The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

like."
               
Scandal Point unfurled before them. Saladin felt the past rush in like a tide,
drowning him, filling his lungs with its revenant saltiness. I'm not myself
today , he thought. The heart flutters. Life damages the living. None of us
are ourselves. None of us are like this .
               
These days there were steel gates, operated by remote control from within,
sealing the crumbling triumphal arch. They opened with a slow whirring sound to
admit Saladin into that place of lost time. When he saw the walnut-tree in
which his father had claimed that his soul was kept, his hands began to shake.
He hid behind the neutrality of facts. "In Kashmir," he told Zeeny,
"your birth-tree is a financial investment of a sort. When a child comes
of age, the grown walnut is comparable to a matured insurance policy; it's a
valuable tree, it can be sold, to pay for weddings, or a start in life. The
adult chops down his childhood to help his grown-up self. The unsentimentality
is appealing, don't you think?"
               
The car had stopped under the entrance porch. Zeeny fell silent as the two of
them climbed the six stairs to the front door, where they were greeted by a
composed and ancient bearer in white, brass-buttoned livery, whose shock of
white hair Chamcha suddenly recognized, by translating it back into black, as
the mane of that same Vallabh who had presided over the house as its major-domo
in the Olden Days. "My God, Vallabhbhai," he managed, and embraced
the old man. The servant smiled a difficult smile. "I grow so old, baba, I
was thinking you would not recognize." He led them down the crystal-heavy
corridors of the mansion and Saladin realized that the lack of change was
excessive, and plainly deliberate. It was true, Vallabh explained to him, that
when the Begum died Changez Sahib had sworn that the house would be her
memorial. As a result nothing had changed since the day she died, paintings,
furniture, soap-dishes, the red-glass figures of fighting bulls and china
ballerinas from Dresden, all left in their exact positions, the same magazines
on the same tables, the same crumpled balls of paper in the wastebaskets, as
though the house had died, too, and been embalmed. "Mummified," Zeeny
said, voicing the unspeakable as usual. "God, but it's spooky, no?"
It was at this point, while Vallabh the bearer was opening the double doors
leading into the blue drawing room, that Saladin Chamcha saw his mother's
ghost.
               
He let out a loud cry and Zeeny whirled on her heel. "There," he
pointed towards the far, darkened end of the hallway, "no question, that
blasted newsprint sari, the big headlines, the one she wore the day she,
she," but now Vallabh had begun to flap his arms like a weak, flightless
bird, you see, baba, it was only Kasturba, you have not forgotten, my wife,
only my wife. My ayah Kasturba with whom I played in rock-pools. Until I
grew up and went without her and in a hollow a man with ivory glasses .
"Please, baba, nothing to be cross, only when the Begum died Changez Sahib
donated to my wife some few garments, you do not object? Your mother was a
so-generous woman, when alive she always gave with an open hand." Chamcha,
recovering his equilibrium, was feeling foolish. "For God's sake,
Vallabh," he muttered. "For God's sake. Obviously I don't
object." An old stiffness re-entered Vallabh; the right to free speech of
the old retainer permitted him to reprove, "Excuse, baba, but you should
not blaspheme."
               
"See how he's sweating," Zeeny stage-whispered. "He looks scared
stiff." Kasturba entered the room, and although her reunion with Chamcha
was warm enough there was still a wrongness in the air. Vallabh left to bring
beer and Thums Up, and when Kasturba also excused herself, Zeeny at once said:
"Something fishy. She walks like she owns the dump. The way she holds
herself. And the old man was afraid. Those two are up to something,