The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie Page B

would offer
him a present, a bar of imported chocolate or a tin of Kraft cheese, and would
then grab him when he came to get it. "Donkey," Changez scorned his
infant son. "Always, always, the carrot leads you to my stick."
               
Salahuddin in London took the proffered wallet, accepting the gift of manhood;
whereupon his father said: "Now that you are a man, it is for you to look
after your old father while we are in London town. You pay all the bills."
               
January, 1961. A year you could turn upside down and it would still, unlike
your watch, tell the same time. It was winter; but when Salahuddin Chamchawala
began to shiver in his hotel room, it was because he was scared halfway out of
his wits; his crock of gold had turned, suddenly, into a sorcerer's curse.
               
Those two weeks in London before he went to his boarding school turned into a
nightmare of cash-tills and calculations, because Changez had meant exactly
what he said and never put his hand into his own pocket once. Salahuddin had to
buy his own clothes, such as a double-breasted blue serge mackintosh and seven
blue-and-white striped Van Heusen shirts with detachable semi-stiff collars
which Changez made him wear every day, to get used to the studs, and Salahuddin
felt as if a blunt knife were being pushed in just beneath his newly broken
Adam's-apple; and he had to make sure there would be enough for the hotel room,
and everything, so that he was too nervous to ask his father if they could go
to a movie, not even one, not even The Pure Hell of St Trinians, or to
eat out, not a single Chinese meal, and in later years he would remember
nothing of his first fortnight in his beloved Ellowen Deeowen except pounds
shillings pence, like the disciple of the philosopher-king Chanakya who asked
the great man what he meant by saying one could live in the world and also not
live in it, and who was told to carry a brim-full pitcher of water through a
holiday crowd without spilling a drop, on pain of death, so that when he
returned he was unable to describe the day's festivities, having been like a
blind man, seeing only the jug on his head.
               
Changez Chamchawala became very still in those days, seeming not to care if he
ate or drank or did any damn thing, he was happy sitting in the hotel room
watching television, especially when the Flintstones were on, because, he told
his son, that Wilma bibi reminded him of Nasreen. Salahuddin tried to prove he
was a man by fasting right along with his father, trying to outlast him, but he
never managed it, and when the pangs got too strong he went out of the hotel to
the cheap joint nearby where you could buy take-away roast chickens that hung
greasily in the window, turning slowly on their spits. When he brought the
chicken into the hotel lobby he became embarrassed, not wanting the staff to
see, so he stuffed it inside double-breasted serge and went up in the lift
reeking of spit-roast, his mackintosh bulging, his face turning red.
Chicken-breasted beneath the gaze of dowagers and liftwallahs he felt the birth
of that implacable rage which would burn within him, undiminished, for over a
quarter of a century; which would boil away his childhood father-worship and
make him a secular man, who would do his best, thereafter, to live without a
god of any type; which would fuel, perhaps, his determination to become the
thing his father was-not-could-never-be, that is, a goodandproper Englishman.
Yes, an English, even if his mother had been right all along, even if there was
only paper in the toilets and tepid, used water full of mud and soap to step
into after taking exercise, even if it meant a lifetime spent amongst
winter-naked trees whose fingers clutched despairingly at the few, pale hours
of watery, filtered light. On winter nights he, who had never slept beneath
more than a sheet, lay beneath mountains of wool and felt like a figure in an
ancient myth,