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‘I have noticed you,’ Chamcha heard him say, ‘I have noticed you, and come to appreciate your kindness and understanding.’ Saladin realized that he was making a formal speech of thanks to the empty space where he clearly believed the physiotherapist was still standing. ‘I am not a man who forgets a kindness. One day, perhaps, I may be able to repay it, but for the moment, please know that it is remembered, and fondly, too...’ Chamcha did not have the courage to call out, she isn't there, old man, she left some time back. He listened unhappily until at length the blind man asked the thin air a question: ‘I hope, perhaps, you may also remember me? A little? On occasion?’ Then came a silence; a dry laugh; the sound of a man sitting down, heavily, all of a sudden. And finally, after an unbearable pause, bathos: ‘Oh,’ the soliloquist bellowed, ‘oh, if ever a body suffered... !’
We strive for the heights but our natures betray us, Chamcha thought; clowns in search of crowns. The bitterness overcame him. Once I was lighter, happier, warm. Now the black water is in my veins.
Still no Pamela. What the hell. That night, he told the manticore and the wolf that he was with them, all the way.
The great escape took place some nights later, when Saladin's lungs had been all but emptied of slime by the ministrations of Miss Hyacinth Phillips. It turned out to be a well-organized affair on a pretty large scale, involving not only the inmates of the sanatorium but also the detenus, as the manticore called them, held behind wire fences in the Detention Centre nearby. Not being one of the grand strategists of the escape, Chamcha simply waited by his bed as instructed until Hyacinth brought him word, and then they ran out of that ward of nightmares into the clarity of a cold, moonlit sky, past several bound, gagged men: their former guards. There were many shadowy figures ru
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Jumpy Joshi had become Pamela Chamcha's lover by what she afterwards called ‘sheer chance’ on the night she learned of her husband's death in the Bostan explosion, so that the sound of his old college friend Saladin's voice speaking from beyond the grave in the middle of the night, uttering the five gnomic words sorry, excuse please, wrong number, – speaking, moreover, less than two hours after Jumpy and Pamela had made, with the assistance of two bottles of whisky, the two-backed beast, – put him in a tight spot. ‘Who was that?’ Pamela, still mostly asleep, with a blackout mask over her eyes, rolled over to inquire, and he decided to reply, ‘Just a breather, don't worry about it,’ which was all very well, except then he had to do the worrying all by himself, sitting up in bed, naked, and sucking, for comfort, as he had all his life, the thumb on his right hand.
He was a small person with wire coathanger shoulders and an enormous capacity for nervous agitation, evidenced by his pale, sunken-eyed face; his thi
He had rushed over to Pamela's place the moment he heard the news, and found her dry-eyed and composed. She led him into her clutter-lover's study on whose walls watercolours of rose-gardens hung between clenched-fist posters reading Partido Socialista, photographs of friends and a cluster of African masks, and as he picked his way across the floor between ashtrays and the Voice newspaper and feminist science-fiction novels she said, flatly, ‘The surprising thing is that when they told me I thought, well, shrug, his death will actually make a pretty small hole in my life.’ Jumpy, who was close to tears, and bursting with memories, stopped in his tracks and flapped his arms, looking, in his great shapeless black coat, and with his pallid, terror-stricken face, like a vampire caught in the unexpected and hideous light of day. Then he saw the empty whisky bottles. Pamela had started drinking, she said, some hours back, and since then she had been going at it steadily, rhythmically, with the dedication of a long-distance ru
Now, sitting up in bed with a thumb instead of a bottle, his secret and his hangover banging equally painfully inside his head (he had never been a drinking or a secretive man), Jumpy felt tears coming on once again, and decided to get up and walk himself around. Where he went was upstairs, to what Saladin had insisted on calling his ‘den’, a large loft-space with skylights and windows looking down on an expanse of communal gardens dotted with comfortable trees, oak, larch, even the last of the elms, a survivor of the plague years. First the elms, now us, Jumpy reflected. Maybe the trees were a warning. He shook himself to banish such small-hour morbidities, and perched on the edge of his friend's mahogany desk. Once at a college party he had perched, just so, on a table soggy with spilled wine and beer next to an emaciated girl in black lace minidress, purple feather boa and eyelids like silver helmets, unable to pluck up the courage to say hello. Finally he did turn to her and stutter out some banality or other; she gave him a look of absolute contempt and said without moving her black-lacquer lips, conversation's dead, man. He had been pretty upset, so upset that he blurted out, tell me, why are all the girls in this town so rude?, and she answered, without pausing to think, because most of the boys are like you. A few moments later Chamcha came up, reeking of patchouli, wearing a white kurta, everybody's goddamn cartoon of the mysteries of the East, and the girl left with him five minutes later. The bastard, Jumpy Joshi thought as the old bitterness surged back, he had no shame, he was ready to be anything they wanted to buy, that read-your-palm bedspread-jacket Hare-Krishna dharma-bum, you wouldn't have caught me dead. That stopped him, that word right there. Dead. Face it, Jamshed, the girls never went for you, that's the truth, and the rest is envy. Well, maybe so, he half-conceded, and then again. Maybe dead, he added, and then again, maybe not.