Sri Srinivas, too, swore by the goddess Lakshmi that he had seen the parting of the Arabian Sea; and by the time the detectives got to Mrs. Qureishi, they were utterly unnerved, because they knew that it was impossible for the men to have cooked up the story together. Mishal's mother, the wife of the great banker, told the same story in her own words. ‘Believe don't believe,’ she finished emphatically, ‘but what my eyes have seen my tongue repeats.’
Goosepimply CID men attempted the third degree: ‘Listen, Sarpanch, don't shit from your mouth. So many were there, nobody saw these things. Already the drowned bodies are floating to shore, swollen like balloons and stinking like hell. If you go on lying we will take you and stick your nose in the truth.’
‘You can show me whatever you want,’ Sarpanch Muhammad Din told his interrogators. ‘But I still saw what I saw.’
‘And you?’ the CID men assembled, once he awoke, to ask Mirza Saeed Akhtar. ‘What did you see at the beach?’
‘How can you ask?’ he protested. ‘My wife has drowned. Don't come hammering with your questions.’
When he found out that he was the only survivor of the Ayesha Haj not to have witnessed the parting of the waves – Sri Srinivas was the one who told him what the others saw, adding mournfully: ‘It is our shame that we were not thought worthy to accompany. On us, Sethji, the waters closed, they slammed in our faces like the gates of Paradise’ – Mirza Saeed broke down and wept for a week and a day, the dry sobs continuing to shake his body long after his tear ducts had run out of salt.
Then he went home.
Moths had eaten the punkahs of Peristan and the library had been consumed by a billion hungry worms. When he turned on the taps, snakes oozed out instead of water, and creepers had twined themselves around the four-poster bed in which Viceroys had once slept. It was as if time had accelerated in his absence, and centuries had somehow elapsed instead of months, so that when he touched the giant Persian carpet rolled up in the ballroom it crumbled under his hand, and the baths were full of frogs with scarlet eyes. At night there were jackals howling on the wind. The great tree was dead, or close to death, and the fields were barren as the desert; the gardens of Peristan, in which, long ago, he first saw a beautiful young girl, had long ago yellowed into ugliness. Vultures were the only birds in the sky.
He pulled a rocking-chair out on to his veranda, sat down, and rocked himself gently to sleep.
Once, only once, he visited the tree. The village had crumbled into dust; landless peasants and looters had tried to seize the abandoned land, but the drought had driven them away. There had been no rain here. Mirza Saeed returned to Peristan and padlocked the rusty gates. He was not interested in the fate of his fellow-survivors; he went to the telephone and ripped it out of the wall.
After an uncounted passage of days it occurred to him that he was starving to death, because he could smell his body reeking of nail-varnish remover; but as he felt neither hungry nor thirsty, he decided there was no point bothering to find food. For what? Much better to rock in this chair, and not think, not think, not think.
On the last night of his life he heard a noise like a giant crushing a forest beneath his feet, and smelled a stench like the giant's fart, and he realized that the tree was burning. He got out of his chair and staggered dizzily down to the garden to watch the fire, whose flames were consuming histories, memories, genealogies, purifying the earth, and coming towards him to set him free; – because the wind was blowing the fire towards the grounds of the mansion, so soon enough, soon enough, it would be his turn. He saw the tree explode into a thousand fragments, and the trunk crack, like a heart; then he turned away and reeled towards the place in the garden where Ayesha had first caught his eye; – and now he felt a slowness come upon him, a great heaviness, and he lay down on the withered dust. Before his eyes closed he felt something brushing at his lips, and saw the little cluster of butterflies struggling to enter his mouth. Then the sea poured over him, and he was in the water beside Ayesha, who had stepped miraculously out of his wife's body... ‘Open,’ she was crying. ‘Open wide!’ Tentacles of light were flowing from her navel and he chopped at them, chopped, using the side of his hand. ‘Open,’ she screamed. ‘You've come this far, now do the rest.’ – How could he hear her voice? – They were under water, lost in the roaring of the sea, but he could hear her clearly, they could all hear her, that voice like a bell. ‘Open,’ she said. He closed.
He was a fortress with clanging gates. – He was drowning. – She was drowning, too. He saw the water fill her mouth, heard it begin to gurgle into her lungs. Then something within him refused that, made a different choice, and at the instant that his heart broke, he opened.
His body split apart from his adam's-apple to his groin, so that she could reach deep within him, and now she was open, they all were, and at the moment of their opening the waters parted, and they walked to Mecca across the bed of the Arabian Sea.
IX. A Wonderful Lamp
1
Eighteen months after his heart attack, Saladin Chamcha took to the air again in response to the telegraphed news that his father was in the terminal stages of multiple myeloma, a systemic cancer of the bone marrow that was ‘one hundred per cent fatal’, as Chamcha's GP unsentimentally put it when he telephoned her to check. There had been no real contact between father and son since Changez Chamchawala sent Saladin the proceeds from his felled walnut-tree all those eternities ago. Saladin had sent a brief note reporting that he had survived the Bostan disaster, and had been sent an even terser missive in return: ‘Rec.'d yr. communication. This information already to hand.’ When the bad news telegram arrived, however – the signatory was the unknown second wife, Nasreen II, and the tone was pretty unvarnished: FATHER GOING FAST + IF DESIROUS OF SEEING BETTER MOVE IT + N CHAMCHAWALA (MRS)– he discovered to his surprise that after a lifetime of tangled relationships with his father, after long years of crossed wires and ‘irrevocable sunderings’, he was once again capable of an uncomplicated reaction. Simply, overwhelmingly, it was imperative that he reach Bombay before Changez left it for good.
He spent the best part of a day first standing in the visa queue at the consular section of India House, and then trying to persuade a jaded official of the urgency of his application. He had stupidly forgotten to bring the telegram, and was told, as a result, that ‘it is issue of proof. You see, anybody could come and tell that their father is dying, isn't it? In order to expedite.’ Chamcha fought to restrain his anger, but finally burst, ‘Do I look like a Khalistan zealot to you?’ The official shrugged. ‘I'll tell you who I am,’ Chamcha bellowed, incensed by that shrug, ‘I'm the poor bastard who got blown up by terrorists, fell thirty thousand feet out of the sky because of terrorists, and now because of those same terrorists I have to be insulted by pen-pushers like you.’ His visa application, placed firmly at the bottom of a large pile by his adversary, was not granted until three days later. The first available flight was thirty-six hours after that: and it was an Air India 747, and its name was Gulistan.
Gulistan and Bostan, the twin gardens of Paradise – one blew apart, and then there was one... Chamcha, moving down one of the drains through which Terminal Three dripped passengers into aircraft, saw the name painted next to the 747`s open door, and turned a couple of shades paler. Then he heard the sari-clad Indian stewardess greeting him in an unmistakably Canadian accent, and lost his nerve, spinning away from the plane in a reflex of straightforward terror. As he stood there, facing the irritable throng of passengers waiting to board, he was conscious of how absurd he must look, with his brown leather holdall in one hand, two zippered suit-hanger bags in the other, and his eyes out on stalks; but for a long moment he was entirely unable to move. The crowd grew restive; if this is an artery, he found himself thinking, then I'm the blasted clot. ‘I used to chichi chicken out also,’ said a cheerful voice. ‘But now I've got the titrick. I fafa flap my hands during tatake-off and the plane always mama makes it into the isk isk isky.’