The Satanic Verses

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 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 possibility of actual, jaw-breaking fisticuffs. Changez wrote back by return of post; a brief letter, four lines of archaic abuse, cad rotter bounder scoundrel varlet whoreson rogue. ‘Kindly consider all family connections irreparably sundered,’ it concluded. ‘Consequences your responsibility.’
    After a year of silence, Saladin received a further communication, a letter of forgiveness that was in all particulars harder to take than the earlier, excommunicatory thunderbolt. ‘When you become a father, O my son,’ Changez Chamchawala confided, ‘then shall you know those moments – ah! Too sweet! – when, for love, one dandles the bonny babe upon one’s knee; whereupon, without warning or provocation, the blessed creature – may I be frank? – it
wets
one. Perhaps for a moment one feels the gorge rising, a tide of anger swells within the blood – but then it diesaway, as quickly as it came. For do we not, as adults, understand that the little one is not to blame? He knows not what he does.’
    Deeply offended at being compared to a urinating baby, Saladin maintained what he hoped was a dignified silence. By the time of his graduation he had acquired a British passport, because he had arrived in the country just before the laws tightened up, so he was able to inform Changez in a brief note that he intended to settle down in London and look for work as an actor. Changez Chamchawala’s reply came by express mail. ‘Might as well be a confounded gigolo.