go for a while. When he said hello to Bob, the publisher said, with great intensity, “I’m always defending you, Salman. I always tell people, if you had known that your book was going to kill people, of course you wouldn’t have written it.” He counted very slowly to ten. It would not be right to hit this old man. It would be better to make an excuse and just walk away. He inclined his head in a meaningless gesture and turned on his heel. In the years that followed they did not speak. He owed a great deal to Bob Gottlieb but he couldn’t get those final words out of his head, and he knew that, just as Gottlieb hadn’t understood the impact of his words about Naipaul’s book when they had met for the first time, he also didn’t understand what was wrong with what he said at this, their last meeting. Bob believed he was being a friend.
In 1984 his marriage ended. They had been together for fourteen years and had grown apart without noticing it. Clarissa wanted a country life, and they had spent one summer looking at houses west of London, but in the end he realized that to move into the countryside would drive him insane. He was a city boy. He told her this and she acquiesced, but it was a difficulty between them. They had fallen in love when they were both very young and now that they were older their interests often failed to coincide. There were parts of his life in London that didn’t greatly interest her. One such part was his antiracist work. He had been involved for a long time with a race relations group, the Camden Committee for Community Relations, or CCCR, and his voluntary work there, overseeing the community work team, had become important to him. It had shown him a city he had previously known little about, the immigrant London of deprivation and prejudice, what he would afterward call
a city visible but unseen
. The immigrant city was right there in plain sight, in Southall and Wembley and Brixton as well as Camden, but in those days its problems were largely ignored, except during brief explosions of racial violence. This was a chosen blindness: an unwillingness to accept the city, the world, as it really was. He gave a lot of his spare time to race relations work, and used his experiences with CCCR as the basis of a polemical broadcast titled “The New Empire Within Britain,” an attempt to describe the growth of a new underclass of black and brown Britons, made for the
Opinions
slot on Channel Four, and it was obvious she didn’t much care for the rhetoric he used in that talk, either.
But their biggest problem was a more intimate one. Ever since Zafar’s birth they, and in particular Clarissa, had wanted more children, and the children had not come. Instead there was a series of early miscarriages. There had been one such miscarriage before Zafar’s conception and birth and there were two more afterward. He discovered that the problem was genetic. He had inherited (probably from his father’s side) a condition known as a
simple chromosome translocation
.
A chromosome was a stick of genetic information and all human cells contained twenty-two pairs of such sticks, as well as a twenty-third pair that determined gender. In rare cases a piece of genetic information broke off one chromosome and attached itself to another. Therewere then two faulty chromosomes, one with too little genetic information and another with too much. When a child was conceived, half the father’s chromosomes, chosen at random, combined with half the mother’s, to create a new set of pairs. If the father had a simple chromosome translocation and
both
his faulty chromosomes were selected, the child would be born normally, except that it would inherit the condition. If
neither
of the faulty chromosomes were selected, the pregnancy would also be normal and the child would not inherit the condition. But if only one of the two problem chromosomes were to be selected, then the fetus would not form, and the pregnancy would
In 1984 his marriage ended. They had been together for fourteen years and had grown apart without noticing it. Clarissa wanted a country life, and they had spent one summer looking at houses west of London, but in the end he realized that to move into the countryside would drive him insane. He was a city boy. He told her this and she acquiesced, but it was a difficulty between them. They had fallen in love when they were both very young and now that they were older their interests often failed to coincide. There were parts of his life in London that didn’t greatly interest her. One such part was his antiracist work. He had been involved for a long time with a race relations group, the Camden Committee for Community Relations, or CCCR, and his voluntary work there, overseeing the community work team, had become important to him. It had shown him a city he had previously known little about, the immigrant London of deprivation and prejudice, what he would afterward call
a city visible but unseen
. The immigrant city was right there in plain sight, in Southall and Wembley and Brixton as well as Camden, but in those days its problems were largely ignored, except during brief explosions of racial violence. This was a chosen blindness: an unwillingness to accept the city, the world, as it really was. He gave a lot of his spare time to race relations work, and used his experiences with CCCR as the basis of a polemical broadcast titled “The New Empire Within Britain,” an attempt to describe the growth of a new underclass of black and brown Britons, made for the
Opinions
slot on Channel Four, and it was obvious she didn’t much care for the rhetoric he used in that talk, either.
But their biggest problem was a more intimate one. Ever since Zafar’s birth they, and in particular Clarissa, had wanted more children, and the children had not come. Instead there was a series of early miscarriages. There had been one such miscarriage before Zafar’s conception and birth and there were two more afterward. He discovered that the problem was genetic. He had inherited (probably from his father’s side) a condition known as a
simple chromosome translocation
.
A chromosome was a stick of genetic information and all human cells contained twenty-two pairs of such sticks, as well as a twenty-third pair that determined gender. In rare cases a piece of genetic information broke off one chromosome and attached itself to another. Therewere then two faulty chromosomes, one with too little genetic information and another with too much. When a child was conceived, half the father’s chromosomes, chosen at random, combined with half the mother’s, to create a new set of pairs. If the father had a simple chromosome translocation and
both
his faulty chromosomes were selected, the child would be born normally, except that it would inherit the condition. If
neither
of the faulty chromosomes were selected, the pregnancy would also be normal and the child would not inherit the condition. But if only one of the two problem chromosomes were to be selected, then the fetus would not form, and the pregnancy would
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