Changez Chamchawala returned home in an ambulance, lying in an aluminium 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 on white sheets on the floor of the room in which, once upon a time, Saladin and Zeeny had visited the ogre, Changez; women sat with them to mourn, many of them reciting the qalmah over and over, with the help of counting beads. Salahuddin was irritated by this; but lacked the will to tell them to stop. – Then the mullah came, and sewed Changez's winding-sheet, and it was time to wash the body; and even though there were many men present, and there was no need for him to help, Salahuddin insisted. If he could look his death in the eye, then I can do it, too. – And when his father was being washed, his body rolled this way and that at the mullah's command, the flesh bruised and slabby, the appendix scar long and brown, Salahuddin recalled the only other time in his life when he'd seen his physically demure father naked: he'd been nine years old, blundering into a bathroom where Changez was taking a shower, and the sight of his father's penis was a shock he'd never forgotten. That thick squat organ, like a club. O the power of it; and the insignificance of his own... ‘His eyes won't close,’ the mullah complained. ‘You should have done it before.’ He was a stocky, pragmatic fellow, this mullah with his mous-tacheless beard. He treated the dead body as a commonplace thing, needing washing the way a car does, or a window, or a dish. ‘You are from London? Proper London? – I was there many years. I was doorman at Claridge's Hotel.’ Oh? Really? How interesting. The man wanted to make small-talk! Salahuddin was appalled. That's my father, don't you understand? ‘These garments,’ the mullah asked, indicating Changez's last kurta-pajama outfit, the one which the hospital staff had cut open to get at his chest. ‘You have need of them?’ No, no. Take them. Please. ‘You are very kind.’ Small pieces of black cloth were being stuffed into Changez's mouth and under his eyelids. ‘This cloth has been to Mecca,’ the mullah said. Get it out! ‘I don't understand. It is holy fabric.’ You heard me: out, out. ‘May God have mercy on your soul.’
And:
The bier, strewn with flowers, like an outsize baby's cot.
The body, wrapped in white, with sandalwood shavings, for fragrance, scattered all about it.
More flowers, and a green silken covering with Quranic verses embroidered upon it in gold.
The ambulance, with the bier resting in it, awaiting the widows' permission to depart.
The last farewells of women.
The graveyard. Male mourners rushing to lift the bier on their shoulders trample Salahuddin's foot, ripping off a segment of the nail on his big toe.
Among the mourners, an estranged old friend of Changez's, here in spite of double pneumonia; – and another old gentleman, weeping copiously, who will die himself the very next day; – and all sorts, the walking records of a dead man's life.
The grave. Salahuddin climbs down into it, stands at the head end, the gravedigger at the foot. Changez Chamchawala is lowered down. The weight of my father's head, lying in my hand. I laid it down; to rest.
The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.
Waiting for him when he returned from the graveyard: a copper-and-brass lamp, his renewed inheritance. He went into Changez's study and closed the door. There were his old slippers by the bed: he had become, as he'd foretold, ‘a pair of emptied shoes'. The bedclothes still bore the imprint of his father's body; the room was full of sickly perfume: sandalwood, camphor, cloves. He took the lamp from its shelf and sat at Changez's desk. Taking a handkerchief from his pocket, he rubbed briskly: once, twice, thrice.
The lights all went on at once.
Zeenat Vakil entered the room.
‘O God, I'm sorry, maybe you wanted them off, but with the blinds closed it was just so sad.’ Waving her arms, speaking loudly in her beautiful croak of a voice, her hair woven, for once, into a waist-length ponytail, here she was, his very own djinn. ‘I feel so bad I didn't come before, I was just trying to hurt you, what a time to choose, so bloody self-indulgent, yaar, it's good to see you, you poor orphaned goose.’
She was the same as ever, immersed in life up to her neck, combining occasional art lectures at the university with her medical practice and her political activities. ‘I was at the goddamn hospital when you came, you know? I was right there, but I didn't know about your dad until it was over, and even then I didn't come to give you a hug, what a bitch, if you want to throw me out I will have no complaints.’ This was a generous woman, the most generous he'd known. When you see her, you'll know, he had promised himself, and it turned out to be true. ‘I love you,’ he heard himself saying, stopping her in her tracks. ‘Okay, I won't hold you to that,’ she finally said, looking hugely pleased. ‘Balance of your mind is obviously disturbed. Lucky for you you aren't in one of our great public hospitals; they put the loonies next to the heroin addicts, and there's so much drug traffic in the wards that the poor schizos end up with bad habits. – Anyway, if you say it again after forty days, watch out, because maybe then I'll take it seriously. Just now it could be a disease.’
Undefeated (and, it appeared, unattached), Zeeny's re-entry into his life completed the process of renewal, of regeneration, that had been the most surprising and paradoxical product of his father's terminal illness. His old English life, its bizarreries, its evils, now seemed very remote, even irrelevant, like his truncated stage-name. ‘About time,’ Zeeny approved when he told her of his return to Salahuddin. ‘Now you can stop acting at last.’ Yes, this looked like the start of a new phase, in which the world would be solid and real, and in which there was no longer the broad figure of a parent standing between himself and the inevitability of the grave. An orphaned life, like Muhammad's; like everyone's. A life illuminated by a strangely radiant death, which continued to glow, in his mind's eye, like a sort of magic lamp.
I must think of myself , from now on, as living perpetually in the first instant of the future, he resolved a few days later, in Zeeny's apartment on Sophia College Lane, while recovering in her bed from the toothy enthusiasms of her lovemaking. (She had invited him home shyly, as if she were removing a veil after long concealment.) But a history is not so easily shaken off; he was also living, after all, in the present moment of the past, and his old life was about to surge around him once again, to complete its final act.
He became aware that he was a rich man. Under the terms of Changez's will, the dead tycoon's vast fortune and myriad business interests were to be supervised by a group of distinguished trustees, the income being divided equally between three parties: Changez's second wife Nasreen, Kasturba, whom he referred to in the document as ‘in every true sense, my third’, and his son, Salahuddin. After the deaths of the two women, however, the trust could be dissolved whenever Salahuddin chose: he inherited, in short, the lot. ‘On the condition,’ Changez Chamchawala had mischievously stipulated, ‘that the scoundrel accepts the gift he previously spurned, viz., the requisitioned schoolhouse situated at Solan, Himachal Pradesh.’ Changez might have chopped down a walnut-tree, but he had never attempted to cut Salahuddin out of his will. – The houses at Pali Hill and Scandal Point were excluded from these provisions, however. The former passed to Nasreen Chamchawala outright; the latter became, with immediate effect, the sole property of Kasturbabai, who quickly announced her intention of selling the old house to property developers. The site was worth crores, and Kasturba was wholly unsentimental about real estate. Salahuddin protested vehemently, and was slapped down hard. ‘I have lived my whole life here,’ she informed him. ‘It is therefore for me only to say.’ Nasreen Chamchawala was entirely indifferent to the fate of the old place. ‘One more high-rise, one less piece of old Bombay,’ she shrugged. ‘What's the difference? Cities change.’ She was already preparing to move back to Pali Hill, taking the cases of butterflies off the walls, assembling her stuffed birds in the hall. ‘Let it go,’ Zeenat Vakil said. ‘You couldn't live in that museum, anyway.’