The Satanic Verses

You’ll be fine
. Changez Chamchawala shook his head. ‘I’m going, son,’ he said. His chest heaved; Salahuddin grabbed a large plastic mug and held it under Changez’s mouth. The dying man vomited up more than a pint of phlegm mixed up with blood: and after that was too weak to talk. This time Salahuddin did have to carry him, to the back seat of the Mercedes, where he sat between Nasreen and Kasturba while Salahuddin drove at top speed to Breach Candy Hospital, half a mile down the road. ‘Shall I open the window, Abba?’ he asked at one point, and Changez shook his head and bubbled: ‘No.’ Much later, Salahuddin realized this had been his father’s last word.
    The emergency ward. Running feet, orderlies, wheelchair, Changez being heaved on to a bed, curtains. A young doctor, doing what had to be done, very quickly but without the appearance of speed.
I like him
, Salahuddin thought. Then the doctor looked him in the eye and said: ‘I don’t think he’s going to make it.’ It felt like being punched in the stomach. Salahuddin realized he’d been clinging on to a futile hope,
they’ll fix him and we’ll take him home; this isn’t ‘it’
, and his instant reaction to the doctor’s words was rage.
You’re the mechanic. Don’t tell me the car won’t start; mend the damn thing
. Changez was flat out, drowning in his lungs. ‘We can’t get at his chest in this kurta; may we …’
Cut it off. Do what you have to do
. Drips, the blip of a weakening heartbeat on a screen, helplessness. The young doctor murmuring: ‘It won’t be long now, so …’ At which, Salahuddin Chamchawala did a crassthing. He turned to Nasreen and Kasturba and said: ‘Come quickly now. Come and say goodbye.’ ‘For God’s sake!’ the doctor exploded … the women did not weep, but came up to Changez and took a hand each. Salahuddin blushed for shame. He would never know if his father heard the death-sentence dripping from the lips of his son.
    Now Salahuddin found better words, his Urdu returning to him after a long absence.
We’re all beside you, Abba. We all love you very much
. Changez could not speak, but that was, – was it not? – yes, it must have been – a little nod of recognition.
He heard me
. Then all of a sudden Changez Chamchawala left his face; he was still alive, but he had gone somewhere else, had turned inwards to look at whatever there was to see.
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.
    ‘Please,’ the doctor said, ‘go outside the curtain now and let us make our effort.’ Salahuddin took the two women a few steps away; and now, when a curtain hid Changez from their sight, they wept. ‘He swore he would never leave me,’ Nasreen sobbed, her iron control broken at last, ‘and he has gone away.’ Salahuddin went to watch through a crack in the curtain; – and saw the voltage being pumped into his father’s body, the sudden green jaggedness of the pulse on the monitor screen; saw doctor and nurses pounding his father’s chest; saw defeat.
    The last thing he had seen in his father’s face, just before the medical staff’s final, useless effort, was the dawning of a terror so profound that it chilled Salahuddin to the bone. What had he seen? What was it that waited for him, for all of us, that brought such fear to a brave man’s eyes? – Now, when it was over, he returned to Changez’s bedside; and saw his father’s mouth curved upwards, in a smile.
    He caressed those sweet cheeks.
I didn’t shave him today. He died with stubble on his chin
. How cold his face was already; but the brain, the brain retained a little warmth. They had stuffed cotton-wool into his nostrils.
But suppose there’s been a mistake? What if he
wants to breathe
? Nasreen Chamchawala was beside him. ‘Let’s take your father home,’ she said.

    Changez Chamchawala returned home in an ambulance, lying in an aluminum tray on the floor between the two women who had loved him, while Salahuddin followed in the car. Ambulance men laid him to rest in his study; Nasreen turned the air-conditioner up high. This was, after all, a tropical death, and the sun would be up soon.
    What did he see
? Salahuddin kept thinking.
Why the horror? And, whence that final smile
?
    People came again. Uncles, cousins, friends took charge, arranging everything. Nasreen and Kasturba sat