Joseph Anton: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page A

sleep, and if they heard raised voices in another room, if they heard their mother crying, there was nothing they could do about it. They pulled their sheets over their heads and dreamed.
    Anis took his thirteen-year-old son to England in January 1961 and for a week or so, before he began his education at Rugby School, they shared a room in the Cumberland Hotel near the Marble Arch in London. By day they went shopping for the school’s prescribed items, tweed jackets, gray flannel trousers, Van Heusen shirts with detached semistiff collars that necessitated the use of collar studs that pressed into the boy’s neck and made it hard to breathe. They drank chocolate milk shakes at the Lyons Corner House on Coventry Street and they went to the Odeon Marble Arch to watch
The Pure Hell of St. Trinian’s
and he wished there were going to be girls at his boarding school. In the evening his father bought grilled chicken from the Kardomah takeout on Edgware Road and made him smuggle it into the hotel room inside his new double-breasted blue serge mackintosh. At night Anis got drunk and in the small hours would shake his horrified son awake to shout at him in language so filthy that it didn’t seem possible to the boy that his father could even know such words. Then they went to Rugby and bought a red armchair and said their goodbyes. Anis took a photograph of his son outside his boarding house in his blue-and-white-striped house cap and his chicken-scented mackintosh, and if you looked at the sadness in the boy’s eyes you would think he was sad to be going to school so far from home. But in fact the son couldn’t wait for the father to leave so that he could start trying to forget the nights of foul language and unprovoked, red-eyed rage. He wanted to put the sadness in the past and begin his future, and after that it was perhaps inevitable that he would make his life as far away from his father as he could, that he would put oceans between them and keep them there. When he graduated from Cambridge University and told his father he wanted to be a writer a pained yelp burst uncontrollably out of Anis’s mouth. “What,” he cried, “am I going to tell my friends?”
    But nineteen years later, on his son’s fortieth birthday, Anis Rushdiesent him a letter written in his own hand that became the most precious communication that writer had ever received or would receive. This was just five months before Anis’s death at seventy-seven of rapidly advancing multiple myeloma—cancer of the bone marrow. In that letter Anis showed how carefully and deeply he had read and understood his son’s books, how eagerly he looked forward to reading more of them, and how profoundly he felt the fatherly love he had spent half a lifetime failing to express. He lived long enough to be happy at the success of
Midnight’s Children
and
Shame
, but by the time the book that owed the greatest debt to him was published he was no longer there to read it. Perhaps that was a good thing, because he also missed the furor that followed; although one of the few things of which his son was utterly certain was that in the battle over
The Satanic Verses
he would have had his father’s unqualified, unyielding support. Without his father’s ideas and example to inspire him, in fact, that novel would never have been written.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad?
No, that wasn’t it at all. Well, they did do that, perhaps, but they also allowed you to become the person, and the writer, that you had it in you to be.
    The first gift he received from his father, a gift like a message in a time capsule, which he didn’t understand until he was an adult, was the family name. “Rushdie” was Anis’s invention;
his
father’s name had been quite a mouthful, Khwaja Muhammad Din Khaliqi Dehlavi, a fine Old Delhi name that sat well on that old-school gentleman glaring fiercely out of his only surviving photograph, that successful industrialist and part-time essayist