The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie Page A

I
bet." Chamcha tried to be reasonable. "They stay here alone most of
the time, probably sleep in the master bedroom and eat off the good plates, it
must get to feeling like their place." But he was thinking how strikingly,
in that old sari, his ayah Kasturba had come to resemble his mother.
               
"Stayed away so long," his father's voice spoke behind him,
"that now you can't tell a living ayah from your departed ma."
               
Saladin turned around to take in the melancholy sight of a father who had
shrivelled like an old apple, but who insisted nevertheless on wearing the
expensive Italian suits of his opulently fleshy years. Now that he had lost
both Popeye-forearms and Bluto-belly, he seemed to be roaming about inside his
clothes like a man in search of something he had not quite managed to identify.
He stood in the doorway looking at his son, his nose and lips curled, by the withering
sorcery of the years, into a feeble simulacrum of his former ogre-face. Chamcha
had barely begun to understand that his father was no longer capable of
frightening anybody, that his spell had been broken and he was just an old
geezer heading for the grave; while Zeeny had noted with some disappointment
that Changez Chamchawala's hair was conservatively short, and since he was
wearing highly polished Oxford lace-ups it didn't seem likely that the
eleven-inch toenail story was true either; when the ayah Kasturba returned,
smoking a cigarette, and strolled past the three of them, father son mistress,
towards a blue velour-covered button-backed Chesterfield sofa, upon which she
arranged her body as sensually as any movie starlet, even though she was a woman
well advanced in years.
               
No sooner had Kasturba completed her shocking entrance than Changez skipped
past his son and planted himself beside the erstwhile ayah. Zeeny Vakil, her
eyes sparkling with scandalpoints of light, hissed at Chamcha: "Close your
mouth, dear. It looks bad." And in the doorway, the bearer Vallabh,
pushing a drinks trolley, watched unemotionally while his employer of many long
years placed an arm around his uncomplaining wife.
               
When the progenitor, the creator is revealed as satanic, the child will
frequently grow prim. Chamcha heard himself inquire: "And my stepmother,
father dear? She is keeping well?"
               
The old man addressed Zeeny. "He is not such a goody with you, I hope so.
Or what a sad time you must have." Then to his son in harsher tones.
"You have an interest in my wife these days? But she has none in you. She
won't meet you now. Why should she forgive? You are no son to her. Or, maybe,
by now, to me."
                I did not come to fight him. Look, the old goat. I mustn't fight. But this,
this is intolerable . "In my mother's house," Chamcha cried
melodramatically, losing his battle with himself. "The state thinks your
business is corrupt, and here is the corruption of your soul. Look what you've
done to them. Vallabh and Kasturba. With your money. How much did it take? To
poison their lives. You're a sick man." He stood before his father,
blazing with righteous rage.
               
Vallabh the bearer, unexpectedly, intervened. "Baba, with respect, excuse
me but what do you know? You have left and gone and now you come to judge
us." Saladin felt the floor giving way beneath his feet; he was staring
into the inferno. "It is true he pays us," Vallabh went on. "For
our work, and also for what you see. For this." Changez Chamchawala
tightened his grip on the ayah's unresisting shoulders.
               
"How much?" Chamcha shouted. "Vallabh, how much did you two men
decide upon? How much to prostitute your wife?"
               
"What a fool," Kasturba said contemptuously. "England-educated
and what-all, but still with a head full of hay. You come talking so big-big, in
your mother's house etcetera, but maybe you didn't love her so