The Satanic Verses

re-entered Vallabh; the right to free speech of the old retainer permitted him to reprove, ‘Excuse, baba, but you should not blaspheme.’
    ‘See how he’s sweating,’ Zeeny stage-whispered. ‘He looks scared stiff.’ Kasturba entered the room, and although her reunion with Chamcha was warm enough there was still a wrongness in the air. Vallabh left to bring beer and Thums Up, and when Kasturba also excused herself, Zeeny at once said: ‘Something fishy. She walks like she owns the dump. The way she holds herself. And the old man was afraid. Those two are up to something, I bet.’ Chamcha tried to be reasonable. ‘They stay here alone most of the time, probably sleep in the master bedroom and eat off the good plates, it must get to feeling like their place.’ But he was thinking how strikingly, in that old sari, his ayah Kasturba had come to resemble his mother.
    ‘Stayed away so long,’ his father’s voice spoke behind him, ‘that now you can’t tell a living ayah from your departed ma.’
    Saladin turned around to take in the melancholy sight of a father who had shrivelled like an old apple, but who insisted nevertheless on wearing the expensive Italian suits of his opulently fleshy years. Now that he had lost both Popeye-forearms and Blutobelly, he seemed to be roaming about inside his clothes like a man in search of something he had not quite managed to identify. He stood in the doorway looking at his son, his nose and lips curled, by the withering sorcery of the years, into a feeble simulacrum of his former ogre-face. Chamcha had barely begun to understand that his father was no longer capable of frightening anybody, that his spell had been broken and he was just an old geezer heading for the grave; while Zeeny had noted with some disappointment that Changez Chamchawala’s hair was conservatively short, and sincehe was wearing highly polished Oxford lace-ups it didn’t seem likely that the eleven-inch toenail story was true either; when the ayah Kasturba returned, smoking a cigarette, and strolled past the three of them, father son mistress, towards a blue velour-covered button-backed Chesterfield sofa, upon which she arranged her body as sensually as any movie starlet, even though she was a woman well advanced in years.
    No sooner had Kasturba completed her shocking entrance than Changez skipped past his son and planted himself beside the erstwhile ayah. Zeeny Vakil, her eyes sparkling with scandal-points of light, hissed at Chamcha: ‘Close your mouth, dear. It looks bad.’ And in the doorway, the bearer Vallabh, pushing a drinks trolley, watched unemotionally while his employer of many long years placed an arm around his uncomplaining wife.
    When the progenitor, the creator is revealed as satanic, the child will frequently grow prim. Chamcha heard himself inquire: ‘And my stepmother, father dear? She is keeping well?’
    The old man addressed Zeeny. ‘He is not such a goody with you, I hope so. Or what a sad time you must have.’ Then to his son in harsher tones. ‘You have an interest in my wife these days? But she has none in you. She won’t meet you now. Why should she forgive? You are no son to her. Or, maybe, by now, to me.’
    I did not come to fight him. Look, the old goat. I mustn’t fight. But this, this is intolerable
. ‘In my mother’s house,’ Chamcha cried melodramatically, losing his battle with himself. ‘The state thinks your business is corrupt, and here is the corruption of your soul. Look what you’ve done to them. Vallabh and Kasturba. With your money. How much did it take? To poison their lives. You’re a sick man.’ He stood before his father, blazing with righteous rage.
    Vallabh the bearer, unexpectedly, intervened. ‘Baba, with respect, excuse me but what do you know? You have left and gone and now you come to judge us.’ Saladin felt the floor giving way beneath his feet; he was staring into the inferno. ‘It is true he pays us,’ Vallabh went on. ‘For our work, and also for what yousee. For this.’ Changez Chamchawala tightened his grip on the ayah’s unresisting shoulders.
    ‘How much?’ Chamcha shouted. ‘Vallabh, how much did you two men decide upon? How much to prostitute your wife?’
    ‘What a fool,’ Kasturba said contemptuously. ‘England-educated and what-all, but still with a head full of hay. You come talking so big-big,
in your mother’s house
etcetera, but maybe you didn’t love her so much. But we loved her, we all. We