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

sheer barbaric love of pain."
Changez Chamchawala ignored his son, had eyes only for Zeeny; who gazed straight back into his own.
"Ours is a government of philistines, young lady, don't you agree? I have offered this whole collection free
gratis, did you know? Let them only house it properly, let them build a place. Condition of cloths is not A-1,
you see . . . they won't do it. No interest. Meanwhile I get offers every month from Amrika. Offers of
what-what size! You wouldn't believe. I don't sell. Our heritage, my dear, every day the U S A is taking it
away. Ravi Varma paintings, Chandela bronzes, Jaisalmer lattices. We sell ourselves, isn't it? <strong>Th</strong>ey drop
their wallets on the ground and we kneel at their feet. Our Nandi bulls end up in some gazebo in Texas. But
you know all this. You know India is a free country today." He stopped, but Zeeny waited; there was more
to come. It came: "One day I will also take the dollars. Not for the money. For the pleasure of being a
whore. Of becoming nothing. Less than nothing." And now, at last, the real storm, the words behind the
words, _less than nothing_. "When I die," Changez Chamchawala said to Zeeny, "what will I be? A pair of
emptied shoes. <strong>Th</strong>at is my fate, that he has made for me. <strong>Th</strong>is actor. <strong>Th</strong>is pretender. He has made himself
into an imitator of non-existing men. I have nobody to follow me, to give what I have made. <strong>Th</strong>is is his
revenge: he steals from me my posterity." He smiled, patted her hand, released her into the care of his
son. "I have told her," he said to Saladin. "You are still carrying your take-away chicken. I have told her my
complaint. Now she must judge. <strong>Th</strong>at was the arrangement."
Zeenat Vakil walked up to the old man in his outsize suit, put her hands on his cheeks, and kissed him
on the lips.
o o o
After Zeenat betrayed him in the house of his father's perversions, Saladin Chamcha refused to see her
or answer the messages she left at the hotel desk. _<strong>Th</strong>e Millionairess_ came to the end of its run; the tour
was over. Time to go <strong>home</strong>. After the closing-night party Chamcha headed for bed. In the elevator a young
and clearly honeymooning couple were listening to music on headphones. <strong>Th</strong>e young man murmured to his
wife: "Listen, tell me. Do I still seem a stranger to you sometimes?" <strong>Th</strong>e girl, smiling fondly, shook her
head, _can't hear_, removed the headphones. He repeated, gravely: "A stranger, to you, don't I still
sometimes seem?" She, with unfaltering smile, laid her cheek for an instant on his high scrawny shoulder.
"Yes, once or twice," she said, and put the headphones on again. He did the same, seeming fully satisfied
by her answer. <strong>Th</strong>eir bodies took on, once again, the rhythms of the playback music. Chamcha got out of
the lift. Zeeny was sitting on the floor with her back against his door.
o o o
Inside the room, she poured herself a large whisky and soda. "Behaving like a baby," she said. "You
should be ashamed."
<strong>Th</strong>at afternoon he had received a package from his father. Inside it was a small piece of wood and a
large number of notes, not rupees but sterling pounds: the ashes, so to speak, of a walnut-tree. He was full
of inchoate feeling and because Zeenat had turned up she became the target. "You think I love you?" he
said, speaking with deliberate viciousness. "You think I'll stay with you? I'm a married man."
"I didn't want you to stay for me," she said. "For some reason, I wanted it for you."
A few days earlier, he had been to see an Indian dramatization of a story by Sartre on the subject of
shame. In the original, a husband suspects his wife of infidelity and sets a trap to catch her out. He
pretends to leave on a business trip, but returns a few hours later to spy on her. He is kneeling to look
through the keyhole of their front door. <strong>Th</strong>en he feels a presence behind him, turns without rising, and
there she is, looking down at him with revulsion and disgust. <strong>Th</strong>is tableau, he kneeling, she looking down,
is the Sartrean archetype. But in the Indian version the kneeling husband felt no presence behind him; was
surprised by the wife; stood to face her on equal terms; blustered and shouted; until she wept, he
embraced her, and they were reconciled.
"You say I should be ashamed," Chamcha said bitterly to Zeenat. "You, who are without shame. As a
matter of fact, this may be a national characteristic. I begin to suspect that Indians lack the necessary
moral refinement for a true sense of tragedy, and therefore cannot really understand the idea of shame."
Zeenat Vakil finished her whisky. "Okay, you don't have to say any more." She held up her hands. "I
surrender. I'm going. Mr. Saladin Chamcha. I thought you were still alive, only just, but still breathing, but
I was wrong. Turns out you were dead all the time."
And one more thing before going milk-eyed through the door. "Don't let people get too close to you,
Mr. Saladin. Let people through your defences and the bastards go and knife you in the heart."
After that there had been nothing to stay for. <strong>Th</strong>e aeroplane lifted and banked over the city.
Somewhere below him, his father was dressing up a servant as his dead wife. <strong>Th</strong>e new traffic scheme had