What a nasty surprise! He had come awake with a jolt, and sat stiffly in his chair, ignoring alcohol and peanuts. How had the past bubbled up, in transmogrified vowels and vocab? What next? Would he take to putting coconut-oil in his hair? Would he take to squeezing his nostrils between thumb and forefinger, blowing noisily and drawing forth a glutinous silver arc of muck? Would he become a devotee of professional wrestling? What further, diabolic humiliations were in store? He should have known it was a mistake to go home, after so long, how could it be other than a regression; it was an unnatural journey; a denial of time; a revolt against history; the whole thing was bound to be a disaster.
I'm not myself, he thought as a faint fluttering feeling began in the vicinity of his heart. But what does that mean, anyway, he added bitterly. After all, ‘les acteurs ne sont pas des gens', as the great ham Frederick had explained in Les Enfants du Paradis. Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.
The seatbelt light came on, the captain's voice warned of air turbulence, they dropped in and out of air pockets. The desert lurched about beneath them and the migrant labourer who had boarded at Qatar clutched at his giant transistor radio and began to retch. Chamcha noticed that the man had not fastened his belt, and pulled himself together, bringing his voice back to its haughtiest English pitch. ‘Look here, why don't you...’ he indicated, but the sick man, between bursts of heaving into the paper bag which Saladin had handed him just in time, shook his head, shrugged, replied: ‘Sahib, for what? If Allah wishes me to die, I shall die. If he does not, I shall not. Then of what use is the safety?’
Damn you, India, Saladin Chamcha cursed silently, sinking back into his seat. To hell with you, I escaped your clutches long ago, you won't get your hooks into me again, you cannot drag me back.
Once upon a time – it was and it was not so, as the old stories used to say, it happened and it never did – maybe, then, or maybe not, a ten-year-old boy from Scandal Point in Bombay found a wallet lying in the street outside his home. He was on the way home from school, having just descended from the school bus on which he had been obliged to sit squashed between the adhesive sweatiness of boys in shorts and be deafened by their noise, and because even in those days he was a person who recoiled from raucousness, jostling and the perspiration of strangers he was feeling faintly nauseated by the long, bumpy ride home. However, when he saw the black leather billfold lying at his feet, the nausea vanished, and he bent down excitedly and grabbed, – opened, – and found, to his delight, that it was full of cash, – and not merely rupees, but real money, negotiable on black markets and international exchanges, – pounds! Pounds sterling, from Proper London in the fabled country of Vilayet across the black water and far away. Dazzled by the thick wad of foreign currency, the boy raised his eyes to make sure he had not been observed, and for a moment it seemed to him that a rainbow had arched down to him from the heavens, a rainbow like an angel's breath, like an answered prayer, coming to an end in the very spot on which he stood. His fingers trembled as they reached into the wallet, towards the fabulous hoard.
‘Give it.’ It seemed to him in later life that his father had been spying on him throughout his childhood, and even though Changez Chamchawala was a big man, a giant even, to say nothing of his wealth and public standing, he still always had the lightness of foot and also the inclination to sneak up behind his son and spoil whatever he was doing, whipping the young Salahuddin's bedsheet off at night to reveal the shameful penis in the clutching, red hand. And he could smell money from a hundred and one miles away, even through the stink of chemicals and fertilizer that always hung around him owing to his being the country's largest manufacturer of agricultural sprays and fluids and artificial dung. Changez Chamchawala, philanthropist, philanderer, living legend, leading light of the nationalist movement, sprang from the gateway of his home to pluck a bulging wallet from his son's frustrated hand. ‘Tch tch,’ he admonished, pocketing the pounds sterling, ‘you should not pick things up from the street. The ground is dirty, and money is dirtier, anyway.’
On a shelf of Changez Chamchawala's teak-lined study, beside a ten-volume set of the Richard Burton translation of the Arabian Nights, which was being slowly devoured by mildew and bookworm owing to the deep-seated prejudice against books which led Changez to own thousands of the pernicious things in order to humiliate them by leaving them to rot unread, there stood a magic lamp, a brightly polished copper-and-brass avatar of Aladdin's very own genie-container: a lamp begging to be rubbed. But Changez neither rubbed it nor permitted it to be rubbed by, for example, his son. ‘One day,’ he assured the boy, ‘you'll have it for yourself. Then rub and rub as much as you like and see what doesn't come to you. Just now, but, it is mine.’ The promise of the magic lamp infected Master Salahuddin with the notion that one day his troubles would end and his innermost desires would be gratified, and all he had to do was wait it out; but then there was the incident of the wallet, when the magic of a rainbow had worked for him, not for his father but for him, and Changez Chamchawala had stolen the crock of gold. After that the son became convinced that his father would smother all his hopes unless he got away, and from that moment he became desperate to leave, to escape, to place oceans between the great man and himself.
Salahuddin Chamchawala had understood by his thirteenth year that he was destined for that cool Vilayet full of the crisp promises of pounds sterling at which the magic billfold had hinted, and he grew increasingly impatient of that Bombay of dust, vulgarity, policemen in shorts, transvestites, movie fanzines, pavement sleepers and the rumoured singing whores of Grant Road who had begun as devotees of the Yellamma cult in Karnataka but ended up here as dancers in the more prosaic temples of the flesh. He was fed up of textile factories and local trains and all the confusion and superabundance of the place, and longed for that dream-Vilayet of poise and moderation that had come to obsess him by night and day. His favourite playground rhymes were those that yearned for foreign cities: kitchy-con kitchy-ki kitchy-con stanty-eye kitchy-ople kitchy-cople kitchy-Con-stanti-nople. And his favourite game was the version of grandmother's footsteps in which, when he was it, he would turn his back on upcreeping playmates to gabble out, like a mantra, like a spell, the six letters of his dream-city, ellowen deeowen. In his secret heart, he crept silently up on London, letter by letter, just as his friends crept up to him. Ellowen deeowen London.
The mutation of Salahuddin Chamchawala into Saladin Chamcha began, it will be seen, in old Bombay, long before he got close enough to hear the lions of Trafalgar roar. When the England cricket team played India at the Brabourne Stadium, he prayed for an England victory, for the game's creators to defeat the local upstarts, for the proper order of things to be maintained. (But the games were invariably drawn, owing to the featherbed somnolence of the Brabourne Stadium wicket; the great issue, creator versus imitator, colonizer against colonized, had perforce to remain unresolved.)
In his thirteenth year he was old enough to play on the rocks at Scandal Point without having to be watched over by his ayah, Kasturba. And one day (it was so, it was not so), he strolled out of the house, that ample, crumbling, salt-caked building in the Parsi style, all columns and shutters and little balconies, and through the garden that was his father's pride and joy and which in a certain evening light could give the impression of being infinite (and which was also enigmatic, an unsolved riddle, because nobody, not his father, not the gardener, could tell him the names of most of the plants and trees), and out through the main gateway, a grandiose folly, a reproduction of the Roman triumphal arch of Septimius Severus, and across the wild insanity of the street, and over the sea wall, and so at last on to the broad expanse of shiny black rocks with their little shrimpy pools. Christian girls giggled in frocks, men with furled umbrellas stood silent and fixed upon the blue horizon. In a hollow of black stone Salahuddin saw a man in a dhoti bending over a pool. Their eyes met, and the man beckoned him with a single finger which he then laid across his lips. Shh, and the mystery of rock-pools drew the boy towards the stranger. He was a creature of bone. Spectacles framed in what might have been ivory. His finger curling, curling, like a baited hook, come. When Salahuddin came down the other grasped him, put a hand around his mouth and forced his young hand between old and fleshless legs, to feel the fleshbone there. The dhoti open to the winds. Salahuddin had never known how to fight; he did what he was forced to do, and then the other simply turned away from him and let him go.