Step Across This Line (23 page)

THURSDAY, APRIL 6

I have left India many times. The first time was when I was thirteen and a half and went to boarding school in Rugby, England. My mother didn’t want me to go, but I said I did. I flew west excitedly in January 1961, not really knowing that I was taking a step that would change my life forever. A few years later, my father, without telling me, suddenly sold Windsor Villa, our family home in Bombay. The day I heard this, I felt an abyss open beneath my feet. I think that I never forgave my father for selling that house, and I’m sure that if he hadn’t I would still be living in it. Since then my characters have frequently flown west from India, but in novel after novel their author’s imagination has returned to it. This, perhaps, is what it means to love a country: that its shape is also yours, the shape of the way you think and feel and dream. That you can never really leave.

Before the Partition Massacres of 1947, my parents left Delhi and moved south, correctly calculating that there would be less trouble in secular, cosmopolitan Bombay. As a result I grew up in that tolerant, broad-minded city, whose particular quality—call it freedom—I’ve been trying to capture and celebrate ever since.
Midnight’s Children
(1981) was my first attempt at such literary land reclamation. Living in London, I wanted to get India back; and the delight with which Indian readers clasped the book to themselves, the passion with which they, in turn, claimed me, remains the most precious memory of my writing life.

In 1988, I was planning to buy myself an Indian base with the advances I’d received for my new novel. But that novel was
The Satanic Verses,
and after it was published the world changed for me, and I was no longer able to set foot in the country that has been my primary source of artistic inspiration. Whenever I made inquiries about getting a visa, the word invariably came back that I would not be granted one. Nothing about my plague years, the dark decade that followed the Khomeini fatwa, has hurt more than this rift. I felt like a jilted lover left alone with his unrequited, unbearable love. You can measure love by the size of the hole it leaves behind.

It has been a deep rift, let’s admit that. India was the first country to ban
The Satanic Verses
—which was proscribed without following India’s own stipulated due process in such matters, banned before it entered the country by a weak Congress government led by Rajiv Gandhi, in a desperate, unsuccessful bid for Muslim votes. After that, it sometimes seemed as if the Indian authorities were determined to rub salt in the wound. When
The Moor’s Last Sigh
was published in the fall of 1995, the Indian government, in an attempt to appease Bal Thackeray’s brutal Shiv Sena in Bombay (which has done much to damage the city’s old free-spirited openness, and which I therefore satirized in the novel), blocked the book’s import through customs but backed down quickly when challenged in the courts. Then BBC Television’s efforts to make a prestigious five-hour dramatization of
Midnight’s Children,
with a screenplay I myself adapted from the novel, were thwarted when India refused permission to film. That
Midnight’s Children
was deemed unfit to be filmed in its own country, the country which had so recently celebrated its publication with so much recognition and joy, was a bad and miserable shock.

There were smaller but still wounding slights. For years I was declared persona non grata by the Indian High Commission in London’s cultural arm, the Nehru Centre. And at the time of the fiftieth anniversary of Indian independence, I was similarly barred from the Indian consulate’s celebrations in New York.

Meanwhile, in some Indian literary quarters, it has become fashionable to denigrate my work. And the ban on
The Satanic Verses
is, of course, still in place.

After the September 24, 1998, agreement between the British and Iranian governments that effectively set aside the Khomeini fatwa, things began to change for me in India too. India granted me a five-year visa just over a year ago. But at once there were threats from Muslim hard-liners like Imam Bukhari of the Delhi Juma Masjid. More worryingly, some commentators told me not to visit India because if I did so I might look like a pawn of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party government. I have never been a BJP man, but that wouldn’t stop them using me for their own sectarian ends.

“Exile,” it says somewhere in
The Satanic Verses,
“is a dream of glorious return.” But the dream fades, the imagined return stops feeling glorious. The dreamer awakes. I almost gave up on India, almost believed the love affair was over for good.

But, as it turns out, not so. As it turns out, I’m about to leave for Delhi after a gap of twelve and a half years. My son Zafar, twenty, is coming with me. He hasn’t been to India since he was three, and is very excited. Compared to me, however, he’s the very picture of coolness and calm.

FRIDAY, APRIL 7

The telephone rings. The Delhi police are extremely nervous about my impending arrival. Can I please avoid being spotted on the plane? My bald head is very recognizable; will I please wear a hat? My eyes are also easily identified; will I please wear sunglasses? Oh, and my beard, too, is a real giveaway; will I wear a scarf around that? The temperature in India is close to 100°F, I point out: a scarf might prove a little warm. Oh, but there are cotton scarves . . .

These requests are relayed to me in a don’t-shoot-the-messenger voice by my usually unflappable Indian attorney, Vijay Shankardass. How about, I suggest hotly, if I just spend the entire journey with my head in a paper bag? “Salman,” says Vijay, carefully, “there’s a lot of tension out here. I’m feeling fairly anxious myself.”

The organizers of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, at whose invitation I am traveling to Delhi, are sending mixed messages. Mr. Pavan Varma, a civil servant who is also in charge of media relations for the event, ignores all requests for discretion and holds a press conference to say that I’ll probably be at the prize banquet. Contrariwise, Colin Ball, head of the Commonwealth Foundation, whose prize it is, tells Vijay that if police protection is not extended to all the twenty or so foreign visitors arriving at Claridge’s Hotel for the ceremony, he may have to withdraw my invitation, even though I won’t be staying at Claridge’s, and nobody has ever threatened the delegates, who are not deemed by the Indian authorities to be in any danger. The only threats around right now are Mr. Ball’s.

I’m going to India because things are better now and I judge that it’s time to go. I’m going because if I don’t go I’ll never know if it’s okay to go or not. I’m going because in spite of everything that has happened between India and myself, in spite of the bruises on my heart, the hook of love is in too deeply to pull out. Most of all, I’m going because Zafar asked to come with me. High time he was reintroduced to his other country.

But the truth is I don’t know what to expect. Will I feel welcomed or spurned?
I don’t know if I’m going back to say hello or good-bye.
Oh, stop being so melodramatic, Salman. Don’t meet trouble halfway. Just get on the plane and go.

So: I fly to Delhi, and nobody sees me do it. Here’s the invisible man in his business class seat. Here he is, watching the new Pedro Almodóvar movie on a little pop-up screen, while the plane flies over, er, Iran. Here’s the invisible man sleep-masked and snoring.

And here I am at journey’s end, stepping out into the heat of Delhi’s international airport with Zafar at my side, and only Vijay Shankardass can see us.
Abracadabra!
Magic realism rules. Don’t ask me how it’s done. The shrewd conjurer never explains the trick.

I feel an urge to kiss the ground or, rather, the blue rug in the airport “finger,” but am embarrassed to do so beneath the watchful eyes of a small army of security guards. Leaving the rug unkissed, I move out of the terminal into the blazing, bone-dry Delhi heat, so different from the wet-towel humidity of my native Bombay. The hot day enfolds us like an embrace. A road unrolls before us like a carpet. We climb into a cramped, white Hindustan Ambassador, a car that is itself a blast from the past, the British Morris Oxford, long defunct in Britain but alive and well here in this Indian translation. The Ambassador’s air-conditioning system isn’t working.

I’m back.

SATURDAY, APRIL 8

India doesn’t stand on ceremony, and rushes in from every direction, thrusting me into the middle of its unending argument, clamoring for my total attention as it always did.
Buy Chilly cockroach traps! Drink Hello mineral water! Speed Thrills But Kills!
shout the billboards. There are new kinds of messages, too.
Enroll for Oracle 81. Graduate with Java as well.
And, as proof that the long protectionist years are over, Coca-Cola is back with a vengeance. When I was last here it was banned, leaving the field clear for the disgusting local imitations, Campa-Cola and Thums Up. Now there’s a red Coke ad every hundred yards or so. Coke’s slogan of the moment is written in Hindi transliterated into Roman script:
Jo Chaho Ho Jaaye.
Which could be translated, literally, as “whatever you desire, let it come to pass.”

I choose to think of this as a blessing.

HORN PLEASE, demand the signs on the backs of the one million trucks blocking the road. All the other trucks, cars, bikes, motor-scooters, taxis, and
phut-phut
autorickshaws enthusiastically respond, welcoming Zafar and me to town with an energetic rendition of the traditional symphony of the Indian street.

Wait for Side! Sorry-Bye-Bye! Fatta Boy!

The news is just as cacophonous. Between India and Pakistan, as usual, acrimony reigns. Pakistan’s ex–Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has just been sentenced to life imprisonment after what looked very like a show trial stage-managed by the latest military strongman to seize power, General Pervez Musharraf. India’s army of vociferous commentators, linking this story to the unveiling by Pakistan of a new missile, the Shaheen-II, warn darkly of the worsening relations between the two countries. A politician from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) accuses Imam Bukhari of “seditious utterances” for some allegedly pro-Pakistani, anti-Indian statements.
Plus ça change.
Tempers, as ever, run high.

Inevitably, Bill Clinton, on his recent visit to the subcontinent, was drawn into these old antagonisms. From an Indian point of view, he said most of the right things. In particular, his toughness toward Pakistan, its dictatorship, its nuclear bomb, its illiberalism, won him many friends, and this after many years during which Indians were convinced that the basis of American foreign policy in the region was, in Dr. Kissinger’s phrase, to “tilt toward Pakistan.”

India is, on the whole, basking in the afterglow of the Clinton visit when I arrive. The roseate old charmer has done it again. Bombay’s movie world is agog. “Hindustani hearts,” reports a showbiz magazine in the city’s inimitable prose style, “went bonkers over the Grand daddy of Uncle Sam.” A starlet, Suman Ranganathan, variously described as a “sexy babe” and “apni sizzling mirchi,” that is, “our very own sizzling hot chili,” is much taken by Big Bill, who is, she declares, “amazing, approachable, and someone who knows the pulse of the people.”

In India, as my friend the distinguished art critic Geeta Kapur reminds me, people have very rarely been bothered by politicians’ private lives. One very senior BJP leader is known to have kept a mistress for years without it affecting his career in the slightest. Indians, therefore, view the Lewinsky scandal with bemused puzzlement. If various hot chilis choose to sizzle at the world’s most powerful man, who could be surprised?

I’ve been back only for an instant, and already everyone I talk to—Vijay Shankardass, friends I’m eagerly ringing up to announce my arrival, even policemen—is regaling me with opinions on the new shape of Indian politics. If Bombay is India’s New York—glamorous, glitzy, vulgar-chic, a merchant city, a movie city, a slum city, incredibly rich, hideously poor—then Delhi is like Washington. Politics is the only game in town. Nobody talks about anything else for very long.

Once, India’s minorities looked for protection to the left-leaning Congress, then the country’s only organized political machine. Now the disarray of the Congress Party, and its drift to the right, is everywhere apparent. Under the leadership of Sonia Gandhi, the once mighty machine languishes and rusts.

People who have known Sonia for years urge me not to swallow the line that she was never interested in politics and allowed herself to be drafted into the leadership only because of her concern for the party. A portrait is painted of a woman completely seduced by power but unable to wield it, lacking the skill, charm, vision, indeed everything except the hunger for power itself. Around her fawn the sycophantic courtiers of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, working to prevent the emergence of new leaders—P. S. Chidambaram, Madhavrao Scindia, Rajesh Pilot—who just might have the freshness and will to revive the party’s fortunes, but who cannot be permitted to usurp the leadership role that, in the Sonia clique’s view, belongs to her and her children alone.

I was last in India in August 1987, making a television documentary about the fortieth anniversary of Independence. I have never forgotten being at the Red Fort listening to Rajiv Gandhi delivering a stunningly tedious oration in broken schoolboy Hindi, while the audience simply and crushingly walked away. Now, here on television is his widow, her Hindi even more broken than his, a woman convinced of her right to rule but convincing almost nobody except herself.

I remember another widow. In that 1987 documentary we included an interview with a Sikh woman, Ravel Kaur, who had seen her husband and sons murdered before her eyes by gangs known to be led and organized by Congress people. Indira Gandhi had recently been assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards, and the whole Sikh community of Delhi was paying the price. The Rajiv Gandhi government prosecuted nobody for these murders, in spite of much hard evidence identifying many of the killers.

For Vijay Shankardass, who had known Rajiv for years, those were disillusioning days. He and his wife hid their Sikh neighbors in their own home to keep them safe. He went to see Rajiv to demand that something be done to stop the killings, and was deeply shocked by Rajiv’s seeming indifference. “Salman, he was so
calm.
” One of Rajiv’s close aides, Arjun Das, was less placid.
“Saalón ko phoonk do,”
he snarled. “Blow the bastards away.” Later, he too was killed.

Through the Indian High Commission in London (my friend and namesake, Salman Haidar, then the deputy high commissioner, was pressed into censorious service), the Rajiv government did its level best to prevent our film from being shown, because of the interview with the Sikh widow. Even though she was no Sikh terrorist but a victim of anti-Sikh terrorism; even though she remained opposed to radical Sikh demands for a state of their own, and asked no more than justice for the dead, India sought to stifle her voice. And, I’m pleased to say, failed.

So many widows. In
Midnight’s Children,
I satirized the first widow to take power in India, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, for her abuse of that power during the quasi-dictatorial Emergency years in the mid-seventies. I could not have foreseen how resonant—by turns tragic and bathetic—the trope of the widow would continue to be.

Widows also feature prominently in the Indian Canadian film director Deepa Mehta’s unfinished film
Water,
which is partly set in a widows’ hostel in the holy city of Benares, where bereaved women come to pray and mourn by the banks of the sacred Ganges. Threats of violence from extremist Hindu groups stopped the filming. Mehta has abandoned her efforts to complete the picture and returned to Canada in despair.

Years ago, the climactic scenes of
Midnight’s Children
were also set in a Benares widows’ hostel. This, of course, is pure coincidence, but another writer, Sunil Gangopadhyay of Bengal, is making serious allegations against Deepa Mehta. He accuses her of plagiarism, claiming that substantial passages of his novel
Those Days
have been “lifted” and incorporated in Ms. Mehta’s screenplay. She accepts that she was “inspired” by Gangopadhyay’s book but denies the charge of plagiarism. The author’s translator, Aruna Chakravati, retorts that Mehta’s screenplay is far inferior to Gangopadhyay’s epic historical novel: not “enlightened” but “stagnant.”

The plagiarism charge is one reason why much of the Indian cultural elite has given Deepa Mehta only halfhearted support against her bully-boy opponents. People say she shouldn’t have sought to ingratiate herself with the BJP’s information minister, Arun Jaitley, who, like the BJP in general, is abhorred by much of the arts community. Also that she did herself and her movie no favors by making so many outspoken public statements, which hardened her opponents’ attitudes and made it less likely that the film would ever be completed. She should have got her film made first and screamed later, people say.

The painter Vivan Sundaram argues that the episode shows us with great clarity the two faces of the BJP: the “moderate” stance of Atul Behari Vajpayee’s government, which initially gave the filmmaker permission to film, and the “hard-line” position of the party’s rank and file, whose gangs threw part of the film set into the Ganges and threatened Mehta’s life, until the BJP leadership was forced to stop the filming.

Congress has strange bedfellows these days. Its decay can perhaps best be measured by the poor quality of its allies. In the state of Bihar, the bizarre political double-act of Laloo Prasad Yadav and his wife, Rabri Devi—on whom the wholly fictitious, and wildly corrupt, Bombay politicians Piloo and Golmatol Doodhwala in
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
were very loosely modeled—is once again taking center stage. Some years ago, Laloo, then Bihar’s chief minister, was implicated in the Fodder Scam, a swindle in which large amounts of public livestock subsidies were claimed for the maintenance of cows that didn’t actually exist. (In my novel, Piloo, India’s “Scambaba Deluxe,” runs a similar scheme involving non-existent goats.) Laloo was jailed but managed to secure the chief ministership for Rabri, and blithely went on running the state, by proxy, from his prison cell.

Since then he has been in and out of the clink. At present he’s inside, and Rabri is at least technically in the driving seat, and another juicy corruption scandal is emerging. The tax authorities want to know how Laloo and Rabri manage to live in such high style (they have a particularly grand house) on the relatively humble salaries that even senior ministers in India pull down. Rabri has been “chargesheeted”—indicted—but refuses to resign; or rather, Laloo, from jail, announces that there is no question of his wife the chief minister vacating her post.

As a writer with satirical inclinations, I’m delighted by the Yadav saga, the barefaced skulduggery of it, the shameless wholeheartedness, the glee with which Laloo and Rabri just go on being their appalling selves. But their survival is also a sign of the growing corruption of Indian political culture. This is a country in which known gangsters have been elected to the national parliament, and where a man who runs a state from his prison cell can receive the vocal support of no less a figure than the Congress Party leader, Sonia Gandhi herself.