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Extract from Joseph Anton copyright © Salman Rushdie 2012
Extract from Shame copyright © Salman Rushdie 1983
Extract from Imaginary Homelands © Salman Rushdie 1981, 1982, 1983, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991
Extract from East, West © Salman Rushdie 1994
Author photograph © Beowulf Sheehan 2015
Salman Rushdie has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Joseph Anton was first published in the United Kingdom by Jonathan Cape in 2012
Shame was first published in the United Kingdom by Jonathan Cape in 1983
Imaginary Homelands was first published in the United Kingdom by Granta
Books in association with Penguin Books Ltd in 1991
East, West was first published in the United Kingdom by Jonathan Cape in 1994
This short edition published by Vintage in 2017
penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
WHEN HE TURNED away from his father, wearing the blue-and-white-striped cap of Bradley House and the serge mackintosh, and plunged into his English life, the sin of foreignness was the first thing that was made plain to him. Until that point he had not thought of himself as anyone’s Other. After Rugby School he never forgot the lesson he learned there: that there would always be people who just didn’t like you, to whom you seemed as alien as little green men or the Slime from Outer Space, and there was no point trying to change their minds. Alienation: it was a lesson he relearned in more dramatic circumstances later on.
At an English boarding school in the early 1960s, he quickly discovered, there were three bad mistakes you could make, but if you made only two of the three you could be forgiven. The mistakes were: to be foreign; to be clever; and to be bad at games. At Rugby the foreign, clever boys who had a good time were also elegant cricketers or, in the case of one of his contemporaries, the Pakistani Zia Mahmood, so good at cards that he grew up to become one of the world’s finest bridge players. The boys who had no sporting ability had to be careful not to be too clever and, if possible, not too foreign, which was the worst of the three mistakes.
He made all three mistakes. He was foreign, clever, non-sportif. And as a result his years were, for the most part, unhappy, though he did well academically and left Rugby with the abiding feeling of having been wonderfully well taught – with that nourishing memory of great teachers that, if we are lucky, we can carry with us for the rest of our lives. There was P. G. Lewis, known, inevitably, as ‘Pig’, who so inspired him with the love of French that he rose in the course of one term from the bottom to the top of the class, and there were his history teachers J. B. Hope-Simpson, aka ‘Hope Stimulus’, and J. W. ‘Gut’ Hele, thanks to whose skilled tutelage he was able to go on to win an exhibition, a minor scholarship, to read history at his father’s old alma mater, King’s College, Cambridge, where he would meet E. M. Forster and discover sex, though not at the same time. (Less valuably, perhaps, ‘Hope Stimulus’ was also the person who introduced him to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which entered his consciousness like a disease, an infection he never managed to shake off.) His old English teacher Geoffrey Helliwell would be seen on British television on the day after the fatwa, ruefully shaking his head and asking, in sweet, vague, daffy tones, ‘Who’d have thought such a nice, quiet boy could get into so much trouble?’
Nobody had forced him to go to boarding school in England. Negin had been against the idea of sending her only son away across oceans and continents. Anis had offered him the opportunity and encouraged him to take the Common Entrance exam, but, even after he came through that with some distinction and the place at Rugby was his, the final decision to go or stay was left entirely to him. In later life he would wonder at the choice made by this thirteen-year-old self, a boy rooted in his city, happy in his friends, having a good time at school (apart from a little local difficulty with the Marathi language), the apple of his parents’ eye. Why did that boy decide to leave it all behind and travel halfway across the world into the unknown, far from everyone who loved him and everything he knew? Was it the fault, perhaps, of literature (for he was certainly a bookworm)? In which case the guilty parties might have been his beloved Jeeves and Bertie, or possibly the Earl of Emsworth and his mighty sow, the Empress of Blandings. Or might it have been the dubious attractions of the world of Agatha Christie that persuaded him, even if Christie’s Miss Marple made her home in the most murderous village in England, the lethal St Mary Mead? Then there was Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons series telling of children messing about in boats in the Lake District, and, much, much worse, the terrible literary escapades of Billy Bunter, the ‘Owl of the Remove’, the fat boy at Frank Richards’s ridiculous Greyfriars School, where, among Bunter’s classmates, there was at least one Indian, Hurree Jamset Ram Singh, the ‘dusky nabob of Bhanipur’, who spoke a bizarre, grand, syntactically contorted English (‘the contortfulness’, as the dusky nabob might well have put it, ‘was terrific’). Was it, in other words, a childish decision, to venture forth into an imaginary England that only existed in books? Or was it, alternatively, an indication that beneath the surface of the ‘nice, quiet boy’ there lurked a stranger being, a fellow with an unusually adventurous heart, possessed of enough gumption to take a leap in the dark exactly because it was a step into the unknown – a youth who intuited his future adult self’s ability to survive, even to thrive, wherever in the world his wanderings might take him, and who was able, too easily, even a little ruthlessly, to follow the dream of ‘away’, breaking away from the lure, which was also, of course, the tedium, of ‘home’, leaving his sorrowing mother and sisters behind without too much regret? Perhaps a little of each. At any rate, he took the leap, and the forking paths of time bifurcated at his feet. He took the westward road and ceased to be who he might have been if he had stayed at home.
A pink stone set into the Doctor’s Wall, named for the legendary headmaster Dr Arnold and overlooking the storeyed playing fields of the Close, bore an inscription that purported to celebrate an act of revolutionary iconoclasm. ‘This is to commemorate the exploit of William Webb Ellis,’ it read, ‘who, with a fine disregard for the rules of football as played in his time, first picked up the ball and ran with it, thus originating the distinctive feature of the rugby game.’ But the Webb Ellis story was apocryphal, and the school was anything but iconoclastic. The sons of stockbrokers and solicitors were being educated here and ‘a fine disregard for the rules’ was not on the curriculum. Putting both your hands in your pockets was against the rules. So was ‘running in the corridors’. However, fagging – acting as an older boy’s unpaid servant – and beating were still permitted. Corporal punishment could be administered by the housemaster or even by the boy named as Head of House. In his first term the Head of House was a certain R. A. C. Williamson who kept his cane hanging in full view over the door of his study. There were notches in it, one for each thrashing Williamson had handed out.
He was never beaten. He was a ‘nice, quiet boy’. He learned the rules and observed them scrupulously. He learned the school slang, dics for bedtime prayers in the dormitories (from the Latin dicere, to speak), topos for the toilets (from the Greek word for place), and, rudely, oiks for non-Rugby School inhabitants of the town, a place best known for the manufacture of cement. Though the Three Mistakes were never forgiven, he did his best to fit in. In the sixth form he won the Queen’s Medal for a history essay about Napoleon’s foreign minister, the clubfooted, cynical, amoral libertine Talleyrand, whom he vigorously defended. He became secretary of the school’s debating society and spoke eloquently in favour of fagging, which was abolished not long after his schooldays ended. He came from a conservative Indian family and was in no sense a radical. But racism was something he quickly understood. When he returned to his little study, he more than once found an essay he had written torn to pieces, which were scattered on the seat of his red armchair. Once somebody wrote the words WOGS GO HOME on his wall. He gritted his teeth, swallowed the insults and did his work. He did not tell his parents what school had been like until after he left it (and when he did tell them they were horrified that he had kept so much pain to himself). His mother was suffering because of his absence, his father was paying a fortune for him to be there, and it would not be right, he told himself, to complain. So in his letters home he created his first fictions, about idyllic schooldays of sunshine and cricket. In fact he was no good at cricket and Rugby in winter was bitterly cold, doubly so for a boy from the tropics who had never slept under heavy blankets and found it hard to go to sleep when so weighed down. But if he cast them off, then he shivered. He had to get used to this weight also, and he did. At night in the dormitories, after lights out, the metal-frame beds began to shake as the boys relieved their adolescent urges, and the banging of the beds against the heating pipes running around the walls filled the large dark rooms with the night music of inexpressible desire. In this matter, as in all else, he strove to be like the others, and join in. Again: he was not, by nature, rebellious. In those early days, he preferred the Rolling Stones to the Beatles, and, after one of his friendlier housemates, a serious, cherubic boy named Richard Shearer, made him sit down and listen to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, he became an enthusiastic Dylan worshipper; but he was, at heart, a conformist.
the Indian MutinyTom Brown’s Schooldays.