Rushdie, Salmon - Th.. - hudson's home on the web

pink-and-white Krishna--eyes that saw everything. "Too damn much to see," Bhupen said. "<strong>Th</strong>at is fact of
matter."
o o o
In a crowded dhaba that George had started frequenting when he was making contact, for movie
purposes, with the dadas or bosses who ran the city's flesh trade, dark rum was consumed at aluminium
tables and George and Bhupen started, a little boozily, to quarrel. Zeeny drank <strong>Th</strong>ums Up Cola and
denounced her friends to Chamcha. "Drinking problems, both of them, broke as old pots, they both
mistreat their wives, sit in dives, waste their stinking lives. No wonder I fell for you, sugar, when the local
product is so low grade you get to like goods from foreign."
George had gone with Zeeny to Bhopal and was becoming noisy on the subject of the catastrophe,
interpreting it ideologically. "What is Amrika for us?" he demanded. "It's not a real place. Power in its
purest form, disembodied, invisible. We can't see it but it screws us totally, no escape." He compared the
Union Carbide company to the Trojan Horse. "We invited the bastards in." It was like the story of the forty
thieves, he said. Hiding in their amphoras and waiting for the night. "We had no Ali Baba, misfortunately,"
he cried. "Who did we have? Mr. Rajiv G."
At this point Bhupen Gandhi stood up abruptly, unsteadily, and began, as though possessed, as though
a spirit were upon him, to testify. "For me," he said, "the issue cannot be foreign intervention. We always
forgive ourselves by blaming outsiders, America, Pakistan, any damn place. Excuse me, George, but for me
it all goes back to Assam, we have to start with that." <strong>Th</strong>e massacre of the innocents. Photographs of
children's corpses, arranged neatly in lines like soldiers on parade. <strong>Th</strong>ey had been clubbed to death, pelted
with stones, their necks cut in half by knives. <strong>Th</strong>ose neat ranks of death, Chamcha remembered. As if only
horror could sting India into orderliness.
Bhupen spoke for twenty-nine minutes without hesitations or pauses. "We are all guilty of Assam," he
said. "Each person of us. Unless and until we face it, that the children's deaths were our fault, we cannot
call ourselves a civilized people." He drank rum quickly as he spoke, and his voice got louder, and his body
began to lean dangerously, but although the room fell silent nobody moved towards him, nobody tried to
stop him talking, nobody called him a drunk. In the middle of a sentence, _everyday blindings, or
shootings, or corruptions, who do we think we_, he sat down heavily and stared into his glass.
Now a young man stood up in a far corner of the joint and argued back. Assam had to be understood
politically, he cried, there were economic reasons, and yet another fellow came to his feet to reply, cash
matters do not explain why a grown man clubs a little girl to death, and then another fellow said, if you
think that, you have never been hungry, salah, how bloody romantic to suppose economics cannot make
men into beasts. Chamcha clutched at his glass as the noise level rose, and the air seemed to thicken, gold
teeth flashed in his face, shoulders rubbed against his, elbows nudged, the air was turning into soup, and in
his chest the irregular palpitations had begun. George grabbed him by the wrist and dragged him out into
the street. "You okay, man? You were turning green." Saladin nodded his thanks, gasped in lungfuls of the
night, calmed down. "Rum and exhaustion," he said. "I have the peculiar habit of getting my nerves after
the show. Quite often I get wobbly. Should have known." Zeeny was looking at him, and there was more in
her eyes than sympathy. A glittering look, triumphant, hard. _Something got through to you_, her
expression gloated. _About bloody time_.
After you recover from typhoid, Chamcha reflected, you remain immune to the disease for ten years or
so. But nothing is forever; eventually the antibodies vanish from your blood. He had to accept the fact that
his blood no longer contained the immunizing agents that would have enabled him to suffer India's reality.
Rum, heart palpitations, a sickness of the spirit. Time for bed.
She wouldn't take him to her place. Always and only the hotel, with the gold-medallioned young Arabs
strutting in the midnight corridors holding bottles of contraband whisky. He lay on the bed with his shoes
on, his collar and tie loose, his right arm flung across his eyes; she, in the hotel's white bathrobe, bent over
him and kissed his chin. "I'll tell you what happened to you tonight," she said. "You could say we cracked
your shell."
He sat up, angry. "Well, this is what's inside," he blazed at her. "An Indian translated into
English-medium. When I attempt Hindustani these days, people look polite. <strong>Th</strong>is is me." Caught in the aspic
of his adopted language, he had begun to hear, in India's Babel, an ominous warning: don't come back
again. When you have stepped through the looking-glass you step back at your peril. <strong>Th</strong>e mirror may cut
you to shreds.
"I was so proud of Bhupen tonight," Zeeny said, getting into bed. "In how many countries could you go
into some bar and start up a debate like that? <strong>Th</strong>e passion, the seriousness, the respect. You keep your
civilization, Toadji; I like this one plenty fine."
"Give up on me," he begged her. "I don't like people dropping in to see me without warning, I have