The Satanic Verses

three. And in this manner we may keep her spirit alive.’
    ‘It is pooja, you could say,’ came Vallabh’s quiet voice. ‘An act of worship.’
    ‘And you,’ Changez Chamchawala spoke as softly as his servant, ‘you come here to this temple. With your unbelief. Mister, you’ve got a nerve.’
    And finally, the treason of Zeenat Vakil. ‘Come off it, Salad,’ she said, moving to sit on the arm of the Chesterfield next to the old man. ‘Why be such a sourpuss? You’re no angel, baby, and these people seem to have worked things out okay.’
    Saladin’s mouth opened and shut. Changez patted Zeeny on the knee. ‘He came to accuse, dear. He came to avenge his youth, but we have turned the tables and he is confused. Now we must let him have his chance, and you must referee. I will not be sentenced by him, but I will accept the worst from you.’
    The bastard. Old bastard. He wanted me off-balance, and here I am, knocked sideways. I won’t speak, why should I, not like this, the humiliation
. ‘There was,’ said Saladin Chamcha, ‘a wallet of pounds, and there was a roasted chicken.’

    Of what did the son accuse the father? Of everything: espionage on child-self, rainbow-pot-stealing, exile. Of turning him into what he might not have become. Of making-a-man of. Of what-will-I-tell-my-friends. Of irreparable sunderings and offensive forgiveness. Of succumbing to Allah-worship with new wife and also to blasphemous worship of late spouse. Above all, of magiclampism,of being an open-sesamist. Everything had come easily to him, charm, women, wealth, power, position. Rub, poof, genie, wish, at once master, hey presto. He was a father who had promised, and then withheld, a magic lamp.

    Changez, Zeeny, Vallabh, Kasturba remained motionless and silent until Saladin Chamcha came to a flushed, embarrassed halt. ‘Such violence of the spirit after so long,’ Changez said after a silence. ‘So sad. A quarter of a century and still the son begrudges the peccadilloes of the past. O my son. You must stop carrying me around like a parrot on your shoulder. What am I? Finished. I’m not your Old Man of the Sea. Face it, mister: I don’t explain you any more.’
    Through a window Saladin Chamcha caught sight of a forty-year-old walnut-tree. ‘Cut it down,’ he said to his father. ‘Cut it, sell it, send me the cash.’
    Chamchawala rose to his feet, and extended his right hand. Zeeny, also rising, took it like a dancer accepting a bouquet; at once, Vallabh and Kasturba diminished into servants, as if a clock had silently chimed pumpkin-time. ‘Your book,’ he said to Zeeny. ‘I have something you’d like to see.’
    The two of them left the room; impotent Saladin, after a moment’s floundering, stamped petulantly in their wake. ‘Sour-puss,’ Zeeny called gaily over her shoulder. ‘Come on, snap out of it, grow up.’
    The Chamchawala art collection, housed here at Scandal Point, included a large group of the legendary
Hamza-nama
cloths, members of that sixteenth-century sequence depicting scenes from the life of a hero who may or may not have been the same Hamza as the famous one, Muhammad’s uncle whose liver was eaten by the Meccan woman Hind as he lay dead on the battlefield of Uhud. ‘I like these pictures,’ Changez Chamchawala told Zeeny, ‘because the hero is permitted to fail. See how often he has to be rescued from his troubles.’ The pictures also provided eloquent proof of Zeeny Vakil’s thesis about the eclectic, hybridized nature of theIndian artistic tradition. The Mughals had brought artists from every part of India to work on the paintings; individual identity was submerged to create a many-headed, many-brushed Over-artist who, literally,
was
Indian painting. One hand would draw the mosaic floors, a second the figures, a third would paint the Chinese-looking cloudy skies. On the backs of the cloths were the stories that accompanied the scenes. The pictures would be shown like a movie: held up while someone read out the hero’s tale. In the
Hamza-nama
you could see the Persian miniature fusing with Kannada and Keralan painting styles, you could see Hindu and Muslim philosophy forming their characteristically late-Mughal synthesis.
    A giant was trapped in a pit and his human tormentors were spearing him in the forehead. A man sliced vertically from the top of his head to his groin still held his sword as he fell. Everywhere, bubbling spillages of blood. Saladin Chamcha took a grip on