Salman Rushdie

EAST, WEST

East

GOOD ADVICE IS

RARER THAN RUBIES

  

On the last Tuesday of the month, the dawn bus, its headlamps still shining, brought Miss Rehana to the gates of the British Consulate. It arrived pushing a cloud of dust, veiling her beauty from the eyes of strangers until she descended. The bus was brightly painted in multicoloured arabesques, and on the front it said ‘MOVE OVER DARLING’ in green and gold letters; on the back it added ‘TATA-BATA’ and also ‘O.K. GOOD-LIFE’. Miss Rehana told the driver it was a beautiful bus, and he jumped down and held the door open for her, bowing theatrically as she descended.

Miss Rehana’s eyes were large and black and bright enough not to need the help of antimony, and when the advice expert Muhammad Ali saw them he felt himself becoming young again. He watched her approaching the Consulate gates as the light strengthened, and asking the bearded lala who guarded them in a gold-buttoned khaki uniform with a cockaded turban when they would open. The lala, usually so rude to the Consulate’s Tuesday women, answered Miss Rehana with something like courtesy.

‘Half an hour,’ he said gruffly. ‘Maybe two hours. Who knows? The sahibs are eating their breakfast.’

The dusty compound between the bus stop and the Consulate was already full of Tuesday women, some veiled, a few barefaced like Miss Rehana. They all looked frightened, and leaned heavily on the arms of uncles or brothers, who were trying to look confident. But Miss Rehana had come on her own, and did not seem at all alarmed.

Muhammad Ali, who specialised in advising the most vulnerable-looking of these weekly supplicants, found his feet leading him towards the strange, big-eyed, independent girl.

‘Miss,’ he began. ‘You have come for permit to London, I think so?’

She was standing at a hot-snack stall in the little shanty-town by the edge of the compound, munching chilli-pakoras contentedly. She turned to look at him, and at close range those eyes did bad things to his digestive tract.

‘Yes, I have.’

‘Then, please, you allow me to give some advice? Small cost only.’

Miss Rehana smiled. ‘Good advice is rarer than rubies,’ she said. ‘But alas, I cannot pay. I am an orphan, not one of your wealthy ladies.’

‘Trust my grey hairs,’ Muhammad Ali urged her. ‘My advice is well tempered by experience. You will certainly find it good.’

She shook her head. ‘I tell you I am a poor potato. There are women here with male family members, all earning good wages. Go to them. Good advice should find good money.’

I am going crazy, Muhammad Ali thought, because he heard his voice telling her of its own volition, ‘Miss, I have been drawn to you by Fate. What to do? Our meeting was written. I also am a poor man only, but for you my advice comes free.’

She smiled again. ‘Then I must surely listen. When Fate sends a gift, one receives good fortune.’

He led her to the low wooden desk in his own special corner of the shanty-town. She followed, continuing to eat pakoras from a little newspaper packet. She did not offer him any.

Muhammad Ali put a cushion on the dusty ground. ‘Please to sit.’ She did as he asked. He sat cross-legged across the desk from her, conscious that two or three dozen pairs of male eyes were watching him enviously, that all the other shanty-town men were ogling the latest young lovely to be charmed by the old grey-hair fraud. He took a deep breath to settle himself.

‘Name, please.’

‘Miss Rehana,’ she told him. ‘Fiancée of Mustafa Dar of Bradford, London.’

‘Bradford, England,’ he corrected her gently. ‘London is a town only, like Multan or Bahawalpur. England is a great nation full of the coldest fish in the world.’

‘I see. Thank you,’ she responded gravely, so that he was unsure if she was making fun of him.

‘You have filled application form? Then let me see, please.’

She passed him a neatly folded document in a brown envelope.

‘Is it OK?’ For the first time there was a note of anxiety in her voice.

He patted the desk quite near the place where her hand rested. ‘I am certain,’ he said. ‘Wait on and I will check.’

She finished the pakoras while he scanned her papers.

‘Tip-top,’ he pronounced at length. ‘All in order.’

‘Thank you for your advice,’ she said, making as if to rise. ‘I’ll go now and wait by the gate.’

‘What are you thinking?’ he cried loudly, smiting his forehead. ‘You consider this is easy business? Just give the form and poof, with a big smile they hand over the permit? Miss Rehana, I tell you, you are entering a worse place than any police station.’

‘Is it so, truly?’ His oratory had done the trick. She was a captive audience now, and he would be able to look at her for a few moments longer.

Drawing another calming breath, he launched into his set speech. He told her that the sahibs thought that all the women who came on Tuesdays, claiming to be dependents of bus drivers in Luton or chartered accountants in Manchester, were crooks and liars and cheats.

She protested, ‘But then I will simply tell them that I, for one, am no such thing!’

Her innocence made him shiver with fear for her. She was a sparrow, he told her, and they were men with hooded eyes, like hawks. He explained that they would ask her questions, personal questions, questions such as a lady’s own brother would be too shy to ask. They would ask if she was virgin, and, if not, what her fiancé’s love-making habits were, and what secret nicknames they had invented for one another.

Muhammad Ali spoke brutally, on purpose, to lessen the shock she would feel when it, or something like it, actually happened. Her eyes remained steady, but her hands began to flutter at the edges of the desk.

He went on:

‘They will ask you how many rooms are in your family home, and what colour are the walls, and what days do you empty the rubbish. They will ask your man’s mother’s third cousin’s aunt’s step-daughter’s middle name. And all these things they have already asked your Mustafa Dar in his Bradford. And if you make one mistake, you are finished.’

‘Yes,’ she said, and he could hear her disciplining her voice. ‘And what is your advice, old man?’

It was at this point that Muhammad Ali usually began to whisper urgently, to mention that he knew a man, a very good type, who worked in the Consulate, and through him, for a fee, the necessary papers could be delivered, with all the proper authenticating seals. Business was good, because the women would often pay him five hundred rupees or give him a gold bracelet for his pains, and go away happy.

They came from hundreds of miles away – he normally made sure of this before beginning to trick them – so even when they discovered they had been swindled they were unlikely to return. They went away to Sargodha or Lalukhet and began to pack, and who knows at what point they found out they had been gulled, but it was at a too-late point, anyway.

Life is hard, and an old man must live by his wits. It was not up to Muhammad Ali to have compassion for these Tuesday women.

But once again his voice betrayed him, and instead of starting his customary speech it began to reveal to her his greatest secret.

‘Miss Rehana,’ his voice said, and he listened to it in amazement, ‘you are a rare person, a jewel, and for you I will do what I would not do for my own daughter, perhaps. One document has come into my possession that can solve all your worries at one stroke.’

‘And what is this sorcerer’s paper?’ she asked, her eyes unquestionably laughing at him now.

His voice fell low-as-low.

‘Miss Rehana, it is a British passport. Completely genuine and pukka goods. I have a good friend who will put your name and photo, and then, hey-presto, England there you come!’

He had said it!

Anything was possible now, on this day of his insanity. Probably he would give her the thing free-gratis, and then kick himself for a year afterwards.

Old fool, he berated himself. The oldest fools are bewitched by the youngest girls.

‘Let me understand you,’ she was saying. ‘You are proposing I should commit a crime . . .’

‘Not crime,’ he interposed. ‘Facilitation.’

‘. . . and go to Bradford, London, illegally, and therefore justify the low opinion the Consulate sahibs have of us all. Old babuji, this is not good advice.’

‘Bradford, England,’ he corrected her mournfully. ‘You should not take my gift in such a spirit.’

‘Then how?’

‘Bibi, I am a poor fellow, and I have offered this prize because you are so beautiful. Do not spit on my generosity. Take the thing. Or else don’t take, go home, forget England, only do not go into that building and lose your dignity.’

But she was on her feet, turning away from him, walking towards the gates, where the women had begun to cluster and the lala was swearing at them to be patient or none of them would be admitted at all.

‘So be a fool,’ Muhammad Ali shouted after her. ‘What goes of my father’s if you are?’ (Meaning, what was it to him.)

She did not turn.

‘It is the curse of our people,’ he yelled. ‘We are poor, we are ignorant, and we completely refuse to learn.’

‘Hey, Muhammad Ali,’ the woman at the betel-nut stall called across to him. ‘Too bad, she likes them young.’

That day Muhammad Ali did nothing but stand around near the Consulate gates. Many times he scolded himself, Go from here, old goof, lady does not desire to speak with you any further. But when she came out, she found him waiting.

‘Salaam, advice wallah,’ she greeted him.

She seemed calm, and at peace with him again, and he thought, My God, ya Allah, she has pulled it off. The British sahibs also have been drowning in her eyes and she has got her passage to England.

He smiled at her hopefully. She smiled back with no trouble at all.

‘Miss Rehana Begum,’ he said, ‘felicitations, daughter, on what is obviously your hour of triumph.’

Impulsively, she took his forearm in her hand.

‘Come,’ she said. ‘Let me buy you a pakora to thank you for your advice and to apologise for my rudeness, too.’

They stood in the dust of the afternoon compound near the bus, which was getting ready to leave. Coolies were tying bedding rolls to the roof. A hawker shouted at the passengers, trying to sell them love stories and green medicines, both of which cured unhappiness. Miss Rehana and a happy Muhammad Ali ate their pakoras sitting on the bus’s ‘front mud-guard’, that is, the bumper. The old advice expert began softly to hum a tune from a movie soundtrack. The day’s heat was gone.

‘It was an arranged engagement,’ Miss Rehana said all at once. ‘I was nine years old when my parents fixed it. Mustafa Dar was already thirty at that time, but my father wanted someone who could look after me as he had done himself and Mustafa was a man known to Daddyji as a solid type. Then my parents died and Mustafa Dar went to England and said he would send for me. That was many years ago. I have his photo, but he is like a stranger to me. Even his voice, I do not recognise it on the phone.’

The confession took Muhammad Ali by surprise, but he nodded with what he hoped looked like wisdom.

‘Still and after all,’ he said, ‘one’s parents act in one’s best interests. They found you a good and honest man who has kept his word and sent for you. And now you have a lifetime to get to know him, and to love.’

He was puzzled, now, by the bitterness that had infected her smile.

‘But, old man,’ she asked him, ‘why have you already packed me and posted me off to England?’

He stood up, shocked.

‘You looked happy – so I just assumed . . . excuse me, but they turned you down or what?’

‘I got all their questions wrong,’ she replied. ‘Distinguishing marks I put on the wrong cheeks, bathroom decor I completely redecorated, all absolutely topsy-turvy, you see.’

‘But what to do? How will you go?’

‘Now I will go back to Lahore and my job. I work in a great house, as ayah to three good boys. They would have been sad to see me leave.’

‘But this is tragedy!’ Muhammad Ali lamented. ‘Oh, how I pray that you had taken up my offer! Now, but, it is not possible, I regret to inform. Now they have your form on file, cross-check can be made, even the passport will not suffice.

‘It is spoilt, all spoilt, and it could have been so easy if advice had been accepted in good time.’

‘I do not think,’ she told him, ‘I truly do not think you should be sad.’

Her last smile, which he watched from the compound until the bus concealed it in a dust-cloud, was the happiest thing he had ever seen in his long, hot, hard, unloving life.

THE FREE RADIO

  

We all knew nothing good would happen to him while the thief’s widow had her claws dug into his flesh, but the boy was an innocent, a real donkey’s child, you can’t teach such people.

That boy could have had a good life. God had blessed him with God’s own looks, and his father had gone to the grave for him, but didn’t he leave the boy a brand-new first-class cycle rickshaw with plastic covered seats and all? So: looks he had, his own trade he had, there would have been a good wife in time, he should just have taken out some years to save some rupees; but no, he must fall for a thief’s widow before the hairs had time to come out on his chin, before his milk-teeth had split, one might say.

We felt bad for him, but who listens to the wisdom of the old today?

I say: who listens?

Exactly; nobody, certainly not a stone-head like Ramani the rickshaw-wallah. But I blame the widow. I saw it happen, you know, I saw most of it until I couldn’t stand any more. I sat under this very banyan, smoking this selfsame hookah, and not much escaped my notice.

And at one time I tried to save him from his fate, but it was no go . . .

The widow was certainly attractive, no point denying, in a sort of hard vicious way she was all right, but it is her mentality that was rotten. Ten years older than Ramani she must have been, five children alive and two dead, what that thief did besides robbing and making babies God only knows, but he left her not one new paisa, so of course she would be interested in Ramani. I’m not saying a rickshaw-wallah makes much in this town but two mouthfuls are better to eat than wind. And not many people will look twice at the widow of a good-for-nothing.

They met right here.

One day Ramani rode into town without a passenger, but grinning as usual as if someone had given him a ten-chip tip, singing some playback music from the radio, his hair greased like for a wedding. He was not such a fool that he didn’t know how the girls watched him all the time and passed remarks about his long and well-muscled legs.

The thief’s widow had gone to the bania shop to buy some three grains of dal and I won’t say where the money came from, but people saw men at night near her rutputty shack, even the bania himself they were telling me but I personally will not comment.

She had all her five brats with her and then and there, cool as a fan, she called out: ‘Hey! Rickshaaa!’ Loud, you know, like a truly cheap type. Showing us she can afford to ride in rickshaws, as if anyone was interested. Her children must have gone hungry to pay for the ride but in my opinion it was an investment for her, because must-be she had decided already to put her hooks into Ramani. So they all poured into the rickshaw and he took her away, and with the five kiddies as well as the widow there was quite a weight, so he was puffing hard, and the veins were standing out on his legs, and I thought, careful, my son, or you will have this burden to pull for all of your life.

But after that Ramani and the thief’s widow were seen everywhere, shamelessly, in public places, and I was glad his mother was dead because if she had lived to see this her face would have fallen off from shame.

Sometimes in those days Ramani came into this street in the evenings to meet some friends, and they thought they were very smart because they would go into the back room of the Irani’s canteen and drink illegal liquor, only of course everybody knew, but who would do anything, if boys ruin their lives let their relations worry.

I was sad to see Ramani fall into this bad company. His parents were known to me when alive. But when I told Ramani to keep away from those hot-shots he grinned like a sheep and said I was wrong, nothing bad was taking place.

Let it go, I thought.

I knew those cronies of his. They all wore the armbands of the new Youth Movement. This was the time of the State of Emergency, and these friends were not peaceful persons, there were stories of beatings-up, so I sat quiet under my tree. Ramani wore no armband but he went with them because they impressed him, the fool.

These armband youths were always flattering Ramani. Such a handsome chap, they told him, compared to you Shashi Kapoor and Amitabh are like lepers only, you should go to Bombay and be put in the motion pictures.