as far away from his father as he could, that he would put oceans between them and keep them there. When he graduated from Cambridge University and told his father he wanted to be a writer a pained yelp burst uncontrollably out of Anis’s mouth. “What,” he cried, “am I going to tell my friends?”

  But nineteen years later, on his son’s fortieth birthday, Anis Rushdie sent him a letter written in his own hand that became the most precious communication that writer had ever received or would receive. This was just five months before Anis’s death at seventy-seven of rapidly advancing multiple myeloma—cancer of the bone marrow. In that letter Anis showed how carefully and deeply he had read and understood his son’s books, how eagerly he looked forward to reading more of them, and how profoundly he felt the fatherly love he had spent half a lifetime failing to express. He lived long enough to be happy at the success of Midnight’s Children and Shame, but by the time the book that owed the greatest debt to him was published he was no longer there to read it. Perhaps that was a good thing, because he also missed the furor that followed; although one of the few things of which his son was utterly certain was that in the battle over The Satanic Verses he would have had his father’s unqualified, unyielding support. Without his father’s ideas and example to inspire him, in fact, that novel would never have been written. They fuck you up, your mum and dad? No, that wasn’t it at all. Well, they did do that, perhaps, but they also allowed you to become the person, and the writer, that you had it in you to be.

  The first gift he received from his father, a gift like a message in a time capsule, which he didn’t understand until he was an adult, was the family name. “Rushdie” was Anis’s invention; his father’s name had been quite a mouthful, Khwaja Muhammad Din Khaliqi Dehlavi, a fine Old Delhi name that sat well on that old-school gentleman glaring fiercely out of his only surviving photograph, that successful industrialist and part-time essayist who lived in a crumbling haveli in the famous old muhallah or neighborhood of Ballimaran, a warren of small winding lanes off Chandni Chowk that had been the home of the great Farsi and Urdu poet Ghalib. Muhammad Din Khaliqi died young, leaving his son a fortune (which he would squander) and a name that was too heavy to carry around in the modern world. Anis renamed himself “Rushdie” because of his admiration for Ibn Rushd, “Averroës” to the West, the twelfth-century Spanish-Arab philosopher of Córdoba who rose to become the qadi or judge of Seville, the translator of and acclaimed commentator upon the works of Aristotle. His son bore the name for two decades before he understood that his father, a true scholar of Islam who was also entirely lacking in religious belief, had chosen it because he respected Ibn Rushd for being at the forefront of the rationalist argument against Islamic literalism in his time; and twenty more years elapsed before the battle over The Satanic Verses provided a twentieth-century echo of that eight-hundred-year-old argument.

  “At least,” he told himself when the storm broke over his head, “I’m going into this battle bearing the right name.” From beyond the grave his father had given him the flag under which he was ready to fight, the flag of Ibn Rushd, which stood for intellect, argument, analysis and progress, for the freedom of philosophy and learning from the shackles of theology, for human reason and against blind faith, submission, acceptance and stagnation. Nobody ever wanted to go to war, but if a war came your way, it might as well be the right war, about the most important things in the world, and you might as well, if you were going to fight it, be called “Rushdie,” and stand where your father had placed you, in the tradition of the grand Aristotelian, Averroës, Abul Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd.

  They had the same voice, his father and he. When he answered the telephone at home Anis’s friends would begin to talk to him as if he were his father and he would have to stop them before they said anything embarrassing. They looked like each other, and when, during the smoother passages of their bumpy journey as father and son, they sat on a veranda in a warm evening with the scent of bougainvillea in their nostrils and argued passionately about the world, they both knew that although they disagreed on many topics they had the same cast of mind. And what they shared above all else was unbelief.

  Anis was a godless man—still a shocking statement to make in the United States, though an unexceptional one in Europe, and an incomprehensible idea in much of the rest of the world, where the thought of not believing is hard even to formulate. But that was what he was, a godless man who knew and thought a great deal about God. The birth of Islam fascinated him because it was the only one of the great world religions to be born within recorded history, whose prophet was not a legend described and glorified by “evangelists” writing a hundred years or more after the real man lived and died, or a dish recooked for easy global consumption by the brilliant proselytizer Saint Paul, but rather a man whose life was largely on the record, whose social and economic circumstances were well known, a man living in a time of profou
nd social change, an orphan who grew up to become a successful merchant with mystical tendencies, and who saw, one day on Mount Hira near Mecca, the Archangel Gabriel standing upon the horizon and filling the sky and instructing him to “recite” and thus, slowly, to create the book known as the Recitation: al-Qur’an.

  This passed from the father to the son: the belief that the story of the birth of Islam was fascinating because it was an event inside history, and that, as such, it was obviously influenced by the events and pressures and ideas of the time of its creation; that to historicize the story, to try to understand how a great idea was shaped by those forces, was the only possible approach to the subject; and that one could accept Muhammad as a genuine mystic—just as one could accept Joan of Arc’s voices as having genuinely been heard by her, or the revelations of Saint John the Divine as being that troubled soul’s “real” experiences—without needing also to accept that, had one been standing next to the Prophet of Islam on Mount Hira that day, one would also have seen the Archangel. Revelation was to be understood as an interior, subjective event, not an objective reality, and a revealed text was to be scrutinized like any other text, using all the tools of the critic, literary, historical, psychological, linguistic, and sociological. In short, the text was to be regarded as a human artifact and thus, like all such artifacts, prey to human fallibility and imperfection. The American critic Randall Jarrell famously defined the novel as “a long piece of writing that has something wrong with it.” Anis Rushdie thought he knew what was wrong with the Qur’an; it had become, in places, jumbled up.

  According to tradition, when Muhammad came down from the mountain he began to recite—he himself was perhaps illiterate—and whichever of his close companions was nearest would write down what he said on whatever came to hand (parchment, stone, leather, leaves, and sometimes, it’s said, even bones). These passages were stored in a chest in his home until after his death, when the Companions gathered to determine the correct sequence of the revelation; and that determination had given us the now canonical text of the Qur’an. For that text to be “perfect” required the reader to believe (a) that the Archangel, in conveying the Word of God, did so without slipups—which may be an acceptable proposition, since Archangels are presumed to be immune from errata; (b) that the Prophet, or, as he called himself, the Messenger, remembered the Archangel’s words with perfect accuracy; (c) that the Companions’ hasty transcriptions, written down over the course of the twenty-three-year-long revelation, were likewise error-free; and finally (d) that when they got together to arrange the text into its final form, their collective memory of the correct sequence was also perfect.

  Anis Rushdie was disinclined to contest propositions (a), (b) and (c). Proposition (d), however, was harder for him to swallow, because as anyone who read the Qur’an could easily see, several suras, or chapters, contained radical discontinuities, changing subject without warning, and the abandoned subject sometimes cropped up unannounced in a later sura that had been, up to that point, about something else entirely. It was Anis’s long-nurtured desire to unscramble these discontinuities and so arrive at a text that was clearer and easier to read. It should be said that this was not a secret or furtive plan; he would discuss it openly with friends over dinner. There was no sense that the undertaking might create risks for the revisionist scholar, no frisson of danger. Perhaps the times were different, and such ideas could be entertained without fear of reprisals; or else the company was trustworthy; or maybe Anis was an innocent fool. But this was the atmosphere of open inquiry in which he raised his children. Nothing was off-limits. There were no taboos. Everything, even holy writ, could be investigated and, just possibly, improved.

  He never did it. When he died no text was found among his papers. His last years were dominated by alcohol and business failures and he had little time or inclination for the hard grind of deep Qur’anic scholarship. Maybe it had always been a pipe dream, or empty, whiskey-fueled big talk. But it left its mark on his son. This was Anis’s second great gift to his children: that of an apparently fearless skepticism, accompanied by an almost total freedom from religion. There was a certain amount of tokenism, however. The “flesh of the swine” was not eaten in the Rushdie household, nor would you find on their dinner table the similarly proscribed “scavengers of the earth and the sea”; no Goan prawn curry on this dining table. There were those very occasional visits to the Idgah for the ritual up-and-down of the prayers. There was, once or twice a year, fasting during what Indian Muslims, Urdu—rather than Arabic—speaking, called Ramzán rather than Ramadan. And once, briefly, there was a maulvi, a religious scholar, hired by Negin to teach her heathen son and daughters the rudiments of faith. But when the heathen children revolted against the maulvi, a pint-sized Ho Chi Minh look-alike, teasing him so mercilessly that he complained bitterly to their parents about their disrespect for the great sanctities, Anis and Negin just laughed and took their children’s side. The maulvi flounced off, never to return, muttering imprecations against the unbelievers as he went, and after that there were no further attempts at religious instruction. The heathen grew up heathenish and, in Windsor Villa at least, that was just fine.

  When he turned away from his father, wearing the blue-and-white-striped cap of Bradley House and the serge mackintosh, and plunged into his English life, the sin of foreignness was the first thing that was made plain to him. Until that point he had not thought of himself as anyone’s Other. After Rugby School he never forgot the lesson he learned there: that there would always be people who just didn’t like you, to whom you seemed as alien as little green men or the Slime from Outer Space, and there was no point trying to change their minds. Alienation: It was a lesson he relearned in more dramatic circumstances later on.

  At an English boarding school in the early 1960s, he quickly discovered, there were three bad mistakes you could make, but if you made only two of the three you could be forgiven. The mistakes were: to be foreign; to be clever; and to be bad at games. At Rugby the foreign, clever boys who had a good time were also elegant cricketers or, in the case of one of his contemporaries, the Pakistani Zia Mahmood, so good at cards that he grew up to become one of the world’s finest bridge players. The boys who had no sporting ability had to be careful not to be too clever and, if possible, not too foreign, which was the worst of the three mistakes.

  He made all three mistakes. He was foreign, clever, non-sportif. And as a result his years were, for the most part, unhappy, though he did well academically and left Rugby with the abiding feeling of having been wonderfully well taught—with that nourishing memory of great teachers that, if we are lucky, we can carry with us for the rest of our lives. There was P. G. Lewis, known, inevitably, as “Pig,” who so inspired him with the love of French that he rose in the course of one term from the bottom to the top of the class, and there were his history teachers J. B. Hope-Simpson, a.k.a. “Hope Stimulus,” and J. W. “Gut” Hele, thanks to whose skilled tutelage he was able to go on to win an exhibition, a minor scholarship, to read history at his father’s old alma mater of King’s College, Cambridge, where he would meet E. M. Forster and discover sex, though not at the same time. (Less valuably, perhaps, “Hope Stimulus” was also the person who introduced him to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which entered his consciousness like a disease, an infection he never managed to shake off.) His old English teacher Geoffrey Helliwell would be seen on British television on the day after the fatwa, ruefully shaking his head and asking, in sweet, vague, daffy tones, “Who’d have thought such a nice, quiet boy could get into so much trouble?”

  Nobody had forced him to go to boarding school in England. Negin had been against the idea of sending her only son away across oceans and continents. Anis had offered him the opportunity and encouraged him to take the Common Entrance exam, but, even after he came through that with some distinction and the place at Rugby was his, the final decision to go or stay was left entirely to him. In later life he would wonder at the choice made
by this thirteen-year-old self, a boy rooted in his city, happy in his friends, having a good time at school (apart from a little local difficulty with the Marathi language), the apple of his parents’ eye. Why did that boy decide to leave it all behind and travel halfway across the world into the unknown, far from everyone who loved him and everything he knew? Was it the fault, perhaps, of literature (for he was certainly a bookworm)? In which case the guilty parties might have been his beloved Jeeves and Bertie, or possibly the Earl of Emsworth and his mighty sow, the Empress of Blandings. Or might it have been the dubious attractions of the world of Agatha Christie that persuaded him, even if Christie’s Miss Marple made her home in the most murderous village in England, the lethal St. Mary Mead? Then there was Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons series telling of children messing about in boats in the Lake District, and, much, much worse, the terrible literary escapades of Billy Bunter, the “Owl of the Remove,” the fat boy at Frank Richards’s ridiculous Grayfriars School, where, among Bunter’s classmates, there was at least one Indian, Hurree Jamset Ram Singh, the “dusky nabob of Bhanipur,” who spoke a bizarre, grand, syntactically contorted English (“the contortfulness,” as the dusky nabob might well have put it, “was terrific”). Was it, in other words, a childish decision, to venture forth into an imaginary England that only existed in books? Or was it, alternatively, an indication that beneath the surface of the “nice, quiet boy” there lurked a stranger being, a fellow with an unusually adventurous heart, possessed of enough gumption to take a leap in the dark exactly because it was a step into the unknown—a youth who intuited his future adult self’s ability to survive, even to thrive, wherever in the world his wanderings might take him, and who was able, too easily, even a little ruthlessly, to follow the dream of “away,” breaking away from the lure, which was also, of course, the tedium, of “home,” leaving his sorrowing mother and sisters behind without too much regret? Perhaps a little of each. At any rate, he took the leap, and the forking paths of time bifurcated at his feet. He took the westward road and ceased to be who he might have been if he had stayed at home.