Nothing is forever, he thought beyond closed eyelids somewhere over Asia Minor. Maybe unhappiness is the continuum through which a human life moves, and joy just a series of blips, of islands in the stream. Or if not unhappiness, then at least melancholy... These broodings were interrupted by a lusty snore from the seat beside him. Mr Sisodia, whisky-glass in hand, was asleep.
The producer was evidently a hit with the stewardesses. They fussed around his sleeping person, detaching the glass from his fingers and removing it to a place of safety, spreading a blanket over his lower half, and trilling admiringly over his snoring head: ‘Doesn't he look poochie? Just a little cuteso, I swear!’ Chamcha was reminded unexpectedly of the society ladies of Bombay patting him on the head during his mother's little soirees, and fought back tears of surprise. Sisodia actually looked faintly obscene; he had removed his spectacles before falling asleep, and their absence gave him an oddly naked appearance. To Chamcha's eyes he resembled nothing so much as an outsize Shiva lingam. Maybe that accounted for his popularity with the ladies.
Flicking through the magazines and newspapers he was offered by the stewardesses, Saladin chanced upon an old acquaintance in trouble. Hal Valance's sanitized Aliens Show had flopped badly in the United States and was being taken off the air. Worse still, his advertising agency and its subsidiaries had been swallowed by an American leviathan, and it was probable that Hal was on the way out, conquered by the transatlantic dragon he had set out to tame. It was hard to feel sorry for Valance, unemployed and down to his last few millions, abandoned by his beloved Mrs. Torture and her pals, relegated to the limbo reserved for fallen favourites, along with busted entrepreneur-boffins and insider-dealing financiers and renegade ex-ministers; but Chamcha, flying to his father's deathbed, was in so heightened an emotional condition that he managed a valedictory lump in the throat even for wicked Hal. At whose pool table, he wondered vaguely, is Baby playing now?
In India, the war between men and women showed no sign of abating. In the Indian Express he read an account of the latest ‘bride suicide’. The husband, Prajapati, is absconding. On the next page, in the weekly small-ad marriage market, the parents of young men still demanded, and the parents of young women proudly offered, brides of ‘wheatish’ complexions. Chamcha remembered Zeeny's friend, the poet Bhupen Gandhi, speaking of such things with passionate bitterness. ‘How to accuse others of being prejudiced when our own hands are so dirty?’ he had declaimed. ‘Many of you in Britain speak of victimization. Well. I have not been there, I don't know your situation, but in my personal experience I have never been able to feel comfortable about being described as a victim. In class terms, obviously, I am not. Even speaking culturally, you find here all the bigotries, all the procedures associated with oppressor groups. So while many Indians are undoubtedly oppressed, I don't think any of us are entitled to lay claim to such a glamorous position.’
‘Trouble with Bhupen's radical critiques,’ Zeeny had remarked, ‘is that reactionaries like Salad baba here just love to lap them up.’
An armaments scandal was raging; had the Indian government paid kickbacks to middlemen, and then gone in for a cover-up? Vast sums of money were involved, the Prime Minister's credibility had been weakened, but Chamcha couldn't be bothered with any of it. He was staring at the fuzzy photograph, on an inside page, of indistinct, bloated shapes floating down-river in large numbers. In a north Indian town there had been a massacre of Muslims, and their corpses had been dumped in the water, where they awaited the ministrations of some twentieth-century Gaffer Hexam. There were hundreds of bodies, swollen and rancid; the stench seemed to rise off the page. And in Kashmir a once-popular Chief Minister who had ‘made an accommodation’ with the Congress-I had shoes hurled at him during the Eid prayers by irate groups of Islamic fundamentalists. Communalism, sectarian tension, was omnipresent: as if the gods were going to war. In the eternal struggle between the world's beauty and its cruelty, cruelty was gaining ground by the day. Sisodia's voice intruded on these morose thoughts. The producer had woken up to see the photograph from Meerut staring up from Chamcha's fold-out table. ‘Fact is,’ he said without any of his usual bonhomie, ‘religious fafaith, which encodes the highest ass ass aspirations of human race, is now, in our cocountry, the servant of lowest instincts, and gogo God is the creature of evil.’
KNOWN HISTORY SHEETERS RESPONSIBLE FOR KILLINGS, a government spokesman alleged, but ‘progressive elements’ rejected this analysis. CITY CONSTABULARY CONTAMINATED BY COMMUNAL AGITATORS, the counter-argument suggested. HINDU NATIONALISTS RUN AMUCK. A political fortnightly contained a photograph of signboards that had been mounted outside the Juma Masjid in Old Delhi. The Imam, a loose-bellied man with cynical eyes, who could be found most mornings in his ‘garden’ – a red-earth-and-rubble waste land in the shadow of the mosque – counting rupees donated by the faithful and rolling up each note individually, so that he seemed to be holding a handful of thin beedi-like cigarettes – and who was no stranger to communalist politics himself, was apparently determined that the Meerut horror should be turned to good account. Quench the Fire under our Breast, the signboards cried. Salute with Reverence those who met Martyrdom from the Bullets of the P o l i s. Also: Alas! Alas! Alas! Awak the Prime Minister! And finally, the call to action: Bandh will be observed, and the date of the strike.
‘Bad days,’ Sisodia went on. ‘For the moomoo movies also TV and economics have Delhi Delhi deleterious effects.’ Then he cheered up as stewardesses approached. ‘I will confess to being a mem member of the mile high cluck cluck club,’ he said gaily within the attendants’ hearing. ‘And you? Should I see what I can ficfic fix?’
O, the dissociations of which the human mind is capable, marvelled Saladin gloomily. O, the conflicting selves jostling and joggling within these bags of skin. No wonder we are unable to remain focused on anything for very long; no wonder we invent remote-control channel-hopping devices. If we turned these instruments upon ourselves we'd discover more channels than a cable or satellite mogul ever dreamed of ... He himself had found his thoughts straying, no matter how hard he tried to fix them on his father, towards the question of Miss Zeenat Vakil. He had wired ahead, informing her of his arrival; would she meet the flight? What might or might not happen between them? Had he, by leaving her, by not returning, by losing touch for a time, done the Unforgivable Thing? Was she – he thought, and was shocked by the realization that it had simply not occurred to him earlier – married? In love? Involved? And as for himself: what did he really want? I'll know when I see her, he thought. The future, even when it was only a question-shrouded glimmer, would not be eclipsed by the past; even when death moved towards the centre of the stage, life went on fighting for equal rights.
The flight passed without incident.
Zeenat Vakil was not waiting at the airport, ‘Come along,’ Sisodia waved. ‘My car has come to pipi pick, so please to lelet me drop.’
Thirty-five minutes later Saladin Chamcha was at Scandal Point, standing at the gates of childhood with holdall and suit-bags, looking at the imported video-controlled entry system. Anti-narcotics slogans had been painted on the perimeter wall: DREAMS ALL DROWN / WHEN SUGAR IS BROWN. And: FUTURE IS BLACK / WHEN SUGAR IS BROWN. Courage, my old, he braced himself; and rang as directed, once, firmly, for attention.