Home by Salman Rushdie

Author:Salman Rushdie [Rushdie, Salman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2017-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

The Courter

A story from East, West

1

CERTAINLY-MARY WAS THE smallest woman Mixed-Up the hall porter had come across, dwarfs excepted, a tiny sixty-year-old Indian lady with her greying hair tied behind her head in a neat bun, hitching up her red-hemmed white sari in the front and negotiating the apartment block’s front steps as if they were Alps. ‘No,’ he said aloud, furrowing his brow. What would be the right peaks. Ah, good, that was the name. ‘Ghats,’ he said proudly. Word from a schoolboy atlas long ago, when India felt as far away as Paradise. (Nowadays Paradise seemed even further away but India, and Hell, had come a good bit closer.) ‘Western Ghats, Eastern Ghats, and now Kensington Ghats,’ he said, giggling. ‘Mountains.’

She stopped in front of him in the oak-panelled lobby. ‘But ghats in India are also stairs,’ she said. ‘Yes yes certainly. For instance in Hindu holy city of Varanasi, where the Brahmins sit taking the filgrims’ money is called Dasashwamedh-ghat. Broad-broad staircase down to River Ganga. O, most certainly! Also Manikarnika-ghat. They buy fire from a house with a tiger leaping from the roof – yes certainly, a statue tiger, coloured by Technicolor, what are you thinking? – and they bring it in a box to set fire to their loved ones’ bodies. Funeral fires are of sandal. Photographs not allowed; no, certainly not.’

HE BEGAN THINKING of her as Certainly-Mary because she never said plain yes or no; always this O-yes-certainly or no-certainly-not. In the confused circumstances that had prevailed ever since his brain, his one sure thing, had let him down, he could hardly be certain of anything any more; so he was stunned by her sureness, first into nostalgia, then envy, then attraction. And attraction was a thing so long forgotten that when the churning started he thought for a long time it must be the Chinese dumplings he had brought home from the High Street carry-out.

ENGLISH WAS HARD for Certainly-Mary, and this was a part of what drew damaged old Mixed-Up towards her. The letter p was a particular problem, often turning into an f or a c; when she proceeded through the lobby with a wheeled wicker shopping basket, she would say, ‘Going shocking,’ and when, on her return, he offered to help lift the basket up the front ghats, she would answer, ‘Yes, fleas.’ As the elevator lifted her away, she called through the grille: ‘Oé, courter! Thank you, courter. O, yes, certainly.’ (In Hindi and Konkani, however, her p’s knew their place.)

So: thanks to her unexpected, somehow stomach-churning magic, he was no longer porter but courter. ‘Courter,’ he repeated to the mirror when she had gone. His breath made a little dwindling picture of the word on the glass. ‘Courter courter caught.’ Okay. People called him many things, he did not mind. But this name, this courter, this he would try to be.

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